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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Katherine Mansfield criticism

May 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Katherine Mansfield criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Mansfield and her works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks and print-on-demand reissues. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings a paperback copy of Antony Alper’s biography The Life of Katherine Mansfield was available at Amazon for one penny.


Katherine Mansfield criticism


The Life of Katherine Mansfield – Antony Alpers, Oxford University Press, 1987. This is one of the first serious biographies, written by fellow New Zealander and Mansfield scholar Antony Alpers.

Katherine Mansfield – Ida Constance Baker, London: Michael Joseph, 1971. A memoir by Mansfield’s long-suffering yet most devoted friend.

Katherine Mansfield (Writers & Their Work) – Andrew Bennet, Northcote House Publishers, 2002. This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield’s short stories informed by recent biographical, critical and editorial work on her life and on her stories, letters and notebooks.

Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer – Gillian Boddy, Penguin Books, 1988.

Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield – Mary Burgan, Johns Hopkins Press, 1994. This study shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses in a way that sheds new light on the study of women’screativity. It concludes that Mansfield’s drive toward self-integration was her strategy for writing–and for staying alive.

Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories – Pamela Dunbar, Palgrave Schol Print, 1997. A new evaluation of Katherine Mansfield reveals her as an original and highly subversive writer preoccupied with issues like sexuality and the irrationality of the human mind.

Katherine Mansfield – Joanna FitzPatrick, La Drome Press, 2014.

Katherine Mansfield (Key Women Writers) – Kate Fullbrook, Prentice Hall, 1986.

Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories – Cherry A. Hankin, London: P{algrave Macmillan, 1983.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence – Melinda Harvey, Edinburgh University Press, 2015. This study shows that ‘influence’ is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can be evidenced by such things as satire, plagiarism, yearning and resentment.
Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller – Kathleen Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Weaving together intimate details from Katherine Mansfield’s letters and journals with the writings of her friends and acquaintances, this study creates a captivating drama of this fragile yet feisty author: her life, loves and passion for writing.
Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction – Sydney Janet Kaplan, Cornell University Press, 1991.

Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. A collection which ncludes essays by major scholars in several areas including musicology, postcolonial theory, epistolary and biographical studies, representing recent developments in Modernist studies and thus exploring her continued literary legacy to contemporary writers.

Katherine Mansfield and World War One – Gerri Kimber (ed), Edinburgh University Press, 2014.The articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield’s explicit and implicit war stories, these essays refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and their genealogy.

Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story – Gerri Kimber, Palgrave Pivot, 2014. This volume offers an introductory overview to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, discussing a wide range of her most famous stories from different viewpoints. The book elaborates on Mansfield’s themes and techniques, thereby guiding the reader – via close textual analysis – to an understanding of the author’s modernist techniques.

Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. This collection of essays offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield’s work by bringing together recent biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art in the context of Continental Europe.

Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public – Jenny McDonnell, London: Palgrave Schol Print, 2010. This study provides the first comprehensive study of Mansfield’s career as a professional writer in a commercial literary world, during the years that saw the emergence and consolidation of literary modernism in Britain.
Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View – Jeffrey Meyers, Cooper Square Publishers, 2002. This study chronicles her tempestuous relationships (that mixed abuse with devotion) and the years she fought a losing battle with tuberculosis.

Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction – Patrick D. Morrow, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993. This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield’s fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime.

The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks – Margaret Scott, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. The first unexpurgated edition of her private writings. Fully and accurately transcribed, these diary entries, drafts of letters, introspective notes jotted on scraps of paper, unfinished stories, half-plotted novels, poems, recipes, and shopping lists offer a complete and compelling portrait of a complex woman.

Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) – Angela Smith, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. This study explores Mansfield’s idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive.

Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life – Claire Tomalin, London: Penguin, 2012. A biography which captures the creative zest of a writer who was sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism – Janet Wilson (ed), London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Reinterpretations and readings enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to Mansfield’s diaries and letters. These essays combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class, gender, and biography/autobiography.

© Roy Johnson 2015


More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
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Filed Under: Katherine Mansfield Tagged With: English literature, Katherine Mansfield, Literary criticism, Literary studies

King, Queen, Knave

February 29, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

King, Queen, Knave was first published in Berlin in 1928 under the title Korol, Dama, Valet. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s second novel, written in his native Russian, and appeared under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin, which he had adopted earlier to distinguish himself from his father (also called Vladimir Nabokov) who was a writer and a politician. The novel was much later translated into English by Nabokov and his son Dmitri, and published in London in 1968.

King, Queen, Knave


King, Queen, Knave – critical commentary

Characters

There are really only three characters of any importance in the novel – Kurt Dreyer, his wife Martha, and his young nephew Franz. Because there are only three characters, the motivation for their behaviour becomes an important factor in the logic and development of the narrative.

Dreyer is almost a parody of the rich and bountiful uncle. He is affable and generous towards his nephew, and he is amazingly tolerant towards his cold and unresponsive wife, though we do learn that he has liaisons with two of his former secretaries (‘stenographists’). We are given no information that explains his indulgent attitude to Franz, and he passes the whole narrative apparently sublimely ignorant of his wife’s infidelity and her plans to kill him.

Martha is a cold and scheming manipulator who is obnoxious to her husband and nasty to everybody else except Franz. She even mistreats her own pet dog, and eventually arranges for it to be put down. Her physical attractiveness is seen largely from Franz’s point of view. The main problem with her characterisation is that it is very unlikely that a woman of her type would forge such an important alliance with an inexperienced and penniless young man from the countryside who was fifteen years younger, and her protestations of love for Franz do not seem psychologically convincing.

Franz is the archetypal naive young man from a small country town sent into the big metropolitan city to make good. He is treated generously by his rich and indulgent uncle, and then seduced by his scheming aunt and led into the realms of plots to murder his own benefactor. As this process deepens, he does become quite convincingly distanced from Martha and oppressed by the illicit relationship he has forged with her.

Translation

Nabokov wrote his earliest novels and stories in Russian, but when he emigrated to the United states in 1940, he switched to writing in English – the ‘third’ language of the Russian aristocracy (French being second). For the next twenty years he worked as a college and university teacher, then following the worldwide success of his novel Lolita in 1959, he moved to Switzerland and began translating his earlier works into English – for understandable commercial reasons.

It is almost certain that he ‘improved’ these earlier productions during this process. In his author’s foreword to the English edition he admits to not only making ‘little changes’ but to having ‘mercilessly struck out and rewritten many lame odds and ends’ as well as making changes to the plot.

The little changes show up nowhere more obviously than in his choice of vocabulary. Nabokov was much given to stylistic quirks such as the use of mixed registers, alliteration, and obscure terminology – but some of the language he uses in King, Queen, Knave gives the impression of having been excavated from a very large dictionary and shoehorned into the narrative. He uses terms such as nacrine, chelonians, cerevis, chorea, pygal, karakul and even words he makes up, such as avunculicide.

It is not just that the terms are obscure, but they do not sit easily with the prose in which they are embedded. They create a distinct impression of an author showing off – something about which Nabokov’s detractors have often complained.

There are also instances of irregular translation and non-standard English. Dreyer at one point is described as a ‘saloonkeeper’ which he certainly is not, and at another point Martha finds ‘an old little album of faded snapshots’ – which any native speaker would render as ‘a little old album’.

There is no cultural law against an author ‘improving’ his own work. This process commonly takes place in early drafts and revisions of a work in galley proof. In the nineteenth century it also took place when a work made its first appearance in serial magazine format and then was re-edited by the author before its publication as an independent volume as a book. But these were normally minor revisions of spelling and punctuation – what are known as ‘accidentals’ in editing parlance.

Substantial changes and re-workings on the other hand amount to a new version of the text, and changes to the plot make it virtually a new work altogether. This is quite a contentious issue, and there is a whole academic project waiting for someone with the language skills to make a comparison of Nabokov’s early works in Russian with his later translations into English which were made by Nabokov himself, often in collaboration with his wife and son.

Reader expectation

Nabokov is particularly fond of teasing his readers and thwarting their expectations by ironic plot reversals or false signals woven into his narratives. Early in King, Queen, Knave there are a number of motoring problems, all of which seem like pre-figurations of disaster – particularly for Dreyer. First his car (the symbolically named ‘Icarus’) is involved in an accident, which makes him suspect that his driver has been drinking. But when the foreshadowed accident actually does occur, it is the driver who is killed, not Dreyer.

Franz never reveals the address of his seedy apartment which acts as a trysting spot for his meetings with Martha. But when Dreyer meets Franz in the street and asks to see the apartment, neither of them know what we the readers know – that Martha has also gone out for a walk and is likely to be in the room. So the scene is set for a classical farce-type exposure and denouement. But the adultery is not revealed, because the landlord actually announces to Franz (and Dreyer) that ‘Your girl is in there’. Dreyer assumes Franz has a secret girlfriend, and tactfully withdraws, not realising that the clandestine lover is his own wife.

Similarly, the holiday plan to murder Dreyer by throwing him out of a boat is very carefully orchestrated and is surrounded by lots of small setbacks which heighten the dramatic tension. Dreyer at first doesn’t want to get into the boat, then when he does the ‘arrangements’ are thwarted, and finally Dreyer reveals that he is on the point of securing a business deal that will make him even richer. Martha’s ambition to be a wealthy widow leads her to call off the murder, she catches cold in the rain, and with a final dramatic plot twist, it is she who dies from pneumonia shortly afterwards.


