Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile 9781501766787

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction: The Cinematic Commonplace
Chapter 1 The Weimar Picture Palace: From Film to Cinema in Berlin Exile (1925–1928)
Chapter 2 The Man from the Movie Kingdom: Cinema Debates and Culture Theory (1925–1930)
Chapter 3 A Cinematic Genius: Camera Obscura and the European Culture Industry (1931–1936)
Chapter 4 America Obscura: Laughter in the Dark (1933–1940)
Coda. The Old Europe Picture Palace
Appendix: Georgy Gessen’s Film Reviews for Rul′ (1924–1931)
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

NABOKOV NOIR

NABOKOV NOIR

C I N E M AT I C C U LT U R E A N D T H E A RT O F E X I L E

Luke Parker

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Parker, Luke, 1986– author. Title: Nabokov noir : cinematic culture and the art of exile / Luke Parker. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022006274 (print) | LCCN 2022006275 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501766527 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501766787 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501766596 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Criticism and interpretation. | Motion pictures and literature. | Literature and transnationalism. | Motion pictures and transnationalism. Classification: LCC PG3476.N3 Z817 2022 (print) | LCC PG3476.N3 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/42— dc23​/­eng/20220611 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006274 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov​ /2022006275 Cover photograph: Berlin bei Nacht, photograph of the Capitol am Zoo (1927). Courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek–Museum für Film und Fernsehen.

For Lauren

To be an exiled writer is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course, than a man, b­ ecause they ­will never retrieve you). —­Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile”

C o n te n ts

Acknowl­edgments  ix Note on Transliteration and Translation  xiii

Introduction: The Cinematic Commonplace 1 1. The Weimar Picture Palace: From Film to Cinema in Berlin Exile (1925–1928) 30 2. The Man from the Movie Kingdom: Cinema Debates and Culture Theory (1925–1930) 69 3. A Cinematic Genius: Camera Obscura and the Eu­ro­pean Culture Industry (1931–1936) 99 4. Amer­i­ca Obscura: Laughter in the Dark (1933–1940) 139 Coda: The Old Eu­rope Picture Palace Appendix: Georgy Gessen’s Film Reviews for Rul’ (1924–1931)  187 Notes  195 Bibliography  241 Index  255

170

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

This work is the product of many conversations, real as well as i­ magined, spanning at least a de­cade and maybe two. A uniquely brilliant teacher, Peter Allwright, taught me Rus­sian. His ­career at City of London School lasted from the year I was born ­until the summer this manuscript was completed. This book is one of the many testaments left by former pupils to his inspirational, sporting love for cryptic intellectual challenges. At Oxford, Andrew Kahn, Mike Nichols, and Catriona Kelly expanded my study of Rus­sian culture, while tutorials with Jennifer Baines, Belinda Jack, and Jennifer Lee deepened my reading of lit­er­at­ ure and pushed me to argue for my ideas. Ian Watson, an indefatigable, enthusiastic, and infectiously serious teacher, told me to keep my mind open—­I might be surprised, one day, to find myself a professor. Studying French symbolism with Patrick McGuinness was the foretaste of research that led me to gradu­ate school in California. At Stanford, where no conformity or discipleship is tolerated, I loved e­ very minute of deregulated intellectual freedom. Monika Greenleaf first introduced me to Nabokov and was this manuscript’s last reader. Her comments—in all caps, inserted between or in the very ­middle of sentences—­still represent an ideal of intellectual engagement, and it is against her critical eye that I mea­sure my writing. Gabriella Safran’s mentoring (not to mention shared fascination for maps, modernities, and diasporas) represent a second ideal of critical engagement. I owe to her generosity and inimitable poise many subsequent years of sanity. Grisha Freidin’s corner office on sunny after­noons, a case of Nespresso at the ready—­such warmth, humor, wisdom, and humanity—is a memory I cherish. His bird’s-­eye view of any situation continues, year a­ fter year, to provide solace and the peace afforded by perspective: “onward and upward.” Faculty at Stanford who influenced the thinking b­ ehind this proj­ect include Jean-­Marie Apostolidès, Adrian Daub, Martón Dornbach, Lazar Fleishman, Roland Greene, Sepp Gumbrecht, Nick Jenkins, Josh Landy, Nariman Skakov, and Hannah ­Sullivan. For countless days of excellent com­pany, thank you to my former companions in gradu­ate study: Lucy Alford, Jason Cieply, Irina Erman, Brian Kim, Bill Leidy, Anna Lordan, Dylan Montanari, and Rujuta Parikh. ix

x

A c k n ow l­e d g m e n ts

My colleagues at Oberlin College gave so much more than they demanded during my postdoctoral fellowship: Stiliana Milkova, Pablo Mitchell, and Tim Scholl, and especially Arlene Forman and Tom Newlin. At Colby College, Dean Allbritton, Rory Bradley, Sarah Duff, Aaron Hanlon, Seth Kim, Kerill O’Neill, Adrianna Paliyenko, and Vivian Wood have been a plea­sure to work with, providing unfailing support and encouragement. I would like to thank Cedric Bryant and especially Paul Josephson for leading by example and standing firmly on princi­ple. For intellectual conversations of all kinds, thank you to Stephen Blackwell, Galya Diment, Polina Barskova, Marijeta Bozovic, Alexander Dolinin, Siggy Frank, Kat Hill, Tom Seifrid, Roman Utkin, Duncan White, and Alberto Zambenedetti. I want to thank in par­tic­u­lar Angela Brintlinger for offering me several opportunities early in my c­ areer, including lecturing on this proj­ect; Olga Hasty for inviting me to pre­sent this material to her Nabokov students; Michael Kunichika for ­going out of his way to help in a time of need; and Eric Naiman for his generous and longstanding support. I am grateful to Brian Boyd, not only for his biography of Nabokov, that thick description of Rus­sian émigré life, but also for generously supporting this proj­ect and unfailingly saying yes to vari­ous requests for help or clarification. Several selfless colleagues read this manuscript at one or more stages, and the book owes what clarity it has to their questions and suggestions. Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya is a collaborator in so many ways, and I am deeply grateful to her. Alisa Ballard Lin similarly provided invaluable feedback. Perhaps unconventionally, I would like to acknowledge an intellectual debt to the editors of and contributors to Kinovedcheskie zapiski, whose back cata­logue, obtained through vari­ous Interlibrary Loan requests, continues to supply a store of archival discoveries, wide-­ranging inquiry, and critical insight. I also am deeply indebted to two figures whose passing prevented personal contact, but without whose insights, intuitions, and fearless trespassing of national and disciplinary bound­aries this proj­ect would not even begin to be thinkable: Thomas Elsaesser and Rashit Yangirov. Thanks are due to the staff of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, Lilly Library at Indiana University, and Library of Congress. My gratitude is also due to the Interlibrary Loan staff at Oberlin and Colby, especially Gabe Stowe, whose efforts to procure very disparate t­ hings indeed w ­ ere essential to this proj­ect’s completion. A Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oberlin College, as well as Colby College’s generous leave policies, allowed me to finish the manuscript. At Cornell University Press, thank you to Mahinder Kingra, who alone “got” the proj­ect from the outset and waited patiently for it to materialize, as well as to the ideal editorial team of Bethany Wasik and Mary Kate Murphy,



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who gracefully navigated all challenges. At Westchester Publishing Ser­vices, Mary Gendron and Jane Lichty edited the manuscript with scholarly care and a perfect understanding of the book’s aims and use of evidence. Thanks to Dina Dineva for her sterling work indexing the manuscript. I would like to extend special gratitude to Yuri Tsivian and my other, anonymous, reader—­receiving their insights may have been this proj­ect’s most rewarding moment. Thank you to my parents Ian and Elaine for their belief in education and continued support of my intellectual pursuits. And to my family Laura and Chris, Marit and Shawn, and Lyle and Shirley, who have always welcomed us home. My boys Micah and Rafe are in some ways the joyful counterbalance to the obsessive focus this work requires—­and yet, as readers and researchers themselves, they are already following their own intellectual pursuits no less creatively, doggedly, and exuberantly. My partner in every­thing—my first reader and editor—­ shares responsibility for this book’s strengths (­we’ll split the proceeds), while I remain responsible for wherever it falls short. It is to her that the work is dedicated. This book contains excerpts from Camera Obscura and a translation of the previously untranslated Rus­sian poem “Kinematograf,” both by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © by The Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, Inc., used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. The poem “Tolstoy” appears from Selected Poems by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a ­division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Quotations from Bobbs-­Merrill Manuscripts are courtesy of the Lilly ­Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. ­There is an excerpt from On Grief and Reason by Joseph Brodsky. Copyright © 1995 by Joseph Brodsky. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. The book’s epigraph is from On Grief and Reason by Joseph Brodsky published by Penguin. Copyright © Joseph Brodsky, 1995. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books L ­ imited.

N ote o n Tr a nsl i te r ati o n a n d Tr a nsl ati o n

I follow the Library of Congress (LOC) transliteration system, making exceptions in the text for legibility of proper names (Maxim Gorky). For the sake of precision, in the scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography I follow the LOC system strictly (Maksim Gorʹkii). All translations into En­glish from Rus­sian, French, or German are mine ­unless other­wise noted. In all cases I take the language of a work’s first composition as primary, which in Nabokov’s case is usually (but not always) Rus­ sian. For the sake of accessibility, I quote from published En­glish translations of Nabokov’s fiction when available but indicate departures from the Rus­sian. To restore omissions I use square brackets, and to indicate the original phrasing I include the Rus­sian using italics in square brackets.

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Introduction The Cinematic Commonplace

Exile is dispersal, an expansive loss and cultural diffusion; it is also a compressive force, where space contracts and compatriots crowd. The Rus­sian émigrés, a loosely connected group of more than a million refugees and exiles from the Rus­sian Revolution and subsequent civil war, fanned out across the world in the years following 1918. Exiled from the East, Rus­sian writers moved to Berlin, or Prague, or Warsaw, before eventually finding themselves, willing or not, in Paris, the literary capital of the emigration.1 For the Rus­sians who had followed the gradient down to Paris by 1940, the only haven from Adolf Hitler’s armies and another war was the sea, as they fled south to the Côte d’Azur, north to London—or west again, to New York. Vladimir Nabokov was one of the very few Rus­sian intellectuals who made it off the Continent in May 1940.2 Soon ­after Nabokov had relocated to the United States, readers of the Atlantic Monthly entered his first American story through a darkened auditorium: “To­night we ­shall go to the movies. Back to the thirties, and down the twenties, and round the corner to the old Eu­rope Picture Palace.”3 In the 1943 story “The Assistant Producer,” the cinema serves as a structuring device for revisiting and fictionalizing interwar Eu­rope as the space of exile. This world, which Nabokov had left b­ ehind, was now being obliterated by the Second World War. If Nabokov’s life (1899–1977) paralleled that of the twentieth ­century, the life of his Rus­sian fiction (1922–1940) flourished in tandem with that c­ entury’s 1

2 I NT R OD U CT I ON

signature cultural formation, the cinema. Nabokov was born three years a­ fter the first cinema screening in Rus­sia, making him an almost exact con­temporary of the cinema. His aristocratic childhood in early twentieth-­century St. Petersburg paralleled the infancy of film. By the 1920s, when Nabokov, now living in exile in Berlin, was trying to make his mark as a writer, the cinema was also coming out of adolescence. As Jean-­Paul Sartre, Nabokov’s near con­temporary, put it in his autobiography, “We had the same m ­ ental age: I was seven and knew how to read; it was twelve and did not know how to talk.”4 Rus­sian exile was indeed the “Eu­rope Picture Palace,” the space of cinema itself. This included the technology and art of film, the habitus and experience of moviegoing, the entertainment and promotion complex of production companies’ “­grand design,” and, paramount for the literary context, the discourse of film theory and cinema debates. Nabokov’s response to the intellectual and artistic challenge of s­ ilent and early sound cinema took the form of a sustained engagement that has never been studied in its historical context. Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, his Rus­sian fiction and essays pre­sent a richly compelling thinking through and working out of modernist-­ era lit­er­a­ture’s relation to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon.

An International Language: The Cinema as Émigré ­Career By the 1920s, ­silent cinema was recognized as an international language. As film historian Miriam Hansen has pointed out, the topos of a universal art—­ egalitarian, international, and technocratic—­was carried over from photo­ graphy to the cinema, leading to the emergence of Hollywood’s exported “Americanism” as “the first global vernacular.”5 With its im­mensely popu­lar comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the adventures of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and the romances of Rudolph Valentino, Hollywood stood in the middlebrow vanguard, leading a worldwide diffusion of mass culture. The effect of this universal, nonverbal language on the Rus­sian emigrants in Eu­rope was precisely the inverse of its effect on immigrants to Amer­i­ca. In the United States, direct appeals to the imagination supposedly hurdled the language barrier, easing tension and facilitating integration into American society.6 For the Rus­sian émigrés, who defined themselves negatively in terms of Rus­sia’s absence, not Eu­rope’s presence—­those who had departed but not yet arrived—­cinema’s universalism provided a way to navigate exile. As the scholar of Rus­sian literary diaspora Maria Rubins has shown, transnationalism

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was the basic practice of many émigré writers, not assimilation.7 For some, mutation and adaptation ­were viewed as capitulation, a voluntary degradation of Rus­sian culture. For Nabokov, Rus­sian literary culture had always been international, and engagement with Western realia and artistic traditions was a natu­ral metamorphosis for his Rus­sian writing. In the Rus­sian émigré context, therefore, it is especially vital to examine cinema through what film scholars have called the “bifocal” lens of aesthetics and economics, art and business.8 The cinema was both a philosophical object—­film and cinema theory—­and a historical constituent of artistic ­careers in exile. Rus­sian exiles ­were especially concerned with the growth of the culture industry, which presented a double-­edged sword. This im­mense promotional apparatus allowed the formation of an international audience accessible to Rus­sian writers through translations and screenplays; at the same time, it threatened the preservation and transmission of Rus­sian high literary culture. The technological development of film, which moved en masse between 1928 and 1931 from s­ ilent to sound, theoretically l­imited the international potential of accented actors and actresses.9 For Nabokov, however, the market for translation and cinematic adaptation only grew a­ fter 1928, the beginning of the most concerted transition to sound, as his multilingual c­ areer flourished alongside the coming of sound. Throughout the 1930s, Nabokov engaged in entrepreneurial commercial dealings with foreign publishers and production companies in order to reach an international market ­either in translation or in the revised form of a screenplay. The culture industry was a way of transcending the physical and material limitations of exile, enabling his fiction to reach places that he, stateless if not penniless, could not. In the straitened circumstances of exile—­without state support, an established matrilingual readership, or significant private patronage—­writers turned to Western cultural markets to supplement their living. In Nabokov’s case, this meant an essentially trilingual c­ areer from the outset. Not only ­were his first two Rus­sian prose books themselves translations (one from French, the other from En­glish), but his first in­de­pen­dently authored novels Mary (Mashenʹka, 1926) and King, Queen, Knave (Korolʹ, dama, valet, 1928) ­were translated immediately into German.10 His third, fifth, and sixth novels (The Luzhin Defense [Zashchita Luzhina, 1929–1930], Camera Obscura [Kamera obskura, 1932–1933], and Despair [Otchaianie, 1934]) ­were translated into French, with the latter two also translated into En­glish for a British audience.11 Camera Obscura has the distinction of having been not only translated into French and En­glish but also rewritten and retitled for an American audience as Laughter in the Dark (1938), all within five years of its Rus­sian publication. ­These translations and self-­ translations must be considered an integral ele­ment of Nabokov’s ­career,

4 I NT R OD U CT I ON

in addition to his original work in other languages during the 1920s and 1930s.12 In sum, Nabokov’s “Rus­sian years”—or at least the years of his Eu­ro­pean exile, 1919–1940—­are rather more than Rus­sian.13 The scale of Nabokov’s international promotion of his work during t­ hese years, negotiating and collaborating with agents, publishers, and translators, has not yet been fully appreciated. The narrator of Nabokov’s 1936 story “Spring in Fialta” (“Vesna v Fialʹte”) works for a film com­pany specializing in screen adaptations of lit­er­a­ture, including the writing of Ferdinand, the husband of the story’s heroine, Nina. “Subsequently,” writes the narrator, “I even turned out to be of some use to [Ferdinand]: my firm acquired the film rights of one of his more intelligible stories [kupila u nego fabulu dlia filʹma], and then he had a good time pestering me with tele­g rams.”14 Like Ferdinand, pestering production companies with tele­g rams, Nabokov himself had had the “option” on stories and novels bought by publishers and movie companies, which often fell s­ ilent for long stretches a­ fter paying an initial advance. As Nabokov wrote to his fellow émigré, the writer Nina Berberova in 1935, stretches of his correspondence ­were taken up with his efforts to find out the fate of his texts: “I have more agents than readers, and the business side of my life consists of the complex distribution of options [optsionov]—­countless and fruitless. If one w ­ ere to gather ­these men and ­women together, they would form an enormous international sanatorium (it is strange, but a­ fter a first passionate period of tele­grams t­ here follows a mysterious silence which [­really!], ­after inquiries, is excused by ‘illnesses’; with just my female translators one could form a small pine forest hospital).”15 This letter and small fictional detail from “Spring in Fialta” is a recognition that in certain senses a writer with global aspirations was subordinate to and dependent on the film industry, with its publicity divisions, financial resources, and hard-­nosed tradecraft in boosting a new writer. Nabokov would have been aware in Weimar Berlin of the example set by the c­ areer of Vicki Baum, who was assiduously and successfully promoted by his own German publisher, Ullstein. Baum’s 1929 novel Menschen im ­Hotel was turned into the Hollywood hit ­Grand ­Hotel (1932), starring Greta Garbo as the Rus­sian ballerina Grusinskaya.16 What the “movie kingdom” (as Nabokov calls it in The Luzhin Defense) needed from an author was minimal: a famous title, a bare-­bones outline, and a marketable authorial persona, perhaps scandalous, or mysterious, or just foreign. In his 1927 story “The Passenger” (“Passazhir”), Nabokov’s narrator, a writer, tells a literary critic that authors cannot hope to compete with Life’s inimitable plots, but instead must “cheat” and “treat her creations as a film producer [filʹmovyi rezhisser] does a famous novel.”17 This is of course not Nabokov’s method: the narrator is, as Nabokov ­later pointed out, “not a self-­portrait

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but the generalized image of a middlebrow author” and is reproved by the critic (modeled on Yuly Aikhenvald) for missing the fact that lit­er­a­ture has an unrivaled power to make chance fatidic, to “make of chance something unusual and make the unusual something not by chance [iz sluchainosti sozdavatʹ neobychainostʹ, neobychainoe delatʹ ne sluchainym]”—an axiom around which much of Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction turns.18 Yet the narrator’s description of how the movie industry treats literary fiction can be taken as an uncontroversial shorthand for émigré perceptions of film’s cultural niche: “The producer [rezhisser] needs to prevent servant maids [gornichnym] from being bored on Saturday nights; therefore he alters the novel beyond recognition; minces it, turns it inside out, throws out hundreds of episodes, introduces new characters and incidents he has in­ven­ted himself—­and all this for the sole purpose of having an entertaining film [zanimatelʹnyi filʹm] unfold without a hitch, punishing virtue [dobrodetelʹ] in the beginning and vice [porok] at the end, a film perfectly natu­ral in terms of its own conventions and, above all, furnished with an unexpected but all-­resolving outcome.”19 It is impor­tant to note that the issue of Rulʹ (The Rudder), the Rus­sian newspaper in Berlin in which this story appeared, was itself suffused with cinematic culture. In addition to a promotional notice for Nabokov’s play “from émigré life,” The Man from the U.S.S.R. (Chelovek iz SSSR, 1927), the newspaper featured large advertisements for three such “entertaining” films. ­These all starred Rus­sian actors and ­were being shown at movie palaces near Nabokov’s west Berlin residence, including at the Tauentzien-­Palast, Nabokov’s corner theater (see chapter 1).20 A number of this passage’s topoi would recur in Nabokov’s Rus­sian and early American fiction, including the importance of the figure of the film producer (life itself is called “an assistant producer” in the 1943 story of that name) and film director (in par­tic­u­lar the assistant director, the terror of extras in Mary and elsewhere), the lower-­middle-­class (often female) audience, the moral polarities (virtue and vice) of film’s ethical economy, and the ultimately derivative nature of commercial cinema.21 We should note, however, that in this story commercial “middlebrow” lit­er­a­ture is seen as similarly derivative, suggesting that this is a function of a market orientation to mass taste, rather than a deficiency inherent in the medium—an orientation for which Nabokov himself would be reproved by some émigré critics. To trace the story of Nabokov’s strategic involvement with the promotional apparatus of the international movie industry is to reconstruct a deft response to the artificial isolation and shrinking audiences of exile. Nabokov’s attempts to reverse the trend of slowing émigré artistic production through translations and adaptations reflect his advantages over filmmakers in his own polyglottal, translatable, and internationally marketable novels. It is the contention of this

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book that Nabokov’s engagement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of what contemporaries called the “cinematized” culture of interwar Eu­rope enabled him to flourish as a writer during the interwar years. This engagement, understood both as literary poetics and as publishing strategy, amounts to nothing less than an art of exile.

Nabokov and Exile Nabokov’s novels of the 1920s and 1930s can be divided into t­ hose with Rus­ sian émigrés as their subject and ­those without. Reading his Rus­sian fiction by national subject, the pioneering Nabokov scholar Don Barton Johnson characterized them as follows: “The Rus­sian novels, such as Mary, The Defense, The Eye, and Glory [and arguably The Gift—LP], are concerned with the themes of nostalgia and identity. The German novels, such as King, Queen, Knave, Laughter in the Dark, and Despair are crime stories in which Nabokov investigates the nature of evil.”22 Although when stated baldly the dichotomy breaks down (the heroes of Despair and Glory are pointedly not fully Rus­sian, by ­either blood or outlook), the reader of Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction in chronological order cannot help noticing, as did his contemporaries, the periodic alternation of Rus­ sian and non-­Russian characters. At two critical junctures in Nabokov’s Rus­sian ­career, the marked choice of this alternation in subject is especially significant: the turn from the “Rus­sian” Mary (1926) to the “German” King, Queen, Knave (1928) and from the semiautobiographical Glory (Podvig, 1931–1932) to the pastiche of Weimar cinematic culture Camera Obscura (1932–1933), ­later Laughter in the Dark.23 For all Nabokov’s association with memory and nostalgia (traits that endeared him to critics with his first novel, Mary), he was also viewed as the poet of the pre­sent and diagnostician of his contemporaries. These traits were revealed in his second novel, King, Queen, Knave, which, to the vocal disappointment of some, contained not a single Rus­sian.24 Nabokov’s “non-­Russian” novels, in par­ tic­u­lar King, Queen, Knave and Camera Obscura, are works of layered linguistic-­ cultural references. ­There is a surface language, Rus­sian, and an intended initial audience, primarily Rus­sian émigré, which possesses a set of cultural assumptions about the subject m ­ atter and milieu, which is usually German, and its confrontation with a certain cultural substrate, Amer­i­ca and its mass culture. Rus­sian critical opinion at the time recognized the importance of foreign models and readers for Nabokov’s fiction, while disagreeing about the trajectory of his work—­some argued that it read like a translation from French or German, o ­ thers that Nabokov wrote purely to be translated into t­hose lan-

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guages. In a review essay of 1930, covering all Nabokov’s work up to that point, and addressing him by his Rus­sian pen name Sirin, the émigré critic Nikolai Andreev summarized: “Sirin is an émigré [zarubezhnik]. This elementary definition refers not only to his temporary geo­g raph­i­cal attachment (Berlin), but also, to a certain degree, to the spirit and flesh of his works. The emigration [zarubezhʹe], equated in our conception not with the po­liti­cal emigration, but with western Eu­rope, has been reflected in Sirin’s artistic devices and themes and in the writer’s material (the external environment, the plot, the psy­chol­ ogy of the hero), and even perhaps in his style: one can find critics who have discovered in Sirin the influence of the latest German and French authors.”25 Andreev is h ­ ere referring to the émigré poet Georgy Ivanov’s infamous recent attack on Nabokov in the Paris journal Chisla, where Ivanov argued that Nabokov’s striking uniqueness as a Rus­sian writer (“nobody has written Rus­sian like that”) was due only to his direct copying of Eu­ro­pean models: “King, Queen, Knave carefully copies an average German example. In The Luzhin Defense—­a French one.”26 For Andreev, however, Nabokov’s orientation to his Western surroundings allowed him to develop a form suited to the emigration, or what he calls zarubezhʹe—­literally “the abroad,” meaning a Rus­sian culture outside the bounds of the nation-­state.27 For Ivanov, by contrast, this Western form is superficial, and when one glimpses Nabokov’s true nature (Ivanov argues this is pos­si­ble in Mary and Nabokov’s early stories), a disturbing banality emerges: “A long familiar type, the capable, brash, vulgar journalist [poshliaka-­zhurnalista] who ‘wields his pen’ and who, to the fright and surprise of the philistine, whom he despises and who is flesh of his flesh, ‘spins’ plots ‘with a w ­ oman,’ turns a theme inside out ‘like a glove,’ drops cheap aphorisms and is eternally satisfied.”28 Given the many appearances of the figure of the philistine or vulgarian (poshliak) in Nabokov’s Rus­sian work (poshlyi was famously described for an American audience in Nikolai Gogol as “not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely impor­tant, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive,” though its use as an almost magical prophylactic term goes back through Yuly Aikhenvald to the vituperative spats of the Symbolists), this barb was clearly intended to wound Nabokov.29 Yet it also points to the danger perceived by a number of Rus­sia intellectuals and artists in overidentifying with the West or playing to a bourgeois audience (in Gustave Flaubert’s as well as Karl Marx’s sense). Ivanov’s most notorious personal attack in this famously ad hominem essay, it is impor­tant to note, is actually a comparison of Nabokov to a figure from the cinema: “In films they sometimes show a false count worming his way into high society. He is dressed in impeccable eve­ning dress, his manners are ‘the height of nobility,’ his in­ven­ted

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genealogical tree goes back to the Crusaders. . . . ​Yet all the same he is an impostor, the cook’s son, trash, a peasant. Such impostors, by the way, are not always definitely exposed, sometimes they remain ‘counts’ their w ­ hole life. I do not know what ­will happen with Sirin.”30 This criticism of Nabokov as a fake (not just affected, but an impostor), rarely stated so bluntly elsewhere, nonetheless dogged Nabokov. In his fiction of the 1930s, Nabokov thinks through the position of the creative exile by creating a series of cosmopolitan characters who successfully, if unlikeably, navigate the culture industry. As if in defiance of Ivanov, Nabokov shows how the movie business actually creates a space for a unique kind of émigré. ­These characters, such as Valentinov (The Luzhin Defense), Robert Horn with his creation Cheepy (Camera Obscura), and Ferdinand (“Spring in Fialta”), are the ultimate cosmopolitans, peppering their speech with foreign phrases, able to slip between cultures and occupations. They contrive to avoid debts, girlfriends, m ­ others, and History. Ultimately, they survive, even—­and perhaps especially—­when the innocent do not. It is not so much that they deserve to suffer what they avoid—as Rus­sian or German émigrés, they are subjected to ­things in which they are not complicit, such as revolution and war. But the suspicion of treachery in the national-­political sense hangs over them, although ­here cowardice and the dereliction of duty are conceived more in the social-­ exilic sense (they give émigrés a bad name) and in aristocratic terms (without honor, they are not gentlemen).31 Nabokov’s intent is far from a condemnation of cosmopolitan inauthenticity, but it does seem to betray an anxiety on Nabokov’s part about his own pos­si­ble role as a “salamander of fate” and “basilisk of good fortune.”32 It is worth stating that if Ganin, Luzhin, Martin, and Fyodor (Mary, The Luzhin Defense, Glory, and The Gift) resemble Nabokov in their pasts (they receive the autobiographical gift of Nabokov’s own nostalgic childhood memories), then Nabokov’s pre­sent situation finds a far from imperfect portrait in the ­careers of Valentinov and the German-­American Horn (and his global creation Cheepy), ­those entrepreneurial creatives in exile. Ultimately cruel and manipulative, ­these figures nonetheless possess the talents needed to navigate the interwar period.33 Most philosophically, Nabokov’s cosmopolitan characters of the 1930s constitute, in their ironic fates, an inexplicable phenomenon that puts into relief the susceptibility of the rest of the emigration to larger, devastating historical forces. A few months l­ater, Nabokov’s longtime friend and promoter Gleb Struve explic­itly rebutted Ivanov’s argument, calling Nabokov “the biggest gift of the emigration [Zarubezhʹia] to Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture” and arguing that the charge of “non-­Russianness” (nerusskostʹ) was in any case nonsensical.34 Struve pointed out that, despite Nabokov’s wide range of intertexts, the very incompatibility

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of his supposed models for imitation (Marcel Proust, German Expressionism, even Ivan Bunin) undermined the accusation of derivativeness. It is indicative of the direction of the young émigrés’ ­careers that Struve would translate and repurpose this essay to introduce Nabokov to a British and a French audience ­later in the 1930s, turning Nabokov’s non-­Russianness to his advantage (see chapter 3). For c­ areers to thrive in exile, internecine disputes among émigrés had to be put to use appealing to a broader, international audience. Émigré critics at the time ­were in agreement that, for Nabokov, the pre­ sent’s exilic environment was an in­de­pen­dently valid subject for fiction. From this perspective, a number of Nabokov’s works that cross the Rus­sian/German, nostalgia/crime divide are in fact about the culture of interwar Eu­rope as the irrefutable ground of con­temporary experience. Novels like Mary, King, Queen, Knave, The Luzhin Defense, and Camera Obscura are concerned with characters’ creative engagement with modernity, which often entails negotiation and adaptation within multiple symbolic and linguistic contexts. Con­temporary critics, both Rus­sian and non-­Russian, therefore read his characters historically, as representative of the postwar era, products of a cultural modernity shared by Eu­ro­pe­ans and exiled Rus­sians alike. It is significant that the outlet in Paris that published all but the first two of Nabokov’s Rus­sian novels was called Sovremennye zapiski, or Annales contemporaines in French, on the cover page.35 This émigré “thick journal” was a deliberate link to the Rus­sian nineteenth-­century tradition of housing high fiction, politics, and cultural revue between the same covers. By contrast with its prerevolutionary precursors like Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski), the title of the Paris journal pointedly contrasted the “con­temporary” or “modern” nature of its place in Western exile, now deprived of that very fatherland.36 In sum, Nabokov’s fiction evinces a commitment as much to the pre­sent and contemporaneity as to a remembered past, be it personal or literary: Sirin and sovremennostʹ ­were almost synonymous.

Cinematic Culture The dominant symbol and cultural symptom of the pre­sent—as much for prerevolutionary debates on modernity as for émigré conceptions of postwar Eu­ro­pean decline—­was the cinema. In a foundational article, the Rus­sian film historian and specialist in émigré culture Rashit Yangirov has posited that the cinema was the outstanding feature of the host cultures that émigrés like Nabokov encountered in Eu­rope during the 1920s and 1930s.37 Although a fascinated, competitive relationship to the cinema is a defining mark of literary modernism in general, Yangirov is correct that Nabokov “perceived the lessons

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of the screen more acutely, subtly, and deeply than many,” making an engagement with film a “trademark” of his poetics.38 The pervasiveness of film tropes and commonplaces about the cinema, at times positive, at ­others negative or deeply conflicted, has led Yangirov to posit the “cinefication” (kinofikatsiia) of Rus­sian émigré writing in general.39 He argues that the “film sense” (chuvstvo filʹma), which scholars have applied to Nabokov’s “cinefied” or “cinematic” writing, should instead be “extrapolated to the literary output of the Rus­sian emigration of the 1920s–1930s, since this period was suffused with ‘film sense,’ which radically revitalized lit­er­at­ ure’s artistic devices and their reception.”40 As Yangirov has amply demonstrated through his other writings on the émigrés, they attended and extensively reviewed American, German, French, and Soviet films, as well as incorporated the cinema into their fiction, poetry, letters, diaries, and essays—­what he calls “the cinematic context of lit­er­at­ ure—­a dynamic complex of themes, plots, devices, allusions, connotations and semantic codes, worked out by poets and fiction writers u ­ nder the 41 influence of the cinema and its subculture.” In attributing “film sense” not only to Nabokov but to émigré culture, and even the interwar period more generally, Yangirov is following the lead of Nabokov’s con­temporary, the poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich. Yangirov cites his 1934 review of Nabokov’s “film novel” Camera Obscura, explored in detail in chapter 3, in which Khodasevich argues, “It is not the style of the novel that is penetrated and poisoned by the cinema, but the style of the very life depicted in the novel. . . . ​It is this suffusion of life with the cinema that is the true subject of Sirin’s novel.”42 If Nabokov’s fiction is “cinematized,” that is ­because interwar culture (both Western and émigré) was itself cinematized. This “cinematized” environment of exile is what I term cinematic culture. In investigating and substantiating this suffusion with the cinema—­a saturation that suffocated some while inspiring ­others—­I radically historicize the notion of what cinematic meant. We should hesitate to assume that our con­temporary term the cinema is adequate to the historical phenomenon of ­these early years. In order to defamiliarize the teleological notion of early twentieth-­century visual and commercial culture as a precursor to our own, we need a historical, if not archaeological, approach that examines what the cinema (as “cinematograph”) meant for contemporaries. What was obvious to Khodasevich (and by extension Nabokov) is something that now, in the twenty-­first ­century, must be recovered piecemeal, separating our current preoccupations and perceptions of the cinema from the experience of the 1920s and 1930s. The work of Rus­sian scholars on the cultural reception of a dynamic and mutable cinema and cinematic culture enables us to reexamine the traditional notion, often found in literary studies, of the cinema as a set of film texts that

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can be subjected to close reading alongside fiction in order to elucidate affinities and influences. In writing on Nabokov and cinema, ­there is a temptation to compare his texts to what appear to be their equivalents in aesthetic value or at least cultural capital. Even t­ hose works, like Alfred Appel’s Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, which suggest Nabokov’s receptiveness to “low” culture, seek the individual source, the striking and traceable detail, which can be appended to Nabokov’s fiction as intertext.43 Rich works on film in Nabokov’s fiction have been written that are openly ahistorical, treating synchronically as the work of a “film theorist” Nabokov’s philosophy of perception, memory, and imagination in his fictional treatments of the cinema.44 ­Others read Nabokov’s Rus­sian works teleologically, examining his “cinematic” style to explain his success in Amer­i­ca.45 Yet it is impor­tant to recognize how far this departs from the experience of film during the 1920s and 1930s. This is particularly crucial in order to avoid an anachronistic focus on individual films or on the oeuvre of par­tic­u­lar directors, which, as scholar of film and lit­er­a­ture Colin MacCabe has pointed out, is to privilege one legacy of the modernist era—­New Criticism—­over the other competing strands of a more anonymous and collective mass cultural experience.46 The work of historical contextualization, placing Nabokov back into the circumstances of the 1920s–1930s, leads us to reevaluate previous work on Nabokov as a “cinematic” stylist and film “theorist.” Exploring historically what it meant to “stylize” or “theorize” the cinema in t­ hose years, as well as situating such practices among the other forms of engagement he pursued, allows us to better understand what kind of work, in situational and dispositional terms, his fiction was intended to accomplish. As this book’s subtitle suggests, I shift the term cinematic from Nabokov’s style to the culture of his exilic environment. This move is not intended to imply Nabokov’s exclusion or even distance from this environment. In fact, as moviegoer, extra, screenplay writer, and eminently if unsuccessfully filmable author, he swam with the tide in a way perhaps surprising (but not aty­pi­cal, as I show) for a member of the reputedly conservative Rus­sian emigration. Nor do I deny the extent to which the term cinematic is a cliché, a scholarly commonplace. It is, in fact, Nabokov’s deployment of what at the time was itself a cliché—­the cinematic commonplace—­that makes him such an in­ter­ est­ing figure. As the film historian Yuri Tsivian has shown, the reception of cinema in the Rus­sia of Nabokov’s adolescence was highly self-­conscious.47 This discourse, already passé, was redeployed by Nabokov in the 1920s with the added self-­awareness of his status as an émigré and member of a Western culture industry. This insider-­outsider position is one of the major components of Nabokov’s art of exile, a compelling achievement given the instability and multiplicity of cultural developments during t­ hese years. A recognition of this

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means always keeping in mind a sense of his audiences, publishing venues, and dispositional stance with regard to cultural and economic capital—­both especially precious commodities in exile.48 It is worth noting that a historical view of the cinema in the 1920s and 1930s offers insights into Nabokov’s fiction in exile. Much like the ­Great Unread of novelistic fiction, the majority of ­silent films are now lost, including a good number reviewed in Berlin by Nabokov’s friend Georgy Gessen.49 Similarly, it was standard practice even in the ­silent period for films to be made in multiple cuts, with some earmarked for export and ­others for domestic circulation. ­These logistical facts approximate the situation of the exiled novelist whose works ­were translated and reworked. Prefiguring Nabokov’s comments once he had moved to the United States, Thomas Mann complained to his German publisher in 1938 that his work in his native language was being eclipsed by versions for foreign readers: “Especially in regards to the economic point of view one gets the impression that the originals have more or less been lost, and only the translations remain in the world.”50 In Anglophone Nabokov scholarship ­today it is common to refer to the ­later En­glish versions of his novels, even when they differ greatly from the originals. Though done for reasons of economy (and perhaps the reader’s sanity), it leads to anachronisms and historical confusion and is especially misleading when dealing with works like Laughter in the Dark and King, Queen, Knave, which ­were thoroughly rewritten for an American audience at a remove of six and forty (!) years, respectively.51 In the case of Kamera obskura (Rus­sian), Chambre obscure (French), Camera Obscura (British), and Laughter in the Dark (American), to pick only the last of ­these, as so many treatments do, is to miss the historical ele­ment almost entirely—to miss asking, what w ­ ere Nabokov’s texts ­doing in context and what was he ­doing with them? This continual pro­cess of rewriting for new audiences is in fact a key datum of Nabokov’s transnational ­career, showing its development up to the end of his life. Much like attempts to historicize the pre­sent in the 1920s, Rus­sian émigré debates on the nature, danger, and use of the cinema drew heavi­ly on a fin de siècle tradition of viewing the cinema as part of a broader cultural complex. As Tsivian has shown, the “cultural reception” of the cinema was key to the poetics of Symbolism, the dominant literary school of the 1900s and 1910s. Tsivian’s insight is to show how “medium-­sensitive” and context-­sensitive educated Rus­sian moviegoers ­were during the period of Nabokov’s youth.52 In his investigation of the “reception of cinema as per­for­mance,” Tsivian documents the blurring of bound­aries “between the world of the screen and the acoustic, social and architectural spaces around the screen.”53 In other words, ­there was the sense, even before the 1920s, that modern urban culture was

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already cinematic culture.54 As he shows, many of the debates on cinema from this period not only w ­ ere resurrected in the emigration in the 1920s but w ­ ere 55 reenacted by the very same figures. Tsivian’s work is focused, in its En­glish version, on the period 1896–1920 and grapples with the fact of early cinema’s immediate novelty, part of its appeal as a modern phenomenon. Rus­sian moviegoers’ perception of the cinema, and not the film, as the basic unit of movie experience did indeed begin to change in the 1910s, when individual titles began to be recalled and discussed.56 Yet I argue that Tsivian’s discussion is instructive for émigré Berlin and Paris of the 1920s for the ­simple reason that Rus­sian intellectuals and artists now found themselves in the defamiliarized environment of exile. Even ­those for whom Eu­rope was a “second home” found their old haunts made strange, and this novelty prompted a renewed attention to the context of moviegoing. While film reviewers like Andrei Levinson and Gessen paid attention to the film itself, most still spoke of g­ oing to the cinema as an end in itself. Nabokov himself frequently mentions the activity of moviegoing in his letters but only rarely names an individual film—­and this procedure is followed by his characters.57 As a prism for reading Nabokov’s literary responses to exile, the cinema’s main advantage is its existence as both material and conceptual space. The cinema was a shared cultural arena where Rus­sian writers and intellectuals mingled with the Eu­ro­pean consumers of a Western mass culture. H ­ ere they could observe both the products and the intended audience of Eu­ro­pean and American movie industries, mea­sur­ing their own (and their fellow exiles’) reception against that of the host country. At the same time, for contemporaries the cinema was a rhetorical commonplace, around which clustered conceptions of Rus­sian high culture’s place in a purportedly demo­cratic and global culture industry. Thus émigrés reviewed, critiqued, and debated the cinema as a symptom of larger historical forces and cultural pro­cess, to the point where it became a metonym (as had the railroad in an e­ arlier age) for modernity itself. In this study I use the term cinematic commonplace to describe ­these two phenomena: cinema as discursive topos and shared physical space. A liberal aristocrat by birth, Nabokov was by choice both a “top-­and bottom-­feeder,” as scholar Eric Naiman has pointed out.58 Nabokov enjoyed such a reputation at the time. What distinguished in par­tic­u­lar Nabokov’s attitude to film was the refusal to conceive of the preeminence of a mass, commercialized cinema as in any way ill-­fated or epochal. Rejecting all forms of determinism, he saw cinema not as a closed phenomenon, but rather as an art form in pro­cess and open to shaping. Similarly, I argue that his first Eu­ro­pean exile, from 1919 to 1940, the majority of which was spent in Berlin (1922–1937),

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must be approached as an open pre­sent. It should be approached, in other words, not retrospectively or teleologically, but as an unstable set of temporary possibilities, vague threats, and recent memories. In this book I attend to the historical specificity and inexhaustible mobility of the cinema in its artistic and technological development. My proj­ect builds on the remarkable archival discoveries of Rus­sian cultural historians like Yangirov, while putting to use a theoretical framework based on recent work on modernism and mass culture, visual culture, and ­silent / early sound film.59 The pre­sent work focuses squarely on the Rus­sian and earliest American periods, drawing on new Russian-­, German-­, and French-­language sources and the originals of Nabokov’s fiction. It is structured as an investigation of the Rus­sian emigration, taking Nabokov’s time in Berlin as a case study of a larger cultural phenomenon: exile through the cinema.

Nabokov as an Émigré Writer As Alexander Dolinin has shown in his study The Real Life of the Writer Sirin (Istinnaia zhiznʹ pisatelia Sirina), Nabokov engaged extensively with Rus­sian literary precursors and contemporaries (both émigré and Soviet) as a way of winning his own place in a national literary canon. In addition to his talks, poems, and parodies of Rus­sian writers, Alexander Dolinin points to novels like Despair and The Gift (Dar, 1937–1938) as works that decisively refute attempts by émigré critics in Paris of the 1930s, or by Nabokov himself ­later in his ­career, to portray his interwar work as sui generis, aloof, and cut off from the Rus­sian tradition.60 Dolinin elaborates on “Nabokov’s three-­tier intertextual strategy—­ continuation (of classical and neoclassical poetic idiom), amelioration (of the nineteenth-­century realist novel), and mocking parody (of influential con­ temporary trends).”61 This reading of Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction of the 1920s and 1930s as a deeply “tradition-­conscious” and competitive intertextual dialogue points up the importance of the past to Nabokov while in exile. At the same time, such an engagement with the Rus­sian literary past necessarily entailed an orientation t­ oward a ­future audience. Nabokov knew that, as long as the Soviet Union prevailed, the only reader he could hope for in his homeland would be the f­ uture reader, at once historian and judge. In the meantime, Nabokov would be forced to endure what Mann called “total exile,” in which a writer was “not only physically far from [his] country but . . . ​totally expelled from its life.”62 Nabokov was not the only Rus­sian writer to complain of the paucity (both material and intellectual) of the émigré readership, and

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he joined writers like poet and critic Khodasevich in writing above all for f­ uture generations, who would appreciate and incorporate their contributions. Moreover, Nabokov’s early stories and talks of the mid-1920s, as well as his novel Glory, constitute a polemic with the older generation of Rus­sian émigrés who felt rejected by their Eu­ro­pean counter­parts and who “rationalized their disenchantment with their ‘second home’ in historicist terms—as a reaction to the crisis or downfall of Eu­ro­pean civilization.”63 As a member of the émigré intelligent­sia, Nabokov certainly shared a common background that did not see Rus­sian and Eu­ro­pean as mutually exclusive terms.64 Yet Nabokov at the outset (rather than sunset) of his literary c­ areer, fresh from a degree at Cambridge University, felt that the pre­sent was far from determined and roundly mocked any attempts to generalize about or affix labels to himself, his readers, or what was then called the “postwar” period of the 1920s. In this he was typical of a number of other younger émigrés, like the Paris-­based writers Nina Berberova and Gaito Gazdanov, as well as his close friend in Berlin, the film critic Gessen. In the short story “A Guide to Berlin” (“Putevoditelʹ po Berlinu,” 1925), the narrator imagines “some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-­ first ­century, wishing to portray our time.” For this writer, museums ­will be priceless in their preservation of even the most mundane realia: “Every­thing, ­every trifle, ­will be valuable and meaningful . . . ​every­thing ­will be ennobled and justified by its age.”65 The narrator suggests that a writer should approach his own time (i.e., the twenties of the twentieth ­century) as it ­will have been remembered and trea­sured by ­f uture generations. This poetics of the ­f uture perfect can be read as a manifesto for Nabokov’s early fiction: “I think that h ­ ere lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they ­will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of ­f uture times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity [nashi potomki] ­will discern and appreciate in the far-­off times when e­ very trifle of our plain everyday life w ­ ill become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of ­today ­will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”66 It is worth adding h ­ ere that film of the 1920s is just such an everyday phenomenon, so ubiquitous that copies ­were roughly handled, used up, and discarded. Nabokov correctly foresees that, a hundred years l­ater, in the twenties of the twenty-­first c­ entury, early film w ­ ill be cherished—­formerly “lost” films found, restored, and preserved for ­future generations.67 The under­ lying assumption, demonstrating a confidence not shared by all Rus­sian émigrés, is that t­ here would in fact be a historian of the Rus­sian emigration and its culture. As twenty-­first-­century readers, an involuntarily conspiratorial

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relation with Nabokov perhaps derives from our shared confidence in the existence of such a historian. This confident assumption was made explicit in Nabokov’s nonfiction of ­these years. In “Anniversary” (“Iubilei”), a programmatic statement addressed to fellow émigrés in 1927 celebrating ten years of exile, Nabokov avers that “­there is nonetheless something linking us all, some kind of common drive, a common spirit, which the ­future historian w ­ ill understand and appreciate.”68 As an artist of attention and sharp-­sightedness, Nabokov could be seen to be contributing through his early fiction to this preservation.69 In his novel Glory Nabokov has his semiautobiographical protagonist reflect on the historicist temptation: In the study of history Martin liked what he could imagine clearly, and therefore he was fond of Carlyle. With his poor memory for dates and scorn for generalizations, he avidly sought out what was live and h ­ uman, what belonged to that class of astonishing details which well may satiate coming generations as they watch old, drizzly [morosiashchie] films of our day. He vividly visualized the shivering white day, the simplicity of the black guillotine, and the clumsy tussle on the scaffold, where the executioners roughly ­handle a bare-­shouldered fat man while, in the crowd, a good-­natured citoyen raises by the elbows a citoyenne whose curiosity exceeds her stature.70 In recording ­these “astonishing details,” the camera opposes ­those historicizing generalizations that Nabokov already saw creeping into discourse about the postwar 1920s. In talks such as “On Generalities” (1926), Nabokov made a preemptive strike against the ­f uture historian who would ignore the ­factor of chance, instead weighing down his hy­po­thet­i­cal descriptions with deterministic reasoning. Thus film, preserving the chaotic and fortuitous truth of part of émigré life, could serve as an aide-­mémoire for the ­f uture historian of the emigration. The preservation of chance details and combinations of everyday life is shown to be key not only to Nabokov’s poetics but also to the broader community of émigrés as a rec­ord of their time in exile. As a recording medium, film is therefore particularly valuable to the liberal-­ artistic emigration, so oriented to the f­ uture. If Nabokov makes the coincidental combination the defining characteristic of his early fiction, the implication is that cinema can preserve something of the Rus­sian émigrés’ lives for the f­ uture historian. But if the narrator of Glory may well be “satiated” with such shots, Nabokov is another story. As he put it in a French opinion piece in 1931, the same year Glory began serialization, the man of the twenty-­first ­century ­will

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not be satisfied with films of the 1930s, ­because “the cinematographic methods which seem to our eyes to give a perfectly exact image of life . . . ​­will be rendered false by the very style of the photography.”71 His description t­here of “the ­little gray gleam of an old-­fashioned film” is echoed across his work of the 1930s, yet it begins in the Rus­sian poem “Tolstoy” (“Tolstoi,” 1928). This remarkable and understudied poem demonstrates Nabokov’s awareness of his historical position between literary pre­de­ces­sors and ­future readers: Insidious technology sometimes can bolster memory artificially. . . . In an archive of ancient films, they say (which blink, t­ hese days, as though with dimming vision [podslepovato]) ­there is a Yasnaya Polyana sequence [snimok]; a nondescript old man of modest stature, his beard disheveled by the wind, who walks by with accelerated ­little steps, disgruntled by the cameraman. And ­we’re content. He’s close and comprehensible.72 The aging Lev Tolstoy on his estate scowling at the camera makes the writer appear falsely (if tantalizingly) approachable.73 The term “in an archive of ancient films [v arkhive filʹmov vetkhikh]” is a remarkable collocation to describe a medium only thirty-three years old. Yet it shows that even at this early juncture, film had a history, even a prehistory. This is underscored by the technological marker of Tolstoy’s “accelerated” steps, which recur in Laughter in the Dark as Tolstoy’s funeral.74 For Nabokov’s generation (Berberova, Gazdanov, Gessen), this epochal separation coincides with the biographical fact that the appearance of the earliest films predates their own birth. Nabokov’s poem associates film with the phonograph, which has recorded Tolstoy’s voice in a similarly technologically marked and distanced way: a slightly husky, almost senseless sound, like someone coughing in the next compartment when, in the old days, at a nighttime station, your railroad car would make a sighing stop.75 Like photography, showing Tolstoy’s “picture in a school anthology,” t­ hese forms of recording technology (now dated, yet once revolutionary) in fact only

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serve to distance the poem’s lyric speaker from his pre­de­ces­sor. In a remarkable turn, Nabokov contrasts this “insidious technology” with lit­er­a­ture itself: . . . Yet ­there remains one t­ hing we simply cannot reconstruct, . . . The mystery is almost superhuman! I mean the nights on which Tolstoy composed; I mean the miracle, the hurricane of images flying across the inky expanse of sky in that hour of creation, that hour of incarnation . . . ​For the ­people born on t­ hose nights ­were real . . . ​That’s how the Lord transmits to his elected his primeval, his beatific license to create his worlds, and instantly to breathe into the new-­made flesh a one-­and-­only spirit.76 The imagery is stark: cinema is profane, lit­er­a­ture sacred. Nabokov described his own literary creation in similarly deistic terms in an early letter to his ­mother. Describing his work on Mary, he wrote: I am getting to know them even better and it begins to seem that [the characters of Mary] are real ­people, not ones created by me. . . . ​I understand so well that God finds in creating the world a pure and moving joy. But we, translators of God’s creations, his l­ittle plagiarists and imitators, at times perhaps adorn what God has written, as it happens that a charming commentator adds even greater beauty to a certain line of genius. And as a reward for our adorning, adding, and explaining, we ­shall be given an honorarium in the editorial offices of heaven.77 Tolstoy’s fiction is more real than the illusory verisimilitude of technologically mediated reproductions of his image and voice. For the poem’s speaker, as for his readers in exile, something of the historical truth of their lost homeland is contained in Tolstoy’s creation, which survives the death of both the creator and the world formerly inhabited by his readers: And ­here they are, alive; all, in them, lives— their habits, their locutions, and their mores: their homeland is that special kind of Rus­sia we carry in the depths where ­there exists

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a blurry dream of signs ineffable: a Rus­sian of smells, of nuances, of sounds, of g­ iant clouds above at haying time, a Rus­sia of fascinating swamplands, where wild game abounds . . . ​­Those are the ­things we love. The p­ eople he creates, thousands of them, transpire incredibly through our own life, lend color to the distance of recall— as though we actually lived beside them.78 It is not hard to extrapolate: if Tolstoy’s fiction preserves a world left ­behind, Nabokov’s fiction ­will preserve the world of exile that too ­will pass.79

Film, Cinema, Culture, Praxis If cinematic culture is so much more than the aesthetic reception of a set of film texts, and comes ultimately to stand in for modernity and exile itself, then we need a method for categorizing Nabokov’s engagement with such a polymorphous phenomenon. For this we can turn back to one of the earliest Rus­ sian descriptions of the cinema, which approaches the cinema from three key ­angles, which force us beyond the binary “cinematic-­uncinematic” and into a broader contextual discussion of Nabokov’s ­career in exile. One of the most discussed early responses to the cinema was written in 1896, three years before Nabokov’s birth, by the provincial short story writer and part-­time journalist Maxim Gorky, l­ater a writer of world renown.80 In this newspaper report on the Nizhny-­Novgorod Fair—­part of a series ­under the general heading “Brief Notes” (“Beglye zametki”)—­Gorky describes one of the first displays of the Lumière ­brothers’ Cinématographe: Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows [v tsarstve tenei]. If you only knew how strange it is to be t­ here. It is a world without sound, without colour. Every­thing t­here—­the earth, the trees, the ­people, the w ­ ater and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey f­ aces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow [tenʹ], it is not motion but its soundless spectre [tenʹ].81 Gorky was disturbed not only by the images on-­screen—­innocuous in themselves, yet so estranged in their ghostlike presentation—­but also by the context for this first unveiling of a new technology. The cinematograph was

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located in a dark room at one of French entrepreneur Charles Aumont’s “restaurants,” the infamous Théâtre Concerto Parisienne—­which in fact served, as contemporaries knew only too well, as a brothel. It would not be long, Gorky reasoned, u ­ ntil filmmakers began to replace the w ­ holesome images of families at breakfast or laughing workers exiting a factory with scenes more suited to a faux-­Parisian bordello audience, such as “As She Undresses, or Madam at Her Bath, or A ­Woman in Stockings.”82 Lastly, Gorky was troubled by the fact that this invention, which might well be put to philosophical or scientific ends, was being used solely to line the pockets of shady impresarios like Aumont, who, incidentally, l­ater fled Rus­sia to avoid a charge of embezzlement.83 As the film historian Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, in the debates among early film theorists and critics in Weimar Germany three key themes emerge: film theory, cinema theory, and culture criticism.84 ­These three terms map remarkably well onto Gorky’s three main concerns about the cinema. Voiced over thirty years previously, Gorky’s reflections had by the 1920s proved remarkably insightful and enduring, as almost all discussion of film flowed along ­these channels. First, ­there was film theory, a fascination with the medium of film itself, its ability to capture and proj­ect life onto a screen that magnified and distorted real­ity in uncanny ways. Second, t­ here was cinema theory, the context of moviegoing, linked to cinema’s scandalous origins as a sideshow fairground entertainment, w ­ hether in Franco-­Russian bordellos or American-­ style nickelodeons, pandering to audiences “thirsting for the piquant and the extravagant,” as Gorky had put it.85 Third, t­ here was culture theory (a term I prefer to culture criticism as not implying a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal orientation), the intellectual suspicion of the openly commercial nature of cinema as the latest form of mass culture, linked to unscrupulous profiteering like Aumont’s and the pacification of the masses through escapism, yet accompanied by a sense of enormous potential in the medium and ascendant industry as a w ­ hole. ­These terms can be used to trace Nabokov’s relation to cinema during the 1920s and 1930s, as long as his own theoretical, imaginative, and practical contributions are taken into account, allowing for a reshaping of ­these ideal-­type categories. Much of Nabokov’s engagement as a writer with the cinema was practical and strategic and, as I argue, directly related to the rapidly changing material circumstances of exile in interwar Eu­rope. At the same time, this writerly engagement certainly includes within it his stylistic and intellectual engagement with the medium of film. Nabokov’s film theory, discussed in chapter 1, based on the roles of spectator and actor, constitutes a theory of film experience and production. Seen in the context of the cultural reception of the cinema of the 1910s, Nabokov in

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his earliest work recapitulates a number of t­ hese clichés about film experience. At the same time, his familiarity with the production side of filmmaking through his work as extra and screenwriter leads him to an innovative discussion of how the interaction of studio and screen interact as a meta­phor of exile. Its power resides in its ability to capture life, especially movement. In its tendency to capture chance combinations (inadvertent montage), it approaches art, manifesting a kind of humor, capturing the arbitrariness of life itself—­ thereby tying into Nabokov’s own poetics of chance in his 1920s short fiction. The spectrality and uncanniness of film’s black-­and-­white, s­ ilent depictions are actually well suited to the emigration, with its transient existence where the past is always vis­ib­ le on the see-­through surfaces of the pre­sent. As such, film has the potential for historical value for the émigrés, capturing their radically transient real­ity for a f­uture audience. Furthermore, by the 1920s, film as a recording technology possesses its own history, such that Nabokov’s narrators can discuss “old” film and the aesthetic breakdown of the film image in rain streaks and jerkiness.86 Despite its recording power, the intentional use of the medium to rec­ord p­ eople of historical interest is dangerous in its apparent ease and accuracy: it pre­sents comfortable generalities, giving an illusory sheen of truth to staged repre­sen­ta­tions. The perceptual regime of the cinema is so pervasive that it becomes a common language, shared by Nabokov, his “average” characters, and both his literate and his “average” readers, allowing him to communicate both with émigrés and (in projected translation) with foreign audiences. For Nabokov, film is a truly popu­lar medium: when it remains true to its fairground roots of entertaining, excelling in adventure and ­simple entertainment, it is unobjectionable and, in a sense, au­then­tic. As a truly popu­lar urban medium (i.e., white-­and blue-­collar, meshchanskii in addition to narodnyi), film runs the danger of vulgarity (or poshlostʹ) when it reaches for the status of art. Film plots are at heart melodramatic, pitting good against evil, using heavy-­handed symbolism and trite passé literary conventions to move the story along, supplying entertainment, distraction, and escapism. Yet t­ here is a clear hierarchy of artistic perception in watching films. Nabokov’s narrators often watch how t­ hings work and describe them in literal terms to ironize and estrange them, supplying the “unthinking” viewer’s thought pro­cesses at a distance. As in daily life itself—­night streets, Berlin, shop win­dows—­one has to be gifted with a certain ability to notice or see to derive plea­sure from chance combinations. As such, films are part of the overall urban exile experience— to be seized and enjoyed for what it is, while vocalizing and contextualizing the unpleasant parts. As a recording medium it is particularly valuable to the

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(liberal-­artistic) emigration, so oriented to the ­future: like the gramophone and before it photography, it is imperfect and partial, yet retains traces of ­those trea­sured but evanescent parts of unstable lives. Filmmaking is ultimately an alchemical pro­cess: by both the magic of the screen and the w ­ ill and technical skill of the director, a film transforms haphazard or half-­baked screenplays, tired extras, shabby costumes and sets, and hammy or untalented actors into something strangely compelling, even moving. If film theory is a question of the individual’s perceptual apparatus and aesthetic appreciation, Nabokov’s cinema theory is radically social, devoted to the embodied, communal, and locally contextualized experience of belonging to a moviegoing public. It is therefore with cinema theory that we move from the familiar image of Nabokov as an individualist to a much more socially embedded figure. As was once forgotten, but is now beyond dispute, Nabokov was from the start deeply involved in the cultural life of the Rus­sian emigration, at first in Berlin and l­ater also in Paris. Yet his fiction, as Rus­sian and non-­Russian contemporaries recognized, was also deeply attentive to the social environment.87 In Nabokov’s cinema theory, discussed in chapter 2, space is especially impor­tant where the émigrés mingle with Eu­ro­pe­ans in the public and communal space of the movie theater. At the same time, cinema theory looks beyond the theater to the broader cinematic culture—­how cinema restructures the schedules and regimes of daily life, the autobiographical and moral frameworks, the ambitions and social be­hav­iors of interwar Eu­ro­pe­ans. Whereas film theory was focused on the perspective of the (sensitive) émigré, including within it the gap between screen and production, h ­ ere the perspective is primarily German, appearing from 1928, and most fleshed out in his “German” novels and stories, such as King, Queen, Knave and Camera Obscura. It is in discussing Nabokov’s cinema theory that we move beyond an often fruitful, but ultimately ahistorical, focus on an immanent analy­sis of his fiction. A valuable result of this approach is in documenting the space Nabokov devoted to an exploration of the social character of cinematic culture. ­There is a recognition that cinema surrounds the public. Nabokov is concerned with cinema’s place in the modern metropolis—­its street-­level sites and illuminated signs, as well as its posters, journals, magazines, and books. Cinema is seen as a quintessentially urban phenomenon, like the newly professionalized, pop­u­lar­ized, and mediatized sports of boxing and chess. As such, the cinema is part of the growing entertainment complex of interwar cities, where rationalized and bureaucratized ­labor alternated with an often equally planned and or­ga­nized leisure. This context links Nabokov to Weimar theorists of the

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cult of distraction and the rise of the white-­collar worker.88 Crucially for Nabokov, participation in ­these cultural phenomena (and in the 1920s, they ­were perceived as truly elemental forces) is active, not passive, from amateur competition to fan culture. If film theory is about watching (disembodied) figures on-­screen, cinema theory highlights class aspirations about access to premieres, the lifestyle of stars and divas, and the illusorily graspable chance of a ­career in the movies. As such, cinema theory exists not just in fiction but in the critical discourse surrounding cinema. In the mid-1920s, this took the form of intellectual and polemical debate in high-­and middlebrow journalistic outlets, as well as of the often-­undervalued critical practice of film reviews. In this, the cinema comes into its own as a narrative force that competes with the author and lit­ er­at­ure more generally. But it fully replaces lit­er­a­ture only for t­hose whose reading habits are ­limited to pulp fiction, the penny dreadful, and adventure novels. The cinema poses no threat to lit­er­a­ture like Nabokov’s, as it cannot satisfy the aesthetic needs of sophisticated readers. Nabokov’s insouciance in this regard is remarkable in the context of modernism, yet perhaps indicative of the fact that he kept this cultural rival so close. If cinema theory was a question of local context, then culture theory, explored in chapter 3, focuses on the entanglement of mass culture with global capital: the international network of finance and promotion entailed by the mass and middlebrow culture industry. Culture theory pre­sents a metareflection on the place of the literary author with regard to the “movie kingdom”—­ the back-­office and business side, producers and investors, the inherently speculative nature of the industry with its array of promotional resources. This takes on an especial importance for Nabokov, for whom an outsider’s perspective on this American-­European conjuncture informs his stance as an exiled writer in the 1920s and 1930s. In the context of his move to the United States in 1940, as well as his extensive engagement with the American market in the 1930s, it is crucial to note the discussion among Rus­sian émigrés of the Americanization of Eu­ro­pean culture as early as the 1920s. The cinema, as a global and transnational phenomenon, supplies one answer to the question of how to produce an art of exile through the “legacy” medium of lit­er­a­ture. So far, the circle has widened from film theory’s perspective on the screen and its backlot, to cinema theory’s surveillance of the movie theater and its ramifications in daily life, to culture theory’s bird’s-­eye view of cinema’s place in an increasingly Americanized, imported mass culture. This progression can be tracked temporally in Nabokov’s own interwar ­career. As a former Rus­sian filmgoer of the 1910s, and now an extra and occasional screenwriter, Nabokov’s

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earliest focus around 1925–1926 is on film reception and production. By the late 1920s, Nabokov writes for a Rus­sian and German audience as a frequent moviegoer in west Berlin who participates and is implicated as consumer and observer in the Americanized Weimar cinematic culture he depicts. At the turn of the de­cade and into the early 1930s, Nabokov’s cosmopolitan identity—­Berlin resident, Cambridge educated, French speaking—­allows him to expand beyond a Russian-­German audience to a c­ areer centered in Paris and London, and ultimately New York. Working with translators, promoters, agents, and editors in multiple countries and languages, Nabokov is able to treat in his fiction the relation of cinematic culture to the global economic and promotional power of mass culture. At the same time, he manages to portray the metatheme of culture theory in a way that is not only palatable but salable to multiple audiences and markets. In an entrepreneurial turn, Nabokov instrumentalizes cinematic culture’s market for translations and screenplays to enable his own transnational ­career. This engagement with the possibilities for translations and screenplays based on his fiction I term cinema praxis. The encounter of Nabokov’s own cosmopolitanism with cinematic culture results in an opportunistic and bracingly pragmatic stance. Aiming at maximum exposure or “reach” for his fiction across languages, media, and markets, Nabokov worked tirelessly (along with a platoon of agents and supporters) to court publishers and production companies. This entailed a flexibility and humility not always credited to Nabokov, but which his interwar ­career, in an environment of unfathomable instability, more than warrants. For all his imaginative and intellectual work with the concepts of film, cinema, and culture, Nabokov mastered a thoroughgoing instrumentalization of motion pictures, aimed ultimately at supporting his writing and his f­ amily, at escaping the fate of so many fellow émigrés. Michel de Certeau’s description of tactics, as opposed to strategy, illuminates Nabokov’s situation in exile. Whereas a strategic approach starts from a space that is its own (propre), tactics are a question of timeliness, making something on the fly from what is to hand. Nabokov’s opportunistic and improvisational brilliance—in chess terms his combinatorial imagination—is a phenomenon of radical presentness. Nabokov’s rootedness (he is never deracinated, as Dolinin shows) is rhizomatic, spreading across the map of Western exile, making up in extent what is lost in depth.89 If, like Alexander Pushkin, Nabokov was a writer “to whom life and library w ­ ere one,” we should not be surprised that Nabokov’s engagement with his exilic environment is both timeless and timely, principled and opportunistic, idiosyncratic and accommodating.90 Ultimately, Nabokov both judged the pre­sent by the criteria of the past and dealt with the pre­sent on its own terms.

