Chapter IIB. Sirin/Dostoevsky and the Question of Russian Modernism in Emigration

Abstract

V ladimir Nabokov’s literary career as the Russian writer V. Sirin got off to a brilliant start in the years of the first European emigration (1919-1940). His second emigration—to the United States in 1940—was marked by his turning to the English language and the subsequent international fame of this unique bilingual writer. In a 1962 interview Nabokov maintains, “I do feel Russian and I think that my Russian works... are a kind of tribute to Russia.... Recently I have paid tribute to her in an English work on Pushkin.”2 Meanwhile, contemporary scholars in both the West and in Russia have noted on more than one occasion, with a certain bewilderment, Nabokov’s negative attitude to another classic of Russian literature, Fedor Dostoevsky. This critical attitude to Dostoevsky manifested itself even more strongly in the writer’s English prose, in particular his Lectures on Russian Literature. In her essay “The Quarrelsome Nabokov,” the Russian Dostoevsky specialist Lyudmila Saraskina is at a loss to explain the contemptuousness of Nabokov’s remarks, the “insoluble enigma of his loathing for Dostoevsky.”3 How should we go about solving the “riddle” of his loathing for Dostoevsky? How can we come to an understanding of why Nabokov chose precisely this figure of Russian prose to be the target of parody and hostile criticism? In order to answer this question, it is essential to reconsider the myth of Dostoevsky as a central fact of Silver Age culture, to sketch this myth’s further development in Russian émigré literature, and its parodic trans-