This post has been contributed by Renata Goroshkova, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. Read her previous posts here and here.

This post is in two parts. Read the second part here.

Vladimir Nabokov writes to Edmund Wilson in a letter of 1950: “My father had read every word Dickens wrote. Perhaps his reading to us aloud, on rainy evenings in the country, Great Expectations (in English, of course) when I was a boy of twelve or thirteen prevented me mentally from re-reading Dickens later on” (Letters 273). I have a suspicion that in this part of the letter Nabokov, in accordance with his poetic style, switched to unreliable narration out of habit, and wasn’t very sincere with his friend and colleague. In my previous post I demonstrated some intertextual borrowings from Dickens’s “Going Into Society” in Nabokov’s story “The Potato Elf,” which was written in 1929. The fact that the stories are so similar to each other in terms of style, imagery, and plot proves that Nabokov reread at least Dickens’s minor works. Obviously, it is not the only connection or, in the words of Nabokov, “life’s ‘blending of lines of play’” between these two great novelists (the second connection might be the figure of Wilson himself, who apart from being a recognized Dickens scholar also “became something of an unpaid literary agent and adviser for Nabokov” [Karlinsky12]).  Most comments about Dickens in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature can be applied to Nabokov’s stylistic techniques as well. And, coming back to the starting point, we must not forget about Nabokov’s father.

Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was a politician, and a very famous liberal activist: Simon Karlinsky describes him as “a man who represented the finest traditions of pre-Revolutionary democratic anti-government dissent” (8). Having published plenty of deep articles on law and politics, he was one of the distinguished scholars of the Faculty of Law of Saint Petersburg State University (although, surprisingly, he wasn’t mentioned in the faculty list of best graduates). His son Vladimir Nabokov describes his unique abilities in Speak, Memory: “His drafts were the fair copies of immediate thought. In this manner, he wrote, with phenomenal ease and rapidity…It would be impossible to list the literally thousands of his articles in various periodicals” (152-153).

Anglophilia was another prominent feature of Vladimir Dmitrievich’s life, which manifested itself in different areas: from clothing style to his way of talking. It doesn’t look strange or uncommon for Russian aristocrats to be well-read, to love English literature and to possess a huge collection of Dickens’s books. However, Nabokov’s statement that his father was “an authority on Dickens” (Speak, Memory 152), which he gives without one word of explanation, could be perceived as puzzling. Tatiana Ponomareva, former director of the Nabokov Museum and a reputable biographer of Nabokov’s family, said: “There is no full bibliography of V. D. Nabokov’s articles yet and some of his critical works in the area of literature may not be known” (email communication). Vladimir Nabokov mentioned only one of his father’s essays: “…his favorite Russian poets were Pushkin, Tyutchev, and Fet –he published a fine essay on the latter” (Speak, Memory 152), but I haven’t been able to uncover this essay to have a better idea of the level of Vladimir Dmitrievich’s philological background.

The puzzle has now been solved. While working with archives of pre-revolutionary Russian magazines and academic books, I came across two essays on Charles Dickens by Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (excerpts from which are translated below into English for the first time). These essays were professionally written, and contained many unique ideas especially for those times. These essays were professionally written, and contained many unique ideas especially for those times. The first text – “Charles Dickens as a criminalist” – was published in the juristic newspaper Pravo. The second work is a chapter of 17 pages in the 4th volume of the academic series of books The History of Western Literature. Having no doctoral degree in Language or Literature, Vladimir Dmitrievich was in the company of professional contributors, literary critics, and famous Professors of the Philological Faculty of Saint Petersburg State University such as F. Batushkov, K. Tiander, V. Zhirmunsky, A. Veselovsky, and others.

In the first article V. D. Nabokov pays attention to the dark side of Dickens’s prose and imagery:

It’s hard to find a writer, who more often than Dickens, made the external or internal side of crime the subject of his work. Сuriously enough, in this sphere Dickens appears to be a more deep and sophisticated psychologist than in any other area. He is capable of showing – at the beginning only by hinting – how any criminal design germinates, how it grows with progressive speed, step by step encompassing all the consciousness of an offender, how it comes true, and then, how it becomes the corrupting principle for a person’s mind, tormented by remorse, fear, and regret. Dickens is a great master in crime depiction. By the vividness of his pictures he causes a feeling of fear in us: as if we see with clarity the blood, and hear the victim’s groans, and the murderer’s face deformed by the brutal fury is before our eyes. (188)

V.  D. Nabokov  also  focuses on  socially  significant issues,  such as Dickens’s attitude towards  the death penalty, a topic which, even after more than 100 years, is still relevant in some parts of our world:

Dickens turns not only against public execution, but, in general, fundamentally, against the punishment of death…Dickens correctly points out that, even if history hadn’t known the examples of miscarriages of justice before, there is an objection against the application the irreparable and final punishment based on doubtful data by people with limited intellect. (192)

Speaking about choosing punishment for criminals, V. D. Nabokov says that people of his profession have to be led not only by the letter of the law, but also by principles of love and compassion (quite a strange thought for the contemporary era!), and reading Dickens’s works can help in this.

Pictures, which were drawn by Dickens, still haven’t become meaningless. Because even now we cannot say that the boundary between punishment as a necessary but tolerable evil and cruel torment, which undermines the body and mocks the soul, has been found. In this sphere, more than in any other, we are in need of lessons of love to the fallen, and of sympathy to the outcast, – great lessons that could draw upon the works of a great writer and lover of men! (195)

Works Cited:

• Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition. Edited, Annotated, and with Introductory essay by Simon Karlisky. University of California Press, 2001.
• Nabokov, V. V. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. San Diego: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
• —. Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. Penguin UK, 2012.
• Nabokov, V. D. “Dickens as a Criminalist.”  Pravo [The Law], 1912, № 4, January, 29. Pp.188 – 195. (In Russian) (Translation mine)