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Mapping Nabokov’s Art of Exile My focus in this book is on Nabokov’s embeddedness within interwar Americanized Eu­ro­pean mass and middlebrow culture, and in par­tic­u­lar on his engagement with the cinema, during his first Eu­ro­pean exile. If film, cinema, and culture theory are forms of artistic and intellectual engagement familiar from numerous studies of modernism, cinema praxis changes the ­angle of approach to focus on the writer’s ­career: the production, dissemination, and promotion of his texts.91 Given this study’s focus on exile, this turn is appropriate to our appreciation of Nabokov’s c­ areer as a writer as well as the opportunities afforded by the cinema. It is surely significant that a writer who has sparked such discussion of the ideal, “good” reader should have emerged from, even thrived within, the multiplicity (generic, media, and linguistic) of the interwar culture industry. The presence of the cinema (as theme, topos, or practical outlet) has been the main criterion of se­lection. At the same time, the proj­ect is also motivated by the desire to pay attention to works that have received less satisfying explanations (King, Queen, Knave and Camera Obscura) or almost no attention (The Man from the U.S.S.R., the poems “The Cinema” and “Tolstoy”) or that have been treated out of context (Laughter in the Dark). Nabokov’s entry into the literary canon, just like the cinema’s ac­cep­tance as a full-­fledged art form, has opened up the possibility for synchronic studies of timeless artistry, a kind of liberation from historical origins. Yet the radically tactical nature of his literary engagements during the 1920s and 1930s, while not canceling out the longer-­term strategic goals he set for himself as an artist, prompt us to highlight the provisional and improvisatorial ele­ments of his oeuvre. This study places Vladimir Nabokov’s early literary ­career in response to ­silent and early sound cinema—­Nabokov “noir”—­back into the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. The visual scheme of Nabokov’s early, “black and white” period fits perfectly his image, cultivated in reaction to Rus­sian critics and promoted to an international audience: cosmopolitan, exotically “Eu­ro­pean,” ironic, urbane, dark, sordid, even morbid—it is not for nothing that an early American reviewer of Laughter in the Dark compared him to hardboiled novelist James Cain—in 1938, truly noir avant la lettre (see chapter 4). Amer­i­ca looms large in this study: although for many Eu­ro­pean intellectuals Soviet montage revealed the artistic potential in the idea of the filmic, for most Rus­sian émigrés the idea of Soviet art was in itself an absurdity, a bias that predisposed them to associate cinematic culture exclusively with its American middlebrow and mass, rather than Soviet avant-­garde, variant. Furthermore, while

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biographically speaking Nabokov’s “American years” may begin only in 1940, in terms of his American literary c­ areer, we must start our account in the early 1930s. As film scholars have shown, interwar cinematic culture was generated by the dynamic, always un­balanced (unequal yet unpredictable), interaction of Film Eu­rope and Film Amer­i­ca—­a two-­way street traveled by talented Rus­sian artists and entrepreneurs. Understood in this longer time frame, film noir is perhaps one of the best-­ known examples of this conjuncture, a triumph of literary adaptation, a stimulating mixture of highbrow and lowbrow, valorizing moody black and white in an era of sunny Technicolor hits. The noir directors’ transition from Weimar Berlin (via Paris and London) to Hollywood mirrors Nabokov’s own move from local success during the 1920s in Weimar Germany, through negotiations with the French and British culture industry of the 1930s, to an increasing engagement with an American ­career linked to middlebrow publishing and Hollywood moviemaking. Above all, film noir is, like Nabokov’s cinema praxis, an art of exile. Nabokov’s continuation in the United States of his Eu­ro­pean literary work within cinematic culture parallels that of Austro-­German Weimar filmmakers, whose war­time noir films display a transnationalism as much about markets and economics as about politics. In his revisionist account, Elsaesser’s insight is to treat film noir as a phenomenon of exile or, more precisely, of migration—­showing that while the question of transnationalism is key, it is not the filmmakers’ immediate status as “refugees” but rather their long-­standing status as international professionals that leads them (more than once) to Amer­ i­ca.92 Seen from this perspective, the German and Austrian directors and producers “­were neither poor immigrants fleeing their country of origin to escape hunger in search of the American dream, nor ­were they po­liti­cal exiles and refugees. They w ­ ere film artists and cinema professionals who w ­ ere attracted ­because of the technology, resources and rewards that Hollywood could offer.”93 In this light, Nabokov’s move to the United States, entertained as a desirable outcome since at least 1932, a year before Hitler even came to power, can be seen less as a fugitive reaction to the 1940 invasion of France than as a premeditated and professionally motivated migration. As Elsaesser says of a transnational director like E. A. Dupont, “In order to understand the logic of his professional life, it needs to be reviewed as several, rather discrete ‘slices,’ happening almost to dif­fer­ent individuals.”94 Elsaesser’s discussion of the ­career of the multitalented Karl Freund in terms of his “several ‘vis­ib­ le’ as well as ‘invisible’ identities as an émigré” could well apply to the indefatigable Nabokov, as could his assessment that Freund’s skilled flexibility (again recalling de Certeau’s tactics) made him a “champion ‘chameleon’ in the

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survival stakes of southern California.”95 If “chameleon” brings to mind Nabokov’s own terms of “salamander” and “basilisk,” it is b­ ecause, it seems to me, that each of ­these animals possesses remarkable, almost miraculous, adaptations that help them survive: color changing, self-­regeneration, walking on ­water. The importance of adaptation and translation for Nabokov’s c­ areer in exile emerges in this context as part of a larger fa­cil­i­ty (exceptional among Rus­ sian émigré writers) with self-­adaptation and self-­translation. The first half of the book focuses on Nabokov’s contribution in the 1920s, through his fiction, poetry, and plays, to vari­ous theories of cinema and cinematic culture. Its two chapters overlap in time, as Nabokov’s life in Berlin, writing for a Russian-­German audience, from 1925 to 1928 is paralleled by his reading of and engagement with a larger audience, based in Paris, which he also addressed with an increasing exclusivity, from his novel The Luzhin Defense on (1929–1930). T ­ hese first chapters lay the groundwork for the second half of the book, where I read Nabokov’s transnational work of the 1930s as a response to the dual tracks of his Weimar Berlin experience and the Paris-­based émigré debates on the cinema. In the third and fourth chapters, I focus on Nabokov’s cinema praxis in the 1930s with regard to his “film novel” Kamera obskura, first within Eu­rope as Chambre obscure and Camera obscura, then in Amer­i­ca as Laughter in the Dark. Chapter 1, centered on Berlin, shows the move in Nabokov’s work (poetry, drama, fiction) from film theory to cinema theory between 1925 and 1928. In his early stories of 1925, his first novel Mary (1926) and the play The Man from the U.S.S.R. (1927), Nabokov focuses on film as a meta­phor for exile, combining the clichés of Rus­sian prerevolutionary literary responses to the movie screen with his own practical experience with film production. But ­after several years of close friendship (moviegoing and boxing) with the film critic Gessen, Nabokov invests more fully in the Weimar context, writing about a shared experience of Berlin’s urban cinematic culture for a Rus­sian and German audience. By examining Gessen’s reviews for Rulʹ (the émigré newspaper their f­athers had cofounded), I show how this critical engagement with a large mass of films provided, in contrast to the aestheticized or intellectualized response of fiction or theory, a discursive model for an engagement with cinema with consumption at its center. Nabokov’s writing of the ­later 1920s—­for émigrés, in the previously untranslated poem “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf,” 1928), and for a Rus­sian and German audience in his second novel, King, Queen, Knave (1928)—­provides an insider-­outsider account of how the urban environment of Berlin was suffused with cinematic culture, from spaces and images to language itself. Chapter 2 places Nabokov’s c­ areer into the larger context of Paris, the center of the intellectual and artistic emigration. By examining four key Rus­sian

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theorists of cinema and culture who entered into direct dialogue in a debate on the cinema, I show how the approaches to exile of t­ hese more established figures informed Nabokov’s connection of chess and cinema in The Luzhin Defense, his first Rus­sian novel to be serialized in Paris and translated into French. Two of ­these figures, the art critic Pavel Muratov and the poet Khodasevich, pre­sent sophisticated analyses of cinema’s place within an Americanized mass culture, which lead them to pessimistic conclusions about the place of art (read Rus­sian high culture) in Eu­ro­pean exile. Meanwhile, the polymathic and multilingual writers Andrei Levinson (dance, art, and literary critic) and Evgeny Znosko-­Borovsky (engineer, theater historian, chess player) saw the cinema as part of a flourishing and healthy Eu­ro­pean culture, a continuation of demo­ cratic art and recreation. Tellingly, Levinson and Znosko-­Borovsky transitioned permanently in the late 1920s to writing in other languages, namely, French and En­glish. In following this debate with his own practical take, Nabokov’s portrayal in The Luzhin Defense of the émigré chess impresario turned movie producer Valentinov combines an awareness of the culture industry with the gambit of a multilingual c­ areer. This allows Nabokov to bring the cinema into his own artistic sphere, a form of practical culture theory. Thus Nabokov’s work with the cinema is seen as turning decisively from the theoretical to the practical, yet retaining the scope of debates on the cinema’s status as art. Chapter 3 offers a reading of Camera Obscura that dramatizes its status as a work that both recapitulates the 1920s and transitions to the new, “born translated” cinema praxis of the 1930s.96 Set mainly in 1928, the high point of Nabokov’s engagement with and appreciation by German culture, Camera Obscura represents a reworking of his e­ arlier “German” novel King, Queen, Knave from the far side of Weimar Berlin’s economic collapse. I argue that the novel includes a precise topography of Berlin cinematic culture, centered on a pastiche of the Weimar Straßefilm (street film), a genre focused on the infiltration of cinematic culture into urban life. The guinea pig Cheepy—­with her own comic strip, animated film series and franchised line of toys—is shown to be inspired by Disney’s German promotional campaign for Mickey Mouse’s animated sound films. The German-­American creation Cheepy is seen as a metonym for the intended role of Camera Obscura as a transnational, translatable and adaptable commodity. Now no longer able to publish in German translation in Berlin, Nabokov turns to Paris and London, where he is aided by the critical portraits of him as a cosmopolitan author written by French-­and English-­speaking fellow émigrés. Through archival correspondence, I tell the story of the translation of the Rus­sian novel Kamera obskura into French as Chambre obscure (1934) and En­glish as Camera Obscura (1936), which reveals a

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Nabokov geared to assuring the promotion and dissemination of this novel through translation and screen adaptation. Fi­nally, the purchase of the option on screen rights to the novel by the German émigré-­owned com­pany Capitol Film Productions shows the continual role that Weimar culture played even ­after the publishing market in Berlin had closed to Nabokov. Chapter 4 examines Nabokov’s attempts to secure an American outlet for his fiction throughout the 1930s, culminating in his contract with Bobbs-­Merrill to rewrite Camera Obscura as Laughter in the Dark (1938). By examining his correspondence with the American agent Altagracia de Jannelli and reviews of his work in the American press by bilingual and assimilated Rus­sian émigrés, I show how the figure built up in chapter 3 of Nabokov as a cosmopolitan Eu­ ro­pean was used to promote him to a new American audience. I argue that in writing Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov responded directly to ­these reviews, as well as to newly discovered reader reports from the Bobbs-­Merrill archives. The Bobbs-­Merrill correspondence confirms the interconnectedness of middlebrow American publishing and Hollywood, as his first American publisher sought from the start to market the novel as a movie. Ultimately, it was unsuccessful due to the stipulations of the Production Code Administration. But I show that the publisher’s support was instrumental in obtaining for Nabokov the visa that allowed him to escape France with his wife and son on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Cinema, that literary commonplace, is seen in exile to have eminently practical consequences. In a coda, I examine Nabokov’s first American short story, “The Assistant Producer” (1943), as his summation of the Rus­sian emigration’s history through the medium of the cinema. By placing this work into the context of German émigré culture in the World War II–­era United States, I show how Nabokov’s cinema praxis approaches film noir from the unexpected ­angles of craft and audience triangulation. I argue that the dynamic interplay of Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope, pre­sent even in the 1920s, would continue in Nabokov’s work of the 1950s, resulting in the American success, via Eu­rope, of Lolita (1955).

C h a p te r 1

The Weimar Picture Palace From Film to Cinema in Berlin Exile (1925–1928)

It is quite natu­ral that [Nabokov-]Sirin does not have ­g reat success among readers. The more difficult and disturbing [trevozhnei] any attempt to penetrate the terrible meaning of the cataclysm we are living through, the more willingly we look for respite [otdokhnovenie] in an adventure novel, printed in teasing excerpts on the last page of a newspaper, in a game of bridge, or in the cinema, which shamelessly exploits the ­g reat achievement of the ­human mind. Even for Sirin himself ­there seems to be no greater plea­sure than to watch a deliberately ridicu­lous American picture. The more insouciantly stupid it is, the more forcefully he chokes and literally shakes with laughter to the point that sometimes he is forced to leave the auditorium. —­Iosif Gessen, Years of Exile, 1979

If we agree with Joseph Brodsky that “to be an exiled writer is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space,” then we can say that on his way to the ideal isolation of Montreux, Nabokov spent considerable time in the orbit of the cinema.1 During the mid-­to late 1920s, Nabokov frequented the cinema in Berlin, often using the tickets of his friend and con­temporary Georgy Gessen, who, as a professional film reviewer, could supply a ­free pass or two. Between November 1924 and March 1931, Gessen was the ­house critic for the Berlin daily Rulʹ (The Rudder). Gessen and Nabokov ­were sons of two of the newspaper’s three found­ers, Iosif Gessen and Vladimir D. Nabokov, whose names appeared on its masthead.2 The sons’ contributions avoided ­these famous surnames, appearing instead ­under pseudonyms and initials: Nabokov as “Cantab” and “V. Sirin,” Gessen as “G.G.” This avoidance of the f­ amily name is at once practical and intentionally symbolic. The relation of Nabokov (b. 1899) and Gessen (b. 1902) to the cinema should be seen in the broader generational context of Eu­ro­pean exile. For the younger 30

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émigrés to accept the cinema, albeit not without ironizing, was to accept the challenge of displacement and to make do without the crutch of an inherited identity. It can also be viewed as the instinctive rejection by young writers of what they saw, at times unfairly, as the begrudging and grumbling of an older generation. This stance was itself, moreover, sanctioned by the older generation. Protected at least within the confines of Rulʹ by the patronage of their ­fathers and their f­ athers’ friends, Nabokov and Gessen w ­ ere expected to make sense of their con­temporary environment for an exported Rus­sian literary culture. In generational terms, it is impor­tant that one of the most appreciative readers of Nabokov’s striking descriptions of the cinema was his m ­ other. As I document ­here and in chapter 2, Rus­sian émigrés like Nabokov ­were intimately engaged with cinema across the realms of consumption (as moviegoers), of critical reception (as reviewers), and of audience observations (as cultural theorists). ­These activities are only separable as ideal types. A trip to the cinema usually involved some mea­sure of all three, resulting in curious admixtures within the genres of reviews, essays, poems, stories, plays, or novels. Nabokov, famously prolific, produced all six. Gessen’s several hundred film reviews for Rulʹ comprise an unknown yet fascinating source for Nabokov’s opinions on the cinema—­German, Soviet, American, French—of the 1920s. In the appendix, I list all the films reviewed by Gessen as the main Rus­sian film critic in Berlin between 1924 and 1931. Nabokov’s and Gessen’s stories, poems, and reviews can be seen as reports from a new Eu­ro­pean culture—­one so dif­fer­ent, as many émigrés stressed, from the high culture previously perceived from afar and remembered from trips overseas before the ­Great War. Such short forms as the film review, essayistic feuilleton, and topical poem, common across Eu­rope during the 1920s, have been called “metropolitan miniatures.” In the scholar of modernism Andreas Huyssen’s definition, t­hese are literary forms interacting with new media, occupying an ever-­shrinking margin, yet refusing to cede conceptual space to a visual culture with which it competes but never apes.3 ­These w ­ ere written quickly for immediate publication and consumption, merging mimetically with their ever-­changing, disposable environment. Gessen’s film reviews are in this re­spect typical. Nabokov’s own short stories in Rulʹ also inscribed themselves directly into this fleeting context, a kind of ticker tape of Rus­sian Berlin.4 For Rulʹ, Nabokov produced not only fiction and plays but also chess prob­lems, essays, and poems, which appeared alongside Gessen’s reviews.5 Nabokov’s 1928 poem “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf ”) (examined in detail below) also falls into this category of metropolitan miniature, as it was published just two weeks a­ fter its date of composition.6 Rulʹ treated the cinema as an emanation of the city itself. Unlike lit­er­at­ ure, which was located in the m ­ iddle of the paper (with its “Print” [“Pechatʹ”] and

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“Criticism and Bibliography” [“Kritika i bibliografiia”] sections), cinema notices and film reviews appeared in the back, which h ­ oused the paper’s final section, “In Berlin” (“V Berline”). Following the “Chronicle” (“Khronika”) section of faits divers in the city, “In Berlin” showcased per­for­mance and entertainment culture. We therefore find “Cinema” (“Kino”) sandwiched between “Theater and ­Music” (“Teatr i muzyka”) and “Sport.” Notably, the Rus­sian term for this section was not the standard kinematograf, which had been in use in the 1900s and 1910s and would continue to be used in the emigration throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, it is the punchier term kino, a German borrowing already in evidence in Rus­sia of the 1910s, but which in the émigré context of the 1920s resonates, like the macaronic film advertisements and film reviews in Rulʹ, with the polyglot world of Berlin.7 It was not uncommon to locate film reviews next to pictures of chess grandmasters at the board or heavyweight champions in the ring. For Rus­sian Berlin, cinema was squarely a phenomenon, like boxing and chess, of urban mass culture. This orientation suited Nabokov and Gessen to a tee. Both ­were avid sportsmen and in fact sparring partners.8 Nabokov’s early biographer Andrew Field relates the story from 1926 of Gessen unexpectedly bloodying Nabokov’s nose at the salon of Gessen’s f­ ather, during a friendly exhibition designed to recruit boxing pupils for Nabokov: once the shortsighted Gessen had removed his glasses, he l­ater explained, “Suddenly the fog cleared for a moment, and I could see him” (the number of pupils recruited by this spectacle has not come down to us).9 Nabokov and Gessen repeated the bout in a September 1930 public demonstration at the Schubert-­Saal in Berlin. This artistic eve­ning of the “Union of Rus­sian Journalists in Germany” featured a cinema section alongside a sport section, with the centerpiece of a boxing match between Nabokov and Gessen.10 The connection drawn by émigré cinema theorists between cinema and sport would have seemed to Nabokov, in his shorts, neither strange nor insulting.11 Nabokov’s residence in Berlin-­West (Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg) put him at the heart of Weimar cinematic culture, within walking distance of the densest concentration of Filmpaläste, the newly constructed “picture palaces” that sprang up or ­were converted in the mid-1920s to host premieres and other high-­profile events. Of the 342 cinemas in Berlin in 1925, only 22 ­were film palaces seating more than one thousand spectators.12 An overview of Berlin’s cinematic culture can be gleaned from the 1925 Kino-­Pharus-­Plan (see figure 1.1 showing the location of cinemas in central and western Berlin).13 As the film historian Brigitte Flickinger points out, “Of the more than 250 cinemas mapped on the 1925 ‘Kino-­Pharus-­Plan’ most (38) are situated in the western district of bourgeois Charlottenburg. Between [Charlottenburg and Berlin-­Mitte, the cen-

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Figure 1.1.  “Kino-­Pharusplan” (1925) map of Berlin cinemas. Image and permissions courtesy of Pharus-­Plan Verlag.

ter] are the respectable areas of Wilmersdorf (10), Tiergarten (15) and Schöneberg (18).”14 That is, by 1925 ­there ­were eighty-­one cinemas in the areas that Nabokov would inhabit during his fifteen years in the city—­and many more ­were built in subsequent years. Although the map does not distinguish cinemas by capacity, we know from other sources that the majority of the large-­capacity film palaces ­were clustered around the Gedächtniskirche in west Berlin, only blocks from Nabokov’s residence, where old churches squatted alongside the aggressive novelty of cinema palaces, their advertising forming the backdrop

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for his nocturnal strolls in the city. Gessen attended hundreds of showings at such high-­end movie theaters, and we know that Nabokov made use of f­ree tickets to accompany him. Not only was ­there a Rus­sian grocery and a Rus­sian bookstore on Nabokov’s street, in addition to Berlin’s most famous department store, the Kauf haus des Westens (KaDeWe), but around the corner ­there also stood a movie theater, the Tauentzien-­Palast. As Nabokov’s local corner theater, the Tauentzien-Palast was likely the venue for many of his outings with Vera and served as the premiere location of nine of Gessen’s reviews.15 The map in figure 1.2 features Nabokov’s residences during the years 1925– 1932 alongside the locations of the four most frequent venues for Gessen’s first-­ run viewings (see t­ able 1.1) cata­loged in the appendix, which together account for more than 50  ­percent of Gessen’s over three hundred reviews. However frequently he visited them, Nabokov was surrounded by ­these film palaces.16

Figure 1.2.  Close-up of figure 1.1, showing Nabokov’s residences (pentagons) and the locations of Gessen’s most frequent first-­run movie palaces (stars).

­Table 1.1  Locations of the four most frequent venues for Gessen’s first-­run viewings GESSEN’S PREMIERES 1924–1931 (STARS)

NABOKOV’S RESIDENCES 1925–1932 (PENTAGONS)

1. Ufa-­Palast am Zoo (70 screenings)

1. Luitpoldstraße 13 (April 1925–­July 1925)

2. Gloria-­Palast (around 45 screenings)

2. Motzstraße 31 (September 1925–­spring 1926)

3. Ufa-­Kurfürstendamm (around 35 screenings)

3. Passauer Straße 12 (spring 1926–­July 1929)

4. Ufa-­Mozartsaal (around 25 screenings)

4. Luitpoldstraße 27 (August 1929–­early 1932)

Source: Appendix.

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Gessen’s write-up of perhaps the grandest premiere of the Weimar p­ eriod, the reopening by Germany’s major film com­pany, the Universum-­ Film Aktiengesellschaft  (Ufa), of one of their flagship cinemas, the Ufa-­ Palast am Zoo in September 1925, paints a picture of the scale of ­these events: This premiere—­the most pompous so far in Berlin—­was or­ga­nized by Sam Rachmann, the man­ag­er of leading New York movie theaters, who was specially called for this purpose from Amer­i­ca. He was able at once to deafen, blind and stun the Berlin audience—­but failed to save this unsuccessful premiere. Almost 3,000 viewers fit now into this hall, repainted from gray-­g reen to red with gold; the orchestra of 75 ­people plays without a moment’s silence for two and half hours straight; ten (or more?) projectors, hidden and on view, flood the orchestra and stage from above, ­behind and the sides with blue, white and yellow light and beam against the walls; the hall is saturated with the smell of roses—­ along the balcony is strung a thick garland, and ­every female attendee receives a bouquet. At eight ­o’clock starts a singular per­for­mance: the overture to Tannhäuser (with light effects), then comes an unusual mixture of jazz, organ and dances (classical and character dances), films (travel, animated and comedic), and excerpts from an operetta. At ten thirty the curtain rises for the final time: on the stage are all the performers, a burst of magic, and “Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles.” ­Whether through the fault of the invited American or someone e­ lse, ­there was nothing extraordinary in all that was shown onstage, and even without pauses the show dragged on too long. The most essential disappointment was Charleys Tante [Charley’s Aunt]. A long and per­sis­tent advertising campaign preceded this American picture—­could Ufa ­really not have found another film for the opening of their principal cinema?17 The notion of early cinema as above all per­for­mance, event, and screen-­ adjacent spectacle is palpable at such premieres. Most tellingly, the feature film itself is almost an afterthought and, to Gessen at least, best forgotten.18 With such an emphasis on the historical and on the cinematic, it is nonetheless legitimate to ask what exactly “film” was for Nabokov during ­these years. As film critics, regular moviegoers, and film theorists recognized at the time, that key feature of cinematic culture—­its mass character—­extended also into the realm of reception. Mass consumption kept pace with production, not merely in the sense of a “mass” spectator, but in the sense that each individual

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amassed an aggregate experience of the cinema. As the novelist and professional film critic Graham Greene put it in a review of 1936, “In the last eleven months I have reviewed 124 films, of which only 13 conveyed any kind of aesthetic experience and another 48 ­were reasonably entertaining: the other 63 items ­were trash.”19 For his part, Nabokov studiedly refused to respond to (or name) individual films or directors in his fiction written during the 1920s and 1930s.20 Only much ­later, ­after Lolita encouraged a search for origins, did he mention genres, directors, and actors, which have been traced and analyzed in his fiction. I suggest instead that such anonymity—in the face of an extensive engagement with the cinema—is best understood by looking at the mass of films that he may have seen. Certainly, Nabokov did not see e­ very one of the films reviewed by Gessen. But the aggregate of the films reviewed by Gessen affords a sense of what Nabokov may have watched and discussed and establishes the basic repertoire of Rus­ sian Berlin’s cinematic culture. This cinematic culture, like sporting culture, rubbed shoulders with literary culture, as reviews, advertisements, and tag­lines from ­these films featured in Berlin’s print, visual and urban landscapes with the ubiquity unique to the promotional genius of cinematic culture. The transnational nature of this culture is evident in the film advertising that plastered the final pages of Rulʹ. ­These advertisements w ­ ere consistently macaronic, mixing Cyrillic and roman scripts, as if giving each contributor to the film his or her national due. Such, for example, is the advertisement for Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924), a German film with German and Rus­sian actors, including a Rus­sian episode, made with Rus­sian technical personnel (see figure 1.3). Perhaps the most impor­tant ele­ment of such transnationalism was already on display in Gessen’s premiere: the invited American or­ga­nizer and the centerpiece of an American film, as well as the promotion leading up to and including the premiere, indicate the Americanization of Weimar cinematic culture.21 The economic superiority of the United States following the First World War facilitated the forceful (some argued forcible) spread of American mass culture to Eu­ro­pean markets. The re­sis­tance to assimilating domestic output to American models was symbolized by the ­battle between Hollywood and Eu­ro­pean “national” production for German and French audiences.22 The dependence of local culture industries on American financial and technical assistance was signaled by such agreements as Parufamet, the u ­ nion concluded in 1925 between the German Ufa and the American Paramount and Metro-­ Goldwyn-­Mayer, giving t­ hese studios exhibition rights in Germany, which would flood the market with American films. As film historian Thomas J. Saunders has shown, the interplay between German and American film was com-

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Figure 1.3.  Advertisement for Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, Rul′, November 13, 1924.

plex and extremely productive.23 The resultant Americanized culture of Weimar Berlin is a vital backdrop for Nabokov’s early ­career.24 We can approach the cinema of the 1920s in terms of the basic functions of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception—or making, exporting, showing, and viewing films. Across the emigration, Rus­sians engaged in all four activities. Though they usually lacked the capital to act as distributors, but did function as exhibitors, with numerous examples of Russian-­owned cinemas during this period, Rus­sian émigrés are perhaps best known for production and reception.25 Rus­sian businessmen, man­ag­ers, artists, and writers funded, produced, directed, and acted in films. This standard set of émigré occupations features across Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction, from the extra Ganin in Mary (Mashenʹka, 1926), the actress Marianna in The Man from the U.S.S.R. (Chelovek iz SSSR, 1927), and the producer Valentinov in The Luzhin Defense (Zashchita Luzhina, 1929–1930), and on into his descriptions of their German counter­parts in Magda the would-be actress and Kretschmar the financial backer in Camera Obscura (Kamera obskura, 1932–1933).

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In this chapter I show how Nabokov’s lived experience of cinematic culture and practical engagement with film in 1920s Berlin can be traced through the development of his fiction between 1925 and 1928, from his earliest mature Rus­sian prose to his first work written with a German readership in mind. Nabokov’s portrayal of cinema in his fiction of the 1920s spans all four categories of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Nabokov’s most original and influential portrayals of the cinema in his early stories of 1925 and in Mary and The Man from the U.S.S.R. juxtapose production and reception, contrasting backstage real­ity to on-­screen appearances, or rather on-­screen apparitions, ghostly images that then, taken up by film distribution, take on a life of their own, dispersed by the cinema industry across the world and thereby condemned to exile. H ­ ere the cinema is taken to represent the condition of exile itself, with film distribution, taken as the international dissemination of ­human likenesses, seen as symbolic of the Rus­sian actors’ and viewers’ own exilic dispersal. By 1928, Nabokov enlarges his scope beyond the concerns of émigrés to the wider world of Weimar cinematic culture, showing in the poem “The Cinema” and the novel King, Queen, Knave (Korolʹ, dama, valet, 1928) the extent to which the language and imagery of con­temporary Berlin was suffused with the cinema.

Uncanny Images Nabokov was impressed by film’s reflection of the uncanniness of émigré and interwar urban life. The very spectrality of film, which had so unnerved Maxim Gorky in 1896, seemed to Nabokov not to distort real­ity but to hold up a mirror to the ghostlike and insubstantial existence of dispossessed Rus­sian émigrés in cities like Berlin and Paris. As the émigré critic Yuly Aikhenvald, his friend and mentor, put it in 1927, “Do not the erasable shades of the cinema and the ceaseless turnover of its fleeting contents constitute a symbol of our real­ity [deistvitelʹnostʹ], which in fact is just as fleeting and transparent as that life which e­ very eve­ning lures viewers through the hospitable doors of electric theaters, where they show emptiness, but also instruct in the inner meaning of that emptiness?”26 Yet it was Nabokov who first articulated this idea in his stories and first novel in the years 1925–1926. In its earliest appearances, Nabokov’s estrangement of the screen comes in the form of drawing attention to the enormity of the projections of actors and, in par­tic­u­lar, their ­faces. Perhaps the purest description of film reception is in the short story “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia” (“Pisʹmo v Rossiiu,” 1925). The screen is described in defamiliarizing terms as part of the narra-

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tor’s idiosyncratic, late-­night tour of Berlin’s street attractions and is the earliest extended depiction of the cinema in Nabokov’s work: And beyond the bend, above the [damp] sidewalk—­how unexpectedly!—­ the front of a cinema r­ipples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-­pale screen you can watch more-­or-­less skillfully trained mimes [liudi]: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining [glycerin] tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) t­ here appears real life [sama zhiznʹ], unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright w ­ aters, a noiselessly but visibly [zrimo] 27 rustling tree. The scene features the uncanny experience of the film screen, the pro­cess of film production as more or less successful illusion, and the potential of the camera as recording instrument (chance, spontaneity, unique): built on the contrast between the film’s intentional and unintentional effects, between production and reception, it encapsulates Nabokov’s early film theory.28 The most impor­tant contrast evoked in this passage is between the foregrounded image of the actors and the chance capture of “life itself ” caught unawares. The first film image is a defamiliarized close-up. One of the defining features of film art according to early theorists Béla Balázs (Vis­i­ble Man, 1924) and Rudolf Arnheim (Film as Art, 1932), as well as the émigré critic Evgeny Znosko-­Borovsky, the close-up facilitated a new expressivity of the actor’s physiognomy in s­ ilent film. H ­ ere the narrator focuses naively on scale in the disproportionately large eyes and lips, which are defined by their color and light properties: black, shimmering, glistening. The image is not static but continues to grow as the face moves closer to the camera, seeming to approach the audience, fixed by the character’s regard. The other moving ele­ment is the tear, which is also defined according to its light reflection as shining. In the Rus­sian, this is a “glycerin” tear—­a signal of the narrator’s knowledge of how the illusion is produced. This adjective suggests a nuanced ambivalence on the part of Nabokov’s narrator, produced by a tension between the recognition of the artifice (“more or less skillfully trained ­people”) and its effect (“wonderful”).29 The second, contrasting series of images emerges when, in a “heavenly” moment, the camera captures coincidental combinations. T ­ hese moments, incidental to the film’s plot, foreground the unplanned: an unchoreographed crowd, the play of light on w ­ ater (another luminous verb—­literally “shining”), and even the vis­i­ble appearance of a tree’s rustling leaves, discernible despite the film’s lack of sound. In this it returns us to the earliest reception of cinema

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in Gorky’s article, which also features a moving tree. For Gorky, the tree’s movement was ghostly and uncanny in its lack of color and sound. And for the émigré Zinaida Gippius in her 1926 essay “Cinema” (“Sinema”), ­there was a macabre ghostliness to film’s lifeless imitations, absent of sound or color: “The chopped up, jumpy movement of lightless figures is far more similar to the dance of death than to the flow of life.”30 But for Nabokov’s narrator, the very fact of movement and light is revelatory, compensating for the lack of diegetic sound and full color spectrum.31 Film’s ability to give (often unintentional) glimpses of formerly unnoticed aspects of real­ity and to reveal unsuspected truths through accidental juxtapositions particularly delighted Nabokov. The valorization of chance, spontaneity, and unrepeatability is in fact a feature of Nabokov’s fiction of the mid-1920s. It is directly connected to his stance t­ oward life in emigration—an optimism in exile. Refusing all attempts to historicize the pre­sent, which he branded “generalizations,” Nabokov latches onto the enchantments of a fleeting pre­sent.32 Thus the story “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia” (in which the cinema scene above appears) is framed as a letter written by an émigré in Berlin to a former lover in Rus­sia. It ends with the following defiant rapture: Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn s­ oles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries w ­ ill roll by, and schoolboys ­will yawn over the history of our upheavals; every­thing w ­ ill pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness w ­ ill remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black w ­ aters, in the smiles of a dancing c­ ouple, in every­ thing with which God so generously surrounds ­human loneliness.33 Nabokov’s narrator is often searching for fortuitous images surrounding the “loneliness” of exile. ­Here the challenge is implicitly to exile itself: the story is in fact an excerpt from an abandoned novel titled “Schastʹe” (“Happiness”).34

Exile as Film Shoot Nabokov’s depiction of Rus­sian émigré extras in Mary and actors in The Man from the U.S.S.R. drew on his personal experience, concentrated in the years 1923–1925.35 One of the richest sources for this experience is his correspondence with his ­mother, Elena Nabokova. In a letter from early 1925, he complains of the all-­day shoots, from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.: “­Today my eyebrows

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are still black (from indelible makeup) and white spots swim in my eyes when I look at something white (by the way, it has snowed), which always happens ­after a blinding light, with which they bombard the extras, as if with cannons. I was paid 10 marks for this plea­sure.”36 Yet he was also considered for more impor­tant roles than extra, as a letter from 1924 shows: “A good friend of mine—an up-­and-­coming film star [kino-­zvezda]—­de­cided to get me involved in the business. She brought me to her director, who looked me over in raptures for two hours and offered me the starring role in his new film. Eh? He was told that I am an actor, who has performed a lot in the south of Rus­sia.”37 Furthermore, Nabokov was involved in the Rus­sian cabaret scene, writing skits with his friend Ivan Lukash, as well as trying his hand at film screenplays (stsenarii).38 As he wrote to his ­mother, “Now we are busy with writing screenplays [kinematograficheskikh stsenariev]. I write with Lukash, I write with Gorny, I write with Alexandrov and I write alone. I visit film divas [kinematograficheskikh div], who call me the ‘En­glish prince.’ ”39 In another letter to her Nabokov confided, “Lukash was just ­here and we worked on a screenplay (for you). It seems it ­won’t come out too badly. I’ve been asked for a screenplay by three dif­fer­ent directors—­there is a huge demand for them and they pay from 1000 to 3000 dollars for a synopsis [ekspoze]. But I’ve figured out that you r­ eally have to create for the cinema, and that it is not so easy. I w ­ ill get t­ here.”40 A 1924 notice in the Berlin émigré film trade journal Ekran (Screen, 1924–1925) gives a sense of just how in demand such writing was and what advantages a Rus­sian might have in the eyes of Hollywood: The editors of the Ekran journal have managed through our New York correspondent to contact a series of large American firms that are at pre­ sent very much in need of good screenplays. The American firms consider that Rus­sian literary thinking would enliven the monotony of the mechanical fabrication of American screenplays, and therefore the proposal of Ekran was met with ­g reat interest. The editors of Ekran would like to offer all Rus­sian writers assistance in helping them place their screenplays in Amer­i­ca. For this it is sufficient to send to the Ekran editors a two-­to-­three-­page synopsis [konspekt] or treatment [fabulu] of the proposed screenplay (preferably typewritten) with a note about the proposed fee and an accurate address. The Ekran journal w ­ ill take it from ­there.41 Nabokov continued to work on the screenplay “The Love of a Dwarf ” (“Liubovʹ karlika”) and l­ater that summer reported that he had sold the cabaret script “The Chinese Screens” (“Kitaiskie shirmy”) for $100, but only received $15 as his portion (“pretty slim,” he added).42 ­These experiences provide context to

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his depiction of the film studio in The Man from the U.S.S.R., as well as the reactions of Marianna to her screened per­for­mance. In Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1926), the protagonist, Ganin, has worked as an extra, like Nabokov and, the narrator assumes, many of his émigré readers, whom he addresses with the conspiratorial “as many of us have.”43 Rus­ sian émigrés ­were in demand with filmmakers during the early 1920s—­Rashit Yangirov points out that, among émigré occupations, their numbers dwarfed even t­ hose of Rus­sian “balalaika players, taxi ­drivers and taxi dancers.”44 Nabokov’s description of the pro­cess, both in the letter to his ­mother and in the novel, is in fact typical of con­temporary firsthand accounts. In 1923 Alexander Lapiner, the ­f uture editor of Ekran, gave an account in Rulʹ confessionally titled “How I Was a Film Extra” (“Kak ia byl kinematograficheskim statistom”). In this piece one finds many of Nabokov’s details—­the assistant director shouting into a megaphone, the lights, heat, fatigue, and makeup: ­ fter an exhausting wait the assistant director [pomoshchnik rezhissera] A climbed onto the platform, took hold of a large megaphone and began to make plain to the extras what they would need to do. . . . ​­After the crowd was completely worn out [by rehearsals] the director appears, the master of the shoot. . . . ​The director was shouting, as ­were his assistants. ­After a ­couple of hours we could at last proceed to filming. . . . ​The lamps gleamed, the Jupiter lights [iupitera] blazed, the projectors started up, and it became as hot as a sauna. The primitive makeup began to run down our f­ aces. It hurt our eyes.45 The experience of work as an extra, then, is shared between character, narrator, and reader—­and for t­hose in the know, the author himself. It is presented as a thoroughly typical émigré circumstance, repeated numerous times for Ganin and across the emigration as a ­whole: Nothing was beneath his dignity; more than once he had even sold his shadow [tenʹ], as many of us have. In other words he went out to the suburbs to work as a movie extra on a set, in a fairground [balagannom] barn, where light seethed with a mystical hiss from the huge facets of lamps that w ­ ere aimed, like a cannon, at a crowd of extras, lit to a deathly brightness. They would fire a barrage of murderous brilliance, illuminating the painted wax of motionless [zastyvshikh] ­faces, then expiring with a click—­but for a long time yet t­ here would glow, in t­ hose elaborate crystals, d­ ying red sunsets—­our ­human shame. The deal [sdelka] was clinched, and our anonymous shadows [teni] sent out all over the world.46

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In this description, Nabokov introduces in miniature three key ele­ments—­the film shoot (the vio­lence of the operators, the death-­like submission of the extras), the loss of dignity (selling one’s image, shame), and the diasporic dispersal of ghostly images—­which ­will recur in a more famous screening scene ­later in the novel. The image of death is not subtle: murderous, deathly, d­ ying; even the f­ aces are in Rus­sian literally “stiffened” (zastyvshikh) like corpses. No less blunt is the association with prostitution (a real­ity for some Rus­sian émigrés, as for even middle-­class Weimar Berliners during the period of hyperinflation), overlaid with the tint of a Faustian bargain (“sold,” “deal”). T ­ hese overtones and local color had already been pre­sent in the playwright Lev Urvantsov’s account of work as an extra in a Berlin studio, published in Rulʹ and titled “A Film Night” (“Filʹmovaia nochʹ,” 1924). H ­ ere the Rus­sian extras stagger home in the early hours of the morning, “sleepless ­people, tired, with smeared makeup on their ­faces, but with ­g reat joy in their pockets.”47 A similar degradation concludes the émigré Yuri Felsen’s ­later story “Extras” (“Figuratsiia,” 1940), set in Paris.48 The most intriguing development is Nabokov’s transformation of Gorky’s “shade” imagery to move from a kind of imprisonment of the image to a diasporic dispersal of it. Like Gorky, Nabokov uses the Rus­sian teni, ­here translated as “shadows.” Yangirov notes that for the émigrés the figure of the extra was most often associated with Peter Schlemihl, the 1814 novella of the exiled French nobleman Adelbert von Chamisso, in which the romantic hero sells his shadow to the devil in exchange for immortality. In emigration, he notes, such an extraordinary deal had now become “a routine conversion of celluloid illusions into banknotes.”49 Yet although the imagery of a “shadow realm” is appropriate to such a transaction, the visual properties of the image in Mary are not t­ hose of a silhouette or a dark approximation, but of a light-­colored (gray-­blue is the l­ater description) spectral apparition on the film screen, so that teni ­here might better be translated as “shades” or “specters.” T ­ hese shades are the resemblance, but without substance or depth, of the extras at the moment of their film shoot “deaths,” ­faces set in wax, corpse-­like. Note also the fairground barn and the cannon, conjuring clowns and circus vio­lence, a conjuncture assured by the use of the historically overdetermined Rus­sian word balagan, which ­will recur in Nabokov’s descriptions of cinema (see below). The imagery of course could be misread to imply that emigration is a living death. The sense of the postwar period as a kind of lifeless limbo following the ­Great War was, for example, played out by veterans like Ernst Jünger, who wrote that Berlin’s new neon lights turned passersby the “color of corpses.”50 Yet Nabokov had not served in the trenches (though his l­ater characters like

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Kretschmar in Camera Obscura would), and the image of an immobile, packed crowd ­under cannon fire is more redolent of a Napoleonic square formation circa 1812 than a trench ­under mortar attack. Perhaps ironically, a feature in the technical section of the trade journal Ekran from 1924 reveals the director’s intent in using such a punishing barrage of light—­the obliteration of shadows (teni). This new 150-­amp Jupiter light “can achieve the complete annihilation of the projector’s so-­called ‘dark field.’ . . . ​Only with the help of such an apparatus has anyone attained an utterly uniform field, f­ree of shadows.”51 The side effect of this vio­lence ­toward shadows, then, was the creation of shades. Instead, the deathly imagery implies the passivity of the émigré extras, who do not actively participate in the production (they do not even know which film they are in), and their “mortification,” both in the moment of selling themselves and in Ganin’s l­ater moment of recognition. We have seen that Nabokov’s stance t­oward daily life was predicated on the search for and redemption of spontaneous images of joy. In fact, the account we have of Nabokov’s own experience of seeing himself as an extra on-­screen recounts his glee.52 Through his own creative activity he obtained, if not superiority to, then an in­de­pen­dence from the instrumentalization of the screen. The ­later scene where Ganin’s film is screened has been discussed multiple times, but never in historical context as a starting point for a consideration of Nabokov’s conception of exile.53 Ganin recognizes himself “with a shudder of shame” among the extras.54 His first reaction is a classic experience of the uncanny: “Ganin sensed that he was watching something vaguely yet horribly familiar.”55 The uncanniness is actually caused by the émigré context: what was beautiful in the 1925 story (light, movement, in contrast to the artificiality of the close-up) is ­here disturbing ­because of the protagonist’s involvement in the production and the relation between the extras and the film audiences. The following description interlaces his memories of the scene of production with his current reception of the transformed images on-­screen, as the horror of the uncanny gives way to shame and fi­nally to a sense of life’s impermanence: ­ ater in the cinema it was crowded and hot. For a long time, colored L advertisements for ­grand pianos, dresses, perfumes flocked silently across the screen. At last the orchestra struck up and the drama began . . . . . . ​The film [filʹma] was thrilling [zanimatelʹnaia] and excellently done. . . . On the screen moved luminous, bluish-­g ray shapes [sizoe dvizhenie]. A prima donna, who had once in her life committed an involuntary murder, suddenly remembered it while playing the role of a murderess in opera. Rolling her improbably large eyes, she collapsed supine onto the

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stage. The auditorium swam slowly into view, the public applauded, the boxes and stalls r­ ose in an ecstasy of approval. Suddenly Ganin sensed that he was watching something vaguely yet horribly familiar. He recalled with alarm the roughly carpentered rows of seats, the chairs and parapets of the boxes painted a sinister violet, the lazy workmen walking easily and nonchalantly like blue-­clad angels from plank to plank high up above, or aiming the blinding muzzles of klieg lights at a w ­ hole army of Rus­sians herded together onto the huge set and acting in total ignorance of what the film was about. He remembered young men in threadbare but marvelously tailored clothes, ­women’s ­faces seared with mauve and yellow make-up, and t­hose innocent exiles, old men and plain girls who ­were banished far to the rear simply to fill in the background. On the screen that cold barn was now transformed into a comfortable auditorium, sacking became velvet, and a mob of paupers a theatre audience. Straining his eyes, with a deep shudder of shame he recognized himself among all t­ hose p­ eople clapping to order, and remembered how they had all had to look ahead at an imaginary stage where instead of a prima donna a fat, red-­haired, coatless man was standing on a platform between floodlights and yelling himself to insanity through a megaphone. Ganin’s doppelgänger also stood and clapped, over t­ here, alongside the very striking-­looking man with the black beard and the ribbon across his chest. ­Because of that beard and his starched shirt he had always landed in the front row; in the intervals he munched a sandwich and then, ­after the take, would put on a wretched old coat over his eve­ning dress and return home to a distant part of Berlin, where he worked as a compositor in a printing plant. And at the pre­sent moment Ganin felt not only shame but also a sense of the fleeting evanescence [nepovtorimostʹ] of ­human life. T ­ here on the screen his haggard image, his sharp uplifted face and clapping hands merged into the gray kaleidoscope of other figures; a moment l­ater, swinging like a ship, the auditorium vanished and now the scene showed an aging, world-­famous actress giving a very skillful repre­sen­ta­tion of a dead young w ­ oman. “We know not what we do,” Ganin thought with repulsion, unable to watch the film any longer.56 The key contrast appears between what is presented on-­screen and the real­ity of how something was filmed. The narrative alternation of scenes of reception and production creates an equivalence between the images of memory and the film screen. Interestingly, neither is privileged: though memory has the advantage of so­cio­log­i­cal fact, revealing the extras to be a “mob of paupers,” the film

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is nonetheless convincing in its alchemical transformation of poverty into luxury (barn to auditorium, sacking to velvet), causing Ganin to hesitate. The film is said to be “thrilling and excellently done,” and ­later an actress gives “a very skillful repre­sen­ta­tion.” This contrast between reception and production is also a contrast between film plot and literary story, as the reedited and reframed siuzhet on-­screen is undercut by the narrator’s verbal fa­bula. Thus, in addition to the contrast with Ganin’s perception of the screen action, ­there is the implicit helplessness of film before lit­er­a­ture’s ability to expose and undermine through acidic commentary. This ­will reappear ­later in Nabokov’s fiction as the narrator’s comments parodying the director’s intentions, providing a kind of voice-­over or, in 1920s terms, intertitles, which subvert the intended, “naive” reaction of the supposedly average moviegoer (a role at times acted out by another hapless character). At the same time, this contrast produces a synthesis. The film images recorded by the camera, though “staged” as something dif­fer­ent with some success (as Ganin’s initial hesitation makes clear), nonetheless retain the “truth” of the extras’ “real lives”—­once decoded using Ganin’s memory and, by extension, the narrator’s commentary. What has therefore gone unnoticed in scholarship is that the film camera does preserve the true state of the Rus­sian extras, their lives in emigration, once we know how to read the images. This was how Aikhenvald, one of Nabokov’s most perceptive critics in Berlin, read Mary on its first appearance: “It fits ­these residents [of the Berlin boarding­house], ­these pale figures, that several of them sell their shades—in other words, that in order to provide themselves with some meager nourishment, they participate as extras in a film shoot, a­ fter which their nameless shades wander the entire Earth, ­running and shimmering on the white brightness of the screen—­‘shadowy doppelgängers, sold for ten marks apiece.’ T ­ hese are already the haziest of mirages, already the shadiest of shades, ­because t­hese residents of the Berlin boarding­house are themselves not entirely real and not entirely normal.”57 Furthermore, the film pre­sents a complex illusion that preserves not just the extras at the moment of filming but the prior life of ­these émigrés before the revolution. The émigrés’ clothing in its genuine details (imperial ribbons, tailoring) preserves a memory of a former life, one that the casting agent is able to appreciate and the cameraman able to capture. For the “real­ity” of the film shoot is not the only “truth” of their existence, which maintains an identity through the remnants (material and mnemonic) of a more distant past. In this way, the film restores to the character of the printer’s compositor the duality of both his eve­ning dress and his “wretched old coat,” superimposing multiple temporalities.

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­Here the medium acts contrary to the conventions of the art form, revealing and in fact recording the “real life” of the extras. This real life only emerges (for the informed spectator, Ganin; or for the informed reader, via Nabokov’s fiction) in the juxtaposition between the extras’ daily selves (working at the factory) and their on-­screen selves. Through an ironic juxtaposition of the impoverished Rus­sian extras off camera with their imposing on-­camera selves, ­there emerges the spectral nature of their remembered former prerevolutionary existence, when the extras wore t­hese “threadbare but marvelously tailored” clothes in real­ity and not as costumes.58 What the camera is capturing is not simply the “real­ity” of a moving tree, but the palimpsestic overlayering of the past on the pre­sent—­recording the uncanny spectrality of the émigrés’ existence. And so although the unknown foreign audiences who w ­ ill watch this film, as Ganin’s “shade” wanders and roams the earth, are uninitiated, seeing only the intended effects of the film’s diegetic narrative (opera, audience, luxury), t­ here is the understanding that an initiated ­f uture viewer, a ­f uture reader and ­f uture historian, w ­ ill be able to access the ele­ments of truth recorded despite the director’s intentions. This momentary resurrection of multiple pasts paradoxically elicits in Ganin a sense of life’s “evanescence”—­literally “unrepeatability,” or nepovtorimostʹ in Rus­sian. The past can be re-­created, not repeated; the image, by contrast, is in practice endlessly repeatable. And it is this repetition of the images that assails Ganin as he leaves the movie theater: “As he walked he thought how his shade [tenʹ] would wander [stranstvovatʹ] from city to city, from screen to screen, how he would never know what sort of ­people would see it or how long it would roam [mykatʹsia] round the world.”59 The shades, previously “sent out all over the world” in the film shoot scene, again wander and roam the world. The connection of this image to exiles is immediately obvious. Yet it is also colored by the notion of the dev­il’s bargain à la Chamisso struck for the sale of the images—­exile as a curse. Back in his boarding­house (which w ­ ill ­later be called, in Gorkyian style, a “house of ghosts [dom tenei]”), Ganin produces the most sophisticated film meta­phor in Nabokov’s early work: “And when he went to bed and listened to the trains passing through that cheerless ­house in which lived seven Rus­ sian lost shades [teni], the ­whole of life seemed like a piece of film-­making [sʺemkoi—­film shoot] where heedless extras [ravnodushnyi statist] knew nothing of the picture in which they w ­ ere taking part.”60 The movement of the émigrés’ shadow doubles is so disturbing to Ganin not ­because of the centrifugal movement (which they had already experienced as exiles) but ­because of the extras’ lack of agency and participation in the creative pro­cess. This is essentially a question of narrative control. ­There is a parallel drawn between

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the poor Rus­sian extras’ unwitting participation in a cinematic narrative and the lives of émigrés playing out parts in a story they cannot “direct.”61 The question of controlling one’s own narrative in exile is at stake in the novel as a w ­ hole. In the final scenes Ganin realizes that he needs to live not in the past, through the shadow life of memories, but in the pre­sent. The trigger for this realization is remarkable, hinting at Ganin’s transcendence of his status as passive extra in the film shoot and his joining with t­ hose who work away nonchalantly in the barn on the boards above: Despite the early hour, work was already in pro­g ress. The figures of the workmen on the frame showed blue against the morning sky. One was walking along the ridge-­piece, as light and f­ ree as though he ­were about to fly away. The wooden frame shone like gold in the sun, while on it two workmen ­were passing tiles to a third man. . . . ​This lazy, regular pro­cess had a curiously calming effect; the yellow sheen of fresh timber was more alive than the most lifelike dream of the past. As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever.62 ­ hese blue-­suited workmen recall “the lazy workmen walking easily and nonT chalantly like blue-­clad angels from plank to plank high up above” in the makeshift movie studio of the barn, absorbed in the rhythm of their work.63 This Tolstoyan admiration by the intellectual for the unburdening rhythm of work further aligns Ganin with an unexpected ele­ment of film production.64 In par­tic­ul­ar, this is a focus on the pre­sent: “But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old ­dying poet, now remained in the ­house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory. Other than that image no Mary existed, nor could exist.”65 Rather than meeting Mary at the eastern station as she arrives from Rus­sia, he heads instead for the southwestern station in order to board, still visa-­less, a train bound for “France, Provence, and then—­the sea.”66 ­Here Ganin becomes a protagonist precisely by abandoning the shadow existence of the passive extra in the drama of exile. Nabokov’s reflections on film are subsumed in Mary to his thoughts on exile. As Aikhenvald noted in his review, the émigrés are shown to be spectral and evanescent even before the arrival of a movie camera. The camera, in capturing this dual real­ity, both alleviates their condition, restoring an image of the past, and exacerbates it by multiplying and dispersing t­ hese images, perpetuating their exile. Furthermore, the émigré images would not, by 1926, be imported into the Soviet Union—­nor would Nabokov’s fiction—­denying them even this shadow return. The intrinsic uncanniness of film signaled by Gorky

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only emerges ­here as a function of exile. More precisely, only a literary narrative, which comments on and contrasts the barn with the auditorium, allows this contrast to emerge. In his early stories and Mary, Nabokov’s film theory distinguishes between degrees of intention ­behind the cinematography. The valence of a film depends on ­whether the director or cameraman aims at the effects created. Nabokov’s narrative at times acts as rival, at o ­ thers as supplement, to the film. In this, he pries open the gap between viewer and reader, or between “average” moviegoer and literate émigré. We can therefore distinguish between the camera’s unintentional, partly intentional, and intentional effects. Unintentionally, the camera captures life—­this is captivating in its verisimilitude, yet at the same time uncanny in its spectrality. In ways partly intended, costumed characters on-­screen reveal hidden truths that, when the camera rec­ords the “real life” of the actors, show through their roles. Nabokov’s narrative usually helps the reader to read the film against the grain by superimposing ­these two images and therefore to perceive their latent contrast.67 Lastly, the camera intentionally “rec­ords” for posterity fragments valuable for their historical interest. Yet for Nabokov, showing a remarkable degree of sophistication in media history, what is ultimately preserved is the medium itself, so marked historically at each stage of technological development. Rather, he implies, it is lit­er­a­ture that is the ultimate recording medium, a theme of ­later work like the poem “Tolstoy,” the novel Glory, and the French essay “Writers and the Age” (“Les écrivains et l’époque,” 1931) (see chapter 3). By contrast, in The Man from the U.S.S.R., begun in fall 1926 and first performed in April 1927, Nabokov moves Rus­sian film production center stage.68 Rather than a onetime extra, Nabokov includes a Rus­sian émigré actress, Marianna, whose participation in a German film about the Rus­sian Revolution supplies a backdrop to the action. Only act 1 of the play was published in Rulʹ, but the play was performed (twice) in Berlin by the émigré troupe Gruppa (an early group theater).69 Their director, Yuri Ofrosimov, who also happened to be the theater critic for Rulʹ, had commissioned the play from Nabokov. The play was promoted in advance in Rulʹ as of special interest as “the first stage production drawn from our con­temporary émigré life” (praise for topicality directed similarly at Mary by early reviewers) and was subsequently reviewed ­there by Boris Brodsky, who similarly praised it as “the first play drawn from émigré life.”70 In par­tic­u­lar, it is worth paying attention to act 4, which is set in a film studio.71 Though act 4 was unpublished at the time, mentions w ­ ere made of this scene in advertising.72 The act starts with a revealing stage direction: The lobby of a film studio. On the right, along the edge of the stage, the same gray wall as in the preceding act. To the left of it, a wide passageway

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crowded with movie props, creating an effect reminiscent si­mul­ta­neously of a photographer’s waiting room, the ­jumble of an amusement-­park booth [i balagannye budki], and the motley corner of a futurist’s canvas. (Among t­ hese angular shapes are con­spic­u­ous three cupolas—­a large one and two smaller ones—­the ochre, onion-­shaped domes of some crudely reproduced Rus­sian church [lubochnogo khrama]. ­There is also a balalaika lying ­here haphazardly, and a half-­unfurled map of Rus­sia.) ­These props have uneven gaps and apertures (in the distance are vis­i­ble the outlines of enormous klieg lights). All of it reminds the viewer of a many-­colored jigsaw puzzle, carelessly and only partially assembled. As the curtain rises, the front of the stage is swarming with Rus­sian émigrés who have just arrived for the shooting. Among them is Lyulya. The Assistant Director [pomoshchnik rezhissera] briskly and buoyantly squeezes onstage through the scenery blocking his way. He is redheaded, has a paunch, wears neither jacket nor waistcoat, and immediately begins to speak very loudly.73 The specific details of film production in the scene hark back to the “fairground [balagannom] barn” of Mary, with its “fat, red-­haired, coatless man” who “was standing on a platform between floodlights and yelling himself to insanity through a megaphone” (the Assistant Director ­here soon acquires a megaphone too). This figure, who recurs not only in Mary and The Man from the U.S.S.R. but also in the poem “The Cinema” and (briefly) in the novel Camera Obscura, was the most impor­tant person on the film set for the émigrés. As Nikolai Ukhtomsky, who lived in Berlin between 1922 and 1929, reports in the appropriately titled Kharbin paper Rupor (Mouthpiece—or Megaphone), “For an extra the assistant directors [pomoshchniki rezhissera] are like gods, and of course are more impor­tant than directors themselves. ­Because it is they who command the armies of extras and personally recruit for them.”74 It points as well to what Dmitri Nabokov has called the “proppiness” (butaforstvo) of the backstage world, which is both a feature of the fictional world that the reader is allowed to glimpse and an observation about the shoddiness of behind-­the-­scenes, off-­camera sets.75 While this is certainly a property of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction in general, in this instance Nabokov chooses loaded terms that comment not only on the proppiness of émigré existence but also on the threadbare attempts of 1920s film to portray Rus­sia and Rus­sianness, which long predated Josef von Sternberg’s riff on this theme in The Last Command (1928). Nabokov’s friend Gessen reviewed The Last Command in Rulʹ and Nabokov certainly saw it, referring to the film in a letter to his wife in the 1930s; yet it was part of a longer tradition that not only Rus­sian Berlin but also Nabo-

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kov’s own fiction (in Mary and The Man from the U.S.S.R.) predated.76 Thus the untranslated (and hard to translate) terms balagan and lubok refer back to the folk art and urban pseudo–­folk art of Nabokov’s Petersburg childhood.77 ­These objects and images ­were repurposed in the 1920s by cabarets performing for nostalgic émigrés and Germans drawn to the exotic.78 This world was portrayed in his En­glish essay of 1923 “Painted Wood,” written to promote the Rus­sian Berlin cabaret Karussel, where peasant-­style moujike toys and painted lacquer palekh boxes are shown to be truly Rus­sian only for foreigners: “Art is always a l­ittle slyish and Rus­sian art particularly so.”79 The word balagan in par­tic­u­lar conjures images of irreverence, play, and a nod to the Symbolist theatrical culture of Nabokov’s childhood that had recuperated (and imaginatively reconstructed) the Italian and Rus­sian folk per­ for ­mance traditions.80 By the 1920s, t­hese terms w ­ ere used by the literate émigrés to look down on the less cultured émigrés’ exported ideas of Rus­sia, something Nabokov indulges in The Luzhin Defense when describing a “gimcrack” (lubochnaia) émigré apartment full of nostalgic kitsch.81 They ­were also used to mock the primitive nature of the cinema, as had Gippius in her essay “Sinema,” or to concede, albeit affectionately, the cinema’s lack of sophistication, as Nabokov does in his 1928 poem “The Cinema,” also featuring the very same director (see below). As in Mary, this working backdrop is contrasted to the filmed images produced, which are then revealed during a film screening. In the case of The Man from the U.S.S.R., the actress Marianna recounts this as “a terrible catastrophe” in act 5: “Every­thing I had has been destroyed—my dreams, my faith in myself, my life. I’m totally ruined.”82 Ganin’s embarrassment at his on-­screen image is repeated using the same word (stydno). But ­here it is multiplied by professional pride, ­because unlike for Ganin the part-­time extra, this is Marianna’s métier: I saw myself on the screen. It was monstrous [chudovishchno]. I had waited with such anticipation for the moment when I would see myself, and fi­nally that moment came. An absolute horror [uzhas]. In one place, for instance, I’m lying flat on the couch and then I get up. When we ­were shooting, I thought I was so graceful, so vivacious [zhivaia]. But when I saw myself on the screen, Yevghenia Vasilyevna, I got up—­excuse the expression—­bottom first [zadom]. . . . ​I stuck out my ­behind [zad] and made such a clumsy turn! And it was like that all the way through. Artificial, horrendous [ubiistvennye] gestures. And h ­ ere that lousy [gadina] Pia Mora glides like a swan. It’s mortifying [stydno].83

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What she had thought was alive (zhivaia) turns out to be deadly (ubiistvennye—­ literally “murderous”) in its movements. This combination revives the uncanny impressions of Mary, the “monstrous” “horror” of one’s own image—­the exilic undead. Fi­nally, Marianna makes the same imaginative leap that Ganin does, picturing the dissemination of ­these doppelgängers: “And that’s only the beginning: this was just a private screening for us. But now the film is ­going to be shown all over Berlin, and then all over the world, and with it my ridicu­lous [duratskie] gestures and grimaces, my unbelievable gait.”84 For Marianna, the focus is on professional ruin, not a meta­phorization of émigré existence. This scene of a private screening for an ambitious actress would be repurposed by Nabokov in his novel Camera Obscura. In a move that he would successfully make numerous times, Nabokov takes a scene from Rus­sian émigré life and regrafts it onto a description of German Berlin. This scene from Camera Obscura features Magda at a private viewing for her very first movie. Though she had initially hated her rehearsals, she has come to be satisfied with her acting. What she sees catches her (but not Robert Horn, a professional caricaturist and her former and f­ uture lover) by surprise. What is revealed ­here is not the spectrality of her existence, but the uncanny truth of Magda’s real appearance. Although Kretschmar, a connoisseur of art, ­will ­later consider his young lover Magda his greatest discovery, the film uncovers her suppressed resemblance to her proletarian m ­ other: “She was like her ­mother, the porter’s wife, in her wedding photo­g raph.”85 What is worse for Magda (as it was for Marianna) is the knowledge that this truth ­will be inexorably disseminated. The same technology of multiplication that had (temporarily) enriched her lover Horn by mass-­producing and exporting his cartoon guinea pig Cheepy would only compound her film failure. In The Man from the U.S.S.R. as ­later in Camera Obscura, by combining production with distribution, Nabokov portrays the cinema as a power­f ul yet painfully objective mechanism of mass exposure.

