Reader As Accomplice

Alexander Spektor is an associate professor of Russian at the University of Georgia.

“A paradigm-setting book that boldly recasts our understanding of Bakhtin and, through him, the authors with whom he has often been placed in dialogue. Particularly important is Spektor’s profound revision of the notion of polyphony, which has (mis)guided readers of Dostoevsky for several decades. His engrossing analysis of Dostoevsky and Nabokov grows out of a transformative polemic with Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, which Spektor reads through the lens of Bakhtin’s ‘dark’ work of the 1940s.” —Eric Naiman, author of Nabokov, Perversely“Nabokov disliked Dostoevsky as artist and moralist. But Alexander Spektor, in this provocative and close-grained study, asks us to look beyond matters of personal preference to the actual working of both writers’ great novels, how they nurture and bind the reader. The result is fresh insight into the relation between authorship and freedom, reading and ethical maturation, and narrative plot inexorably experienced as acts of witnessing.” —Caryl Emerson, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature“Alexander Spektor’s task, to pair Dostoevsky and Nabokov, is not an easy one, and yet he succeeds. He looks at the ‘ethics of form,’ and not at the writers’ moral preoccupation (or lack thereof). In the end, Spektor’s Reader as Accomplice shows how—through intricate use of literary form—both Dostoevsky, a Christian ethicist, and Nabokov, a self-professed amoralist, create literature that puts the reader into the position of appreciating the ethical complexities and contradictions inherent in the act of writing.” —Irina Paperno, author of “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self“Reader as Accomplice offers a vital and revitalizing juxtaposition of Dostoevsky and Nabokov, emphasizing the intertwined responsibilities of author, reader, and character that each of these two giant figures brought to literary art. Spektor proves dazzlingly that despite their many differences, these two writers shared profound ethical concerns about all discursive relationships, and that reading them in light of one another brings new sharpness and potential to our understanding of both. For Spektor, readers, authors, and characters all share profound ethical responsibility for the acts unfolding within and beyond the text.” —Stephen H. Blackwell, author of The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science

• Introduction. Dostoevsky and Nabokov: The Case for Narrative Ethics1. Between Sin and Redemption: Narrative as the Conduit for Responsibility in Dostoevsky’s The Meek One2. From Word to Silence: Responding to The Idiot Ethically3. The Metaphysics of Authorship: Narrative Ethics in Nabokov’s Despair4. The Dangers of Aesthetic Bliss: The Double Bind of Language in Bend SinisterConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex