Nabokov calls Dostoyevsky a neurotic and, after serving four years in Siberia for political radicalism (out of which came The House of Dead), labels the writer’s new philosophy ‘neurotic Christianism’, which has at its heart an ‘artificial and completely pathological idealisation of the simple Russian folk’.
After being released from prison and exile, Nabokov says, it wasn’t just Dostoyevsky’s aesthetics that changed but also his politics. Gone were the socialism and liberalism of his youth, dismissed as Western contaminants of Russia and the Orthodox Church; Dostoyevsky was now a reactionary, an ardent advocate of Russian nationalism, absolute monarchy and slavophilism.
In fact, Dostoyevsky’s crude politics, Nabokov argues, his quest in politics for universal salvation, reminiscent of attitudes in fascism and communism, crossed over into his literature, where Dostoyevsky the prophet wallows in ‘the tragic misadventures of human dignity’ and regales us with characters who ‘sin their way to Jesus’.
Nabokov goes on to accuse Dostoyevsky of melodramatic sentimentality, which Nabokov defines as ‘the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader’.
Nabokov says it wasn’t just neurotic Christianity that impelled Dostoyevsky’s sentimentality, but also the influence on the writer of the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel.
Nabokov writes:
‘The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict [Dostoyevsky] liked – placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos.
‘When after his return from Siberia his essential ideas began to ripen – the idea of salvation to be found through transgression, the ethical supremacy of suffering and submission over struggle and resistance, the defence of free will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, and the ultimate formula of egoism-antichrist Europe on one side and brotherhood-Christ-Russia on the other –when these ideas (which are all thoroughly examined in countless textbooks) suffused his novels, much of the Western influence still remained, and one is tempted to say that in a way Dostoyevsky, who so hated the West, was the most European of the Russian writers.’
Finally, Nabokov berates Dostoyevsky for focusing on the spiritual lives of ‘warped souls’ – epileptics, those suffering from senile dementia, alcoholics, hysterics, psychopaths – as if they were archetypical of the human experience. Moreover, Nabokov says this rogues gallery of characters share a common feature in Dostoyevsky’s novels: they never develop as personalities.
‘We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them.
‘In the case of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, we see a man go from premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens somehow from without: innerly even Raskolnikov does not go through any true development of personality, and the other heroes of Dostoyevsky do even less so.’
The only developments that take place in Dostoyevsky’s novels, Nabokov says, the only thing that ‘vacillates, takes unexpected sharp turns, deviates completely to include new people and circumstances, is the plot.’
Dostoyevsky, Nabakov asserts, is essentially a writer of mystery stories ‘where every character, once introduced to us, remains the same to the bitter end, complete with his special features and personal habits, and that they all are treated throughout the book they happen to be in like chessmen in a complicated chess problem.’
It is his intricate plotting, Nabokov argues, that allows Dostoyevsky to hold the reader’s attention.
‘He builds up his climaxes and keeps up his suspenses with consummate mastery. But if you re-read a book of his you have already read once so that you are familiar with the surprises and complications of the plot, you will at once realise that the suspense you experienced during the first reading is simply not there any more.’
The only thing Dostoyevsky wrote that escapes Nabokov’s withering assessment is The Double, the Gogol-like story of a petty government bureaucrat driven insane by the notion that one of his colleagues has assumed his identity. Nabokov describes the novella as ‘a perfect work of art, that hardly exists for the followers of Dostoyevsky the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840s, long before his so-called great novels.’