Gessen, Film Critic It is in this context that Gessen’s status as film critic, rather than film theorist, emerges as significant. In his reviews he is catholic, rather than selective; concrete, rather than abstract; tending to merge with, rather than separate himself from, the mass of spectators. The advantage of this breadth of experience is that he can see commonalities, judging films on their typological relations,

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rather than isolated merits. In par­tic­u­lar, Gessen is able to point out the tropes of cinematic symbolism, a trademark of a medium heavi­ly conventionalized by the mid-1920s. From his first in November 6, 1924, to his last on March 22, 1931, Gessen’s reviews appeared at an average rate of once a week, demonstrating the saturation of the Berlin film market. Of more than three hundred reviews, just over half are German films and just ­under half are American, with only a very small portion of French and Soviet films (fewer than twenty and ten, respectively). From spring 1925 on, titles are given no longer in Rus­sian but in the German “original,” as they would have appeared on the marquee and in advertising. Alongside plot summaries and evaluations of acting and cinematography, Gessen offers typologies of dif­fer­ent film genres. For example, in a 1924 review he describes the three distinguishing features of the average mass-­produced American film: external (stark photography, contrast between black and white); artistic (decent, even good, acting); plot (positive hero versus evil villain). He then adds two recurring details: the villain’s l­ittle moustache and the concluding kiss of the hero and his beloved.86 The American “grotesque” film, by contrast, is shown to upstage what­ever e­ lse it is on the bill with (this at a time when cinema programs would contain multiple numbers): “a grotesque—­a heap of improbabilities—­a frenzied whirlwind of p­ eople, cars, bulls, steam engines, collapsing houses—­carried out in an uninterrupted sequence of falls, jumps, flights, and collisions—­a complete, amazingly done, ‘sensation’ [sensatsiia].”87 This word, sensatsiia, is one of Gessen’s favorites, used to describe what we might now call a cinema of attractions. In fact, Gessen is lucid about the purpose of much filmmaking—to demonstrate and exploit the affective possibilities of virtuoso camerawork. As he puts in a 1926 review, “As in many other average American pictures, so in this one—­a Sam Goldwyn production—we are interested not so much by the topic itself, so much as by the episodic ele­ ment [epizodicheskoe], added by the author (or director).”88 He cites as examples of such episodes, “the sea, pearl hunting, . . . ​the underwater fight of two ­people, with an interfering shark . . . ​or the arrival of a steamship into the port of San Francisco and the accidental details of life in ‘heaven’: polo matches, bathing in the swimming pool.”89 This rapture before details—­both accidental and incidental, and always in­de­ pen­dent of the primitive story line—­coincides with Nabokov’s own praise in numerous works of the 1920s of film’s ability to capture chance combinations. In fact, this is one of Nabokov’s signal notions of cinematic potential: that much of its beauty, its greatest discoveries, happens in­de­pen­dently of the intentions of the screenwriters, directors, and actors. In other words, cinema’s power

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to capture life is a mechanical, not an intentional, gift. At the same time, Gessen also possesses Nabokov’s orientation to a ­future history. In a review of F. W. Murnau’s Tartüff (Tartuffe), he avers that “in the history of the cinema, 1926 ­will likely be marked by the sign of Tartüff, evidence of how as yet undefined w ­ ere the paths of the cinema in our days.”90 It is indicative of Gessen’s outlook, which is typical of a number of émigré writers on cinema, that he speaks for a universal history of cinema, rather than a narrowly national one. Given Nabokov’s drive not only to write texts partially or fully about the cinema, such as Camera Obscura, but also to explore direct production for the screen, it is curious that in 1925 Gessen complains in a review of a dearth of good screenwriters: “­There is no special film lit­er­a­ture [kino-­literatury].”91 Though ­there are many talented directors and outstanding actors, the scripts—­ and therefore the stories themselves—­are mass-­produced: “Therefore e­ very new picture—­however perfectly it may be made—­leaves the impression of lacking originality, lacking freshness, of the staleness of the plot’s goal—­and calls for comparison with what one has already seen.”92 The resultant monotony of cinematic plots, in contrast to the breathtaking originality he proclaims in aerial or time-­lapse photography, was a commonplace in con­temporary literary reflections on film.93 Yet the precise contours of its patterned repetitions ­were only revealed a­ fter hundreds of viewings. If we put together Gessen’s reviews and Nabokov’s fiction, moviegoing emerges as a cumulative experience of film in the aggregate. In fact, this more closely approximates an “average” experience of the cinema in the 1920s. Film scholars, especially in the Weimar context, have begun to rediscover this con­ temporary perspective, which is often at odds with the auteur film theory frequently used in literary studies. In fact, often this involves looking at the early film reviews of influential theorists. As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, our understanding of Weimar film was ­shaped by the conceptual frameworks of “Expressionist film” and “Weimar cinema” established by Lotte Eisner and Siegfried Kracauer in the late 1940s and early 1950s.94 ­These two German-­ Jewish exiles, writing for foreign audiences in Paris and in New York, ­were writing in direct response to the Second World War and the suspicions raised subsequently about the role of the cinema in the rise of Nazism.95 As the work of Weimar-­era critics such as Rudolf Arnheim has been collected and translated, however, it has become increasingly clear the extent to which Eisner’s and Kracauer’s pathbreaking postwar accounts, despite all their retrospective, teleological explanatory power, obscured key features of the con­temporary reception of the cinema.96 By the 1990s, once Arnheim’s and Kracauer’s reviews and articles of the 1920s had appeared in En­glish, a more complicated picture of the origins of Weimar film theory began to emerge.97 Nabokov and

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Gessen, joined as they w ­ ere by a generational bond in relation to their f­ athers’ peers, ­were aware of their own historical role as documenters and recorders of a shared exilic pre­sent.

Nabokov’s “The Cinema” Parallel to Nabokov’s early fiction, between 1925 and 1927 a debate on the cinema raged in the journals of Rus­sian Paris. We ­will look closely at this debate in chapter 2, but we know from an unpublished letter to his ­mother that, as of September 27, 1927, Nabokov was writing his own article on the cinema.98 In March of that year he had published “The Passenger,” which opened with an imaginary dialogue between a hack writer and a sensitive critic about the supposedly derivative relation between life, lit­er­a­ture, and the cinema (see introduction). In any case, it is clear that Nabokov followed the émigrés’ debates on the cinema, which appeared alongside his poems and fiction in Rus­sian newspapers and journals and ­were written by authors and critics who reviewed his work. Moreover, key contributions to the debates ­were made by impor­tant figures in Nabokov’s own artistic development, including the Berlin-­based literary critic Aikhenvald and the elder poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who had settled in Paris in 1925. Though abandoned, Nabokov’s article is an indication that his fiction, as well as his essays of this time, enters into dialogue with the discursive commonplace of the cinema. The following year, Nabokov published a poem titled “The Cinema (“Kinematograf,” 1928), which could be justly termed an anti-­entry into the cinema debate. The title alone aligns it with the other contributions, which w ­ ere united 99 by a focus on the term kinematograf. Nabokov’s poem bypasses the theoretical apparatus of a full essay for the short form of a metropolitan miniature published in what was in many re­spects a ­family newspaper. It is the product of moviegoing and is closest to the cinema reviews of his friend Gessen: another example of the importance to the younger generation of Rus­sian émigré writers of the extraliterary—be it commercial, sporting, or entertainment—to their thoroughly literary working through of exile. In this poem Nabokov’s conception of film is insightful, practical, and idiosyncratic. He ignores (or rather refuses to comment on) the achievements of real masters of the art of directing, German or Soviet. He appreciates film as an entertainment, at times dubious, ­either morally speaking or in terms of taste, at ­others innocent in its vigorous fairground bluster.100 His poem at once parodies and renders aphoristic the common “anti-­cinematic” charges against the cinema.

Кинематограф Люблю я световые балаганы все безнадежнее и все нежней . . . Там сложные вскрываются обманы простым подслушиваньем у дверей. Там для распутства символ есть единый – бокал вина; а добродетель –шьет. Между чертами матери и сына острейший глаз там сходства не найдет. Там, на руках, в автомобиль огромный не чуждый состраданья богатей усердно вносит барышень бездомных, в тигровый плед закутанных детей. Там письма спешно пишутся средь ночи: опасность . . . ​трепет . . . ​поперек листа рука бежит . . . ​И как разборчив почерк, какая писарская чистота! Вот спальня озаренная . . . ​Смотрите, как эта шаль упала на ковер. Не виден ослепительный юпитер, не слышен раздраженный режиссер;

The Cinema I love the fairground dramas of light More hopelessly and tenderly each day . . . ​ ­There, complex deceptions are exposed By simply eavesdropping at the door.

They have a single symbol for vice t­ here—­ A glass of wine; and for virtue—­a needle and thread. ­There even the sharpest eye could find nothing In common between the features of ­mother and son.

­ here a rich man, no stranger to compassion, T Carefully carries homeless girls in his arms, ­Children wrapped in a tiger skin blanket, Placing them into an enormous car.

Letters are hurriedly written ­there in the dead of night: Danger . . . ​trepidation . . . ​the hand flies across the page . . . ​ And how legible is the script, What clerkly purity!

­ ere is a bedroom lit up . . . ​Look H At this shawl lying on the carpet. We cannot see the blinding projectors Or hear the irascible director;

но ничего там жизнью не трепещет: пытливый гость не может угадать связь между вещью и владельцем вещи, житейского особую печать. О, да! Прекрасны гонки, водопады, вращение зеркальной темноты . . . Но вымысел? Гармонии услады? Ума полет? О, Муза, где же ты? Утопит злого, доброго поженит, и снова, через веси и века, спешит роскошное воображенье самоуверенного пошляка. И вот – ­конец . . . ​Рояль незримый умер, темно и незначительно пожив. Очнулся мир, прохладою и шумом растаявшую выдумку сменив. И со своей подругою приказчик, встречая ветра влажного напор, держа ладонь над спичкою горящей, насмешливый выносит приговор.

But nothing quivers with life ­there; A demanding guest could not discern The connection between a ­thing and its owner That special stamp of everyday life.

Oh, yes! The chases and waterfalls are wonderful, The spinning of the mirrored darkness . . . ​ But invention? The pleasures of harmony? A soaring mind? Muse, where art thou?

An evil character ­will be drowned, a good one married off, And once again, across centuries and landscapes Hurries the luxurious imagination Of a self-­confident philistine.

And then—­The End . . . ​The unseen piano dies away, ­After a dark and insignificant spell of life. The world has awoken, substituting Cold and noise for the fading fantasy.

And a shop clerk with his girlfriend, Bracing against the wind’s damp force, His palm above a burning match, Delivers his mocking verdict.101

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This cata­log of “intentional” film effects not only encapsulates much of Nabokov’s film theory in 1928 but also recapitulates his e­ arlier works like Mary and “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia,” as well as pointing the way to subjects taken up in his ­later fiction. The setting of the film—­the space, ­music, audience, and so on—is vital to understanding this poem and forms part of the cinema theory to be examined in chapter 2. It is impor­tant to notice the opening. In the face of the barrage of mockery and ironic commentary, the persona opens, “I love the fairground dramas of light [svetovye balagany] / More hopelessly and tenderly each day . . .” Thus although the poem posits the film’s plot as the creation of a “self-­confident philistine” in stanza 8 (line 32) and casts a shop clerk and his girlfriend in the role of its typical spectators and judges in stanza 10 (line 37), the author has already implicated himself from the very outset. The fairground dramas (balagany) directly recall the barn in Mary and the studio in The Man from the U.S.S.R. The implication is that the lyric persona has affection for a transparently artificial yet good, honest form of entertainment, perhaps ro­guishly subversive, even creative in its dynamism. As we have seen, for Nabokov’s sensitive characters and narrators, film, though utterly predictable in its conventions, always contained an ele­ment of spontaneity through its recording of chance images. The formulaic, yet anarchically improvised, forms of the balagan served as an analogue for the recording technology of the camera, which had its roots as a sideshow exhibit. Like the lyric persona ­here, and like Ganin (before he realized his unwitting participation in the film), the British student Darwin in the novel Glory reflects on the contradiction between transparent artifice and unfeigned enjoyment: “ ‘Funny ­thing,’ said Darwin one night, as he and Martin came out of a small Cambridge cinema, ‘it’s all unquestionably poor, vulgar, and rather implausible, and yet t­ here is something exciting about all that flying foam, the femme fatale [rokovaia dama] on the yacht, the ruined and ragged he-­man swallowing his tears.’ ”102 In lines 25–28 the persona praises film’s adventurous antics—­its chases and waterfalls—­but poses the question asked by ­every émigré writer on the cinema: If this is art, where is the artistry? In the poem’s terms, where is the invention, the pleasures of harmony, the soaring mind (or “soul” in an archival variant), the Muse herself ?103 Clearly, the function of the film is to provide an “eve­ning’s entertainment,” and it is on this criterion that the cinema is to be judged. It is this utterly quotidian and demo­cratic criterion that allows the poet to indulge in the plea­sure of moviegoing. We return, then, to where the poem (and indeed the cinema itself, historically) begins: the popu­lar urban entertainment of fairground booths, merely electrified and illuminated: svetovye balagany.

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The poem’s criticisms of film’s intentions and devices are nonetheless significant. Often ­these plots, created by “vulgarians” (peddlers of what Nabokov would recast into En­glish as “poshlust” in Nikolai Gogol), range from banality to obscenity as sordid wish-­fulfillments. In The Luzhin Defense the narrator gives us a sample of the Berlin-­based Rus­sian movie producer Valentinov’s screenplays. A year ­after abandoning Luzhin, Valentinov seeks him out by leaving his name with the maid: “The other day a man from the movie kingdom [iz kinematograficheskogo korolevstva] asked me for your telephone number.”104 Luzhin ­will appear alongside other real chess masters in the midst of a fictional tournament. ­Those familiar with Soviet cinema ­will recognize Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Shakhmatnaia goriachka (Chess Fever, 1925) as a pre­ce­dent for this, although the moneymaking, earnest exploitation of this device in Valentinov’s case is far from Pudovkin’s ironic intent. ­Here is the script as retold by Valentinov: “Imagine, dear boy, a young girl, beautiful and passionate, in the compartment of an express train. At one of the stations a young man gets in. From a good ­family. Night descends on the train. She falls asleep and in her sleep spreads her limbs. A glorious young creature. The young man—­ you know the type, bursting with sap but absolutely chaste—­begins literally to lose his head. In a kind of trance he hurls himself upon her.” (And Valentinov, jumping up, pretended to be breathing heavi­ly and hurling himself.) “He feels her perfume, her lace underwear, her glorious young body . . . ​She wakes up, throws him off, calls out” (Valentinov pressed his fist to his mouth and protruded his eyes), “the conductor and some passengers run in. He is tried, he is condemned to penal servitude. His aged ­mother comes to the young girl to beg her to save her son. The drama of the girl. The point is that from the very first moment—­there, in the express—­she has fallen in love with him, is seething with passion, and he, ­because of her—­you see, that’s where the conflict is—­because of her he is being condemned to hard ­labor.” Valentinov took a deep breath and continued more calmly: “Then comes his escape. His adventures. He changes his name and becomes a famous chess player, and it’s precisely ­here, my dear boy, that I need your assistance.”105 This mishmash of incongruous adventures and dubious fantasies fulfilled, with some sporting celebrities thrown in for realism, is precisely the product of “the luxurious imagination / Of the self-­confident philistine.” To return to the poem, over the first four stanzas Nabokov indicts the film’s shopworn narrative, moral oversimplicity, and unimaginative symbolism, each example of which is introduced by the anaphoric “­there [tam].” Thus Nabokov uncovers the film’s lack of craft: even as a story, it cannot sustain the spectator’s

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suspension of disbelief. Every­thing—­the props, the acting of the characters, and the unsubtle filmic conventions—is overtly fake. The opening gambit, in lines 3–4, mocks the hackneyed device of listening in at the door. In lines 5–6, film is shown to place a premium on the obvious: dissolution is symbolized by a glass of wine, virtue by sewing (much like the villain’s clichéd “­little moustache” noted by Gessen). And Nabokov lays out the absurd convention of perfectly legible handwriting in lines 13–16. This mockery of cinema’s implausible shortcuts was parodied the following year in The Luzhin Defense. In this novel the images rendered aphoristically in the poem are expanded and set within the body of a novel. In addition to an extended example of the vulgar screenplay (above) and a screening, Nabokov includes another cliché, this time with a twist. The trite device (notably attributed to both old novels and new films) is improved on in Nabokov’s narration: “She made his acquaintance on the third day a­ fter his arrival, made it the way they do in old novels or in motion pictures [kinematograficheskikh kartinakh]: she drops a handkerchief and he picks it up—­with the sole difference that they interchanged roles.”106 In lines 9–12 the plot is nothing more than a clichéd wish-­fulfillment, a typical reversal of fortune, where fortune is presented in the least nuanced sense as the material luxury of a huge car and tiger skin blanket. The influence of such forms of wish fulfillment is a major ele­ment of Nabokov’s cinema theory, recurring especially in King, Queen, Knave and Camera Obscura, explored more fully below and in chapter 3, as well as part of con­temporary Weimar German discussions of film on the social impact of film.107 To the trained eye ­there is an absolute lack of verisimilitude, as shown by the absence of even a superficial resemblance between the actress playing the ­mother and the actor playing the son in lines 7–8. A variant of this criticism is the seed of his ­later novel Despair (Otchaianie, 1934), where Hermann Karlovich points to the easily spotted fakery of having one actor play two parts, then sticking two bits of film together, leaving a vis­i­ble trace.108 This is of course an old reproach against dramatic repre­sen­ta­tion in general, including the theater. This central ele­ment of the antitheatrical tradition preferred the unembodied dramatic text, f­ ree of the actors’ flaws and contingencies.109 In the 1966 En­glish version, Nabokov includes a final monologue where the protagonist claims to be an actor and calls for the assembled French locals to make way for him.110 The most damning criticism concerns the lack of life’s special stamp in lines 21–24. H ­ ere the two basic ele­ments of film theory—­film as experience and film as product—­are juxtaposed to expose the paucity of the screen image. The criticism of the absence of organic connection between the actor and the props was of course the basis for naturalist theater’s reforms of stage conventions,

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beginning with the Meiningen Players and André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre. In Rus­sia the tradition was taken to both historical (Tsar Ioann) and everyday (Anton Chekhov) extremes by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater. His cry of “I ­don’t believe you!” (Ne veriu!) in response to acting without detail or context, what he called acting “in general” (voobshche), demanded the actor inhabit the “given circumstances” of the role so immersively that the audience could in fact perceive, in Nabokov’s words, “the connection between a ­thing and its owner / That special stamp of everyday life.” A generation l­ater, for Nabokov’s contemporaries like Béla Balázs, the beauty of film was precisely this ability to reveal “the physiognomy of ­things,” capturing their personalities and relations to the h ­ uman world around them. Notably, elsewhere in his fiction Nabokov evokes this physiognomy, as his novel King, Queen, Knave makes clear, but most film, he argues, does not make use of the camera’s potential. In numerous recapitulations of this topic in his l­ater Rus­sian work, Nabokov would pinpoint exaggeration as a key quality of the film experience: as the images are enormous, so are the actors and their acting. In King, Queen, Knave an actress is a “doe-­eyed idiot” with lips like a heart and eyelashes like spokes.111 In The Luzhin Defense the action is overacted: “The f­ ather, growing in size, walked ­toward the spectators and acted his part for all he was worth; his eyes widened, then came a slight trembling, his lashes flapped, ­there was another bit of trembling, and slowly his wrinkles softened, grew kinder, and a slow smile of infinite tenderness appeared on his face, which continued to ­tremble.”112 ­After 1930, sound films (which made their way to German screens more slowly than American ones), too, are roundly mocked. In “The Leonardo” (“Korolek,” 1933) the still-­clunky technology of the new “talkies” is ironically undercut: “Specters conversed in trumpet tones. The baron tasted his wine and carefully put his glass down—­with the sound of a dropped cannonball.”113 ­There is a par­tic­u­lar manifestation of this critique that occurs when Nabokov’s characters (not narrators) mea­sure up the cinema’s plausibility, authenticity, and verisimilitude in an area where they possess special competence. Emphasizing the ineptitude of film’s attempt at realism, characters mock an imprecise or unrealistic depiction of an area of life where they have expertise. ­Here film is shown to misrepresent a par­tic­u­lar field or activity and therefore show itself to be inauthentic. The chess ­g rand master Luzhin in The Luzhin Defense laughs at the impossible position of the pieces in a chess game brought into a film by its director “for atmosphere.”114 We might term this “specialized verisimilitude”—in contrast to the general plausibility of cinema, which suffices to convince an undemanding, b­ ecause untrained, public. This is a harder standard for film to pass and therefore seems to be less objective as a judgment on its quality. Yet Nabokov’s understanding

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of “real­ity” as something that is best available to the critical, trained eye—­a view in evidence in his 1929 review of Alexander Kuprin’s stories, in which he praises the author’s knowledge of horses—­suggests that such specialized verisimilitude is the real test of film as art.115 Off camera and on set ­there are blinding spotlights and an irritated director (in an archival draft Nabokov has a “gesticulating” director), unseen and unheard by the spectators of the finished product. This irritated, gesticulating director recalls the identical types of redheaded men with megaphones in Mary and The Man from the U.S.S.R. Note that the would-be actress Magda in Camera Obscura (Margot in Laughter in the Dark) would also complain “that the director shouted at her and that she was blinded by the dazzling light of the lamps.”116 Yet once the traces of its production are removed, the film is left less lifelike, rather than more so. Nabokov, who had himself worked as a film extra on German sets in the early 1920s, points out the irony that, in banishing the genuine intensity of the filming pro­cess, all that is left in t­hese ­silent, black-­and-­white films, is the ghost of life: “nothing quivers with life ­there.” As we saw, this criticism was made by Rus­sian émigré writers like Gippius and was l­ater extended by Aikhenvald, Nabokov’s fellow Berliner, to the metaphysical level, pointing out that perhaps such deathly images ­were appropriate to the émigré condition.117 A similar inversion happens with the a­ ctual movie theater itself, where the cold and inhospitable hall replaces the rapidly melting fabrication on the screen. Again, neither real­ity nor its pale shadow has a mono­poly on lifelessness. In lines 35–36 the world awakes and substitutes its cold and noise for the fading fantasy (vydumka), before the poem concludes with the ultimate bathetic return to banality: the mocking verdict of the shop clerk (prikazchik) with his girlfriend outside in the damp wind, lighting a cigarette. That the salesman has the last word, whereas the poet had the first, suggests Nabokov’s vision of the cinema’s cultural position as the centerpiece of or­ga­nized leisure arranged for the newly rationalized lower ­middle classes.118

Nabokov’s White-­Collar Workers Fascinatingly, the proto-­sociological analy­sis in “The Cinema” is an insight developed in remarkably similar terms in the work of the film reviewer and urban ethnographer Siegfried Kracauer.119 Kracauer, though a professional film critic like Gessen, contextualized the cinema in his other role as sociologist of Weimar Germany (he had trained ­under Georg Simmel). His critical lens—or viewfinder—is strikingly similar to Nabokov’s street-­level exploration of Weimar Berlin. If Nabokov was a “top-­and bottom-­feeder,” Kracauer was a “rag

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and bone man.”120 As the German scholar Karsten Witte put it, “Most impor­ tant about Kracauer’s early work is that his critical gaze looked to the marginal areas of high culture, and to . . . ​popu­lar culture: film, the streets, sports, operetta, revues, advertisements and the circus.”121 It is during the mid-1920s that Weimar critics like Kracauer homed in on the “salaried employees” (die Angestellten) and the “­little shopgirls” (kleine Ladenmädchen) as the targets of cinematic culture, much as Nabokov had in his 1927 story “The Passenger” (see introduction). The previous year Kracauer had published a classic metropolitan miniature, “The ­Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies”—­a multipart feuilleton in the Frank­furter Zeitung, collected and reprinted as the booklet “Film and Society.” Building on his thesis that “stupid and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society,” at the end of each installment Kracauer gives a Gessen-­like typology followed by the imputed imaginative and affective reactions of the “shopgirls,” like Nabokov’s white-­collar spectator and judge: The ­little shopgirls gain unexpected insights into the misery of mankind and the goodness from above. . . . ​In the dark movie theaters, the poor ­little shopgirls grope for their date’s hand and think of the coming Sunday. . . . ​It is hard for the l­ittle shopgirls to resist the appeal of the marches and the uniforms. . . . ​The ­little shopgirls want so badly to get engaged on the Riviera. . . . ​The l­ittle shopgirls learn to understand that their brilliant boss is made of gold on the inside as well; they await the day when they can revive a young Berliner with their silly ­little hearts. . . . ​ If the ­little shopgirls ­were approached to­night by an unknown gentleman, they would take him to be one of the famous millionaires from the illustrated magazines. . . . ​Furtively, the l­ittle shopgirls wipe their eyes and quickly powder their noses before the lights go up. . . . ​The ­little shopgirls ­were worried; now they can breathe easy again.122 It has been pointed out that Kracauer as a professional moviegoer displaces in his theoretical writings his own plea­sure as a spectator onto ­others, usually ­women.123 As we have seen, Nabokov does not deny his own plea­sure in the poem “The Cinema”—­part of his identity, as a younger Rus­sian émigré like his friend Gessen, is built on the possibility of taking plea­sure as a spectator, albeit a detached and g­ ently ironizing one. At the same time, Nabokov’s female figures are especially susceptible to overinvesting in the cinema—­a key critique in the cinema theory discussed in chapter 2. In the novel Camera Obscura, Nabokov portrays a movie theater usher, Magda, who very much takes to heart ­these “daydreams”—­the promotional ubiquity of cinematic culture. Avoiding the fate of her friend, a shopgirl (prikazchitsa), this young working-­class girl from North Berlin finds herself

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a rich man, Kretschmar (see chapter 3). In a dif­fer­ent key, Nabokov’s 1934 short story “A Rus­sian Beauty” (“Krasavitsa”) depicts a thirty-­year-­old émigré ­woman who frequents the cinema and, equally impoverished as but less savvy than Magda, dreams listlessly of advertising’s unobtainable glamour.124 ­Earlier, in June 1928, Nabokov had completed his second novel, King, Queen, Knave, which was written to appeal to both a Rus­sian émigré and a German Berliner audience and thematizes Weimar Berlin’s new “surface culture” for this dual readership. Linking the poem “The Cinema” and Kracauer, King, Queen, Knave details the transformation of a provincial young man into a Berlin prikazchik. As I have pointed out, the fact that the protagonist, Franz, is a prikazchik rather than prikazchitsa—­a shop clerk rather than shopgirl—­is an inversion of a Weimar commonplace about lower-­middle-­class w ­ omen as consumers of mass culture.125 The word prikazchik (salesman), its adjective prikazchichii (salesmanly), and its female equivalent prikazchitsa (translated ­here as “shopgirl” and “salesgirl”) appear fourteen times in the novel.126 Franz is trained to be a salesman by his wealthy u ­ ncle, Kurt Dreyer, and groomed so intensively to fit into his u ­ ncle’s menswear emporium that he begins to resemble the store’s wax mannequins.127 Franz’s aesthetic and professional induction into the life of a salesman (or shop clerk) could also be termed a ritual of class initiation, as he transitions from small-­town boy to one of the Berliner masses who consumed and perpetuated Weimar mass culture. Franz is a typical Kracauerian “salaried employee” whose leisure is as routinized and automatized as his l­abor. In King, Queen, Knave, Martha, the ­daughter of a ruined Hamburg merchant, is married off to the wealthy businessman Dreyer and thereby secures access to a middle-­class lifestyle, which in her estimation should include a lover: “In turn, she had been given a husband, a beautiful villa, antique silver, an automobile; the next gift on her list was Franz.”128 Martha is thoroughly implicated in cinematic culture, of which she is no less an avid consumer than Magda, despite her dif­fer­ent social status. She is shown attending (expensive) Friday night film premieres and has the habit of recounting to her husband all the latest details.129 Like her dedication to “rhythmical gymnastics,” Martha’s passion for the cinema is both fash­ion­ able and viscerally personal.130 Moviegoing affects her physically, sapping her energy and leaving her ravenous.131 Dull Martha’s association with the cinema in fact links her back to her husband Dreyer’s newly in­ven­ted “automannequins”: both she and the dummies are described separately as moving “in slow motion [kak v zaderzhannom kinematografe].”132 Conversely, Dreyer is a bibliophile who is never pictured attending the cinema. Franz only attends a screening when at a loose end one eve­ning, but he plainly does not enjoy it: “At the cinema, a doe-­eyed fool [volookaia dura] with a ­little black heart for lips and with eyelashes like the spokes of an umbrella was impersonating a rich heiress impersonating in turn a

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poor office girl [kontorskuiu baryshniu].”133 Franz’s viewing combines the defamiliarized close-up of “A Letter to Rus­sia” with the plot parody of “The Cinema.” The poem’s homeless misses (baryshni) have become the Kracauerian white-­ collar workers, with the reversal of filmic impersonation and masquerade. Though in his novel Nabokov shuffles the deck, positing the “Queen,” Franz’s aunt Martha, as the one obsessed with the cinema, King, Queen, Knave displays the author’s increasing awareness and critical engagement with the so­cio­log­i­cal context of Weimar culture.134 Nabokov’s first two novels (from 1926 and 1928) ­were immediately translated into German by the large publishing concern Ullstein. In the case of Mary, the German translation was published and promoted with a cover image of the German movie star Gerda Maurus—­again showing the “cinematized” world of Rus­sian exile in Weimar Berlin (see figure 1.4).135 By including scenes of German (not Rus­sian) reception of the cinema, Nabokov demonstrates greater ambition and sophistication in his engagement with the environment of exile. By tapping into not only the observed real­ity of film reception but also the theoretical discourse around it, Nabokov is able to reach a wider circle of readers. In par­tic­ul­ar, the world of the novel is a Berlin permeated by cinematic culture to such a degree that the language of the narrator is also saturated with meta­phors drawn from the characters’ and readers’ shared moviegoing experience.

Cinematic Language The perceptual regime of the cinema had by the late 1920s become so pervasive that it was now a common language, shared by Nabokov with his “average” characters and both his literate and his “average” readers, allowing Nabokov to communicate both with émigrés and (in projected translation) with Eu­ro­pe­ans. Dotted throughout Nabokov’s Rus­sian works are film meta­phors or similes, referring to the technological and perceptual novelty of the cinema screen in manipulating the speed of motion, the experience of the screen in the cinema, and the textual quality of old film. For example, the comparison in King, Queen, Knave of both Martha and an automannequin to figures “in slow motion film” is preceded by the description of a tortoise moving “slowly (as in a slowed down [zaderzhannyi] shot in film),” in the 1925 story “A Guide to Berlin” (as often happened, this circumlocution was reduced in the En­glish version to “in slow motion.”)136 Film becomes the basis for a dif­fer­ent kind of simile in Glory, where Martin imagines for himself a lover behaving with the languor of a film star, her eyes closing slowly “as in a film [kak v kinematografe].”137

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Figure 1.4.  Cover of German translation of Mashen’ka (1926), entitled Sie kommt—­kommt sie? (Ullstein, 1928). Image courtesy of Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of En­glish and American Lit­er­a­ture, New York Public Library.

As we have seen, Nabokov’s use of film as meta­phor in Mary had ranged from the ­simple, such as when Ganin looks down from the top deck of a bus in Berlin—­“Ganin felt that this alien [chuzhoi] city passing before him was nothing but a moving picture [dvizhushchiisia snimok]”138—to the sophistication of Ganin’s comparison of émigré life to a film shoot. Intriguingly, a ­simple

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d­ escription from that novel reappears in King, Queen, Knave as a meta­phor. In Mary Ganin’s screening is preceded by the following description: “For a long time, colored advertisements for g­ rand pianos, dresses, perfumes flocked silently across the screen. At last the orchestra struck up and the drama began.”139 Then in King, Queen, Knave Franz’s working life is also compared to film advertising: “Like the colored commercial stills [added in En­glish: advertising furniture or furs] that succeed each other on the cinema screen for a long time, unaccompanied by m ­ usic, before a fascinating film starts, all the details of his work ­were as inevitable as they ­were trivial.”140 Similarly, Martha’s ­mental pro­ cesses are described in terms of film: “And suddenly an extraneous image floated by, ­stopped, turned, and floated on like t­ hose objects that move by themselves in commercial cinema advertisements [v reklamnom filʹme].”141 Thus Nabokov repurposed an e­ arlier, neutral figure of Rus­sian émigré experience for use as an analogy typical of a German moviegoer. T ­ hese original, and historically specific, similes are used in King, Queen, Knave to appeal to the typical Ullstein reader promised by Nabokov’s advance contract for translation into German, while remaining comprehensible to a Rus­sian émigré reader. The question remains, if Nabokov prized accuracy over generalizations, why use the (already) clichéd film meta­phors? The simplicity and repetitiveness of ­these similes demonstrate the degree to which the life described by Nabokov was itself penetrated by cinematic perception—in the language of émigré film theorists, “cinematized.” Thus not only the characters, with their imaginations and ­mental pro­cesses, but also the narrator is cinematized, using film naturally (and neutrally, for all Nabokov’s strong opinions on film) as a vehicle for meta­phor. As we s­ hall see, this was also calculated to extend to foreign readers in translation during the 1920s and 1930s. It is instructive that, in the En­glish translations of ­these works, which often postdate the first French or German translations, t­ hese casual references are minimized or removed entirely. Clearly, many of t­hese translations ­were done during a very dif­fer­ent technological and cultural context for film—­Mary was translated into En­glish in 1970. Yet as early as the translation of Camera Obscura completed in 1935, the translator (and ­later Nabokov) revealed an awareness of the asynchronous reception of film in the Anglophone West (see chapters 3 and 4). The only exception to the rule that Nabokov’s translations tended to reduce the presence of the cinema is in fact King, Queen, Knave itself. The 1968 En­glish rewrite features, as a kind of r­ unning inside joke, the construction of “a palace-­like affair . . . ​a movie ­house.”142 ­Toward the end of the novel it nears completion and starts advertising, in typically g­ rand fashion, its premiere: “At the corner of the next street [was] a tall ­house bared of most of its

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scaffolding: its first story was ornamented with a huge picture, advertising the film to be shown on the opening night, July 15, based on Goldemar’s play King, Queen, Knave which had been such a hit several years ago. The display consisted of three gigantic transparent-­looking playing cards resembling stained-­glass win­dows which would prob­ably be very effective when lit up at night: the King wore a maroon dressing gown, the Knave a red turtleneck sweater, and the Queen a black bathing suit.”143 Nabokov, onetime habitué of Berlin’s neighborhood cinemas and occasional visitor to Weimar Filmpalast premieres with Gessen, h ­ ere places a film of his own dramatized novel on the same level as F. W. Murnau’s Tartüff, which opened the Ufa Gloria-­Palast in 1926, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which had not one but two premieres, including one that covered the entire structure of the Ufa-­Pavillon in silver in 1927.144 It is telling that the novel passes through the intermediary step of a stage adaptation by Goldemar. As we s­ hall see in chapters 3 and 4, this was a common path for a lucrative film adaptation of a novel, one followed by fellow Ullstein writer Vicki Baum, whose Menschen im ­Hotel passed through the stage on the way to a Hollywood version in 1932 ­Grand ­Hotel. Furthermore, it was the path chosen (unsuccessfully) by Nabokov’s American agent with Laughter in the Dark ­after the novel was initially turned down by Hollywood. Though the introduction of the movie palace was a change made in 1968, it speaks to the outlook of the young Nabokov of forty years ­earlier. For the German readers of King, Queen, Knave and the French readers of his next novel, The Luzhin Defense, the cinema was both a physical and discursive commonplace, something shared with the characters by the Rus­sian émigré author and Eu­ro­pean readers alike. It may be too ­simple to say with Zinaida Shakovskoi that such novels ­were written in order to “break into translation.”145 His first (if not always primary) audience was ­until Laughter in the Dark always a Rus­sian émigré readership, as well as, in the second instance, the f­uture reader and f­uture historian of the emigration. Yet Nabokov’s display of familiarity with the larger social context of cinematic culture expanded on the purely exilic significance of film in Mary. Through his moviegoing and friendship with the film critic Gessen, with whom he shared the pages of Rulʹ, their f­athers’ newspaper, Nabokov gained experience of cinema in the aggregate—­the mass reception of mass-­produced film. In King, Queen, Knave, The Luzhin Defense, and beyond, Nabokov expanded his circle of inquiry to this larger circle of pan-­European concern—­what I investigate in chapter 2 as cinema theory.

C h a p te r 2

The Man from the Movie Kingdom Cinema Debates and Culture Theory (1925–1930)

The nightlife of cities, especially big cities, is to a significant degree a life ­under the sign of the cinema. Its attraction is so ­g reat, so vis­i­ble, in a way that the attraction of the theater, a painting, or a book never was. . . . ​The b­ attle against the cinema would be pos­si­ble if a ­battle against an entire era ­were pos­si­ble. However, this is hardly a task that can be set for a generation that has already sailed off from the sacred shores of the old Eu­rope ­toward unknown horizons. —­Pavel Muratov, “The Cinema,” 1925

Nabokov’s coming-­of-­age paralleled the linguistic and conceptual working out of cinema in the Rus­sian and, more broadly, Western (American and Eu­ro­pean) contexts. In Rus­sian the cinema possessed an unstable etymology, national provenance, and even grammatical gender. The émigrés simply could not agree on what to name the new phenomenon. In this it belied the terminological difficulties of exilic self-­definition, when a m ­ other tongue has to accommodate the sounds of a nonnative milieu. In this re­spect the external pressures on the Rus­sian language w ­ ere exacerbated even beyond Yuri Tsivian’s famous description of a similar instability in prerevolutionary Rus­sian culture, as émigré usage began to diverge from Soviet.1 ­Here the vari­ous sites of emigration lent their color to the Rus­sians’ cultural vocabulary: alongside the kinematograf or sinematograf was the French loanword sinema and the German kino, the aesthetic term kartina (picture) and the technological appellation filʹm (or the more refined, feminine-­gendered filʹma, recommended by the émigré poet and critic Georgy Adamovich and preferred in Paris).2 This terminological fluidity—­resolved only a­ fter the Second World War with the disappearance of sinema and filʹma—­constituted a kind of internal debate, a critical polyphony.3 At the same time, the lexical instability of the new cultural phenomenon testified to the rapid transformation of the cinema during ­these years. 69

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The stakes of this Rus­sian debate over naming are clear from the opening salvo of a new monthly journal that appeared in Berlin in 1922. The film director and now editor Iosif Soifer launched Kino-­iskusstvo (Film Art) with a memorable tirade: “My precious,” wrote Goethe to his lover, “do not compromise me—do not greet me on the Unter den Linden.” This is how p­ eople now treat the cinema [kinematograf]. ­People frequent it, work in it, and love it, but they do not greet it in public. In polite society it is customary to refuse to acknowledge the cinema. This seems to us provincialism of the worst taste, as we belong not to polite society, but to the society of artists. Enough of watching the cinema [kino] as a beautiful but compromising lover, enough of considering it a rich but uncultured relative. Let us acknowledge the fact: a new art has appeared, the cinema [kino]. It did not ask anyone’s permission to be born. It has had its successes and thousands of failures, but it is ­here. In full awareness of this fact, we are calling our new journal neither Screen nor Film nor Bioscope nor The Cinematograph [Kinematograf], nor even simply Cinema [Kino], but are instead placing on the title page the crucial words: Film Art [Kino-­iskusstvo].4 This editorial was part of a much larger international discourse that ranged far beyond the question (which a number of émigré artists and intellectuals, as opposed to film personnel, considered redundant) of ­whether or not film was “art.” The technological and socioeconomic development of the cinema was accompanied by extensive debates across the world on its significance and status. This multilingual critical forum on the cinema’s place in modern culture has been compiled and translated into En­glish, supplementing familiar British and American criticism by bringing into Anglophone circulation the German “debate on the cinema,” the French “­g reat debates,” and the Soviet arguments surrounding the “film factory.”5 The Rus­sian émigrés, whose Eu­ ro­pean exile geo­g raph­i­cally and conceptually triangulated ­these coordinates, found themselves in the midst of this discursive storm. Their responses to ­these debates, which they certainly read, and their own polemical engagements— an émigré cinema debate of their own—­have been anthologized in Rus­sian (and that only partially) and never translated or discussed in En­glish.6 In 1925, a provocative article titled “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf ”) by the émigré art critic Pavel Muratov drew immediate responses from the émigré enclaves of Berlin, Paris, and Prague.7 This debate, which ran in the émigré press from 1925 to 1927, divided writers, crudely speaking, into an adversarial stance for and against the cinema. On the one side, writing against the cinema, w ­ ere art

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historians, critics, and poets for whom the cinema was the symptom, if not the cause, of decreasing possibilities for art in post–­First World War Eu­rope. On the other side ­were grouped critics and theorists of performing arts and sports: drawing on their experience with historical attacks on adjacent media like theater and dance, they defended the cinema as a nascent medium, which could yet be developed into a full-­fledged art form if nurtured by the artistic experimentation of in­de­pen­dent, noncommercial ventures. Though understood in ­these broadly adversarial terms at the time, and described as such by recent historians, a more complex picture emerges when we look at the debates in the cross-­ sectional terms of film, cinema, and culture theory.8 In this chapter I focus on the contributions of four figures as the background to Nabokov’s exploration of culture theory in his 1929–1930 novel The Luzhin Defense. Each of the four is best known to specialists in another area: Muratov, as an art historian; Andrei Levinson, as a dance critic; Vladislav Khodasevich, as a poet; and Evgeny Znosko-­Borovsky, as a chess player and theorist.9 It is certainly pos­si­ble to arrange the pair in f­avor of cinema, Levinson and Znosko-­Borovsky, in opposition to the two against it, Muratov and Khodasevich, as they entered into direct polemics. But in pushing off from one another, ­these writers developed sophisticated cinema and culture theories, probing the cinema’s historical place in 1920s Eu­rope and seeking to understand its function as much as its aesthetics. In fact, much of what was truly novel in this discussion—­rather than simply a rerun of the Rus­sian disputes of the 1910s—­ was due to the renewed attentiveness of its participants to Eu­ro­pean cinematic culture.10 In focusing on the socioeconomic context of the “cinema,” the Rus­sian émigrés benefited uniquely from the vantage afforded by exile itself. Stateless, dispossessed, and concerned with the preservation of Rus­sian language and culture, the émigrés tended to view the phenomenon of the cinema in existential terms. As we have seen, Nabokov in his early reflection on the film medium emphasized its inherent transience, spectrality, and uncanniness, using it as a basis for a conceptualization of Rus­sian exile. In the wider theoretical debates among the Rus­sian émigrés in Paris (to which Nabokov’s own contribution from Berlin was more oblique), the fundamental questions of the French, German, and Soviet debates—­such as ­whether the cinema is art or entertainment, a force for acculturation or dissipation, a natu­ral ally of lit­er­a­ ture or its parasite, deeply national or inherently cosmopolitan—­became ­matters of intense personal and communal anxiety.11 Par­tic­u­lar emphasis was placed on cinema as a form of mass culture, a dangerous Americanism. The debates should be seen not just as an internal squabble over definitions of art, the epoch, and émigré culture, but as forms of discursive re­sis­tance to the

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movie industry’s own ambitions and artistic aspirations. Across the mass media forms of the traditional and trade press, magazines, and thick journals, we witness a b­ attle for discursive control over the symbolism and significance of the cinematic commonplace.

Cinema as Anti-­Art: Muratov’s Culture Theory The most contentious émigré article on the cinema was the phi­los­o­pher and art historian Muratov’s treatise defining cinema as “the most clearly expressed form of anti-­art.”12 Muratov’s essay “The Cinema” was printed in the Paris-­based thick journal Sovremennye zapiski and was therefore guaranteed serious consideration and wide exposure. It is fair to see the piece, printed in mid-­December 1925, as a response to the dance and film critic Levinson’s ­earlier reviews as well as his series “The Magic of the Screen” (“Volshebstvo ekrana”), ten installments of which had appeared by that point.13 But we should also bear in mind that Muratov’s essay is the third in his three-­part series, preceded by “Anti-­Art” (April 1924) and “Art and the P ­ eople [narod]” (December 1924). Somewhat forgotten t­oday, but prominent and influential in their original context, Muratov’s “Anti-­Art,” “Art and the ­People,” and “The Cinema” set forth the concepts of a new sociocultural formation, “post-­Europe” (post-­Evropa), dominated by a newly arisen mass culture of “anti-­art” (antiiskusstvo).14 In other words, Muratov’s views on the cinema are the culmination, and in places a recapitulation, of his own thinking on the place of art in the postwar landscape of the 1920s. What is most striking about ­these pieces is that Muratov’s undoubted cultural pessimism is focused not inward, on the tragic fate of the émigré artist, but outward, on the Eu­ro­pean environment surrounding the critic. Like many of the contributors to the cinema debates, Muratov had worked with Western lit­er­at­ ure before the revolution (as a translator from En­glish and French, in addition to his Italian work) and ended up writing in multiple languages ­after it.15 ­Today Muratov, a renowned art historian, is best remembered for his multivolume Images of Italy (Obrazy Italii, 1911–1912, revised in 1924), which has earned him an entry in Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia.16 Muratov had left the Soviet Union in 1922 (like his friend Khodasevich), and his analy­sis is based on firsthand observation of urban realia in Eu­ro­pean exile—­published in Paris, ­these essays ­were written in Rome, following his more than yearlong stay in Berlin.17 For Muratov, it is not so much Rus­sian as Eu­ro­pean artistic culture that is on the wane. Muratov’s pessimistic diagnosis of con­temporary Eu­ro­pean culture was not unique in its analy­sis of recent decline. Yet the par­tic­u­lar vantage point of the

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Rus­sian émigré gave a curious edge to arguments that overlapped in places with figures such as phi­los­o­phers and essayists Oswald Spengler and José Ortega y Gasset.18 For many of the participants in the cinema debate, such as Levinson, Muratov, Znosko-­Borovsky, and Prince Sergei Volkonsky, their point of reference was intimate familiarity with prewar Eu­ro­pean high culture, encompassing art history, theater, dance, and ­music. Muratov, as the author of Images of Italy, took art history as the starting point for his analyses. His idiosyncratic terminology—­anti-­art and post-­Europe—is therefore rooted in aesthetic considerations, extrapolating cultural definitions and periodizations from stylistic, even technical, analyses of landscape painting. Perhaps surprisingly, Muratov the aesthete and art historian admits to the almost guilty plea­sure of moviegoing in Nabokovian terms. What is more, the aesthetic plea­sure in the camera’s power to unintentionally rec­ord natu­r al movement—­against the intentions of its operator—­directly echoes similar scenes in Nabokov’s early short fiction. Despite the dif­fer­ent conclusions they draw, Muratov and Nabokov evince a similar reception of the silent-­era screen, creating from apparently shared experience a comparable film theory: And all the same, despite every­thing said above, it is almost always pleasant to see a film [posmotretʹ kinematograf]! And this most ­simple and brief formula summarizes the enormous victory of anti-­art. In the cinema it is most often enjoyable to watch not what is shown with such an expenditure of all sorts of energy, but the most ordinary, inconspicuous ­things. Sometimes ­people simply walking are enjoyable, especially p­ eople on the stairs. A street is always joyful, a port alluring, and the strictly coordinated actions of p­ eople launching an airplane are diverting. It is always pleas­ur­ able to see a moving car or a departing steamer. The movement of a person turns out to be a sufficient spectacle by itself. And that is by no means in the sense in which a theater actor can possess a captivating gesture (the hand gestures of Duse). T ­ here the significant gesture is impor­tant, but ­here the movement emerges into the foreground in­de­pen­dent of its meaning—if only it be subordinated to some kind of rhythm.19 Implicit is Muratov’s assertion that cinema should move away from its theatrical beginnings (the Italian tragedian and international “star” Eleonora Duse) ­toward a recognition of its mechanical nature, a recording apparatus that can manipulate time, a re-­creator of rhythm. Thus the cinema’s inherent frivolity—­ “one of the rules of the cinema industry—­not to touch any serious themes”— is explained as a function of mass appeal and is not an aesthetic concern, just as it was not a concern for Nabokov in his poem “The Cinema.”20 What Muratov terms cinema’s “beloved ground—­the chase, the race, pursuits, obstacles,

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climbing over walls, high jumps into w ­ ater and so on” is redeemed as pure rhythmical spectacle.21 For Muratov, the industrial nature of cinema determines its commercial calculus, as well as the products of its film factories, which cater to “mass tastes.” The economics of the cinema are key, then, not only in terms of Eu­ro­pean consumption (i.e., exhibition) but also in terms of networks of distribution. In the mid-1920s, American dominance of the international market was the cause of discussions across Eu­rope about the “Americanization” of Eu­ro­pean culture. Muratov devotes most of his essay to both ­these ele­ments: the masses and American dominance. Unlike Levinson the reviewer and critic, Muratov focuses not on individual films, but on the cinema as an entire cultural-­industrial formation—­cinema as symptom. For Muratov, the outstanding feature of the cinema is its ubiquity, its indispensability to the con­temporary Eu­ro­pean. He argues that, while almost no one would notice if artists ­stopped painting and hanging pictures in galleries, and even the majority of a given country’s urban population would not notice the closure of all its theaters, “the closure of the cinemas would without any doubt affect a true majority of ­every city’s inhabitants and consequently would turn out to be a major event in its social life.”22 This passage directly recalls his comments in the e­ arlier article “Anti-­ Art” on sport as the other prime example of anti-­art, where Muratov had noted the outsize role occupied by sport: “Put a stop to sport, and you would deprive many, many millions of their favorite recreation [rekreatsii], their rest [otdykh], their minutes of holiday [prazdnichnykh], distracted from everyday life.”23 In turn, the terms “recreation” and “rest,” used to describe the appeal of sport as a refuge from work, are repeated in “The Cinema”: “The cinema has made itself essential for the con­temporary individual. To it are given over the hours of leisure [dosug], rest [otdykh] and recreation [rekreatsiia].”24 ­These key terms, used variously to describe what the average post-­European does when not at work, are key to an understanding of the cinema debates. The opposition of leisure, rest, and recreation to work and ­labor ­will be explored more explic­itly by Khodasevich, who, like Muratov, pays as much attention to the context of moviegoing as to the films themselves. Muratov’s approach verges on the so­cio­log­ic­ al, using his investigation of cinema as anti-­art to uncover the identity of the post-­Europeans alongside whom he and his readers, as émigrés, now live: “Anti-­art must reveal in the very pro­cess of its formation the con­temporary ‘post-­European.’ . . . ​During the eve­ning hours in metropolises coming convulsively to rest, each semi-­dark hall, with a bright screen of flickering, dully colorless images, is the place for a most noteworthy experience of our con­temporary and of ourselves.”25 In this, he anticipates the “symptomatic” approach of Siegfried Kracauer, both

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in his American work and in his early Weimar journalism. The cinema appears as a common (public and shared) place, where the Rus­sian émigré can observe the average Eu­ro­pean, as well as his own exiled compatriots. For Muratov, the most pressing questions are, why and how does the con­ temporary Eu­ro­pean live without art? His answer is that since 1914 and the start of World War I, Eu­rope has been replaced with “post-­Europe.”26 Through the war­time domination of science and industry and its traumatic psychological shocks, art is “replaced and displaced” by anti-­art, primarily cinema and sport, which nonetheless manage to serve the needs and occupy the “energies” of the average individual: “The cinema is no better or worse than what overall is signified by the start of a new post-­European cultural cycle: industrialism, the inherence of a scientific worldview, the dominance of nonhuman forces and speeds, the preeminence of mechanical rhythms above organic ones.”27 This historicist idea of needing to combat “an entire era” was taken explic­itly to task by Nabokov in “On Generalities” (1926) for its anachronism and inattention to detail and its ignorance of the cyclical nature of fashion. Clearly, then, the idea of the barbarization of Eu­ro­pean culture as a subtext for “On Generalities,” usually traced to the émigré phi­los­o­pher Nikolai Berdiaev and his New ­Middle Ages (Novoe srednevekovʹe, 1924), should also be attributed to Muratov’s three-­part series on anti-­art.28 The richest ele­ment of Muratov’s historicist analy­sis is the new role played by the United States in Eu­ro­pean culture. One of his basic assertions is that Eu­ro­ pean cinema has become “infected with Americanism, in the worst sense of that word” and therefore needs to f­ree itself from “the hegemony of the extremely vulgar products of American industry.”29 In itself, this assertion, like the basic statement that “the world cinema business is in the hands of the Americans,” is not an original insight. As we have seen, the threat of Americanization, especially in m ­ usic, dance, and Hollywood cinema—­genuinely popu­lar and geared with uncanny precision t­ oward mass tastes—is a theme found throughout Eu­ro­ pean discourse of the 1920s. But Muratov’s deeper exploration of the mechanism and consequences of American dominance shows a perhaps unexpected familiarity with Hollywood. Muratov laments the fact that it is the very worst of Amer­i­ca that dictates the laws of cinema: This is not at all talented Hollywood, not Boston and not even New York, but the Amer­i­ca of the mass consumer, provincial, philistine, gray, deathly boring Amer­ic­ a, the very one that is designated in a highly expressive manner on Hollywood business maps showing the spread of the movie screen: Hicks Land—­stupid country. The tastes and habits of “stupid country” reign in this way over the American cinema business, and

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through it over the Eu­ro­pean viewer. As far as morality, then, as is known, not a single film can receive mass distribution in Amer­i­ca without the sanction of the Federation of W ­ omen’s Clubs. Thanks to the financial and technical might of the American cinema this honorable Federation of Loyal Ladies now sets the model of morality for the entire world.30 The unattributed source for t­ hese remarkably confident judgments can be identified as the nine-­part series titled “­Future of the Cinema [Hollywood from Within],” which ran in The Times of London from August 27 to September 5, 1925, and which was summarized by Zinaida Gippius in the Paris weekly Zveno just over a week ­later.31 The series was authored by the British poet Robert Nichols, who had been sent to Hollywood in order to investigate, unsubtly, why American movies ­were so bad.32 It was clearly part 2 of the series, titled “The ‘Hicks’ Decide,” that made the biggest impression on the émigrés.33 Nichols is unsparing in his judgment of “hick territory”: “Nobody who has not had experience by direct contact or through reports of film-­salesmen can possibly realize the depth of sheer stupidity, bathos, want of moral courage, and general lack of the veriest rudiments of culture prevalent in t­hose territories.”34 This leads to what he considers “perhaps the sovereign prob­lem of the betterment of the Movies. The ‘hicks’ decide.”35 He explains the economic reason for this: the primacy of the domestic market in determining profitability.36 Muratov’s mention of “Hicks Land” shows that he has digested Nichols’s main point, that average American tastes, through the global economic power of Hollywood to spread mass culture, shape Eu­ro­pean culture.37 In late 1926, the critic Mikhail Kantor drew explicit attention to Nichols’s series. In writing “In Defense of the Cinema” (“V zashchitu kinematografa”), Kantor follows Nichols in lamenting the absence of real “cinema criticism”: “In a cycle of articles about the American cinema that made a splash last year in the Times, Nichols dropped the following aphorism: ‘He who goes to the movies is not in a state to relate critically to it, and he who relates critically to it does not go to it.’ ”38 As with Muratov’s Hicks Land, something is lost in translation (the original is: “­Those who go to the movies ­don’t criticize, and ­those who criticize ­don’t go”), but Kantor has identified the point: “Nowhere is the public in need of leadership and cultivation to such a degree as precisely ­here. . . . ​The development of the cinema industry [promyshlennostʹ] has proceeded with such speed that neither theoretical understanding and generalization nor critical thought have followed, and that which is usually called cinema criticism, in the majority of cases, amounts to the s­ imple registering of new ‘products,’ or e­ lse to biographies of stars [starʹov] and the deferential

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proclaiming of yearly profit numbers.”39 Kantor’s explanation of the current absence of true criticism of cinema as art supports Muratov’s broader understanding of cinema as industry.40 For Muratov, however, as the cinema should not aim to become art, such a film criticism as the work of cultured, artistically sensitive observers is beside the point. Rather, the cinema’s ­f uture success “depends exclusively on its recognition of its own possibilities, that is to say, on its total rupture with art and its development of the ele­ments of anti-­art.”41 This would lead to it aiming more, not less, at satisfying mass demands: For all the cinema’s faults, con­temporary life finds in it an incomparably more faithful reflection and expression [otrazhenie i vyrazhenie] than in con­temporary art. This life, narrowing art’s circle of action, atrophying the feeling of architecture, rendering lit­er­a­ture idle, driving painting into the empty halls of exhibitions no one needs, defeating theater by the influence of the screen, circus and ­music hall, nonetheless gives birth to the very need for anti-­art and seizes man’s energy again with newly established forms of recreation [rekreatsii]—­the cinema, sport, the newspaper.42 This historicist and quasi-­sociological view, connecting the cinema to other forms of mass culture as answers to recent social issues (­labor, war, urban life), ultimately moves from cinema theory to a kind of culture theory. Po­liti­cally, Muratov, like Nabokov, is far from the leftist position of a critic like Kracauer, who wants to see cinema as a force for social change. Muratov does note that such “very deep and very tragic social contradictions” as “the relations of capital and l­ abor” (he gives the example of the con­temporary conflict of En­glish miners and mine o ­ wners) are depicted only in “false didactic tales” of wish fulfillment.43 At the same time, however, he remains confident in the ability of the Eu­ro­pean moviegoer (“the most average, most commonplace viewer, most modest and unsubtle person from the street of Rome, Paris or Berlin—­a dactylographer, clerk [prikashchik], petty servant”) to discern and ignore the baseness of “cinema morality.”44 Much like Nabokov’s clerk (prikazchik), who pronounces his “mocking verdict” on the film he has just seen, the man in the street is no more threatened than the cultured émigré man of letters.45 The biggest issue facing the cinema, then, is its industrial and commercial basis—­its mass production and pandering to mass tastes: “The cinema is in very bad hands, in the hands of p­ eople who understand (with individual exceptions) neither art nor anti-­art. . . . ​The ignorant ­people ­running the cinema business throw millions at senselessly lavish productions and do not spend anything on

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the search for new paths, on experimental work in laboratories and studios.”46 In The Luzhin Defense, Nabokov would create just such a pair of hands in the émigré and former chess impresario Valentinov.

