It was Vladimir Nabokov who deposited me near this particular trough tonight, at the rim of this slop-bucket where the degradations of sentimentalism meet the elisions of the sensitivity. Specifically, it was Nabokov’s lecture on Dostoevsky, published in his Lectures on Russian Literature (which I read recently and which one can find partially excerpted in 1981 by the New York Times) that led me to this uncomfortable mess that continues to ravage poetics and prosody and discussions about craft.

After rigorously dragging Dostoevsky across the literary landscape and then proceeding to smear his own rancorous excrement on what remains of Dostoevsky’s disembodied soul, Nabokov scowls himself into theorizing that we must distinguish between the sentimental and the sensitive. This is quite sensible. Thus do I quote:

Nabokov begins by making a claim which he then substantiates with series of examples. Unfortunately, the only thing we learn about the sensitive is that “a sensitive person is never a cruel person”— which is as bald lie as any, since countless sensitive people are also viciously cruel, depending on their socialization, worldview, and personal ethics. Many bullies are just hypersensitive kids who prefer to feel powerful rather than vulnerable. Many sensitive people lack a capacity to feel for others. As everyone who has dated a born-in-the-US human knows, narcissists can be incredibly sensitive.

Since Nabokov doesn’t define the sensitive, or posit any correlation between sensitivity and empathy, I’m not sure why Lenin’s opera tears are sentimental rather than evidence of Lenin’s sensitivity. Nor do I understand why the politician’s evocation of Mother’s Day is taken for sentimentalism rather than political strategy. Nabokov’s fictional characters rarely weep. Is this because they are sensitive but not sentimental?

“Bullies are afraid of looking weak or sensitive,” my youngest informs me.

Trump won a political election by campaigning as a Bully; the American Christian Right went so far as to suggest that their God created him to be a bully, as part of His Plan to increase profits for gun makers. Trump, like Stalin, performed the politics of loving babies.

As for Dostoevsky, he is in big, big trouble with Nabokov, whose defines a “sentimentalist” as a writer who is guilty of “the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.”

Sentimentalism (noun): the excessive expression of feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia in behavior, writing, or speech.

“Automatic traditional compassion”! A tragedy that Vera permitted her beloved to past a first reading with this turgid phrasing. Personal sentiments aside, the word “sentiment” comes from the Latin for feeling, which is to say, sensing or experiencing. And sentiment, in every sense, has decreased in usage, where it is associated with maudlin sentimentalism, Romanticism, and amatory manipulation.

I feel close to you: this is how an expression of sentiment may sound in the 21st century, where the “I” speaks for itself, accepting responsibility for its “feelings,” and declaring those feelings in a relational context that implies individualistic agency and self-determination.

After determining that D. is vaguely and absolutely one of those sentimental saps, Nabokov detours into the lamentable influence of the “European mystery novel” on Dostoevsky’s novels:

Certainly, Dostoevsky’s obsession with staying Slav—-and cultivating the dark suffering of the Russian soul—was dreadfully essentialist, but one could argue that this particular relationship to suffering also became the lever applied by Stalinism. Dostoevsky didn’t invent it: he fictionalized it. One could argue that Solzhenitsyn also represents this school of Russian imperialist tenderness alongside the theme of Russian imperial carceral systems.

One could argue that a certain imperial tenderness inflects the descriptions of how conventions are altered in carceral spaces, as seen in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Notes from A Dead House, the fictionalized narration of Dostoevsky’s time in a prison camp:

It is now quite understandable why, as I already said earlier, my first question on entering prison was how to behave, on what footing to put myself wit these people. I sensed beforehand that I would often have such clashes with them as now, at work. But, despite any such clashes, I decided not to change my plan of action, which I had already partly thought out at the time; I knew it was right. Namely; I decided that I must behave as simply and independently as possible, by no means to betray any any effort to get closer with them; but not to reject them if they themselves wished to get closer. By no means to fear their threats and hatred and, as far as possible, to pretend I did not notice it. By no means to side with them on certain points, and not to cater to some of their habits and customs—in short, not to invite myself into their full friendship. I realized at first glance that they would be the first to despise me for it. However, by their way of thinking (and I later learned this for certain), I still had to maintain and even show respect for my noble origin before them, that is, to pamper myself, put on airs, disdain them, turn up my nose at everything, and keep my hands clean. That was precisely how they understood a nobleman to be. Naturally, they would abuse me for it, but deep down they would still respect me. Such a role was not for me; I had never been a nobleman according to their notions but instead I promised myself never to belittle my education or my way of thinking before them by any concession. If, to please them, I were to start fawning on them, agreeing with them, being familiar with them, entering into their various “qualities” in order to gain their sympathy—they would at once assume I was doing it out of fear and cowardice, and would treat me with contempt.