King, Queen, Knave – study resources

King, Queen, Knave King, Queen, Knave – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

King, Queen, Knave King, Queen, Knave – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

King, Queen, Knave Korol, Dama, Valet – Russian original – Amazon UK

King, Queen, Knave Korl, Dama, Valet – Russian original – Amazon US

King, Queen, Knave The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

King, Queen, Knave Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

King, Queen, Knave Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

King, Queen, Knave Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

King, Queen, Knave The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

King, Queen, Knave Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

King, Queen, Knave Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

King, Queen, Knave Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials


King, Queen, Knave


King, Queen, Knave – chapter summaries

1.   Young dreamer Franz transfers from his third class carriage to second class on a train to Berlin. There he silently shares a compartment with Dreyer and his wife Martha, to whom Franz is attracted. There appears to be mild domestic tension between the couple.

2.   Next day Franz breaks his spectacles, then takes a bus to his uncle’s house on the outskirts of the city. The uncle turns out to be Dreyer, who generously lavishes food and drink on him over lunch. Afterwards, Martha argues with her husband about his behaviour.

3.   Next day Franz gets new glasses and goes hunting for a room. Martha helps him to find one, then reflects on the men she has attracted. Franz goes out every day exploring Berlin, until he is suddenly summoned to the house by Dreyer.

4.   Dreyer takes Franz to his department store at night and gives him lessons in sales technique. Franz takes up his role of shop assistant but feels distant from it in the sportswear department. He visits the Dreyer house frequently and is obsessed with Martha’s physical attractiveness. Martha secretly wants a lover, and thinks Franz will do. He is too timid to act.

5.   Dreyer is approached by the inventor of some synthetic material in search of funding. Franz is writing a letter to his mother one Sunday when he is visited by Martha in his room. They become lovers, and she visits him on a regular basis. Franz subsequently feels uncomfortable in Dreyer’s presence. Dreyer summons the inventor to another interview, but his intentions remain obscure.

6.   Martha is in a rapture over Franz. She thinks about how much money she has for the future. Dreyer, Martha, and Franz go to a variety show. When Dreyer doesn’t show up as expected, Franz and Martha have dinner alone. She becomes agitated when Dreyer is very late. Eventually he arrives, having been in a car crash which has killed his driver.

7.   Franz and Martha fantasise about marriage and begin to consider ‘removing’ Dreyer. There is a Xmas party where Dreyer frightens the guests and Franz is sick. Next day Dreyer announces that he is leaving for three weeks’ skiing in Davos.

8.   Martha teaches Franz to dance. After two weeks Dreyer decides to go back home. Martha and Franz are playing at being married, and they narrowly miss being caught out when Dreyer returns. They start to consider various ways of poisoning him.

9.   Dreyer meets Erica, his former lover, who correctly guesses that his wife is unfaithful to him. Franz and Martha rehearse plans to kill Dreyer by shooting him. Martha locates a revolver in her husband’s desk. They all go off to play tennis, at which Franz is quite hopeless. Martha explains to Franz a new (and quite impractical) plan for the shooting.

10.   Dreyer’s inventor acquaintance produces an automated mannequin. The men’s outfitting business starts to lose money. The gun turns out to be a cigar lighter. Martha and Franz begin to despair. Dreyer visits an exhibition of crime at police headquarters.

11.   Dreyer and Martha go for separate walks. Dreyer bumps into Franz and they go to visit his apartment, not knowing that Martha is already there. She is saved from discovery by Dreyer’s misunderstanding of the landlord’s warning. Preparations are made for a holiday at the seaside, where Martha has a plan to kill Dreyer by drowning..

12.   Dreyer, Martha, and Franz are on holiday at a Baltic seaside resort. Martha and Franz plan to throw Dreyer (who cannot swim) out of their rowing boat. But Dreyer reveals that he is selling his secret product and will make a lot of money next day. The murder is postponed and Martha becomes ill.

13.   Dreyer returns to Berlin and puts on a display of the automated mannequins for his prospective customer – but it does not seem successful. He is recalled to the seaside hotel, because Martha has been taken to hospital in a nearby town. Franz is oppressed by the whole intrigue, but is asked to bring Martha’s earrings to the hospital. But the request turns out to be a linguistic error – and when he arrives there, she is dead.


King, Queen, Knave

first edition 1928


King, Queen, Knave – principal characters
Franz Bubendorf a myopic 20 year old
Kurt Dreyer his uncle, a rich and expansive owner of Dandy, a men’s clothing business
Martha his attractive and manipulative wife (34)
Enricht Franz’s seedy landlord
Piffke a store manager at Dandy
Willy Wald a friend of Dreyer
Elsa Wald his wife

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

King, Queen, KnavePale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
King, Queen, Knave Buy the book at Amazon UK
King, Queen, Knave Buy the book at Amazon US

King, Queen, KnavePnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
King, Queen, KnaveBuy the book at Amazon UK
King, Queen, KnaveBuy the book at Amazon US

King, Queen, KnaveCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
King, Queen, KnaveBuy the book at Amazon UK
King, Queen, KnaveBuy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2016


More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories


Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Vladimir Nabokov

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

March 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, textual history, study resources, and web links

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) is Lawrence’s most controversial novel, and perhaps the first serious work of literature to explore human sexuality in explicit detail. It features some of his most lyrical and poetic prose style alongside the theme of class conflict – acted out between the aristocratic Constance Chatterley, and her gamekeeper-lover Mellors. Some feminist critics now claim the novel to be deeply misogynistic, because part of its argument is that women will reach true fulfillment only by submitting themselves to men. Lawrence wrote the novel three times, and it made important historical impacts twice over: one when it was first published in 1928, and the second in the famous obscenity trial in 1960.

D.H.Lawrence portrait

D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence is a writer who excites great passions in his readers – which is entirely appropriate, since that is how he wrote. He is the first really great writer to come from the (more or less) working class, and much of his work deals with issues of class, as well as other fundamentals such as the relationships between men, women, and the natural world.

At times he becomes mystic and visionary, and his prose style can be poetic, didactic, symbolic, and bombastic all within the space of a few pages. He also deals with issues of sexuality and politics in a manner which is often controversial.


Lady Chatterley’s Lover – textual history

There were in fact three different versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The first, written in 1926, is now known as The First Lady Chatterley. Its main focus is on social and political aspects of a mining community, and it has none of the explicit sex scenes or the frank language for which the third version became famous. The first version was not published until 1944.

The second version was called, rather coyly, John Thomas and Lady Jane. The relationship between Constance Chatterley and her gamekeeper (then called Oliver Parkin) is treated in a more gentle manner. Indeed, Lawrence had Tenderness as an alternative title. It was first published in an Italian translation by Mondadori in 1954.

When he finished the third version in 1928 Lawrence encountered immediate opposition to its publication – both by his agents and his publishers. Nobody would touch the book unless he made substantial cuts – which he refused to make. Lawrence was a veteran of battles with publishers and censors, but he believed very passionately that writers should be free to express themselves openly about matters which they believed to be important and true.

Lady Chatterley's Lover - Penguin coverHe reverted to an old-fashioned strategy for publication and raised money by subscriptions, comissioning a Florentine bookseller named Guiseppe Orioli to print the book in his Tipografia Giuntina using Lawrence’s own capital. The 1,000 copies of this first edition printed in July 1928 were sold through Lawrence’s close personal friends. At only two pounds, the book sold quickly, so that by December, this first version was completely sold out. In November, he published another cheaper edition of 200 copies which sold just as quickly as the first.

The novel quickly developed a scandalous reputation, both because of its explicit sexual scenes and because of Lawrence’s (very occasional) use of words such as cunt and fuck which were regarded as completely taboo terms at the time. Lawrence did indeed make money out of the venture, which he shrewdly put into successful investments on the New York Stock Exchange. But two things conspired against him making even more.

Because the book had been privately published, it was not formally copyrighted, and because of its reputation many other printers and publishers issued pirated copies, which sold well and made them, but not Lawrence, healthy profits. The book was pirated on both sides of the Atlantic.

In response to this, Lawrence put forth a second edition in November 1928, again from the tiny Florentine print shop, and then a cheap edition in May 1929 of 3,000 copies in Paris. This edition sold out by August at sixty francs and was the first to include his prefatory essay entitled ‘My Skirmish with Jolly Roger’. This was a defense, explication, and history of the novel that was published posthumously as A Propos of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

Lawrence became extremely ill in late 1929 and moved to the Swiss Alps and then to the South of France, where he died in 1930. With the death of Lawrence, publishers felt at liberty to expurgate the novel at will. Without a copyright, a publisher who could come up with a clean version had the promise of the novel’s preceding reputation to back up its success.

In 1932, two expurgated versions were published, 2,000 copies in America and 3,440 copies in England. The publishers of this version euphemistically referred to it as an `abridged’ edition. Whole pages were left out with nothing but confusing asterisks left to mark their omissions. There was no consistency in the use of these astriks; some deleted pages were not even mentioned. Every description of the act of sex and all four-letter words which could have been remotely objectional were left out.

The National Union Catalog records fifteen different printings of expurgated versions between the years 1932 and 1943 in America, England, and Paris. A considerable number of these novels were sold, and the black market still carried a full line of assorted unexpurgated copies. The novel continued to have an underground existence and a high reputation as a banned or forbidden work in the post-war years.

When the full unexpurgated edition was published in Britain in 1960, the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act, introduced by Roy Jenkins, had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was for the frequent use of the word ‘fuck’ and its derivatives.

Various academic critics, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner and Raymond Williams, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on November 2, 1960, was not guilty. This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it was the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read’.

[With thanks to Randall Martin.]


Lady Chatterley’s Lover – study resources

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – annotated Kindle eBook edition

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Signet Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover –  Signet Classics – Amazon US

Lady Chatterley's Lover The First Lady Chatterley’s Lover – first version – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley's Lover The Second Lady Chatterley’s Lover – second version – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – plain text edition at Project Gutenberg

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – audioBook on CD – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley's Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Cambridge scholarly edition – Amazon UK

Pointer The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Short Novels of D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK


Lady Chatterley’s Lover – plot summary

Connie Reid is raised as a cultured bohemian of the upper-middle class, and is introduced to love affairs – intellectual and sexual liaisons – as a teenager. In 1917, at 23, she marries Clifford Chatterley, the scion of an aristocratic line. After a month’s honeymoon, he is sent to war, and returns impotent, paralyzed from the waist down.

