Vladimir Nabokov Archives - Page 7 of 8

Revenge

April 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Revenge was written in the early spring of 1924 and was published in
Russkoye Ekho in April 1924. In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed the story under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, and it was first included in Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995.

Vladimir Nabokov

Revenge – critical commentary

This is an early (and rather crude) example of Nabokov’s love of the grotesque, coupled with his penchant for narrative suspense and playfulness, as well as the use of irony and the dramatic twist.

The contents of the professor’s second suitcase are not revealed – but we know that fellow passengers on board the cross Channel ferry think it is something unusual. The professor has previously joked to a student trying to assist him that it is ‘Something everybody needs. Why, you travel with the same kind of thing yourself. Eh? Or perhaps you are a polyp?’

So – we know the professor wishes to murder his wife, but we do not know that the suitcase contains a skeleton. And the suspense generated by these two features of the narrative (and the connection between them) is not resolved until the final words of the story.

The principal irony is that the professor’s young wife actually loves him, even though he is an unattractive bully, and her note to ‘Jack’ is just a girlish piece of romantic nonsense written to an imaginary man who has appeared to her in a dream. But the professor wants her to die in the most excruciating way possible – something he actually fails to achieve, for we are led to believe that she has died of fright.

Nabokov also shows his early love of first person narrators and self-referentiality in fiction – that is, stories that comment upon themselves. In the opening of the narrative a student and his sister are discussing the professor’s appearance and his similarity to a comic actor:

‘He’s really enjoying the sea,’ the girl added sotto voce. Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my story.

Narrators commenting on their own narratives became almost a hallmark of Nabokov’s later works as both a novelist and writer of short stories. It is also worth noting that his narrators sometimes became increasingly unreliable – reaching perhaps what is a highpoint in his novel Pale Fire where Charles Kinbote comments on and interprets another writer’s work – to create a narrative which is an elaborate, gigantic, and very amusing lie.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Revenge – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Revenge – plot summary

Part 1 A middle-aged biology professor is travelling back from a scientific congress in Berlin to his home in England. On the Ostend ferry he has two suitcases – one old and well-travelled, the other new and orange-coloured. He has hired a private detective to spy on his much younger wife and received evidence of a love note she has written to a man called Jack. He has therefore determined to murder his wife. At the customs inspection the contents of the orange suitcase amaze his fellow travellers.

Part 2 His young wife who believes in ghosts has written a note to Jack, a man who has appeared to her in a dream, but in fact she loves her husband the professor even though he is jealous of her and very temperamental.

When he arrives home he makes fun of her beliefs then tells her a macabre story about a woman whose body unravels until she is just a corpse. He then goes to bed and tells her to follow him. She prepares herself then joins him in the dark, snuggling up to him under the covers. But her husband has put into their bed the skeleton of a hunchback, and she dies of shock on making contact with it.

Revenge – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected 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.
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Buy the book at Amazon US

Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster

April 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, further reading, plot, and web links

Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster was written in English and first published in The Reporter in 1950. The story then appeared in the single volume collection of Nabokov’s short stories Nabokov’s Dozen (1958).

Vladimir Nabokov

Critical commentary

The term ‘scenes’ in the title should alert readers to the fact that it is not a short story in the conventional sense, but a sketch or the unfinished germ of an idea. Having set up the conceit of a narrative told from the point of view of a conjoined twin, Nabokov does not seem to have known what to do with it. Not only is there no development or elaboration in the point of view, but the chain of events simply comes to an abrupt halt when the two boys are captured by their uncle. The only sense of closure to the narrative is the grim revelation that the brothers remain captives twenty years later.

It is interesting to note that in contrast to all that is known about the telepathic levels of communication that normally exists between twins, Nabokov completely excludes the second brother Lloyd from the narrative. Indeed Floyd’s consciousness is rigorously individualistic, and he even observed that the two brothers do not speak to each other. He distances himself from Lloyd, observing of their dead parent the ‘bliss’ he feels in calling her ‘my mother’. And he mentions a propos their miserable childhood that Lloyd ‘forgot much when he grew up. I have forgotten nothing’.

The story is a typically Nabokovian mixture of pathos and the grotesque, but the Black Sea setting remains quite unconvincing.

Study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plot summary

The story is narrated in the first person by Floyd, one of conjoined twin brothers who are born as a result of their mother being raped. Following her death in childbirth, they grow up on a remote farm somewhere near the Black Sea which is owned by their villainous grandfather.

As children, local villagers are allowed to regard them as a circus-like curiosities, and the grandfather quickly realises he can make money from exhibiting them as such. Floyd naively wonders (exclusively on his own behalf) if normal ‘single’ children have any advantages in life, whilst he and his twin Lloyd are forced into humiliating proximity with each other

The twins grow to the age of twelve, at which point their wellbeing is threatened by another relative – a newly arrived uncle. Floyd dreams of being separated from his brother and escaping to freedom, and when the uncle threatens to tour them as a freak show spectacle, they escape from the farm and head to the nearby seashore. However, the uncle is waiting for them when they arrive. He abducts them, and for the next twenty years they are in his power. It is from this point, at the age of thirty-two, that the story is related.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

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

Solus Rex

April 9, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Solus Rex is the second chapter of an unfinished novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote around 1939/40. (The first chapter was Ultima Thule.) The chapter was first published in Paris as Sovremennyya Zapiski in 1940, then in the collection A Russian Beauty and Other Stories in 1973. It represents a brief transition phase in Nabokov’s writing. When he arrived in Paris to begin the second phase of his exile (the first having been in Berlin) he had toyed initially with the idea of writing and publishing in French. But he quickly switched to his third language and from 1940/41 onwards wrote in English when he emigrated to America to begin the third phase of his exile.

In this story, as with its counterpart, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nabokov embellished the prose style of the text whilst engaged in the process of translation. The piece has many of the features of his late, Rococo mannerism – the persistent use of alliteration, a straining for obscure vocabulary, and a wilful, almost irritating wordplay. There is certainly a case to be made for a scholarly comparison of the original 1940 Russian text with its revised counterpart of thirty years later. That would make an interesting research project for someone in comparative literary studies.

Vladimir Nabokov

Solus Rex – critical commentary

There are some very faint traces of a connection between Solus Rex and its companion piece in the abandoned novel, the ‘story’ Ultima Thule. It is just possible that the events of Solus Rex, which take place in a country called Ultima Thule, are the story which Gosopin Sineusov, the protagonist of the first chapter, has been asked to illustrate. He is mentioned in the second chapter of the novel – although he is given a different Christian name and patronymic.