The Magic of the Screen: Levinson as Film Critic (1925–1926) In 1926 Volkonsky published an updated version of his famous 1914 article “The ­Silent Danger” (“Nemaia opasnostʹ”) as “To the Revilers of Cinema” (“Khuliteliam kinematografa”).47 Given Volkonsky’s own many film reviews from this period, this should be explained less by his ignorance of changes to the cinema than by his awareness that many of his opponents’ arguments had not kept pace with ­these developments.48 Volkonsky’s ally and fellow theater aficionado Levinson would soon take up that charge. Levinson, who lived in exile in Paris from 1921 u ­ ntil his death in 1933, wrote authoritatively on dance, lit­er­a­ture, and cinema in Rus­sian, French, and En­ glish. Though virtually forty years Nabokov’s se­nior, Levinson’s appreciation and mastery of Eu­ro­pean languages and cultures enabled him similarly to adapt successfully to exile. A professor of French and a dance critic, he quickly resumed his ­career of lecturing and writing about literary and per­for­mance culture, this time in French, giving lectures at the Sorbonne and the Louvre starting in 1922 and contributing articles to Comoedia and Les nouvelles littéraires from 1926 to 1927. Between 1921 and 1926, Levinson wrote extensively in Rus­sian for émigré outlets.49 Most importantly, however, he turned his attention to the signature artistic formation of the early 1920s, the cinema. In the highbrow émigré weekly Zveno (1923–1928) he initiated a film review section, thus legitimating the enterprise of film criticism. Then in 1925 he started in the Paris daily Poslednie novosti (eventually transferring to Dni) a cycle of longer reflections on the cinema titled “The Magic of the Screen.” Signing them, unlike his ­earlier reviews, with his own name, Levinson clearly considered ­these reflections worthy of his own reputation as an art critic. As Rashit Yangirov points out, Levinson was the first major Rus­sian émigré critic to embrace the cinema as the object of serious attention.50 Levinson’s Zveno reviews, like the longer “Magic of the Screen” cycle in Poslednie novosti and Dni, focus primarily on Hollywood and star directors and actors. Levinson’s work as a film critic orients him t­oward the particularity of each film within the technical and aesthetic development of film art, privileging film’s exploitation of its visual and rhythmical resources over ideological,

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national, or historical considerations. Thus articles on D. W. Griffiths as “poet of the screen” and “artist of rhythm” are accompanied by debates on the comparative merits of Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino as physical actors and types. Charlie Chaplin is another recurring figure, both as creator of the hit Gold Rush and in the context of his comic “rivals” Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. At the same time, Levinson devotes a number of articles to the Rus­sian émigré and Eu­ro­pean ­silent film star Ivan Mosjoukine (Rus­sian: Mozzhukhin) and to Rus­sian émigré cinema in general (he ignores Soviet productions). Greeting the Franco-­Russian productions of the Albatros studio as a welcome break from the static (and unexportable) Chekhovian cinema of prewar Rus­sia, he nonetheless pinpoints its basic failings: “the episodic nature of its screenplays and its neglect of rhythm.”51 A separate article dedicated to the film L’heureuse mort, which Levinson considers the happy exception to Rus­sian émigré underper­for­mance in cinema, demonstrates his basic attitude to the role of cinema in exile. By contrast with Muratov, Levinson privileges cinema’s specifically artistic potential above its symptomatic function for 1920s culture. At the same time, Levinson does not neglect the cultural context of film’s production. A vital frame for his articles is the degree to which the French and Rus­sian émigré cinemas approximate (or not) the industrial conditions and market-­driven impetus of Hollywood. In two pieces of 1925, “Won­ders of the Screen” (“Chudesa ekrana”) and “The Theater and the M ­ usic Hall” (“Teatr i miuzik-­khollʹ”), Levinson addresses the big questions of cinema as art versus mass product or entertainment and the epochal transformation in aesthetics and consumption. In “Won­ders of the Screen,” a dialogue between two émigrés, the answers to ­these questions are at once obvious and secondary to other, more practical considerations: “Do you call cinema art?” “Let’s leave ­these theoretical questions to the German academics. They are prob­ably already writing a multivolume ‘aesthetics of the cinema.’ ” “But agree that 99 out of 100 films are unbearable.” “It cannot be any other way. . . . ​The creation of cinema is mass production, a kind of industry [industriia]. It is surprising that in that factory arrangement ­there are any talented and original works.” “The cinema is a new art answering to mass needs. The character and technology of this art . . . ​excuse me, not art, but, say, craft—­are extremely in­ter­est­ing. However talentless a film [filʹma] may be, it carries out definite tasks; it is dictated by the mass.”52 What this mass (note the singular noun, more common in émigré discourse than the En­glish “masses”) dictates is “the poetics of melodrama”: “tempestuous

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passions, a fierce ­battle, dangers, adventures, effects, touching episodes, a luxurious production and a happy ending [blagopoluchnaia razviazka].”53 Thus the question of aesthetic value is secondary to the question of entertainment, the quality of the script secondary to its conformity to well-­established tropes approved by the audience and its emotional-­psychological reactions, and the interest supplied by the 1 ­percent of talented films emerges in their origins in mass production. In “The Theater and the ­Music Hall” Levinson considers the displacement of art by entertainment as a quasi-­sociological, rather than aesthetic, phenomenon. He defends the cinema against charges of killing the theater: “One cannot kill art in which thrives the genius of an era; one can just observe its natu­ral death. It is not the cinema that disputes the primacy of the theater, ramming it from without, but the theater which is undergoing an internal rebirth. Somewhat forcibly simplifying a complex pro­cess, we can determine that the theater in the prior conception of its function is being swallowed up by the ­music hall.”54 More impor­tant ­here than his analy­sis of theater’s own self-­destruction by imitating the popu­lar entertainments (attractions) of the ­music hall is Levinson’s defense of cinema as a form of neutral technology, whose faults must be ­those of the surrounding culture and society it proj­ects back: “On the cinema screen is a projection of our real­ity. If the screen lisps, this means not that it is at fault, but that we have nothing to say.”55 Levinson argues that in fact the cinema, by expanding the audience for culture, however derivative of theater or lit­er­a­ture, serves to transmit and preserve what would other­wise be lost by the epochal transformations of modernism in high culture: “The enchantment [volshebstvo] of the screen has drawn into its magical [magicheskii] circle millions of p­ eople, who have u ­ ntil now been alien to any elevating deceit. In this Noah’s Ark ­will survive [lit. sail to the joyful shore] the invaluable fragments of the past: the pathos of active ­will, the romance of boundless [volʹnye] spaces, the strug­gle of ­human passions, all that has been made obsolete and forgotten by the theater.”56 Fi­nally, Levinson downplays the power of cinema, reducing it to the role of techne, a mere apparatus, much like the other recording technologies of the turn of the ­century: “We have not yet given in to the machine! And does a mechanical device [mekhanika] ­really have it in its power to kill the artistry of the living [zhivoe tvorchestvo]—­a ‘Player’ roll to squeeze out Stravinsky, a Phonograph disk to arbitrarily replace Caruso, a wireless telephone to sing instead of Ninon Vallin? T ­ hese apparatuses live only as reflections, feeding on only a tiny part of the life entrusted to them by us. They are all only our obedient servants, quivering at a ­human touch.”57

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This position, that cinema is a mass cultural phenomenon that is inherently demo­cratic, acculturating if not essentially artistic, no threat to true art, and not to blame for the decline in quality or appeal of traditional high culture, is one that fits well with Nabokov’s experience of Weimar cinematic culture. Levinson’s discussion recalls Nabokov’s poem “Tolstoy”—­that the cinema rec­ ords, preserves, and transmits, in a highly imperfect yet still valuable way, without, however, eclipsing the far more power­ful medium of literary creativity. Having provoked with his film reviews Muratov’s article “The Cinema,” Levinson in January 1926 was moved to reply directly. In “The Cinema as ‘Anti-­ Art,’ ” the eleventh entry in his “Magic of the Screen” series, Levinson tackles Muratov’s long essay with a relatively brief article, thereby refusing to engage him point by point.58 For Levinson, the charge of “anti-­art” is one with a long history. Levinson defends the cinema by comparing it to photography (recognized as art, despite its mechanical ele­ments) and the printing press (similarly attacked as a destructive epochal shift from art to industry). Yet he opens by reducing Muratov’s theory of anti-­art to generational grumbling against novelty: I ­will not dispute with the Rus­sian Cassandra and her slander of the epoch. For e­ very generation lives to see the moment when the creations of the following generation appear to be “anti-­art.” Our m ­ ental life is short, ­limited to several decades—­from its coming-­of-­age to its decrepitude; art is continuously in the making. T ­ here are theories that testify not to the bankruptcy of the era, but to the tragedy of its authors. The passenger remains on the platform. The train rushes on. The latecomer asserts that it is not worth traveling further on and prophesies that the steam train is speeding with its passengers into an abyss.59 As he puts it in the article’s conclusion, “Grumbling against the cinema is a hopeless and lifeless form of snobbery.”60 Levinson likens the cinema to the printing press, as both technologies ­were attacked b­ ecause of “the mechanization of the means of production, the turn ­toward the broad masses, and industrialization.”61 The main difference he notes (an “aggravating circumstance”) is the exponentially greater “circle of ­human communion” created by the cinema: “­There is likely no eve­ning when several tens of thousands of p­ eople, scattered throughout the world, are not rereading the Gospel or Hamlet. But on that very eve­ning tens of millions of ­people are watching Chaplin the prospector [Sharlo-­zolotoiskatelia].”62 This mass character of the medium brings him close to Muratov’s position that market forces are limiting the potential of the cinema. But he blames critics like Muratov for making this situation worse: “The haughty fastidiousness and

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­ ental arrogance [chvanstvo] of [cinema’s] critics [zoilov] merely plays into the m hands of t­ oday’s masters of the s­ ilent art, the rapacious exploiters of its elemental creativity, the ignorant dictators of the market. The merchant has taken possession of the cinema—­but this is our fault—he, not we, first anticipated the ­f uture of this g­ reat invention.”63 In other words, it ­will take an aesthetic criticism and an artistic ac­cep­tance of the cinema in order to help it develop, rather than condemning it to the remit of a new form of distraction and recreation cut off from artistic traditions. Particularly impor­tant for Nabokov’s c­ areer is the practical corollary of ­these ideas: Levinson’s eventual abandonment of Rus­sian writing. In 1926 Levinson turned definitively to French, explic­itly for economic reasons. In a 1923 letter to a Rus­sian editor, Levinson complains of the difficulties of supporting his ­family through writing and admits that, while the French work paid, it took so much of his time that ­little was left for Rus­sian work.64 His film series for L’art vivant in fact began with a series of self-­translations into French of his original Rus­sian “Magic of the Screen” cycle.65 He also began adapting his ideas for an Anglophone audience in the New York–­based Theatre Arts Monthly.66 As the editors of Andre Levinson on Dance point out, ­these American “essays show not only a thorough knowledge of the movies of the 1920s (he went to all the openings, says his ­daughter, and took her with him) but also a firm grasp of film technicalities—­close-up, montage, sound versus ­silent—­and the aesthetic issues related to them.”67 Following his turn from Rus­sian to French, Levinson continued to write about Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture for a foreign audience. In 1930, he introduced Nabokov to a French audience through his laudatory review of The Luzhin Defense, “V. Sirine et son joueur d’échecs.” Upon the translation of the novel into French as La course du fou with the Fayard publishing h ­ ouse, Levinson supplied the preface.68 As we s­ hall see, not only did Levinson’s mediation of Rus­sian and French provide a model for Nabokov, who reworked his ­earlier Rus­sian essays on exile and history for a French audience in “Les écrivains et l’époque,” but Levinson personally contributed to Nabokov’s own engagement with a French audience.

Cinema in Daily Life: Khodasevich on Labor and Leisure Muratov’s close friend and onetime collaborator, the poet and critic Khodasevich, contributed his own critical analy­sis of the cinema in fall 1926. His rich essay “On the Cinema” (“O kinematografe”) explic­itly addresses Muratov’s

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theories of “post-­Europe” and “anti-­art,” not to refute them but to elaborate on the status of cinema as symptom.69 For Khodasevich, as for Muratov, the cinema is the prime example of a cultural phenomenon: the death of art. In Khodasevich’s view, this death preceded the cinema, just as for Levinson the theater’s search for new forms preceded the invention of moving images. Khodasevich is a key figure in reading Nabokov’s Rus­sian work in Eu­ro­pean exile. Perhaps more than any other living figure, Nabokov admired and drew from Khodasevich as an artist. And, as we ­shall see in relation to Camera Obscura (Kamera obskura, 1932–1933), Khodasevich’s readings of Nabokov offer unsurpassed insight into a contextual understanding of his work, nowhere more so than in the context of the cinema. It is impor­tant to note in connection with Camera Obscura that Khodasevich’s article “On the Cinema” is ultimately about the death of art, although the bulk of the article explores in attentive detail how the cinema is answering the new demands of the masses. Both Khodasevich and Muratov base their analy­sis of the cinema on an assessment of art and artistic canons. Unlike Muratov’s prewar focus, Khodasevich’s argument hangs on his assessment of the avant-­garde art of the 1920s—­what he calls “left-­wing” (levoe) or progressive art.70 Where Muratov cites Cézanne, Khodasevich cites Picasso. Correcting Muratov, he shows that the postwar environment (“new forms of life, the growth of cities, the changing tempo of movement, the influence of machine technology”) have led not just to “anti-­art” but to new art.71 It is not the source, then, but the activity of moviegoing itself that provides Khodasevich the criteria to categorize ­these cultural forms. Khodasevich opens with a remarkable ekphrastic description of an American mass spectacle, drawn from a French illustrated magazine: “Pictures in L’Illustration: a crowd in front of the ­house where Rudolph Valentino has died; another snapshot: fainting ­women are carried out of the same crowd, and on the ground are shreds of fabric and broken pieces of umbrellas and sticks—­the signs of a strug­gle; fi­nally, the third snapshot, its contents striking: ten or so ­children in front of the portrait of the same Valentino with their hands pressed prayerfully together.”72 This spectacle testifies to Khodasevich’s attentiveness to the new cinematic culture of the 1920s. His reading of the famous French journal L’illustration already signals an attentiveness to the popu­lar culture of the 1920s, the mass media form of the illustrated press presaging what Levinson had called cinema’s “optical thinking, visual storytelling.”73 ­These scenes (see figures 2.1–2.3) of mass adoration, verging on mass hysteria, at the American funeral of the Italian-­born actor Valentino contain

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Figure 2.1.  “In New York, following the death of Rudolph Valentino: the police holding back the crowd around the funeral chapel.” L’illustration, September 11, 1926.

paradoxes of identity: cinema as American export but Eu­ro­pean invention (and perfected by Eu­ro­pean émigrés in Hollywood); American mass culture as rationalized production and ruthless calculation but Hollywood’s culture of “stars” and “fans” as sentimental, quasi-­religious fervor. What Khodasevich does not mention is that Robert de Beauplan’s article in L’illustration is in fact about the similarity of cinema and sport and is accompanied by just as many images of similar crowds greeting Gertrude Ederle, the American who had just become the first ­woman to swim the En­glish Channel. As the article puts it, “Rudolph Valentino était un recordman du cinéma comme miss Ederlé est une recordwoman de la nage.”74 It is in perfect accord with Muratov’s thesis, in other words, about the American, and now Eu­ro­ pean, striving for rec­ords. The French title of the article in L’illustration is “American Frenzy,” but what it pre­sents аre Eu­ro­pean images of American frenzy. The point is that ­these scenes are happening and being observed not just in the New World but in the Old, as mass culture—­and particularly cinematic along with sporting culture—­takes hold in Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere. Khodasevich’s analy­sis draws the comparison, as Muratov’s had, between a historical Eu­ro­pean tradition and a new post-­European (read: Americanized) mass culture:

Figure 2.2.  “A young lady who has fainted during the crush that followed the death of R. Valentino.” L’illustration, September 11, 1926.

Figure 2.3.  “­Children kneeling before the portrait of R. Valentino, framed by an American flag made of flowers.” L’illustration, September 11, 1926.

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Popu­lar crowds pay royal homage to the living luminaries of the cinema, and fight for the ­great happiness of seeing their corpses, and nightly millions upon millions summon up their specters onto canvases stretched out in huge but stifling halls. It may seem that we are living through an era of unseen and unheard-of mass participation in artistic events—­such a lively and active participation as was not dreamed of by e­ ither Periclean Athens or Re­nais­sance Florence. However, ­were Sophocles, Dante, Raphael, Shakespeare or Goethe to appear now before this crowd, they would have to content themselves with a modest success among “specialists” and “amateurs” as well as celebratory receptions in the academies.75 The language of corporeality and transience—­stars, corpses, specters—­harks back to Gorky’s discussion of the uncanny in the earliest cinema and its development in the film theory of Nabokov and Gippius. However, Khodasevich locates the uncanny, itself a form of irony, not in the gap between what is filmed and what is projected but in the gap between the industrial nature of the movie business and the rapturous reception of its pseudo-­celestial celebrity culture. The explanation is striking: “Clearly, the huge masses of con­temporary humanity possess such a burning need [potrebnostʹ] for rest that they are almost ready to deify ­those who or­ga­nize this rest.”76 It is the contrast between ­these two semantic spheres—­the so­cio­log­ic­ al terms of rest, leisure, entertainment that we had observed in Muratov and the spiritual terms of prayer, deification, rapture—­that produces a sense of historical disjuncture, an anachronism compounded of the ultramodern laboring masses and the timeless madness of crowds. Khodasevich’s theoretical advance on Muratov is to approach the reception of cinema with more so­cio­log­ic­ al precision, in terms of the novel dynamic of ­labor and leisure prevalent in 1920s Eu­rope. While agreeing with Muratov about the artistic poverty of much cinema, its industrial production methods and mercantile promotional strategies, Khodasevich trains his eye on the spectators, the mass audience itself. Khodasevich’s rhetorical starting point may be a Eu­ro­pean view of American frenzy, but his analytical premise is American rationalized ­labor practices. Each member of the Eu­ro­pean masses, no less than the American, is in his words “to a greater or lesser degree ‘Taylorized’ and ‘Fordized,’ or, to put it in Rus­sian, stupefied [obaldel]. He seeks rest [otdykh] and entertainment [razvlechenie]—­and finds them in cinema precisely ­because the cinema is not art.”77 Khodasevich’s citing of the names of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford connects him to con­temporary Eu­ro­pean and Soviet thinkers grappling with the increasing

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“Americanism” (Amerikanismus) or “Americanitis” (amerikanshchina) of not only industrial, ­labor, and business practices but also popu­lar culture.78 Unlike Muratov, Khodasevich is interested less in the aesthetic experience of the screen than in the socioeconomic conditions out of which arose the “burning need for rest.” His pithy, apparently flippant correction of Muratov should therefore be taken in a broader so­cio­log­i­cal context of the rhythms of the con­temporary Eu­ro­pean working week: “The cinema is not art and not anti-­art. It simply has no relation whatsoever to art, like fishing or sleeping till ten on a day off instead of getting up at seven. It cannot be explained or justified by the events that lie at the center of art, b­ ecause it is not art, but entertainment, not l­ abor, but rest.”79 The alternation of working week and weekend, seen in the white-­collar worker’s repetitive daily schedule (parodied by Nabokov in Franz’s Berlin life in King, Queen, Knave), and of the flight from the city to the recreations of the suburbs (rendered grotesque by Khodasevich in his Berlin poems, collected in 1927 as part of Eu­ro­pean Night [Evropeiskaia nochʹ]), supplies the vital context for Khodasevich’s analy­sis of cinema’s success.80 Khodasevich’s definition of art as essentially a form of active work—­the equivalent of industrial l­abor—is, as critics of this piece have pointed out, somewhat idiosyncratic and restrictive: “It demands from the perceiver (reader, viewer, listener) known cultural skills; above all the conscious desire to merge with the artist within a single creative act; and next the ability to participate in this act, i.e., a certain spiritual experience, approaching the religious and demanding a readiness to put in work [potruditʹsia] together with the artist for the quenching of a ‘spiritual thirst.’ ”81 The word “­labor” (both noun and verb: trud and truditʹsia) is operative only secondarily as a model of artistic reception. In this sense, it is both unjustifiably narrow as a normative statement and unhistorical if applied to lit­er­a­ture produced before modernism, as Znosko-­Borovsky was to point out (below). Primarily, we should understand “­labor” to refer to the social position of the mass audience. It is not that cinema is inherently lacking in art or artistry, but that it currently serves a par­tic­u­lar function as a leisure activity: “In no way do I wish to say by this that the cinema is vulgar by nature. But I do wish to say that, although not born of vulgarity, it was born of another just as universal reason: exhaustion from ­labor.”82 This alone explains the content of films: “The most competent, marketable, and self-­aware cinema [kinematografiia], American cinema, knows this perfectly well and demands outright: not to allow in the film ­either a contentious topic or an original thought, or formal innovation, or tragedy (hence the obligatory ‘happy endings’)—­i.e., exactly nothing of the sort that would force the viewer to ‘tire’ and which constitutes the essence of art.”83 Compared to Muratov, Khodasevich in his conclusion is more optimistic: “By

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its very nature cinema in no way poses a threat to art. More accurately—it is not hostile to art, it is neutral.”84 Thus Khodasevich’s focus is not so much film theory as cinema theory: cinema’s role in daily life; its place in urban centers; the rhythms of ­labor and leisure; forms of consumption; cinema’s relation to other spectacles and forms of entertainment such as sport, the ­music hall, pulp fiction, and the illustrated press. This is ultimately an argument about the twinned influence of American mass culture on interwar Eu­rope, wherein the psychological and spiritual toll of industrialized and rationalized ­labor demands the salve of rationalized, bureaucratized leisure. It is for this reason that he links (as Muratov did) sport with cinema as “essentially forms of primitive spectacle.”85 If we detect a note of pessimism, it is that the formerly “spiritual thirst” (in quotation marks in original) answered by art is being replaced, through the stupefaction of urban economic life, with the physical need to escape exhaustion through distraction.86 Lastly, Khodasevich’s essay touches on two themes that Nabokov was soon to take up in his engagement with culture theory in The Luzhin Defense: cinema’s obsessive self-­promotion as a commodity and its anxious self-­justification as a true art form. Having opened with a description of the “royal homage” paid to cinema’s “living luminaries,” with Valentino serving as an example of the masses’ virtual “deification” of the organizers of leisure, Khodasevich continues with a discussion of the “cinema palaces” (kinematograficheskie dvortsy), in comparison with which art galleries are deserted.87 In his concluding thoughts, Khodasevich turns from consumers to producers to consider the movie industry’s self-­promotion as art. If art needs no defense from cinema as cultural commodity, the same cannot be said about the elevated place ascribed to cinema by its faux royalty: “By its very nature cinema . . . ​is not hostile to art, it is neutral, u ­ ntil someone tries to thrust it into art or uses it to blow up art. Extraneous to art by its nature, it becomes ‘anti-­ art’ only from the moment when it begins to be treated as a new motivating force for art. The cinema as anti-­art exists only in its admirers and propagandists, striving to justify it artistically—­that is, in the person of ­those who have ­either not grown up enough for art or who have become corrupted, disoriented, and lost the light.”88 This could be read as a curmudgeonly call for the cinema to know its place. At the same time, the 1920s ­were the very period in which the cinema was becoming firmly bourgeois, vying for middle-­class recognition and patronage through, to take just one example, the creation of the very movie palaces cited by Khodasevich. But for Khodasevich, the spread of cinema—or rather of cinematic culture—­into all areas of daily life, up to and including art, did in fact pose a threat.89 The threat was not so much to the dignity and aesthetic integrity of

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art (whose worth did not depend on contemporaries’ appreciation of it), but in the hy­poc­risy of profit motives masquerading as aesthetic disinterest. H ­ ere we recall Muratov’s discussion of the “very bad hands” into which the cinema had fallen—­“the hands of ­people who understand (with individual exceptions) neither art nor anti-­art”—­and even Levinson’s fear of playing into the “hands of t­ oday’s masters of the ­silent art, the rapacious exploiters of its elemental creativity, the ignorant dictators of the market.”90 In his third novel, The Luzhin Defense (Zashchita Luzhina, 1929–1930), Nabokov would take this self-­aggrandizing mercantilism and the regal corpse of Valentino and merge it mercilessly with the figure of an opportunistic Rus­sian émigré who has “become corrupted, disoriented, and lost the light”: the impresario and movie producer Valentinov, the “man from the movie kingdom.”

Cinema and Sport: Znosko-­Borovsky on the Active Spectator Nearly a full year a­ fter Khodasevich’s article, in June 1927, the final major contribution to the cinema debates was made by the Paris-­based polymath, theater critic, and historian, decorated veteran of the Russo-­Japanese War and First World War, and chess expert Znosko-­Borovsky. The scope of Znosko-­ Borovsky’s contribution, responding point by point to the objections of Khodasevich, Muratov, and even Gippius, gives him the claim of representing the last word on the subject. Most intriguing is his recasting of Khodasevich’s and Muratov’s proto-­sociology based on his superior knowledge (as a recognized chess expert) of sport, that favorite point of comparison in ­matters of rest, relaxation, leisure, entertainment, and recreation. At the same time, Znosko-­ Borovsky is unafraid to take on Khodasevich and Muratov on home ground, as it w ­ ere, tackling their theorizes of aesthetics and artistic reception. As equally an authority on the performing arts (like Volkonsky and Levinson), Znosko-­ Borovsky reframes the parallels with theater in f­ avor of the cinema, recalling that the theater, too, has often been denied the “elevated title” of art.91 Tellingly, he further argues that it is the lack of familiarity with a­ ctual films that skews the judgment of Khodasevich and Muratov. Like Levinson, Znosko-­ Borovsky is theoretically informed, yet eminently practical, preferring the complexity of “actually existing” cinema to normative abstractions. Znosko-­Borovsky opens by naming and dismissing the views of Khodasevich (much as Levinson had with Muratov): the cinema’s “enemies do not have much to say in support of their opinion, if they must have recourse to, and be content with” such arguments. For Znosko-­Borovsky, Khodasevich’s attack

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was circumstantial, addressing the surrounding culture and sidestepping the question of film art itself: “Khodasevich does not in fact discuss the essence of the cinema, an analy­sis of which could alone justify or repudiate this new art form. He turns to external arguments, which do not solve the fundamental question. The audience, the state of postwar Eu­rope, sport: this is good for the illumination of the practical side of the current state of the ‘film industry’ [kino-­promyshlennostʹ], but not at all for the theoretical study of ‘film art’ [kinoiskusstvo].”92 This astute perception recognizes the extent to which the émigré cinema debates are ­really about cinema and culture theory, far more than film theory. In this vein, Znosko-­Borovsky goes on to engage exactly t­ hose “external” questions. First, Znosko-­Borovsky rebuts the central position of Khodasevich, that the cinema answers the needs of their exhausted contemporaries, whereas real art would require more work. As Znosko-­Borovsky points out, “The very assertion that au­then­tic art calls for work seems abstract, a cold schema, a dry play on words,” one that would seem to exclude from art the Romantic Weltschmerz poetry of exhaustion or the plays of Chekhov about the dream of “rest.”93 Daring to contradict the Pushkinist and poet Khodasevich, Znosko-­Borovsky reminds his readers of the historical point that “in its time, verse was likened to ‘lemonade’ ” but that “art remains art, w ­ hether it is drunk like lemonade or sweated over, as Khodasevich demands.”94 Even if one agrees with Khodasevich that true art demands a form of l­abor, it is not true, argues Znosko-­Borovsky, that moviegoing is a passive activity: “It is completely incorrect to say that the cinema spectator is only relaxing: on the contrary, in an exceptional way and often painfully he experiences [perezhivaet] every­thing happening before him on the screen.”95 Znosko-­Borovsky adduces psychological studies that show that “the spectator remains neither indifferent nor passive, but truly works [truditsia] with the author.”96 But in the end his clinching piece of evidence is the cinema experience itself. The reader can be convinced by a s­ imple expedient: “Take a few trips to the cinema.”97 The same argument is then extended to sport, with which Khodasevich had compared the cinema as a form of passive spectacle: “To say that spectators at sporting events are just exhausted [istomlennye] ­people who have come for passive relaxation is pos­si­ble only if one has never attended t­hese events.”98 As he points out, “Are t­ hose ­people ­really tired who stand for hours in the rain before the opening of the ring for the Dempsey-­Tunney fight?”99 For Znosko-­ Borovsky, spectatorship is an active, mimetic pro­cess that “strains ­every nerve” and “induces muscular fatigue” as “the crowd at boxing, tennis or football repeats all the movements of the sportsmen.”100 As we have seen, this stance accords well with Nabokov’s. Znosko-­Borovsky further points out that “the

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majority of sport spectators are themselves sportsmen”—­drawing a dif­fer­ent conclusion from Muratov’s statement that “the post-­European is no longer an architect, a sculptor, or a landscape painter like the pre-­European, he is now a boxer, a cyclist, a football player, or a skier.”101 Such a description of a sportsman would be used, significantly, to describe Nabokov himself to French and American audiences (see chapter 3). Fi­nally, Znosko-­Borovsky turns the ­tables, using Muratov’s and Khodasevich’s so­cio­log­i­cal terms to argue for the value of sport and cinema to the con­ temporary, postwar (we might add “post-­European”) audience of blue-­and white-­collar workers. If such spectatorship is relaxation, then “it is not a passive immersion in Nirvana, as Khodasevich understands it,” but is instead that active rest with which sociologists want to occupy workers in their ­free time. The reduction in working hours has presented economists with the prob­lem of how to fill the worker’s rest so as not to encourage idleness and apathy. Inactivity and passivity is replaced by the dispersal of t­ hose forces which find no application in daily work. On this slogan is founded the creation of all sorts of workers’ clubs and circles attached to large factories and plants: physical sport, theater, choirs and so on. One could even, in rebuttal to Mr. Khodasevich, defend the point of view that the success of sport (as of cinema) is due in significant part to its development of activity among the masses of ­people who, ­after 8 hours of monotonous ­labor, are not satisfied with a lazy, drowsy condition for rest, but wish for activity and action [aktivnosti, deistviia] in one form or another.102 This is a remarkable argument for a Rus­sian émigré to make about the cinema. Note that no mention is made of exile or of the Rus­sians at all—­all is oriented outward, t­oward an almost paternalistic concern for the Eu­ro­pean working and lower-­middle classes. At the same time, Znosko-­Borovsky’s citing of what in his conclusion he calls the “social basis” of sport and the cinema is based also on the recognition that t­hese mass cultural formations are shared spaces for Rus­sians and Eu­ro­pe­ans, prototypical forms of global culture.103 For Znosko-­Borovsky, as for Nabokov, chess was one of the most psychologically and emotionally intensive forms of sporting competition, even more so for the apparent absence of physical exertion. While writing this article, Znosko-­ Borovsky was also beginning work on a book about the upcoming Chess World Championship between the Cuban José Raúl Capablanca and the Rus­sian émigré Alexander Alekhine. Nabokov wrote a well-­known appreciative review of this book, Capablanca and Alekhine: The B ­ attle for World Supremacy in Chess, more than half of which Znosko-­Borovsky devotes to “the art” of Capablanca and

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Alekhine.104 As Nabokov put it in his review of November  1927, “Znosko-­ Borovsky writes about chess with gusto, juicily and aptly, just as a master should write about his art.”105 Although the cinema debate ostensibly ends with Znosko-­Borovsky’s contribution, we know that Nabokov himself was planning a contribution in between the appearance of Znosko-­Borovsky’s article in June and his book on chess in November 1927 but that Nabokov abandoned this for the poem “The Cinema,” which came out a year l­ater (see chapter 1).106 One of Nabokov’s fullest responses to the cinema debates came instead in 1929 in The Luzhin Defense. ­Here chess and cinema are joined in revealing ways, demonstrating Nabokov’s attention to the stakes of cinema theory and culture theory. Chess is, in its mathematical and diagrammatic clarity of form, a universal language. Yet as a ­great sport, it lends itself to prose-­based commentary, peppered with meta­phorical reflections on artistry, and its prac­ti­tion­ers and commentators w ­ ere often highly literate polyglots like Znosko-­Borovsky, who wrote in multiple languages for dif­fer­ent audiences.107 Thus chess modernists like Aaron Nimzowitsch, Savely Tartakower, and Alexander Alekhine himself wrote books that remain classics, read as much for plea­sure as instruction ­today—­just like the ­great early film theorists Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and Sergei Eisenstein.108 Through the interplay of cinema and chess, which like boxing had been recently professionalized and commercialized as an international sporting phenomenon, Nabokov brings into focus questions of celebrity, international markets, the role of the print media, the power of spectacle, and the variety of occupations open to Rus­sian émigrés.

The Émigré Producer as Cosmopolitan: Valentinov and The Luzhin Defense Only several months following his poem “The Cinema,” Nabokov set to work on a novel that contains his most extended portrayal of a man from the movie kingdom. Begun in the South of France in February 1929, The Luzhin Defense features the impresario Valentinov, doubtless named with one eye on Khodasevich’s essay and Rudolph Valentino.109 Nabokov is very par­tic­u­lar about Valentinov’s c­ areer, giving him a backstory related through hearsay and snatched glimpses, with plenty of dubious lacunae—­autobiography and created legend as a form of self-­recommendation: A man of undoubted talent, as he was characterized by ­those who ­were about to say something nasty about him; an odd fellow, a Jack-­of-­all-­trades, an indispensable man for the organ­ization of amateur shows, engineer,

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superb mathematician, chess and checkers enthusiast, and “the amusingest gentleman,” in the words of his own recommendation. He had wonderful brown eyes and an extraordinarily attractive laugh. On his index fin­ger he wore a death’s head ring and he gave one to understand that ­there had been duels in his life. At one time he had taught calisthenics in ­little Luzhin’s school, and pupils and teachers alike had been much impressed by the fact that a mysterious lady used to come for him in a limousine. He in­ven­ted in passing an amazing metallic pavement that was tried in St. Petersburg on the Nevsky, near Kazan Cathedral. He had composed several clever chess prob­lems and was the first exponent of the so-­called “Rus­sian” theme. He was twenty-­eight the year war was declared and suffered from no illness. The anemic word “deserter” somehow did not suit this cheerful, sturdy, agile man; no other word, however, can be found for it. What he did abroad during the war remained unknown.110 The one word unspoken by the narrator ­here is émigré: this is a Rus­sian who has no roots, a fish never out of ­water, whom history’s blows cannot harm. “Postwar” cannot describe him, as he has contrived to evade trauma. This character is part Julio Jurenito, part Khlestakov, and like Ilya Ehrenburg’s and Nikolai Gogol’s heroes, Valentino is a profiteer by his very nature, insinuating, slippery, untraceable—­a trickster.111 Two characters in Nabokov’s late Rus­sian story “Spring in Fialta” (“Vesna v Fial’te,” 1936), who miraculously and (the narrator implies) undeservedly survive a fatal car crash, are termed “­those salamanders of fate, t­ hose basilisks of good fortune.”112 This fits Valentinov perfectly. We are introduced to Valentinov as Luzhin’s chaperone and man­ag­er, ferrying the young wunderkind from one international tournament to another before sensing the end of the boy’s run: When even this span had run out he made a gift to Luzhin of some money, the way one does to a mistress one has tired of, and dis­appeared, finding fresh amusement [razvlechenie—­entertainment] in the movie business, that mysterious astrological business where they read scripts [manuskripty] and look for stars. And having departed to the sphere of jaunty, quick-­talking, self-­important con-­men [zhulikovato-­vazhnykh liudei] with their patter about the philosophy of the screen, the tastes of the masses and the intimacy of the movie camera [v filʹmovym prelomlenii], and with pretty good incomes at the same time, he dropped out of Luzhin’s world.113 This latter description of the cinema as part of a culture industry, staffed by salesmen on the make, fast-­talkers promoting their art, a sales pitch masquer-

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ading as an intellectual and aesthetic discourse, fits Khodasevich’s description of “admirers and propagandists, striving to justify it artistically” to a tee. Valentinov’s choice of the cinema as his next venture points to the possibilities for Rus­sian integration into an international culture industry. Valentinov unites metafictionality with historicity. The protagonist Luzhin is a Rus­sian émigré grandmaster who commits suicide ­after his persecution mania is activated by unexpected contact with Valentinov, now a movie producer, who asks Luzhin to appear in his latest film. Valentinov is the locus of Luzhin’s anxiety about the uncanny, which is bound up with Luzhin’s awareness that something (fate, a repetition compulsion, an author) is manipulating him like a chess pawn. Valentinov is the mimetic double of the author, acting as Luzhin’s exploitative agent, then, significantly, dropping chess for the movies and the Berlin-­based “Veritas” firm. Valentinov is variously the devil, the ­father figure, the author, and the prob­lem composer. All ­these meta­phorical associations are nonetheless anchored to a historical bed of competitive sporting events, which made available to the talented good money, press coverage, and (although Luzhin, unlike his real-­life counter­parts, does not take advantage of them) book contracts. Thus Valentinov is also a figure emblematic of the professionalization of modern chess in mass culture. We ­later see Valentinov as described from the outside by Luzhin’s wife, who does not know who he is and therefore pre­sents a naively defamiliarized and by this token—as so often in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture—­privileged perspective: A ­g reat many p­ eople attended this [Rus­sian émigré] ball . . . ​a famous Rus­sian singer, and two movie actresses. Somebody pointed out their ­table to her: the ladies wore artificial smiles, and their escorts—­three well-­fed men of the producer-­businessman type [rezhissersko-­kupecheskogo obraztsa]—­kept clucking their tongues and snapping their fin­gers and abusing the pale, sweating waiter for his slowness and inefficiency. One of t­ hese men seemed particularly obnoxious to her: he had very white teeth and shining brown eyes; having dealt with the waiter he began to relate something in a loud voice, sprinkling his Rus­sian with the most hackneyed German expressions. All at once, she felt depressed that every­ one was looking at t­ hese movie p­ eople, at the singer and at the consul, and nobody seemed to know that a chess genius was pre­sent at the ball, a man whose name had been in millions of newspapers and whose games had already been called immortal.114 Nabokov hits ­here on the same phenomenon of celebrity as Khodasevich: even though Luzhin, the chess grandmaster, is a figure of indisputably more artistic talent, he is ignored in f­ avor of the entertainers and politicians.

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Thoroughly banal in his moneymaking, Valentinov is endowed by Nabokov with the force of a petty demon. Luzhin’s wife, trying to insulate her mentally unstable husband from shocks, imagines herself banishing Valentinov to an ­earlier stage in Luzhin’s life. Yet he is ultimately unshakable and apparently essential to Luzhin’s life story (as controlled by Nabokov) and to the milieu of interwar Eu­rope. Just as Cheepy w ­ ill be essential to the narrative of Camera Obscura, Valentinov is the ultimate middleman, a figure without whom Nabokov’s narrative of Luzhin would not be pos­si­ble. Not only a “salamander of fate” and “basilisk of good fortune,” Valentinov is described in terms of a Rus­sian folk devil à la Gogol: But Valentinov had been dealt with. What a cloying name. And for a minute she became thoughtful, accomplishing during that one minute, as sometimes happens, a long leisurely journey: she set off into Luzhin’s past, dragging Valentinov with her, visualizing him, from his voice, in horn-­rimmed spectacles [v cherepakhovykh ochkakh] and long-­legged, and as she journeyed through the mist she looked for a spot where she could dump the slippery, repulsively wriggling Valentinov, but she could not find one b­ ecause she knew almost nothing about Luzhin’s youth. . . . ​She was forced to go back home with the puffing, triumphant Valentinov and return him to the firm of “Veritas,” like a registered package that has been dispatched to an undiscovered address. So let him remain ­there, unknown but undoubtedly harmful, with his terrible sobriquet: chess ­father.115 In this description Valentinov is endowed with characteristics of a minor devil, as defined in Nabokov’s 1944 work Nikolai Gogol: “In its wriggly immature stage, the ‘Chort’ is for good Rus­sians a shrimpy foreigner, a shivering puny green-­blooded imp with thin German, Polish, French legs, a sneaking ­little cad (‘podlenky’) with something inexpressibly repellent (‘gadenky’) about him.”116 The only addition is a pair of horn-­rimmed spectacles, the symbol of ­imagined and mimetic Americanism in Nabokov’s Rus­sian work. Made famous by Harold Lloyd, who reappears in Valentinov’s office in a still from Safety Last (1923), clinging from the skyscraper (an image that demonically suggests to Luzhin his own method of suicide), t­ hese “big American glasses” can be found in numerous Nabokov works.117 Such horn-­rimmed or tortoiseshell spectacles (rogovye / cherepakhovye ochki) link Valentinov in The Luzhin Defense to the two other adoptive Berliners discussed in this chapter and chapter 3: Franz in King, Queen, Knave and Horn in Camera Obscura.118 In King, Queen, Knave, as part of Franz’s self-­adaptation to modern urban life—­the Weimar equivalent of Lucien de Rubempré’s new clothes in Balzac’s Illusions perdues—he acquires new

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eyewear: “Franz bought American glasses: the frame was tortoiseshell [cherepakhovaia], with the caveat of course that tortoiseshell is well known for being excellently and variously faked.”119 ­These likely plastic but up-­to-­date frames appeal to Martha’s sense of comme il faut Americanized fashion.120 In Camera Obscura, Kretschmar imagines the German-­American Horn as “stout, with horn-­rimmed glasses [v rogovykh ochkakh],” yet despite his name, Horn does not bear this obvious marker of Americanism—­another example of Kretschmar’s own meta­ phorical shortsightedness.121 Yet Valentinov, Nabokov’s “man from the movie kingdom,” sprinkling his Rus­sian with German phrases and covered in a patina of Americanism, is truly one of Muratov’s post-­Europeans. In this, Nabokov, the ­future American, accused at this time so vociferously of “un-­Russianness,” surely appreciated the irony. In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova devotes an extended passage to Nabokov as a case study of a “translated man.” For Casanova, Nabokov’s practice of self-­translation is a story of transnational emancipation, effected through the intervention of Paris and its investment of cultural capital in the Rus­sian novelist: By the beginning of the 1930s, Paris had taken over from Berlin as the capital of the Rus­sian émigré community. Its most prestigious review, Sovremennyia Zapiski (Con­temporary Annals), which in the meantime had moved ­there from Germany as well, agreed to publish Nabokov’s new novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense, 1930), in three installments. Rus­sian critics greeted it with hostility. But then with the publication of an enthusiastic review in the 15 February 1930 issue of Les Nouvelles Littéraires by the French critic André Levinson, the situation suddenly changed. In the space of a week, and even before the original Rus­sian version of the novel had appeared in its entirety, Nabokov signed a contract with Fayard for the French translation. Recognition in France allowed him to cross the Rhine without leaving Berlin and at the same time to escape the anathema of Rus­sian critical opinion.122 Certainly, Casanova is correct to point out the importance of French as a waypoint on the road to Nabokov’s English-­language ­career. But ­there are a number of inaccuracies in this account, not least of which is that, perhaps more than any other Nabokov novel, The Luzhin Defense was met with “unfeigned enthusiasm” by a majority of Rus­sian émigré critics.123 Yet perhaps most striking is the appearance of the French critic André Levinson, who, at a stroke, confers on Nabokov the recognition by Paris that, in Casanova’s Francocentric model, holds together the world republic of letters. This is none other than the Rus­sian émigré dance and film critic Andrei Levinson.124

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The missing ­factor in this account is exile as a constitutive, not occasional, f­ actor in Eu­ro­pean culture of the 1920s and 1930s. As we have seen with Levinson’s own turn to French in 1926, Rus­sian émigrés’ choice to publish in languages other than Rus­sian was dictated not by concerns of prestige but by payment. In this way, Levinson not only provides a model for Nabokov’s turn to French but also serves as a direct intermediary on the path ­toward international recognition. Levinson’s review, written in French for a French audience, pre­sents Nabokov as a Muratovian post-­European—­the first in a long line of critics’ promotions of Nabokov as a cosmopolitan during this period: “[His ­father, Vladimir D. Nabokov,] was a fervent Anglophile, ­g reat Rus­sian lord turned liberal gentleman. In his turn, our author, at twenty, followed his ­father into exile, completed his studies at Cambridge (Romance languages and zoology), and returned to live in Germany. To untangle the filiations and influences in this Rus­sian of the West would not be an easy task. In none of his works does Mr. Sirin take a position in the quarrel between the two Rus­sias.”125 Although Levinson is (perhaps knowingly, given the typical antipathy of the French to White Rus­sians) incorrect in his description of Nabokov’s apo­liti­cal stance, his description of Nabokov as a “Rus­sian of the West” is savvy. He advocates for Nabokov’s translation into French, dramatizing for the reader his own unearthing of a new talent: “You remain in anxious, delicious suspense, torn between the almost certainty of a discovery and the fear of a disappointment.”126 This tactic is supremely effective. In chapter 3, we track Nabokov’s own multilingual turn—to France, as well as Britain, through his writing on the cinema.

C h a p te r 3

A Cinematic Genius Camera Obscura and the Eu­ro­pean Culture Industry (1931–1936)

The novel is finished, I have just now taken it to the Institut de Beauté. I am giving it a manicure, massaging its ­little face, smoothing its wrinkles, a bit of this and that—­and you ­will soon see it in all its beauty. It ­will stun you a ­little. It is taken from German life, and ­there is much of the picturesque and of the smutty—­ passe-­moi le mot—­but the main t­ hing is that it is extremely engaging—as far as the author himself can judge. Bravo, bravo, Sirinchuk, I cry, tired, but satisfied (and in a few days ­there ­will be the reaction—it ­will seem rotten, painfully rotten). —­Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, his ­mother, February 1931

In Nabokov’s works of the early 1930s, ­there appears an ambitious and sophisticated treatment of the cinema aimed at an international audience. If Nabokov’s early fiction of the 1920s had been interwoven with a specifically Rus­sian debate among exiles in the Russophone press, the theme of the cinema outgrows this national context with the publication of his third Rus­sian novel, The Luzhin Defense (Zashchita Luzhina, 1929–1930). Now serialized in Paris, Nabokov’s novels from The Luzhin Defense on w ­ ere a publishing event. Following his fourth novel, Glory (Podvig, 1931–1932), Nabokov turned to a new work on the subject of the cinema—or, more accurately, on the subject of cinematic culture. Nabokov’s fifth novel, referred to in the opening letter to his m ­ other u ­ nder its initial title, “Bird of Paradise” (“Raiskaia ptitsa”), Camera Obscura (Kamera obskura, 1932–1933), represents a liminal work.1 As fiction, it thematizes and reflects back on the late 1920s, a world now radically and irrevocably altered. In fact, the novel’s opening chapters introduce the crucial backstory set in 1925–1928, the period of the émigré cinema debates, the American “invasion” 99

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of Weimar cinema and mass culture, and the height of Nabokov’s own biographical and creative engagement with Berlin and its surface culture. The bulk of the novel is set in 1928, the year of his ­earlier Weimar work King, Queen, Knave (Korol’, dama, valet), which had been written for both a Rus­sian and a German readership. Camera Obscura self-­consciously recalls his e­ arlier Weimar novel, to the extent that Kretschmar receives a dinner invitation from the main ­couple of King, Queen, Knave, Martha and Kurt Dreyer.2 In King, Queen, Knave Nabokov made a number of apparent predictions about Weimar culture. Some ­were implicit, such as the dark side of that culture’s capability for vio­lence and cruelty, and ­others explicit, like the remarkable description of the protagonist Dreyer’s economic fortunes as a golden top that one day would stop spinning.3 The following year, 1929, the Wall Street crash produced that very effect in the United States. By 1931, Europe—­and the Weimar Republic in particular—­ was facing a similarly large po­liti­cal and economic crisis, one that in the movie industry was compounded by the arrival of sound film as an expectation in popu­lar feature film production and exhibition. This rapid rise of the “talkies” required investment in one of several new technologies, retrofitting of existing theaters, and changes in production, to the point that existing s­ ilent proj­ects w ­ ere hastily converted to sound in midshoot. In this sense, Camera Obscura can be considered a reworking of King, Queen, Knave from the other side of the cultural catastrophe latent in that ­earlier novel. If the entrepreneur Kurt Dreyer’s shop win­dow in King, Queen, Knave functioned as a metonym for the novel’s commercial attractiveness as Berlin spectacle to both Rus­sians and Germans, in Camera Obscura the caricaturist Robert Horn’s creation Cheepy, a worldwide phenomenon of franchising—­comic strip, film animation, and ­children’s toy—­works as a metonym for the novel’s intended role as exportable commodity.4 By 1931, neither the Rus­sian nor the German readerships in Berlin w ­ ere any longer available to Nabokov. In retrospect, then, the year 1928 represented the pinnacle of Nabokov’s investment in the market of Weimar Berlin and of that culture’s ac­cep­tance of his work. Whereas the option on a German edition of King, Queen, Knave was bought by the major publisher Ullstein before the novel was even complete, that novel’s disappointing sales in German translation as König, Dame, Bube (1930) made it clear that a productive relationship was at an end.5 Similarly, the shrinking Rus­sian presence in Berlin entailed the demise of major Rus­sian publishing outlets.6 During Nabokov’s work on the novel between January and May 1931, his friend Georgy Gessen wrote his last film review and the “Kino” section of Rulʹ essentially dis­appeared.7 Fi­nally, in October 1931 the newspaper—so central to Nabokov’s early ­career—­ceased to exist, essentially



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taking the literate cinematic culture of Rus­sian Berlin with it.8 The “death” of Rus­sian émigré culture is something that Rus­sian critics like Vladislav Khodasevich ­later picked up on in their reviews of the novel (discussed below). When reading Camera Obscura, it is therefore impor­tant to keep in mind that the trajectory of Nabokov’s literary c­areer in 1931 was away from a Russian-­German audience. Nabokov had to look outside Germany (primarily west, to France and Britain—­and ­later the United States) to publish his fiction in translation. Though his first two novels had found a German publisher based in Berlin, his home in exile, Nabokov’s cinema novel points forward to his increasingly international ­career, which emerges through the story of its publication, translation, and film treatments of the 1930s. Camera Obscura also marks a turning point in Nabokov’s c­ areer ­toward cinema praxis, where he uses the perspective of culture theory (film as economic force) to facilitate a move to the international stage. Camera Obscura proved to have significant global reach, finding audiences in places Nabokov was himself (as yet) unable to live and work. The history of the translations of the Rus­sian novel Kamera obskura into French (Chambre obscure, 1934) and British En­glish (Camera Obscura, 1936), and its rewriting for an American audience (Laughter in the Dark, 1938), ­will be discussed in this chapter and chapter 4, as w ­ ill its attempted screen adaptations by German exiles in Britain. As Nabokov recognized even while composing it, Camera Obscura would be perfect for screen adaptation and for pitching to foreign audiences as a translation. It was, Nabokov wrote to his friend in ­England Gleb Struve, a “quite juicy” novel “from German life.”9 This topicality and daring would, in the novel’s transnational afterlife, catalyze Nabokov’s global ambitions.

Cheepy The opening of Camera Obscura is one of the most remarkable Nabokov ever composed, yet few En­glish readers ­today are familiar with it. It was entirely cut from the 1938 American adaptation Laughter in the Dark, which is the only En­glish version in print ­today. Conversely, the British translation Camera Obscura (1936) has the only published En­glish translation of this opening, but it occasionally cuts passages or phrases.10 In that sense, the Rus­sian novel Kamera obskura has no satisfactory translation into En­glish. In my quotations from the novel below I use the out-­of-­print British edition but restore its cuts from the Rus­sian.

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The novel starts over international w ­ aters, as the cartoon guinea pig Cheepy is transmitted—­first as color image, then as monochrome animated film, and fi­nally as mass-­produced object—­across the globe: Round about the year 1925 an amusing l­ ittle animal enjoyed world-­wide popularity [razmnozhilosʹ po vsemu svetu]. It is now almost forgotten, but for a period of some three to four years it was to be seen everywhere: from Alaska to Patagonia, from Manchuria to New Zealand, from Lapland to the Cape of Good Hope—in a word, in ­every region accessible to picture post cards. This l­ittle creature rejoiced in the seductive [simpatichnoe] name of “Cheepy,” and it was a guinea-­pig.11 The origin of its [or rather: her] rise to fame is said to have been connected with the question of vivisection. Robert Horn, the caricaturist, was once lunching in New York with a chance acquaintance, a young physiologist. They ­were talking about experiments on living animals, and the physiologist, a very sensitive man, maintained that in the dissecting room scientists permitted dumb animals to be tortured more than was ­really necessary. [The physiologist, an impressionable man, not yet accustomed to the nightmares of the laboratory, expressed the thought that science not only allows elaborate cruelty to the same animals which, at other times, evoke tenderness in p­ eople through their fluffiness, warmth, and ­little facial expressions, but also gets carried away, crucifying and slicing up more of the creatures than actually necessary.] “I tell you what,” he said to Horn. “You do charming sketches for the newspapers. Take up the cause of one of ­these long-­suffering creatures—­ for instance, the guinea-­pig, and create a vogue for it [pustite, tak skazatʹ, na volny mody]. Make drawings of it with some droll heading, and refer incidentally to the tragic connection between the guinea-­pig and the laboratory. In this way you might not only create a very original and amusing type, but also [surround the guinea-­pig with a certain halo of fash­ion­able kindness, which would] draw the attention of the public to the sad fate of this most lovable l­ittle animal.” “I ­don’t know,” replied Horn. “Guinea-­pigs always remind me of rats. I ­can’t stand them. Let them squeal u ­ nder the dissecting-­knife for all I care.” But a month a­ fter this conversation, when Horn was trying to think of a subject for a series of drawings which an illustrated paper had commissioned from him, he recalled the advice of the tender-­hearted physiologist—­and, on that same eve­ning, the first paper guinea-­pig [pervaia morskaia svinka Chipi] was swiftly and painlessly born. The public



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was immediately [attracted, more than attracted,] charmed with the sketch. The sly expression of the round, twinkling eyes, the plump ­little figure of the guinea-­pig, with its stout hind-­quarters, the sleek head, [the manner of standing like a gopher on its hind legs,] the skin with its [splendid] patches of black, brown and yellow [chernyi, kofeinyi i zolotoi], and, above all, the creature’s delicious and comical sprightliness [neulovimoe, prelestno-­smeshnoe nechto, fantasticheskaia, no vesʹma opredelennaia zhiznennostʹ], won it extraordinary popularity. For Horn had succeeded in hitting off the characteristic [karikaturnuiu] outline of the animal, [bringing out and] emphasizing its drollness and yet at the same time investing it with something curiously h ­ uman. One of his guinea-­pigs, for instance, was holding in its small paws the skull of a rodent [with the label Cavia cobaja] and exclaiming: “Alas! poor Yorick!” Another was shown lying on its back on the bench of a laboratory and trying to do fash­ion­able gymnastic exercises—­feet to head (and you can imagine how far it could reach with its short hind legs); a third was calmly trimming its claws with a suspiciously fine pair of scissors surrounded by cotton wool, a lancet, n ­ eedles and all sorts of other instruments. . . . Very soon, however, the allusions to vivisection ­were dropped, and the guinea-­pig [Chipi] appeared in [other settings and in] quite unexpected positions—­dancing the Charleston, burning itself quite black in the sun, and so on. ­These guinea-­pigs ­were reproduced on picture post cards and in animated films [na filʹmovykh risunkakh], as well as in solid form [na izobrazheniiakh Chipi v trekh izmereniiakh], for soon ­there grew a demand for guinea-­pigs [podobiia Chipi] in plush, cloth, wood and clay; and Horn made a g­ reat deal of money by them. The physiologist often used to tell ­people how he had given Horn the idea of drawing guinea-­ pigs, but no one believed him, and so he gave up talking about it.12 Cheepy is a genuinely global phenomenon in her reach. In manifold forms and formats, adaptations and instantiations, Cheepy reaches far beyond the circumscribed cir­cuit of the Eu­ro­pean market. As a franchise, she touches places where highbrow, or even middlebrow, fiction had no hope of penetrating. The world of Berlin, Paris, London, and New York—­the metropolitan centers of the interwar publishing industry at which Nabokov’s fiction aimed—­seem ­limited by comparison. To the Germans of the story, Cheepy is technically an American import, a prime example of the feared Americanism that featured so prominently in the émigré cinema debates: machine-­produced mass culture, internationally circulated and promoted, and aiming at market saturation through franchising.13

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Yet Nabokov characteristically adds the nuance of disruptive detail: Cheepy is in fact a German-­American coproduction. Her author, Robert Horn, a metropolitan cartoonist (not a Berliner, but from Hamburg, like Martha Dreyer), is a cosmopolitan in his business dealings, travel, and knowledge of the world, who lives in New York, visits Berlin, writes from Paris, and is planning a trip to ­England. Horn evades conscription and the First World War by moving to Amer­i­ca in 1913. Much like his fictional Rus­sian equivalent, the impresario Valentinov of The Luzhin Defense, Horn is a quin­tes­sen­tial “salamander of fate” and “basilisk of good fortune” who avoids the war in which Magda’s ­father is shell-­shocked and in which Kretschmar also serves—­albeit quite comfortably, supplied in the trenches with care packages by an older lover.14 Horn becomes rich in New York in 1925, briefly visits his native Hamburg in 1926, and takes the fourteen-­year-­old Magda as his lover before leaving her and returning to Amer­i­ca. By 1928, the star of his creation Cheepy is fading and Horn is forced to “bury” her: Robert Horn was ­really in a very remarkable position. He, the talented caricaturist [karikaturist], the creator of the fash­ion­able guinea pig [zverʹka], who two or three years before had been making piles of money, was now drifting back slowly but surely, if not to poverty, at any rate to very mediocre earnings. He had not by any means lost his talent—on the contrary, his drawings ­were more subtle and clever than before—­ but some inexplicable change had come over the public. In Amer­i­ca and ­England p­ eople had grown sick of the guinea-­pig, and this ­little animal had been ousted by the creation of another fortunate colleague. [­These critters (zverʹki) and dolls are inherently ephemeral. Who now recalls the Golliwog, black as soot, with a shock of jet black hair sticking straight out, with trouser buttons instead of eyes and a huge red flannelette mouth. If in general Horn’s talent was ­going from strength to strength, with regard to Cheepy he had run completely dry. His latest portraits of the guinea-­pig w ­ ere weak.] He had buried his guinea-­pig [On pochuvstvoval eto i reshil Chipi pokhoronitʹ]. In the last picture he had depicted a moonlight night, a grave and a tombstone with a brief epitaph. Some of the foreign editors, who had not yet scented Cheepy’s inevitable doom, ­were alarmed, and begged him to go on with his guinea-­pigs at all costs. But he now experienced an unconquerable aversion to his own child. Cheepy, the insidious Cheepy, had contrived to get in the way of all his other work, and this he could not forgive her.15 Nabokov’s attention to the temporal dynamics of mass culture, already in evidence in his work of the mid-1920s (see chapter 1), remains remarkably well



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attuned. Nabokov notes ­here the asynchronicity of international markets, where some are slow to pick up on the life cycle of mass phenomena. Such for instance was the lag between Hollywood release dates and their Berlin film palace premieres—­usually a delay of one to two years (see appendix). As the novel’s incipit points out, by the time of the narrative itself—­that is, a “now” consistent with Nabokov’s writing of the novel in 1931—­Cheepy is already a fading memory, “now [teperʹ] almost forgotten.”16 ­Here Nabokov’s “now” signals that the readers of the early 1930s shared a similarly distanced relationship with the year 1928 (and the years leading up to it), symbolized by Cheepy’s global oblivion by the time of the novel’s composition. Brian Boyd has precisely characterized Nabokov’s attention to the “fads” of popu­lar culture: “the slow uptake, the rapid spread beyond a certain critical threshold, the ubiquity that invites ­others to feed off and share in the current success, the saturation and decline into obscurity.”17 In fact, the word for fashion, moda/ modnyi, appears three times in the Rus­sian original of this opening passage.18 In a passage omitted from the British version, the narrator extrapolates from the fictional Cheepy to the real global phenomenon of the “inherently ephemeral” Golliwog—an example perhaps already out-­of-­date by 1935, when (as now) the doll was far from forgotten. This would not be the last of the changes that would be necessitated in the numerous translations of this novel—­the revenge of global fashion on transnational fiction. The costly change in audience tastes and markets, the differentiation in international markets, Eu­rope’s slight delay ­behind Amer­i­ca—­all ­these f­ actors would come into play for Nabokov personally in the coming years, as he attempted to turn Camera Obscura into an international phenomenon of its own. As the novel opens in 1928, Horn is returning from Amer­i­ca to escape his creditors. Crucially, in order to find Magda and find money Horn returns not to his hometown Hamburg, but to Berlin, the economic and cultural capital of the Weimar Republic. The narrative strands of the novel’s opening chapters are joined by two events of March 1928. The first is the lawsuit brought by Horn from New York, for which Kretschmar in Berlin is called as expert witness. In Berlin at the beginning of 1928, Bruno Kretschmar, the art connoisseur, a learned, but by no means brilliant individual, was invited to give his expert opinion regarding a ridicu­lous—­yes, ­really, a quite absurd ­matter. Kok, a fash­ion­able artist, had painted a portrait of Dorianna Karenina, the film actress. A firm which manufactured face-­cream had acquired from the actress the right to reproduce this picture as an advertisement for its lipstick. In this portrait Dorianna was clasping a

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huge plush guinea-­pig [Chipi] to her bare shoulder. Horn, from New York, immediately brought an action against the firm. All the parties concerned had ­really only one end in view: to get themselves talked about as much as pos­si­ble [pobolʹshe poshumetʹ]. Articles ­were written about the picture and about the actress; the lipstick was sold; and the guinea-­pig [Chipi]—­which was in need of a l­ittle boost [reklame], since it was getting out-­of-­date [daby ozhivitʹ khladevshuiu liubovʹ]—­appeared in a new drawing by Horn, with eyes modestly lowered, a flower in its paw, and the laconic title: Noli me tangere. “This fellow Horn seems quite in love with his guinea-­pig [zveria],” remarked Kretschmar one day to his brother-­in-­law, Max, a stout, good-­ natured man, with rolls of fat bulging over his collar. “Do you know him?” asked Max. “No; how should I? He lives [full-­time] in Amer­i­ca. But he ­will win his case if he succeeds in proving that the public attention is captivated by the guinea-­pig, more than by the film star [vzory gliadiashchikh na reklamu privlekaiutsia bolʹshe zverʹkom, chem damoi].”19 In the twinned figures of Cheepy and the German actress Dorianna Karenina (replete with ersatz Rus­sian name), we find representatives of mass culture and cinematic culture, their synergistic relationship emblematized in the lipstick advertisement.20 Together they demonstrate the truly global reach of an American and Americanizing culture, “from Alaska to Patagonia, from Manchuria to New Zealand, from Lapland to the Cape of Good Hope.”21 Nabokov’s promotional picture of Karenina and Cheepy is based on a popu­ lar postcard of 1930, showing the Russian-­German film actress Olga Tschechowa holding a plush doll of Mickey Mouse (see figure 3.1). The postcard was part of a massive campaign by Walt Disney and his German partners to promote the first Berlin showings of Steamboat Willie—­one of the signature American “invasions” of Weimar culture.22 As the use of a dif­fer­ent photo­g raph from the same shoot on the cover of the German weekly Film-­Magazin ( June 21, 1930) shows, such promotion was mutual, with Disney’s creation turned equally adroitly to promote Tschechowa’s new film, Der Liebling der Götter (Darling of the Gods, 1930). Crucially, both promoted films ­were sound films (Tonfilme). The sea change brought into film art and the international movie industry by the arrival of sound film is of g­ reat thematic import for Nabokov’s cinema novel. Debuted by Warner B ­ rothers in 1927 with The Jazz Singer and shown throughout 1928 to be commercially v­ iable, sound had by 1931 revolutionized film production. Its arrival was slower in Eu­rope (The Jazz Singer was shown in sound in



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Figure 3.1.  Ross-­Verlag postcard of Olga Tschechowa and Mickey Mouse (1930). Collection Ivo Blom and Paul van Yperen.