After the war, Clifford becomes a successful writer, and many intellectuals flock to the Chatterley mansion at Wragby Hall. Connie feels isolated; the intellectuals she meets prove empty and bloodless, and she resorts to a brief and dissatisfying affair with a visiting playwright, Michaelis.

Lady Chatterley's Lover Connie longs for real human contact, and falls into despair, as all men seem scared of true feelings and true passion. There is a growing distance between Connie and Clifford, who has retreated into the meaningless pursuit of success in his writing and in his obsession with coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep physical aversion. A nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford so that Connie can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep dependence on the nurse, his manhood fading into an infantile reliance on her services.

Into the void of Connie’s life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on Clifford’s estate, newly returned from serving in the army. Mellors is aloof and derisive, and yet Connie feels curiously drawn to him by his innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of natural sensuality.

After several chance meetings in which Mellors keeps her at arm’s length, reminding her of the class distance between them, they meet by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This happens on several occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between them, remaining profoundly separate from him despite their physical closeness.

One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and they have sex on the forest floor. This time, they experience simultaneous orgasms. This is a revelatory and profoundly moving experience for Connie; she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that they have connected on some deep sensual level. She is proud to believe that she is pregnant with Mellors’ child. He is a real, ‘living’ man, as opposed to the emotionally dead intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow progressively closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman and man rather than as two minds or intellects.

Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone, Mellors’ old wife returns, causing a scandal. Connie returns to find that Mellors has been fired as a result of the negative rumors spread about him by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated divorce proceedings. Connie admits to Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors’ baby, but Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working on a farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister, also waiting.


Lady Chatterley’s Lover – principal characters
Clifford Chatterley landowner, disabled WW1 veteran, and businessman
Constance Chatterley his wife, an intellectual and social progressive
Oliver Mellors ex-soldier, ex-blacksmith, intellectual, and the gamekeeper at Wragby Hall
Mrs (Ivy) Bolton Clifford’s devoted housekeeper
Michaelis successful Irish playwright
Sir Macolm Reid Connie’s father, a painter
Hilda Reid Connie’s sister
Tommy Dukes an intellectual friend of Clifford’s
Duncan Forbes an artist friend of Connie and Hilda
Bertha Coutts Mellor’s wife – who does no appear in the novel

Film version

2007 French adaptation of the second version of the novel

Pointer See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Further reading

Biography

Pointer Frieda Lawrence, Not I, But the Wind…, New York: Viking Press, 1934.

Pointer Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D.H. Lawrence, London: Unwin Books, 1951.

Pointer Keith Sagar, The Life of D.H.Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.

Pointer John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Early Years: 1885-1912: The Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Pointer Brenda Maddox, The Married Man: A Biography of D.H.Lawrence, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994.

Letters

Pointer J.T. Boulton (ed), The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Criticism

Pointer David Ellis, D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Pointer John Worthen, The First ‘Women in Love’ (Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.HLawrence), Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Pointer Graham Handley, Brodie’s Notes on D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’, London: Macmillan, 1992.

Pointer Harold Bloom, D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ (Modern Critical Interpretations), Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Pointer Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Pointer Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence, London: Routledge, 2002.


D.H.Lawrence painting - The Holy Family

Painting by Lawrence – ‘The Holy Family’


Background reading

Pointer button Mary Freeman, D.H.Lawrence A Basic Study of His Ideas, Grosset and Dunlap, 1955.

Pointer button F.R.Leavis, D.H.Lawrence: Novelist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1955.

Pointer button Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D.H.Lawrence, Dobson, 1955.

Pointer button Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Capricorn Books, 1956.

Pointer button Eliseo Vivas, D.H.Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art, General Books 1960.

Pointer button Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D.H.Lawrence’s Shorter Fiction, University of Washington Press, 1962.

Pointer button Eugene Goodheart, The Utopian Vision of D.H.Lawrence, Transaction Publishers, 1963.

Pointer button Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D.H.Lawrence, Oxford University Press, 1963.

Pointer button George Panichas, Adventure in Consciousness: Lawrence’s Religious Quest, Folcroft Library Editions, 1964.

Pointer button Helen Corke, D.H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years, Austin (Tex): University of Texas Press, 1965.

Pointer button George Ford, Double Measure; A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

Pointer button H M Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, Evanston (Ill): Northwestern University Press, 1965.

Pointer button Keith Sagar, The Art of D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Pointer button David Cavitch, D.H.Lawrence and the New World, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Pointer button Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D.H.Lawrence and English Romanticism, London: Routledge, 1969.

Pointer button Baruch Hochman, Another Ego: Self and Society in D.H.Lawrence, University of South Carolina Press, 1970.

Pointer button Keith Aldritt, The Visual Imagination of D.H.Lawrence, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971.

Pointer button R E Pritchard, D.H.Lawrence: Body of Darkness, Hutchinson, 1971.

Pointer button John E Stoll, The Novels of D.H.Lawrence: A Search for Integration, University of Missouri Press, 1971.

Pointer button Frank Kermode, D.H. Lawrence, London: Fontana, 1973.

Pointer button Scott Sanders, D.H.Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels, Vision Press, 1973.

Pointer button F.R.Leavis, Thought, Words, and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence, Chatto and Windus, 1976.

Pointer button Marguerite Beede Howe, The Art of the Self in D.H.Lawrence, Ohio University Press, 1977.

Pointer button Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Pointer button Anne Smith, Lawrence and Women, London: Vision Press, 1978.

Pointer button R.P. Draper (ed), D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979.

Pointer button John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, London: Macmillan, 1979.

Pointer button Aidan Burns, Nature and Culture in D.H.Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1980.

Pointer button L D Clark, The Minoan Distance: Symbolism of Travel in D.H.Lawrence, University of Arizona Press, 1980.

Pointer button Roger Ebbatson, D.H.Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction 1859-1914, Humanities Oress, 1980.

Pointer button Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Writer and His Work, New York: Scribner, 1980.

Pointer button Philip Hobsbaum, A Reader’s Guide to D.H.Lawrence, Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Pointer button Kim A.Herzinger , D.H.Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915, Bucknell University Press, 1982.

Pointer button Graham Holderness, D.H.Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1982.

Pointer button Hilary Simpson, D.H.Lawrence and Feminism, London: Croom Helm, 1982.

Pointer button Gamini Salgado, A Preface to D.H. Lawrence, London: Longman, 1983.

Pointer button Judith Ruderman, D.H.Lawrence and the Devouring Mother, Duke University Press, 1984.

Pointer button Anthony Burgess, Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H.Lawrence, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Pointer button Sheila McLeod, Lawrence’s Men and Women, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Pointer button Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, London: Calder Publications, [1930] 1985.

Pointer button Keith Sagar, D.H.Lawrence: Life Into Art, London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Pointer button Mara Kalnins (ed), D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, Bristol: Classical Press, 1986.

Pointer button Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1986

Pointer button Peter Scheckner, Class, Politics, and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D.H.Lawrence, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.

Pointer button Cornelia Nixon, D.H.Lawrence’s Leadership Novels and the Turn Against Women, University of California Press, 1986.

Pointer button Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, Mercat Press, 1988.

Pointer button Peter Balbert, D.H.Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Pointer button Wayne Templeton, States of Estrangement: the Novels of D.H.Lawrence 1912-17, Whiston Publishing, 1989.

Pointer button Janet Barron, D.H.Lawrence: (Feminist Readings), Prentice Hall, 1990.

Pointer button Keith Brown (ed), Rethinking Lawrence, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.

Pointer button James C Cowan, D.H.Lawrence and the Trembling Balance, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

Pointer button John B Humma, Metaphor and Meaning in D.H.Lawrence’s Later Novels, University of Missouri Press 1990.

Pointer button G M Hyde, D.H.Lawrence (Modern Novelists), London: Macmillan, 1990.

Pointer button Allan Ingram, The Language of D.H. Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Pointer button Nancy Kushigian, Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre-War Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1990.

Pointer button Tony Pinkney, Lawrence (New Readings), Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Weatsheaf, 1990.

Pointer button Leo J.Dorisach, Sexually Balanced Relationships in the Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.

Pointer button Nigel Kelsey, D.H.Lawrence: Sexual Crisis (Studies in 20th Century Literature), London: Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer button Barbara Mensch, D.H.Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality, London: Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer button John Worthen, D H Lawrence (Modern Fiction), London: Arnold, 1991.

Pointer button Michael Bell, D.H.Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Virginia Hyde, The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Pointer button James B.Sipple, Passionate Form: life process as artistic paradigm in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1992.

Pointer button Kingsley Widmer, Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D.H.Lawrence, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Anne Fernihough, D.H.Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, Clarendon Press, 1993.

Pointer button Linda R Williams, Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D.H.Lawrence, Prentice Hall, 1993.

Pointer button Katherine Waltenscheid, The Resurrection of the Body: Touch in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1993.

Pointer button Robert E.Montgomery, The Visionary D.H.Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Pointer button Leo Hamalian, D.H.Lawrence and Nine Women Writers, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Pointer button Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Pointer button Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D.H.Lawrence, London: Routledge, 2002.

Pointer button James C Cowan, D.H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality, Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Pointer button John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, London: Penguin, 2006.

Pointer button David Ellis (ed), D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006.


