Nabokov's novel “The real life of Sebastian knight” as the hybrid Dostoevsky's hypertext (article I)

Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight” is not one of those works of the writer, which reveal a clear orientation to Dostoevsky. And yet, it has both obvious and rather hidden traces of the presence of this Russian classical writer’s images. Although Nabokov himself never mentioned Dostoevsky’s novel “The Adolescent”, however, in the development of the main plot conflict of his novel there are characters and images inspired by this novel. At the same time, it is quite noticeable that certain characters of Nabokov’s novel: Mr. Bishop, Madame Lecerf, Sebastian, V. - are partly stylized as the characters of Dostoevsky’s novel “The Gambler”: Mr. Astley, M-lle Blanche, Alexei Ivanovich. Finally, there are also some reminiscences of other Dostoevsky’s works in “The Real Life…” and its certain relationship with the poetics of the writer. This article represents a detailed analysis of this obligatory and optional intertextual ties of Nabokov’s novel with Dostoevsky’s works. The hypertextuality of “The Real Life…” in relation to “The Adolescent” is seen in the article primarily in the fact that its main conflict related to V.’s attempts to unravel the personality of his deceased brother Sebastian ia s variation of the central storyline of “The Adolescent”, which aims to Arkady Dolgoruky’s comprehension of the character of his father Versilov. Tht author’s attention in this first of two articles devoted to this topic also focuses on the affinity of some plot points and of sone characters of the two novels: Sebastian and his father, on the one hand, and Versilov, on the other, V. and Arkady Dolgoruky, Sebastian’s mother Virginia and Versilov’s first wife Fanariotova, Clare’s friend Miss Pratt and Tatyana Pavlovna Prutkova.