These connections are also pre-echoes of later fiction by Nabokov – particularly Pale Fire (1962), which also features the relationship between one level of fictionality and another, plus a similar fantasy-land called Zembla (‘a distant northern land’). The difference between them however is that Zembla is the invention of a madman, the novel’s narrator, Charles Kinbote. There is no comparable distancing device in the case of Ultima Thule.

It also has to be said that whereas Pale Fire is inventive and amusing, Solus Rex is amazingly below par by Nabokov’s usual standards. The literary style is annoyingly mannered, cluttered with over-long sentences stuffed with chained clauses, unnecessary parentheses, and contorted syntax. The events of the narrative are unfocussed, at a schoolboy level of invention, and not the slightest bit funny.

As in the case of Ultima Thule, Nabokov left behind his comments on the unfinished status of the ‘story’, and confirmation that the narrative had not been planned in detail before it was written.

Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S.P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), remains one of my favourite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises. I do not remember the details of poor Adulf’s death, except that he was despatched, in some horrible, clumsy manner, by Sien and his companions, exactly five years before the inauguration of the Egel bridge.

Solus Rex – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solus Rex – plot summary

Ultima Thule is a fairy tale island in the far north where it rains for 306 days in every year. It is ruled by a king called K who has taken over after the thirty-seven year reign of his predecessor and uncle, King Gafon. The narrative is a retrospective account of K’s earlier life centred on a bizarre power struggle between K and Prince Adulf (the heir apparent).

K has greasy hair, doesn’t wash, and wears foppish clothes. In his student days he meets Prince Adulf (also known derisively as Prince Fig) who is King Gafon’s degenerate son. Adulf believes that the history and traditions of this Nordic realm are founded on a hidden system of magic and sorcery. K agrees with him, but does not know why.

The two cousins go horse-riding, where the Prince seems to be planning something with K in mind. A few days later he invites K to a gathering of his reputedly self-indulgent friends. The company seems strangely heterogeneous but harmless enough. But when Adulf publicly performs a sex act on a pretty young man, K leaves in disgust.

When K reports the incident, his guardian the Count excuses the incident as ‘hygienic’ and passes K on to an economist called Gumm. In the two years that follow K learns that old King Gafon has excused the behaviour of his licentious son Adulf. K wonders why there isn’t public resentment, but the lower classes actually enjoy the spectacle of Adulf’s behaviour, which is widely reported in the press.

However, there is criticism and opposition to Prince Fig amongst the intelligentsia, but they are afraid to act because of a fear of the possible consequences. Eventually, a philosopher Dr Onze volunteers to spearhead a prosecution of Prince Fig. A trial reveals all sorts of pornographic iniquities committed by Fig, the details of which fill the newspapers and further enhance his reputation as a popular royal ‘rogue’. When the trial ends, the jury finds the prosecutor Dr Onze guilty and sentences him to eleven years hard labour. But then King Gafon pardons him.

Two years later K is still studying and is invited to a meeting of the opposition to the royal family. When he gets there he realises from the silences and the signals in the room that they are plotting to assassinate Fig. He feels uncomfortable and asks to leave.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

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

The Defence

April 26, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot, study resources, web links

The Defence was Vladimir Nabokov’s third novel. It was written in the French Pyrenees and Berlin during 1929, then first serialized as Zashchita Lubina in the Russian emigre quarterly Sovremennye Zapiski. This was followed by publication as a single volume novel by Slovo in Berlin (1930).

Nabokov had composed chess problems and various puzzles (as well as short stories) for the Russian emigre newspaper ‘Rul that his father had established in Berlin in the early 1920s. All of these contributions were composed under the pen name of ‘V. Sirin’ which he adopted to distinguish himself from his father, whose name was also Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was later serialized in The New Yorker and then appeared simultaneously in the UK and the USA in 1964, translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.

The Defence – critical commentary

Autism?

In a typically tongue-in-cheek, semi-boastful introduction to the novel, Nabokov congratulates himself on the complex structure of the novel and the compositional chess references and allusions he weaves into his narrative:

the chess effects I planted are distinguishable not only in these separate scenes; their concatenation can be found in the basic structure of this attractive novel. Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board, sixteen years elapse in the course of one paragraph, and Luzhin, suddenly promoted to seedy manhood and transferred to a German resort, is discovered at a garden table

It is certainly true that the moving backwards and forwards in the chronology of events is handled in a masterful fashion, but Nabokov’s more remarkable achievement is the creation of a narrative related largely from the perspective of someone we would now call autistic.

Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is sullen, withdrawn, and uncommunicative. He fails to recognise social norms and does not respond to the positive efforts and signals of those around him, including his own parents. He isolates himself from his peers at school, and has obsessive compulsive disorders such as stepping on the cracks between paving stones and memorising car number plates in case they will come in useful at a later date .

Later he is unable to distinguish between dream fantasies and reality, he clings to ‘favourite books’ (Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes) and he rejects replacements because they are ‘the wrong edition’ – that is, they are not visually identical to the volumes he read as a child. In the medical jargon of autism, this is called ‘sameness’ – a pathological clinging to what is already known.

Luzhin is emotionally detached from both his mother and father, feels only a glimmer of interest in his aunt because she shows him the rudiments of chess, and he lives in a parallel universe of abstract metaphors and tapping every tree he passes with his walking stick. These are all classic symptoms of autism, which at the time of the novel’s composition in 1929 was not as widely recognised as a psychological disorder as it is today.

Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins Hospital first used autism in its modern sense in English when he introduced the label early infantile autism in a 1943 report of 11 children with striking behavioral similarities. Almost all the characteristics described in Kanner’s first paper on the subject, notably “autistic aloneness” and “insistence on sameness”, are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of disorders. [Wikipedia]

Nabokov’s skill is to create Luzhin’s sense of detachment and failure to understand or empathise with what is going on around him, whilst the same time giving the reader enough information to see both Luzhin’s point of view and that of the other characters.

Names

Nabokov appears to have been making some strange and not always successful experiments regarding the naming of his characters in this novel. His protagonist Luzhin is referred to by his surname (family name) throughout – even by his fiancée and then wife, which would not be at all likely or realistic. Apart from this distancing effect reflecting the character’s emotional isolation from other characters, the device doesn’t seem to be much more than a literary mannerism on Nabokov’s part. This is underlined by the fact that Luzhin’s birth name and patronymic are dramatically revealed in the very last lines of the novel – to no apparent purpose.

