SOURCE: “Madness and Doubling: From Dostoevsky's The Double to Nabokov's The Eye,” in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 24, 1991, pp. 129–39.

In the following essay, Connolly discusses The Double as a source of inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov's The Eye.

Vladimir Nabokov often expressed himself harshly when evaluating Fyodor Dostoevsky's abilities as a writer: “He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian,” he told an interviewer in 1963,¹ and in his Lectures on Russian Literature he stated that Dostoevsky was “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one.”² Not only did he criticize Dostoevsky in his lectures and interviews, he made fun of Dostoevsky in his fiction too, most notably in the novel Despair (Otchainie), where his narrator Hermann Karlovich calls Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment “Crime and Slime” and “Crime and Pun.”³ Yet Dostoevsky wrote one work that Nabokov professed to admire—The Double (Dvoinik)—which he termed...