The reasons he gives are several, and can be found in his Lectures on Russian Literature. He considered Dostoyevsky's writing the clumsy product of hasty necessity, sentimental, lacking in precise detail, filled with absurd gothicism, better suited to a Russo-spiritual mind than a seriously literary one. He said in his lectures, I believe, that in the Russia of old people used to rate others by whether they preferred Dostoyevsky to Checkov. I loved his idea that The Brother's Karamazov was really just a puffed up mystery happening in slow motion over nearly a thousand pages. Another reason was of course Political: Dostoyevsky was a rabid anti-semite. I often recall with amused horror a scene from The Brothers in which one of the many silly neurotic women in the book, can't remember her name but she was unable to
walk, spouts a gush of crazed visions, the way Dostoyevskyian characters are always so want to do, in which she said she had heard that Jews had an annual practice of killing Christian babies on Christmas and making some kind of compote out of them to eat. She asks Alyosha, the great saint of the book, if Jews really do this. He says, I quote, "I don't know"! He doesn't say "not no, but HELL NO", he, the christ-like angel of the novel, its moral center says, "I don't know" as if it required a little sober research.The funny thing is that I actually liked The Brothers even less than Nabokov. He praises a ludicrous section about a child tricked by Smerdyakov, a bastard, hence an evil epileptic sociopath, into feeding a dog some bread with a nail in it; when the dog runs off, possibly to its death, the boy becomes bed bound with guilt and pines away for the dog's return; thankfully, the dog does show up, healthy
and happy, right on cue as the boy expires at the end of the novel, freeing him of his terrible guilt. And it begins to snow?---I'm not sure about that last detail. Anyway, those are just some of the reasons N. didn't like Dostoyevsky. I've noticed one interesting thing across N's writing on the subject. In The Gift, during the first of the two imagined discussions on literature the main character Fyodor has with his rival Khonchaev, Fyodor says that he can think of one good image in The Brothers, a water ring on a table; but in the lecture on the book Nabokov later taught he singles out this precise image as a criticism, an example of Dostoyevsky's bare utilitarian use of details and props, like in a stage play--N's idea was that D should have been one of Russia's great playwrights but took a wrong turn and wound up floundering in prose, though I believe an audience could never have lasted through many
of those raging monologues.
--- On Sat, 12/13/08, Siri Bendtsen <neptunes_only_daughter@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
From: Siri Bendtsen <neptunes_only_daughter@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Dostoyevsky and Nabokov
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Saturday, December 13, 2008, 10:01 PM
I have a very simple question for the list. It is a well known fact that Nabokov didn't like Dostoyevsky. My question is "why ?". ----------------
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