Even more strangely, and for no evident dramatic reason, we never learn the name of his fiancée and bride at all. She is referred to as his fiancée and ‘Mrs Luzhin’. Yet on the other hand, Nabokov does name completely inconsequential characters who have no importance in the development of the novel. They are named, only to disappear a few pages later after making their brief appearances.

The Defence – study resources

The Defence – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The Defence – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon UK

The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon US

Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon UK

Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon US

The Defence – chapter summaries

1 Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is a shy, sullen, and awkward boy – possibly what would now call autistic. When his parents take him home from summer holiday back to St. Petersburg, he runs away and goes to hide in a wood shed.

2 His father is a writer who hopes that his backward son is specially gifted. But young Luzhin is not happy and is undistinguished at school, where he is bullied by the other boys. He has two favourite books – by Jules Verne and Conan Doyle. He develops an interest in jigsaw puzzles and number games.

3 Luzhin sees a chess set for the first time and immediately wants to play. There is friction between his father and mother regarding relations with her more attractive sister. Luzhin watches a game played at school then starts playing truant to learn the game from his aunt.

4 He learns more about chess from an elderly admirer of his aunt, then he advances to learn chess notation and replays games in his head. He plays against his father and beats him. He stops going to school, loses track of time, and eventually has a breakdown. His parents take him to an Adriatic resort where, after his mother returns to St Petersburg, her sister joins his father.

5 His mother dies. Luzhin tours Russia as a chess prodigy. His father plans to write a novel about a child chess champion. Luzhin goes go on a European tour with his tutor-manager Valentinov, and when the first world war breaks out he refuses to go home. Valentinov acts in a suspicious and unprofessional manner. His father has difficulty writing the novel and dies before it is produced.

6 Luzhin meets a young woman at a German spa where he is playing exhibition matches. Valentinov has kept him on a Spartan regime, and when he is no longer a youthful prodigy, abandons him. Luzhin announces to the woman that she must become his wife. She introduces him to her mother, who thinks Luzhin is an ill-mannered boor.

7 The mother cannot take Luzhin seriously, but she is mildly impressed when he asks for her daughter’s hand in marriage in a gentlemanly manner.

8 In Berlin he meets the woman’s father, who he bamboozles with chess arcana. The mother continues to be hostile and rude. His fiancée is worried about his ‘illness’. He begins to confuse dreams and reality, and he develops spatial dislocation. He engages in a stressful chess tournament against his rival Turati. There is an adjournment, after which he has another nervous breakdown and imagines he is back in his Russian childhood.

9 Luzhin is found unconscious in the street by some drunks and taken to his fiancée’s house. He is placed in a sanatorium and the chess competition is considered ‘unfinished’.

10 His psychiatrist says that he will recover, but that chess is forbidden for the time being. The fiancée’s parents angrily try to forbid the marriage to ‘this penniless crackpot’. Luzhin gradually emerges from his breakdown. He recaptures childhood memories with great difficulty.

11 Luzhin leaves the sanatorium, and preparations are made for the marriage. A flat is rented, he gives up chess, and he begins to behave more normally. After the marriage ceremony he and his new bride return to the flat, where Luzhin immediately falls asleep.

12 He amuses himself in a desultory manner with an office typewriter and a phonograph. At a charity ball he meets someone from his old school who quizzes him about the past in a way that is disturbing.

13 There are further discussions about making a journey abroad. Mrs Luzhin has a lady visitor from the Soviet Union who is mindlessly patriotic about the Stalin regime. Luzhin thinks he has discovered a hidden pattern in the events of his life. He finds a pocket chess set in the lining of his jacket and recreates his game against Turati at exactly the point it was abandoned.

14 Luzhin gradually rejoins the world of chess and believes his life is a contest being played against an invisible opponent. His wife invites Russian emigres to the home, but Luzhin ignores them all and thinks about a plot to beat his unknown opponent. He wants to devise an unbeatable ‘defence’ Valentinov reappears and invites him to appear in a seedy film that involves chess, but Luzhin thinks this is a trap to lure him back into competitions. He decides that the ultimate defence against his antagonist is to ‘leave the game’ – and following the logic of this notion he commits suicide.

The Defence – further reading

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Vladimir Nabokov – Routledge Critical Heritage- Amazon UK

Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – Cambridge UP- Amazon UK

Women in Nabokov’s Life and Art – paperback- Amazon UK

Strong Opinions (Essays) – Penguin Classics paperback- Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov – Writers and their Work- Amazon UK

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

The Enchanter

December 23, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

The Enchanter (1939) was one of the last works Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian, using his original pen name of V. Sirin. It was composed in Paris, at a time when he had just started to create works in English – the third of his childhood languages (the two others being his native Russian, and French which was the lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy). Following his arrival in America the manuscript appeared to have been lost, but it surfaced again in 1959 and was first published in English translation in 1987, ten years after the author’s death.

Because of the sensational publication of Lolita in 1955 and the scandal that ensued, The Enchanter was very obviously ripe for its own commercial success, since it dealt with the same subject – the obsession of a middle-aged man for a young girl. Yet strangely, the novella has never generated nearly as much interest with the reading public – even amongst Nabokov specialists.

The Enchanter – critical commentary

Form

Unusually for Nabokov, there is no effort made to locate the events of the story either temporally or geographically. – and none of the characters are given names, although there is a possibility (discussed by his son and translator Dmitri Nabokov in an afterward) that the protagonist’s name at one time might have been Arthur.

In terms of genre, the narrative is too long to be classified as a short story, and too short to be a novel. But the fact that its subject is concentrated so powerfully on one character and his obsession means it might justly be considered a novella.

It has the classical unities of time, place, character, and action to warrant this classification. The story is entirely concerned with the protagonist’s obsession. The other characters, even the woman he marries and the daughter he abducts, are of secondary importance. The events take place in one location, they are orchestrated in once continuous movement, and their outcome culminates in the protagonist’s tragic downfall.

Nabokov and paedophilia

In recent years, careful scrutiny of Nabokov’s work as a whole has revealed that the subject of paedophilia has been a recurring feature of his novels, from earliest to last. Consequently, there has been an embarrassed effort by some critics and editors to downplay and obfuscate the issue of a distinguished writer who had such an apparently unhealthy interest in the seduction of young girls.