Other work by D.H.Lawrence

Sons and LoversSons and Lovers This is Lawrence’s first great novel. It’s a quasi-autobiographical account of a young man’s coming of age in the early years of the twentieth century. The setting is working class Nottinghamshire, and the story it focuses on class conflicts and gender issues as young Paul Morrell is torn between a passionate relationship with his mother and his attraction to other women. He is also locked insomething of an Oedipal struggle with his coal-miner father. If you are new to Lawrence and his work, this is a good place to start.
Lady Chatterley's Lover Buy the book at Amazon UK
Lady Chatterley's Lover Buy the book at Amazon US

Women in LoveWomen in Love begins where his previous big novel The Rainbow leaves off and features the Brangwen sisters as they try to forge new types of liberated personal relationships. The men they choose are trying to do the same thing – and the results are problematic and often disturbing for all concerned. Many regard this as his finest novel, where his ideas are matched with passages of superb writing. The locations combine urban Bohemia with a symbolic climax which takes place in the icy snow caps of the Alps.
Lawrence greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Lawrence greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US


D.H.Lawrence – web links

D.H.Lawrence web links D.H.Lawrence at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, study guides, videos, bibliographies, critical studies, and web links.

Project Gutenberg D.H.Lawrence at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the novels, stories, travel writing, and poetry – available in a variety of formats.

Wikipedia D.H.Lawrence at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, publishing history, the Lady Chatterley trial, critical reputation, bibliography, archives, and web links.

Film adaptations D.H.Lawrence at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of Lawrence’s work for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production, box office, trivia, and even quizzes.

D.H.Lawrence D.H.Lawrence archive at the University of Nottingham
Biography, further reading, textual genetics, frequently asked questions, his local reputation, research centre, bibliographies, and lists of holdings.

Red button D.H.Lawrence and Eastwood
Nottinhamshire local enthusiast web site featuring biography, historical and recent photographs of the Eastwood area and places associated with Lawrence.

D.H.Lawrence The World of D.H.Lawrence
Yet another University of Nottingham web site featuring biography, interactive timeline, maps, virtual tour, photographs, and web links.

Red buttonD.H.Lawrence Heritage
Local authority style web site, with maps, educational centre, and details of lectures, visits, and forthcoming events.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: D.H.Lawrence Tagged With: D.H.Lawrence, English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Literary studies, Study guides, The novel

Laughter in the Dark

April 24, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Laughter in the Dark (1933) is often regarded as one of the most cruel of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels. He is famous for dealing with challenging subjects and using black comedy in his work. This novel tells the story of a well-intentioned family man with a weakness for young girls who is drawn into a complex web of desire, deceit, and revenge which has disastrous consequences. It is also a story told with all Nabokov’s usual subtle twists and verbal panache. It has become much discussed in recent years because it clearly prefigures the more famous Lolita he wrote more than twenty years later.

Laughter in the Dark


Laughter in the Dark – a note on the text

Laughter in the Dark (1933) is the sixth novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was first serialised in the Russian language journal Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Annals) in 1932. It was then published in Berlin the following year with the title Camera Obskura in the name of V. Sirin. Nabokov used this nom de plume in his early works to avoid confusion with his father, a writer and politician who was also called Vladimir Nabokov.

It was the first work by Nabokov to appear in English, published in London by John Long in a translation by Winifred Roy. Nabokov disliked this version so much that he made his own translation for its publication in America by Bobbs-Merrill in 1938.

In the Russian original, the protagonist Albert Albinus had the name Bruno Krechmar, and his rival Axel Rex was called Robert Gorn, whilst Margot was called Magda. Nabokov rarely missed an opportunity to ‘improve’ or update his texts.

Following Nabokov’s huge international success with Lolita in 1955, many of his earlier novels were re-translated and re-issued in English. It is possible that Laughter in the Dark was translated again in 1965, since in that year Nabokov renewed his copyright to the title.


Laughter in the Dark – commentary

Narrative strategies

Nabokov is famous for the inventive and playful manner in which he delivers his stories. Sometimes he teases his readers by planting clues in a game of literary hide and seek, and at others he introduces unusual variations on the conventions of story-telling. Laughter in the Dark begins with two very good examples of this inventiveness.

The first instance is a particularly daring narrative venture: he reveals the plot of his novel in advance. The opening paragraph is presented in mock fairy tale mode:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

That is the plot of Laughter in the Dark summed up in two sentences. As readers we know what is going to happen. The more important issues are how it is going to happen, and how will the tale be told?

The second example of narrative inventiveness comes shortly afterwards, and in terms of story-telling strategy it is the exact opposite. He includes cleverly concealed details which do not become significant until much later in the novel. When Albinus enters the cinema where he meets Margot:

He had come in at the end of a film: a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun. There was no interest whatever in watching happenings which he could not understand since he had not yet seen their beginning.

Albinus might well have paid more attention to the film – because what he is witnessing (and what Nabokov is foretelling) is how the novel will end. This is a version of the final scene of the story when Albinus goes to shoot Margot. He is not ‘masked’ but blind – and it is she who ends by shooting him. [For those interested, the technical term for this literary device is ‘prolepsis’.]

In 1932 Nabokov was at an early stage of his development as a novelist and in particular his manipulation of narratives – though he had at that time produced the masterly novella The Eye (1930). This is a story in which a first person narrator both tells lies about himself and commits ‘suicide’ half way through the story he is relating.

Nabokov and paedophilia

Nabokov had been writing about older men yearning for and having sexual encounters with young girls ever since his earliest works. The English novelist Martin Amis (a great Nabokov enthusiast) calls this an ‘embarrassment’ in assessing Nabokov’s achievement as a writer.

In A Nursey Tale (1926) an elderly man strolls through the story with a girl whom the protagonist will choose as his erotic object. She is described as ‘a child [my emphasis] of fourteen or so in a low-cut party dress … mincing at the old poet’s side … her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly’.

In Laughter in the Dark Margot is slightly older, though it should be noted that although Albinus thinks she might be eighteen, her brother Otto confirms that she is in fact sixteen and has been virtually a prostitute up to the point when Albinus meets her.

Moreover, Nabokov later wrote a whole novella based on the same theme, The Enchanter (1939) then found fame with an entire novel devoted to the seduction, abduction, and abuse of an under-age girl in Lolita (1955). He was still including scenes of paedophilia in works as late as Ada or Ardor (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins (1974).

In his posthumous and unfinished The Original of Laura (2009) the girl in question is twelve years old and is pursued lecherously by an ageing roué called (believe it or not) Hubert H. Hubert.

The purpose of pointing to the recurrence of this topic in his work is to emphasise that paedophilia is not an accidental subject in his novels, but a theme deeply rooted in his consciousness. Nabokov tried to sidestep any accusations of impropriety by re-naming his obsession as nympholepsy and frequently attributing its origin to the loss of an ideal love during childhood. His verbal flim-flam might have been an understandable form of self-defense in the middle of the twentieth century, but now in the twenty-first it can be seen for what it is – a loquacious and over-elaborated form of self-justification.

It is interesting that these narratives often end with the death of the paedophile. The unnamed protagonist of The Enchanter dies under the wheels of the passing truck after giving way to his impulse to molest the girl he has abducted. Humbert murders his rival and fellow paedophile Quilty, then dies in prison whilst awaiting trial. The blind Albinus sets out to shoot Margot because of her treacherous deception of him with Axel Rex, but is shot by her instead.

The relationships between Albinus, Margot, and Alex Rex are clearly a precursor to Humbert, Lolita, and Quilty in Lolita. One middle-aged man is obsessed with a young girl, but is being cruelly deceived by her engagement with a fellow paedophile.

In works such as Laughter in the Dark Nabokov was publishing under the moral constraints of the early twentieth century. Those who transgressed society’s norms must be punished. But following the turning point of Lolita, which appeared around the same time as the famous legal controversies surrounding The Naked Lunch (1959), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960), and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), Nabokov gradually lowered the age of his ‘nymphets’ in his later works until it stabilised around twelve.

This takes the question of aesthetic judgements into very murky waters. Most critics of Nabokov ignore this aspect of his work, concentrating instead on his verbal dexterity, his wit, and the gymnastic stunts he brings to the arrangement of his narratives. But the inescapable fact is that it is a subject he returned to again, again, and again.

The double

Axel Rex and Albert Albinus mirror or ‘double’ each other throughout the novel. Albinus is a wealthy art critic, and Rex is a cartoonist whom he first contacts with a view to their producing animations of classical paintings. Rex buys Margot from the procuress Frau Levandovsky and puts her into an apartment for his own use. When Rex disappears, Albinus does exactly the same thing: his first act is to install Margot in a flat as his sexual plaything.

When Alex reappears later in the story Albinus is quite friendly towards him. The two men socialise with each other, and whilst Margot is deceiving Albinus behind his back, they even go on holiday together. In the end, they are not only sharing Margot’s sexual favours but (thanks to Axel’s unscrupulous venality) Albinus’s money.

In their final scene together both men are in a state of undress. Axel is completely naked and Albinus is wearing a dressing gown. Axel caresses Albinus with a blade of grass he had just been sucking. It is also significant that whenever Albinus fears he is being deceived or when he actually discovers her betrayal, it is Margot who he seeks to kill, not his rival Axel Rex.

What does this tell us about the novel? It is often observed that when two men desire(or share) the same woman, this tells us more about their unconscious attraction to each other than to the woman herself. This might be regarded as accidental or a coincidence – except for the fact that exactly the same senario is acted out in Lolita, written almost a quarter of a century later.


Laughter in the Dark – study resources

Laughter in the Dark – Penguin – Amazon UK

Laughter in the Dark – Penguin – Amazon US

Lolita – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Martin Amis – The Problem with Nabokov


Laughter in the Dark


Laughter in the Dark – plot summary

Albert Albinus is a wealthy art critic who has the idea of animating famous paintings, and he seeks someone who might help him technically. He is married to the placid Elizabeth, but has hankerings after young girls, including Margot Peters, an usherette whom he meets in a cinema. Margot dreams of being a film star, but she works as an artists’ model. She is procured by a man called Axel Miller who keeps her in a flat for a month then disappears. She subsequently resorts to prostitution then meets Albinus.

