Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair: Mortal Combat with the Other

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

The central point of the article is that despite Vladimir Nabokov’s
well-known contempt for psychoanalysis, many of his prosaic
texts are commensurate to psychoanalytic discourse. In particular,
Nabokov’s novel Despair can be read not only as a crime
story or a novel on writing, but also as a peculiar analytics of
human subjectivity. Using some lacanian concepts as a theoretical
tool the author of the text considers Despair as a phenomenology
of the split in consciousness where hero’s (Hermann) narcissistic
speech is perpetually undermined by the speech of the unconscious.