For instance, the contents of this slim volume come heavily protected by double ‘explanatory’ prefaces from Nabokov himself and an afterward and running commentary by his son and translator Dmitri Nabokov. Both of these additions to the text seek to deflect attention from the uncomfortable subject of paedophilia towards the genesis and aesthetic details of the work itself.

In an afterward to Lolita (written in 1956) Nabokov claimed that the idea for its main subject had come to him from a newspaper report of a drawing produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes. The drawing showed the bars of its cage, the implication being that the poor beast was imprisoned both literally and metaphorically.

The protagonist of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, is a character who produces a written account of his seduction of a young girl who is his step-daughter, and his murder of a rival who also abducts and seduces her. Humbert’s written deposition (the novel) is produced from his prison cell whilst awaiting trial.

This round-about appeal to our sympathy deflects attention from two uncomfortable facts. The first is that Humbert Humbert, is not imprisoned by his obsession for 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 under-age girls ever since his earliest works – such as A Nursery Tale (1926) and <Laughter in the Dark (1932). Moreover, he had already written The Enchanter (1939) which was based on that theme, and he was still including mention of what we would now class as paedophilia in works as late as Ada or Ardor (1969) and Transparent Things (1972).

Neither The Enchanter nor Lolita are isolated examples of this theme: they are merely the most explicit and fully developed examples of a topic to which Nabokov returned again and again in his work.

The Enchanter and Lolita

There is no escaping the fact that the plots of Lolita and The Enchanter are virtually identical. A middle-aged man is obsessed by young girls of a certain age – generally around twelve years old. In order to secure access to one such girl, the man marries her widowed mother and then plans to kill her. When the mother unexpectedly dies, he takes the young girl away by car to a hotel where he plans to seduce her.

Lolita herself is a far more fully developed character than the un-named girl in The Enchanter. She is more fully described and dramatised, with a quite witty line in teenage American slang.

But if The Enchanter had been published around the time it was written, Nabokov might well have been accused of self-plagiarism when Lolita appeared. It is Nabokov’s good fortune (or his skilful management of his own literary reputation) that the manuscript of The Enchanter did not emerge until three decades after the work which established his worldwide fame – and after his death in 1977.

Point of view

The whole of The Enchanter is related from the protagonist’s point of view. In fact the tale starts in first person singular narrative mode, documenting his turbulent thoughts as he tries to justify his aberrant cravings to himself:

This cannot be lechery. Coarse carnality is omnivorous; the subtle kind presupposes eventual satiation. So what if I did have five or six normal affairs—how can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?

But after a few pages the narrative switches to a conventional third person mode – which is worth noting for two reasons. The first reason is technical. The story must be delivered by someone other than the protagonist if he is to die at the end of the story. (In the case of Lolita Humbert Humbert’s account of events is written whilst waiting for his trial in jail, where he dies.)

Nabokov, presenting the story in third person narrative mode, expresses the protagonist’s desires in a very sympathetic manner = almost as if they are a burden imposed upon him by forces outside himself.

having, by the age of forty, tormented himself sufficiently with his fruitless self-immolation

The protagonist’s thoughts and actions are dressed up in all the elaborate and metaphorical imagery for which Nabokov is famous, as if he wishes to obscure and intellectualise his protagonist’s desire – almost as if as an author he does not wish to address his subject directly.

The second noteworthy reason is one of persuasion. It is interesting that the articulation of the protagonist’s thoughts in the first few pages and the presentation of his acts in the remainder of the text are recounted in a remarkably similar literary style. And the style is one that regular readers of Nabokov will instantly recognise: it is the witty, elegant, and very sophisticated ‘literary’ prose he uses in most of his other works:

At daybreak he drowsily laid down his book like a dead fish folding its fin, and suddenly began berating himself: why, he demanded, did you succumb to the doldrums of despair, why didn’t you try to get a proper conversation going, and then make friends with the knitter, chocolate woman, governess, or whatever; and he pictured a jovial gentleman (whose internal organs only, for the moment, resembled his own) who could thus gain the opportunity—thanks to that very joviality— to collect you-naughty-little-girl-you onto his lap.

The reader is given every encouragement to identify and sympathise with the protagonist – which creates a moral and aesthetic problem that few people have been able to resolve in Nabokov’s work. His supporters have concentrated on the skill of his literary invention and his glossy poetic style; his detractors have pointed to his apparent lack of concern for the victims of the outrages perpetrated by his protagonists.

The Enchanter – study resources

The Enchanter – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Enchanter – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Enchanter: An Adventure in the Land of Nabokov – Amazon UK

The Enchanter: An Adventure in the Land of Nabokov – Amazon US

The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon UK

The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Enchanter – plot summary

A forty year old man tries to justify his passion for young girls. His fervid thoughts swirl around memories of some earlier instances of attraction in his life.

He sees a pretty young girl roller-skating in a park, then goes back the next day to befriend the old lady who is looking after her. Following this, he arranges to visit the girl’s widowed and invalid mother on the pretext of buying some furniture.

He visits again, and they exchange information about each other – she her medical problems, he his wealth and prosperity. Despite her warnings that she might not have long to live, he eventually proposes to her.

He wants to keep the girl at home, but the mother insists on peace and quiet; she insists that the girl live with friends. On their wedding night he cannot face their nuptials, and walks the streets, planning to poison her. But he gets through the occasion, after which she reverts to being a full time invalid.

In the months that follow, her health deteriorates and she is hospitalised. He receives news that an operation has been successful, and feels outraged and disappointed. But she does die, and he makes preparations to take the girl away.

He plans to escape with her into a world of permanent sexual indulgence shielded from any influences of everyday life. He has rhapsodic visions of a love life between them which will grow with time – so long as she is not distracted by contact with other people.

He collects the girl from her minder and they go off in a chauffeur driven car, staying overnight at a hotel. After some delays with the management, he joins her in bed and explores her body whilst she is asleep.

Overcome by his desire for her, he abandons all his plans of caution and restraint, and begins to molest her. But she wakes up and screams, and this disturbance awakens other people in the hotel. He panics, escapes into the street, where he is run over and killed by a passing truck.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Enchanter, London: Penguin Classics, 2009, pp.96, ISBN: 014119118X

Vladimir Nabokov – web links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylvania State University Library.

Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading. Buy the book here

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

The Fight

April 11, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Fight first appeared in September 1925 in the Russian emigré newspaper Rul’ published in Berlin. The paper had been established by Vladimir Nabokov’s father in 1921. Its first publication in English translation was in The New Yorker for February 1985.

In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed The Fight under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, but it was included in the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995. It also seems to me no less worthy than many of the other shorter and lighter pieces from the early period of his output as a writer.

Vladimir Nabokov

The Fight – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories set in Berlin which combines detailed observations of everyday life with a curious sense of emotional detachment. Nabokov had spent the years 1919 to 1923 as a student at Trinity College Cambridge and then settled in Berlin as the first major centre of Russian emigration. He earned a precarious living teaching English, giving tennis lessons, and working as a walk-on extra in the film industry.

It’s almost as if he was reassuring himself that the appreciation of aesthetic phenomena was a bulwark against the existential despair which engulfed so many of his uprooted fellow countrymen. But the story is also an early example of two literary features which Nabokov returned to again and again throughout his career – reflections on aesthetic pleasure and self-referentiality in fiction.

The narrator first of all quits the scene of the conflict before it is ended:

I neither know nor wish to know who was wrong and who was right in this affair. The story could have been given a different twist, and made to depict compassionately how a girl’s happiness had been mortified for the sake of a copper coin

So – after a conventional account of events, Nabokov suddenly breaks the unspoken contract with his readers and has his narrator reveal himself as conscious of creating a fictional narrative. This is fiction reflecting upon itself – but he goes on to offer an alternative subject matter in the form of the specific and momentary effects available in the details of everyday life:

Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all, but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way.

The Fight – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fight – plot summary

An un-named narrator is living in Berlin. In the heat of summer he goes each day to bathe in a nearby lake. There he sees an elderly German man who is also a daily visitor. When he goes for a drink in the evening, the man turns out to be Krause, the keeper of a tavern who works there with his daughter Emma.

The narrator becomes a regular visitor to the tavern and realises that one of the other customers is Emma’s lover. When the lover helps himself to a drink at the bar and tries to leave without paying, Krause follows him into the street and a fight breaks out. The narrator watches the two men brawling for a while, then goes back into the tavern to retrieve his hat, comforts Emma, then leaves without knowing the outcome of the conflict. Instead he reflects on a number of different number of ways the story might have ended.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

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

The Original of Laura

January 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a novel in fragments

The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) is a novel from beyond the grave by Vladimir Nabokov. Everyone has now woken up to the fact that Nabokov has been writing stories and novels about older men and younger women (and even younger girls) for quite some time. It’s no good taking his word for it (as he claims in his preface) that the original inspiration for Lolita came from a ‘painting’ by a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes. He had already written an entire novella (The Enchanter 1939) on exactly the same theme of what is now technically classed as paedophilia.

We now have his posthumous (and presumably last) work, which has been released even though he made an express wish that it should not be published if it were to be unfinished at the time of his death. And it certainly isn’t finished. Even to call it ‘a novel in fragments’ is stretching definitions somewhat. It consists of the drafts of three discernable and coherent chapters, plus lots of notes for other vaguely related materials which Nabokov was working on at the time of his death in 1977.

The novel-to-be seems to contain two main themes. The first is the sexual life of a flirty young girl called Flora (aged twelve in the semi-completed chapters) who is pursued lecherously by an ageing roué called (believe it or not) Hubert H. Hubert. She survives this and moves with her mother to an American college, where she studies French and Russian. Readers of Nabokov’s other novels will recognise elements from Laughter in the Dark, Lolita, and Pnin already.

Part way through, the index cards on which Nabokov famously composed his novels change from relating a story to notes and instructions to himself – ideas for the plot, memos to invent a plausible name for a pharmaceutical, and lists of unusual words he was obviously striving to coin.

The second theme, which gives the book its sub-title, concerns Dr Philip Wild, a teacher at the college, whom Flora eventually marries. He is overweight, has bad feet, and he embarks on a quest of what he calls ‘dying by auto-dissolution’. It seems quite clear that the connections between these two parts of the narrative had not been conceptualised by Nabokov – which provides an interesting glimpse into his methods as a writer.

There are also hints that his story is the original source material for another book called My Laura written by somebody else that went on to become a best-seller. Here we have further echoes of Lolita, and typical Nabokovian playfulness – but since this theme remains undeveloped it warrants little attention.

This brings us to the book as a physical object and a product of print production. It’s the nearest a reader could get to seeing the system of writing for which Nabokov was famous. The index cards on which he wrote are photographically reproduced at the top of each right-hand page, with the text of the card reproduced below, complete with mis-spellings, grammatical errors, and slips of the pen.

The cover of the book is a photo-print of a typical index card, and each of the 138 index cards also has perforated edges, so theoretically they can be removed from the book and arranged in a different order if required. I imagine this gimmick will be dropped when the book is published in paperback, but Nabokovians and bibliophiles will undoubtedly want to possess this novelty edition.

That’s the good part. The not-so-good news is that the book is set in a font (Filosofia, by Zuzana Licko) which is a version of Bodoni. The body text is quite elegant and readable, but some headlines are set in the font’s unicase version, which has capitals and lower case of the same height. I am quite confident that Nabokov would have detested such affectation, and the results on some pages look awful.

The book has been created by Chip Kidd, a respected graphic designer, but I’m afraid this does not add anything to the appeal of this particular book or to Nabokov’s oeuvre as a whole. The index cards come out of this well enough, but reading the text in black print on dark grey paper is no joke.

The story is presented in an interesting and very allusive manner. There are unexplained shifts in the temporal sequence of events and the narrative point of view. These suggest that Nabokov was still experimenting with narrative strategies right up to the end of his life. [I have examined this phenomenon in my study of his short stories.] However, it has to be said that in common with the prose style of his other late works, it is contaminated by lots of irritating quirks and tics, such as his weakness for alliteration – though it might be slightly unfair to judge him from what was obviously a work in progress.

‘foetally folded … narrow nates … He brought from the favourite florist of fashionable girls a banal bevy of bird of paradise flowers’

It has been claimed that Nabokov would envisage a novel complete in his mind before starting to write it. This was supposed to allow him to work on any section his wished, then place a card in the stack already written. The cards in this volume cast severe doubts on that claim. There is some sense of fluency in the semi-completed chapters, but it’s of a kind that characterises his less distinguished novels; and the remainder prove that he was thinking aloud and making it up as he went along.

