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Nabokov, Dostoevski, Proust: Despair , Timothy L. Parrish

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Nabokov criticism has long identified Despair with Dostoevski, critics have for the most part addressed Despair in terms of how it either attacks or validates Dostoevski and thus have understood Nabokov to be speaking primarily about Dostoevski's achievement as a novelist. As I argue, Despair revises Dostoevski as a sly assertion of Nabokov's paradoxical aesthetic independence, and does so through the medium of Marcel Proust. It predicts the more obvious Proustian influence that critics have noticed in Nabokov's later works. In Despair Proust gives Nabokov the fundamental modernist narrative that makes an artist's coming to consciousness coincident with the …