He rapidly becomes obsessed with her. She flirts and torments him, even provocatively visiting his house to check that he is wealthy. Albinus sets Margot up in a flat. When she writes to tell him the address, his wife Elizabeth intercepts the letter then leaves home with their daughter. Albinus moves in with Margot, who is menaced by her thuggish brother Otto with demands for money.

Albinus takes Margot to the Adriatric on holiday, but when they return to Berlin she objects to being hidden from public view. They move into his old apartment where he tries to disguise the fact that they are living together. He finds her a part in a low-budget film which he finances. To alleviate her boredom they throw a party – at which another guest is Axel Rex (previously Axel Miller). Margot regards him as her first true love – but she demands that Albinus seek a divorce.

The cruel and cynical Rex is down on his luck. He befriends Albinus as a ruse to regain Margot, who at first rejects Axel’s advances because he has no money. Albinus’s daughter contracts pneumonia and when she is dying Margot tries to prevent Albinus going to see her. Rex takes advantage of his absence to seduce Margot.

After a year Albinus resolves to return to his former life – but fails to do so. At a private showing of the film Margot is revealed as hopelessly incompetent. Albinus takes her on a motoring holiday as a compensation, together with Axel, who is pretending to be a homosexual. They drive to the south of France, where Margot continues to deceive Albinus with Rex.

Albinus meets an old friend Udo Conrad who naively reveals that he has overheard Axel and Margot discussing their love affair. Albinus confronts Margot with a gun, but she denies wrongdoing. They depart immediately, leaving Rex behind. Albinus crashes the car on a mountain road and recovers in hospital to discover that he has gone blind.

Rex writes to say that he is going back to New York, but in fact he takes over Albinus’s money and secretly moves with Margot and Albinus into a Swiss chalet. Rex and Margot torment the blind Albinus by flirting with each other in his presence. They plan to take over his property assets then leave him.

Elizabeth’s brother Paul is suspicious of the large cash withdrawals that Albinus appears to be making from his bank. He goes to Switzerland where he catches Rex and reveals the deception. Albinus wants to stay and kill Margot, but Paul takes him back to Elizabeth. A few days later, learning that Margot has returned to Berlin, Albinus takes a taxi to their old apartment where he tries to shoot her. But in the struggle it is she who shoots him dead.


Laughter in the Dark – main characters
Albert Albinus a wealthy German art critic
Elizabeth his placid wife
Axel Rex an unscupulous cartoonist and gambler
Margot Peters a lower-class teenage waif
Otto Peters her thuggish brother
Paul Hochenwart Elizabeth’s loyal brother
Dorianna Karenina a fashionable Berlin actress

© Roy Johnson 2018


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Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol I

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life,  and literature – 1880 to 1969

Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.

Leonard Woolf Autobiography - Vol IThe first volume of his autobiography deals with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

You also get full details of all the property leases and house buyings of this group as it established its regular system of one place in town and another in the countryside. Some of his more inspired passages are his tirades against mysticism, religious belief, and any surrender to irrationalism. He has a seductively convincing underpinning to his philosophic position that Nothing matters, which he interprets in a non-passive manner – no doubt his own brand of G.E.Moore’s ethics, which he absorbed at Cambridge along with the rest of the Apostles.

Occasionally he’s quite humorous, and he is certainly a humane, rational, and honest man; yet he seems slightly naive in claiming that money is not really important – a claim contradicted by his obsessive habit of listing every penny he spent and earned throughout his fife. But these are minor human inconsistencies.

The next part (a whole volume in its original publication) deals with a part of his life of which most literary enthusiasts know nothing – his work as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. These pages include scenes you would not normally associate with this pillar of Bloomsbury: supervising floggings and executions; eliminating outbreaks of rinderpest; trekking through jungles; and issuing certificates for celebrity big game hunters.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

He lived an astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 (covered in Volume II) engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.

He’s very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess – how much they make from their writing.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Leonard Woolf Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1880-1911 v. 1, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.320, ISBN: 0192812890


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Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol II

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature 1911-1969

Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.

Leonard Woolf: AutobiographyThe first volume of his autobiography dealt with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

This second volume covers his astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 – engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.

He’s very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess – how much they make from their writing.

In the last part of his memoir, written when he was eighty-five, it has to be said that he rambles quite a lot, and goes over ground he has already covered earlier. But this does help to reinforce the tremendous variety in his life. He felt that all his political efforts amounted to nothing, and that the Hogarth Press had been successful because it had been kept small scale and independent. He’s probably a bit too hard on himself politically, and anybody with a CV half as long could hold their head up high.

However, this is not a memoir full of gossip or personal revelation. You would never know from this that his wife fell in love with another woman, or that he had a largely sexless relationship with her. Nor would you ever guess that for the last thirty years of his life he shared the wife of his business associate on a weekend-weekday basis.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

© Roy Johnson 2000

redbtnSee volume one of this autobiography

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1911-1969 v. 2, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.536, ISBN: 0192812904


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Leonard Woolf biography

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

lifeline, literature, publishing, politics

Leonard Woolf biographyLeonard Sidney Woolf was born in London in 1880, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney and Marie (de Jongh) Woolf. When his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at the Arlington House School, a preparatory school near Brighton. From 1894 to 1899 he studied on a scholarship as a day student at St. Paul’s, a London public school noted for its classical studies. In 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Woolf became part of a youthful group of intellectuals who were elected to an elite group called ‘The Apostles’. The members of this group included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, who were students, and Bertrand Russell, who was a Fellow. These people eventually formed the core of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1902 Woolf earned his B.A. degree but stayed on at Cambridge for a fifth year to study for the civil service examination. He left Trinity College in October 1904 to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. His professional progress was rapid. In August 1908 he was appointed an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, assigned to administer the District of Hambantota.

As part of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf met Virginia Stephen, Thoby’s sister, and twice proposed marriage to her. He was twice refused. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year’s leave, expecting to return to Ceylon later. In July, however, he proposed to Virginia yet again, and this time she accepted him.

Partly because he chose to marry Virginia and partly because of a growing distaste for colonialism, Woolf resigned from the Ceylon Civil Service early in 1912 (as George Orwell was to do over a decade later). It was at this time that the Bloomsbury Group began to gain momentum as an intellectual and artistic force, and Leonard Woolf was at the centre of it.

In 1913 Woolf published his first novel, The Village and the Jungle, based on his experiences in the colonial service. This was followed by The Wise Virgins in 1914.

Like most other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf was a pacifist and an opponent of Britain’s involvement in the First World War. However, he was spared becoming a conscientious objector, because he was rejected by the military as unfit for duty.

With the outbreak of the war, Woolf turned his attention to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government which outlined future possibilities for a international agency to enforce peace in the world. The book was incorporated by the British government in its proposals for a League of Nations at Geneva. Woolf was later active in the League of Nations Society and the League of Nations Union.

During the war years Woolf spent a lot of his time caring for his wife Virginia, who was then suffering extreme manic-depression. To provide her with a relaxing hobby they bought a small hand printing press in 1917 and set up the Hogarth Press – named after their home in Richmond. Their first project was a pamphlet containing a story by each of them, printed and bound by themselves.

Other small books followed, written by their friends including T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster. Many of the book jackets were designed by Virginia’s sister, the designer and painter Vanessa Bell. Within ten years, the Hogarth Press was a full-scale publishing house and included on its list such seminal works as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Freud’s Collected Papers, which were translated into English by Julian Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother. Leonard Woolf remained the main director of the publishing house from its beginning in 1917 until his death in 1969.

After the war, Leonard Woolf occupied himself more and more with political work. He became editor in 1919 of International Review, and edited the international section of Contemporary Review from 1920 through 1922. He was literary editor of Nation Athenaeum from 1923 to 1930 and joint editor of Political Quarterly from 1931-1959. Woolf also served during the period between the wars as secretary of the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and colonial questions.

Leonard looked after his wife Virginia through all her periods of depression, right up to the point of her suicide in 1941. They remain a couple who typify the Bloomsbury Group through their personal lives and their prodigious creative output. What is less well known about Leonard Woolf however, is that the latter part of his life was no less radical at a personal level. Love Letters reveals the whole story of this extraordinary episode.

During the Second World War he began an affair with a painter and book illustrator Trekkie Parsons, who was married to a publisher – at that time on active military service. Leonard was 61, Trekkie 39. He wanted her to get a divorce and marry him, but instead she persuaded him to move into the house next door to her in London and she spent the weekends with him at Monk’s House in Rodmell.

When her husband came back from the war, their lives not surprisingly became more complex. She spent the weekends with her husband and the week with Leonard. She took holidays with the two men separately, and acted as hostess for them both. This arrangement worked smoothly for the next twenty-five years.

When Trekkie and Leonard were not together they talked through the post. Trekkie sealed up their correspondence, and it was only opened after her death. Linked by excerpts from her diary, the letters shine with details of daily life: of gardens and glow-worms, books and plays; of Leonard’s publishing and politics; of Trekkie’s struggle to balance her professional and personal life. This remarkable exchange of letters tells the story of two contrasting personalities, their love for one another and their unusual and creative domestic arrangement.

Among Woolf’s most important writings are After the Deluge (1931-51), a multi-volume modern political and social history, and his five-volume autobiography, Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All The Way (1967) and The Journey Not The Arrival Matters (1969). He died August 14, 1969.


Leonard Woolf biography


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Literature and Revolution

June 5, 2010 by Roy Johnson

collected essays, articles, and reviews

Marxists have always had a problem with theorising Art. Radical proposals for changing the State and replacing the power of one class with that of another does not sit easily with a taste for Beethoven, Michaelangelo, and Marcel Proust. And political sympathy for an oppressed class (the proletariat) has often resulted in wishing its artistic achievements into being. When a revolution (of sorts) did take place in St Petersburg in 1917, expectations were high that a different art would be formed in the new type of society. And at first it did start to happen. The graphic art of Rodchenko and El Lissitzsky, the architecture of Tatlin, and the poetry of Mayakovsky produced a native form of modernism whose influence is still alive today, almost one hundred years later. Literature and Revolution is Victor Serge’s on-the-spot essays engaging with the new literary endeavours of the period.