The volume has a preface written by his son Dmitri which is a pompous and badly-written piece of self-indulgence that tells us very little about the manuscript and why it came to be published. What it does tell us is how not to behave as the offspring of a famous person.

So, it’s a production with a number of interesting features. It’s clearly a piece of gross commercial opportunism; it gives more ammunition to those who see Nabokov as a great writer with a dubious interest in under-age girls; it’s unlikely to enhance his reputation as a writer; but for me it’s a fascinating glimpse into the writer’s workshop – and further proof that we shouldn’t take what writers say about their own motivations and methods at face value.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura: (Dying is Fun) a novel in fragments, London: Penguin, 2009, pp. 278, ISBN 0141191155

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

The Razor

April 10, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Razor first appeared in September 1926 in the Russian emigré newspaper Rul’ published in Berlin. The paper had been established by Vladimir Nabokov’s father in 1921.

In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed The Razor under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, but it seems to me no less worthy than many of the other shorter and lighter pieces from the early period of his output as a writer. His first novel, Mary was published the same year.

Vladimir Nabokov

The Razor – critical commentary

This is a short and relatively lightweight story – but it pursues its central conceit with admirable restraint and brevity. Every element in the dramatic situation raises the expectation that Ivanov will exact revenge. He has his adversary completely at his mercy. He is on his own, unobserved in the shop. The customer has put him through an ‘interrogation’ which he must have expected to lead to Ivanov’s death.

The artistic success of the tale lies not in the generation of tension – ‘don’t move please, or I might cut you prematurely’ – but in the fact that the customer never speaks. We can only imagine his terror. Even the details of the ‘interrogation’ are not dramatised – so we are spared any gruesome details, but by default encouraged to guess what they might be.

And in the end Ivanov does nothing, but simply dismisses his former tormentor. He triumphs over any desire for revenge. Technically, this is an anti-climax in the narrative, but in fact it is a very satisfying resolution.

Moreover, although the dramatic tension might seem rather artificial, the situation in the story is perfectly realistic. Berlin was the ‘first centre’ of emigration for Russians of both colours – Red and White – fleeing from the consequences of the 1917-1918 revolutions. Former aristocrats (like Nabokov himself) were forced to earn a living by doing menial jobs.

The Razor – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of phtographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

The Razor – plot summary

Ivanov is a White Russian emigré working in a barber shop in Berlin. His nickname as a military Captain had been ‘Razor’ because of his sharp features.

One quiet summer morning whilst the other staff are absent, a man comes into the shop for a shave. Ivanov recognises him as someone who has previously interrogated and (by implication) tortured him.

He shaves the man and menaces him by reminding him that a single slip of his razor would produce a lot of blood. He then proceeds to recount the events of his interrogation, all the while shaving his victim.

Ivanov reminds the man that both corpses and people sentenced to death are shaved, and asks him if he can guess what is going to happen next.

The man is clearly terrified, He keeps his eyes tightly shut and doesn’t utter a word. But Ivanov finally whisks the cloth from around his neck and bundles him out of the shop.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

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

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

May 12, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the first novel that Vladimir Nabokov wrote in English. He began its composition in late 1938 whilst living in Paris, having left his exile in Berlin the year before. Around this time, amidst the diaspora of Russian exiles, he realised that he would probably lose his Russian-speaking audience. He switched to writing in English, which was technically his third language (the second being French, the traditional lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy). The novel was first published by James Laughlin’s newly-founded New Directions press in America in 1941.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – commentary

This is one of a number of works in which Nabokov made use – for comic and satirical purpose – of biographical details from his own life. He had already used his Russian background and European exile for the substance of Glory (1932) and The Gift (1937) and he continued to do the same later in his career with the burlesque Pale Fire (1962) and the parodic Look at the Harlequins (1974).

Nabokov inserts all sorts of small details from his own life into the narrative – references to exile from Russia, his interest in butterflies, his personal habits of a cold bath each morning, writing in bed, undergraduate life at Cambridge, and the fact that he had a brother, from whom he was rather distant.

The novel also plays teasingly with the relationship between literature and ‘real life’, it parodies the literary genre of biography at a number of levels, and it is a variant on the theme of ‘the unreliable narrator’ which he had exploited so successfully in his earlier novella The Eye (1930).

The book purports to be a biography of Sebastian Knight, written by his half-brother V. But it is mainly about V’s efforts to gather information – including several passages of quite inconsequential events and detailed accounts of his failure to unearth accurate evidence. Moreover, V’s first person narrative is deliberately self-contradictory. He observes:

As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of myself as possible.

Quite the opposite is the case. His ‘biography’ is a ragback of personal anecdotes and memoirs from his own childhood, plus scenes he imagines from his half-brother’s life, extracts from Sebastian Knight’s own books, and episodes that have no bearing on Sebastian Knight at all.

As a biography, it omits huge sections of Sebastian Knight’s childhood and youth; it fails to give any account of important figures in his life (such as Clare Bishop and the Russian lover); it misinterprets his artistic achievement; ignores the fact of his boorish behaviour; and ends on a note of grotesque bathos when the narrator offers a gripping account of a journey across France that reveals nothing whatever about the subject of his study.

The narrator rejects other people’s opinions and memories of Sebastian Knight if they do not agree with his own; he burns two packets of private correspondence which would (we assume) have revealed important details of Knight’s relationships with the two important women in his adult life; and he fails to interview people who knew him well.

Running through the whole work is a petulant rant against a rival biographer Mr Goodman, whose publication The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight he excoriates as a worthless sham. We have no way of knowing if this is true or not, because he does not quote from it.

We note in addition that as preparation for the biography, the narrator takes a correspondence course in creative writing. Nabokov is deliberately creating an unreliable and an untalented narrator – which would be an interesting literary strategy if he made any coherent or persuasive use of it. But his intention seems to be only to tease and amuse. This is certainly a novel which paved the way for his overwhelmingly successful use of these tricksy devices in later works such as Lolita and Pale Fire, but The Real Life of Sebastian Knight remains a lightweight rehearsal for these later triumphs.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – study resources

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – GradeSaver Notes – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – GradeSaver Notes – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – summaries

1 Following the death of the writer Sebastian Knight, a biography is being written by V, his un-named half-brother. The chapter deals with the two marriages of their father, and his death in a duel fought over the honour of Sebastian’s mother, his first wife.

