Nabokov's novel “The real life of Sebastian knight” as the hybrid Dostoevsky's hypertext. Article 2

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. Nabokov himself never mentioned Dostoevsky’s novel “The Adolescent”, however, his orientation at this novel is so significant that just not mentioning it by the writer anywhere and never seems to be very significant. In the development of the main plot conflict of his novel there are heroes and images inspired by the “Adolescent”. In the first of two articles on the echoes of “The Adolescent” in Nabokov’s novel, our attention was focused mainly on the commonality of some plot lines and images: Sebastian and their father in common with V., on the one hand, and Versilov, on the other, V. and Arkady Dolgoruky, the first wife of Sebastian’s father Virginia and the first wife of Versilov Fanariotova, Claire’s friend Miss Pratt’s and Arkadiy’s “aunt” Tatyana Pavlovna Prutkova. The second article deals with the clear similarity of some of the other heroes of these two novels: Madame Leserf and Katerina Nikolaevna and Anna Andreevna Akhmakova, Claire and Arkady’s mother Sofya Andreevna, as well as Palchin and Byoring. The article contains a detailed analysis of this “obligatory” and “optional”, according to M. Riffater, intertextual ties of Nabokov’s novel with the work of Dostoevsky. “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight” is considered in the article as the phenomenon of “hybrid intertextuality”, since the second part of it moves along the plot tracks and motifs not so much of the “The Adolescent” as along the plot tracks and motifs of another Dostoevsky’s novel “The Gambler”.