Literature and RevolutionBut none of these artists were working class, and before long Party apparatchiks were calling for the suppression of their work and demanding art that followed the Party line. Since the party had a monopoly of the means of production and even the supply of paper, they got what they called for. The result was worthless propaganda of the ‘boy meets tractor’ variety.

Victor Serge was able to avoid these ideological traps more than his contemporaries (and his predecessors) for two good reasons. The first was that throughout his life he retained a critical integrity that kept him free from any Party line prejudice. The second was that unlike many of the so-called theorists of his time, he was a practising artist. Even though he worked in the most appalling circumstances and spent the last twenty years of his life in exile, he produced two excellent trilogies of novels, as well as his amazing memoirs and other works.

The first part of this collection of his writings is on the subject of literature and politics, under the title of ‘The Theory of Proletarian Literature’. Serge is defending the political gains of the revolution and pointing out quite rightly that the proletariat is too busy defending itself and producing enough to sustain life to be creating great works of art.

The development of any intellectual culture takes for granted stable production, a high level of technique, well-being, leisure and time.

The so-called proletarian writing produced under Party diktat turned out to be entirely schematic, with heroes ‘bearing no resemblance to any human being one had actually ever met.’ But his argument is that this was to be expected.

The second part of the book is a collection of critical essays on literary topics written in the heat of events during the early 1920s. It’s interesting to note that they were all published in France – a fact which established Serge’s reputation outside Russia and later helped to save his life when he was granted permission to leave Russia at a time when his contemporaries were simply being shot.

These essays provide what’s called ‘A Chronicle of Intellectual Life in the Soviet Union’. Apart from beating the drum for Russian achievements at a time of austerity and shortages, the only artists to emerge from this honourably are the poets – Blok, Biely, Yesenin, and especially Mayakovsky, whom Serge puts into a category of his own, presumably because he was the most committed Bolshevik and therefore (in 1922) above criticism. The only other writer to emerge with laurels is Leon Trotsky, whose own Literature and Revolution closely resembles Serge’s own work.

There’s a section on individual writers – tributes to the poet Blok, novelist Boris Pilnyak who was an influence on Serge’s own literary style (shot during the purges) Gorky and Mayakovsky. Because so many of these articles were written during the early 1920s they have an optimistic tone and they speak of literary potential which is yet to be fully realised. Knowing as we do what happened shortly afterwards, they have a sort of unreality about them. It is therefore fortunate that the collection ends with appreciative notes on some of the same writers as they began to ‘disappear’ in the purges of the mid 1930s and onwards. This is why Serge was happy to accept Trotsky’s description of ‘the revolution betrayed’.

It is a dark but honest note on which to end the collection – his outrage at the murder of Osip Mandelstam and countless others in the purges, but it confirms that his line of argument on politics and literature was consistent, and it has been proved to be true.

Serge never fell into any of the crude over-simplifications of propagandist writing in his own fictional creations. His artistic practice was based firmly on the literary traditions which he and his fellow theorists would call ‘bourgeois’, and even though his material existence was light years away from the comforts of the western literary world of 1920-1945, he was in his own way a contributor to ‘modernism’.

He removed the central ‘I’ from the controlling individual consciousness of his narratives, and put in its place a more general ‘We’. That was his conscious political choice. We read his novels and come away with a sense of collectives or representatives of general social tendencies, rather than Big Individuals.

And his other literary techniques fit comfortably alongside other literary modernists – from Conrad to Woolf and Beckett. He uses extended metaphors, repeated motifs, sparkling imagery, blurs the distinctions between prose and poetry, flits from one point of view to another with no clunky connecting passages, and has what might be called a ‘mosaic’ rather than a linear approach to narrative.

Serge survived in terrible conditions in Mexican exile until 1946, and thank goodness he was able to produce his finest novels in those last years. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Unforgiving Years, and The Long Dusk stand as testaments to a passionate belief in truth, a militant critic, and a great artist.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution, London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2004, pp.367, ISBN: 1903427169


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Lolita

February 11, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, film versions, study resources

Lolita (1955) is without doubt Nabokov’s masterpiece – a tour de force of fun and games in both character, plot, and linguistic artistry. And yet its overt subject is something now considered quite dangerous – paedophilia. A sophisticated European college professor goes on a sexual joy ride around the USA with his teenage step-daughter. He evades the law, but drives deeper and deeper into a moral Sargasso, and the end is a tragedy for all concerned. There are wonderful evocations of middle America, terrific sub-plots, and language games with deeply embedded clues on every page. You will probably need to read it more than once to work out what is going on, and each reading will reveal further depths.

Vladimir Nabokov - portrait

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the great twentieth-century writers. He wrote of himself: “I was born in Russia and went to university in England, then lived in Germany for twenty years before emigrating to the United States.” The first half of his oeuvre was written in Russian; then he switched briefly to French, and then permanently to English. He also spent a third period of exile living in Geneva, and translating his earlier works from Russian into English.

Nabokov loves word-play, stories that pose riddles, and games which keep readers guessing. Above all, he loves jokes. He produces witty and intellectual writing – and yet persistently draws our attention to moments of tenderness and neglected sadness in life. It is lyric, poetic writing, in the best sense of these terms. Yet be prepared for black humour and unashamed tenderness – often on the same page. And be sure to keep a dictionary on hand.


Lolita – plot summary

LolitaLolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as ‘nymphets’. Humbert suggests that this obsession results from his failure to consummate an affair with a childhood sweetheart before her premature death. In 1947, Humbert moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town. He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze, a widow, mainly for the purpose of being near Charlotte’s 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L).

While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, tells him that he must either marry her or move out. Humbert reluctantly agrees in order to continue living near Lolita. Charlotte is oblivious to Humbert’s distaste for her and his lust for Lolita until she reads his diary. Upon learning of Humbert’s true feelings, Charlotte is appalled: she makes plans to flee with Lolita and threatens to expose Humbert’s perversions. But as she runs across the street in a state of shock, she is struck and killed by a passing car.

LolitaHumbert picks Lolita up from camp, pretending that Charlotte is ill and in a hospital. He takes Lolita to a hotel, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert attempts to use sleeping pills on Lolita so that he may molest her without her knowledge, but they have little effect on her. Instead, she consciously seduces Humbert the next morning. He discovers that he is not her first lover, as she had sex with a boy at summer camp. Humbert reveals to Lolita that Charlotte is actually dead; Lolita has no choice but to accept her stepfather into her life on his terms.

Lolita and Humbert drive around the country, moving from state to state and motel to motel. Humbert initially keeps the girl under control by threatening her with reform school; later he bribes her for sexual favours, though he knows that she does not reciprocate his love and shares none of his interests. After a year touring North America, the two settle down in another New England town. Humbert is very possessive and strict, forbidding Lolita to take part in after-school activities or to associate with boys; the townspeople, however, see this as the action of a loving and concerned, if old fashioned, parent.

Lolita begs to be allowed to take part in the school play; Humbert reluctantly grants his permission in exchange for more sexual favours. The play is written by Clare Quilty. He is said to have attended a rehearsal and been impressed by Lolita’s acting. Just before opening night, Lolita and Humbert have a ferocious argument, which culminates in Lolita saying she wants to leave town and resume their travels.

As Lolita and Humbert drive westward again, Humbert gets the feeling that their car is being tailed and he becomes increasingly suspicious. Lolita falls ill and must convalesce in a hospital; Humbert stays in a nearby motel. One night, Lolita disappears from the hospital; the staff tell Humbert that Lolita’s ‘uncle’ checked her out. Humbert embarks upon a frantic search to find Lolita and her abductor, but eventually he gives up.

Lolita - posterOne day in 1952, Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert goes to see Lolita, giving her money and hoping to kill the man who abducted her. She reveals the truth: Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte’s and the writer of the school play, checked her out of the hospital and attempted to make her star in one of his pornographic films; when she refused, he threw her out.

Humbert asks Lolita to leave her husband and return to him, but she refuses, breaking Humbert’s spirit. He leaves Lolita forever, kills Quilty at his mansion in an act of revenge and is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road and swerving. The narrative closes with Humbert’s final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well.

The narrative has been written by Humbert in jail, whilst he is awaiting his trial for murder. But a ‘forward’ to the novel supposedly written by a psychiatrist, tells us that Humbert died of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. Lolita too died whilst giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952.


Lolita – video documentary


Lolita – study resources

Lolita Lolita – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Lolita Lolita – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

RLolita The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon UK

RLolita The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon US

Lolita Lolita: A Reader’s Guide – Amazon UK

Lolita Lolita: A Reader’s Guide – Amazon US

Lolita Lolita: A Casebook – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Lolita Lolita – the 1965 Stanley Kubrick film version – Amazon UK

Lolita Lolita – the 1998 Adrian Lyne film version – Amazon UK

Lolita Lolita – audiobook version – Amazon UK

Red button Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amaz UK

Red button Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amaz UK

Red button Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

Red button The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Red button First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Red button Lolita USA – Humbert’s and Lolita’s journeys across America

Red button Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Lolita


Lolita – principal characters
Humbert Humbert literary ‘scholar’ aged 37, heir to perfume company
Charlotte Haze bourgeois American housewife and widow
Dolores (Lolita) Haze Charlotte’s precocious 12 year old daughter
Clare Quilty playwright, playboy, and pornographer
Annabel Leigh Humbert’s 12 year old childhood love
Valeria Humbert’s first wife, who leaves him for a Russian taxi driver
Dick Schiller a working man who Lolita marries after she escapes from Quilty
Rita an alcoholic who Humbert lives with after Lolita leaves him
Mrs Pratt the short-sighted headmistress at Lolita’s school
Mona Lolita’s school friend who flirts with Humbert
Gaston Grodin a plump gay French professor at Lolita’s school
Vivian Darkbloom Quilty’s female writing partner

Lolita – film versions

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Lolita – the main theme

In an afterward to his novel — ‘On a Book Entitled Lolita‘ — written a year after it was first published, Nabokov sought to explain the genesis of the story which had caused such a scandal when it appeared in 1955.

the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage. The impulse I record had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long … but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it some time after moving to America in 1940.

