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".