Berlin only in 1929—­see Gessen’s review of November 27), but by 1931 the debate over the merits of sound and ­silent film was in practice a moot point.23 The early sound era was a time of professional anxiety for actors, doubly so for ­those with transnational ambitions. Tschechowa, née Knipper, may have hailed from a German f­amily, but she had grown up in Rus­sia and emigrated only at age twenty-­three.24 Her success in German-­language sound films was anything but assured—­her costar in Darling of the Gods, Emil Jannings, had recently returned to Berlin from Hollywood, since linguistic difficulties had ­limited his success in speaking parts. Jannings was only given the role, moreover, ­because the initial choice of lead actor, the ­silent film star and émigré Ivan Mosjoukine was discovered to be not proficient enough in German, French, or En­glish.25 A similar transition was evident in the world of animated film: Mickey Mouse, whose films delighted audiences in their skillful, painstakingly orchestrated synchronization of action and sound, rendered obsolete even Disney’s own previous s­ ilent creations, like the popu­lar Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (even to the extent that Disney, like his live action studio counter­parts, remade Oswald’s ­silent hits with Mickey’s revamped sound versions).26 Again, Nabokov’s timing is precise: 1928 was the year that ­silent cartoons, like Cheepy, began to be eclipsed by animated sound films like Disney’s Steamboat Willie—­“the Jazz Singer of animation.”27

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In her c­ areer trajectory, Cheepy herself is most plausibly based on Felix the Cat, the most popu­lar animated character of the s­ ilent era, who had migrated from comic strips to s­ ilent film in the mid-1920s and had a highly lucrative ­career as a franchised item, “in plush, cloth, wood and clay,” as Nabokov puts it.28 Nabokov’s attention may have been drawn by the character’s success as Felix der Kater in Berlin, where he appeared in fifty-­three films between 1924 and 1930 (of which thirty-­five ­were concentrated in the two-­year period 1924– 1926).29 Or perhaps Nabokov’s imagination was sparked by the famous movieland parody Felix in Hollywood (1923) or even by Felix All Puzzled (1924), which has Soviet Rus­sia as its theme.30 But it was likely the fact that Felix’s creator resisted the conversion of his films to sound, ensuring Felix’s eclipse by Mickey Mouse, who took Berlin by storm in 1930–1931—­the ubiquitous image of “Micky Maus” appeared not only on postcards but also in shop win­dows and on cinema screens, newspaper pages, and cabaret stages.31 Mickey Mouse’s omnipresence in Berlin as Nabokov wrote the novel is replicated by Cheepy’s pervasiveness in the novel itself. Cheepy “multiplies” as she is disseminated, a phenomenon of mass production and promotion. This multiplication is imitated in the opening description’s repetition of the name “Cheepy”—in Rus­sian mentioned nine times (first in romanized characters, thereafter in Cyrillic). Cheepy not only appears in the incipit but also crops up at key moments throughout the novel, a point not usually mentioned in discussions of the novel.32 In fact, the Rus­sian novel is strewn with thirty-­three references to Cheepy, who recurs throughout as comic strip, animated film, and plush doll.33 ­These repetitions are maintained in the British version, albeit usually replacing “Cheepy” with “guinea-­pig” and choosing not to make use of Nabokov’s deliberate play on “cheep” and “cheap”—­hardly the last time his fondness for macaronic puns would not carry over.34 The figure of Cheepy is integral to the novel’s narrative elaboration, binding together the characters of Horn, Magda, and Kretschmar and linking the backstory to the main action of 1928. ­Every time Horn is introduced, he is called the “creator” or “inventor” of Cheepy.35 When Dorianna Karenina is first introduced, the reader is referred back to her appearance with an enormous plush Cheepy doll in the lipstick advertisement.36 Magda is described as a fan of Cheepy—­she “laughs till she cries” when watching animated films of Cheepy with Horn (who is likely enjoying the irony that she does not know he is the inventor of Cheepy).37 Initially, Magda loves Cheepy, but ­after being left by Horn and starting work at the cinema as an usher, she tires of each week’s new program within days, including not only Cheepy but even Greta Garbo.38 Kretschmar’s first contact with Horn is when he is called as an expert witness to Horn’s lawsuit on the role of Cheepy in the offending lipstick



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advertisement (Kretschmar must decide if the viewer’s eyes are drawn more to the film actress than to the Cheepy doll—­a test readers can perform for themselves with Tschechowa and Mickey). Yet it turns out that Kretschmar has already had an encounter with Cheepy. When Kretschmar makes the fateful decision to go back to Magda’s Argus cinema a second time, a Cheepy film is showing (she is dancing a Rus­sian ballet in a tutu, of course).39 Perhaps most disturbingly, when Magda enters the bedroom of Kretschmar’s ­daughter Irma, we discover that Irma, who ­will be the indirect, innocent victim of her ­father’s affair, owns a plush Cheepy doll.40 Magda then appears to steal this doll, as it reappears in her apartment l­ater, irritating Horn, who cannot stand the sight of it.41 Fi­nally, a Cheepy doll (perhaps the very same object, talisman turned bad omen) hangs in the back win­dow of the car that Horn drives south on holiday with Magda and Kretschmar—­the same car, presumably with the same doll, that Kretschmar ­will crash, blinding himself.42

Berlin as Camera Obscura Cheepy is a guiding device, who leads the reader through the tragicomic plot, which is at least as sticky as it is “juicy” and forms a pastiche of the Weimar Straßefilm, or street film. Gavriel Moses has pointed out some of the basic similarities in plot and style between Camera Obscura (Moses uses the American rewrite Laughter in the Dark) and the originator of the street film genre, Karl Grune’s 1923 film Die Straße.43 In addition, like Die Straße, where the film’s protagonist is arrested on suspicion of hom­i­cide and tries to hang himself in jail, Nabokov’s novel also contains a murder (Magda’s, in the draft ending), one of the many ele­ments that, in Anton Kaes’s words, make the Straßefilm genre “the prototype for American film noir of the 1940s.”44 Perhaps more impor­ tant, however, than the novel’s portrayal of the danger of the city’s lures for an unimaginative married man (Magda as prostitute, Horn as her associate and con artist) is the film’s thematic treatment of vision. In his recovery of the film’s “under­lying theoretical proj­ect—­the nexus between urban modernity and the disciplining power of vision,” Kaes brings back to the surface a key feature of Weimar film—­its remarkable self-­reflexivity.45 Thus the hero’s descent into the street one evening—­from which he returns home chastened at daybreak—­imitates nothing so much as the habitual act of moviegoing itself: “An escape from the everyday humdrum life, a brief virtual encounter with crime and sex, and ­after two hours’ action and adventure in the dark theater, a return to ordinary life. We watch a film to see, not to be seen; we submerge ourselves in the darkness of the theater and crave anonymity.”46 In

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this sense, Die Straße centers on a theme Rus­sian critics would read into Camera Obscura—­the infiltration of cinematic culture into urban life. The signature visual encounter of Die Straße is the scene where the protagonist, following a prostitute, is transfixed by the opening and closing eyes of an optometrist’s Lichtreklame, one of the illuminated advertisements that contributed so recognizably to Weimar Berlin’s urban nightscape.47 In Camera Obscura the name of the Argus cinema, where Magda works and which attracts Kretschmar one eve­ning with its red Lichtreklame, is likely a reference to that scene’s all-­seeing (Panoptes) eyes—­cinematic culture as a spectacle turned outward.48 In another moment of framed vision, the protagonist of Die Straße, like Kretschmar, guiltily removes his wedding ring and slips it into his pocket, but not before he is struck by a vision (encircled by the ring in close-up) of his wife shutting him out of their home. Fi­nally, the theme of vision is balanced in the film, as in Camera Obscura, by that of blindness—­a blind man, played by Max Schreck, the vampire from Nosferatu (1922), reappears at key points as the companion and guardian of a small child, who at the end of the film incriminates the murderous con man (his ­father, we eventually learn). The symbolic blindness so central to Camera Obscura—­facetiously summarized in the mailman’s quip “Love is blind! [Liubovʹ slepa!]”—­also draws on the lost ­silent film Liebe macht blind (1925), starring Lil Dagover and (in an uncharacteristic comic role) Conrad Veidt.49 Veidt is mentioned by name in Camera Obscura when Magda the cinephile compares the eyes of one of her ­brother’s imposing friends to Veidt’s.50 Even the details of the film overlap: the husband returns home in the eve­nings with his wedding ring in his pocket, and the plot revolves around the wife’s attempts to win back his affection (disguise, flirting) from a beautiful film star who is shooting locally.51 We should note, however, that whereas in both Die Straße and Liebe macht blind the unfaithful husband is re­united with his accepting wife—as Kracauer said of the former film, “Love is copulation, murder is accident, and tragedy never occurs”—in Camera Obscura the vulnerable child dies, the hero is murdered, and the wife is left alone.52 In this Nabokov’s novel, completed in May 1931, has the same tenor as Fritz Lang’s M, released at the end of that month, where t­here is a decidedly real tragedy underpinning the cinematic staging of events.53 Nabokov’s incorporation of Weimar genre films is part of the novel’s precise topography of Berlin cinematic culture.54 Nabokov’s insider knowledge of an Americanized Weimar cinematic culture is put on display in the novel’s references to the Continental actors Garbo and Veidt, both of whom are associated with the transition from Weimar Berlin to Hollywood.55 As Alfred Appel pointed out, the novel’s many references to German-­American culture



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­ ere removed from Laughter in the Dark.56 In fact, some of ­these w w ­ ere cut even in the British version: references to illustrated journals, which are specified in the Rus­sian as the German Die Dame and the French L’illustration (in which Khodasevich had read about Rudolph Valentino’s death) are reduced to “illustrated paper” and “illustrated magazine” in Winifred Ray’s translation.57 Nabokov’s novel exceeds even the self-­reflexivity of Grune’s Die Straße in giving the characters self-­awareness about their relation to cinematic culture. Nabokov’s three main German characters are often described as cardboard or sketchily drawn—­supposedly like the “card” characters of King, Queen, Knave.58 Yet much as King, Queen, Knave in fact presented the perspectives on Weimar surface culture of three types—­Dreyer the Berliner, Franz the provincial, and Martha the Hamburg merchant’s ­daughter—so Camera Obscura pre­sents Weimar cinematic culture from the very dif­fer­ent perspectives of three demographically and geo­g raph­i­cally differentiated Germans. Seen in historical context, they are in fact imbued with a quasi-­sociological level of detail. The novel pre­sents the cinematic culture of late 1920s Berlin through film theory, cinema theory, and culture theory. Thus the Rus­sian reader, familiar with the cinema debates of the mid-1920s, is presented with the German embodiments of film theory in Kretschmar, bourgeois art critic and aesthetic pedant (recalling Andrei Levinson’s quip about German academics’ multivolume film aesthetics), who theorizes irrelevantly about sound film yet fails to understand its economic and social basis, as represented by Horn and Magda; of cinema theory in Nabokov’s portrait of the working-­class North Berliner Magda, ultimate mass culture consumer, who dreams of movie stardom but works as an usher; and of culture criticism in the cosmopolitan German-­ American Horn and his global franchising phenomenon Cheepy.59 Magda, a working-­class Berlin girl, the d­ aughter of a shell-­shocked f­ ather, happily consumes Americanized mass culture while dreaming of a screen ­career. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen (changed to fifteen and eigh­ teen in the British version), Magda wants to leave home, earn money, and, most importantly, become a film star. The only job this character, whom Khodasevich called “a typical product of the ‘inflation period’,” can initially get is as a nude artist’s model.60 By March 1928, she has ended up as an usher in a small, neighborhood movie theater. The intervening stages, from usher to extra to actress to film star, are explic­itly laid out in the Rus­sian version: “For a time Magda enjoyed her new occupation, though it was, of course, a l­ittle humiliating to start her film ­career not as an actress or even as a super [statistkoi—­ extra].”61 This is a reference to her pre­de­ces­sors in Nabokov’s fiction of the 1920s: the progression from usher to star takes Magda through the paths of Ganin the extra from Mary (Mashen’ka, 1926) and Marianna the middling actress

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from The Man from the U.S.S.R. (Chelovek iz SSSR, 1927). Indeed, Magda is forced to experience Marianna’s horror at seeing herself at the private screening and equally dreads the image’s distribution and exhibition, just as Ganin had (see chapter 1). Nonetheless, to Magda “somehow the path from art model to film star seemed very short,” and Magda uses sex as her shortcut: to buy both her escape from the working class (or Kracauer’s Angestellten) and a shot at an acting ­career.62 The Rus­sian émigré reader of Nabokov would know that Magda’s desired shortcut ­will not actually pay off, as would anyone familiar with cinematic culture of the time. As Gessen had pointed out in the mid-1920s, stories of movie hopefuls contradicted the ease with which film heroines made the transition on-­screen from pauper to princess.63 In the Rus­sian poet Jacques Noir’s poem “Cine-­Nina: An Émigré Tale” (“Kino-­Nina: Bezhenskaia povestʹ”), written in 1930 and published the same year in the newspaper Rulʹ, an average émigré girl attempts to conform herself to the studios’ expectations yet fails to secure a role, u ­ ntil an old lady tells her the secret—­she must please the right men and use connections (sviazi—in the sense of “liaisons”) to gain a foothold—at which point she gives up and becomes a typist, pleasing her relieved ­father.64 Magda has no such qualms, but she is still unsuccessful. A ­ fter approaching three production companies on Berlin’s Friedrichstraße (a precise reference to what Viktor Shklovsky had called Berlin’s “Film Street,” but removed in the American version), she encounters an el­derly German producer. This is a kindly figure who refuses Magda’s implicit offer of sex and correctly predicts her failure as an actress—an unfashionably sympathetic portrayal, much like Nabokov’s unconventional sketch of the entrepreneur Dreyer in King, Queen, Knave.65 In the prosaic interim, Magda earns money through informal prostitution, notably with three figures—­Horn, an old man, and Kretschmar—­all of whom pay for her apartment and clothes. By the time she meets Kretschmar in March 1928 her money has run out.66 Kretschmar is an educated middle-­class Berlin art expert (connoisseur of painting), presumably in­de­pen­dently wealthy, who served dutifully and comfortably in the First World War. His relation to the cinema is more intellectualized: he takes the cinema “seriously” and dreams of working “in the sphere” of film in an utterly impractical way, producing a color film in the tones of Rembrandt or Goya.67 He has “favourite theories regarding the comparative merits of the s­ ilent film and the talkie [o filʹme nemoi i o filʹme govorunʹe]”—in other words, he is a pedant.68 Note the feminine gender of “filʹma govorunʹia” (talkie) ­here—­despite the lexical instability of this term in the 1920s, by the 1930s Nabokov’s choice is likely deliberate, part of Kretschmar’s shortsighted condescension to the power of cinema and its culture, as well as its represen-



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tatives the “­little girl” Magda and the harmless “homosexual” Horn, by whom he ends up overpowered, defrauded, and cruelly tormented.69 This reference to the German debates of the late 1920s on the Tonfilm is, as scholars have noted, a historical reference to the sound debates of 1928, as well as an in-­joke for readers of the early 1930s on the vociferous German (as well as French and Soviet) debates on the impact of sound technology on film art.70 It is only in the 1938 American version that Nabokov reduces the theories of Kretschmar (now Albinus) to a single, laughable one, recalling the intransigent reactions of Rudolf Arnheim and, in the Soviet context, Yuri Tynianov: “[Albinus] began to unfold a certain favorite theory of his regarding the comparative merits of the ­silent film and the talkie: ‘Sound,’ he said, ‘­will kill the cinema straightaway.’ ”71 In this American version, Albinus is shown “giving his learned mind a holiday and writing . . . ​a ­little essay on the cinema”—­a moment that, if it parodies the impulse to take cinema too seriously, might also place within its crosshairs Nabokov circa 1928, with his unfinished “article on the cinema” (see chapter 1).72 Nabokov himself likely followed Gessen in seeing the “silence” of s­ ilent film as anything but an artistic or technical defect. As Gessen put it as early as 1926, “Silence is not a fault [porok] of the cinema, but an attribute of a bad film, for only then do we feel it. (Surely we do not want to hear Fairbanks, Lloyd or Jannings in Variety or Anne Boleyn?).”73 The most famous opponent of sound film was the Weimar critic Arnheim, who argued as early as 1928 that sound would inherently detract from film aesthetics: “The addition of sound ­will have about the same ennobling effect on the average feature film as the affixation of a curly tail might have on a realistic picture postcard of a dachshund: it ­will wag flirtatiously with its third dimension, thereby adding a ­g reat deal to the amusement of the public at large, and to the horror of the few who ­matter.”74 While Arnheim uniquely stuck to that position throughout his c­ areer, initial re­sis­tance to the coming of sound was fairly widespread among sophisticated moviegoers.75 As Graham Greene l­ ater recalled, “I was horrified by the arrival of ‘talkies’ (it seemed the end of film as an art form), just as ­later I regarded colour with justifiable suspicion.”76 The German émigré Robert Horn’s only involvement in movies is to draw thousands (in the British translation, hundreds) of illustrations to turn Cheepy from comic to cartoon.77 Unlike Kretschmar, Horn has no “theories” on the cinema and does not take it seriously. He has too much sense to get closely emotionally or aesthetically involved in the cinema as Magda does—­his disdain for the star actress Dorianna Karenina is palpable, contrasting with Magda’s awe. Horn is, however, savvy enough to involve himself commercially with the movie industry, resist his Eu­ro­pean editors’ calls to continue Cheepy

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when she had become stale, and file a lawsuit against a cosmetics firm that has used an image of his creation Cheepy. Thus Horn is a figure able, for a time at least, to adroitly navigate both the German and American markets, much like the real-­world film producers and directors of the interwar era (Erich Pommer, E. A. Dupont, Ernst Lubitsch) and the noir directors of the 1940s (Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak) (see coda). As a character, Horn is gifted with a certain talent, following the procedure by which Nabokov gives his creations of the 1930s individual facets of his artistic capabilities. For Alexander Dolinin, Horn (like Magda) is a “demonically sharp-­sighted” character who is nonetheless also a “blind man,” unable to “escape from the ‘dark room’ [camera obscura] of his own egotism.”78 Eric Naiman has complicated this picture, pointing out that Nabokov deliberately severs the connection (or at least the “necessary” connection) “between a good life and good art” and instead has the amoral Horn and Magda inspire, through their gift of vision, artistically valuable passages of prose.79 If Naiman is correct that Nabokov took Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?, 1897) as a blueprint, making Camera Obscura the “negative” of the l­ater moralizing Tolstoy, and that “the novel does not so much discredit [Horn/]Rex’s aesthetic princi­ples as it does put them to work,” then it is also impor­tant to note that the qualities of a “bad” artist like Horn/Rex had recently been attributed by Georgy Ivanov to Nabokov himself: clichéd “borrowing,” hyperreal “imitativeness,” erotic or horrific “shockingness,” and verbal or narrative “engagingness.”80 Nabokov gifts Horn the poisoned chalice of his own entrepreneurial abilities. Nabokov knew, as much from Pushkin as from the late Tolstoy, that in working with cinematic culture he was, in terms of cultural capital, playing a dangerous game, skirting the edge of producing “best-­selling” work like Weimar exports Vicki Baum and Stefan Zweig or l­ ater his fellow émigré Ayn Rand (see chapter 4). Yet it was a game that he felt obliged, as an exile with transnational ambitions, to play.

Khodasevich on “Cinematized” Culture In 1934, the poet Khodasevich, literary critic for the Paris-­based Rus­sian émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie (The Re­nais­sance) and author of “On the Cinema” (1926), reviewed Camera Obscura. Countering several years’ worth of critical reactions to the novel, Khodasevich distanced himself from attacks on the apparent superficiality of Nabokov’s novel. Khodasevich downplays the importance of finding a “cinematized” [sinematografizirovannyi] style in Nabokov’s work.81 On the one hand, Khodasevich is defending Nabokov against the rival



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critic Georgy Adamovich’s charge that the novel is “superlative cinema but fairly weak lit­er­a­ture.”82 On the other hand, Khodasevich is pointing out that discussions of Nabokov’s “cinematic” style tell us less than they appear to.83 Essentially, a purely stylistic analy­sis is ahistorical, omitting the temporal and geographic coordinates necessary to a contextual understanding of Nabokov’s art of exile. The first step in Khodasevich’s analy­sis is to recognize how deeply this novel is penetrated by film: “Cinema governs by no means only the author’s literary style but also the fate of the characters. It not only suggests some device or other to the author but also suggests actions to the characters. . . . ​In a word, in Sirin’s novel the cinema acts as the most impor­tant animating force, at times remaining ­behind the scenes, like a tragic Fate, at ­others appearing directly onstage as a character. From the very first pages the reader enters the world of the cinema.”84 In other words, the novel is not “cinematic” but “cinematized,” shifting the agency from Nabokov to the subject m ­ atter itself. Radically, the ­whole way of life depicted in the novel is itself pervaded by the cinema: “By no means does Sirin depict regular life with the devices of the cinema, [but] rather he shows how cinema, bursting in, subjugates life to its tempo and style, marks it with its own stamp, and, so to speak, cinematizes [sinematografiruet] it. . . . ​It is not the style of the novel that is penetrated and poisoned by the cinema, but the style of the very life depicted in the novel. This difference is enormous and most essential for an understanding of Sirin’s new book.”85 For Khodasevich, Nabokov’s novel should be read as contributing to the cinema debates begun in the 1920s on the role of the cinema in con­ temporary life: “Sirin in his literary devices imitates (in this case it is better to say ‘follows’ for t­ here can be no talk of real imitation) the cinema only insofar as it is imitated and followed by modern life itself, suffused with the spirit of this pseudo-­art [lzheiskusstvo] as it has never been suffused with any real art. It is this suffusion of life with the cinema that is the true subject of Sirin’s novel, in which the story of Magda and Kretschmar serves only as an example, a sample, or a private instance illustrating the general situation.”86 In the 1920s, ­these debates had engaged with the question of cinema’s status as art, its relation to Eu­ro­pean social conditions and l­abor practices, the purported Americanization of Eu­ro­pean popu­lar culture, and the stakes of cinema’s increasing domination for lit­er­a­ture and art in general. In his contribution, Khodasevich had argued that the cinema “had no relation to art whatsoever” and had relegated it, with sport, to the category of entertainment, rest, and leisure as an occupation for t­ hose exhausted by modern ­labor and urban living. H ­ ere the cinema appears as a Tolstoyan “pseudo-­art [lit. false art]” that is distinguished above all by its permeation of all aspects of daily life. The category of the

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fake—­the disguise, false name, assumed identity—is pervasive in this cinematic culture, as Ivanov’s 1930 attack on Nabokov as a film impostor and fake count had shown.87 In his review of Camera Obscura, Khodasevich praised Nabokov’s depiction of the cinematic culture of con­temporary Eu­ro­pean life. Nabokov’s novel was not a mass cultural stylization of interwar Germany, but a depiction of life stylized ­under the aegis of a newly dominant mass culture. Thus the imagery, the language, and—in particular—­the characters’ self-­fashioning (as Khodasevich put it, “both the style and the spirit of cinematic existence”) proceeded from the cinema and its promotional vehicles in visual and print culture (newspapers, posters, postcards, cinema palaces, Lichtreklamen, magazines).88 As we have seen, even Nabokov’s first novel appeared in German translation with the picture of a film star on the front cover. In this sense, the presence of the cinema in the novel is overdetermined. It is pre­sent as theme, argument, promotion, reception, adaptation, and (vitally) catalyst to translation. It is this last, transnational role that Khodasevich omits in his review. By placing Nabokov’s novel back among the discursive commonplaces of the cinema debates, Khodasevich argues for its intellectual depth and significance: “Sirin’s ‘cinematized’ novel is in essence very serious. It touches on a theme that has become fateful for us all: the theme of the terrifying danger hanging over our entire culture, distorted and blinded by forces, among which the cinema, of course, is far from the strongest, but is perhaps the most characteristic and expressive. . . . ​Again and again it is about the death threatening our ­whole culture.”89 By “our ­whole culture,” Khodasevich means the literary culture of Rus­sia that, according to some émigrés, had been preserved by them in exile.90 The closure of émigré publishing outlets in the West, and the shrinking readership for Rus­sian émigré lit­er­a­ture (about which Khodasevich complained many times), presaged an ultimate erasure of the Rus­sian literary tradition in the age of mass culture and po­liti­cal tyranny. Therefore the “general situation” illuminated by the story of Magda, Kretschmar, and Horn is that of the Rus­sian émigrés themselves. By 1934, when Khodasevich was writing, Germany was no longer the Weimar Republic, but the Third Reich, a year into Hitler’s reign. In his talk of the “death” of this culture, Khodasevich is therefore not only alluding to aesthetic and philosophical considerations, as the younger writer Vladimir Weidlé did, but also alluding to the increasing material and physical dangers posed to Rus­sian and Russian-­Jewish émigrés by militarism (and paramilitarism) in the 1930s.91 Given the changes both to the émigré community and to the cinema itself since the mid-1920s, Camera Obscura is impor­tant for its concomitant exposure of the dangers, by the 1930s, to Rus­sian high culture in exile. Against a critical per-



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ception of Camera Obscura as a light, throwaway book—­a mere novelized screenplay—­Khodasevich makes a claim for its significance as a sociocultural commentary on the Rus­sian emigration’s place in con­temporary postwar Eu­ ro­pean culture.92 Certainly, Nabokov was aware of the dangers to Rus­sian émigrés—at the time of Khodasevich’s review, he was at work on Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn’, 1935–1936), which can be seen as his reflection on the suffering of the exiled artist (kazn’ as both execution and torment).93 Yet Nabokov did not agree with ­those émigrés for whom mutation and adaptation w ­ ere viewed as capitulation, a voluntary degradation of Rus­sian culture. For Nabokov, Rus­sian literary culture had always been international, and engagement with Western realia and artistic traditions was a natu­ral metamorphosis for his Rus­sian writing.94 As we have seen in Levinson’s pre­sen­ta­tion of Nabokov’s cosmopolitanism (a strategy adapted by Struve and examined below), this was essential to his transnational identity as an exiled writer. Although in the most immediate sense, the novel is about the cinematic culture of Weimar Berlin, given the connections to the cinema debates, it is also about the interwar period in general, expanding beyond Berlin to the entire world of the Rus­sian emigration. That is to say, Weimar Berlin—­and by implication Paris and the other Eu­ro­pean metropolises where Khodasevich’s readership was based—is ­shaped with all its economic, aesthetic, social, and ethical forms in response to the newly dominant cultural formation of the cinema. The subject of the novel is nothing less than what Nabokov would call “the old Eu­rope picture palace” in his 1943 story “The Assistant Producer.” To assume the primacy of Nabokov’s ethical intentions, as Khodasevich does, is to downplay the multiplicity of intended audiences for the novel. Although Kretschmar can be profitably read as a parody of the film theory of the 1920s, it is an overly narrow reading of Nabokov’s intentions to see in the novel an argument against the cinema as art. ­Either deliberately (he was by 1934 familiar with Nabokov’s works and intentions) or inadvertently, blinded by a focus on the danger posed to the Rus­sian literary émigrés by the cinema, Khodasevich misleads us when he purports to read Nabokov’s novel as aimed exclusively at a Rus­sian émigré readership. Khodasevich may not have been aware of the translation history of Nabokov’s ­earlier novels. In fact, the novel aimed from the first at translation. Unbeknownst to Khodasevich, it would soon be translated into French and then (via German) En­glish, before being reworked and retranslated by Nabokov himself as Laughter in the Dark. Khodasevich’s blind spot in an other­wise perspicacious review is the extent to which Nabokov was at work within mass culture: not just through his parody of the topic of cinema, or the “cinematic” style, but in his entrepreneurial

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commercial dealings with foreign publishers and production companies in order to reach an international market ­either in translation or in the revised form of a screenplay. ­After all, the first book edition of the Rus­sian Kamera obskura specified on its copyright page: “All rights reserved, especially translation and film adaptation.”95 Khodasevich is unwittingly nearer the mark when he equates Nabokov’s “daring [derzostʹ]” in his scandalously inventive prose to Horn’s outrageous torture of Kretschmar, while also calling Horn “the true spirit of cinema, a screen demon, turning God’s creation on-­screen into parody and caricature.”96 This comparison between Nabokov and Horn raises the question of Nabokov’s complicity in the cinematic culture that he parodies. In a key phrase excised from the British and American versions (restored in square brackets below), Magda’s fate is said to be ruled “by a cinematic genius”: For the rest, Magda had only a very vague idea of what she ­really wanted. She had visions of herself as a film star [filʹmovoi divy] in the dim ­future. [A gentleman in a fancy coat with a cat-­fur collar helped her into a lacquered automobile. She bought a flowing, downright effervescent dress which shone and streamed in the shop win­dow of a fairy-­tale store. To sit naked for hours on end without even being offered the portraits painted of you was a fairly dull lot in life. She did not notice that in a certain sense the genius of her fate was a cinematic genius (genii kinematograficheskii).]97 Akin to the omission of Cheepy in the American version, this absence in the British version leaves a gaping hole. This passage on the romance of consumption, linking cinematic culture to the broader complex of mass culture, is crucial to Nabokov’s historically situated culture theory. Only the French Chambre obscure (1934) retained this passage, with its key phrase “the genius of her fate was a cinematic genius”—­“l’esprit mystérieux qui présidait à sa destinée avait quelque chose de cinématographique.”98 If “the mysterious spirit that presided over her destiny had something of the cinematic” does not quite hit the spot like “cinematic genius,” Doussia (Ida Mikhailovna) Ergaz’s translation also avoids the connotation of an inspired artistic talent. But it is this turn, which includes what it rejects, that Nabokov’s phrase pulls off. While Khodasevich locates this force with Horn, “the true spirit of cinema, a screen demon,” I am not so sure that the spirit does not belong to the Nabokov of the late 1920s, embedded in Weimar cinematic culture.99 The American movie industry had unfathomable resources at its disposal, and even Eu­ro­pean film concerns had bottomless pockets compared to a publisher of lit­er­a­ture, let alone the struggling émigré publishers surviving without state patronage. Treating the cinema provided a transnational commodity, attractive to potential publishers of translated foreign fiction. Furthermore,



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the hope of a screen adaptation held out the promise of incomparable rewards. The story of Nabokov’s maneuvering among multiple markets—­one that, despite financial successes, left him deeply dissatisfied, yet determined to persevere with himself as translator—is crucial to understanding his engagement with the cinema. In fact, to trace the story of Nabokov’s strategic involvement with the promotional apparatus of the international movie industry is to reconstruct a practical answer to the paradox of exile.

French Film Theory: Struve and “Les écrivains et l’époque” While putting the finishing touches to the Rus­sian novel Kamera obskura in May 1931, Nabokov paused to compose his first French essay. Responding to his friend Struve’s invitation to produce an opinion piece for Le mois, Nabokov delivered an essay titled “Les écrivains et l’époque” (“Writers and the Age”). Nabokov’s reflections on fiction and the con­temporary moment opens with an extended discussion of the cinema: I try sometimes to suppose [m’imaginer] the idea that twenty-­first-­century man w ­ ill have of our epoch. It would seem that we have this advantage over our ancestors, that our technology has found certain means for the more or less permanent conservation of time. ­People like to say to themselves [On aime à se dire] that the most impersonal writer, making the best pos­si­ble portrait of his ­century, cannot tell us as much as the ­little gray gleam of an old-­fashioned [suranné] film. Wrong. Con­temporary cinematographic methods which seem to our eyes to give a perfectly exact image of life w ­ ill prob­ably be so dif­fer­ent from the methods used by our great-­g reat-­nephews that the impression that they ­will give of the movement of our era (the wan quivering of a street corner swarming with vehicles forever vanished) w ­ ill be rendered false by the very style of the photography, by that antiquated [vieillot] and awkward air that engravings showing the events of a past c­ entury have for our eyes. In other words, our descendants ­will not have a direct sensation of real­ity. Man w ­ ill never be the master of time—­but how curious it would be to be able at least to stop it to examine at leisure the nuance that escapes us, the ray that’s out of place, that shade whose ungraspable velvet ­isn’t made for our touch.100 We recognize that Nabokov’s concern in this piece for the role of lit­er­a­ture in shaping how the pre­sent w ­ ill be perceived and categorized by the f­uture

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directly recalls his Rus­sian writing on the f­ uture historian and the f­ uture recollection in “On Generalities” and “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia.” At the same time, it reworks his reflections on media history in the Rus­sian poem “Tolstoy,” which compared “ancient films” and the mnemonic power of lit­er­at­ ure, that first and greatest recording medium. Now for a French audience, Nabokov demonstrates his ability to grapple not only with the visual media that seem to define the pre­sent but with the discursive commonplaces surrounding their impact on a historical understanding of the postwar period. Notably, Nabokov includes himself and his Rus­sian compatriots within a general Eu­ro­pean discourse on the cinema: on aime à se dire could also be translated as “we like to tell ourselves.” By 1931, Nabokov was able to show a familiarity with a cinema that already possessed its own history. At the same time, he could imagine a f­ uture technological development—­ sound had recently arrived, and color was already being experimented with. From his own childhood memories of film of the 1910s, he was able, quite accurately, to predict that the films of the 1930s would l­ater strike viewers by what is precisely their mediated and indirect access to recorded real­ity. In “Les écrivains et l’époque,” Nabokov, while showing himself attuned to the cinema in its development, and sympathetic to the desire to capture a precious but fleeting pre­sent, nonetheless foregrounds the limitations of an overrated or over­burdened art form. This seems to bring him close to Khodasevich’s and Pavel Muratov’s very qualified admiration for the cinema. Yet Nabokov’s approach ­here, as in the Rus­sian work of the 1920s, is closest above all to that of Levinson, whose perspective was always historical and comparative, rather than absolute. As with nineteenth-­century engravings, it is the inherent dynamism of technological pro­gress that w ­ ill render the pre­sent’s sufficiency inad101 equate to f­ uture viewers. Implicit e­ arlier in the “Tolstoy” poem was the privileging of fiction over film or phonograph. Similarly, in “Les écrivains et l’époque,” the f­ uture historian, it is implied, would do best to turn to lit­er­at­ure in order to picture (s’imaginer) the 1930s. The key difference ­here is that instead of Tolstoy’s novels of the past, it is Nabokov’s fiction of the pre­sent that fulfills the function of recording device, capturing, even for con­temporary readers, the nuances that other­wise escape us. Nabokov’s intent ­here, making use of Struve’s invitation, is to appeal directly to a French readership. Following Levinson’s February 1930 review of The Luzhin Defense, Nabokov had signed a contract with the French publisher Fayard. Now he was ­eager to see his latest novels in French: the novella The Eye (Sogliadatai, 1930), the novel Glory, or, above all, the novel he was just completing, Kamera obskura. This becomes clearest when we realize that Nabokov’s essay is immediately



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followed in the pages of Le mois by Struve’s “portrait” of Nabokov titled “L’amoureux de la vie” (“The Lover of Life”).102 In “The Lover of Life,” twinned as it was with “Writers and the Age” and its treatment of the cinema, the reader is struck by Struve’s focus on Nabokov’s sense of sight. Building on his analy­sis of Nabokov’s latest novella, Struve praises Nabokov’s vision: “For Sirin is above all e­ ager to see, just like the hero of his novella The Eye. . . . ​In ­these pathological subjects, ­behind ­these hideous characters, one feels the joy, the physical, sensual delectation that Sirin experiences at the sight and touch of the t­ hings of this world. . . . ​One might say that he has a hypertrophied sense of sight, that he looks at the world with a magnifying glass in hand.”103 In this Struve follows Rus­sian critics of the 1920s, who had been impressed, if a l­ittle disconcerted, by Nabokov’s sharp-­sighted and unrelenting details, verging on the excessive, even tasteless. As Nabokov himself implies in “Writers and the Age,” this promotion of perspicacity sets Nabokov’s optical instrument up to rival the movie camera. “The Lover of Life” was in fact the second piece in recent months that Struve had published in Le mois on Nabokov. In April 1931 Struve wrote a review essay boosting Nabokov’s unique brand of fiction: “In opposition to the roman-­fleuve of the c19th and the impressionist novel of the c20th, Sirin offers the novel of artifice, the vanis­hing act novel [le roman escamotage].” In his essay titled “Les ‘romans-­escamotages’ de V. Sirine” (“Vladimir Sirin’s Vanis­hing Act Novels”), Struve recapitulated his recent Rus­sian article “The Art of Sirin” (“Tvorchestvo Sirina,” 1930), adjusting it for a French audience.104 The piece is particularly revealing for his comparisons to Rus­sian and French authors: Lit­er­a­ture can ­either reproduce or re-­create life, or it can on the contrary detach itself from it and flee it. The Rus­sian novel has always belonged to the first genre. With Sirin it is neither the one nor the other: he does not flee life, but he never reproduces or re-­creates it like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. He proclaims the absolute sovereignty of the writer, his equality with life, his right to create on a plane parallel to real­ity. . . . ​One can find an analogy with this “creative freedom” in the work of only one con­ temporary: Jean Giraudoux. . . . ​Sirin is completely lacking that love of man that Nikolai Berdiaev, the well-­known Rus­sian phi­los­o­pher, holds as the defining trait of Rus­sian lit­er­at­ure (according to Berdiaev, it is also lacking in Gogol) and that creates invisible links of sympathy between the author and his characters. A complete artistic detachment characterizes his manner.105 Struve is careful to distance Nabokov from the classical Rus­sian novel but teases with a reference to Gogol and intrigues with a reference to the popu­lar French

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novelist and playwright Giraudoux. In a letter before the article was published, Nabokov thanked him for “the promised article in Mois about moi.”106 In “The Lover of Life” portrait two months ­later, Struve developed this international literary context. Note again the movement away from the classical novel, ­toward an ­earlier, less familiar Rus­sian precursor who nonetheless renders Nabokov approachable to the French reader: ­ here is nothing lax, unnecessary or shapeless in the construction of his T novels, not a stone out of place in the edifices capriciously but skillfully built by an architect with a supreme sense of mea­sure. In this Sirin perhaps departs from the general line of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture. Foreign to him are the “excesses” of Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy’s slightly loose and overgrown design, his broad and indistinct strokes. For Sirin lacks that “holy zeal” so characteristic of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and thought: his avid interest in life renders him, like one of his characters, invulnerable. He closely approaches the Rus­sian writer who was perhaps the most perfect and the least appreciated in Eu­rope, with only several exceptions: Alexander Pushkin, whose phrasing Mérimée found “utterly French.” Like Pushkin, Sirin has a concern, par­tic­ul­ ar to the French, for form, for mea­ sure, that love for order.107 Struve turns what had been a criticism in Rus­sian reviews—­Nabokov’s supposed non-­Russianness, the accusation that his works read like translations from German or French—­into an advantage, Nabokov’s native cosmopolitanism making him a perfect candidate for translation. This approach was to be successfully used for a variety of markets in the 1930s. As befits a “portrait,” Struve also gives t­hese comparisons a biographical basis. The sketch opens: “Tall, slim, a haughty but candid expression, always nonchalantly dressed, but always with a meticulousness and elegance that are typically En­glish, a lover of sport (in Berlin where he lives now he gives lessons in boxing and tennis), Vladimir Nabokov Sirin has more the manner of an En­glishman than a Rus­sian.” Nabokov’s Anglophilia was also noted when he eventually visited Paris in 1932.108 Struve consistently draws comparisons between Nabokov’s biography and his oeuvre. This can take the form initially of a curious contrast: “It is a bizarre and paradoxical ­thing: this young man in good health, well balanced, sporty, bursting with joie de vivre, likes to portray perverted ­people, sickly, even pathological.”109 It is then developed into a motivating force: “His extraliterary occupations have left a vis­i­ble trace in his work. . . . ​One finds in Sirin the entomologist’s sense of color and clarity of vision; the tennis player’s light and elegant precision of style.”110 In the face of Nabokov’s own thoroughgoing refusals to do so, Struve’s portrait (follow-



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ing and amplifying Levinson) set a trend, continued in the 1930s, for using Nabokov’s background and experiences to sell his fiction. This tacit division of ­labor with his promoters, agents, and advocates left Nabokov ­free to produce fiction that vaunts its own impersonality. As Struve puts it, somewhat tongue in cheek, and asking to be read perversely, “Il ne se dénude jamais devant le lecteur”—­“He never bares himself to the reader.”111

Chambre Obscure Moving between Berlin, Paris, and London, the story of the French and British translations and the negotiations for their transformation into a screenplay illuminates Nabokov’s entrepreneurial engagement with cinema—­what I term cinema praxis. In the mid-1930s, Nabokov complained graphically to his American agent about the deficiencies of existing En­glish and French translations of his novels. Describing the two translations examined in this chapter (Camera Obscura and Chambre obscure), he lamented with grim humor, “ ‘Camera Obscura’ which, in Rus­sian, was meant as an elaborate parody, lies limp and lifeless in John Long’s and Grasset’s torture-­houses.”112 When read in the context of his attempts at an American c­ areer in the mid-1930s, this remark was clearly designed to bolster his argument that new, American translations w ­ ere worthwhile and would meet with more success than his somewhat lackluster sales in Eu­rope. ­After all, the letter concludes, “I feel sure, however, that with your help, sympathy, and wonderful understanding, I ­shall find in Amer­i­ca at last the readers who, I know, are awaiting me ­there.”113 But the often-­quoted remark has led to the conflation of Nabokov’s reactions to the French and British translations. The first translation of the Rus­sian novel Kamera obskura was into French ­under the title Chambre obscure. It has gone unremarked that the French translation of Camera Obscura, made by the Russian-­French translator Doussia Ergaz, is faithful to the Rus­sian in a way that the British translation by Winifred Ray (or “Roy” as she is listed on the book jacket) is not.114 Nabokov made personal contact with Ergaz (as he had done with Denis Roche, translator of La course du fou), in a way he had been unable to do with Ray for Camera Obscura.115 Ergaz’s version on occasion elaborates, but it does not cut entire scenes or sentences as the British translation would do. Although one can argue about its stylistic merits (an editor of the French collected works calls Ergaz’s translation “extremely awkward”), her translation is impressively faithful to the original Rus­sian as serialized in Sovremennye zapiski.116 The French translation Chambre obscure appeared with the French publisher Grasset in 1934 and

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therefore preceded the British Camera Obscura by a year, and was still being used in the late 1930s by his American agent in negotiations with publishers.117 Although vociferously opposed to the British version from the start, his opinion of the French version had been, u ­ ntil the letter to Amer­i­ca, quite complimentary. In February 1935, following the appearance of the French edition Chambre obscure, Nabokov wrote to Bernard Grasset, “I must compliment you on the elegant cover of the book as well as on the admirable translation of Madame Ergaz.”118 Supreme tact, perhaps, but it was not contradicted by his statements in private. In August 1934 he had written to his m ­ other, “I have received in manuscript form a vile translation of Camera into En­glish, but as for the French I can rest easy.”119 In January 1935 he confessed the same sentiments to the American agent Altagracia de Jannelli (“In fact none of my last novels has been adequately translated yet except for Camera Obscura”) and in May 1935 to his f­ uture British publisher, Hutchinson, “I am sending you a copy of the very precise French version of my novel ‘Camera Obscura.’ ”120 In general, Nabokov’s relations with his French publishers during t­ hese years ­were excellent, leading him to write to his wife ­after meeting with Fayard (publisher of La course du fou) and Grasset (Chambre obscure), “I’m absolutely confident that my c­ areer ­will thrive ­here.”121 By the time he visited Paris in October 1932, Nabokov had a contract in hand with Bernard Grasset for a French translation—­that is, even before the Rus­sian original Kamera obskura had completed its serial publication in Paris in Sovremennye zapiski. While in Paris, Nabokov registered his surprise in chess-­style annotations to the news from an editor at Grasset that “they bought Camera [Obscura] sight unseen or, to be more precise, they bought it thanks to the reports of Nemirovsky (!), Bryanchaninov (??) and Ergaz.”122 In other words, the intervention of French-­speaking Rus­sian émigrés who had read Kamera obskura in Rus­sian was the deciding f­actor in its translation into French. Thus the Rus­sian émigré community in Paris continued to support, as had Levinson, the rise of this Berlin-­based novelist. ­These readers included Irène Némirovsky (Irina Lʹvovna Nemirovskaia), a Rus­sian émigré novelist and published author with Grasset. Intriguingly, Némirovsky herself had a strong connection to the cinema. Her first major success, David Golder, had been adapted for the screen and made into one of the first French sound films in 1931.123 Her publisher Bernard Grasset, in par­tic­u­lar, worked to strategize the promotion of Nabokov’s work, looking for ways to maximize the author’s exposure and profit. Two months before the French book’s publication in August 1934, Grasset wrote to Nabokov that he had being trying to get Chambre obscure serialized “in journals and weeklies.”124 As we now know, this strategy had worked won­ders for Némirovsky, whose publications in monthlies and the new weeklies earned her far more than her book



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publications—so much so that she was able, through writing alone, to outearn her husband, the bank director Michel Epstein.125 In the end, Grasset did not meet with success, b­ ecause, as he said to Nabokov, the novel was “for some too ‘literary’ and for ­others ‘too risqué’ [hardi] for their readership.”126 ­These contrasting objections would be repeated, with variations, in the American context. Nonetheless, the novel clearly had potential in another sphere—­screen adaptations. In his correspondence with Grasset, Nabokov showed himself well acquainted with the business side of motion pictures, writing, “The way business is negotiated in the cinema world is surely familiar to you: one must make a deal [traiter] at that very instant or not at all.”127 Nabokov’s and Grasset’s letters of 1934 show their negotiations over percentages, settling on 10 ­percent of the rights payment to Grasset if Nabokov himself finds a buyer for the film option, rising to 30 ­percent if they find one themselves.128 The novel had at least three companies interested, the most significant of which (Capitol Film) we ­will examine below. Before that possibility in London emerged, a letter from Paris, dated March 7, 1935, informed Nabokov that t­here was initial French interest. His Eu­ro­pean literary agent, the fellow émigré Marc Slonim, head of the Eu­ro­pean Writers Bureau, wrote to update him: “Film: This is, as you know, a drawn-­out affair. Just yesterday in fact I managed to interest a Franco-­British trust, and I handed over Camera Obscura to their representative for screenplays. Now it is essential for me to know with precisely which En­ glish film companies you have held talks.”129 Slonim likely handed over the French translation, which had been published in August 1934 (the British version was not released u ­ ntil January 1936). In fact, on the verso of this letter are Nabokov’s handwritten notes of his reply, which indicate that yet another potential buyer had been found: “The other day [the film agent and publisher Lev] Chertok wrote to me. He is asking for the film rights to Camera Obscura. I directed him to you.”130 Although neither of t­ hese probes led to a contract, it is clear (as the correspondence with Grasset had suggested) that Nabokov himself was directly involved in facilitating screen adaptations of his work, just as he was in soliciting translations into other languages. Furthermore, Slonim’s letter shows that not only Nabokov but also his agent saw an equivalence between translations and film adaptations as outlets for his fiction. Slonim’s letter summarizing Nabokov’s affairs lists seven categories, of which the first six are headed “1. France, 2. Italy, 3. Hungary, 4. Norway and Denmark, 5. Poland, 6. Film.”131 This snapshot of the international activities of just one of Nabokov’s agents in mid-1935 gives a sense of the scale of Nabokov’s profile, even leaving aside his activities in Britain (where his agent in London had negotiated a contract for two novels the previous year)

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and the United States (where his agent in New York was si­mul­ta­neously shopping his fiction to multiple publishers). Considerable effort was expended on building Nabokov’s profile in order to make him fit the cosmopolitan, Eu­ro­ pean image sketched for him by Levinson’s and Struve’s French profiles.132 As we see below, Nabokov’s next trip to Paris in 1937 saw him meeting with other émigrés connected to the Franco-­Russian movie industry, this time including his own new proj­ects and pos­si­ble film treatments. Although Nabokov’s ­future eventually lay in En­glish, not French, both the French and Rus­sian émigré literary worlds of Paris ­were a significant source of support during the transitional years of the mid-1930s.

Klement and Camera Obscura In the mid-1930s, Nabokov’s most realistic hope lay in Britain, the home of his tireless promoter Struve, to whom he wrote in early 1933, “My oldest dream is to be published in En­glish. Could you not arrange something in this sense or give advice?”133 London was also home to another of Nabokov’s literary agents, Otto Klement, who had succeeded in selling British translation rights to the Rus­sian original Kamera obskura and his new novel Despair (Otchaianie, 1934).134 It has gone unnoted that the intermediaries in the first English-­language possibilities for translations and screen adaptations of his novels ­were not British at all. Klement, an agent and movie producer, was in fact one of three Weimar émigrés who acted as intermediaries in the story of Kamera obskura’s path to an En­glish translation and mooted, but never realized, film adaptation; the other two w ­ ere the film producer Max Schach and the actor Fritz Kortner. All Weimar émigrés, they w ­ ere themselves imbricated with a Eu­ro­pean culture industry, warped but not broken by the ascent of Hitler. Klement’s role in the publication of Camera Obscura is, from a literary point of view, somewhat inglorious. Nabokov, who was attempting to break into the Anglophone market for translations while si­mul­ta­neously working on original English-­language memoirs of his childhood, understandably aimed to tightly control what was released in En­glish ­under his name. As is well known, the British version Camera Obscura not only made editorial changes to the Rus­sian text but did not meet with his approval aesthetically; furthermore, the John Long imprint of Hutchinson did not place him before the most receptive readership (“like a rhinoceros in a world of humming birds” was Nabokov’s description).135 Scholars have hypothesized that Winifred Ray, the British translator of Camera Obscura, must have worked from a French version, as she did not know Rus­sian. This would explain the looseness of which Nabokov complained. But



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we know that the French text does not contain any of the deviations to be found in the British version and that, besides French, Ray also worked as a translator from German. Furthermore, in a letter to his ­mother, Nabokov speaks of a trio of translators: “Kamera obskura ­will appear in En­glish, although my En­glish translators have caused me such irritation, tormented me with such dev­ilish torments (three ­people translated Kamera!) that I ­will just translate Otchaianie [Despair] myself.”136 In fact, it is clear from Nabokov’s correspondence that Ray’s job was to improve on an En­glish version originally supplied by Klement. The evidence strongly suggests that this first En­glish version was in turn based on a German draft translation of Kamera obskura. Nabokov was connected with the agent Klement in 1933 (the year Klement left Berlin for exile in London) by Yakov Frumkin, a friend of Nabokov’s late ­father. Nabokov and Klement never met, but they began a correspondence that led to Klement, by July 1934, selling the translation rights for two recent novels, Kamera obskura and Otchaianie, to the London publisher Hutchinson. At some point ­later in 1934, Klement showed Nabokov a draft translation, which Nabokov criticized but did not extensively revise. By January 1935, however, Nabokov still did not know the identity of the publisher. In a previously untranslated German letter from Nabokov to Klement (likely typed and edited for him by his wife, Vera, whose German was far more competent), Nabokov complains bitterly, if politely, to Klement that he has not respected their original agreement. This letter, of January  1935, is the earliest evidence we have of the genesis of Camera Obscura’s En­glish translation: I . . . ​find it incomprehensible that you dispute the clause in the contract regarding the submission of the translation for my approval. . . . ​­After the experience that I have had with the translations of my works in vari­ ous countries in recent years, I unfortunately cannot sign a contract that does not assure me control over the execution of the translation. You write that the new translation is based on my corrections. This is false, ­because it would have gone too far if I had been required to improve the original, very inadequate translation. I only highlighted a few inconsistencies, e­ tc., in order to make it clear to you how far this translation deviates from the Rus­sian text. You can see that I am not engaging in chicanery on this issue, but rather that I am very accommodating from the fact that I had no objection to the two translators you offered me (Struve and Gubsky). It is r­ eally not my fault if, instead of turning to one of ­these translators, your publisher had someone ­else do the translation. The condition disputed by you is always observed by my other publishers, among whom I would like to mention Fayard and

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Grasset. In any case, I would rather forgo Camera Obscura, or any other work of mine, appearing in E ­ ngland at all than allow it to be published in a translation that I have not authorized.137 Nabokov’s frustration is palpable, not only with the lack of control but with the lack of communication. Still resident in Berlin, he was conducting business by mail across Eu­rope and the United States, with the attendant miscues and undelivered letters.138 For his part, Nabokov was often on the move, and slow to reply to mail, while Klement himself moved addresses in London and failed to reply to this or the following two letters from Nabokov. Nabokov’s letters to Klement came back “Gone away,” leading him to complain to his publisher: “Mr. Klement has for months left all my letters without reply. Possibly the man is dead.”139 In April 1935, when he received no reply to his January letter to Klement (or its follow-up in February), Nabokov turned to Hutchinson to ask for a copy of the new translation: “A condition I particularly insisted upon when dealing with Mr. Klement was that the En­glish translation should be full and exact and that it should be, when ready, submitted to me for approval.”140 Nabokov received no reply and had to follow up three weeks ­later: “I begin to doubt ­whether you are ­after all the firm which bought from Mr. Klement the En­ glish publishing rights of my novel ‘Camera Obscura.’ ”141 In May 1935, when Nabokov fi­nally heard back from Hutchinson, he was suddenly informed that the translation was about to be typeset. His reply is well known and refers, crucially, to the original translation Klement had shown him (not the newly prepared one by Hutchinson): From the beginning I have been trying to obtain an exact, complete and correct translation. I won­der ­whether Mr. Klement informed you of the defects I found in the translation he sent me. It was loose, shapeless, sloppy, full of blunders and gaps, lacking vigour and spring, and plumped down in such dull, flat En­glish that I could not read it to the end; all of which is rather hard on an author who aims in his work at absolute precision, takes the utmost trou­ble to attain it, and then finds the translator calmly undoing ­every blessed phrase. Please believe me that had the translation been in the least acceptable I would have passed it. . . . ​So I hope that it has now been thoroughly improved and that it ­will not give rise to any objections of the above kind.142 At the end of May, Nabokov asked to see the new, hopefully improved, Hutchinson version: “The best t­ hing would be if you could send me for a ­couple of days only one or two chapters of the revised version.”143



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Three weeks l­ater, in an archival letter not included in the published Selected Letters, Nabokov gives up the right to amend the translation, blaming the fact that it originated from a German translation: I appreciate the gallant attempt to improve the translation. Founded as it is on a rough and unsatisfactory German version, ­there is something radically wrong about it, so that it hardly can ever be raised to the required level by any amount of revising, however careful. It is a ­great pity that I was not in touch with you before for then this mess would have been avoided. I ­shall not discuss the vari­ous blunders discovered in the course of a swift perusal, since I have de­cided to put up with them and have the book published as it is—if you think it fit for publication in its pre­sent condition.144 It therefore seems most likely that an original En­glish version was made (translator 2) from a German draft (translator 1), which was then reworked by Winifred Ray (translator 3). It is probable that Klement himself commissioned the German draft through his contacts, in order to more easily create a first En­glish translation to pitch to publishers upon his arrival in London. Although Nabokov mentions Struve and Nikolai Gubsky as two translators suggested by Klement, it is clear from ­later correspondence that neither was involved in the pro­cess and that neither should be considered one of the trio of translators. In 1935, Nabokov told Struve that he had wanted him as translator but ­there had been a “qui pro quo.”145 In 1937 in Paris, Gubsky informed Nabokov that he had attempted to help by sending long letters about the translation through Klement, which Nabokov did not receive.146 Subsequently, Nabokov did suggest both of them to John Long as potential collaborators in revising his own translation of Despair.147 Despite Nabokov’s obvious distress at the publication of an unsatisfactory translation—­and the fact that Klement may well bear more responsibility for the British translation than previously thought—in the larger view, Klement’s connections to other Weimar film professionals may have helped Nabokov’s ­career in exile. Like Robert Horn, Nabokov aimed for exposure across a variety of languages and media, and he personally negotiated to achieve this. He even complained to Klement about what he perceived as the restriction of this vital activity during the two years of their acquaintance. Nabokov’s use of the language of German commerce (proposals, business, deals, f­ree hand) highlights his cinema praxis: “I have declined all proposals [Vorschläge] from other agencies and missed several opportunities to establish business relationships [Geschäftsverbindungen]; during the same period, I have already made vari­ous deals [Abschlüsse] in other countries where I have had a ­free hand.”148

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Though Klement’s silence in early 1935 led Nabokov to won­der if he was dead, Klement in fact was hard at work on another venture, a film production com­pany. Garrett-­Klement Pictures (it was at this address that Nabokov’s letters fi­nally reached Klement ­later that year) may have indirectly benefited Nabokov by attracting the attention of other Weimar film exiles. Much like Nabokov, Klement courted an international audience. In the film press in July 1935, his com­pany proclaimed—in language that would make Valentinov proud—­its intention to produce blockbusters that “­will feature world-­famous stars, ­either En­glish, American or Continental, and w ­ ill be directed by well-­ known producers for a world market.”149 And, indeed, Klement’s com­pany went on to make two films in 1936, one starring the Rus­sian émigré actress Anna Sten, on loan from Hollywood, and the other Cary Grant. Both ­were directed by directors with German connections: the émigré Eugene Frenke (Sten’s husband) and Alfred Zeisler. Crucially, ­these ­were the only films completed of the planned six. Garrett-­Klement Pictures, floating on the b­ ubble of international investment in British film in 1935, fell victim in 1937 to the subsequent collapse.150 Nabokov was a minor, and nearly a major, beneficiary of the British film industry’s brief, remarkable rise in the mid-1930s. Even before hearing back from Hutchinson, Nabokov was contacted by the A. M. Heath agency with news that a production com­pany wanted to purchase a “thirty day option” on a screen adaptation of Kamera obskura, for which they would pay £25 now and £600 (or even £700) if they purchased the rights. Nabokov replied the very next day with both a tele­g ram and an air mail letter accepting the option, but he haggled over the price: “To be quite frank the sum of £600–700 which you think your clients might pay in case they take up their options seems to me a bit low and I would do with another hundred pounds or so.”151 In the end, the contract was forwarded by Heath less than two weeks l­ ater. It granted the production com­pany the right to produce film, sound, and “novelised versions” of less than three thousand words of Kamera obskura, including the right to “use adapt translate subtract from add to and change the said work and the theme and/or the title thereof ”—­a comprehensive list that might leave l­ittle of the novel remaining.152 Heath’s cover letter revealed that the com­pany was “Capitol Film Productions Ltd.” and asked Nabokov to “rush us a copy of the German edition of the book for the film com­pany to work on.”153 The urgent request for a German translation is a clue that Capitol Film was not a British com­pany, but an enterprise established by Weimar exiles. In this, in fact, it was typical of this par­tic­ul­ar juncture in the British film industry.



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Schach and Capitol Film Closing a famously vituperative film review of a Capitol Film production of 1936, the novelist and film critic Graham Greene gave vent to his frustrations at the increasing dependence of British cinema on the Eu­ro­pean culture industry: “Watching the dark alien executive tipping his cigar ash ­behind the glass partition in Wardour Street, the Hungarian producer adapting Mr Wells’s ideas tactfully at Denham, the German director letting himself down into his canvas chair at Elstree, and the London film critics (I speak with humility: I am one of them) exchanging smutty stories over the hock and the iced pudding and the brandy at the Carlton, I cannot help wondering ­whether from this ­g reat moneyed industry anything of value to the h ­ uman spirit can ever emerge.”154 Greene’s objections are twofold: foreign money now controls British film production and foreign personnel populate British film sets, to the detriment of the finished product. His criticisms consciously echo the earliest reactions of 1890s spectators like Maxim Gorky: “As for ‘the art of the cinema’ it remains almost as unrealized as in the days of The G ­ reat Train Robbery. The peepshow, the fun-­fair, the historical waxworks are triumphant.”155 For film critics like Greene, the question of a “national” revival (an often-­cited characteristic of 1930s sound film) is highly dubious in the light of the cosmopolitan industry: “What is an En­glish film? T ­ here are times when one cannot help brooding with acute distress on the cheap silly international pictures exported ­under that label. . . . ​An En­glish film? Is that a fair description of a picture derived from a novel by Rafael Sabatini, directed by Karl Grune and F. Brunn, photographed by Otto Kanturek, and edited by E. Stokvis, with a cast which includes Nils Asther, Ernst Deutsch and the American Noah Beery?”156 Greene’s somewhat tongue-­in-­cheek criticism of foreign influence in film nonetheless circles, like the acute anxiety of Rus­sian émigré commentators such as Khodasevich and Muratov, around the serious threat facing a perceived national culture. One won­ders how Greene’s injunction against linguistic transnationalism would apply to Nabokov in this period: “­England, of course, has always been the home of the exiled; but one may at least express a wish that émigrés would set up trades in which their ignorance of our language and culture was less of a handicap.”157 Perhaps Nabokov, the born Anglophile and Cambridge gradu­ ate, would have been considered an exception—­certainly, Greene did not hold this against him when placing Lolita on the list of the top three books of 1955. But if even Greene could openly resent an émigré influx in the mid-1930s, this gives some indication of the challenges created by Nabokov’s status as only one of millions of exiles.