One could even imagine a theoretical relationship between the contempt experienced by the incarcerated Russian and the affect of man-shame that characterizes Putin’s recent imperialist ventures. One could, of course, argue, imagine, and saddle many irresponsible yet interesting things, given time and a stable income. Since I cannot argue them all, I will comfort myself by gesturing towards continuation of metaphysical discussion on the stairwell after midnight.

Nabokov made no secret of his contempt for Dostoevsky. In his 1964 interview in Playboy (as reprinted in Strong Opinions), Nabokov insisted:

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.

A few years later, “this reader” told James Mossman:

I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.

At this point, I am prepared to suggest the following: Nabokov reserves his most viperous critique for the writers whose influence is most detectable in his own work. N0 one would suggest Anton Chekhov influenced Nabokov’s writing style; this is why Nabokov considers Chekhov to be the greatest Russian writer who ever lived.

My favorite butterfly-king takes Dostoevsky for a simpleton who pens mystery novels because he cannot imagine the human condition. Additionally, he misuses the word “farce” and refuses to define it; he leaves that “farce” there like a tapeworm in the middle of the paragraph, where what Dostoevsky positions against “drama” is the “absurdity” that will define the coming century.

Is Nabokov envious of Dostoevsky’s insight? Only Vera knows.

Only a frog would populate his books with characters that suffer from epilepsy or mental illness, Nabokov tells us. The “raving lunatic” characters, on this view, have little relation to the world, and offer nothing sublime, nothing as viscerally fantastic as, for example, a man in an elegant coat at the opera who is trying to diddle a child.

“Art is a divine game,” and Nabokov wants the game to feel as if a god set it up rather than a fool who got himself imprisoned in Siberia for several years and dined with various riff-raff and criminals.

“A shudder with a strong element of delight in it” could describe a sadist’s response to the suicides of Othello, Kirilov or Svidrigailov? I’m not sure a strong element of delight is the necessary intellectual or aesthetic response to tragedy. It’s not a wrong response, but it is a personal one, namely, the response of Vladimir Nabokov.

And there are ways in which Nabokov’s own novels fail by the standard he sets for Dostoevsky?

“A genius of spiritual morbidity”: Nabokov grants Dostoevsky this much—which is a bit more than he grants “Pasternak’s vilely-written Zhivago.”

Alas, Dostoevsky fails the Nabokovian test of “harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with”:

Dostoevsky’s “rational” “crude methods” make “his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people”; his “mechanical methods” are soiled by their “earthbound” attention to “conventional novels” published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; his European style betrays Russia; his Slavophilism is anti-European; his “verbal overflow” is epileptic; his “unreal” fictional world fails to transfix the reader.

Truly, Nabokov’s personal embodiment of dialectical energy is exemplary. Only Joseph Brodsky could match so much badminton with his shadow. Alas, despite the tenuousness of some of their critical writings, both Nabs and Joe were incredible writers whose words continue to ravish my brain. So, to be fair, I leave you with a particularly lovely Nabokovian passage from his attack on Dostoevsky’s dead corpus:

Speaking of blood donations, soul-stomachs, and inspiration, here is Paul Auster’s Ferguson (in the novel, 4 3 2 1) describing Dostoevsky’s impact on him:

If the sentimentalism of Auster’s troth bothers the rigorously-sensitive, I would argue they need to make space for the blasting winds of the universe and all related flailings.

Alternately, one can take the route Thomas Bernhard took in Extinctions— and nail the Bovarisms to a chair of national self-implication.