2 The narrator recalls childhood memories of Knight; he quotes from Knight’s memoirs; and he criticises another biographer for factual inaccuracies. He also visits their old Swiss governess, but finds her memories defective.

3 Sebastian, the narrator, and his mother escape from the revolution into Finland. From there, Sebastian goes to Cambridge, whilst the narrator and his mother go to Paris. The narrator recalls Sebastian’s youthful escapade with a ‘modernist’ poet, and his two visits to Paris as an Anglophile undergraduate.

4 The narrator prepares to write the biography by taking a correspondence course in authorship. After Sebastian’s death the narrator visits his rooms in London and goes through the mundane contents of his desk, uncovering vague evidence of a Russian lover..

5 Sebastian’s life as a student at Cambridge. He feels isolated and becomes introspective. He is poor at games, lives eccentrically, and graduates with a first class degree in English Literature.

6 The narrator visits Mr Goodman, Sebastian’s ‘assistant’ and literary agent. Goodman claims to be a close friend of Sebastian’s and tries to dissuade the narrator from writing his biography – because he has just written one of his own.

7 The narrator criticises Goodman’s biography, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, as a rag-bag of feeble anecdotes which he calls The Farce of Mr Goodman. He quotes passages from Sebastian Knight’s autobiographical work Lost Property as evidence of his rich, individualistic inner life.

8 The narrator meets Sebastian with Clare Bishop in Paris, then he appeals to Helen Pratt for information. He makes two attempts to interview Clare Bishop, but is put off by her husband.

9 Sebastian writes and re-writes his first two novels, living with Clare Bishop as typist, then they go on holiday to Germany where a doctor in Berlin diagnoses him with heart disease.

10 The narrator offers enthusiastic accounts of Sebastian’s early two novels. The first is a pathetic jumble of detective story cliches; the second is a ridiculous exploration of all possible causes of a coincidental meeting.

11 Sebastian ignores his own literary success; he behaves boorishly towards Clare and their friend Sheldon; and he insults his half-brother when they meet in Paris.

12 Sebastian leaves Clare and disappears abroad for some time, possibly with a Russian lover. On return he is forced to employ Goodman to look after his chaotic literary affairs. He has his portrait painted by Roy Carswell.

13 The narrator travels to the German hotel where Sebastian stayed, in search of the identity of his Russian lover. The manager refuses to give him any information, but a man he meets on a train agrees to act as a private detective.

14 The man produces four possible names. The first turns out to be a false lead, but it does produce contact with an old friend who reveals that Sebastian was not popular at school.

15 The narrator calls on one Russian contact in Paris, but the woman is not there. Her husband recounts his earlier Bohemian existence with his first wife.

16 At another address the woman is also absent, but her friend Mme Lecerf flirts with V and gives an account of a flighty young woman who might be Sebastian’s former lover.

17 The narrator travels to Mme Lecerf’s house to meet her friend. She continues to flirt, and V finally concludes that she is impersonating her friend, and he leaves.

18 The narrator paraphrases Sebastian Knight’s final work, The Doubtful Asphodel – but does so using poetic images and cod-philosophising about ‘the meaning of Life’.

19 The last months of Sebastian’s life following the disappearance of his Russian lover. The narrator receives a letter from him, saying he is in a sanatorium. He delays the arrangements for departure, then receives a telegram saying the case is hopeless.

20 The narrator gives a vivid and protracted account of his overnight rail journey to Paris, then a taxi ride to the sanatorium. He keeps a bedside vigil whilst Sebastian is sleeping – then discovers it is the wrong patient. His brother died the day before.

Sebastian Knight’s publications

The Prismatic Bezel (1925)

Success (1927)

Lost Property

The Funny Mountain

Albinos in Black

The Doubtful Asphodel (1936)

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – characters

Sebastian Knight	a young Anglo-Russian novelist
V	his un-named younger half-brother and biographer
Clare Bishop	Sebastian Knight’s lover in London
Helen Pratt	Knight’s friend in London
Mr Goodman	Knight’s biographer and literary agent
P.G. Sheldon	a poet and friend of Sebastian and Clare
Roy Carswell	artist who paints Knight’s portrait

Vladimir Nabokov – web links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

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

Transparent Things

April 26, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources web links

Transparent Things (1972) was the penultimate novel Vladimir Nabokov published in his own lifetime. It was superseded only by Look at the Harlequins in 1974 and his posthumous The Original of Laura which was published in 2009. It was his sixteenth novel, and the seventh he had written in English, which was his third language after Russian and French. It is written in a very oblique and mannered style which is typical of works from his late period.

Transparent Things – critical commentary

The intrusive narrator

Nabokov was very keen on using first person narrators. These characters are often witty (Humbert Humbert) sometimes crazy (Charles Kinbote) and on occasions they deliberately set out to bamboozle the reader (Smurov, in The Eye). In Transparent Things the un-named narrator seems intent on making the sequence and the reader’s understanding of events as difficult as possible.

There is no reason to think of the narrator as other than male. Apart from half-formed philosophic observations on time and physical reality, he is presenting the story largely from Hugh Person’s point of view – but it is often difficult to know where one point of view ends and the other begins. The narrator becomes almost like an actor in his own narrative. He addresses his characters; he speaks to the reader; he invents interlocutors; he speaks on behalf of Hugh Person from time to time; and he even talks to himself, commenting on his own story.

This is intended to be playful and amusing, but his presence becomes over-intrusive without ever taking on the persona of a fully realised character. There is also no explanation offered for his relationship to Hugh Person. We are never told how he knows what Hugh is thinking and feeling . Like many of Nabokov’s other stylistic devices used in his later works, this intrusiveness becomes irritating

Nabokov and sexuality

There is now a well-established argument that Nabokov displayed a very questionable interest in sex with under-age girls throughout his career as a writer. Examples range from his earliest stories such as A Nursery Tale (1926), novels such as Laughter in the Dark (1932), his novella The Enchanter (1939), the famous case of Lolita (1955), through to late works such as Ada or Ardor (1969), Look at the Harlequins (1974), and even beyond to his unfinished The Original of Laura which was published in 2009 after his death.