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Historically speaking, Greene’s description of British cinema is not an exaggeration, as the film historian Kevin Gough-­Yates confirms: “What is generally forgotten . . . ​is that for the ten years before World War II the production context outside of the documentary film movement was fashioned by non-­ British film-­makers—­producers, writers, cinematographers, directors and designers—­most of whom had been driven out of Nazi Germany. . . . ​They ­were, for the most part, not economic mi­grants seeking employment, but experienced film-­makers who helped develop a nascent industry.”158 If Nabokov’s agent Klement, founder of Garrett-­Klement Pictures, was one of ­these, another was Schach, the producer of The Marriage of Corbal, the film lambasted by Greene—­and managing director of Capitol Film Productions, headquartered on none other than Wardour Street, the London equivalent of Berlin’s Friedrichstraße. Following the success of the Hungarian Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), a simultaneous revitalization of the industry and influx of Eu­ro­pean directors, actors, and technical personnel led to increased interest in British cinema in the mid-1930s.159 At this point, the goal for British companies became not only to compete with Hollywood productions on the domestic front but to begin exporting films to rival Hollywood on the American market: On the back of Korda’s success in Amer­i­ca, “hot” money, much of it from banks, was recklessly invested in the film business. Among the many beneficiaries was the producer Max Schach, who had been forced out of Emelka Studios, Munich, in December 1931 b­ ecause of his lack of financial control. He came to Britain as a refugee in 1934 and soon established a string of film-­production companies, the Capitol Group, which included Trafalgar, Buckingham, and Cecil Films. According to the journalist Hans Feld, who as film editor of Film Kurier in Germany knew Schach, reputable figures such as the producer Erich Pommer steered well clear of him.160 It was Schach, an exile who, like Korda, “possessed a major talent for charming money out of p­ eople,” who purchased the option on film rights to Nabokov’s Camera Obscura in 1935.161 As managing director of Capitol Film Productions, Schach’s talents w ­ ere perfectly suited not only to the cinematic culture of the 1920s and 1930s but to the Weimar diaspora’s exilic culture of the mid-1930s.162 An Austrian educated in Vienna and Berlin, Schach found success as producer of the 1923 film Die Straße (see chapter’s ­earlier discussion) with his compatriot Grune as director. Having headed Ufa’s Scenario Department, he worked in Munich as



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general man­ag­er of Emelka, the post he was dismissed from in 1931. Arriving in Britain in 1934, he teamed up again with Grune, taking on another fellow Austrian and Weimar exile, the actor Fritz Kortner, as his lead in his first Capital Film production, Abdul the Damned (1935).163 All three exiles—­Klement, Schach, and Kortner—­were instrumental in the transition of Nabokov’s Rus­ sian novel Kamera obskura from émigré fiction to British novel and, very nearly, to screen adaptation in Britain or Hollywood. If Klement initiated the proj­ect with his sale of the rights to Hutchinson, then Schach negotiated for a film, and Kortner continued the proj­ect solo all the way up ­until 1937, even producing his own film “treatments” in two versions. Schach—­whose name (“chess” in German) was as implausibly perfect for his gambit in Nabokov’s ­career as was that of Schreck (“fright”), who played the vampire in the early Weimar cult classic Nosferatu—­was the figure personally invested in filming Kamera obskura.164 In early July 1935, Heath wrote to Nabokov to tell him that Capitol Film’s option had expired in June but that Schach himself was still interested and that they should be allowed to continue negotiations: “­There has been some difficulty with [members of] the distributing organisation who do not like the story. The managing director of Capitol Films [Schach] is himself very keen on it, and is determined to make it provided he can secure another distributor. . . . ​I think it most probable that the rights w ­ ill be sold, though it may take another few weeks.”165 That same month, in addition to allowing Heath to continue negotiating for the film, Nabokov received the initial, disappointing proofs of Camera Obscura from Hutchinson and heard from Ullstein, his German publisher, that they ­were turning down the rights to Despair and Invitation to a Beheading, thereby closing off the market for German translations of Nabokov’s fiction for the foreseeable ­f uture.166 The following month, Nabokov checked in with Heath: “Please let me know how ­matters stand re film rights Camera Obscura [sic]. Do you still think ­there is a chance of selling them in ­England? I have been told by someone who had heard that an alien influence was the reason of our original unsuccess,— do you believe it can be so?”167 It is not clear who the “alien influence” could have been, but in the same letter, he also asks for the “address in ­England of the well-­known German actor Kortner.”168 This detail shows us that Nabokov initiated contact with the man who was to show the most sustained interest in the successful adaptation of Kamera obskura for the screen. Kortner, in addition to his connections to Schach, was also connected to the Rus­sian émigré community in Berlin through his film work with Anna Sten, with whom he had starred in the successful adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The ­Brothers Karamazov, titled Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff.169

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Kortner, Paris, Hollywood It was not ­until October 1936, when the British version Camera Obscura had already appeared and sold poorly and Nabokov was busy translating Despair himself, that Heath fi­nally explained the situation. Now Kortner took center stage: “Mr. Fritz Kortner has always been an admirer of the book and believed that an excellent film could be made of it. When the previous negotiations fell through owing to certain ele­ments in the story which ­were felt to be an obstacle to the success of the film in this country, Mr. Kortner continued to work on the idea and has now produced a treatment in which t­hese difficulties have been overcome. The treatment differs quite substantially from the story in certain points, and succeeds, we think, in avoiding the previous objections.”170 ­There is no mention of alien influence, but while persevering with the promotion of Kamera obskura, in late 1936 Nabokov, now back in Berlin, sent George Shdanoff—­the actor and f­uture longtime collaborator of Michael Chekhov— to talk with Heath. In the end, Shdanoff ’s involvement only confused ­matters, as he instead talked directly to Kortner, leading to Heath accusing Nabokov of attempting to “go above [their] heads in the negotiations”—an accusation similar to the one leveled at around the same time by his American agent, a h ­ azard of negotiating business from afar through multiple proxies and intermediaries.171 It is clear that the objections to the story forwarded by the French publisher Grasset (too literary for some, too risqué for ­others) w ­ ere shared in some form by the distributors and that Kortner’s revisions to the story aimed to placate them—­for the price of at least one-­third commission.172 Nabokov was party to some of t­ hese revisions when he met Kortner in London in 1937. In early 1937, Nabokov fi­nally met Kortner along with Shdanoff in London to discuss Camera Obscura.173 As Nabokov put it to Vera, “The film possibility has arisen again.”174 ­Until the American translation appeared in 1938, Kortner was his best shot, but Nabokov was realistic about the chances of success: “Once again the hope of seeing Cam. Obsc. materialize flared up, but I ­don’t much believe it ­will happen.”175 Despite his ­later comments on Kortner’s talent (below), Nabokov was unimpressed at the time: “He seems to be a perfect fool [nabityi durak], but likeable. Read me two versions of ‘Camera’—­both horrifying to my taste. An oculist cures Kretschmar, but on his return he hides from Magda that he has his sight back and, pretending to be blind, catches the traitoress red-­handed. Tomorrow I’m meeting him again, to reach a final decision on the conditions. He is very optimistic—­but generally talked awful rot [akhineiu].”176 Nonetheless, Nabokov received a contract from Kortner for this and a newly commissioned play, which would also work for the “Rus­sian Theatre” and “the French”—­another example of Nabokov’s versatility and effi-



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ciency during t­hese years.177 Fi­nally, on March  7, Nabokov laid out his frustrations with competing pressures and demands for fees from middlemen: “I must admit that Kort[ner] and Zhdanov [Shdanoff] have somewhat pressured and hurried me. But what does Heath have to do with it? Does he r­ eally have an option? Kort[ner] has no relation to him now whatsoever. As for Grasset—­I’d love to see them dare ask for anything!”178 In the same letter, Nabokov was remarkably clear-­eyed about what a screen adaptation would mean for his novel: “Between you and me, Camera ­will come out u ­ nder a dif­fer­ent title if they film it. It seems that apart from the blindness nothing of it w ­ ill remain.”179 This comment suggests that in Nabokov’s view, what was “filmable” was not the details of his fiction (the much-­vaunted “cinematic” style, language, or plot), but the market success (­either proven or predicted) of its title and story, once reduced to the minimal form of a synopsis.180 Therefore we should not overstate the connection between the “cinematic” nature of Nabokov’s fiction and his attempts to sell the rights to screen adaptations. As we have seen, as early as his 1927 story “The Passenger” Nabokov was fully aware of how ­little a rezhisser (in émigré Rus­sian of this period the term covered both director and producer—­essentially the creative and logistical intelligence b­ ehind filming) would preserve of his fiction if it w ­ ere to be adapted. Certainly, Nabokov was not motivated by the desire to see his work vindicated or consecrated by the movie industry: his relation to film in the 1930s was the instrumental one of cinema praxis. When Nabokov was tasked by his American publisher with revising Camera Obscura for an American audience as Laughter in the Dark, he was undertaking a task similar to Kortner’s. Despite his repeated low opinion of Winifred Ray’s revisions, Ray’s changes ­were maintained by Nabokov, who made his edits directly into a copy of Ray’s text.181 To be sure, it is likely he used ­these changes as a guide to what an Anglophone public would find acceptable. It may also, however, have been a case of making the text more suitable for screen censorship. In the end, Kortner’s treatment did not meet the demands of Capitol Film Productions, and the deal was off. Undeterred, Nabokov asked Heath outright ­whether they would like “trying to place the film or book rights of some other novel” of his.182 The reply is revealing: “We should be very glad to see some other work of yours with a view to placing book and film rights. Perhaps you would send us along some of your recent fiction which appears to you most suitable for this and the American markets?”183 ­Here the interconnected nature of lit­er­at­ure and cinema, and indeed of the British and American markets, points to the importance of Kamera obskura’s multiple translations and adaptations in t­ hese years, both successful and abandoned.

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Nabokov l­ater described Kortner’s charm to Alfred Appel: “Kortner was a gifted artist and a very homely man—­ideal for t­hose films! [Hands of Orlac]—­ whose homeliness dis­appeared when you w ­ ere with him, dissolved by the delightfulness of his person.”184 This on-­screen homeliness may have been what led Nabokov to consider Kortner perfect for Camera Obscura and supports Yuri Tsivian’s suggestion that Nabokov may in fact have written the character of Kretschmar with Kortner’s per­for­mance of Dr. Schön in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1929) in mind.185 As Nabokov wrote to Kortner in November 1937 (­after signing a contract with an American agent annulling all previous deals, including his agreement with Kortner about a film version), Kortner would still be his top choice: “This does not signify by any means that I have given up the hope of seeing you some day performing the part of Kretchmar [sic]. Far from that, should I ever succeed in selling ‘Camera Obscura’ to a film com­pany, I ­shall let them know that I should love to have you play the chief character.”186 As we s­ hall see in chapter 4, this hope was very much alive in the ­later 1930s, with Nabokov’s sights set on a Hollywood adaptation. In fact, 1936 also saw Nabokov back in Paris writing his own film treatments for the émigré producer Semyon Shifrin. Nabokov had connected with an old schoolmate, Savely Kyandzhuntsev, who owned a French cinema run by a man named Dastakiyan. Nabokov wrote to his wife of his attempts to write his own screenplays for the Franco-­Russian cinema: “­Today Dastakiyan came to see me, and I described my film (Hôtel Magique) to him in detail, he very much approved of it and in a few days ­will introduce me to Shifrin and someone ­else, ­we’ll see (I’m trying very hard).”187 The following day he met Shifrin and in response ­imagined another screenplay: “We agreed that I’ll prepare a screenplay for him; he has explained his requirements to me in detail. I’ve already thought up something: the story of a boy, a king’s son; his ­father is killed, just like in Marseilles, and he becomes a king—­a Swiss tutor, et tout ce qui s’ensuit. Then t­ here is a revolution and he returns to his toys and his radio—it sounds rather flat, but one can make it very entertaining.”188 Ten days l­ ater, Nabokov wrote again to document how the screenplays ­were multiplying: “I am writing four, no, in fact five scenarios [stsenariev] for Shifr[in]—­incidentally, Dastakiyan and I w ­ ill go in a day or two to register them—­against theft.”189 None of ­these screenplays ­were ever produced, but they testify to Nabokov’s continued involvement with cinema as more than a means to disseminate and promote his fiction—­a characteristic shared with his return to playwriting during the late 1930s (The Event and The Waltz Invention, both 1938).190 The earliest example of this involved an underappreciated feature of the interwar culture industry: the Rus­sian émigré network, concentrated in Paris, but also extending to the United States. In January 1932 Nabokov received a



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visitor from Hollywood, the theater director Sergei Bertenson. Bertenson was on a recruiting mission in Eu­rope to invite Nabokov, among ­others, to Hollywood at the behest of the Odessa-­born Lewis Milestone, who had read Bertenson’s translation of Nabokov’s 1924 short story “The Potato Elf.”191 Nabokov had turned that story into a screenplay, “The Love of a Dwarf ” (now lost), and Milestone was keen for him to write “stories” “which could be reworked into screenplays.”192 It was at this meeting that Nabokov famously described himself (as Bertenson recorded in his diary) as someone who “literally adores the cinema and watches films with enthusiasm.”193 Over breakfast, Nabokov gave Bertenson the Rus­sian manuscript of Kamera obskura, then being published in Con­temporary Annals in Paris (but not “si­mul­ta­neously . . . ​as a German book edition” as Bertenson seems to have been given to understand). Four days ­later Bertenson recorded his verdict: “It is hardly suitable for American film. Excessively erotic and not a single positive character. The hero is what they call a ‘wet chicken’ and as for the heroine, in order to bring her into the center of the film, one would have to make her more significant, if still repulsive.”194 They parted with the agreement that Nabokov would send Bertenson summaries of work he considered suitable for the cinema.195 The story of Nabokov’s first American publications w ­ ill be the focus of chapter 4, but it is impor­tant to recognize how the American prospect weighed on his choices when dealing with the Eu­ro­pean market. Despite the greater fidelity of the French translation Chambre obscure and better relations with the Paris publishing industry, Nabokov pursued the British market so assiduously partly due to its greater integration with the American publishing industry. In the first instance, this was key for screenplay rights in Hollywood. In addition, American publishers (as his agent ­there pointed out to him) preferred to deal with foreign authors who already had a British contract. In fact, Nabokov’s contract with Hutchinson for Camera Obscura only made his eventual deal with an American publisher for Laughter in the Dark more complicated due to the tricky question of rights when retranslating an existing work. The American prospect is one that ran parallel to his dealings with the Eu­ ro­pean culture industry in the 1930s. This train was set in motion by Nabokov’s meeting in 1932 in Paris with the enthusiastic Russian-­born Berkeley professor Alexander Kaun. The very prospect of an American publishing outlet excited Nabokov. As he wrote to his wife, “In a c­ ouple of days, at Aldanov’s, I’ll meet an American professor who has become ‘interested’ in me. And if the Americans buy even one novel . . . ​Well, you understand.”196 Having found out that Kaun had read some of his work and had “become very interested,” Nabokov was ­eager to place Kamera obskura in par­tic­u­lar with an American publisher: “Kaun,

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who has been, by the way, to Gorky’s and to Bunin’s, wants to take Luzhin, K.Q.K. [King, Queen, Knave] and Glory to Amer­i­ca to the publishers he’s connected with. He ­doesn’t know Camera [Obscura]. I’d like him to take it, it in par­tic­u­lar, but I ­don’t know ­whether we have a complete copy that we can send to him.”197 His instinct proved to be correct, as Laughter in the Dark became his first American work. This would not happen for another six years, but the first steps w ­ ere taken the very next year, when the Rus­sian émigré Alexander Nazaroff praised the Rus­sian original Kamera obskura in the New York Times in a review article called “New Rus­sian Books in Varied Fields.”198 By the end of 1934, Nabokov was already in negotiations with Altagracia de Jannelli, the agent whom he would grant a five-­year contract in 1937. Chapter 4 shows how the promotion of Nabokov by French-­speaking Rus­sian émigrés like Levinson and Struve set the terms by which Nabokov would be packaged and presented to a new American audience. Nabokov’s focus on film and the American market, which began in the mid-1930s, would continue up to the very end of the de­cade through his arrival in the United States. By the time of Laughter in the Dark, the Rus­ sian novel’s success in British and French translations, in addition to several prospects and one profitable near miss as a screenplay, made the figure of Cheepy if anything more appropriate. But as we ­shall see, the guinea pig was bundled offstage in direct response to American demands. ­After half a de­cade of Nabokov’s cinema praxis, his novel no longer needed its own metonym.

C h a p te r 4

Amer­i­ca Obscura Laughter in the Dark (1933–1940)

[Nabokov-]Sirin has succeeded in producing fine portraits of postwar city Germans, ner­vous, lecherous, daring, eccentric, tragic, likeable. —­Albert Parry, American Mercury, 1933 It may be curious, but what charms me personally about American civilisation is exactly that old-­world touch, that old-­fashioned something which clings to it despite the hard glitter, and hectic night-­life, and up-­to-­date bathrooms, and lurid advertisements, and all the rest of it. Bright ­children, you know, are always conservative. When I come across “daring” articles in your reviews—­there was one about condoms in the last [American] Mercury—­I seem to hear your brilliant moderns applauding themselves for being such brave naughty boys. —­Nabokov to his American agent, Altagracia de Jannelli, 1935

As in Paris, starting with The Luzhin Defense, Nabokov’s string of Rus­sian novels written in Berlin emigration between 1929 and 1934 began to attract the attention of critics in the United States. A set of articles by the English-­speaking Rus­sian émigrés Albert Parry in the American Mercury and Alexander Nazaroff in the New York Times, citing Nabokov’s success in French, urgently called for translation of his latest novels into En­glish. In the American Mercury, Parry included Nabokov with two other émigrés who ­ought to be translated into En­glish: “I hope I err, but to the best of my information none of [Nabokov-]Sirin’s or Berberova’s work has ever appeared ­either ­here or in ­England. Yet, ­these two, in addition to Aldanov, bear watching and deserve translation.”1 Nazaroff similarly argued in the New York Times that Otchaianie (1934) “­ought to be translated into all civilized languages.”2

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Nabokov clearly kept up with the American press even in the early 1930s and was aware of ­these articles. He would cite them to friends and relatives and even send clippings of them to publishers. In August 1933, only a month ­after the appearance of Parry’s article, Nabokov wrote to a prospective translator, the American-­based Rus­sian émigré Peter Pertzoff, to ask ­whether he “had come across an article about emigre Rus­sian lit­er­at­ ure that [he] very much enjoyed” or knew anything about its author.3 Similarly in September 1935, a month a­ fter the appearance of Nazaroff ’s article, Nabokov excitedly regaled his ­mother with the critic’s statement that “our age has been enriched by the appearance of a ­g reat writer.”4 Spurred on by such articles and undeterred by the poor sales of the British Camera Obscura, the American publisher Bobbs-­Merrill took interest in Nabokov’s work, which at Nabokov’s specific suggestion had been pitched to them by his American agent Altagracia de Jannelli. In September 1937 Bobbs-­Merrill offered Nabokov an advance contract following a set of positive, if qualified, internal reader reports. In order to promote the book—­a new translation commissioned for January 1, 1938—­Nabokov had to fill out two publicity questionnaires, probing his background, personal preferences, and method of composition. The new translation, Laughter in the Dark, was then reevaluated by another internal reviewer, who wrote two reports on its quality and viability for the American market. On the basis of ­these unpublished materials from the Bobbs-­Merrill com­ pany archives and little-­examined American periodicals of the mid-1930s, this chapter explains the changes Nabokov made to form his first American novel, Laughter in the Dark, which differs in significant re­spects from both the Rus­ sian original and the British translation. I argue that in Laughter in the Dark Nabokov worked directly in response to American reactions to his work to position himself as an alluring commodity for foreign agents, editors, and readers. Nazaroff ’s articles contain summaries of Kamera obskura (which was only available in Rus­sian at the time of writing in 1933–1934). As we s­ hall see, Nabokov not only used ­these articles by naturalized Russian-­Americans to promote his work, but in fact he turned directly to Nazaroff ’s summaries as guides for how to implement the revisions requested by his Bobbs-­Merrill editor in preparing Laughter in the Dark for an American audience. By following how Nabokov was promoted and his work publicized, and how it fared in Code-­ era Hollywood, I show the integration of middlebrow publishing and the movie industry that would prove so impor­tant in Nabokov’s move to the United States in 1940 and his eventually successful transition to a ­career as an American writer.



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Early American Reviews: Parry and Nazaroff In “A New Rus­sian Writer of ­Great Talent” (1934), Nazaroff ’s introduction of the émigré Nabokov to an American audience gives his defining quality as cosmopolitanism, thereby echoing Gleb Struve’s pre­sen­ta­tion to a French audience in 1931: M[onsieur Nabokov-]Sirin belongs to that generation of Rus­sian émigrés whom life has treated to a generous share of cosmopolitanism and who might well describe themselves as citizens of the world. . . . ​His novels are enacted in Berlin, Athens, Switzerland and other countries, and his heroes are as often Germans or En­glishmen as they are Rus­sians. The world unfolded by him is the ner­vous, cosmopolitan and megalopolitan post-­war world of sagging currencies, general unsettlement and perturbed minds, of jazz bands, ­hotel lobbies and crowds emerging on a rainy night from a moving picture theatre on the asphalt fluctuating with reflections of electric signs.5 For the bilingual Rus­sian émigré Nazaroff, Nabokov is a creature of exile, one of the younger émigrés, like Nabokov’s friends Struve and Georgy Gessen (fellow sons of famous f­ athers), who have been fashioned by circumstances outside their control. Like Struve, Nazaroff connects Nabokov’s biography to his works and emphasizes how saturated Nabokov’s fiction is with the con­temporary milieu of interwar Eu­rope. The “non-­Russian” nature of his work—­now seen not as idiosyncratic but generational—is again turned to advantage. Parry, another émigré (and ­future professor of Rus­sian at Colgate), goes even further, placing Nabokov in the context of his contemporaries Nina Berberova and (the slightly older) Mark Aldanov, who are contrasted with elder writers: “­There is no hope, perhaps, for such fossils as Bunin, Shmelev, or Ossorgin to do fine, creative work about their milieu in exile . . . ​but Sirin, Aldanov, Berberova, and other youngsters (young in their writing starts, if not in years) can, and do, produce fine work on non-­Russian themes.”6 For Parry, the key to the success of the younger writers is their turn t­oward, rather than away from, their exilic environment—­again recapitulating Andrei Levinson’s praise of Nabokov: “Most of the older émigré writers, ­those who cannot or ­will not return to Rus­sia, are in a blind alley, for, unable to understand and depict their new foreign environment, they doom themselves to sterile sighs for a Rus­sia that is no more, and to petty pictures of the petty tragedies of their fellow émigrés. But the younger writers, the Sirins and the Aldanovs, escape this blind alley by submerging themselves into the deepest layers of their foreign environment, and

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by their mastery of that environment.”7 In t­ hese pre–­World War II years, it is noteworthy that Nabokov’s choice of German subjects only testifies to his timeliness and relevance: “Sirin has succeeded in producing fine portraits of postwar city Germans, ner­vous, lecherous, daring, eccentric, tragic, likeable. Two of his novels, Korol[ʹ], Dama, Valet (King, Queen, Jack), and Camera Obscura (published in 1928 and 1932 respectively), are written in Rus­sian, but have only an occasional reference to old or new Russia—no more than a line to a book—­, being devoted entirely to the lives and loves of Germans.”8 Of course, Parry is also advocating for translation. So that when he writes, “The less ­these émigrés write about Rus­sia, old or new, or about Rus­sians of any color, the better it seems to be for them,” Parry has in mind the commercial corollary to artistic cosmopolitanism: an international readership.9 Curiously, Parry goes to the extreme of arguing that writers like Nabokov should stick exclusively to translations from their Rus­sian work—an argument that other polyglot Rus­sians like Levinson in Paris, Struve in London, and even Nazaroff in New York would emphatically reject.10 Despite his favorable opinion of the younger émigrés’ work, Parry explic­itly warns them off trying their hand at writing directly in other languages: ­ here are no Joseph Conrads among them, and they have not forsaken T their native tongue for the languages of their new homes, but it is best for them to write in their own language, and not risk excursions into the French, German, and En­glish. No ­matter how well they may know ­these languages, their work, if produced directly in them, would sound stilted in comparison with their Rus­sian work, for they came out of Rus­ sia late enough in their lives to think and feel only in Rus­sian. Anyway, if and when they produce volumes of worth, t­ hese volumes are promptly translated into the major continental languages.11 This advice, given in 1933, was gleefully disregarded by Nabokov throughout the 1930s. In addition to translating his own work into En­glish (partly revising Camera Obscura, fully translating Despair, and producing Laughter in the Dark), Nabokov wrote original pieces in French (“Les écrivains et l’époque,” “Ma­de­moi­selle O,” and “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable”) and En­ glish (his En­glish childhood memoirs and the original novel Sebastian Knight), all before his move to the United States in 1940.12 And whereas Despair was reworked in the 1960s, the version of Laughter in the Dark that was published in 1938 has remained, with small corrections, canonical. We do not know if Nabokov took it as a challenge, but Parry’s assertion that he was (and could be) no Joseph Conrad found an echo in the renaming in Laughter in the Dark of Segelkranz into Udo Conrad. In the long view, Parry



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was wrong.13 But in the short term, his warning must have rung true. As Nabokov complained to his American editor in 1935: My novels . . . ​belong to Rus­sia and her lit­er­a­ture, and not only style but subject undergoes horrible bleeding and distortion when translated into another tongues. The German version of “King, Queen, Jack” is a cheap travesty; “Camera Obscura” which, in Rus­sian, was meant as an elaborate parody, lies limp and lifeless in John Long’s and Grasset’s torture-­houses; and “Despair” which is something more than an essay on the psy­chol­ogy of crime turns out to be a half-­baked thriller—­even when I translate it myself. Strange indeed are the “fata” of my books! I feel sure, however, that with your help, sympathy, and wonderful understanding, I ­shall find in Amer­i­ca at last the readers who, I know, are awaiting me ­there.14 Though somewhat theatricalized, this lament does capture Nabokov’s anxiety for his En­glish work to appear not only in authorized versions but in versions fully authored by him. Amer­i­ca, as it turned out, was best placed to offer him this opportunity. As his f­ uture editor at Bobbs-­Merrill put it, “I am afraid nobody but Nabokoff can translate Nabokoff.”15

Jannelli, American Agent ­ hese positive reviews, as well as his 1932 meeting in Paris with the Russian-­ T American professor Alexander Kaun, convinced Nabokov that the American market was worth probing. In summer 1934 he began corresponding with the American agent and playwright Altagracia de Jannelli. Jannelli worked tirelessly to court American publishers on behalf of Nabokov, before succeeding in in­ter­est­ing Bobbs-­Merrill with Camera Obscura in 1937. At this point Nabokov signed an exclusive five-­year agreement with her. In obvious ways Jannelli, like Otto Klement in Europe—­and much like Bobbs-­Merrill itself—­was not a perfect fit for Nabokov’s literary aesthetics, and he was relieved when their agreement expired in 1942 (she died only three years ­later and drops out of his story). Yet her expertise and advice ­were crucial to his transition to Amer­ i­ca. As Robert Roper has recently pointed out, Nabokov was in need of guidance in the American market, and she worked indefatigably on his behalf, even ­after his arrival in the States.16 ­Here I show that we should further recognize her crucial role in terms of adaptations for the theater and cinema. Lastly, her per­sis­tent efforts to secure him a valuable affidavit from the president of the Bobbs-­Merrill publishing ­house for the American consul in Paris may well have saved his life, allowing him to secure an exit visa early in 1940.

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Jannelli’s first gambit with American publishers was with the Rus­sian version of Zashchita Luzhina (­later The Luzhin Defense), which she offered to John Day, at the same time that an unknown party offered the French version titled La course du fou to Simon & Schuster.17 This mix-up led to Jannelli warning Nabokov not to try “playing one publisher against another”—­a charge he denied.18 Jannelli also unsuccessfully tried to pitch a German translation of Korolʹ, dama, valet and the Rus­sian manuscript of Podvig (­later Glory).19 When in mid-1935 he heard that Simon & Schuster had rejected La course du fou, it was Nabokov himself who took the initiative and suggested to Jannelli a new strategy: “I see from what you tell me that the American publishers all prefer to deal in a book where they can find an En­glish partner. I therefore suggest your temporarily abandoning your attempts at finding a publisher for Podvig and La Course du Fou and trying your hand at Camera Obscura and Despair, ­those two books having already an En­glish publisher in the firm of Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.”20 Nabokov followed up the next month, reiterating his advice. It is clear from this letter that Nazaroff ’s laudatory New York Times review directly prompted Nabokov to promote his work for translation in Amer­i­ca: I have sent you a copy of “Despair,” it is prob­ably due to a very flattering review in the N.Y. Times that American publishers have become interested in my work. I gather from your letters that American publishers are reluctant to buy foreign books ­unless ­there is an En­glish firm to share their expences [sic]. I was myself g­ oing to suggest that you try your [word missing] and place first one of my books which Hutchinson London has already purchased, for instance Despair. The Rus­sian edition of this book is now being printed. . . . [P.S.] Did I send you a Rus­sian or French copy of Camera Obscura? The En­glish edition is appearing next month and you ­will receive a copy then.21 What had changed was that Nabokov had written in March 1935 to his British agent Klement, who was not answering his letters, and taken back from him his American rights. In this letter, Nabokov continues to employ the businesslike German of their previous communications: “Unfortunately I have no choice but to inform you that I am making use of the right provided for in section III of the contract of December 16, 1934 regarding the American rights to Camera Obscura and hereby declare this contract null and void [und diesen Vertrag hiermit als nichtig erkläre]. I w ­ ill dispose of the American rights to Camera Obscura elsewhere [anderweitig].”22 Thus what had previously seemed an impediment (the British deal over Camera Obscura) turned out to be an advantage, as Hutchinson’s rights did not



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in fact cover the United States. In negotiating with his American agent, Nabokov used a similarly businesslike vocabulary, this time in En­glish, in order to assert his control over the rights to his work: “Let me state that Hutchinson (Long) have only the En­glish rights for ‘Camera Obscura’ and ‘Despair,’ so that you ­will have to deal with me in case of an American sale.”23

The View from Indianapolis: The Bobbs-­Merrill Reader Reports By May 1937, Jannelli had succeeded in in­ter­est­ing the publisher Bobbs-­Merrill, whose New York editor George Burford Lorimer commissioned reader reports from their Indianapolis headquarters.24 The interactions between Nabokov, Jannelli, and Bobbs-­Merrill is a fascinating case study in Nabokov’s art of exile, showcasing his careful adaptation to the tastes of the American market while retaining ultimate control of his authorial identity. In many ways, Bobbs-­Merrill is a curious choice of first American publisher for Nabokov. The Indianapolis-­based publisher was known for ­children’s books, textbooks, and middlebrow fiction. Yet the publisher of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1902) and The Joy of Cooking (1936) was also known from the 1920s on for popu­lar novels that ­were designed specifically for screen adaptation (the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz being only the most famous). In fact, the com­ pany’s former president, John Jay Curtis (1926–1931), had opened a California office specifically to h ­ andle Bobbs-­Merrill’s motion picture rights, which w ­ ere “becoming a significant source of income for the firm”—­reaching in 1923 and 1924 the “highest prices ever paid to a book publisher for film rights up to that time.”25 Curtis even boasted in a 1924 newspaper interview that “Bobbs-­Merrill had sold more stories to the movies than all other publishers combined.”26 Since 1935, the com­pany’s new president, David Laurance Chambers, had been working to recapture its former success: “The popularity of the books which composed his lists in the 1930s and 1940s did not match that of the big sellers in the 1920s. The difference was partly due to changing tastes in Amer­i­ca. Chambers indulged a nostalgia for the genteel literary expression. He had no use for the rough language and realism of younger writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, and John Dos Passos who published with Bobbs-­ Merrill’s competition. Chambers maintained that the sale of Hemingway and Farrell declined as their use of obscenity grew.”27 It was only the successes of middlebrow authors like Inglis Fletcher and Alice Tisdale Hobart (both of whom “met his personal standard of literary decency”) that kept the com­pany in the black.28 Again, it was the financial gain of screen adaptation that aided

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the com­pany. Hobart’s best seller Oil for the Lamps of China (1933) was made into a First National Productions film in 1935 starring Pat O’Brien. Graham Greene in his review of the film commented on the stakes of screen adaptations, lamenting that “so in­ter­est­ing a theme should have been passed first through the mind of a good, sincere and sentimental w ­ oman and then through the mind of a perhaps less sincere but certainly not less sentimental Hollywood scenario-­ writer.”29 It is clear from the Bobbs-­Merrill correspondence that Nabokov’s novel had been marked for similar treatment. The gambit of lucrative film rights, as well as the question of gentility and obscenity, is an essential frame for understanding Nabokov’s involvement with Bobbs-­Merrill. The editor Lorimer had become interested—as Nabokov and Jannelli had planned—in producing an American version of the British publisher Hutchinson’s translation of Camera Obscura. In May 1937 Lorimer therefore wrote a memo from New York requesting internal reader reports from Indianapolis: “I hope that two of your best w ­ omen readers—­possibly yourself and Mrs. Lyman—­can give it a quick reading for me. I am not interested in a plot outline, only your reactions to it.”30 Addressed to “Miss Laing,” the memo aims squarely at Greene’s “mind of a good, sincere and sentimental ­woman.” In this initial memo, the Lorimer is already thinking of ways to promote Nabokov’s novel to an American audience, as well as satisfy the tastes of the com­ pany president Chambers: “Should we publish it, it would be handled entirely differently from the way the En­glish publisher apparently did—[instead,] an unusual format, maybe like Simon and Schuster’s Memory of Love, and promotion along the lines that it is the most brutal novel ever written, the brutality being intrinsic and not depending on the superficial muscular prose of the four-­ letter-­word boys.”31 The reference to the “four-­letter-­word” boys can be taken to include the “obscene” work of Hemingway, Farrell, and Dos Passos at which Chambers took umbrage. Yet the tag “most brutal novel ever written” still suggests a strategy that would depart from the usual Bobbs-­Merrill product—­one with impor­tant ramifications for the novel’s eventual reception. The connection with Memory of Love, a novel by an American expatriate living in Paris, is also revealing. In 1935, Simon & Schuster gave Bessie Breuer’s novel the “special treatment” of a cover by the renowned German artist in exile George Salter. Salter had come to the United States in 1934 as an émigré from Hitler’s Germany—up ­until that point, his ­career in the Weimar Republic had paralleled Nabokov’s.32 If we suppose that Bobbs-­Merrill intended to promote Nabokov’s novel to movie production companies, as they had with Hobart’s Oil for the Lamps of China, then Lorimer was correct in his instinct that an “unusual format” might prove successful. In 1939, Breuer’s novel was



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adapted as In Name Only by RKO Radio Pictures, with Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, and Kay Francis in starring roles. The reader report delivered by one of Miss Laing’s “­women readers” constitutes a lengthy critique of the novel.33 The reader report is dated eight days ­after Lorimer’s memorandum and is signed “Jerry” (possibly the “Miss Laing” Lorimer addressed, who was invited to submit a report herself ). The report is a fascinating source for a (professional) American reader’s response to Nabokov’s Eu­ro­pean fiction as filtered by Winifred Ray’s British translation (which, as we have seen, was in turn based on a German draft). In the report, Jerry touches on the book’s literary quality, audience appeal, and promotion strategies and the necessary changes to correct its shortcomings. The report opens by recommending strongly against taking the novel on: “Sorry but I ­can’t see a ­thing in the world in this for our list. ­Needless to say, I began reading it hoping for and expecting a favorable reaction to it. But I ­can’t even see in it a probability.”34 Jerry explic­itly refutes the New York editor Lorimer’s assessment and idea for promotion: “Of course, it would need a title and treatment dif­fer­ent from the En­glish but calling it ‘the most brutal novel ever written’ makes it seem an impor­tant book and on the contrary it is a ‘mere bagatelle’—­even though it is a well-­turned one,” ­later stating that “it ­hasn’t a morbid appeal ­either.”35 Jerry’s negative assessment concedes the author’s craftsmanship: “As [another reviewer] Mrs. Lyman says, it is written by a professional who knows his [‘her’ in the typescript] craft . . . ​[the] characterization is deft, the prose smooth, the good craftsmanship satisfying.”36 Yet Jerry’s review focuses on the book’s lack of appeal to an American readership. The categorization of this readership is canny: “I cannot visualize the audience for it. It is not fine enough to be read for its writing, its author views his characters too coldly to grip the emotions of average circulating library readers, its immorality is not sufficiently graphic for readers of ‘sexy’ books.”37 The criticism of Nabokov’s writing—or, rather, the filtering of his writing through Klement’s German and Ray’s bowdlerized English—as “not fine enough” must have confirmed Nabokov in his intention to personally oversee if not perform all ­future translations into En­glish. In terms of content, Jerry reads Camera Obscura as too cold and too brutal for the average Bobbs-­Merrill reader, yet not enough for fans of the four-­letter-­word boys. Jerry presses this home with a comparison to Aldous Huxley (whom Nabokov detested, or came to detest) and Noël Coward, specifically praising their “witty dialogue” and the “lovable rowdies” of Coward’s 1933 play Design for Living (which was immediately turned into a film starring Gary Cooper—­again showing the com­pany’s concern with screen adaptations).

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One of the most revealing details in Nabokov’s first transaction with the American publishing industry is the mismatch between the cultural background of author and editor. In the damning initial reader report, Jerry mea­sures Nabokov up against the Rus­sian literary tradition: “Some of the author’s virtues seem to me the very ­things which would hurt the sale of the book. For example, the cold, unsympathetic way in which he ­handles his characters—as if they ­were amusing ­little animals. He ­doesn’t like them himself and neither does the reader. Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyitch that way but this author ­isn’t Tolstoy.”38 It is worth noting how this reader picks up on the pervasive Cheepy motif in Camera Obscura as a stand-in for the ­whole cast of characters and how she notes the connection (seeded by the name of Dorianna Karenina, amplified by Horn’s question to her about w ­ hether she has read Tolstoy, and since picked up by numerous scholars) between the novel and Tolstoy’s late work.39 Jerry’s fair, if fairly biting, assessment appears definitive. Yet in the handwritten version in the Bobbs-­Merrill archives a slightly dif­fer­ent picture emerges. A ­ fter the misspelled and corrected sentence “Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Illyitch Ilyitch that way but this author i­sn’t Tolstoy,” the passage continues in parentheses: “(Helen—­check spelling of that title at library—­call them—­but make sure it was Tolstoy. I’m always wrong when I try to be learned!).”40 The exclamation mark and self-­deprecation belie the attempt of a reader who recognizes the allusive range of a manuscript utterly unlike Bobbs-­Merrill’s usual run of “undistinguished, ‘homey’ small-­town novels.”41 As the Rus­sian émigrés had recognized in the cinema debates of the 1920s, however, “Hicks Land” was essential to the global culture industry. ­Here we see that this extended beyond Hollywood proper to the fiction that fed screen adaptations. Nabokov had to contend with precisely t­ hese tastes if he was to expand his readership beyond the narrow if appreciative confines of the Rus­ sian emigration. This pro­cess of negotiation, beginning in the 1920s with German audiences and continuing in the 1930s with French and British readers, would pro­g ress in the United States through Lolita and beyond. Jerry closes her report by reiterating her negative recommendation—­“All of which is a very long and boring way of saying ‘No, I ­don’t think it would do even though we need a novel desperately.’ I ­can’t think of any type of [added: American] reader who would get excited about it. [Deleted: It’s not the type of fare for Americans.] It seems to me similar to a lot of books we get from E ­ ngland.”42 Given the book’s eventual poor sales, the reader was accurate in her assessment of the novel’s likely reception, by the public as well as critics, who saw this novel (even in its revised version Laughter in the Dark) less as a comment on an Americanized Eu­ro­pean culture than as a typical literary product of that culture.



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In that sense, this Bobbs-­Merrill reviewer knows what she is about, putting her fin­ger on a weakness that Nabokov had become aware of in his own writing: in creating a parody (or perhaps in the case of Camera Obscura, a pastiche) of a certain cultural or artistic phenomenon, he was liable to slip himself into the very category he was playing with. Eric Naiman has drawn attention to the fact that in his last completed Rus­sian novel, The Gift (Dar, 1937–1938), Nabokov articulates this self-­criticism through the poet Koncheyev’s comments to the hero Fyodor: “You sometimes bring up parody to such a degree of naturalness that it actually becomes a genuine serious thought, but on this level it suddenly falters [daet neproizvolʹnyi pereboi], lapsing into a mannerism [uzhimkoi] that is yours and not a parody of a mannerism.”43 If even Nabokov’s Rus­sian original (which, as Naiman notes, is far more subtle than e­ ither En­glish version) could be taken as a “screenplay” rather than “lit­er­a­ture,” then it would require Nabokov not just to supervise a competent translation into En­glish but also to develop an equivalently “fine” literary language in En­glish in order to maintain the necessary artistic distance from his subject.44 Remarkably, despite Jerry’s verdict, the following month Jannelli informed Nabokov that Bobbs-­Merrill would publish an American version of the novel. Lorimer, also aware of the com­pany’s “desperate” need, was keen to take a ­gamble on “launching” this Eu­ro­pean author. What is curious about the report is that Jerry’s rejection of the novel on behalf of “Hicks Land” was used by Nabokov as a guide to how better to appeal to it. In fact, Jerry highlighted the exact changes that Nabokov went on to make in rewriting Camera Obscura as Laughter in the Dark: “The three weakest parts of the book, in my estimation, are the dull and misleading opening chapter, which might be omitted or ­else inserted ­later; the improbable coincidence of Kretschmar’s learning about Magda’s and Horn’s tricks during the trip through his author friend (too much a tour de force), rather than in one of the highly probable ways through which he might have discovered them; and the portion where Horn lives and eats with blind Kretschmar without being discovered.”45 Nabokov ­adopted the first two of ­these changes exactly, which are t­ hose major changes listed by Jane Grayson as “part of the general tightening of the novel’s structure” in the transition from Camera Obscura to Laughter in the Dark.46 We know that by June 1937, the editor Lorimer had commissioned Nabokov to make a new translation, with a new “title and treatment” as Jerry put it. Jannelli forwarded Lorimer’s instructions to Nabokov, which clearly included the changes Jerry had suggested: “He wants you to do the translation of ‘Camera,’ with the alterations he wishes—­He wants no one e­ lse to touch it.”47 Jannelli backed up Lorimer and recommended that Nabokov follow his stipulations

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with an implicit reference to the Bobbs-­Merrill readership: “What he wants altered is for your own good in this Country, for, I already told you, he wants to make a success of you.”48 Due to a question mark still hanging over the rights to Camera Obscura (Hutchinson controlled only the British Empire, but the potential claims of Nabokov’s French publisher Grasset ­were less clear), Jannelli made the extraordinary suggestion at this juncture of turning Camera Obscura into a play before commencing a new translation: ­ here is one proposition I should like to make him [Lorimer], if it can T be done. This, I ­don’t know. It may be the only way of saving the book, but I cannot tell if it can be done, or if they would accept it. This would be for me to turn your “Camera” into a play, copyright the play, and perhaps be able to return it back to the original book form, supposedly taken from the play. W ­ hether they would buy that way, I d­ on’t know. Not having been able to see the editor, I d­ on’t know what this would bring. (I must tell you that I am a very good playwright.)49 Jannelli had implied as much in 1936, even before Nabokov got a contract from Bobbs-­Merrill for Laughter in the Dark: “I am still waiting to take your book to film ­houses. As I have already told you, they bring more money when they are published first, and that is the reason I am retarding about that. Have you ever written a play? If so, let me have a copy of it at once, since the theatre is a ­thing I know.”50 Nabokov had of course written numerous plays, most of which ­were not staged, with the signature exception of The Man from the U.S.S.R. It is worth remembering that during November and December 1937, as he was finishing his revisions on Laughter in the Dark, he wrote The Event (Sobytie, 1938), commissioned for and l­ ater staged at Yuri Annenkov’s Rus­sian Dramatic Theater (Russkii dramaticheskii teatr, 1936–1938) in Paris. The choice of Jannelli as playwright is not as surprising as it might seem. Her letterhead prominently displayed her dramaturgical expertise: “Altagracia de Jannelli. Eu­ro­pean Authors’ Representative & Play Agent,” followed by the footer, “Associate Member of the Societé [sic] des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques Paris and of the Dramatists’ Guild of the Authors’ League of Amer­i­ca, Inc.”51 She had numerous playwriting credits to her name, including 1932 adaptations of two Weimar-­era German plays by Richard Duschinsky, for which she used the pseudonym Victor L. Kermen.52 Nabokov’s response to this letter was to commit: “What does the editor think about turning Camera into a play? I am ready to put off every­thing in ­favor of the American deal. Soon I ­will begin the translation, and ­will have at least one book ready by the fall.”53



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From Camera to Laughter Nabokov and Jannelli concluded a contract in August 1937 for a five-­year agreement granting her 10 ­percent commission as his “sole and exclusive representative . . . ​for the disposal of any and all literary, dramatic, cinema or other works.”54 The following month, Nabokov received the first installment of a $600 advance from Bobbs-­Merrill for the new translation of Camera Obscura, which would be due January 1938.55 In the summer and fall of 1937 in the South of France, Nabokov worked on the new translation, incorporating the changes suggested by Jerry and asked for by Lorimer. Remarkably, it appears highly likely that Nabokov turned back to the Rus­sian émigré Nazaroff ’s American reviews for guidance on how exactly to make ­these changes. While promoting Camera Obscura in “New Rus­sian Books in Varied Fields” (1933), Nazaroff had conceded the banality of Nabokov’s basic story lines but praised the manner of their telling: This is the story of a wealthy, sedate, poised German (the novel’s action takes place in Berlin) who, having reached the dangerous age, falls in love with a youthful adventuress, abandons his f­amily, hopelessly entangles himself, and perishes. The subject is old, no doubt; but it is exactly this that makes one appreciate Mr. Sirin’s achievement. For such is the skill with which the author blends adventure with psy­chol­ogy (and excellent psy­chol­ogy, at that), his flexible, elusive, allusive and graceful style (slightly reminding one of André Gide) so grips the reader, and the world and life which he depicts are so distinctly seen by new, fresh and original eyes, that one reads fascinated.56 It is worth comparing this with the opening of Laughter in the Dark, which Nabokov composed in late 1937: Once upon a time t­ here 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. This is the ­whole of the story and we might have left it at that had ­there not been profit and plea­sure in the telling; and although ­there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.57 The coordination of details between Nazaroff ’s précis and Nabokov’s ironically truncated opening is close: the specific location (“Berlin” and “Germany”);

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the tripartite Gogolian description of the protagonist (“wealthy, sedate, poised” compared to “rich, respectable, happy”); the presence of the key plot of Kretschmar’s “love” for a “youthful” partner, for whom he “abandons” his ­family (Nabokov specifies: “wife”); and his eventual “perishing” or “disaster.” In “A New Rus­sian Writer of ­Great Talent” (1934), Nazaroff follows the very same formula, h ­ ere even anticipating the second part of Nabokov’s opening (“profit and plea­sure in the telling”), which focuses on the detailed retelling of an old story. Nazaroff writes: Its subject is as old as the world: it is the carnal passion of Kretschmar, a sedate, cultured German in his “dangerous age,” which throws him in the arms of a young adventuress, prompts him to abandon his ­family and leads to his peril. But how original, fresh and new all that is in M. Sirin’s telling! In construction it is almost an adventure story; in substance it is a high-­grade psychological novel. And what an amount of life-­sap flows through its pages!58 This contrast between the banality of the subject ­matter and the freshness of its treatment in fact follows a review from ­earlier in the year by Struve of Korolʹ, dama, valet (King, Queen, Knave), of which Kamera obskura is in many ways a reworking and revision. Struve’s praise, this time for a British audience, of King, Queen, Knave strikingly echoes Nazaroff ’s praise of Kamera obskura: As the title [King, Queen, Knave] suggests, Sirin chose ­here a trite, hackneyed subject, the eternal triangle of husband, wife and lover. Yet so original is his ­handling of this subject, so peculiar the architectonic of the novel and so fresh and striking its verbal texture, that the impression of freshness and originality prevails despite the banal theme.59 Where Nazaroff has a “subject” that is “old” (1933) or even “old as the world” (1934), Struve has a “trite, hackneyed subject” and “banal theme.” And where Struve has “original . . . ​fresh and striking,” Nazaroff praises Nabokov’s “new, fresh and original eyes” (1933) and his “original, fresh and new . . . ​telling” (1934). This echo chamber of promotional epithets, from France and Britain to the United States, is ultimately put to use by Nabokov himself in Laughter in the Dark, where he recommends himself, Valentinov-­like, to his new American readers: “Detail is always welcome.”60 When one considers Nabokov’s rewriting of the novel’s opening, its function as a calling card for an entirely new audience has to be remembered. It may well be the case, as Brian Boyd has suggested, that it functions as a prompt to a movie producer’s imagination.61 As we have seen, however, even in the 1920s Nabokov was fully aware of how



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l­ittle prompting producers’ imagination needed, of how much license they would take with the novel, and that almost nothing of the original would remain. More immediately, the new opening seems to function as a lesson to an American audience in how to read this new novelist. In a sense, it is the incipit in a proj­ect that would last the rest of Nabokov’s lifetime: coaxing and coercing a readership into appreciating Rus­sian, Eu­ro­pean, and “world” lit­er­a­ture in the absence of a shared set of assumptions, tastes, and cultural references. For when completing Laughter in the Dark in late 1937, Nabokov was no longer, as he had been when finishing Kamera obskura in mid-1931, a young Rus­sian novelist parodying a German middlebrow infatuation with American lowbrow visual culture for a Rus­sian audience resident in western Eu­rope. He was now a Eu­ro­pean novelist first (and a Rus­sian one only second), bringing an outsider’s take on a well-­worn and exhaustively discussed set of intellectual and cultural tropes, told through the medium of a hackneyed love-­triangle plot. In this novel, one of Nabokov’s many elaborate parodies, the object of parody has shifted—as has its audience. In fact the subject, in a sense, has become the audience. When rewriting Camera Obscura for an American audience as an American-­savvy glance at Eu­rope by an internationalist writer, Nabokov reduced the number of references to Amer­i­ca.62 To take a relevant example, when Margot performs for herself in front of a mirror, she finds her own gestures and grimaces no longer done “as well as they ­were done in Hollywood,” but simply done “as well as any screen actress.”63 This is a remarkable change—­from twenty in both the Rus­sian and British versions to just six in Laughter in the Dark—­g iven the fact that one of the main characters, Robert Horn, l­ater Axel Rex, has lived in Amer­i­ca for the past fifteen years. Intriguingly, Nabokov elsewhere adds “an American with a butterfly net” into the first draft of Laughter in the Dark, as if more explic­itly encoding himself into the rewrite as a lepidopterist already established in the United States (which he indeed would be in just three years).64 But in the final version, he adds the alternative autoreferential detail that Rex is seen playing poker “with a c­ ouple of Americans and a Rus­sian.”65 In the Rus­sian Kamera obskura, the theme had been the relation of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture to German cinema and mass culture and, more generally, the relation of Eu­ro­pean lit­er­at­ ure to American cinema and mass culture at the tail end of the 1920s. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, one of the main themes of Nabokov’s “German” works is the mediation of art (or its pseudo-­iterations, vanity proj­ ects) and business by amoral middlemen, full of commercial savvy (Valentinov and Horn). In the Rus­sian and German context, this savvy is represented by the United States: American businessmen, American movie companies, and

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American mass tastes. When reworking Camera Obscura for American readers, however, he had to reverse the novel’s polarity: he was now appealing as a Eu­ro­ pe­an to Americans, for whom such parodic insights w ­ ere not only already known but several years out-­of-­date. By November 1937, Nabokov told Jannelli that he had followed the stipulated removal of the opening chapter of Camera Obscura, which revolved around Cheepy, and changed the title to Laughter in the Dark. Jannelli’s response is equivocal: “You tell me you have killed the pig. I must say frankly, although I h ­ aven’t yet submitted your letter to Mr. Lorimer, that personally I ­don’t like the new title. It sounds like a mystery story, and your book is dif­fer­ent from that.”66 Once Bobbs-­Merrill received Nabokov’s new translation, the Bobbs-­Merrill reader Miriam Lyman was again asked to provide a report. Dated January 18, 1938, this report suggests that Nabokov had hit the mark with his reworking. Most notably, Lyman singles out for special praise the opening paragraph that Nabokov had created in response to ­earlier reader reports, using the newspaper reviews of Struve and Nazaroff. She describes a “most remarkable feat: he sums up the w ­ hole story in the opening paragraph of the novel and then proceeds to tell it in detail in such fashion that he not only holds the reader’s sustained interest but his rapt attention u ­ ntil the very last word,” and then she proceeds to quote this opening in full.67 Lyman’s report perpetuates the echo chamber of descriptions about Nabokov’s fiction for the benefit of English-­ speaking audiences. As we ­shall see, this contrast between plot and telling adheres to the novel to the point of being quoted verbatim on the wrappers of the book itself. Thus Nabokov’s attempt to answer the original feedback of American readers seems to have been successful in precisely the terms posed to him by their reports. No less a critic than Jannelli herself was impressed with the new translation: “This is the first chance I have had to see the changes, and I must say that I like the beginning better, and that it reads better, as far as I’ve gone into it. They think so, too.”68 Lyman also praises the novel’s pacing: “It moves swiftly along without pause; it is modern and worldly and is told in a clever, amusing and original manner; and fi­nally it is light, rapid reading of the type that entertains and at the same time commands one’s re­spect.”69 It is impor­tant to note that she does not trace the source of the novel’s swift pacing or easy consumption to the cinema—­these ­were classic middlebrow qualities, typical of the novels promoted by Bobbs-­Merrill. Fi­nally, Nabokov seems to have satisfied Lyman that Jerry’s original assessment of the characters and style of Camera Obscura no longer applied to Laughter in the Dark. Lyman’s report praises its “elusive, delightful quality” through precisely the ele­ment of parody which Nabokov had e­ arlier complained about



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being lost in translation.70 “It is as though,” she writes, “the story w ­ ere infused with a drop or two of the fine flavor of parody, as though its scope and depth and meaning ­were enhanced by a light, magic touch of caricature.”71 For Lyman, the laughter of Nabokov’s new title is that of narrative style, “a pervasive sort of super humor”: “It tells a tragic tale and yet one is somehow aware of a faint, lurking echo of wise laughter. It is as though the author said: h ­ ere is stark, lurid melodrama of the type you often see and perhaps ridicule in the films, but ­here also is the sad, unadorned truth about a fantastic fate that overtook a respectable, solid citizen; the story is in essence tragic and significant, I grant you, but instead of being too uselessly earnest and serious about it, come and see it with me from the broad humanizing perspective of the comic vein.”72 The question of the author’s relation to his characters would come up several times in reader reports on Nabokov’s fiction. This issue, discussed by Struve as part of Nabokov’s “un-­Russianness,” was also a concern for the launch of Nabokov as an American writer. Bobbs-­Merrill readers w ­ ere expected to want to sympathize with the characters, but Nabokov’s apparent disdain for his creatures was perceived as an obstacle. Perhaps the removal of Cheepy as a connecting device between the characters in Laughter in the Dark helped to alleviate the feeling experienced by Jerry that Nabokov related to them “as if they w ­ ere amusing l­ittle animals,” allowing the “sad, unadorned truth” of Albinus’s loss of his wife and d­ aughter to emerge alongside the “stark, lurid melodrama” of his involuntary ménage à trois with Rex and Margot. In the end, not all readers agreed with Lyman. As Jannelli wrote to Nabokov about the Bobbs-­Merrill editor a­ fter the book’s publication, “I must say that he also finds you a bit too objective, a l­ ittle too heartless. I know that in you this is a distillation of style, but this is a sentimental ­people, basically, and they must attach their affections to at least one character in a book.”73

“Launching” Nabokov Nazaroff ’s and Parry’s early American reviews ­were key to Nabokov’s self-­ promotion in the United States. A ­ fter receiving his contract to rewrite the novel for an American audience (despite Jerry’s objections), Nabokov was asked to answer two publicity questionnaires for Bobbs-­Merrill. Dated November  19, 1937, they comprised a “General” (author) and a “Publicity” (work) form, probing his background, personal preferences, and method of composition.74 His answers reveal his strategy of self-­presentation for an American audience, as well as his direct reliance on Nazaroff ’s and Parry’s pre­sen­ta­tion of him.

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The first questionnaire, “Publicity,” is of par­tic­u­lar interest, less for the information Nabokov supplies than for what he withholds. The Bobbs-­Merrill editors probe their writer from multiple a­ ngles to ascertain potentially receptive audiences who ­will feel a connection with the work.75 In his answers Nabokov is studiedly unhelpful. Rather than attempting to assist in the promotion of his book, Nabokov simply refers the publisher to the American journalists who had originally praised him in the mid-1930s, Nazaroff and Parry.76 Beyond referring Bobbs-­Merrill to the very American critics who had likely attracted the publisher’s interest in the first place, Nabokov refuses to supply any useful information in response to the questionnaire lines most impor­tant to publicity or promotion: anecdotal autobiographical material, indicating what material in the book might be new to the public; which authors influenced him; or which parts of the United States might be most interested in the novel.77 His answer to the very first question, then, could summarize his responses in general: “Do you have any personal interest or connection with the general material, characters or events which explain your interest in this book?”—­“None. All my novels are invention pure and ­simple. I am never interested in my characters. It is just a game and the playthings are put back into the box when I have finished.”78 Although this seems to undo the work of convincing Lyman that some at least of his characters could be sympathized with, Nabokov’s statement could also be read as the adoption of a new stance in 1937 before a quite dif­fer­ent set of anticipated contemporaries. In the second, “General” questionnaire, Nabokov answers in detail about his aristocratic lineage (“My first ancestor, as far as I know, was a Tartar chieftain, Nabok, in the XV ­century. On my paternal grand­mother’s side the line of the Barons von Korff goes back to the Crusades”), his preferences, and his opinions, in order to create the impression of an idiosyncratic, contrarian, and possibly controversial lone artist who defines himself in opposition to what­ ever is common.79 For example, in response to “idiosyncrasies” Nabokov answers, “The squeak of cotton wool, the touch of satin” (next to which the puzzled editor has added in pencil, “Think he means it in the formal definition of ‘mode of expression peculiar to author’ ”—­which is as good a guess as any).80 Tellingly, Nabokov answers in the negative to a question that seems tailor-­made to exploit the publicity around an aristocratic refugee from not only the Bolsheviks but now also Hitler: “­Will you list recent incidents in your experiences which might serve as publicity stories?”—­“I am afraid not—it would take too much time. But I would be glad to give you any special information you might require” (­there is no rec­ord that the editors took him up on the offer).81 It is impor­tant to note, as we s­ hall explore below, that Nabokov’s American agent prompted him numerous times on the kind of autobiographical lit­er­a­ture he should write for an American audience.



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When Bobbs-­Merrill published Laughter in the Dark in May 1938, they did not gave it the “special treatment” originally advocated by Lorimer, nor did they promote it as “the most brutal novel ever written.” They did, however give it a striking dust jacket (now a collector’s item), on the inside flaps of which they laid out their strategy for presenting this new Eu­ro­pean author to an American public. The publisher relies entirely on Nazaroff ’s reviews for descriptions of his work and on Nabokov’s questionnaires for information about the author himself. The blurb opens by leaning directly on the New York Times for credibility and prestige: Vladimir Nabokov has never before been published in Amer­i­ca. Yet three years ago the New York Times reviewed four of his books. ­There can be no better way to pre­sent Mr. Nabokoff and LAUGHTER IN THE DARK than to offer the Times’ opinion: “The four novels reviewed h ­ ere—­‘The Exploit’, ‘Luzhin’s Defense,’ ‘Camera Obscura’ and ‘Despair—­are all remarkable achievements, not to say (as one is strongly tempted to do, speaking of the last three) masterpieces.” LAUGHTER IN THE DARK is “Camera Obscura.” Again we quote the Times: “ ‘Camera Obscura’ is a work of an entirely dif­fer­ent type and an achievement, in a sense, even greater than ‘Luzhin’s Defense.’ Its subject is as old as the world: it is the carnal passion of Kretschmar, a sedate, cultured German in his ‘dangerous age,’ which throws him in the arms of a young adventuress, prompts him to abandon his ­family and leads to his peril. But how original, fresh and new all that is in Mr. Nabokoff ’s telling! In construction it is almost an adventure story; in substance it is a high-­g rade psychological novel. And what an amount of life-­sap flows through its pages!” “His eye is as sharp and intelligent as a blade: it suffices for him to show the reader a detail of a ­human pose or of the furnishings of a room, and the w ­ hole ­human being or room leaps to the reader’s imagination. He combines g­ reat ‘instinctive’ creative power with a highly refined literary technique which is more Eu­ro­pean than Rus­sian in type. Some of his pages make one think of Andre Gide or V ­ irginia Woolf, although this is in no way a result of ‘influence.’ ”82 The article chosen ­here is Nazaroff ’s “A New Rus­sian Writer of ­Great Talent”—­a title and piece that are already promotional in intent. Nazaroff is cited in the very place where he anticipates the second part of Nabokov’s opening, which focuses on the detailed “telling” of an old story.83

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Following Nazaroff, the author of the blurb links Nabokov’s biographical experiences to his importable and consumable fiction: From a distinguished, aristocratic ­family, Vladimir Nabokoff belongs to that generation of Rus­sian emigrés whom life has treated to a generous share of cosmopolitanism. He was about ten when he left Rus­sia and the Imperial Lyceum of St. Petersburg to finish his education at Cambridge. He has since lived in Germany, E ­ ngland, and France, where his latest works have been translated into French, and he is fast attracting a growing attention all over Eu­rope. American readers ­will warmly welcome this “discovery”—an author with the imagination of Scheherazade, the power of Dostoievsky and the ability to write a power­f ul story with finish, taste and grace.84 The author therefore cites without credit Nazaroff ’s opening (“M. Sirin belongs to that generation of Rus­sian émigrés whom life has treated to a generous share of cosmopolitanism and who might well describe themselves as citizens of the world”).85 Though incorrect in biographical details (he attended the Tenishchev School, and even the precocious Nabokov did not enroll at the University of Cambridge at age ten), the blurb captures the spirit of Nazaroff ’s comment about “citizens of the world.” Nabokov’s popularity in Eu­rope is said to prepare his international success—­meaning the United States. A credit to his rewriting, Nabokov’s ­f uture success is ascribed to his literary craft—­“a power­f ul story with finish, taste and grace,” recalling Lyman’s laudatory reader report on Laughter in the Dark, which shifted the emphasis from the tawdriness and banality of the subject m ­ atter to the timeless, universally valid tale. This lines Nabokov up not with the cinema, but with the psychological yet melodramatic realism of the Rus­sian classic. Curiously, this minor dose of orientalism (Scheherazade!) and portrayal of the Rus­sians as masters of instincts and passions is that put forward by Weimar and German filmmaking in the United States.86 This mixture is seasoned with reference to Nabokov’s aristocratism—­another cinematic trope of the interwar period. The attribute of aristocratism (splendor, luxury, profligacy) was essential to American filmic portrayals of Rus­sians in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1933 Hollywood succès de scandale of Rasputin and the Empress, which resulted in a successful lawsuit for libel by Prince and Princess Yusupov, and the 1935 release of Josef von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment and Clarence Brown’s Anna Karenina supply an essential backdrop for the middlebrow American reception of Nabokov.87 ­These two strains would be parodied by Nabokov in his first American short story, “The Assistant Producer” (see coda).



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Ultimately, this results in Nabokov being presented according to four basic coordinates: in persona, an aristocratic Rus­sian and a cosmopolitan Eu­ro­pe­an; in style, a classical psychological realist (Rus­sian) and a refined modernist stylist (Eu­ro­pean). It is therefore fascinating to read what American reviewers made of the novel. Samuel Nock in the Saturday Review was seemingly convinced by Nabokov’s rewriting of the opening à l’américaine. His reaction mirrors that of the ­later Bobbs-­Merrill reader Lyman, to the point that he too quotes the opening in full: “A plot could hardly be less original or promising than that of Laughter in the Dark; so trite is it that the author gives it all in his first paragraph. . . . ​That is all—­material for sentimental tragedy or trivial moralizing. Nabokoff, however, makes the story in­ter­est­ing ­because of the way he tells it.”88 Yet two reviewers of May 1938 ­were more discerning. Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker defines Nabokov in terms of his cultural equivalents, fitting him squarely into middlebrow culture. Most remarkably, he links him to hardboiled novelist James Cain, a signature author of noir fiction before the term itself was in­ven­ted: “A first-­rate thriller with clever psychological trimmings and an atmosphere combining Chekhovian lassitude with surrealist degeneracy is Vladimir Nabokoff ’s ‘Laughter in the Dark,’ which as a title is not much more stomachable than ‘Architects of Ideas.’ Mr. Nabokoff, a Rus­sian exile who has several well-­thought-of books to his credit, is a kind of Continental James Cain. His horrors have a fine sheen and are put over with a boulevard casualness that our own immature prac­ti­tion­ ers may well envy.”89 Tellingly, Nabokov’s novel is read as a thriller: “Rex and Margot now play a game of blindman’s buff with Albinus, a game so cruel but psychologically so fascinating that reading about it ­will wring your withers, stand your hair on end, freeze your blood, and pop your eyes for you. I ­haven’t been so nicely scared since I watched them roll virgins in ground glass at the ­Grand Guignol years and years ago.”90 Thus Nabokov was consumed for a kind of spine-­tingling—­a Pa­ri­sian balagan—­that is presumably far from the one Nabokov had in mind in “Good Readers and Good Writers.”91 For the New York Times reviewer Harold Strauss, however, the novel brings up the same issues it had for the Bobbs-­Merrill reader Jerry—­the author’s distance from his characters and the apparently derivative nature of the story: “strongly reminiscent of a certain type of continental novel which turned up with ­great frequency in the Twenties.”92 In other words, Nabokov’s novel was firmly stamped with the tag “Made in 1928”—­the time and atmosphere of the story having implicated the author himself, another failure of pastiche to maintain the requisite distance. Despite Fadiman’s comfort in the New Yorker with comparisons to Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture (Chekhov), Strauss in the New York Times pushes back

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against the Bobbs-­Merrill marketing: “And fi­nally, it is a pity that so polished and graceful a story should have to go out into a hard and cynical world with a comparison to Dostoievsky on its dust wrapper.”93 Strauss speaks with the authority of someone who would soon be editor in chief at Knopf (from 1942 to 1966), the firm instrumental in promoting Thomas Mann as a global literary icon.94 As ­these reviews show, Nabokov’s ostensible subject in Laughter in the Dark disqualified him for the time being from consideration for such a role.

