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 first part here.

The next article was written with an academic purpose, and aimed to give a full view of Dickens’s life and works, rather than focusing only on one aspect of Dickens’s creative talent:

There is nobody who can challenge his primacy. This is an incontrovertible fact, and especially now we can see many proofs of it. Vast numbers of editions, from the cheapest to the insanely expensive, the existence of the Dickens Fellowship, which publishes a magazine, dedicated to Dickens with successful subscription opened for Dickens’s grandchildren and which gathered nearly 50 thousand rubles [Nabokov, perhaps, converted pounds into rubles to determine the sum for the Russian reader], but, the main thing, is letters that accompany the sending of donations, – the letters that are full of Dickens’s quotes, sometimes jokingly signed by the name of one of the heroes and strictly sustained in the style of this particular hero, the letters full of love, expressing admiration for the “inimitable”… – all of these indicate the exclusive popularity of Dickens. We can add: this popularity is rooted in the fact that Dickens, like Gogol for Russia, Cervantes for Spain, Hugo for France, Schiller for Germany, is the most national writer in comparison with any other English novelist. He was the embodiment of the best qualities of his nation, and in his works he could express the genuine, intimate nature of the English mentality. However, he did it sub specie aeternatis. That is why, being deeply national, and remaining the son of an era, he is understandable and meant so much not only to English people, but both to us and to all other worlds as well. (53 – 54)

V. D. Nabokov connects the creative destiny of the genius with some of his biographical facts, especially highlighting the influence of childhood events on the great novelist.

Dickens’s childhood suffering … explains a lot in his life and in his works. Being in contact with the dark, low-lying side of life, with its scum, with the vicious and the evil, but  also with the humiliated and the insulted, with their prosaic sufferings, shame and grief, Dickens entered the time when painfully tender sensibility reacts to everything. It was obvious that there was something in him that prevented him, as he put it, from becoming a little thief or a vagabond, something that averted corruption from him, and preserved moral purity … But at the same time, should one look for the source of those aspirations in these children’s trials with which Dickens’s work was permeated … The greatest English humorist was also the greatest master in portraying the suffering of the ‘humiliated and insulted’, and his laughter often turns into tears, and pathos is as much an essential force of his genius as humor is, – all of these have roots in his unhappy childhood…

The other consequence of his childhood sufferings is that the experience of children’s souls always was Dickens’s favourite theme. Here Dickens’s heart is everywhere, and how strongly and deeply he was worried about the fate of his characters we can see from his biography, which tells how he sadly wandered the deserted streets of Paris, sad, yearning, that night, when he finished the story of the death of little Dombey. (56 – 57)

According to V. D. Nabokov, the very important human feature of Dickens was his productivity, which sometimes undermined the quality of his works, but was always fueled by his genius: 

His fruitfulness is striking, and almost surpasses understanding. He could be writing three things at a time, all for certain dates. However, in this extraordinary power of creativity lies its weakness. That is why almost all Dickens’s novels are so bad and awkwardly written, so bulky, so disproportionate. That is why dull and sluggish pages could be found almost in every novel. And the genius of Dickens and the inexhaustible wealth of his imagination were needed in order to ‘not write out’ under such conditions, to maintain power over the reader’s mind and heart till the very end. (59)

Being a humanist and a liberal educator, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov also focuses on the humanistic and Christian features of Dickens’s prose:

The christianity of Dickens was not the product of cold and tense rationality. It was not under the influence of mystical ecstasy. It does not have anything militant. It was the starting point, the basement of his spirituality. That is why it had such an impact on his works. That is why Dickens is not only a humorist, but a merciless satirist when he denounces smug hypocrisy or triumphant violence. And, at the end of the day, Dickens’s whole social message is based on one idea: on the battle against tyranny of the strong over the weak in the name of the holiness of human beings. (61)

V. D. Nabokov, who had an impressive background in political life, doesn’t label Dickens as a political figure (in contrast, for example, with Soviet Union literary critics, who confidently attributed Dickens to the leftists):