This is a phenomenon that Martin Amis has described as something of an embarrassment in a writer otherwise so distinguished. But what is not so widely remarked is that at the same time as his interest in paedophilia (which he euphemised by substituting the term nympholepsy) his later works take on a distinct and unpleasant aura of smuttiness half hidden under his lexical virtuosity.

For instance the coquettish Armande has a disagreement with her three male friends that she unnecessarily explains to Hugh Person:

Facing him in the heavenly cable car she gave him a comparatively polite version of what she was to tell him a little later in disgustingly vivid detail. Jacques had demanded her presence at the onanistic sessions he held with the Blake twins at their chalet. Once already he had made Jack show her his implement but she had stamped her foot and made them behave themselves. Jacques had now presented her with an ultimatum – either she join them in their nasty games or he would cease being her lover.

Hugh Person speculates on the sexual relationship between the elderly author R and his stepdaughter Julia Moore – and the first possibilities that occur to him involve paedophilia. These are Hugh Person’s thoughts of course, not Nabokov’s, but the frequency with which the subject recurs throughout his work (and this work in particular) makes them attributable to Nabokov. After all, if this is not a topic in which he is interested, why does he keep on writing about it?

He also caught himself trying to establish … at what age, in what circumstances, the writer had begun to debauch Julia: had it been in her childhood – tickling her in her bath, kissing her wet shoulders, then one day carrying her wrapped in a big towel to his lair, as delectably described in the novel? Or did he flirt with her in her first college year

We have already been told (as has Hugh Person) that Julia ‘had been debauched at thirteen by R.’ The same sort of images and voyeuristic details are written into the chapter where Hugh Person visits Armande’s home and is given a collection of family photograph albums to peruse by her mother:

The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest . . . and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.

Literary style

Nabokov is famous as a master of prose style. He is normally inventive, articulate, witty, and at his best produces marvellous images and turns of phrase. He can be serious and very funny at the same time; his construction of complex plots and unusual approaches to narrative are matchless; his range of language is dazzling; and yet towards the end of his creative life, these very strengths seem to become his weaknesses. The most obvious case is Ada or Ardor – his parallel to Finnegans Wake – a book stuffed so full of literary tricks and word games, it becomes unreadable.

Transparent Things is littered with annoying and childish alliteration – ‘as the pictured past and the perceived present possess’. Nabokov chooses provocatively silly (and alliterative) names – ‘Paul Plam’ – ‘Jack, Jake, and Jacques’ – ‘Tom Tam’. And worst of all he indulges his penchant for embarrassing schoolboy smut – ‘there’s many a mile between Condom in Gascogne and Pussy in Savoie’.

There are also too many bravura but irrelevant passages, long sequences of word-play in the (short) novel that are out of all proportion in their lack of significance. For instance, three pages are devoted to the manufacture of wooden pencils, and there is an equally lengthy description of a trick tennis shot that Hugh Person thinks he has invented. Neither of these has anything to do with the rest of the novel.

Quite apart from the issues discussed above, the principal weakness of the novel is that there is nothing holding its parts together – no unifying theme or subject. Hugh’s relationship with his father leads nowhere; the sections of the novel that are set in America are geographically unconvincing; the characters of R and his stepdaughter Julia add very little; Hugh’s somnambulism is a rather creaking plot device that allows Nabokov to create a protagonist who murders his wife; and Hugh’s death in the hotel fire is quite accidental, not in any way linked to what has preceded it in the narrative.

Transparent Things – study resources

Transparent Things – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Transparent Things – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, study guides

Transparent Things – chapter summaries

1 A narrator reflects on the relationship between the past and future, and on the nature of physical objects.

2 Hugh Person arrives at a Swiss hotel eight years after his previous visit.

3 He finds a pencil in his room. The process of manufacturing wooden pencils is described in detail.

4 He recalls an earlier visit to the hotel with his father, whose clumsiness irritates him.

5 He goes out shopping with his father, who dies in the fitting room whilst trying on some trousers.

6 With his father’s money, he treats himself to an expensive meal, hires a prostitute, then endures a sleepless night alone.

7 As a child then as a youth, he has suffered from somnambulism.

8 After leaving university, he works in publishing. He edits a badly written romance, then takes up work with R, who lives in Switzerland.

9 Travelling through Switzerland on a train, he meets Armande, whom he wishes to impress.

10 He meets the novelist R at the hotel to discuss business, but cannot stop thinking about Armande.

11 Hugh previously attended an avant-garde play in New York with Julia Moore, then had sex with her afterwards.

12 He visits Armande’s home, but she is not there. Her mother shows him photo albums featuring pictures of Armande as a nude young girl.

13 The next day he meets Armande and Julia Moore in a village coffee shop.

14 He meets Armande at a rendezvous, but finds her with three men. They all hike up a mountain, whilst Hugh is forced to turn back.

15 He watches Armande skiing, then unsuccessfully tries to make love to her on the way back home.

16 Hugh’s sleeping problems and his trick tennis shot which he rehearses mentally as a soporific. His horrible erotic dreams, plus flashes forward to his marriage and some sort of crime.

17 Hugh is besotted with Armande, but she is not a very satisfactory wife. She has slightly bizarre sexual preferences, and is unfaithful to him.

18 Hugh travels to Switzerland to persuade R to make changes to his latest book – which he refuses to do.

19 In New York Hugh corrects the proofs to R’s novel, which contains references to the seduction of his young stepdaughter.

20 Hugh is being interviewed by the police, because his wife has been strangled. He has a dream of killing a prostitute, and wakes up to find his wife dead on the floor.

21 R writes to his publisher Phil about his preparations for death following an unsuccessful operation.

22 Hugh buys a pair of walking boots and retraces his journey to Armande’s house.

23 He also retraces the mountain climb he made with Armande and her three men friends, but he fails to reach the cable car.

24 Hugh compiles a list of reflections on death whilst he is in various mental hospitals.

25 Eight years after murdering Armande he is visiting the Swiss hotels they stayed in. He claims that he deliberately arranged for solitary confinement whilst in the hospitals.

26 He transfers himself to the very room they shared, and he waits for Armande, but the hotel catches fire and he is killed in the blaze.

Transparent Things – principal characters

Hugh Person	a 40 year old American publisher’s editor
Dr Person	his father, a private school headmaster
I	an un-named outer narrator
Armande Charmar	a coquettish Swiss girl, who marries Hugh
Mrs Charmar	Armande’s mother
R.	a middle-aged writer living in Switzerland
Julia Moore	R’s American stepdaughter

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