Whores with Hearts of Gold

Nabokov didn’t much like Dostoevsky. What interests him in literature is “enduring art and individual genius,” and from this viewpoint Dostoevsky is mediocre: “with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with
wastelands of literary platitudes in between” (Lectures on Russian Literature, 68).

His characters are mentally unbalanced, his writing repetitious, his psychology incredible. He is a sentimentalist who puts good people in impossible situations and wrings all the pathos he can out of it. Nabokov doesn’t like the way Dostoevsky’s characters “sin their way to Jesus,” doesn’t like the mess of Dostoevsky “spilling Jesus all over the place” (71). He can barely contain his disgust at the way Dostoevsky “kept throwing his weight about
as a true interpreter of Orthodox Christianity” and the way Dostoevsky “for the untying of every psychological or psychopathic knot . . . inevitably leads us to Christ, or rather to his own interpretation of Christ, and to the holy Orthodox Church.” This, he says, displays “the truly irritating side of Dostoevski as ‘philosopher’” (85).

Some of the criticisms are just. Some result from judging Dostoevsky by an alien  aesthetic (according to which “Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled
apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the
tongue with relish,” 72). Nothing offends Nabokov so much as vulgarity, and if there’s one thing Dostoevsky specializes in, it’s vulgar.

Some I suspect comes from deep misunderstanding what Dostoevsky is up to. Of course, those good-hearted whores come from sentimental gothicism. And Nabokov has a valid aesthetic point in his criticism of the scene in Crime and Punishmentwhere “the murderer and the harlot” read “the eternal book”: “neither a true artist nor a true moralist—neither a good Christian nor a good philosopher—neither a poet
nor a sociologist—should have placed side by side, in one breath, in one gust of false eloquence, a killer together with
whom? — a poor streetwalker, bending their completely different heads over that holy book. The Christian God, as
understood by those who believe in the Christian God, has pardoned the harlot nineteen centuries ago. The killer, on the
other hand, must be first of all examined medically. The two are on completely different levels. The inhuman and idiotic
of Raskolnikov cannot be even remotely compared to the plight of a girl who impairs human dignity by selling her
body. The murderer and the harlot reading the eternal book—what nonsense. There is no rhetorical link between a filthy
murderer, and this unfortunate girl. There is only the conventional link of the Gothic novel and the sentimental novel. It is a
shoddy literary trick, not a masterpiece of pathos and piety. Moreover, look at the absence of artistic balance. We have
been shown Raskolnikov’s crime in all sordid detail and we also have been given half a dozen different explanations for his
exploit. We have never been shown Sonya in the exercise of her trade. The situation is a glorified cliché” (75). He lodges similar complains about Sonya’s Doppelganger, Liza, the “fallen girl with the lofty heart” in Notes from Underground.

But why did nineteenth-century Europeans find the whore with the golden heart so compelling? Were they weepy sentimentalists? One would be hard-pressed to so generalize about an age; Nabokov should bristle at the generality, since he is so feverish about the aesthetic imperative of particulars and specifics.

I suspect that in Dostoevsky, if not in other gothicists, that the fallen girl to leads a protagonist to salvation plays an allegorical role. Sonya and Liza and the others are types of the church, a blemished and adulteress bride who still bears the word of God that mediates salvation. Even if Dostoevsky didn’t think explicitly in such terms (and my gut tells me he did), the resonances would still be there in a Russian literary culture that still echoed with Orthodoxy. 

Nabokov’s deafness to these echoes perhaps say more about shifts in Russian intellectual life during the 20th century than they do about Dostoevsky’s sentimentality.