Amer­i­ca Lucida: Laughter in the Dark and the Hollywood Production Code Nabokov himself was hopeful about a film adaptation: a­ fter the near success of Kamera obskura with the British firm Capitol Pictures, he still harbored dreams of an American com­pany picking it up.95 Jannelli was on the same page. In March 1938, two months before the book’s publication, Jannelli pressed Bobbs-­Merrill about planned screen and stage adaptations:96 First, is the pre-­publication sale of the book already begun, and if so, how is it showing up? When w ­ ill you be able to copyright the book? Thirdly, I ­shall have to have at that time quite a few copies, if not of the book, at least dummies or galleys, so that I may carry them first to the movie firms who have asked to see it, and who are waiting, and to many ­others who ­haven’t asked for it yet, with whom I am very friendly. Now that every­thing is settled with Long, when is your firm ­going to grant me the dramatization rights, so I may go ahead?97 Days ­after the book was published in May, she wrote to Nabokov, “The book is copyrighted, so this week I am ­going to start on the work with the movies.”98 The responses from Hollywood companies and their New York offices began rolling almost immediately. The movie companies unanimously concluded that it would never pass censorship. Twentieth C ­ entury Fox Film Corporation wrote, “This is a brilliant story and completely unusual, but it is, I am sorry to say, much too sordid for motion pictures. The characterization of Axel, so skillfully achieved in the book, would be lost on the screen ­because of censorship.”99 Columbia Pictures Corporation: “It’s a ­g rand book, with a strong and well worked out theme, but I’m afraid it’s too morbid for our use.”100 Samuel Goldwyn, Inc.: “It’s a most in­ter­est­ing story and I enjoyed reading it. However, it’s too psychological in content for picture adaptation, and not quite the sort of t­ hing Mr. Goldwyn would like to do.”101 Republic Pictures Corporation: “One of the strongest



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novels we have read in a long time,” but it has been “returned, since it is too cosmopolitan for us, and would require a g­ reat deal of rewriting for the censors, anyway.”102 Other companies canvassed included Universal, Paramount, Selznick, Gainsborough, Metro-­Goldwyn, and RKO. The reactions of Hollywood are the inverse of ­those of American publishers and book reviewers, for whom the “sordid,” “morbid,” “psychological,” and “cosmopolitan” nature of Nabokov and his works had been a selling point. But Bobbs-­Merrill president David Laurance Chambers was not surprised by their uniform rejection of it, writing on June 7, 1938: “The responses from the movies are about what I expected.”103 Days ­later, he commissioned a theatrical adaptation from Nabokov’s agent Jannelli, ostensibly as another way to promote the book. Before turning to that decision, it is worth pausing to ask why Hollywood turned down Laughter in the Dark and why it came as no surprise, given the past and ­future success of Bobbs-­Merrill in selling the film rights to their books (Light the Lamps of China, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Fountainhead). In order to avoid scandal and clean up the image of Hollywood, in March 1930 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of Amer­i­ca (MPPDA) pledged to adhere to a new Production Code, a set of guidelines for cinematic self-­censorship. Between 1930 and 1934, adherence to the Production Code was policed by the Studio Relations Committee, an ultimately ineffectual body. From 1934 on, however, a new institution, the Production Code Administration, headed by the energetic Joseph Breen, engineered a new moral landscape, which lasted ­until the late 1950s. The period 1930–1934 has become known as the pre-­ Code era and has been the subject of a number of scholarly and popu­lar reappraisals. The Code era (or, as one scholar has put it, the “Breen era”) saw the consolidation of what was famously termed the “classical Hollywood cinema,” when artistic and commercial considerations ­were held in balance by the studio system. But the Code, actively enforced by Breen’s administration from 1934 on, nonetheless placed considerable limitations on which subjects could be broached on-­screen and how they ­were to be treated. The basic “Working Princi­ples” ­were clearly laid out: 1. No picture should lower the moral standards of ­those who see it. This is done: (a) When evil is made to appear attractive, and good is made to appear unattractive. (b) When the sympathy of the audience is thrown on the side of crime, wrong-­doing, evil, sin. The same ­thing is true of a film that would throw sympathy against goodness, honor, innocence, purity, honesty.104

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In Nabokov’s case, one could argue that evil is indeed punished, in that the adulterer Albinus is blinded and eventually murdered. And the sympathy of the reader is certainly aroused by the pitiful fate of the innocents, Elizabeth and Irma, Albinus’s wife and ­daughter. To be sure, evil is not universally punished, nor is the punishment proportionate to the crime: the cruel Rex’s comeuppance is l­imited to a beating, and manipulative Margot appears to escape unscathed (in the published ending). But Albinus, Margot, and Rex are all ultimately unsympathetic characters, whose vari­ous ethical and aesthetic blind spots are exposed by the narrator for the reader’s enjoyment, and possibly edification.105 In fact, what is objectionable in the light of the Code is less the novel’s moral (or moral compass) than its subject ­matter and treatment. Most pertinent in the case of Laughter in the Dark are the Code’s provisions on “plot material” and “details of plot, episode and treatment”: Plot Material [to be avoided or minimized, handled carefully]

(1)  The triangle [“the love of a third party by one already married”] (2) Adultery (3)  Seduction and rape (4)  Scenes of passion (5)  Sexual immorality (6)  The pre­sen­ta­tion of murder (7)  Crimes against the law Details of Plot, Episode, and Treatment

Vulgarity (low, disgusting, unpleasant, bad taste or uncivilized, incl. oaths, vulgar expressions, Jesus Christ) Obscenity (neither in fact, nor suggested, incl. word, gesture, episode, plot) Costume [incl. nudity, body parts, stripping, e­ tc.] Dancing (sexual or arousing) Locations (1. Brothels 2. Bedrooms)106 In terms of illicit material, Nabokov ticks almost e­ very box. Centering on not one but two “triangles,” this story of adultery and marital-­domestic collapse includes Margot’s rape by two businessmen, multiple scenes of lustful passion, the comedic treatment of sexual immorality, detailed descriptions of Margot’s body in vari­ous states of undress, scenes of bedroom (and bathroom) farce, vari­ous obscenities of deed and gesture culminating in the vulgar Rex’s naked cavorting, all capped by an abortive revenge murder. No policemen are harmed, however. Even though in his American rewrite, Nabokov had considerably toned down the sexual content, retaining, for example, the British version’s increase in



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the heroine’s age from sixteen to eigh­teen, Laughter in the Dark did not stand a chance in Code-­era Hollywood, with both Twentieth C ­ entury Fox and Republic Pictures referring in their letters to “censorship” and “the censors.”107 What is perhaps most intriguing about the producers’ responses is not the expectation of censorship in the verdict “too morbid” (Columbia) or “too sordid” (Fox), but instead the concerns over audience appeal in the comments “too psychological” (Goldwyn) and “too cosmopolitan” (Republic).108 ­These are the very terms that had been deemed advantages in reviews and promotional materials in the publishing sphere: when the editor Lorimer had suggested promoting Camera Obscura to an American audience as “the most brutal novel ever written,” his reader Jerry had countered that the novel lacked the requisite “morbid appeal.”109 In their promotional materials, Bobbs-­Merrill had followed Nazaroff in touting Nabokov as both a Rus­sian psychologist and a Eu­ro­pean émigré cosmopolitan. For Hollywood, however, ­these very terms reduced his mass appeal. In 1930, the authors of the Production Code had made the basic point that as an art and a form of mass entertainment the cinema was unique in its range and relatively undifferentiated audience and that t­ here “the motion picture has special Moral obligations”: “Most arts appeal to the mature. This art appeals at once to ­every class—­mature, immature, developed, undeveloped, law-­ abiding, criminal. ­Music has its grades for dif­fer­ent classes; so has lit­er­a­ture and drama. This art of the motion picture, combining as it does the two fundamental appeals of looking at a picture and listening to a story, at once reaches ­every class of society.”110 Thus, where the Bobbs-­Merrill reviewer could (hesitatingly) cite Tolstoy, and the dust jacket could link Nabokov with Dostoevsky, the studios could not assume any such middlebrow background knowledge. To an American reader (even the average Bobbs-­Merrill “lending-­library” reader cited by the reviewer Jerry), a Rus­sian name could suggest high culture and a literary pedigree; to the layman, it may just as well suggest suspicious Bolshevism. Even worse, if the concept of émigré was understood, it could connote an equally unwelcome White Rus­sian reactionism. (The vicissitudes of t­ hese reactions upon Nabokov’s arrival in the United States during the Second World War are tackled in the coda.) Faced with Hollywood’s negative (if expected) response, Chambers gave in to Jannelli’s request and authorized a stage version of Laughter in the Dark to be written by Jannelli herself.111 Half the proceeds would go to Bobbs-­ Merrill, and the other half would be split between Jannelli and Nabokov.112 Jannelli’s purpose, as she reiterated to Bobbs-­Merrill in her reply, was to gain Nabokov traction in the American market and maximize profits. The best way to do this was through the movie industry: “My proposal of dramatizing Nabokoff ’s book is quite for the purpose of pushing the author before the public,

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so as to benefit you, his publisher, and his reputation. . . . ​I ­shall, of course, as soon as the play is finished, show scripts to the movie h ­ ouses who h ­ aven’t bitten on the book, for they may then see a possibility of d­ oing it. However, if the play could be produced on Broadway, and it ­were a success, we would, to be sure, get much more money for the film.”113 If previously Jannelli had used a dramatization as a way to circumvent copyright laws, h ­ ere the theater is used as a conduit to the cinema, from stage door to backlot. As Jannelli explained to Nabokov a year l­ater, this was not only an attempt to promote his fiction but an explicit attempt to reimagine it in a way that might be palatable to Hollywood: I once told you that if a movie bought the book they would surely change the story; they would buy the title and write their own story. But in the case of a flop, they are not interested e­ ither in the title or in the story, for the title of a book that remains unknown does not attract the public to see a picture. That is why B-­M [Bobbs-­Merrill] made a contract with me to make a play, so that perhaps the story might be arranged to suit the movies. Thus it would no longer be a question of the title. . . . ​Now it is simply writing a play to see if it ­will sell in ­these hard times.114 Jannelli’s idea for using the theater as a backdoor to the cinema had an apposite pre­ce­dent, however. Vicki Baum, Nabokov’s fellow resident in 1920s Berlin and also an Ullstein author, successfully took a similar route to Hollywood. Her novel Menschen im H ­ otel (translated as ­Grand ­Hotel) was made into a movie following a successful Broadway run.115 The huge media campaigns waged first by Ullstein to have the book adapted and translated and then by Doubleday in the United States to have it turned into a screenplay are remarkable for their mobilization of multiple media. Baum, already a commodity in Germany based on her fiction, now became a literary crossover whose artistic authority (which had actually been compromised in literary circles due to her commercial success) was exploited to bolster the film. This can be seen in the program distributed with ­Grand ­Hotel, where the author is photographed as “voluntary technical advisor” visiting and approving of the set.116 Crucially, however, MGM’s ­Grand ­Hotel belongs to the pre-­Code era of 1930. Jannelli intended to make Nabokov’s name with a single work and then to promote the back cata­log in translation. Only a month l­ater, in July 1938, when Laughter in the Dark sold poorly, Bobbs-­Merrill de­cided to give up their option on translating any more of Nabokov’s previous fiction. From this point on they would wait for an original American novel from him. Jannelli’s reaction was furious, accusing them of shortsightedness:



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Mr. Cameron wrote me that Nabokoff was ­going to be launched as rarely an author has been, and I must say that the lack of advertising has certainly killed his sale—­above all, since he is a new author, with whom the public has to be made acquainted. Mr. Lorimer and I, speaking of his books, all of which he liked, knew very well that the sale of the first book could not be enormous, but he told me himself that the sale of the second book would be greater, and that the third one would sell the two first. I am sorry that you d­ on’t take such a long-­range view of an excellent author. I personally feel that a­ fter I have worked for him long enough and hard enough he is g­ oing to be a big money-­maker h ­ ere. . . . ​ I am very sorry not to see Nabokov be made famous by your firm.117 Although Nabokov and Jannelli parted ways in 1942, and she died in 1945, her assertion ultimately proved to be correct, as Lolita’s success entailed precisely this kind of revision of his previous work, including a flood of translations. In the short term, too, Jannelli correctly sensed a real possibility for immediate success. Less than three years l­ater, another young Bobbs-­Merrill editor gambled on a Rus­sian émigré, quite literally staking his ­career on a contract. Chambers, the famously cautious president, was so impressed with the editor Archibald Ogden’s confidence in the author (“if this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you”) that he acquiesced: “Far be it from me to dampen such enthusiasm. Sign the contract. But the book better be good.”118 Ayn Rand received the agreement on December 10, 1941, only three days a­ fter Pearl Harbor. Her novel The Fountainhead (1943) became a word-­of-­mouth best seller and, following the war, a Hollywood blockbuster in 1949. Despite their obvious differences in aesthetic and po­liti­cal commitments, Rand’s and Nabokov’s relation to American publishing and cinema is worth replacing into a shared context. Rand, who left Rus­sia ­later (a number of years into the Soviet period) and came to the United States over a de­cade ­earlier, shared Nabokov’s love of moviegoing. In the mid-1920s, she not only attended the cinema religiously but also kept a movie diary, scoring each film on a personal scale (like a Rus­sian homework assignment, 5 meant top marks).119 While a student at the Leningrad State Institute for Cinematography in 1924–1925, she even authored two pamphlets that ­were published in the Soviet Union, Pola Negri (1925) (anonymously) and Hollywood: City of Movies (Gollivud: Amerikanskii kino-­gorod, 1926) ­under her real name Alisa Rozenbaum.120 Having worked in Hollywood as a screenplay writer following her move ­there in 1926 (a gig held out to Nabokov as a possibility by Lewis Milestone’s emissary Sergei Bertenson in 1932), Rand maintained strong ties to the movie industry.

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Even while finishing The Fountainhead, she kept a job as a reader for Paramount Studios in New York.121 It was therefore natu­ral that Rand herself would write the screenplay for The Fountainhead. In June 1938, a month a­ fter Laughter in the Dark was published, Rand had won a large advance from Knopf for The Fountainhead, but she had been unable to meet their one-­year turnaround (plus extra year’s extension) for the full manuscript.122 Rand was already a published novelist and playwright—­her first lucrative writing outside the cinema was the drama The Night of January 16th.123 ­After poor reviews and sales of her 1936 novel We the Living (set in the Soviet Union, but out of step with current American intellectuals’ ideas of a socialist utopia), Rand turned it into a play.124 Her success as an author came, however, with The Fountainhead, her largest work to date. And it was only with The Fountainhead that she made Amer­i­ca the subject and setting of her novel. The Fountainhead became a best seller, leading to a bidding war between Hollywood production companies to buy the screen rights (the film appeared in 1949). By eschewing the semiautobiographical Rus­sian material of We the Living and the fictional dystopia of Anthem, Rand was able to create an American myth that appealed to the middlebrow audience (Hicks Land, to use the gleefully applied émigré label) that Bobbs-­Merrill and Hollywood so assiduously courted. It would be simplistic to attribute the success of Lolita to its being the first novel Nabokov set in Amer­ic­ a. A ­ fter all, it was published in Eu­rope and first acclaimed t­ here. But Rand’s success with Bobbs-­Merrill and Hollywood—­her perfectly aimed pitch to “Hicks Land”—is instructive in the context of Nabokov’s fate in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Although Jannelli vigorously defended Nabokov’s work against the charge that it was “too essentially foreign and unfamiliar” to an American reader (“I think it is perfectly obvious that Nabokoff ’s books are bigger than their locale; they are studies in h ­ uman nature, and that does not vary from country to country”), she admitted to Nabokov in private that his subjects w ­ ere not 125 close enough to home for the US market. Her rundown of reader reports on his Rus­sian oeuvre hardly exaggerates: “Le Fou [The Luzhin Defense]: They like it well enough, but it is on a chess player; they ­don’t play chess ­here. Mashenka [Mary]: They are not interested now in Rus­sian refugees—­only in the Germans. Despair: Characters are all too distant, unfriendly. Dame, Knabe, Bube [sic] [King, Queen, Knave]: Cutely done, old-­fashioned story, too light. Exploit [Glory]: Is in Rus­sian. I need new material, as you see. All ­these, if you had one success, would more easily be sold afterwards.”126 At the same time, Bobb-­Merrill remained hopeful of Nabokov’s prospects as an American writer, provided he could turn his hand to autobiography and draw on his own experiences of exile. In a letter of May 1938, two days ­after



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the publication of Laughter in the Dark, Jannelli passed on Bobbs-­Merrill editor Angus Cameron’s pleas: Being their man, they want you to write best-­seller stuff, and, though your manner of writing is beautiful, and they all agree to that and know you can write anything at all, yet they find, as I have found years ago, that in your f­ uture books you should depict p­ eople in situations showing them suffering with the ills of pre­sent humanity. To be sure, as an emigre in Eu­rope, perhaps you have never dared. . . . ​Cameron said, speaking of the horrible situation of non-­citizenship in which you are, that you had a marvelous book within yourself—­the plight of the sensitive artist and writer who cannot make his life with the Left, which is Rus­sia, nor with the Right, which is Germany. You always say you ­don’t like politics; I ­don’t ­either, however, we are suffering ­here too, and I must say that we like books in which the characters are not all rich, and suffer of poverty and other pre­sent misfortunes caused by the situation of the world. With your capacity, they know that you can give them what the American public wants.127 Perhaps it should have been obvious from his replies to the “Author Questionnaire” that Nabokov had no intention, as he put it in his reply, of writing “novels solving ‘modern prob­lems’ or picturing ‘the world unrest.’ ”128 Yet he had in fact already turned his hand to autobiography, of a dif­fer­ent variety. In 1936 he compiled a small book’s worth of material in En­glish on his childhood. Of the multiple titles cited throughout his correspondence in the late 1930s, two came the closest to appearing in print: “A Rus­sian’s Early Associations with ­England” and “En­glish Games in Rus­sia.”129 The former he read out at a dinner in ­England in early 1937, prompting numerous requests for the manuscript. Though publication was ultimately not undertaken, perusing the manuscript led one En­glish publisher to offer similar advice to that of his American counterpart. Significantly, the advice is framed in terms of a contrast with the book that would become Laughter in the Dark: What are you writing now? From what I have heard of “Camera Obscura,” and from my impression of this manuscript, it seems to me that you would do well to write your reminiscences. But to do so successfully, I believe that you would have to let yourself go, as you boast in the Preface to the pre­sent manuscript, that you have never done. You go on to say that you have always considered that the less writers take ­things to heart the better for every­body concerned. This seems to me a fatal attitude, especially for an author of your temperament. If you

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would adopt an exactly opposite course, I believe that your writing would have a far greater appeal to readers, and would even have more intrinsic merit.130 C. Huntington (with what one hesitates to call a classically British backward compliment paid to Camera Obscura) advises Nabokov to write more personally, not less, and engage more fully and deeply with autobiography. This reproach of the narrative stance of this work is also repeated by Cameron ­later (“a bit too objective, a l­ittle too heartless”).131 In other words, both British and American publishers in the late 1930s wanted less style—­and more personality. Furthermore, they ­were interested in the dramatic events now unfolding in Europe—in the experiences of statelessness and exile. As Huntington puts it, “A Rus­sian’s Early Associations with E ­ ngland” is “full of charming atmosphere and subtle and sympathetic perception. But it almost entirely lacks action or drama.”132 In Amer­i­ca, Jannelli attempted to push the most action-­packed parts of Nabokov’s memoirs, “En­glish Games in Rus­sia” (one won­ders exactly how much action this contained). Immediately upon receiving the contract for Laughter in the Dark, she made plans to press the Bobbs-­Merrill owner over the “syndication” of a section of Nabokov’s autobiography. Amusingly, she reports: “The section he had thought of was American sports as played in Rus­sia.”133 In any case, it was turned down by the Saturday Eve­ning Post in September 1938, one of numerous negative responses from American publishers.134 In the end, Nabokov did not produce the autobiographical reflections that his English-­ language agent and publishers called for. Nevertheless, Bobbs-­Merrill was crucial in smoothing Nabokov’s path to the United States. Even before the publication of Laughter in the Dark, Jannelli was working with Bobbs-­Merrill to facilitate Nabokov’s immigration to the United States.135 At the outbreak of the Second World War, Jannelli worked hand in hand with Countess Alexandra Tolstoy to petition for Nabokov to seek refuge in the United States (“­under the circumstances, being a White Rus­sian, he is now considered an ­enemy in France, and might be interned or worse”).136 She wrote to Chambers, enclosing a letter from Nabokov asking for a letter addressed to the American consul in Paris. Chambers obliged, even l­ater amending his original letter to follow a second set of instructions from Nabokov. Understandably, Nabokov wanted to make his case as effective as pos­si­ ble, ­going so far as to promise them the book they wanted him to write: “And, please, make it quite clear to Bobbs-­Merrill that, once in New York, I s­ hall certainly write for them the novel they expect from me.”137 Chambers’s letter to the consul (with the added section in brackets) reads: “We would be very grateful if you could help the celebrated Rus­sian author, Mr. Vladimir Nabokoff-­



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Sirin, now resident in Paris, to obtain his visa for the United States. He is indeed a writer of extraordinary talent, and his presence ­here would enable us to guide him in writing books of interest and appeal to Americans [added: and at the same time help us to develop our activity where foreign lit­er­a­ture is concerned. His knowledge of that lit­er­a­ture is both wide and deep].”138 As Jannelli put it on June 1, 1940: “Mr. Nabokoff has arrived. . . . ​Nabokoff told me that your letter had been a good help to him in obtaining his visa, and now that he is ­here, I hope he w ­ ill write us THE BOOK.”139 Nabokov therefore arrived in the United States not only with an American agent but with an American publisher confident that ­there was a market for Nabokov’s next work. As Chambers pointed out, “While [Laughter in the Dark] had no g­ reat sale, it did make a very strong and vivid impression with some of the p­ eople in the trade, and laid the ground for the next novel.”140 Once in the United States, Nabokov divided his time between working and writing, but his attempts to meet the expectations of Bobbs-­Merrill ­were short-­lived, likely from June to October 1940.141 When Chambers wrote to Jannelli, “I hope that Mr. Nabokov can manage his schedule now so as to devote some time of ­every day to his mystery story,” we look in vain for traces of such a work, other than a comment to his first Rus­sian interviewer in New York that he was writing an English-­language “crime novel.”142 Nabokov wrote to friends in summer 1940, “We are staying amid marvelous green wilds . . . ​where one can go around half-­naked, write an En­glish novel, and catch American butterflies,” but admitted that this novel would hardly satisfy demands for “a genteel book, with agreeable protagonists and moral landscapes,” which Nabokov, somewhat unfairly, attributed to Jannelli (his “anti-­literary” agent) rather than Bobbs-­ Merrill.143 Yet, despite this aborted “mystery,” “detective,” or “crime” novel, Nabokov’s first original full-­length works published in Amer­i­ca (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941) and composed ­there (Bend Sinister, 1947), as well as the intervening and sui generis book Nikolai Gogol (1944) commissioned for New Directions, testify to his refusal, as in the Bobbs-­Merrill questionnaires, to draw directly on or promote himself through his experiences as a Rus­sian émigré.144 As we s­ hall see, he did not give up his work with the cinema, but it was now refracted through the lens of his double exile.

Coda The Old Eu­rope Picture Palace

Nabokov’s first fiction written in the United States in En­glish was “The Assistant Producer” (1943), a short story about cinema and exile published in the Atlantic Monthly.1 It can be seen as Nabokov’s first fictional response to Amer­ic­ a, where he arrived in 1940 as the author of a single American book, Laughter in the Dark. He was still u ­ nder contract to an American agent but was without a publisher, since Bobbs-­Merrill had given up the option on his work back in 1938 in the hopes of coaxing from him a new work better suited to their target demographic.2 He had a novel in his back pocket, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, written in 1938–1939 in the South of France, which would appear in December 1941 with New Directions, hardly noticed less than a fortnight ­after Pearl Harbor.3 But ­there was l­ ittle chance of his Rus­sian back cata­log of novels being translated, perhaps least of all his longest work, the allusive Rus­sian novel Dar (The Gift, 1937–1938)—­despite his touchingly vociferous protestations to the contrary.4 Nabokov had spent most of his first few years in the United States fulfilling commissions as a lecturer at Stanford, Wellesley, and a series of colleges up and down the Atlantic seaboard. He was becoming a fixture in the Atlantic Monthly, with translations of his Eu­ro­pean short stories.5 He had also received an advance from James Laughlin of New Directions to write a book of translations of Rus­sian poetry and compose an introduction to Nikolai Gogol. Despite receiving a Guggen-

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heim Fellowship for novel writing, his main “­free” activity during ­these years had been butterfly hunting and auxiliary entomology.6 “The Assistant Producer” fictionalizes “­actual facts,” as Nabokov l­ater terms them, and replays (with changed names) a spy story that was widely reported in Rus­sian émigré newspapers in Paris.7 The Nabokov scholar Charles Nicol recounts this story in “Finding the ‘Assistant Producer,’ ” using Geoffrey Bailey’s The Conspirators (1960) as his source, even showing that Bailey incorporates several details of Nabokov’s story with only vague attribution and was therefore likely familiar with it—­presumably the kind of “real life” “plagiarizing” of his fiction that would have delighted Nabokov.8 What Nicol does not mention is that “Geoffrey Bailey” is the pseudonym of Prince George Vassiltchikov, a multilingual émigré who served as interpreter at the Nuremberg T ­ rials and ­later edited the well-­known Berlin Diaries of his ­sister Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov. Written concurrently with Nabokov’s story, this rec­ord of an aristocratic Rus­ sian émigré’s perceptions of the war­time German capital, an insider-­outsider account of the fall of the Third Reich, illuminates the world Nabokov had left ­behind.9 That George Vassiltchikov would l­ater read Nabokov’s story, incorporating it silently into his own pseudonymous account, offers a glimpse of the multiple afterlives of émigrés in ­these years. ­After all, by 1943 Nabokov signed his work no longer “Sirin” or “Nabokoff-­Sirine” but “Vladimir Nabokov”—­ with the coy line concluding his bio in the Atlantic Monthly, “It is only in recent years that he has mastered the difficulty of writing in En­glish.”10 The story occupies a pivotal place in Nabokov’s American ­career. Having crafted in Eu­rope a salable persona of urbane cosmopolitanism that was, if not the full picture, at least artistically uncompromising, Nabokov’s second exile in Amer­i­ca forced a recalibration that required a second round of humility and patience. The story may have been prompted by a trip he took to the cinema in late 1942 while on a lecture tour. As he confessed to his wife: Yesterday a­ fter the trip into the country I went, having got awfully bored, to the cinema [v kinematograf] and came back on foot—­I walked for more than an hour and went to bed around eight. On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me—­a passionate desire to write—­and to write in Rus­sian. And yet I c­ an’t. I d­ on’t think anyone who has never experienced this feeling can ­really understand its torment, its tragedy. In this sense the En­glish language is an illusion and an ersatz. In my usual condition, i.e., busy with butterflies, translations, or academic writing, I myself ­don’t fully register the ­whole grief and bitterness of my situation.”11

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In “The Assistant Producer” Nabokov put this language of illusion and ersatz into the ser­vice of depicting the very same qualities in not only American cinematic culture but also the cinematic culture of the Rus­sian emigration in Eu­rope. The narrative of the Rus­sian emigration contained in “The Assistant Producer” chronicles the diaspora from its inception during the Rus­sian civil war up ­until its end with the occupation. This birth to death cycle fits with Nabokov’s view of the emigration in 1940 as a period for which the “past tense” is now appropriate: “For the twenty-­year Eu­ro­pean period of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture ­really came to an end a­ fter the events that for a second time have shattered our lives.”12 Nabokov’s initial reflections set down upon his arrival in the sketch “Definitions”—­his earliest attempt to summarize the Eu­ro­pean emigration—­ equate the fall of France with the death of the Rus­sian emigration. One set of wars had created the Rus­sian artistic emigration; now another had destroyed it.13 Yet Nabokov himself was not bounded by the “life” of the emigration, the dates 1918–1940 carved “on a gravestone . . . ​bound in moss.”14 In the 1920s, Nabokov had resisted attempts to define himself in terms of History writ large, ­either as a victim of revolution or as a product of a postwar mentality. Vigorously resisting ­those who would affix labels, he used paradox and irony to create insider-­outsider portrayals of con­temporary Eu­rope that passed muster with French and German critics and, eventually, American publishers. Thus the Rus­sian émigré culture at the center of “The Assistant Producer,” though based on a true story, is far from the truth of Nabokov’s own experience. It portrays instead a certain parodic refraction of the world of the White Rus­ sians from whom he was always careful to distance himself. Furthermore, the narrator himself, though a Rus­sian in Amer­i­ca, is a former priest from central Rus­sia, not a cosmopolitan author and polyglot aristocrat from St. Petersburg. Lastly, the intended audience is not one of average Hollywood moviegoers (the all-­powerful Hicks, a term put into circulation by Robert Nichols and picked up by Gippius, Muratov, and other Rus­sian émigré cinema theorists), but the sophisticated readers of an outlet like the Atlantic Monthly, already familiar with a se­lection of Nabokov’s Eu­ro­pean stories. The cinematized narrative ­here is a communal one, focusing on the familiar cliché of reactionary White Rus­ sians as proto-­fascists and the less familiar, unsung, and unsophisticated émigrés. The perspective of the “sensitive individual” distances him from the émigré masses. In metafictional terms, Nabokov’s first American short story is an exercise in freedom, criticizing Amer­i­ca as a Rus­sian émigré and Eu­rope as a new American. In “Definitions” Nabokov celebrated the Rus­sian emigration (in words

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recalling his 1927 essay “Anniversary”) as an unheard-of experiment in freedom: “The poverty of living conditions, printing-­press difficulties, the unresponsiveness of readers, the savage ignorance of the average émigré crowds—­all this was compensated for by an incredible opportunity, untried in Russia—to be f­ree of censorship of any kind at all, state or social.”15 Conversely, Code-­era Hollywood, which had rejected Laughter in the Dark, was still ­under censorship, preventing the filming of Nabokov’s Eu­ro­pean fiction.16 It was left to “The Assistant Producer” to recapitulate in a superficially cinematized literary form the unfilmable Rus­sian fiction of its author. Nabokov’s story is a Janus text, looking backward to his immediate past, the Berlin and Paris of the Rus­sian emigration, and his immediate ­f uture, the American frame and filter for rescreening that Eu­ro­pean experience. In terms of Nabokov’s literary c­ areer, “The Assistant Producer” casts a retrospective glance at his Eu­ro­pean c­ areer of linguistically palimpsestic fiction (si­mul­ta­ neously oriented ­toward Rus­sian posterity, German-­French-­English translations, and Eu­ro­pean or Hollywood screenplays) and a prospective glance at his ­g reat American trilogy of Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962). The story returns the reader to the cinematic culture of 1920s and 1930s Eu­rope. It opens: “Meaning? Well, ­because sometimes life is merely that—an Assistant Producer. To­night we ­shall go to the movies. Back to the thirties, and down the twenties, and round the corner to the old Eu­rope Picture Palace.”17 The figure of the Assistant Producer recalls that of the “film producer” of the 1927 story “The Passenger,” who in adapting a well-­known piece of fiction for the screen “alters the novel beyond recognition; minces it, turns it inside out, throws out hundreds of episodes, introduces new characters and incidents he has in­ven­ted himself.”18 Although in Nabokov’s original Rus­sian this figure was called a rezhisser (literally “director”), this term could refer among the émigrés to e­ ither director or producer, and he is not the same as the “assistant directors” (pomoshchniki rezhissera) who run film sets with an iron fist during the same period in Mary, The Man from the U.S.S.R., and “The Cinema.”19 ­There is a difference between the creative intelligence (however derivative) of the producer who buys rights to authors’ works then remakes them for mass cinema audiences and the hands-­dirty logistical skill of the assistant director who hires, rehearses, and commands the extras. The sense h ­ ere is of life so perfectly supplying the material for this tawdry film (“strangely enough, that vile script was enacted in real­ity”) that it should receive a credit in the film.20 The full irony of this can be appreciated only as a comment on the e­ arlier story, “The Passenger,” where the middling writer laments “that Life’s per­for­mance is too sweeping, too uneven, that her genius is too untidy,” forcing the hack to cheat and bowdlerize, producing a more easily consumable distillation for his audience.21

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Looking back in “The Assistant Producer,” Nabokov shows how the communal life of the emigration, with its intrigues, kidnappings, and spy dramas, its “right-­ wing festivals” supplying “both a nostalgic solace and a patriotic kick,” was already cinematized, the “old Eu­rope Picture Palace” needing ­little reworking to keep even American “servant maids” entertained “on Saturday nights.”22 It is key that the story is not just the plot of 1938, but the circumstances leading up to it—1918 and the Rus­sian civil war, on through Constantinople, Berlin, and eventually Paris. In other words, the “life” to be screened is that of the Rus­sian emigration itself. “The Assistant Producer” tracks the life of the emigration from 1918 to the Second World War: from the émigrés’ early wanderings to the cinematic culture of Rus­sian Berlin, on to Paris and the dreams of returning to the Soviet Union, through to the conclusion of profound Eu­ ro­pean indifference to their fate, when “the émigrés ­were decidedly out of focus.”23 The narrator therefore describes the émigrés’ paths from Istanbul to Berlin and on to Paris: “when the ­great exodus began and they, as many ­others, meandered via Sirkedkji to Motztstrasse and rue Vaugirard.”24 He pauses to include a description of Rus­sian Berlin, recapitulating scenes of émigré film extras first set out in Mary and The Man from the U.S.S.R.: “German film companies, which kept sprouting like poisonous mushrooms in t­hose days (just before the child of light learned to talk), found cheap l­abor in hiring t­ hose among the Rus­sian émigrés whose only hope and profession was their past—­ that is, a set of totally unreal ­people—to represent ‘real’ audiences in pictures. The dovetailing of one phantasm into another produced upon a sensitive person the impression of living in a Hall of Mirrors, or rather a prison of mirrors, and not even knowing which was the glass and which was yourself.”25 For the Russian-­speaking reader of the Atlantic Monthly circa 1943, this sense of a Hall of Mirrors would be amplified by the knowledge that this is a translation twice removed. The Rus­sian experience of exile, reflected back by German movie screens, and fixed in Nabokov’s early fiction, is now recaptured in the fun­house distortions of a new American prose. For Nabokov in the early 1940s, resting on a body of work translated in and out of multiple Eu­ro­pean languages (Rus­sian, German, French, En­glish, Swedish, among o ­ thers), the experience of a prison of mirrors cannot have been a purely historical one. Unbeknownst to the story’s first American readers, Nabokov rescreens numerous such passages from his untranslated Rus­sian fiction, thereby retelling not only the story of the emigration but also his own narrative emplotment of it.26 ­These are recapitulations for a new American readership of a back cata­ log of fiction that had not yet been translated into En­glish. This early fiction, written in Berlin of the 1920s and early 1930s, would be the last to be translated. In one of the forewords that preface ­these translations, Nabokov drew

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attention to the “dramatic gap between 1938 and 1959,” that is, between Laughter in the Dark and the flurry of En­glish versions that appeared in the wake of Lolita. Yet the works recycled in “The Assistant Producer” had to wait even longer: Mary (1926–1970), The Man from the U.S.S.R. (1927–1984), King, Queen, Knave (1928–1968), and Glory (1932–1971).27 Following the introduction, the narrator launches into an extended description of an i­magined Hollywood film of the lives of the White military commander General Golubkov and the popu­lar singer La Slavska, starting in the Rus­sian civil war. The narrative’s imitation of Hollywood style is the construction of a recent Eu­ro­pean immigrant long familiar with the conventions of Hollywood repre­sen­ta­tions of Rus­sians, which had been exported to Weimar Germany during the 1920s. The symbolic translation seems to be an adaptation of Rus­sian, German, and French realia into the sights and sounds of Hollywood. To put it in terms of media history, memory is represented through the cinematographic and phonographic conventions of Anglophone cinematic culture of the sound era. This description reprises many of the implicit criticisms of the cinema found in Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction: Ghostly multitudes of ghostly Cossacks on ghost-­horseback are seen charging through the fading name of the assistant producer. Then dapper General Golubkov is disclosed idly scanning the battlefield through a pair of opera glasses. When movies and we w ­ ere young, we used to be shown what the sights divulged neatly framed in two connected circles. Not now. What we do see next is General Golubkov, all indolence suddenly gone, leaping into the s­ addle, looming sky-­high for an instant on his rearing steed, and then rocketing into a crazy attack. But the unexpected is the infra-­red in the spectrum of Art: instead of the conditional ra-­ta-­ta reflex of machine gunnery, a ­woman’s voice is heard singing afar. Nearer, still nearer, and fi­nally all-­pervading. A gorgeous contralto voice expanding into what­ever the musical director found in his files in the way of Rus­sian lilt. Who is this leading the infra-­ Reds? A ­woman. The singing spirit of that par­tic­u­lar, especially well-­ trained battalion. Marching in front, trampling the alfalfa, and pouring out her Volga-­Volga song. Dapper and daring djighit Golubkov (now we know what he had descried), although wounded in several spots, manages to snatch her up on the gallop, and, lusciously struggling, she is borne away. . . . ​We get a gloomy glimpse of ravens, or crows, or what­ever birds proved available, wheeling the dusk and slowly descending upon a plain

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littered with bodies somewhere in Ventura County. A White soldier’s dead hand is still clutching a medallion with his m ­ other’s face. A Red soldier nearby has on his shattered breast a letter from home with the same old w ­ oman blinking through the dissolving lines.28 The discernable lack of accuracy in m ­ usic (“what­ever the musical director found”) and flora and fauna (“what­ever birds proved available”; “somewhere in Ventura County”; “trampling the alfalfa”) and a certain melodramatic tawdriness reminiscent of Valentinov’s screenplay in The Luzhin Defense (“lusciously struggling, she is borne away”) are ­here combined with a parody of Hollywood portrayals of Rus­sianness in “the self-­conscious samovar reflecting distorted ­faces” and the “close-up of an overturned glass.”29 Furthermore, the description creates an artistic ontogeny out of knowing references to the history of the technology (“When movies and we w ­ ere young”) that reappears ­later (“in t­ hose days (just before the child of light learned to talk)”).30 ­These basic criticisms, new for Nabokov’s Rus­sian readers of the mid-1920s, but doubtless less so for a sophisticated American readership of 1943, are rendered more piquant by a contrast between technology and memory: “Indeed, when I recall the halls where the Slavska sang, both in Berlin and in Paris, and the type of ­people one saw ­there, I feel as if I ­were Technicoloring and sonorizing some very ancient motion picture where life had been a gray vibration and funerals a scamper, and where only the sea had been tinted (a sickly blue), while some hand machine imitates offstage the hiss of the asynchronous surf.”31 In his first Rus­sian novel, Mary, Nabokov had equated the spectrality of the émigré extras on-­screen and their “real” lives in exile. ­Here in his first American short story, Nabokov uses the film’s colorized and sonorized verisimilitude (always relative) to underscore the distance of the narrator’s original memories. Most intriguingly, ­these memories, for ­those familiar with Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction, are themselves filtered through a recapitulation of Rus­sian passages imbricated with a cinematic culture of black-­and-­white or primitively tinted ­silent film. Nabokov in 1943 looks back on cinema of the mid-1920s as already archaic—­ monochrome, shaky in focus and quality of detail, movement oddly sped up, and ­silent save for diegetic sound effects—­just as he had looked back at early film in his 1928 poem “Tolstoy.” The point is that the Rus­sian emigration would be forever connected with a cinematic culture whose technological points of reference ­were now, in an era of Technicolor musicals, obsolete. This ­bitter supplement to a second exile rendered their originally spectral selves even more so, a point comprehensible in 1943 by only a very few Rus­sian readers in Amer­i­ca—­and perhaps a few Weimar émigrés too.

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It is a criticism of, as well as a compliment to, Hollywood, then, that “trashy entertainment” could plausibly represent this Rus­sian communal life: the cinema as historical technique. As the émigré critic Yuly Aikhenvald had pointed out in 1927, History itself was a kind of assistant producer: “The divinity who makes movies [krutit filʹmu]—­perhaps it r­ eally is the divinity of ­human history, that ancient cinema, which has played so many films already on the huge surface of its screen, on the stage of its millennia?”32 The ­imagined Hollywood film in “The Assistant Producer” uses cinematic clichés to stylize an already clichéd set of historical commonplaces. ­Here cinema is a parody—or, better, a travesty of Rus­sian history, a costume drama for a foreign audience or for a nostalgic Rus­sian audience content with kitsch. What Nabokov would soon define in Nikolai Gogol as “poshlust”—or poshlostʹ, the Rus­sian term for the falsely beautiful, falsely impor­tant—­had been mocked throughout his Eu­ro­pean works using terms like balagan and lubok. In the figure of La Slavska, this coalesces into a “popu­ lar” style (“a hodgepodge of artificial folklore, military melodrama, and official patriotism”), for which we should imagine a simultaneous translation of the Rus­sian narodnyi and the German völkisch, with all pos­si­ble under-­and overtones.33 The mediocrity of Hollywood’s slapdash imitation of Rus­sianness is therefore slyly shown to be sufficient to its object. Furthermore, given the ersatz nature of the backdrop, flora, and fauna, the film does not even accidentally capture t­hose superficial slices of real life in motion that had so pleased Martin in Glory. Interwar Eu­rope, and Weimar Berlin in par­tic­u­lar, is a vanished world, glimpsed in its full complexity only in period film, photography, and fiction. Such slices of life w ­ ere especially valuable ­after the war, as so much of the urban landscape of interwar Eu­rope was bombed out and survived only in photographic and cinematographic rec­ords.34 What is therefore missing from “The Assistant Producer,” as from the movies it parodies, is the perspective of the émigré creative intellectual, a Nabokovian view of the émigré years. The final paragraph of the story, set in war­time Amer­i­ca, recapitulates Nabokov’s 1928 poem “The Cinema”: Anyhow, the show is over. You help your girl into her coat and join the slow exit-­bound stream of your likes. Safety doors open into unexpected side portions of night, diverting proximal trickles. . . . ​Quick, ­children, let us get out of ­here into the sober night, into the shuffling peace of familiar sidewalks, into the solid world of good freckled boys and the spirit of comradeship. Welcome real­ity! This tangible cigarette ­will be very refreshing ­after all that trashy excitement. See, the thin dapper man

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walking in front of us lights up too ­after tapping a “Lookee” against his old leathern cigarette case.35 ­ ere, the story’s reader takes the position of the Berlin salesman in “The CinH ema” who has seen a show with his girlfriend and now lights a cigarette as a complement to the “cold and noise” of the Berlin street, all the while disparaging the “trashy” film (see chapter 1). Although again the “fantasy” is replaced with “the world,” the poem’s meta­phor of awakening from vulgar dream to petit-­bourgeois real­ity is repurposed to show the transition from the dream of Eu­ro­pean emigration to a new exile in Amer­i­ca—­perhaps more benevolent, but even less comprehending. In the story the ­couple is joined by Golubkov, who also lights a cigarette, incognito and out of uniform—­just as the narrator, a former priest, is no longer in his cassock.36 What is not contained in the communal narrative of the Rus­sian emigration, then, are the unique stories of the flight of isolated individuals to the safety of the United States. Set into motion by the destructive forces of (military-­political) History, and eventually terminated by it, the Rus­sian emigration lived in the midst of Eu­rope’s Americanized cinematic culture. As Nabokov had pointed out in the Rus­sian poem “Tolstoy” (1928) and the French essay “Writers and the Age” (1931), though cinema appeared to capture the inherent real­ity of the pre­sent, in fact it only captured its surface, usually by accident. Rather, it was the technology itself—­the medium as message—­that would be perceived by f­ uture generations. Nabokov lived to see the truth of that, as black-­and-­white, s­ ilent film was made to appear archaic by sound and color—­a pro­cess that for him only perfected the false imitation of “real­ity” while leaving the essence untouched. The communal “life” of the Rus­sian emigration, neatly encapsulated in the film narrative of “The Assistant Producer,” is insufficient to stand in for the imaginative and artistic life of intellectual émigrés like Nabokov. Similarly, this life of the mind, culture and artistic, cannot be screened by Hollywood—­and can only be accessed in Nabokov’s fiction of ­these years. When, following Lolita, The Gift was fi­nally published in En­glish translation, Nabokov included a foreword that summarizes what his Rus­sian fiction uncovers for the American reader: an archaeology and anthropology of the Rus­sian emigration. The ethnographic tone is striking: “The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Rus­sia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems t­oday like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-­signs and moon-­signs I now retrieve from the desert dust. We remained unknown to American intellectuals (who, bewitched by Communist propaganda, saw us merely as villainous generals, oil magnates,

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and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes). That world is now gone.”37 When Nabokov proceeds to call that world a “phantasm” he is pointing both to the destruction of the émigré community and to its traces during World War II (including his own Rus­sian archive), as well as to the essential unreality of the interwar émigré condition that his Rus­sian fiction had brought forth in the 1920s and 1930s.38 Though set in 1938, and reaching back to 1919 in its descriptions of émigré experience, the 1943 short story “The Assistant Producer” is situated firmly in war­time Amer­ic­ a and must be read as a response to it. T ­ here was no rescue operation on the horizon for the Rus­sians left ­behind in France—­D-­Day was another year off. Nabokov worked tirelessly to obtain visas for his ­family friends Georgy Gessen and Anna Feigin, aware that t­ hese ­were the lucky few. He may not yet have known that the Russian-­Jewish émigré writer Irène Némirovsky (who had been instrumental in facilitating the French translation of Camera Obscura) had been handed over to the Gestapo by French authorities in 1942 and murdered in Auschwitz; it was not u ­ ntil 1945 that he learned of the similar fate in Neuengamme of his younger b­ rother Sergei Nabokov. But French collaboration with the Nazis and American welcoming of anti-­Nazi refugees provides the backdrop for his faux-­American portrayal of a Rus­sian spy story set in Paris. Arriving in Amer­ic­ a at the same time was another group of Eu­ro­pean exiles, German émigrés, po­liti­cally united (if not always exclusively motivated) by anti-­Nazism. Following Robert Siodmak and Thomas Mann in 1939, in 1941 Bertolt Brecht, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno all made the move to the United States. As Nabokov complained, the German émigrés ­were given a moral authority and cultural legitimacy that Rus­sian émigrés such as himself had been denied.39 The Germans had a common e­ nemy, one shared by the Americans. Even back in Eu­rope, the Rus­sian émigrés themselves had been disunited, with a po­liti­cal spectrum ranging from rival socialisms to proto-­ fascism. Nabokov’s ­father had been murdered, ­after all, defending a po­liti­cal opponent to his left from po­liti­cal assassins to his right. Now in Amer­i­ca, even Nabokov’s strident anti-­Soviet stance, which had impressed American audiences with his early equation of Hitler and Joseph Stalin, became a liability once Operation Barbarossa put the Soviets on the side of the Allies.40 For the German émigrés to the United States, it was indeed pos­si­ble to navigate Hollywood censorship. In 1943 (the same year Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead appeared with Bobbs-­Merrill), two residents of Pacific Palisades, the German enclave of Los Angeles, took the war­time news item of Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in Prague and collaborated on an anti-­Nazi film. Brecht and Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die has been viewed as a stylistic clash between

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epic theater and film noir, a kind of American-­made compromise between two Weimar legacies.41 It is also clear to what extent ­these two German émigrés exploited the receptiveness of American audiences to their anti-­Nazi message. Despite their artistic differences, Brecht and Lang benefited from a common po­liti­cal cause, one that they shared with their American hosts. This was a po­ liti­cal luxury denied to Rus­sian émigrés, as Nabokov noted.42 American audiences hungered for a German explanation of interwar Eu­ ro­pean culture. Mann’s Doctor Faustus, also begun in 1943, would be published in En­glish translation the year following its German publication. Similarly, Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, a portrait of the interwar era, The World of Yesterday, appeared in En­glish in 1943, a year a­ fter its completion. It was this that enabled Kracauer, funded like Nabokov by a Guggenheim Fellowship, to begin writing his English-­language “psychological history of German film” From Caligari to Hitler, published in 1947.43 ­These works ­were all direct responses to the news coming out of Eu­rope.44 But perhaps the most successful German cultural enterprise during this period was film noir proper. Dating from 1941, noir filmmaking flourished in 1944 with Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Otto Preminger’s Laura, Lang’s The ­Woman in the Win­dow, and Siodmak’s The Phantom Lady. ­These Austrian and German directors had e­ ither worked within or been influenced by the “Ufa style” of Weimar cinema. Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, however, that it is simplistic to read a film—an industrial product with many moving parts, as the Rus­sian émigré critics realized—as a direct expression of directorial sensibility. Rather, he suggests that the noir directors’ Hollywood output speaks as much to their professionalism in adapting to the market, to what producers and audiences hungered for, and what the Production Code Administration would let pass. The fact that it l­ater took French critical reception (astounded by the 1946 flood of new American films blocked by war­time censorship) to coin the term film noir and thereby retroactively canonize a set of films is part of the fascination of this transnational conjuncture. I suggest that film noir tells us much about Nabokov’s transition to Amer­ i­ca. This is not based on style or content—­not ­because his Rus­sian fiction was entirely noir, although t­ here are many features in common between Camera Obscura and the Hollywood noir canon, not least its pastiche of the Straßefilm genre. Nor is it due to the historical coincidence that Nabokov was working ­toward Amer­i­ca during the mid-1930s just as the better-­known German exiles w ­ ere, moving through London and Paris before finding himself working in the United States during the 1940s. A ­ fter all, with Laughter in the Dark (1938) Nabokov was unable to rescreen his Weimar work for an American audience as successfully as, for example, Lang did in Fury (1936), redeploying the para-

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digms of M and his Marbuse cycle.45 Nor was he able to immediately adapt his new American work any more successfully—­the 1947 novel Bend Sinister did not fare much better.46 Elsaesser’s account of film noir as a transnational phenomenon singles out their trained cosmopolitanism and adaptable professional craft as the real key to the German filmmakers’ success in Hollywood during the period of film noir: What made the Germans a prominent force in Hollywood was their professionalism and their technical expertise. Thus, the most likely scenario is that their UFA training, their versatility and adaptability as skilled film personnel was and remained the basis of the émigré’s economic and cultural capital in the eyes of Hollywood. The prosaic answer, then, to the question about the prominence of German directors in the film noir cycle is that the Germans ­were film professionals, that they came from a mature, developed film industry, which is why they could adapt themselves so well to Hollywood, and could leave their mark on so many dif­ fer­ent genres, cycles and modes.47 Similarly, when looking to publish his fiction in the United States, Nabokov’s trump card for American publishers (not discounting the praise of him by Russian-­born Americans) was his adaptability, his professionalism, his craft and versatility.48 As the author of half a dozen novels—­clever and archly parodic works on topical themes and eminently adaptable to stage or screen in their apparently middlebrow generic conventions (crime, detective, thrillers)—­Nabokov resembled the journeyman directors, with extensive and varied ­careers ­behind them. It was this ability to adapt and “stay in the game,” as Elsaesser puts it, that constituted Nabokov’s main attraction.49 At the same time, Nabokov was faced with a similar predicament to directors like Ernst Lubitsch: “Although [Lubitsch] considered himself Germany’s most ‘American’ director (having made satires of Germany’s ‘Americanitis,’ such as The Oyster Princess), Hollywood needed him to be an out-­and-­out Eu­ro­pe­an. . . . ​Obliged to re­create and imitate a version of the world they had left ­behind, directors found their previous work in Germany ­little help in promoting their ­careers in Amer­i­ca.”50 Nabokov’s negotiations with his American agent and the publishing firm Bobbs-­Merrill show that they ­were interested less in translating his Eu­ro­pean work, which had been distinguished by its engagement with an Americanized cultural pre­sent—to the point of accusations of “un-­Russianness”—­than in commissioning new crime novels or autobiographical reflections about the plight of the Rus­sian émigrés.51

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Nabokov’s responses to such demands—­forms of often minimal compromise that are so far from a capitulation that they border on refusal—­usually involved a form of recycling and repurposing of existing themes and aperçus. Particularly in the interwar era, when new media such as the cinema competed with lit­er­at­ ure for l­ imited resources and audiences, the high degree of unpredictability and the complexity of industries like international publishing and filmmaking combined to produce a high rate of failure. The chances of any one novel succeeding internationally w ­ ere minimal. Approached from the “point of sale” (an author’s understanding of what his or her work might be “worth,” broadly conceived, to a range of audiences), Nabokov’s remarkable industriousness during this period in not only promoting but also producing new manuscripts testifies to his understanding of the need to fail multiple times as a precondition of eventual success—­one that, arguably, eluded him ­until the commercial windfall of Hurricane Lolita. Crucially, Elsaesser’s account of film noir as a continuation of Weimar cinema starts from the premise that Weimar cinema itself was already part of the broader transnational nexus of “Film Eu­rope” (the equivalent of Nabokov’s “old Eu­rope Picture Palace”), a web of both competition and complementarity with “Film Amer­i­ca”: “Paris–­Berlin and Berlin–­Hollywood, as well as Paris–­Hollywood.”52 He proposes that this triangulation of the American, German, and French film industries in the 1920s also operated to produce and consecrate film noir as a canon in the 1940s. Eschewing a “linear history of ‘influence’ ” on film noir (including émigré, gender, and po­liti­cal explanations), Elsaesser argues for a “lateral history of ‘interference’ ” around the meta­phors of “circulation of cultural cliché” and “the backhanded compliment.”53 This transnational argument, which has the key advantage in Nabokov’s case of explaining failures and miscommunication as well as successes, does much to explain what is gained by adaptation and lost in translation. Elsaesser’s notion of “transparent duplicity” is a power­ful figure for the role of cinematic culture in Nabokov’s art of exile, especially in his transition from Eu­ro­pean to American émigré. In “The Assistant Producer” the sword cuts both ways. If the recognition of film noir by French critics in 1946 was a backhanded compliment from Eu­rope to Amer­i­ca (“They recognized in B-­movies, pulp fiction and low-­rent angst the cultural mirror of philosophical Existentialism, cinematic auteurism and high seriousness”), then the cinema of film noir itself was a backhanded compliment paid by Hollywood to Eu­rope, using “Eu­ro­pean avant-­garde movements from the 1910s and 1920s . . . ​in order to represent situations of chaos and disorder, of pathology and madness, of Freudian dreams and homicidal manias.”54 As Elsaesser puts it, “Americans,

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too, have never been quite without irony (and dare one say, humour noir) when dealing with Eu­rope and showing their cultural deference.”55 “The Assistant Producer” is a backhanded compliment to Hollywood, showing that it can screen perfectly a tawdry farce from the emigration, not by falsifying, but by capturing its inherent “poshlust” through the circulation of cliché. The Hollywood Hall of Mirrors recycles an American cinematic commonplace of extravagant and tragic Rus­sians, which reuses a French commonplace of Rus­sian artistic culture, embodied by La Slavska, who is herself already a ste­reo­type for Rus­sian émigré intellectuals of a faux-­folk style. At the same time, exploiting a freedom d­ ying in Eu­rope, Nabokov pays a backhanded compliment from Amer­i­ca (writing in En­glish, setting the frame tale in an American movie theater) to Eu­ro­pe­ans, for whom the émigrés, in the midst of the economic and social catastrophes of the interwar era, always remained “out of focus.”56 This apparently farcical story depicts a situation that by 1943 had tragic resonance for the Rus­sian emigration: the active persecution of Rus­sian émigrés across the Continent and the indifference, passive acquiescence, or active collaboration of ordinary Eu­ro­pe­ans in it: The French police displayed a queer listlessness in dealing with pos­si­ble clues, as if they assumed that the disappearance of Rus­sian generals was a kind of curious local custom, an Oriental phenomenon, a dissolving pro­cess which perhaps ­ought not to occur but which could not be prevented. One had, however, the impression that Sûreté knew more about the workings of the vanis­hing trick than diplomatic wisdom found fit to discuss. Newspapers abroad treated the ­whole ­matter in a good-­ natured but bantering and slightly bored manner. On the ­ whole, “L’affaire Slavska” did not make good headlines—­Russian émigrés ­were decidedly out of focus. By an amusing coincidence both a German press agency and a Soviet one laconically stated that a pair of White Rus­sian generals in Paris had absconded with the White Army funds.57 The naturalization of Rus­sian suffering had taken on a more sinister tone by 1943, with the occupation and the Vichy regime—­which may have led Nabokov to underplay the French response. As Gennady Barabtarlo has established, the French effort to track down the real-­life General Miller was considerable and the trial of his abductors was swift.58 Even the Nazi-­Soviet collaboration, ­here shown as a coordinated propaganda campaign to discredit the émigrés, had not lost its relevance, despite Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Nabokov had consistently equated Hitler and Stalin throughout the 1930s.59 Although the new

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alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union had made this stance unpop­ul­ar by 1943, he continued to assert the fundamental similarity of coercive authoritarian regimes. Though Amer­i­ca had proved a refuge from the annihilation of Rus­sian émigré culture, the simpler émigrés ­were of no interest to Hollywood: “The dreams of ­simple Rus­sian folk, hardworking families in remote parts of the Rus­sian diaspora, plying their ­humble but honest trades, as they would in Saratov or Tver, bearing fragile ­children, and naively believing that the [The White Warriors Union] was a kind of King Arthur’s Round ­Table that stood for all that had been, and would be, sweet and decent and strong in fairy-­tale Russia—­these dreams may well strike the film pruners as an excrescence upon the main theme.”60 ­Here the voice is too ingenuous, too folksy—­redolent of the story’s ending, with its faux-­familiar “solid world of good freckled boys and the spirit of comradeship”—to be identified with Nabokov. Yet the detail of fragile ­children rings true to Nabokov’s experience and fears as a parent, refracted in Albinus’s ­daughter’s death in Laughter in the Dark and the cruel murder of Krug’s son in Bend Sinister, filmed and screened, a cinematic torture.61 The joyful experience of his own son, preserved by his parents amid cataclysm, was used to structure his first autobiography, Conclusive Evidence (1951). It was only when the fragile child was the American Dolores Haze (and the “child-­murderer” the Eu­ro­pean Humbert Humbert) that his work found a large enough audience—­but ­here, as with film noir, the consecration had to come by way of Eu­rope. The success of Lolita places it within the noir paradigm. Superficially, the novel has a number of noir traits, such as apparent moral ambiguity, the attractiveness of the conflicted hero, the apparent complicity of the victim, taboos, and an under­lying sense of a world out of control. But more importantly, Lolita, as Nabokov’s first American novel—in the sense that The Fountainhead was Ayn Rand’s first American novel—­showcases Nabokov’s successful adaptation to an American audience. Like film noir, this adaptation was completed through the intercession of a Paris publisher, Maurice Girodias, and a British literary (and former film) critic, Graham Greene. What may ultimately be most noir about Nabokov’s American ­career was his ability to adapt his fiction, as a true craftsman and professional, to a new audience who ultimately wanted to hear not about Eu­rope but about itself. That Eu­rope sanctified and legitimized this work, leading to its publication in the United States, shows the continuation of the dynamic interplay of Eu­ rope and Amer­ic­ a that had characterized so much of Nabokov’s Rus­sian work. The mutual destruction of Humbert the Eu­ro­pean and Lolita the American is a continuation of the 1920s debates about cinematic culture, updated and

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rendered more ambitious by Nabokov’s observations on the broader context of 1950s mass culture. It is also fitting that unlike Laughter in the Dark, on its American publication in 1958 Lolita was fought over by a Hollywood that was beginning to emerge from the Code era. Stanley Kubrick’s film Lolita appeared two years ­after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho had definitively undone the Code.62 This feedback loop of Americanized Eu­rope and Eu­ro­pe­anized Amer­i­ca is the culmination of Nabokov’s c­ areer within cinematic culture. Nabokov’s prose ­career began with a denial of History and a refusal to be defined by personal or communal trauma. At the same time, the catastrophic vio­lence and material deprivation endemic to the Rus­sian emigration’s life, bounded as it was by two world wars, made the prospects of an exiled Russophone writer in the 1920s and 1930s uniquely inauspicious. It is my contention that the cinema supplied the means not only of thinking through and representing exile but of surviving it. Nabokov’s remarkable achievement was to work with the cinema while retaining his in­de­pen­dence as a writer. Hailed as a demo­cratic medium and as an inspiration to the avant-­garde, the cinema also represented what thoughtful contemporaries understood as an easily digestible set of clichés. What emerges from this study is that, for a writer whose practical success with the movie industry was virtually non­ex­is­tent during ­these years (options on screen rights bought and left to lapse, screenplays written but not produced), Nabokov pioneered a remarkably broad set of strategies for deploying the resources of cinema to his advantage. The story of how Nabokov manipulated and instrumentalized t­ hese commonplaces not just for the f­ uture reader of the twenty-­first ­century but for the pre­sent paying public of the 1920s through 1940s uncovers a tactical and combinatorial genius. It also pre­sents this timeless artist of memory, imagination, and discovery as his first readers saw him—­their con­temporary.

Appendix

Georgy Gessen’s Film Reviews for Rul′ (1924–1931) ­Table A.1 DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

November 6, 1924

­Little Church Around the Corner

American

1923

November 8, 1924

Mensch und Tier im Urwald

German

1924

November 14, 1924

Love, Life and Laughter

British

1923

November 18, 1924

Das Wachsfigurenkabinett

German

1924

November 23, 1924

Find Your Man

American

1924

December 5, 1924

Mensch gegen Mensch

German

1924

December 7, 1924

Dreiklang der Nacht

German

1924

December 16, 1924

Moderne Ehen

German-­Czech

1924

December 20, 1924

Liebesbriefe der Baronin von S . . . ​

German

1924

December 30, 1924

Our Hospitality

American

1923

January 4, 1925

How to Educate a Wife

American

1924

January 6, 1925

Colin Ross: Mit dem Kurbelkasten um die Erde

German

1924

January 11, 1925

The ­Great White Way

American

1924

January 25, 1925

Die Motorbraut

German

1925

January 30, 1925

Kampf um die Scholle

German

1925

February 3, 1925

Der Turm des Schweigens

German

1925 (continued) 187

­Table A.1 (continued) DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

February 4, 1925

The Man Who Came Back

American

1924

February 7, 1925

Zaza

American

1923

February 14, 1925

Zur Chronik von Grieshuus

German

1925

February 15, 1925

Schicksal

German

1925

February 18, 1925

Hold Your Breath

American

1925

February 21, 1925

Pietro, der Korsar

German

1925

February 28, 1925

Les ombres qui passent

French

1924

March 3, 1925

The Spoilers

American

1923

March 6, 1925

Die Venus von Montmartre

German

1925

March 7, 1925

Die Kleine aus der Konfektion

German

1925

March 10, 1925

Der Flug um den Erdball

German

1925

March 14, 1925

Ein Sommernachtstraum

German

1925

March 15, 1925

The Covered Wagon

American

1923

March 18, 1925

Der Mann auf dem Kometen

German

1925

March 20, 1925

Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit

German

1925

March 22, 1925

Athleten

German

1925

March 25, 1925

Der Flug um den Erdball

German

1925

March 27, 1925

Le prince charmant

French

1925

March 29, 1925

The White ­Sister

American

1923

April 1, 1925

Zapfenstreich

German

1925

April 7, 1925

Paris

French

1924

April 16, 1925

Face à la mort

French

1925

April 21, 1925

Die Frau von vierzig Jahren

German

1925

April 23, 1925

Broadway ­after Dark

American

1924

April 26, 1925

Der Maler und sein Modell, Le mirage de Paris

German-­French

1924

May 3, 1925

Trailing Wild African Animals

American

1923

May 8, 1925

Blitzzug der Liebe

German

1925

May 9, 1925

Dvorets i krepostʹ

Soviet

1924

May 15, 1925

Flaming Youth

American

1923

May 17, 1925

The Rendezvous

American

1923

May 20, 1925

Thy Name Is ­Woman

American

1924

May 23, 1925

Die freudlose Gasse

German

1925

May 27, 1925

Sherlock Jr.

