Nabokov's Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and "The Gentle Creature"

Nabokov Studies 4 (1997) JULIAN W. CONNOLLY (Charlottesville) Nabokov's Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and "The Gentle Creature" To paraphrase Humbert Humbert's question: "Did Lolita have a precursor? She did, indeed she did."1 As many scholars have pointed out, Nabokov's novel is extremely rich in intertextual references and allusions.2 Several of the more important subtexts which cast their shadow on Nabokov's work are classics of Russian literature, from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin to Dostoevsky's The Devils? Yet one significant Russian text has hitherto escaped critical notice, although in some ways, the traces it has left in Nabokov's novel are quite pervasive. This is Dostoevsky's "fantastic story," "The Gentle Creature" ("Krotkaia"), which was originally published in 1876 as part of 1. Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage 1991), 9. All further citations from to this text will be noted by a parenmetical reference containing me page number. 2. Alfred Appel, Jr. has called Lolita "the most allusive and linguistically playful novel in English since Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan 's Wake (1939)" (The Annotated Lolita xi). One need only look at Appel's annotations to gain some idea of the range and diversity of literary works to which allusion is made in the novel. Carl Proffer, in Keys to Lolita, explicates several of me more prominent subtexts in me novel. 3. See, for example, Priscilla Meyer, "Nabokov's Lolita and Pushkin's Onegin," and Georges Nivat, "Nabokov and Dostoevsky." 16 Nabokov Studies his serial work, The Diary of a Writer. Nabokov's sense of artistic rivalry with Dostoevsky has been well-documented elsewhere , and I believe that the Lolita— "Gentle Creature" relationship represents another skirmish in Nabokov's lifelong battle with his nineteenth-century predecessor.4 While Dostoevsky's text offers up a melodramatic account of unbridled egotism clashing with submissive humility, nanated in a tone of relentless seriousness and suffused with an air of hazy allegory, Nabokov's text presents a subtle, multilayered narrative that represents both a rebuttal and a revision of Dostoevsky's stark vision. This process of "re-vision" culminates in the final pages of the work: where Dostoevsky's narrator breaks off in a cry of solipsistic despair, Nabokov's narrator concludes with an affirmation of timeless beauty. As this essay will show, Nabokov appropriated some of the most striking elements of Dostoevsky's story, only to fashion from them a work that far outstrips his predecessor's achievement in complexity and scope. Over the course of this essay, we shall both point out the parallels between Nabokov's and Dostoevsky's text and reveal how Nabokov responds to and rejects the lessons of his nineteenth-century predecessor. 4. For representative discussions of me ways in which Nabokov's works respond to Dostoevsky's see, inter alia, Julian Connolly, "The Function of Literary Allusion in Nabokov's Despair"; Alexander Dolinin, "Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair"; Sergej Davydov, "Dostoevsky and Nabokov: The Morality of Structure in Crime and Punishment and Despair"; Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, "Rereading Lolita: Reconsidering Nabokov's Relationship with Dostoevsky"; Melvin Seiden, "Nabokov and Dostoevsky"; and Georges Nivat, "Nabokov and Dostoevsky." Anna Ljunggren detects motifs from several of Dostoevsky's works in Lolita, including an excerpt from The Diary of a Writer (but she does not mention "The Gentle Creature"; see her article, "Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Story of Wandering"). Nabokov's Dialogue with Dostoevsky 17 The parallels between the two tales are striking, beginning with the very form of the work. Both texts represent a kind of confession by an overwrought individual who is trying to come to terms with a central emotional experience in his life. Indeed, the subtitle of Humbert's manuscript—the "Confession of a White Widowed Male"—provides an accurate description of the Dostoevsky text as well. The nanator of "The Gentle Creature" is a forty-one-year-old man who describes his unfortunate marriage to a sixteen-year-old girl. Nabokov appropriates this very age differential—twenty-five years, but he shifts the range downwards to emphasize the shocking nature of Humbert's involvement with Dolores Haze: she is twelve, and he...