Blackwell, Stephen H. Nabokov’s (Dostoevskian?) Loopholes. 2010

Stephen Blackwell (University of Tennessee) offered a revision of the relationship Nabokov had with the work of Dostoevsky, showing how in his work Nabokov developed important Dostoevskian devices, such as the loophole, and pushed them to new limits. Following Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky, Stephen Blackwell showed that if Dostoevsky first brought the world a heightened sensitivity to the finalizing power of language, through characters that continually seek to transcend their own and others’ narratives about them, Nabokov extended that project by crafting narratives that extrude and dramatize their own entrapping potential. [MB]