Chesterton was right when he pointed out that Dickens wasn’t an adherent of any specific social doctrine. He was indifferent to politics, with a touch of neglect and irony. However, we meet in Dickens’s works unfading examples of political satire. Let us recall the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, the main aim of which is to try not to do something. In this sense, the Circumlocution Office, according to Dickens, is the best embodiment of the art of ruling the country. It is based on the ability not to do anything. And Dickens with inimitable irony, which resembles the best pages of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, notes the manifestation of this principle in parliamentary life, where yesterday’s candidate, who demanded in the elections the implementation of one reform or another, after getting into parliament, and even more so when he became a minister, only thinks about how not to fulfill the promise. (61)

When V. D. Nabokov wrote his essay, he couldn’t be aware of many details of Dickens’s private life—for instance, his early failed romance with Maria Beadnell, or his later affair with Ellen Ternan. That is why he traces the scarcity of love scenes in Dickens’s books to the fact that Dickens was unexperienced in love affairs:

The real desire, for which, at least for a while, everything is forgotten, everything is discarded, the desire, which fills life to the brim, – apparently, there was not a place for this kind of desire in Dickens’s life. We can’t find it in his works either. Of course, there is a kind of love affair in all of his novels. But how usual and ordinary these affairs are, how similar to each other. Nowhere does the artistic level of Dickens’s work fall so low as in his love scenes. Here he is either pretending to be sweet, or tearfully melodramatic, and most often – unbearably false. He seems to be writing for some people from cheap seats, very undemanding and tasteless…The breath of passion, its impatient, imperious demands, its torment, its bliss – we will not find all of these anywhere in Dickens. This is his Achilles’s heel…this is the explanation of the indifference with which women relate to Dickens. They feel that the caches of their heart are inaccessible to him… The power of Dickens is not in portraying passionate love. And from this point of view, dozens of novelists, relatively secondary to him, are smarter, more interesting, more truthful, and more diverse. And yet they will be hopelessly forgotten, while Dickens will never become obsolete. (65)

V. D. Nabokov ends his academic essay with the statement that Dickens’s works do not fit into any templates and frames:

…for his friends, Dickens was a pleasant companion with whom they forgot that he had ever written something, and felt only charm of his nature and his finer qualities. He was not really a bookworm. Life was more interesting for him than books. Life, not a book, was reflected in his work, so no ‘artistic theories’ can be derived from the study of Dickens. On the contrary, he seems to overturn all the generally accepted canons of artistic creation… His works best prove the futility of all art theories, contrasting their disputes and mutual contradictions with clear, indisputable examples of eternal art. (69)

The more I dive into reading V. D. Nabokov’s works on law or social issues, the more I admire  his nobility, dedication, sophistication and depth of thought, as well as the sincerity and the childish purity of his soul.  His love of Dickens doesn’t seem accidental: he felt that Dickens was the same kind of person: a fighter for the prosperity of his own nation and justice in all senses. A famous Russian writer and a Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Bunin, ends his obituary note on V. D. Nabokov’s death with these words: “God grant all the best for the future, ‘new’ Russia. But when it will make again its own Nabokovs? Former, old Russia had them, and has something to be proud of. And, unfortunately, something to grieve for” (Nabokov V. D. Before and After the Temporary Government: Selected Works, 510).

The year of birth as well as the year of death of the heroes of this post are symmetrical: V. D. Nabokov was born a month after Dickens died in 1870, and died in the year of the 110th anniversary of Dickens. It is symbolic that we have uncovered V. D. Nabokov’s essays on Dickens in the year of their commemoration. Perhaps, by the next important date there will be new facts found from life or literature that connect Dickens with the Nabokovs. M

Postscript: More fascinating facts about Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov’s attitude towards Dickens can be found in Gavriel Shapiro’s book, The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father (University of Michigan Press, 2014).

Works cited:

• Nabokov V. D. Do i posle vremennogo pravitel’stva: izbrannyye proizvedeniya [Before and After the Temporary Government: Selected Works]. Edited, Annotated, and with Introductory Essay by Tatiana Ponomareva. Saint Petersburg: Symposium, 2015. (In Russian)
• —. “Charles Dickens by Vl. Dm. Nabokov.” Istoriya zapadnoy literatury (1800 – 1910) [The History of Western Literature (1800 – 1910)]. Ed. F. Batjushkov. Vol. IV (Unfinished Edition). The Edition of the Partnership “The World”. 1917. Pp. 53 – 70. (In Russian) (Translation mine)