Numerous critics have noted that Despair is the first major work by Nabokov in which the author

resorts to intertextual strategies and stratagems--to literary parody, disguised polemic, cunning play
with several superimposed subtexts, and so on. "Behind Despair stands a nexus of allusions so dense,
so rich, that progressing through their labyrinth would require another Holmes," wrote William C.
Carroll1 in a pioneering article that tracks some very important routes inside this labyrinth leading to
Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle.

Though Hermann Karlovich, the well-read hero-narrator of Despair, either names or quotes all the
above mentioned authors, in the consensus of critical opinion the most important among them is
Dostoevsky or, in the narrator's spiteful parlance, Dusty-and-Dusky, "our national expert in soul ague
and the aberrations of human self-respect."2 Much has been written about Dostoevsky as a main
parodic target of Despair, a book which does indeed abound in echoes from The Double, Crime and
Punishment and Notes from the Underground.3

Such intertextual readings centered on Dostoevsky accord fairly well with Nabokov's 1964 English
version of Despair, which differs drastically from the original in several aspects,4 including its
elaborate system of subtexts and parodic allusions. In this version Dostoevsky looms significantly
larger than in its Russian counterpart, and the vicious attacks upon him become too prominent to be
ascribed exclusively to the narrator's idiosyncrasy. The derogatory paronomasia semanticizing the
very name of Dostoevsky as connected with "dust" and "dusk"5 (which has no analog in the Russian
original) not only injects more venom into Hermann's iconoclastic stingers but also becomes a part of
the deeper semantic layers of the text controlled by the auctor rather than the narrator. Thus when
Hermann in the English translation complains of being unable to free his "dusty, dusky soul" through
a "refined self-torture" of writing (118), this addition to the original ex post facto becomes a
defamatory authorial allusion to the soul-searching of Dostoevsky's heroes and, by implication, to the
popular Western concept of the Russian (or Slavic) Soul associated with Dostoevsky's writings.6
Similarly, the "vortex of dust" that Hermann imagines in the yard of the Tarnitz hotel together with a
Tartar, "the Caspian wind" and "the pale sky sick of looking on fisheries" (77) can be decoded either
as truncated "text of Dusty" or as a part of the anagram VOrtEx Of DuST + SKY = DOSTOEVSKY and
thereby offers a clue to the hidden literary subtexts of this pivotal scene. These anagrams, puns and
paronomastic echoes place the concealed allusions to Dostoevsky on the same level as the "author's
watermarks" which, to quote Julian W. Connolly, now and then "shine through Hermann's words."7

The reorientation of the English Despair toward Dostoevsky was undoubtedly prompted by the
Western cultural context of the 1960's in which (and for which) Nabokov was rewriting his thirty-
year-old novel. By this time Nabokov had severed his ties to contemporary Russian literature,
whether written by émigrés or Soviet nationals. In an interview he explained:

The era of expatriation can be said to have ended during World War II. Old writers died, Russian
publishers also vanished, and worst of all, the general atmosphere of exile culture, with its splendor,
and vigor, and purity, and reverberative force, dwindled to a sprinkle of Russian language periodicals,
anemic in talent and provincial in tone (Strong Opinions, 37) .