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Despair by Vladimir Nabokov A parody of Dusty Dostoyevsky
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Sandy Klein sends (Nab-L 11 Jan 2012) http://anokatony.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/despair-by-vladimir-nabokov-a-parody-of-dusty-dostoyevsky/ [...] "Despair" is a parody of the style of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, often referred to as 'Dusty' in the novel. Dostoyevsky's prestige was rising in the Western literary world in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and Nabokov did not think this new fame and acclaim for Dostoyevsky was merited, so he went to work revising his old "Crime and Punishment" and "The Double" parody, "Despair". Nabokov ranked Dostoyevsky in the category of "mediocre and overrated people" [...] He wrote the following. "A good third [of readers] do not know the difference between real literature and pseudo-literature, and to such readers Dostoevsky may seem more important and more artistic than such trash as our American historical novels or things called From Here to Eternity and such like balderdash." The parody of Dostoyevsky's style was lost on me, so I must be a member of the one-third of readers Nabokov was talking about[...]
JM: Andrew Field ("Nabokov, His Life in Art") in the chapter on Dostoevsky and Despair (p.130-132):notes that "If there is anything held in common between Hermann and his creator, it is their mutual contempt for the great Fyodor Mikhailovich who ends as the second, unnoticed corpse of the novel..." and quotes Hermann: "There is something a shade too literary about that talk of ours, smacking of thumb-screw conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevsky is at home; a little more of it and we should hear that sibilant whisper of false humility, that catch in the breath, those repetitions of incantatory adverbs - and then all the rest of it would come, the mystical trimming dear to that famous writer of Russian thrillers."
According to Field "English offers some splendid opportunities for further fun - another rejected title for Hermann's book is Crime and Pun (in another place it becomes Crime and Slime), Hermann confesses "a grotesque resemblance to Rascalnikov," and Dosstoevsky is familiarly reduced to 'Dusty'.[...] Even without benefit of the later emendations, one would have thought that the contra Dostoevsky animus was not open to misunderstanding. But precisely such a misreading does occur in a 1939 article by Jean Paul Sartre, a short essay on the Gallimard edition of Despair (La méprise) [...] Sartre's essay on Nabokov is perhaps the most intellectually careless thing ever written by him [...] Ten years later Nabokov won the decisive advantage in a review of Sartre's La Nausée (New York Times Book Review, April 24,1949)" - "Nausea belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters - Barbusse, Céline, and so forth. Somewhere behind looks Dostoevsky at his worst, and still farther back there is old Eugene Sue, to whom the melodramatic Russian owed so much [...] One has no special quarrel with Roquentin when he decides that the world exists. But the task to make the world exist as a work of art was beyond Sartre's powers."
The reviewer, standing in awe before Vladimir Nabokov and Dostoevsky, confesses that Nabokov's parody on Dusty's style was lost on him (did he sound ironic when he included himself among the one-third of incompetent readers?). I must admit that, like him, were it not for his warnings and Andrew Field's developments, this parody would also be completely lost on me, with no damage to the pleasure to be extracted from a more "innocent" reading.I must watch again Fassbinder's movie to find out how this parodic or farsical basis was cinematically presented in relation to "Dusty".
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JM: Andrew Field ("Nabokov, His Life in Art") in the chapter on Dostoevsky and Despair (p.130-132):notes that "If there is anything held in common between Hermann and his creator, it is their mutual contempt for the great Fyodor Mikhailovich who ends as the second, unnoticed corpse of the novel..." and quotes Hermann: "There is something a shade too literary about that talk of ours, smacking of thumb-screw conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevsky is at home; a little more of it and we should hear that sibilant whisper of false humility, that catch in the breath, those repetitions of incantatory adverbs - and then all the rest of it would come, the mystical trimming dear to that famous writer of Russian thrillers."
According to Field "English offers some splendid opportunities for further fun - another rejected title for Hermann's book is Crime and Pun (in another place it becomes Crime and Slime), Hermann confesses "a grotesque resemblance to Rascalnikov," and Dosstoevsky is familiarly reduced to 'Dusty'.[...] Even without benefit of the later emendations, one would have thought that the contra Dostoevsky animus was not open to misunderstanding. But precisely such a misreading does occur in a 1939 article by Jean Paul Sartre, a short essay on the Gallimard edition of Despair (La méprise) [...] Sartre's essay on Nabokov is perhaps the most intellectually careless thing ever written by him [...] Ten years later Nabokov won the decisive advantage in a review of Sartre's La Nausée (New York Times Book Review, April 24,1949)" - "Nausea belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters - Barbusse, Céline, and so forth. Somewhere behind looks Dostoevsky at his worst, and still farther back there is old Eugene Sue, to whom the melodramatic Russian owed so much [...] One has no special quarrel with Roquentin when he decides that the world exists. But the task to make the world exist as a work of art was beyond Sartre's powers."
The reviewer, standing in awe before Vladimir Nabokov and Dostoevsky, confesses that Nabokov's parody on Dusty's style was lost on him (did he sound ironic when he included himself among the one-third of incompetent readers?). I must admit that, like him, were it not for his warnings and Andrew Field's developments, this parody would also be completely lost on me, with no damage to the pleasure to be extracted from a more "innocent" reading.I must watch again Fassbinder's movie to find out how this parodic or farsical basis was cinematically presented in relation to "Dusty".
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/