SIMON KARLINSKY
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of these devices appear to Nabokov "like blows of a club instead of
the light touch of an artist's fingers"); and especially the description
of the climactic comical scene at Mrs. Stavrogin's in
The Possessed
as
"grand booming nonsense with flashes of genius illuminating the
whole gloomy and mad farce ."
Nabokov recognized that the story he calls "Memoirs From
Under the Floor" (its title is usually rendered into English, errone–
ously and misleadingly, as
Notes from Underground)
is the quintessen–
tial work of Dostoevsky, a concentration of his "themes and formu–
las and intonations." Because he decided to limit his interest in it to
"a study in style," his usual methodological and structural approach
to literature for once proved inadequate. "Memoirs From Under
the Floor" cannot, as D.S. Mirsky has pointed out, "be regarded as
imaginative literature pure and simple" because "its place is among
the great mystical revelations of mankind," a dimension Nabokov
refused to acknowledge.
Historically, the work was Dostoevsky's refutation of nine–
teenth-century positivism and rationalism as expressed in
Chernyshevsky's atrocious but influential novel
What is to be Done?
Nabokov did his own refuting of that novel and of the entire complex
of ideas it represented in the Chernyshevsky chapter of
The Gift.
On
the surface of it, this would make the Dostoevsky of" Memoirs From
Under the Floor" Nabokov's comrade-in-arms, but the drastically
different approaches of the two writers to all the issues in question
renders such a paradoxical alliance unthinkable.
Yet, the parallelism of their treatment of Chernyshevsky' s novel
and the flashes of sympathy now and then discernible in the
Dostoevsky lecture point to the still unsolved riddle of the affinity of
certain Nabokov novels to Dostoevsky: the parodistic variations on
Crime and Punishment
in
Despair;
the similarity of the narrator of
The
Eye
to the one in "Memoirs From Under the Floor"; and the respec–
tive treatments of pedophilia-as the ultimate, deliberately willed
crime in several of Dostoevsky's novels and, more plausibly, as an
unfortunate and involuntary sexual orientation in Nabokov's
Lolita.
Nabokov may have disliked Dostoevsky and venerated Tolstoy,
but the Russian writer he loved was Anton Chekhov. His deep affec–
tion for Chekhov ("it is
his
works that I would take on a trip to
another planet," as Nabokov put it so memorably in "Anniversary
Notes") puzzles only those who do not look deeply enough into the
sources of the two writers' artistic visions. Among the things that