This is a rather typically Nabokovian piece of post-rationalisation. He was much given to controlling and re-shaping his life to suit his own purposes. Fortunately, the novella-length work he mentions was not destroyed, but was recovered later and published in 1987 as The Enchanter. This tells the story of a middle-aged man who has a passion for little girls, and one day becomes besotted by a twelve year old. He marries her mother to gain access to her, and after the mother dies takes the girl away to a hotel. She wakes up to find him introducing her to his ‘magic wand’, and when she screams in terror he runs out into the street and is killed by a passing truck.

But the theme of a middle-aged man’s passion for young girls goes back further than that. Laughter in the Dark (1932) features a middle-aged art critic who becomes obsessed with a sixteen year old girl who he seduces and runs away with, abandoning his wife. And in the short story A Nursery Tale written as early as 1926, the principal character Erwin is in search of girls to help him fulfil a sexual fantasy. He chooses ‘a child [my emphasis] of fourteen or so in a low-cut party dress … mincing at [an] old poet’s side … her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly’.

And lest it be thought that these are unusual examples, it has to be said that the same theme occurs in later works such as Transparent Things (1972) Ada (1969) which combines the theme with incest between the two principal characters, and his last uncompleted novel The Original of Laura first published in 2009. This features the sexual life of a flirty young girl called Flora aged twelve who is pursued lecherously by an ageing roué called (believe it or not) Hubert H. Hubert.

What does all this add up to? Well, certainly the claim that the Lolita theme is not something that suddenly came to Nabokov out of a newspaper via a painting ape. He was writing about what we currently call paedophilia throughout his life. Fortunately he wrote about many other things as well, but his admirers have to take on board this feature which Martin Amis calls ‘an embarrassment’.


Lolita – further reading

Red button David Andrews, ‘Aestheticism, Nabokov, and Lolita‘. Vol. 31, Studies in American Literature. Lewiston, New York: E. Mellen Press, 1999.

Red button Alfred Appel Jr, The Annotated Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Red button Harold Bloom, ed. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Red button Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Red button Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Red button Harvey Breit, ‘In and Out of Books’. Review of Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. New York Times Book Review, Feb. 26, 1956, p. 8, and March 11, 1956, p. 8.

Red button Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Red button Christine Clegg, Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, London: Macmillan, 2000

Red button Julian W. Connoly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Red button Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Red button Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Red button Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

Red button Ellen Pifer, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Red button David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Red button Marianne Sinclair, Hollywood Lolitas: The Nymphet Syndrome in the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.

Red button Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.


Film version

Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version
starring Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, Dominique Swain

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Nabokov’s writing methods

Nabokov created all of his novels using ordinary 6″ X 4″ office index cards, on which he wrote in pencil. He claimed that he would first of all compose the novel completely in his head, before doing any writing. Then he would write sections of it on the cards, which he could then arrange in any order. This gave him the freedom to work on any section of the novel that he pleased.

The publication of his posthumous fragment of a novel, The Original of Laura, proves that this was not entirely true. The book combines photocopies of its index cards with a transcription of their contents, and they make it quite clear that he was at many points making up the story as he went along.

Despite his claims to be meticulously correct about very single detail of everything he wrote, his cards for The Original of Laura demonstrate that he made spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and he revised heavily most of what he wrote. This of course is similar to the way in which most other writers compose their works.

Nabokov - index card

from The Original of Laura


Nabokov discusses Lolita

In conversation with Lionel Trilling – late 1950s

 

Part two of the same conversation


Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale FirePale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Buy the book at Amazon UK
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PninPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Collected StoriesCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories


Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: Literary studies, Lolita, study guide, The novel, Vladimir Nabokov

Look at the Harlequins!

June 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot summary, links

Look at the Harlequins! was first published in the United States in 1974 by McGraw-Hill, then in the United Kingdom in 1975 by Wiedenfeld and Nicolson. It was the last of Nabokov’s novels to be published during his own lifetime, and was only superseded by his partial work-in-progress, The Original of Laura, which was published posthumously in 2009.

Look at the Harlequins!

first American edition


Look at the Harlequins! – critical commentary

This book was written in the final stages of Nabokov’s career as a novelist. He had taken his famously playful style to an almost ne plus ultra of literary self-indulgence in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969, but Look at the Harlequins! wrings a final gasp of self-referentiality out of both his own life and his own books – both of which form the substance of this lightweight confection.

Vadim (the fictional character) has a life history that closely parallels that of Vladimir Nabokov. Vadim Vadimovich was born in Russia, displaced by the Bolshevik revolution, exiled in Paris and the south of France, and earned his living by writing novels and poetry, mixing amongst emigre literary circles, and later moving from France to a college professorship in America. The parallels between the fictional construction and Nabokov’s own life are quite obvious and do not need to be spelled out.

What is of interest is ‘what does he make of this fictionalisation of his own life?’ And the answer is – not very much. The work includes all sorts of biographical trivia: Nabokov’s interest in chess and its problems, his interest in butterflies (which he transfers onto another character), and his near obsession with rape and young girls.

Nabokov and paedophilia

When Nabokov wrote the afterward to Lolita he claimed that the idea for its principal subject had been inspired by a newspaper report of a sketch produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes showing the bars of its cage. This round-about appeal to our sympathy deflected attention from two uncomfortable facts.

The first uncomfortable fact is that the novel’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is not trapped or imprisoned by his obsession with under-age girls: he acts fully conscious of his desires with the free will of an adult. The second fact is that Nabokov had been writing about older men having sexual encounters with young girls ever since his earliest works – such as A Nursery Tale (1926) and <Laughter in the Dark (1932). Moreover, he wrote a whole novella based on that theme, The Enchanter (1939) and was still including mention of paedophilia in works as late as Ada or Ardor (1969) and Transparent Things (1972).

Readers taken in by his ‘explanation’ should heed the advice of D.H.Lawrence – to ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’. Nabokov was a master of manipulating his own public image – aided and abetted by both his wife and son. Look at the Harlequins! is almost defiantly, brazenly packed with episodes of an older man (Vadim, in this case) having sexual encounters with young girls – from the child Dolly Borg to his own daughter Isabella and her school friend at the end of the novel who – as he deliberately points out – is forty-five years younger than him.

Self-referentiality

The level of self-referentiality in this novel is Nabokov’s idea of an extended joke. He creates a fictional narrative which is closely modelled on elements of not only his own biography, but also the other works of fiction he has produced. Thus when Vadim refers to his first fictional work written in English, See Under Real (1939) the ‘knowing’ reader realises that Nabokov is alluding to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight which was indeed Nabokov’s first work written in English. Similarly, the work which makes Vadim rich is A Kingdom by the Sea (1962) the very title of which is taken from Lolita (1958) which catapulted Nabokov to fame when it was first published.

At one point Vadim gives an extended account of his novel The Dare which is a parody of Nabokov’s 1937 novel The Gift (Russian title, Dar~ – hence a multi-lingual pun). Vadim’s account of The Dare is as follows:

The novel begins with a nostalgic account of a Russian childhood (much happier, though not less opulent than mine). After that comes adolescence in England (not unlike my own Cambridge years); then life in émigré Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier) and the tying of amusing knots in various literary intrigues. Inset in the middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote ‘on a dare’ : this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski, whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd …

Thus we have a real author (Vladimir Nabokov) withing a novel (Look at the Harlequins!) which is narrated by a fictional character (Vadim) who summarises one of his own novels (The Dare) which is written by a fictional character called Victor, based on the events of his fictional life – but which is actually a pastiche of Nabokov’s own 1936 novel The Gift which was based losely on the events of his own life. Nabokov even repeats this conceit later in Look at the Harlequins with a similar account of A Kingdon by the Sea which is a parody of Lolita. Self-referentiality does not come much thicker than this.

The problem with this technique is that rather like the obsessive puns and wordplay in Nabokov’s later works, the literary gesture loses its impact after a very few iterations, and rapidly becomes annoying. Moreover, it is an elitist device in that anyone who does not know Nabokov’s personal biography and his works of fiction is excluded from the supposedly amusing purpose of these references. Per contra, readers who know Nabokov’s work well have nothing new to learn from them.

The other problem connected with this auto and pseudo-biographical ‘playfulness’ is that it dilutes any possibility of the novel having a central theme or core subject. If there is any principal issue in Look at the Harlequins! it is ‘fake biography’ – which is neither amusing, interesting, nor important.

The unreliable narrator

Nabokov was very fond of using the device of an unreliable narrator – someone telling a story whose account is gradually revealed to be unsound, skewed, inaccurate, or even a pack of lies. His un-named narrator in The Eye (1930) manages to invent his own double, misjudge other characters, and fail to recognise that the other people in the story do not like him. Nabokov’s skill is in presenting the unreliable account of events in this novella in such a way that the reader is able to work out the truth of what is happening, behind the misleading surface account of events.

Later in his novel Pale Fire (1962) he has a narrator who edits, comments on, and interprets another man’s poem in such a way that the reader eventually realises that the interpretation is completely wrong and the editor is quite mad.

