Lolita: Nabokov’s Rewriting of Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov

The essay takes its cue from an early hint in The Gift that Nabokov conceived the plot of Lolita as “a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy.” Indeed, the essay argues that Nabokov is deliberately rewriting The Brothers Karamazov in Lolita by revisiting the central philosophical dilemmas that organize Ivan Karamazov’s twin claims that “One really cannot expect eloquence from a murderer,” and that “everything is permitted” in a world without God and immortality.