The Vadim Vadimovich of Look at the Harlequins! is closely related to such narrators. We only have his account of events, and he is obviously not reliable. His description of his spatial inabilities (which is very overdone) is a clear sign that he is neurotic, and he himself reveals that some of the scenes he describes are inventions.

He claims that he has a mental instability that he must confess to any women he is about to marry, but this is clearly an abberation invented by Nabokov which is never really convincing. Moreover, Vadim is not unreliable in any consistent manner. He refuses the opportunity to learn details of his first wife’s infidelity following her death, but in the very next chapter he acknowledges that the letter she showed him was from her lover.

Nabokov acknowledges within the text that there are rules in narratives: “The I of the book / Cannot die in the book”. In other words, if someone is presenting a narrative as a first person narrator, the story cannot include the death of the narrator. But similarly, if a narrator pretends to ignorance of some matter at one stage of the story, they cannot acknowledge the truth of it at a later stage – because first person narrators are in full possession of the facts at the outset, when they begin to compose a narrative. Other writers have fallen foul of this fictional trap when using first person narrators – most noticeably Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford.


Look at the Harlequins! – study resources

Look at the Harlequins! Look at the Harlequins! – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

Look at the Harlequins! Look at the Harlequins! – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Look at the Harlequins! Look at the Harlequins! – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Look at the Harlequins! Look at the Harlequins! – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Look at the Harlequins! Look at the Harlequins! – Library of America – Amazon UK

Look at the Harlequins! Look at the Harlequins! – Library of America – Amazon US

Look at the Harlequins! The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Red button Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Red button Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Red button Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

Red button The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Red button First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Red button Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Look at the Harlequins!


Look at the Harlequins! – plot summary

Part One

1   Vadim Vadimovich arrives at the Cote d’Azur villa of his old university colleague Ivor Black, an actor and director.

2   Vadim recalls his precocious erotic puberty, his aristocratic connections, and his escape from Russia following the Bolshevik revolution. In England he is taken up by an aristocratic sponsor, Count Starov.

3   At the villa, Vadim meets Black’s sister Iris, who acts out charades with Ivor, pretending to be a deaf mute

4   Vadim gives an account of an obsessive nocturnal fear from which he suffers. He consults a psychiatrist, who recommends a dentist – and then Vadim reveals that these scenes are not real but inventions.

5   Vadim discusses literature with Iris in the garden of the villa. His memoir reveals his ambition whilst at Cambridge University to return to a post-revolutionary Russia as a famous writer. He writes and translates poems for Iris.

6   Vadim observes ‘nymphets’ on the beach. Iris acts and talks in a provocative manner. He contemplates the uneven nature of his sun tan, then inspects his naked body in Iris’s bedroom mirror. He plans to propose to Iris the next day.

7   Vadim and Iris walk to the beach, meeting the pianist Kanner on the way, collecting butterflies. Vadim recalls two youthful occasions of cramp seizures whilst swimming.

8   As a prelude to marriage, Vadim tries to explain to Iris his ‘mental aberarration’ concerning spatial orientation, but Iris simply explains it away for him.

9   In the garden at sunset Ivor does a comic imitation of Vadim to amuse his guests. Next day, when Ivor goes off fishing, Vadim takes Iris to bed. He recalls a similar scene he witnessed voyeuristically as a young boy.

10   Vadim and Iris get married and are visited by his patron Count Starov who quizzes Vadim about his finances and his intentions.. Vadim and Iris move to Paris, where eventually Vadim suffers from jealousy. He quizzes Iris about her past and begins to suspect her of infidelity.

11   Iris cannot learn Russian and has no access to Vadim’s writing. She starts writing a detective novel. Vadim publishes his first novel and starts the second. Iris goes briefly for Russian lessons with Nadezhda Starov, who has a dashing husband.

12   Iris gives Vadim a badly written and badly translated letter written to her fictional heroine for his comment. Vadim believes it might be from a real admirer – but screws it up and throws it away.

13   Ivor returns from the USA and goes to dinner with Vadim and Iris, following which Nadezhda’s husband turns up in the street, kills Iris, then shoots himself. When Nadezhda turns up for her husband’s funeral she offers to tell Vadim ‘everything’ – but he prefers not to know about what is obviously his wife’s infidelity.

Part Two

1   Following his wife’s death Vadim goes to stay with his friend Stephan Stephanov and mixes with other Russian emigres. He also has a very dubious relationship with a very young girl called Dolly Borg.

2   After describing his composition techniques, he hires a typist Lyuba Savich, who turns out to be an avid fan of his works. However, even though she is very attractive, he gets rid of her.

3   He continues to complain about his spatial ‘madness’, continues writing, gives lectures, and starts to look for a replacement typist.

4   He visits Oksman, manager of a Russian emigre bookshop in Paris, and former revolutionary. Oksman compliments Vadim on his novels, but gets their titles wrong.

5   Vadim’s second typist is Annette Blagovo, who makes lots of mistakes and criticises his work. She does not understand his writing at all.

6   Vadim describes a dream of his younger self and Annette in two beds in the same room. When he gets into Annette’s bed, an attractive maid enters the room, laughing.

7   Vadim writes Annette an absurdly detailed letter describing his difficulty recreating topographical space in his memory, which he regards as ‘madness’. He feels obliged to warn her about this , before making a proposal of marriage. But she agrees to become engaged anyway.

8   He goes to meet her parents to announce his intentions. Then, despite her inexperience and prudishness, he makes a clumsy and unsuccessful attempt to seduce her.

9   Vadim refuses to get married in grand style. His literary success continues in the late 1930s, and his work begins to appear in English.

10   He complains about translations of his work appearing in the USA and England, and then in the late 1930s he begins writing in the English language. He recalls the language he learned in his childhood, discusses the perils of switching from one language to another, then he goes to America.

Part Three

1   In America Vadim obtains a fellowship in European literature at Quirn University, and his writing becomes more widely known.

2   He and Annette have a child (Isabella) but the marriage rapidly goes cold. On a trip to New York City he meets Dolly Borg whom he knew as a child in Paris. She visits his office at Quirn, and they begin a sexual relationship.

3   Dolly arranges a rendezvous in a friend’s apartment in New York. When they arrive the meeting becomes a nightmare fantasy of thwarted expectations and bad taste. Vadim seems to collapse and is taken to hospital.

4   His wife Annette finds out about his affair with Dolly and leaves him She writes a letter in pro-Soviet tones and demands support payments.

Part Four

1   Vadim takes a sabbatical year from Quirn, buys a car, and drives West. After a year’s wandering he returns to the University and to new quarters. He begins an affair with the wife of his Head of Department.

2   There is a local tornado, after which he prepares his house for the arrival of his daughter Bel. She turns out to be clever and sexually precocious.

3   They go touring in his car together. She writes poetry which he pretends to enjoy, and there is a lot of suggestive foreplay. He is addressing his narrative to one of her school friends, Louise.

4   People at Quirn begin to question the nature of his relationship with Bel. He is invited to a party where he makes a public announcement about his ‘disability’ – prior to proposing to Louise, who says she will marry him nevertheless.

5   Louise calls round next morning at breakfast and meets Bel – with whom there is something of a rivalry and standoff.

6   Louise introduces lots of vulgarity into his household, and the relationship with Bel gets even worse.

7   Bel is sent to a Swiss finishing school and Vadim claims to miss her, whilst working on the novel which is to bring him fame and fortune (A Kingdom by the Sea. His relationship with Louise gets worse, and she makes contact with a former lover.

Part Five

1   Bel marries a young American and elopes to Russia. Vadim’s novel is a big success. He receives word from an intermediary that Bel needs his help. He grows a beard and obtains a false passport.

2   He takes a flight to Moscow and a connection to St Petersburg, the city of his birth. He is followed by an agent of some sort. But when he meets his informant she is a partly deranged woman who tells him that Bel has been taken away by her husband.

3   He flies back to Paris en route to New ~York. At Orly airport he is intercepted by the agent, who turns out to be a Soviet writer and an apparatchik. He insults Vadim for ‘betraying’ Russia in his writings – and Vadim punches him on the nose.

Part Six

1   Vadim resigns from his post at Quirn, and whilst clearing out his belongings meets a classmate of his daughter, forty-five years younger than him.

2   They travel together to Europe. Vadim gives her the index cards on which he has written his latest novel Ardis. He then goes for a walk, reflecting on what a successful writer he is. But at the end of the walk he finds it impossible to turn back.

Part Seven

1   Vadim has some form of mental seizure which he records in fantasmagoric images

2   He is transported to a hospital, suffering from some sort of paralysis or dementia. He perceives life as a series of lurid images composed from elements of his former life.

3   When he partially recovers he cannot remember his family name.

4   He recuperates in another hospital, joined by his still un-named fourth wife-to-be. She has read his confessional fragments from Ardis, and explains that his mental dilemma is based on a false premise.


Vladimir Nabokov - portrait

Vladimir Nabokov


Look at the Harlequins – principal characters
Vadim Vadimovich N. the narrator and protagonist
Ivor Black Vadim’s friend from Cambridge – an actor and director
Count Starov Vadim’s rich Russian patron
Iris Black’s sister, Vadim’s first wife
Kanner a pianist who collects butterflies
Stephan Stephanov Vadim’s friend in Paris
Lyuba Savich Vadim’s first typist
Oksman Russian bookshop owner in Paris
Annette Blogovo Vadim’s second typist and second wife
Isabel (Bel) Vadim and Annette’s daughter
Dolly Borg grand-daughter of Vadim’s Paris friend
Louise school friend of Bel, Vadim’s third wife
Waldemar Exkel Vadim’s Baltic assistant at Quirm
Gerrard Adamson Chair of English at Quirm
Louise Adamson his wife, Vadim’s lover
— a school friend of Bel, and Vadim’s fourth wife

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale FirePale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Buy the book at Amazon US

 

PninPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Collected StoriesCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2015


More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories


Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Vladimir Nabokov

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