American

1924

June 7, 1925

Das Bildnis, L’image

Austrian-­French

1923

June 10, 1925

The Uninvited Guest

American

1924

June 16, 1925

Fashion Row

American

1923

June 17, 1925

Lieblinge der Menschen

German

1925

June 23, 1925

Der König und das kleine Mädchen

German

1925

June 30, 1925

La maison du mystère

French

1923

July 7, 1925

La maison du mystère

French

1923

August 4, 1925

Men

American

1924

August 19, 1925

Liebe und Trompetenblasen

German

1925

September 1, 1925

Die Verrufenen

German

1925

DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

September 6, 1925

Three ­Women

American

1924

September 13, 1925

Three Ages

American

1923

September 18, 1925

Husbands and Lovers

American

1924

September 27, 1925

The Light­house by the Sea

American

1924

January 1, 1926

Circe, the Enchantress

American

1924

January 7, 1926

The Navigator

American

1924

January 23, 1926

Der Wilderer

German

1926

January 29, 1926

Tartüff

German

1926

February 3, 1926

Die tolle Herzogin

German

1926

February 9, 1926

Feu Mathias Pascal

French

1925

February 13, 1926

Three ­Women and Kiss Me Again

American

1924, 1925

February 18, 1926

Manon Lescaut

German

1926

March 2, 1926

Das Blumenwunder

German

1926

March 5, 1926

A Thief in Paradise

American

1925

March 7, 1926

Thundering Hoofs

American

1924

March 11, 1926

Girl Shy

American

1924

March 16, 1926

Die Insel der Träume

German

1925

March 21, 1926

Die letzte Droschke von Berlin

German

1926

March 24, 1926

Familie Schimek

German

1926

April 1, 1926

Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei

Italian

1926

April 16, 1926

Geheimnisse einer Seele

German

1926

April 20, 1926

Die Fahrt ins Abenteuer

German

1926

April 24, 1926

Deutsche Herzen am Deutschen Rhein

German

1926

April 30, 1926

Madame Sans-­Gêne

American

1925

May 5, 1926

Bronenosets Potemkin

Soviet

1925

May 12, 1926

The Sea Beast

American

1926

May 28, 1926

Her Temporary Husband

American

1923

June 3, 1926

The Night Cry

American

1926

June 15, 1926

The Danger Girl

American

1926

July 6, 1926

Seven Chances

American

1925

July 9, 1926

So This Is Paris

American

1926

July 29, 1926

The Amateur Gentleman

American

1926

August 8, 1926

Kubinke, der Barbier, und die drei Dienstmädchen

German

1926

August 19, 1926

Siberia

American

1926

September 9, 1926

Die Unehelichen

German

1926

September 18, 1926

Spitzen

German

1926

October 14, 1926

Der Feldherrnhügel

German

1926

October 16, 1926

Faust

German

1926

October 29, 1926

Die Flammen Iügen

German

1926

November 7, 1926

Überflüssige Menschen

German

1926

November 10, 1926

Nur eine Tänzerin

German-­ Swedish

1926

November 14, 1926

Old Clothes

American

1925

November 21, 1926

Die Flucht in den Zirkus

German

1926 (continued)

­Table A.1 (continued) DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

November 23, 1926

The Freshman

American

1925

November 24, 1926

Deviatoe ianvaria

Soviet

1925

November 28, 1926

Abrek Zaur

Soviet

1926

December 4, 1926

The American Venus

American

1926

December 9, 1926

Die Waise von Lowood

German

1926

December 12, 1926

Die versenkene Flotte

German

1926

December 14, 1926

Carmen

French

1926

December 21, 1926

The Wife Who ­Wasn’t Wanted

American

1925

December 22, 1926

Der heilige Berg

German

1926

December 30, 1926

In der Heimat, da gibt’s ein Wiedersehn!

German

1926

January 5, 1927

Panzergewölbe

German

1926

January 8, 1927

­Hotel Imperial

American

1927

January 15, 1927

The Blackbird

American

1926

January 20, 1927

The Midnight Sun

American

1926

January 25, 1927

Metropolis

German

1927

February 6, 1927

Beau Geste

American

1926

February 11, 1927

Unter Ausschluß der Öffentlichkeit

German

1927

February 25, 1927

The Black Cyclone

American

1925

February 27, 1927

Matʹ

Soviet

1926

March 2, 1927

Deine Tante—­Meine Tante

German

1927

March 10, 1927

Muche

French

1927

March 12, 1927

Da hält die Welt den Atem an

German

1927

March 20, 1927

Die Csárdásfürstin

German

1927

March 25, 1927

Kopf hoch, Charly!

German

1927

April 5, 1927

Das Meer

German

1927

April 8, 1927

Die Bräutigame der Babette Bomberling

German

1927

April 17, 1927

Die 7 Töchter der Frau Gyurkowicz

German-­ Swedish-­British

1926

April 22, 1927

Dirnentragödie

German

1927

April 27, 1927

Der Weltkrieg

German

1927

May 1, 1927

Beverly of Graustark

American

1926

May 5, 1927

Einbruch

German

1927

May 12, 1927

A Regular Fellow

American

1925

May 21, 1927

Grass: A Nation’s ­Battle for Life

American

1925

May 24, 1927

Flower of Night

American

1925

June 1, 1927

Valencia

German

1927

June 4, 1927

Ehekonflikte

German

1927

June 12, 1927

Jugendrausch

German

1927

June 23, 1927

The Sorrows of Satan

American

1926

June 25, 1927

Männer vor der Ehe

German

1927

June 30, 1927

Butterflies in the Rain

American

1926

July 14, 1927

The Road to Mandalay

American

1926

July 21, 1927

Fast and Furious

American

1927

DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

July 29, 1927

The Flaming Frontier

American

1926

July 31, 1927

Die Schönsten Beine von Berlin

German

1927

August 2, 1927

Regine

German

1927

August 13, 1927

Señorita

American

1927

August 16, 1927

Ein Tag der Rosen im August

German

1927

August 20, 1927

The Queen Was in the Parlor

British-­German

1927

August 23, 1927

Der letzte Walzer

German

1927

August 27, 1927

Gehetzte Frauen

German

1927

August 30, 1927

The Cat and the Canary

American

1927

October 11, 1927

Flesh and the Dev­il

American

1926

October 14, 1927

Napoléon

French

1927

October 19, 1927

Die Dame mit dem Tigerfell

German

1927

October 26, 1927

The Big Parade

American

1925

October 27, 1927

Blonde or Brunette

American

1927

October 30, 1927

Kid Boots

American

1926

November 2, 1927

Die tolle Lola

German

1927

November 4, 1927

The Loves of Casanova

French

1927

November 13, 1927

Der fidele Bauer

German

1927

November 16, 1927

Die große Pause

German

1927

November 22, 1927

Das gefährliche Alter

German

1927

November 26, 1927

The Way of All Flesh

American

1927

November 30, 1927

For Heaven’s Sake

American

1926

December 3, 1927

Poet i tsarʹ

Soviet

1927

December 13, 1927

Dr. Bessels Verwandlung

German

1927

December 16, 1927

Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney

German

1927

December 20, 1927

Tell It to the Marines

American

1926

December 24, 1927

Die Apachen von Paris

German-­French

1927

December 28, 1927

Der große Sprung

German

1927

January 4, 1928

Upstage

American

1926

January 7, 1928

Der alte Fritz

German

1928

January 12, 1928

Eve­ning Clothes

American

1927

January 15, 1928

Die Leibeigenen

German

1928

January 20, 1928

Belphégor

French

1927

January 24, 1928

Der alte Fritz

German

1928

January 25, 1928

Moral

German

1928

January 31, 1928

Die Hölle der Jugfrauen

German

1928

February 2, 1928

The Patriot

American

1928

February 7, 1928

Schuldig

German

1928

February 12, 1928

Du sollst nicht stehlen

German

1928

February 15, 1928

Der Weltkrieg, 2. Teil—­Des Volkes Not

German

1928

February 19, 1928

Mr. Wu

American

1927

February 21, 1928

Luther

German

1928

February 24, 1928

Special Delivery

American

1927

February 28, 1928

Friewild

German

1928 (continued)

­Table A.1 (continued) DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

March 2, 1928

Panik

German

1928

March 4, 1928

Die geheime Macht

German

1928

March 9, 1928

­Uncle Tom’s Cabin

American

1927

March 21, 1928

Konets Sankt-­Peterburga

Soviet

1927

March 22, 1928

Der größte Gauner des Jahrbrunderts

German

1928

March 28, 1928

Das weiße Stadion

Swiss

1928

March 29, 1928

Spione

German

1928

April 1, 1928

The Magician

American

1926

April 5, 1928

Das Karussell des Todes

German

1928

April 8, 1928

Oktiabrʹ

Soviet

1928

April 17, 1928

Sorrell and Son

American

1927

April 20, 1928

Scampolo

German

1928

April 25, 1928

Lotte

German

1928

April 27, 1928

Flucht aus der Hölle

German

1928

May 5, 1928

[4 American grotesques]

American

?

May 15, 1928

O, Jugend, wie bist du so schön

German

1928

May 23, 1928

Mann gegen Mann

German

1928

May 24, 1928

Love

American

1927

June 1, 1928

Chicago

American

1927

June 13, 1928

Herr Meister und Frau Meisterin

German

1928

June 17, 1928

Engelein + Die Augen der Mumie Ma

German

1914, 1918

June 26, 1928

[Vari­ous revues]

July 6, 1928

Die Dame und ihr Chauffeur

German

1928

July 11, 1928

Buttons

American

1927

July 20, 1928

Across the Atlantic

American

1928

July 26, 1928

Red Hair

American

1928

July 31, 1928

Das Girl von der Revue

German

1928

August 4, 1928

Hills of Kentucky

American

1928

August 11, 1928

Die Jacht der sieben Sünde and Vom Täter fehlt jede Spur

German

1928

August 22, 1928

The Lone Ea­gle

American

1927

August 25, 1928

Moulin Rouge

British

1928

September 1, 1928

Ein besserer Herr

German

1928

September 4, 1928

Heimkehr

German

1928

September 14, 1928

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg

American

1928

September 21, 1928

Die Todesschleife

German

1928

September 22, 1928

The Last Command

American

1928

October 3, 1928

No Control

American

1927

October 5, 1928

Three Sinners

American

1928

October 12, 1928

Die Frau von gestern und morgen

German

1928

October 20, 1928

Adam und Eva

German

1928

October 23, 1928

Geheimnisse des Orients

German-­French

1928

October 25, 1928

The Red Dance

American

1928

1913, 1915

DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

October 30, 1928

Seine stärkste Waffe

German

1928

November 2, 1928

The Drag Net

American

1928

November 6, 1928

Hot ­Water

American

1924

November 13, 1928

Ungarische Rhapsodie

German

1928

November 16, 1928

Street Angel

American

1928

November 27, 1928

La passion de Jeanne d’Arc

French

1928

December 1, 1928

Dornenweg einer Fürstin

German-­Soviet

1928

December 6, 1928

Le chasseur de chez Maxim’s

French

1928

December 14, 1928

Der Kampf ums Matterhorn

German-­Swiss

1928

December 25, 1928

Wolga

German

1928

December 29, 1928

Hurra! Ich lebe!

German

1928

January 12, 1929

Die Siebzehnjährigen

German

1929

January 18, 1929

Wings

American

1927

January 24, 1929

Ihr dunkler Punkt

German

1929

January 30, 1929

Lost in the Arctic

American

1928

February 2, 1929

Lockendes Gift and Mein Herz ist eine Jazzband

German

1929

February 6, 1929

The Wind

American

1928

February 8, 1929

Der Mann mit dem Laubfrosch

German

1929

February 20, 1929

Wolf ’s Clothing

American

1927

February 27, 1929

The Cossacks

American

1928

March 8, 1929

The Man Who Laughs

American

1928

March 21, 1929

Die Mitternachtstaxe

German

1929

March 28, 1929

The ­Woman Disputed

American

1928

April 21, 1929

Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrovna

German

1929

April 27, 1929

Die Ehe

German

1929

June 12, 1929

Pamir. Krysha mira.

Soviet

1927

July 13, 1929

Forgotten ­Faces

American

1928

July 25, 1929

Hot News

American

1928

July 30, 1929

[Vari­ous sound shorts]

August 10, 1929

Adieu, Mascotte

German

1929

August 28, 1929

Manolescu—­Der König der Hochstapler

German

1929

August 29, 1929

The Wrecker

British-­German

1929

September 25, 1929

Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen

German

1929

September 28, 1929

Flucht vor der Liebe

German

1929

October 3, 1929

The Docks of New York

American

1928

October 18, 1929

Speedy

American

1928

October 20, 1929

Die Frau im Mond

German

1929

October 25, 1929

Sein bester Freund

German

1929

October 27, 1929

Vater und Sohn

German

1929

November 5, 1929

Captain Lash

American

1929

November 14, 1929

Silberkondor über Feuerland

German

1929

November 23, 1929

Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü

German

1929

November 25, 1929

The Royal Box

American

1929

November 27, 1929

The Jazz Singer

American

1927

1929

(continued)

­Table A.1 (continued) DATE

ORIGINAL TITLE

NATIONALITY

YEAR OF RELEASE

December 13, 1929

The Patent Leather Kid

American

1927

December 17, 1929

Der Bund der Drei

German

1929

December 21, 1929

Melodie des Herzens

German

1929

December 31, 1929

Les nouveaux messieurs

French

1929

January 15, 1930

Show ­People

American

1928

January 18, 1930

Das Donkosakenlied: Verlorene Heimat

German

1930

January 25, 1930

Marquis Preferred

American

1929

January 31, 1930

Der weiße Teufel

German

1930

February 2, 1930

Spielerein einer Kaiserin

German

1930

February 11, 1930

Liebeswalzer

German

1930

February 26, 1930

Der unsterbliche Lump

German

1930

March 6, 1930

Stud. chem. Helene Willfüer

German

1930

March 13, 1930

Le collier de la reine

French

1929

March 16, 1930

Die letzte Kompagnie

German

1930

March 21, 1930

Sally

American

1929

March 28, 1930

Takový je život

Czech

1929

April 1, 1930

Wien, du Stadt der Lieder

German

1930

April 15, 1930

Kain i Artëm

Soviet

1929

April 23, 1930

Die heiligen drei Brunnen

German

1930

May 3, 1930

Die Somme: Das Grab der Millionen

German

1930

May 23, 1930

The ­Great Gabbo

American

1929

June 3, 1930

Am Rande der Sahara

German

1930

June 17, 1930

Scandal um Ewa

German

1930

June 28, 1930

Zärtlichkeit

German

1930

January 3, 1931

Tingel-­Tangel

German

1930

January 9, 1931

Schneider Wibbel

German

1931

January 15, 1931

Kaiserliebchen

German

1931

January 24, 1931

Liebeslied

German

1931

January 28, 1931

Der Mann, der den Mond beging

German

1931

February 6, 1931

Stürme über dem Mont Blanc

German

1930

February 10, 1931

Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff

German

1931

February 11, 1931

Der Bettelstuden, Der Liebesartz, and Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht

German

1931

February 18, 1931

Schachmatt

German

1931

February 21, 1931

Drei Tage Liebe

German

1931

February 26, 1931

Faschingsfee

German

1931

February 28, 1931

Grock

German

1931

March 1, 1931

Ariane

German

1931

March 22, 1931

Fra Diavolo

French

1931

N ote s

Introduction

1. Another, less well-­known contingent headed east during the civil war and ended up in Harbin, China. See Simon Karlinsky, “Rus­sian Culture in Manchuria and the Memoirs of Valery Pereleshin,” in Freedom from Vio­lence and Lies: Essays on Rus­sian Poetry and M ­ usic by Simon Karlinsky (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 310–320. 2. Nabokov’s story was appalling enough: he was home visiting from Cambridge when his ­father was murdered in Berlin in 1922; his ­mother died in Prague in 1939, unattended by a son barred from turning back east; his b­ rother Sergei, narrowly missing Vladimir’s departure in 1940, died of exhaustion in the Neuengamme concentration camp in 1945. Yet Nabokov’s fortune was rare for the times: he and his Jewish wife survived Nazi Germany unscathed ­until 1937; on the eve of the fall of Paris, by the last boat out of Saint-­Nazaire, they sailed with their six-­year-­old son to the United States. The prospect of this deus ex machina deliverance is the endpoint of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, and is used by his biographer Brian Boyd to conclude the first volume, The Rus­sian Years. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Rus­sian Years (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1990). 3. Vladimir Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer. A Story,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1943, 68; “The Assistant Producer,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 2008), 546. Though preceded by several translations, this story was the first written by Nabokov in the United States. 4. Jean-­Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (1964; New York: Vintage, 1981), 122. 5. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American S­ ilent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76–77; also, Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/ Modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 68. 6. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 77. 7. Maria Rubins, Rus­sian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 8. Thomas P. Doherty refers to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s “bifocal vision on film culture and studio commerce” in their seminal text The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Thomas P. Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 4.

195

19 6 NOTES

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9. For an overview of Amer­i­ca’s transition to sound, see Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 8–18. 10. Dates refer to a work’s first publication. On the early translations of Romain Rolland and Lewis Carroll in the context of Nabokov’s lifelong practice as a translator of ­others, see Stanislav Shvabrin, “Before Nabokov: Sirin Translates (1919–1939),” in Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 71–190. Both German translations appeared with Ullstein: Mashenʹka as Wladimir Nabokoff-­Sirin, Sie kommt—­kommt sie?, trans. J.  M. Schubert and G. Jarcho (Berlin: Ullstein, 1928), and Korolʹ, dama, valet as Wladimir Nabokoff-­Sirin, König, Dame, Bube: Ein Spiel mit dem Schicksal, trans. Siegfried von Vegesack (Berlin: Ullstein, 1930). 11. In the case of ­these and other novels of the 1930s, the dates of first publication refer to their serialization in the Paris-­based thick journal Sovremennye zapiski. 12. Such works include the French essays “Les écrivains et l’époque” (1931) and “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable” (1937), the French autobiographical chapter “Ma­de­moi­selle O” (1936), and the En­glish novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (written 1938; published 1941). This point is elegantly made in Andrei Babikov, Prochtenie Nabokova: Izyskaniia i materialy (Moscow: Ivan Limbakh, 2019), 9–11. 13. The title of the first volume of Boyd’s biography of Nabokov is of course only that—­a title, a necessary compromise—­and his book reliably and extensively documents t­ hese non-­Russian activities. At the same time, the difficulty of giving any title to ­these years highlights the range and variety of Nabokov’s ­career in his Eu­ro­pean exile. 14. Vladimir Nabokov, “Vesna v Fialʹte,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh, ed. N.  I. Artemenko-­Tolstoi et  al. (St.  Petersburg: Simpozium, 2002), 4:573; “Spring in Fialta,” in Stories, 422. 15. Vladimir Nabokov to Nina Berberova, [­after February 8] 1935, in “Pisʹma V. V. Nabokova k V. F. Khodasevichu i N. N. Berberovoi (1930–1939),” ed. Andrei Babikov and Manfred Shruba, Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch 5 (2017): 237. 16. See Lynda J. King, Best-­Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein ­(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). 17. Nabokov, “Passazhir,” Rulʹ, March 6, 1927, 2–3; “Passazhir,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2: 480–486; “The Passenger,” in Stories, 183–188. 18. Nabokov’s own En­glish translation undermines this parallelism: “­There is much in life that is casual [sluchainogo—­chance], and ­there is also much that is unusual. The Word is given the sublime right to enhance chance and to make of the transcendental something that is not accidental.” Nabokov, “Passazhir,” 2:485; “The Passenger,” in Stories, 187. Nabokov’s l­ater comment comes from Details of a Sunset, and Other Stories (1976) and is reprinted in Stories, 671. 19. Nabokov, “Passazhir,” 2:481; “The Passenger,” in Stories, 183. 20. Da Hält die Welt den Atem an, with Sandra Milovanova, at the Primus-­Palast; Der Soldat der Marie, with Xenia (Kseniia) Desni, at the Ufa-­Theater Kurfürstendamm; and Brodiaga po nevole, with Nikolas Koline (Nikolai Kolin), at the Tauentzien-­Palast. Rulʹ, March 6, 1927, 12. 21. Though the original Rus­sian names a “film director,” both Gleb Struve in his 1934 translation and Nabokov in his l­ater translation render this respectively as “film-­

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producer” and “producer.” Nabokov [V. Nobokov-­Sirin (sic)], “The Passenger,” trans. Gleb Struve, Lovat Dickson’s Magazine 2, no. 6 (1934): 719. 22. Don Barton Johnson, “Sources of Nabokov’s Despair,” in Nabokov at Cornell, ed. Gavriel Shapiro (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 18. 23. See Alexander Dolinin, Istinnaia zhiznʹ pisatelia Sirina: Raboty o Nabokove, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Simpozium, 2019), 117. 24. Readers in the know perhaps noticed the single exception: Nabokov and his wife, Vera, on holiday and incognito. 25. Nikolai Andreev, “Sirin,” Novʹ 3 (October 1930): 6. 26. Georgii Ivanov, “V. Sirin,” Chisla 1 (March 1930): 234. 27. Something of this meaning is conveyed by the title of Marc Raeff ’s foundational history of the emigration: Rus­sia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Rus­sian Emigration, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 28. Ivanov, “V. Sirin,” 234–235. 29. Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (1944; repr., New York: New Directions, 1959), 70. 30. Ivanov, “V. Sirin,” 235. 31. Such concerns ­were alive to Nabokov through his late ­father and the revered poet Alexander Pushkin, both of whom fell to bullets before reaching old age. 32. Nabokov, “Vesna v Fialʹte,” 4:582; “Spring in Fialta,” 425. 33. Rashit Iangirov has pointed out that, contrary to Soviet caricatures of a “moribund Kingdom of Shadows,” the émigrés “­were distinguished by a high level of self-­ organization, mobility and an outstanding entrepreneurial streak.” Rashit Iangirov, “ ‘Emigranty—­eto te, kto idet v statisty,’ ili Kinostatist kak zerkalo russkoi emigratsii,” in Raby nemogo: Ocherki istoricheskogo byta russkikh kinematografistov za rubezhom 1920–1930-­e gody (Moscow: Russkii putʹ, 2007), 120–122. 34. Gleb Struve, “Tvorchestvo Sirina,” Rossiia i slavianstvo 77 (May 17, 1930): 3. 35. For Leonid Livak, the fact that “the epithet sovremennyi, like novyi, retreated from modernist rhe­toric” enabled its “eventual reclamation by . . . ​an émigré journal indifferent to modernism.” On the divergent histories of the adjective sovremennyi and the noun sovremennostʹ, see Leonid Livak, In Search of Rus­sian Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 46–47. 36. When in 1929 the editors invited Nabokov to contribute his next novel to the journal, it was in fact a deliberate attempt to engage the younger generation and live up to this title. In May 1929, one editor admitted to another that their literary section had become “catastrophic” and therefore they would ask for and accept Nabokov’s next novel “without reading it.” Ilʹia Fondaminskii to Mark Vishniak, May 7, 1929, “ ‘Edinstvenno mne podkhodiashchii i ochenʹ mnoiu liubimyi zhurnal . . .’: V. V. Nabokov,” ed. G. B. Glushanok, in “Sovremennye zapiski” (Parizh, 1920–1940): Iz arkhiva redaktsii, ed. Oleg Korostelev and Manfred Shruba (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014), 4:259. 37. Rashit Iangirov, “Chuvstvo filʹma: Zametki o kinematograficheskom kontekste v lit­er­a­ture russkogo zarubezhʹia 1920–1930-kh godov,” in Imperiia N. Nabokov i nasledniki. Sbornik statei, ed. Iurii Leving and Evgenii Soshkin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 399–426. 38. Iangirov, “Chuvstvo filʹma,” 420, 423. 39. Iangirov, “Chuvstvo filʹma,” 400.

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40. Iangirov, “Chuvstvo filʹma,” 399. On this fiction, see Rubins, “Art Deco Fiction: Literary Reflections on the Seventh Art,” in Russian Montparnasse, 121–144. 41. Iangirov, “Chuvstvo filʹma,” 399. See also Rashit Iangirov, Khronika kinematograficheskoi zhizni russkogo zarubezhʹia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Russkii putʹ, 2010). 42. Iangirov, “Chuvstvo filʹma,” 420. 43. Alfred Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). See Stefan Fleischer’s penetrating con­temporary review: Stefan Fleischer, review of Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, by Alfred Appel, and The Spoken Seen, by Frank D. McConnell, Film Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1977): 38–44. 44. Gavriel Moses, The Nickel Was for the Movies: Film in the Novel from Pirandello to Puig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 45. Barbara Wyllie, Nabokov at the Movies: Film Perspectives in Fiction ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). 46. “Literary criticism in its modern form was largely designed by Eliot and Richards in the late 1920s. . . . ​The close reading of difficult modern literary texts was the explicit psychic therapy to cure the facile forms of attention encouraged by modern popu­lar culture, above all by the cinema.” Colin MacCabe, foreword to Cinema and Modernism, by David Trotter (London: Blackwell, 2007), x. 47. Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Rus­sia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger, ed. Richard Taylor (London: Routledge, 1994). 48. In this sense Jonathan Paine’s “point of sale” approach to the work of Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola can be seen to provide a kind of prehistory of such an investigation. Especially useful is Paine’s discussion of authors’ focus on “reach,” a value-­neutral definition of their attempt at market exposure, including for ­future readers (a key audience for writers in exile). Jonathan Paine, Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 49. Paolo Cherchi Usai, former se­nior curator at the George Eastman Museum, estimates that around two-­thirds of all the films from the s­ ilent era have survived in some version the ravages of “neglect, natu­ral decay, and the intentional destruction of negatives and prints,” but he notes that “for ­every 1,000 prints made, at least 995 have dis­appeared.” Paolo Cherchi Usai, ­Silent Cinema: A Guide to Study, Research and Curatorship, 3rd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 206–208. 50. Cited in Tobias Boes, Thomas Mann’s War: Lit­er­a­ture, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 11. 51. The situation is compounded by the fact that the first En­glish translation of Kamera obskura is a bibliophilic rarity (Camera Obscura, 1936), as is Nabokov’s own first version of Despair (1937), which was rewritten in 1966 in a now canonical version. 52. Tsivian argues for the need to “historicize the viewer” and termed the first Rus­ sian film spectators of the 1900s and 1910s “medium-­sensitive.” “I have tried to revive a historical spectator not yet deadened to the novelty of cinematic discourse—­the medium-­sensitive film viewer.” Tsivian, Early Cinema, 216. 53. Tsivian, Early Cinema, 125. 54. “Entering a cinema in the age of Symbolism, one comes into contact not with the film and not even with cinema but with the city, condensed into cinematographic text.” Tsivian, Early Cinema, 39.

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55. See, for example, Tsivian’s discussion of Zinaida Gippius’s recycling of her ideas of 1911 in a 1926 article in Paris titled “Sinema.” Tsivian, Early Cinema, 9. 56. Tsivian, Early Cinema, 130. 57. For example, in his letters to his wife, Vera, between 1925 and 1940, Nabokov specifies precisely twice the film he has seen (and obliquely refers to a handful more that we can trace) yet rec­ords around a dozen trips to the cinema. He saw both versions of Ways to Strength and Beauty (Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, 1925/1926) and Le Carrefour (1938). Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra, ed. and trans. Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 76, 429. His vari­ous trips are found throughout the collection (e.g., 42, 159, 215, 237, 242, 324, 339, 366, 427). 58. Eric Naiman, review of Nabokov at the Movies, by Barbara Wyllie, Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 48, no. 4 (2004): 695. 59. Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period ­(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Trotter, Cinema and Modernism. 60. “What­ever the Pa­ri­sian [Georgy] Adamovich or the American Nabokov said, the work of Sirin is nourished by Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and, in its turn, nourishes Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture. . . . ​Every­thing that Nabokov wrote in the 1920s and 1930s testifies to his vital involvement in the fate of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture.” Dolinin, Istinnaia zhiznʹ, 35–36. 61. Alexander Dolinin, “Nabokov as a Rus­sian Writer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Julian W. Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 62. 62. Thomas Mann, “The Exiled Writer’s Relationship to His Homeland” (1943), cited in Boes, Thomas Mann’s War, 8. 63. Alexander Dolinin, “Clio Laughs Last: Nabokov’s Answer to Historicism,” in Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Julian W. Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 199. 64. “By upbringing and education they belonged to the Westernized elite of Old Rus­sia that considered itself an integral part of all-­European culture. Polyglottal, cosmopolitan, refined, ­these ‘Rus­sian Eu­ro­pe­ans’ regarded the West as a legitimate ‘second home’ rather than as a hostile alterity and so crossing the border for them was not a leap into the unknown but a sort of homecoming.” Dolinin, “Clio Laughs Last,” 203. 65. Nabokov, “Putevoditelʹ po Berlinu,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 1:178; “A Guide to Berlin,” in Stories, 157. 66. Nabokov, “Putevoditelʹ po Berlinu,” 1:178; “A Guide to Berlin,” 157. 67. See the fascinating discussion by Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Curation,” in ­Silent Cinema, 302–323. 68. Nabokov, “Iubilei,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:647; “Anniversary,” in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, by Nabokov, ed. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 62. 69. At the end of the 1925 story “The Fight” (“Draka”), the narrator posits the importance of serendipitous visions: “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 [nepovtorimym] way.” Though “inimitable”—­literally “unrepeatable”—­Nabokov attributes the power to re-­create ­these images to his fiction. Nabokov, “Draka,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 1:75; “The Fight,” in Stories, 146.

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70. Nabokov, Podvig, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:142–143; Glory, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1971; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 62. 71. Nabokov [Vladimir Sirine], “Les écrivains et l’époque,” Le mois, no. 6 ( June–­ July 1931): 137–139; Nabokov, “Writers and the Age,” in Think, Write, Speak, 105. 72. “Коварная механика порой / искусственно поддерживает память. / . . . / Есть, говорят, в архиве фильмов ветхих, / теперь мигающих подслеповато, / яснополянский движущийся снимок: / старик невзрачный, роста небольшого, / с растрепанною ветром бородой, / проходит мимо скорыми шажками, / сердясь на оператора. И мы / довольны. Он нам близок и понятен.” Nabokov, “Tolstoi,” Rulʹ, September 16, 1928, 2; “Tolstoi,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:592–594; “Tolstoy,” trans. Dmitri Nabokov, in Selected Poems, ed. Thomas Karshan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 59–61. 73. Tsivian suggests that Nabokov’s media focus in this poem could have been prompted not just by the Tolstoy cele­brations of 1928 in Berlin but also by his seeing or hearing about Esfirʹ Shub’s 1928 documentary compilation (now lost) Rossiia Nikolaia II i Lev Tolstoi. On this cinematic event in the Soviet Union (which may have reached émigré eyes or ears, as was common), see Liudmila Inozemtseva, “Rossiia Nikolaia II i Lev Tolstoi: Iz istorii utrachennogo filʹma,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 48 (2000): 27–53. 74. “Before Albinus’ eyes ­there appeared a fine, dark rain like the flickering of some very old film (1910, a brisk jerky funeral pro­cession with legs moving too fast).” Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1938; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989), 18. Note that the section in parentheses was absent from the original Rus­sian Kamera obskura. See Thomas Seifrid, “Nabokov’s Poetics of Vision, or What Anna Karenina Is ­Doing in Kamera obskura,” Nabokov Studies 3 (1996): 7. 75. “чуть хриплым говорком,— как человек, / что кашляет в соседнем отделенье, / когда вагон на станции ночной, / бывало, остановится со вздохом.” Nabokov, “Tolstoi,” 2:593; “Tolstoy,” 59. 76. “. . . Но есть одно, / что мы никак вообразить не можем, / . . . / Я говорю о тех ночах, когда / Толстой творил; я говорю о чуде, / об урагане образов, летящих / по черным небесам в час созиданья, / в час воплощенья . . . Ведь живые люди / родились в эти ночи . . . Так Господь / избраннику передает свое / старинное и благостное право / творить миры и в созданную плоть / вдыхать мгновенно дух неповторимый.” Nabokov, “Tolstoi,” 2:593–594; “Tolstoy,” 60. 77. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, October 13, 1925, Vladimir Nabokov Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of En­glish and American Lit­er­at­ ure, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter cited as Berg Collection). 78. “И вот они живут; все в них живет— / привычки, поговорки и повадка; / их родина — такая вот Россия, / какую носим мы в той глубине, / где смутный сон примет невыразимых,— / Россия запахов, оттенков, звуков, / огромных облаков над сенокосом, / Россия обольстительных болот, / богатых дичью . . . Это все мы любим. / Его созданья, тысячи людей, / сквозь нашу жизнь просвечивают чудно, / окрашивают даль воспоминаний,— / как будто впрямь мы жили с ними рядом.” Nabokov, “Tolstoi,” 2:594; “Tolstoy,” 61. 79. Of course, ­there is another strand (I would argue more typical of émigré lit­er­ a­ture, but doubtless no less valued at that time) of autobiographical reminiscence, from

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The Luzhin Defense to The Gift, that could be seen to serve a similar purpose for the lost world of the 1900s and 1910s. 80. Gorky’s article is central to Tsivian’s notion of the educated Rus­sian public’s “active, creative, interventionist, or even aggressive” response to cinema. Tsivian, introduction to Early Cinema, 1–12. Laura Marcus relies on Tsivian’s discussion in her The Tenth Muse, 72–75. 81. Maksim Gorʹkii [I. M. Pacatus], “Beglye zametki,” Nizhegorodskii listok, July 4, 1896, 3; Maxim Gorky, “Maxim Gorky on the Lumière Programme, 1896,” trans. Leda Swan, in Kino: A History of the Rus­sian and Soviet Film, by Jay Leyda, 3rd ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1983), 407. Gorky’s biographer characterizes the “Brief Notes” series as “a mixture of journalism and lit­er­a­ture whereby Gorky expressed his views on the question of the ­future of capitalism in Rus­sia, on the small craft industries, on trade, on tariffs, on foreign investments, on culture, and on l­abor.” Tovah Yedlin, Maxim Gorky: A Po­liti­cal Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 17. 82. Gorʹkii, “Beglye zametki,” 3; Gorky, “Lumière Programme,” 409. 83. “In 1907 Aumont was due to be prosecuted for embezzlement but, it was discovered, had sold all his property and left the country.” Rashit Yangirov and Luke McKernan, “Charles Aumont,” in Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, ed. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan (London: British Film Institute, 1996), https://­www​ .­victorian​-­cinema​.­net​/­aumont​.­php. 84. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Cinema—­The Irresponsible Signifier or ‘The ­Gamble with History’: Film Theory or Cinema Theory,” New German Critique, no. 40 (Winter 1987): 66. 85. Gorʹkii, “Beglye zametki,” 3; Gorky, “Lumière Programme,” 409. 86. An advertisement in the émigré film trade journal Ekran (Screen) called “ ‘Rain’ Removal” (“Ustranenie ‘dozhdia’,” 1925) shows efforts even at this stage to combat ­these scratches on the film surface: “As we know, especially strong ‘rain’ accompanies the showing of old film reels, as well as the start and end of any film.” “Ustranenie ‘dozhdia,’ ” Ekran 5 (1925): 34. 87. Even Dolinin, who recognizes and emphasizes the extent of Nabokov’s activity within the émigré community, nonetheless depicts his artistic relation to his environment as ultimately idiosyncratic and solipsistic: “The worlds freely created by the artist may possess absolutely no links to historical pro­cesses, social existence, and the alien, ‘transparent’ real­ity surrounding the exile, but they must absolutely be related to the literary tradition, for only in it do they receive meaning and substantiation.” Dolinin, Istinnaia zhiznʹ, 35. For me, Nabokov’s engagement with the exilic pre­sent was not only instrumental and improvisational but also artistic, a kind of metamorphosis and balancing act while held in tension with Rus­sian literary dialogue, as Dolinin discusses. 88. One theorist in par­tic­u­lar was Siegfried Kracauer, but he was only the most incisive participant of a much larger debate. 89. See Paul Gilroy’s discussion of the “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” of the Black Atlantic as a “transcultural, international formation.” Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4. Gilroy in turns draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” in A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25.

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90. Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, vol. 2, Commentary and Index, ed. Vladimir Nabokov (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1990), 151. 91. In his investigation of “Rus­sian modernism in the cultural market,” Livak argues that ­there is a scholarly tradition of “downplay[ing] major aspects of literary life—­ competition, remuneration, marketing, professionalism—as conflicting with the sacrosanct aura of Rus­sian authorship.” Livak, In Search of Rus­sian Modernism, 185. Nabokov, at least in terms of his American years, has been better served in this area. Nonetheless, ­these works only cover the 1940s on, leaving his Rus­sian years untouched. Stephen H. Blackwell, “Nabokov and His Industry,” in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design, ed. John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Blue Ash, OH: Print Books, 2013), 230–239; Yuri Leving, “Nabokov and the Publishing Business: The Writer as His Own Literary Agent,” in Marketing Lit­er­a­ture and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Yuri Leving and Frederick H. White (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 101–114; Duncan White, Nabokov and His Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 92. For Elsaesser, who places “trade and competition” and “contracts and markets” ahead of the traditional focus on politics, the centrality of migration to the film industry generally and to film noir in par­tic­u­lar is explained by the professional necessity to follow patterns of investment: “What moved ­people and personnel from country to country was often the sheer power of capital needing to stay in circulation within the vari­ous sectors of the (international) film industry.” Thomas Elsaesser, “To Be or Not to Be: Extra-­Territorial in Vienna–­Berlin–­Hollywood,” in Weimar Cinema and ­After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2000), 366. 93. Elsaesser, “To Be or Not to Be,” 365. 94. Elsaesser, “To Be or Not to Be,” 375. Elsaesser therefore uses such professional migration as a way of reading the multivalent and often apparently internally inconsistent c­ areers of German filmmakers: “However much a biographer might be tempted to construct the linearity of a lived life around the fates of the immigrants, émigrés, adventurers and exiles, it may be much more coherent to assume that many of them lived several lives, quite separate from each other, yet each responding with some degree of logic to the requirements of a par­tic­u­lar film-­historical or film-­economic exigency.” Elsaesser, “To Be or Not to Be,” 374. 95. For Freund, Elsaesser lists “film director, director of photography, inventor, patent holder, and businessman.” Elsaesser, “To Be or Not to Be,” 369. 96. See Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Con­temporary Novel in an Age of World Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 1. The Weimar Picture Palace

1. Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile,” in On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 32. 2. This chapter’s opening statement by Iosif Gessen is from his Gody izgnaniia: Zhiznennyi otchet (Paris: YMCA, 1979), 105. Note that the first half of the paragraph–­ linking Nabokov’s c­ areer as an exiled writer to his position as moviegoer and spectator–is usually omitted when discussing Nabokov. 3. Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Lit­er­a­ture in an Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3–8.

NOTES TO PA GES 31– 33

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4. Maxim Shrayer has commented on how the newspaper context circumscribed and ­shaped Nabokov’s early fiction: “Writing short fiction that had to appeal to both a newspaper editorial staff and a newspaper audience imposed definite limitations on length, subject, narrative structure, and philosophical outlook.” Maxim Shrayer, The World of Nabokov’s Stories (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 27. 5. For example, Nabokov’s poem “Strana stikhov” and Gessen’s review of Karl Gerhardt’s Dreiklang der Nacht (1924) entitled “Trezvuchie nochi” appeared in the same issue of Rulʹ (December 7, 1924), on pages 2 and 5, respectively. 6. The poem, dated November 10, was published November 25, 1928. 7. Even in the 1920s, kino was the standard term in the Soviet Union, and the term has since become standard in Rus­sian. The term had already been introduced into Rus­ sia in 1913 by the author and journalist Petr Boborykin and was common ­there since 1914. See the forthcoming collection, Timatigra: Kinematograf v zerkale russkoi kul’tury 1890-­kh–1920-kh godov, ed. Anna Kovalova, Roman Timenchik, and Yuri Tsivian (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2022). In the Rus­sian émigré context of Berlin, I would argue that the term was perceived as cognate with the German usage with which émigrés ­were surrounded (whereas in Paris the émigrés used Gallic terms like sinema and sinematograf, in addition to the most common, kinematograf). 8. “Nabokov also began to see more of Georgy Gessen, son of his friend and editor Iosif Gessen, at first through tennis and Sunday conversazioni at Avgust Kaminka’s. Three years younger than Nabokov, Gessen would become one of the best friends of his adult life. Short, unhandsome, in wire-­rimmed glasses, he was a keen sportsman (tennis, boxing), chess player, and womanizer.” Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 255. 9. Andrew Field, VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986), 101. 10. Rulʹ, September 30, 1930. Cited in Iangirov, Khronika kinematograficheskoi zhizni russkogo zarubezhʹia, 2:49. 11. See his December 1925 essay on boxing and sport: Nabokov, “Braitenshtreter–­ Paolino,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 1:749–754; “Play (Braitensträter–­ Paolino),” in Think, Write, Speak, 33–36. As Thomas Karshan has shown, Nabokov’s artistic valuation of “play” spilled over into his life in exile. See Thomas Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12. Klaus Kreimeier uses data from 1923–1935. Klaus Kreimeier, “The Aesthetics of the Grandiose in Ufa’s Theaters,” in The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Com­pany, 1918–1945, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 112. By contrast, Peter Boeger lists over forty theaters seating more than one thousand spectators in operation by 1930, of which sixteen ­were built ­after 1925. Peter Boeger, Architektur der Lichtspieltheater in Berlin: Bauten und Projekte 1919–1930 (Berlin: Arenhövel, 1993), 7, 27–28. 13. See Brigitte Flickinger’s gloss: “The ‘Kino-­Pharus-­Plan Berlin’ is a unique undertaking by the Berlin map publishers Pharus and Mattisson, editors of the Berlin Cinema Directory. Their map of the cinematic Berlin City was first published in 1910 and in revised editions again in 1919 and in 1925. Each black dot marked a ‘Lichtspieltheater,’ each hatching a cinema ­under construction and each X stood for a Lichtspieltheater of Phoebus-­Film Com­pany.” Brigitte Flickinger, “Cinemas in the City: Berlin’s Public Space in the 1910s and 1920s,” Film Studies 10 (Spring 2007): 85–86n32. 14. Flickinger, “Cinemas in the City,” 80.

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TO PAGES 34– 40

15. “About once a fortnight in Berlin he and Véra would go to the movies, usually to the cheap corner theater rather than the expensive first-­run cinema palaces around the Gedächtniskirche.” Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 363. Note Boyd’s source is Appel’s Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, itself based on interviews conducted in the 1960s. 16. Pharus-­Plan Verlag, “Kino-­Pharusplan Berlin” (1925); Boeger, Architektur der Lichtspieltheater; Sylvaine Hänsel and Angelika Schmitt, eds., Kinoarchitektur in Berlin 1895– 1995 (Berlin: Reimer, 1995); Dieter E. Zimmer, Nabokovs Berlin (Berlin: Nicolai, 2001). 17. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Otkrytie Ufa-­Palast am Zoo,” Rulʹ, September  29, 1925, 4. 18. The inability of feature films to live up to their ostentatious surroundings was a staple comment of American critics during this period. See Richard Koszarski, An Eve­ning’s Entertainment: The Age of the S­ ilent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 25. 19. Such a scale of value in evaluating the film as product was, as I hope to show, only one of the many ways of relating to the cinema. Graham Greene, review of The Marriage of Corbal, directed by Karl Grune and F. Brunn, The Spectator, June 5, 1936; reprinted in Graham Greene, The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories, ed. David Parkinson (New York: Applause, 1995), 108. 20. The sole exceptions are mentions of Conrad Veidt and Greta Garbo in Camera Obscura. 21. For details of similar premieres, see Kreimeier, “The Aesthetics of the Grandiose.” 22. See Victoria de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to Eu­ro­pean Cinemas, 1920–1960,” Journal of Modern History 61, no.  1 (March 1989): 53–87; Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: Amer­ic­ a in the World Film Market, 1907–34 (London: British Film Institute, 1985). 23. Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 24. As Field put it, “He was from the first not only a working extra but a film buff and Berlin was, of course, the Hollywood of its time.” Even in the early 1920s, of course, Hollywood was the Hollywood of its time. Field, VN, 18. 25. Nabokov’s old Tenishchev School classmate Savely Kyandzhuntsev owned a Paris cinema, which Nabokov visited in the late 1930s (see chapter 3). 26. Iulii Aikhenvalʹd, “Smysl pustoty,” Segodnia, November 13, 1927: 5. 27. Nabokov, “Pisʹmo v Rossiiu,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 1:160; “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia,” in Stories, 138. 28. As often the case with Nabokov’s film theory, the reception of the film image by the narrator or character is not passive and is liable to be read against the grain. Furthermore, the differences noted between the original Rus­sian and the ­later En­glish translation are typical of the adjustments made for a dif­fer­ent audience and historical moment. 29. In the En­glish, Nabokov replaces “­people” with “mimes” in order to signal that this is ­silent film. 30. Zinaida Gippius [Anton Krainii], “Sinema,” Zveno, no. 204 (December 26, 1926); reprinted and annotated in Rashit Iangirov, “Istoriia s ‘sinema,’ ” Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 3–4 (1992): 102–103. 31. This position was also taken up by the émigré critic Pavel Muratov, whose views on the cinema ­were in many ways opposed to Nabokov’s. See chapter 2.

NOTES TO PA GES 40– 43

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32. See Dolinin, “Clio Laughs Last.” 33. Nabokov, “Pisʹmo v Rossiiu,” 1:162; “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia,” 140. 34. The story’s original Rus­sian title is “A Letter to Rus­sia.” It might be more accurately titled “A Letter to Prague,” as its naive, even old-­fashioned description of the cinema screen drew appreciation from his m ­ other, who wrote from Prague: “Yes, I ­really liked ‘A Letter from Rus­sia’ [sic], especially the splendid description of the cinema: in several lines you gave such a lively picture.” (She confuses “Pisʹmo v Rossiiu” with “Pisʹmo iz Rossii.”) Elena Nabokova to Vladimir Nabokov, January 31, 1925, Berg Collection. In fact, it may have been designed to elicit such admiration, and its final lines (“Listen: I am ideally happy”) would make for comforting reading for a worried (and recently widowed) ­mother. At the same time, the stance of the story aligns with the rest of Nabokov’s contemporaneous fiction, including his pronouncements in lectures and essays published or read in Berlin. 35. Field gives 1923–1924, adding, “The payment for such walk-­ons amounted to about two days’ rent, never significant enough to ­matter but always welcome.” Field, VN, 121. 36. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, March 13, 1925, Berg Collection. 37. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, July 1924, Berg Collection. Field also retells this story, without mentioning the letter. He gives his source as “field archive: taped interview.” Field, VN, 21. 38. The term screenplay came into widespread use in the 1940s, but it best translates the kind of writing described by the Rus­sian term stsenarii, literally “scenario” or “script.” 39. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, July 1924, Berg Collection. 40. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, June 1924, Berg Collection (emphasis in original). 41. Ekran 2 (1924): 48. 42. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, August 1924, Berg Collection. Hollywood director (and former citizen of the Rus­sian Empire) Lewis Milestone famously became interested in “The Love of a Dwarf ” (see chapter 3). On Nabokov’s early work with cabaret and film, see Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 227–234; Andrei Babikov, “Primechaniia,” in Tragediia gospodina Morna: Pʹesy, lektsii o drame, by Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Andrei Babikov (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2008), 559. 43. For an extensive treatment of the topos of the émigré extra, or figurant, compars, and ekstra, in Paris, Berlin, and Hollywood, see Iangirov, “ ‘Emigranty,’ ” in Raby nemogo. 44. Iangirov, “ ‘Emigranty,’ ” 122. 45. Aleksander Lapiner [A. L–­r.], “Kak ia byl kinematograficheskim statistom: Iz berlinskikh vpechatlenii,” Rulʹ, October 30, 1923: 5. 46. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:50–51; Mary, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1970; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989), 9. 47. Lev Urvantsov, “Filʹmovaia nochʹ: S natury,” Rulʹ, December 4, 1924: 2–3. Viktor Shklovsky also made this connection explicit for a Soviet audience in his 1927 booklet Motalka (The Editing T ­ able), in which the first chapter describes Berlin’s Friedrichstraße (“The German Film Street”) as catering to both film distribution and sex work. Viktor Shklovskii, “Nemetskaia kino-­ulitsa,” in Motalka (Moscow: Kinopechatʹ, 1927), 3–11.

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48. Iurii Fel’zen, “Figuratsiia,” Bodrost’! ( January 14, 1940): 3–4; collected in Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Leonid Livak, 2 vols. (Moscow: Vodolei, 2012), 2:111–14; Yuri Felsen, “Extras,” trans. Bryan Karetnyk, in Prototype 3, ed. Jess Chandler (London: Prototype, 2021), 157–162. 49. Iangirov, “ ‘Emigranty,’ ” 129–130. 50. Cited in Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 127. 51. “Lampa Iupiter dlia 150 amper,” Ekran, no. 2 (1924): 48. 52. Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part (New York: Viking, 1977), 159. 53. For instance, Moses, The Nickel Was for the Movies, 59–61; Wyllie, Nabokov at the Movies, 6–8. 54. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:60; Mary, 21. 55. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:60; Mary, 21. 56. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:59–61; Mary, 20–22. Yuri Tsivian suggests as the source for the filmed scene E. A. Dupont’s Der Demütige und die Sängerin (The ­Humble Man and the Singer, 1925), starring Lil Dagover as an opera singer who has instigated the murder of her brutal lover, yet now has to play out this situation onstage. This film was another straight-­to-­screen Weimar adaptation, this time of Felix Hollaender’s 1925 Ullstein novel of the same name. See Siegfried Kracauer’s review of April 25, 1925, collected in Kleine Schriften zum Film, ed. Inka Mülder-­Bach, vol. 6 of Werke in neun Bänden, ed. Inka Mülder-­ Bach with Mirjan Wenzel and Sabine Biebl (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2004), pt. 1, 135–136. 57. Iulii Aikhenvalʹd, “Literaturnye zametki,” Rulʹ, March 3, 1926, 2. 58. This theme was picked up in Hollywood two years ­later with Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928). 59. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:61; Mary, 22. 60. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:61; Mary, 22. This dispersal is referred to a third time in the novel. ­Later Ganin is with the poet Podtyagin: “Once again he remembered ­these flickering, shadowy doppelgängers, the casual Rus­sian film extras, sold for ten marks apiece and still flitting, God knows where, across the white gleam of a screen.” Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:124; Mary, 110. 61. Yangirov points out that from the early 1920s many émigrés wrote about their experience of exile as a passive spectacle over which they had no control: “For many émigrés the screen became a vis­i­ble meta­phor of the experience of exile [bezhenskogo opyta], a kind of ‘film of life’ [lentoi zhizni], with its own stage man­ag­ers, heroes and extras.” One émigré is quoted as writing in 1923, “We are living in in­ter­est­ing times. Not life, but ­free cinema [kinematograf].” Rashit Iangirov, “ ‘Berlinskii perekrestok’ russkoi zarubezhnoi kinematografii,” in Raby nemogo, 73–74. 62. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:126–127; Mary, 113–114. 63. Marina Grishakova has linked t­ hese two scenes, but she reads t­ hese “angel-­ workers” in metaliterary terms, occupying a symbolically elevated position as “agents of the author, signs of an ‘other’ real­ity.” Marina Grishakova, “Vizualʹnaia poetika V. Nabokova,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 54, no. 2 (March 2002): 214; cf. Marina Grishakova, Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames, 2nd ed. (Tartu, Estonia: University of Tartu Press, 2012), 86. 64. In fact, the w ­ hole morning scene recalls Levin’s stroll through Moscow on the morning of his engagement in Anna Karenina, when he sees every­thing as if for the first time. Kretschmar has a similar experience in Camera Obscura. See Eric Naiman,

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“When Nabokov Writes Badly: Aesthetics and Morality in Laughter in the Dark,” Rus­ sian Review, no. 73 (October 2014): 559–560. 65. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:127; Mary, 114. 66. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:127; Mary, 114. 67. Of course, by the late 1920s, moviegoers could already read the “real-­life” existence of stars into their roles. But Nabokov is concerned not with celebrities (unlike some of his characters) but with anonymous or unsuccessful individuals. 68. Nabokov, Chelovek iz SSSR, in Tragediia gospodina Morna, 313–356; The Man from the U.S.S.R., in The Man from the U.S.S.R. & Other Plays, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 31–122. 69. See Babikov’s commentary in Nabokov, Tragediia gospodina Morna, 578–584. 70. “Gruppa,” Rulʹ, March 27, 1927, 8; Boris Brodskii, “Chelovek iz SSSR. Na postanovke pʹesy V. Sirina,” Rulʹ, April 5, 1927, 5. 71. Siggy Frank has noted the connection between this act and the Weimar Berlin work of Erwin Piscator, famous for the innovative use of film in his stage productions. Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 26–27. 72. “This drama, the action of which takes place in con­temporary Berlin, depicts the émigré milieu. . . . ​The action transfers from a typical Rus­sian tavern to a boarding­ house, and from ­there to a Rus­sian lecture, a film shoot and so on.” “Gruppa,” 8. 73. Nabokov, Chelovek iz SSSR, 340; The Man from the U.S.S.R., 89. 74. Nikolai Ukhtomskii, “Russkie lavry na kinofronte Germanii,” Rupor (Kharbin), September 8, 1929, 3. 75. Dmitri Nabokov, “Nabokov and the Theatre,” in The Man from the U.S.S.R., 3. Siggy Frank investigates the historical coordinates (German, émigré, Soviet) of Nabokov’s metatheatrical staging of “disintegrating realities” in this play. Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination, 68–78. 76. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Sein letzter Befehl,” Rulʹ, September 22, 1928, 4. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, May 12, 1930, in Letters to Véra, 159: “Yesterday, a ­little old general came, who reminded me of [Emil] Jan[n]ings in the ‘The Last Command.’ ” On this tradition, see Oksana Bulgakowa’s work: “The ‘Rus­sian Vogue’ in Eu­rope and Hollywood: The Transformation of Rus­sian Ste­reo­types through the 1920s,” Rus­sian Review 64 (April 2005): 211–235; “Russische Film-­Emigration in Deutschland: Schicksale und Filme,” in Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918 bis 1941, ed. Karl Schlögel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 379–398; “Typologie des russischen Emigrantenfilms,” Europa Orientalis: Studi e ricerche sui paesi e le culture dell’est europeo, 14, no. 2 (1995): 35–58. Also Rashit Iangirov, “Pod razvesistoi kliukvoi russkoi kinoekzotiki,” Iskusstvo kino 12 (1993): 100–108. 77. On the historical and philosophical resonance of the balagan in its folk and Silver Age (Alexander Blok, Alexandre Benois) forms for Nabokov, especially in Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kaznʹ, 1935–1936), see Savelii Senderovich and Elena Shvarts, “ ‘Verbnaia shtuchka’: Nabokov i populiarnaia kulʹtura: Statʹia pervaia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 24 (1997): 93–110; “ ‘Verbnaia shtuchka’: Nabokov i populiarnaia kulʹtura: Statʹia vtoraia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 26 (1997): 201–222. 78. Andrei Babikov, “Izobretenie teatra,” in Nabokov, Tragediia gospodina Morna, 22. 79. Nabokov, “Painted Wood,” in Think, Write, Speak, 23. On the cabaret and its trilingual journal, see Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 218.

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80. See J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-­Century Rus­sian Theatre and Drama (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1993). 81. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:367; The Luzhin Defense, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 105. 82. Nabokov, Chelovek iz SSSR, 348; The Man from the U.S.S.R., 105. 83. Nabokov, Chelovek iz SSSR, 348; The Man from the U.S.S.R., 106. We could note that the very name “Pia Mora” is itself an uncanny doubling of numerous well-­known actresses from ­these years, especially the Polish-­born Weimar film star Lya Mara (I am grateful to Yuri Tsivian for this point). Gessen reviewed two of Mara’s films: Die Venus von Montmartre (1925) and Mein Herz ist eine Jazzband (1929). We might also add the actresses Lya de Putti (Gessen’s reviews: Manon Lescaut [1926] and The Sorrows of Satan [1926]) and Pola Negri (Gessen’s reviews: Men [1924], Flower of Night [1925], ­Hotel Imperial [1927], and Three Sinners [1928]). All three actresses w ­ ere born in 1897, making them almost exact contemporaries of Nabokov. 84. Nabokov, Chelovek iz SSSR, 348; The Man from the U.S.S.R., 106. 85. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:338; Nabokov [Vladimir Nabokoff-­Sirin], Camera Obscura, trans. Winifred Roy [Ray] (London: John Long, 1936), 179; Laughter in the Dark, 187. The history of the changes from the Rus­sian to the British translation and American rewriting are explored in chapters 3 and 4. ­Here, as ­there, I cite the original British translation while pointing out its departures from the Rus­sian. 86. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Neshchastʹe v shakhte ‘Vostok,’ ” Rulʹ, November 6, 1924, 4. 87. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Der König und die kleinen Mädchen,” Rulʹ, June 23, 1925, 4. 88. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Ein Dieb im Paradies,” Rulʹ, March 5, 1926, 5. 89. Gessen, “Ein Dieb im Paradies,” 5. 90. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Tartüff,” Rulʹ, January 29, 1926, 5. 91. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Der galante Prinz,” Rulʹ, March 27, 1925, 4. 92. Gessen, “Der galante Prinz,” 4. 93. See, for example, Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Polet vokrug zemnogo shara,” Rulʹ, March 10, 1925, 4. 94. Lotte H. Eisner, L’écran démoniaque (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1952); Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1947). Eisner’s book ­later appeared in En­glish translation as The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 95. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Expressionist Film or Weimar Cinema? With Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner (Once More) to the Movies,” in Weimar Cinema and ­After, 18–60. 96. In the case of Kracauer in par­tic­u­lar, work on his 1920s film reviews has shown the differences between his firsthand impressions and their l­ater reworking for a postwar, foreign audience in his “realist” Theory of Film. The same also goes for Arnheim, who had been labeled a “formalist” a­ fter his 1957 Film as Art (a revision of Film als Kunst, 1932), in contrast with Kracauer’s realism. See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Real­ity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960); Rudolf Arnheim, Film as

NOTES TO PA GES 54– 61

209

Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). The classic statement of the dichotomy between the “formative tradition” and the “realist film theory” is J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 97. Rudolf Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). It should be noted that both are translations of much e­ arlier German collections of 1977 (Arnheim) and 1963 (Kracauer)—in this re­spect, it is a case of bringing into general circulation a picture already known to German-­speaking specialists. 98. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, September 21, 1927, Berg Collection. 99. Following Pavel Muratov’s “Kinematograf,” ­there appeared such articles (explored more in chapter 2) as Sergei Volkonsky’s “Khuliteliam kinematografa,” Mikhail Kantor’s “V zashchitu kinematografa,” and Evgeny Znosko-­Borovsky’s “Iskusstvo kinematografa”; only Zinaida Gippius had the contrarian title “Sinema.” 100. Grishakova has drawn attention to this poem’s carefully balanced ambivalence ­toward the cinema. Grishakova, Models of Space, 187. 101. Punctuation cited according to the periodical publication. Nabokov [V. Sirin], “Kinematograf,” Rulʹ, November 25, 1928: 2; Nabokov, “Kinematograf,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:595–596. 102. Nabokov, Podvig, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:158; Glory, 83. Darwin admits to feeling the allure of the adventures displayed on-­screen, which prompt the hero Martin to want to travel. 103. Nabokov, “Kinematograf,” undated draft, Berg Collection. 104. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:450; The Luzhin Defense, 233. 105. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:459–460; The Luzhin Defense, 247–248. 106. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:354; The Luzhin Defense, 86. 107. Cf. Gessen on the typical swift leap in fortunes from small-­town girl to big city lady: Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Madame Sans Gêne,” Rulʹ, April 30, 1926, 5. 108. Nabokov, Otchaianie, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:405–406; [Vladimir Nabokoff-­Sirin], Despair (London: John Long, 1937), 23–24; Despair (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989), 15–16. Two famous Weimar examples of such scenes are Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920, dir. Ernst Lubitsch), where Henny Porten plays both of Kohlhiesel’s “­daughters,” and Die Brüder Schellenberg (1926, dir. Karl Grune), where Conrad Veidt plays both of the Schellenberg “­brothers.” 109. Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-­Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 110. Nabokov, Despair, 212. 111. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:190; King, Queen, Knave, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1968; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989), 92. 112. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:423; The Luzhin Defense, 191. 113. Nabokov, “Korolek,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:636; “The Leonardo,” in Stories, 364 (translation modified). Note that in the En­glish Nabokov adds the historical marker “on the newfangled speaking screen” ­after “trumpet tones.” For a discussion of this scene in terms of Nabokov’s use of sound in the story, see Wyllie, Nabokov at the Movies, 33.

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114. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:423; The Luzhin Defense, 191. As an idiot savant, Luzhin’s competence in one par­tic­u­lar area, chess, enables him to pass a reliable critical judgment on the film in that regard—­the impossible arrangement of the pieces on the board. 115. Nabokov, “Kuprin. ‘Elanʹ.’ (Rasskazy),” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:678–679; “Alexander Kuprin, The Glade: Short Stories,” in Think, Write, Speak, 88–89. 116. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:309; Camera Obscura, 117; Laughter in the Dark, 123. 117. Aikhenvalʹd, “Smysl pustoty.” 118. On the repetition of such an exit from the cinema as an ending in “The Assistant Producer” (1943), see coda. 119. In his article “Film 1928”—­published concurrently with Nabokov’s poem in November  1928—­Kracauer writes, “The single largest segment of t­hese new audiences, presumably, is composed of low-­level white-­collar workers, whose number has increased not only in absolute but also in relative terms since the rationalization of our economy.” Siegfried Kracauer, “Film 1928,” in The Mass Ornament, 307. 120. The latter phrase is Walter Benjamin’s. 121. Karsten Witte, “Introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘The Mass Ornament,’ ” trans. Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes, New German Critique, no. 5 (Spring 1975): 59. He also mentions Kracauer’s “intention to decipher social tendencies revealed in ephemeral cultural phenomena.” 122. Siegfried Kracauer, “The ­Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” in The Mass Ornament, 295–303. 123. See Adorno’s ­later remarks: Theodor W. Adorno, “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer,” trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New German Critique, no. 54 (Autumn 1991): 168. For a more theoretical investigation of the place of ­women in Kracauer’s work of the 1920s, see Sabine Hake, “Girls and Crisis—­The Other Side of Diversion,” New German Critique, no. 40 (Winter 1987): 147–164. 124. Nabokov, “Krasavitsa,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:616, 618; “A Rus­ sian Beauty,” in Stories, 386, 387. 125. Luke Parker, “The Shop Win­dow Quality of T ­ hings: 1920s Weimar Surface Culture in Nabokov’s Korolʹ, dama, valet,” Slavic Review 77, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 402. 126. This Rus­sian word appears across Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction but is translated inconsistently into En­glish. In The Luzhin Defense it is “shop assistant” (108), “salesman” (167), and “shop assistants” (216). In Glory it appears once as “shop clerk” (145). In Camera Obscura (1936 version) it is “girl who served ­behind the ­counter” (22) and “shop-­ girl” (22, 24). In his stories it is more uniform: in “A ­Matter of Chance” it is “sales clerk” (Stories, 51), and in “Details of a Sunset” it is “salesclerk” (Stories, 79). 127. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:182; not in En­glish; Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:241; King, Queen, Knave, 169. 128. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:185; King, Queen, Knave, 84. 129. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:166, 171; King, Queen, Knave, 56, 62. 130. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:185; King, Queen, Knave, 130, 205. 131. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:171; King, Queen, Knave, 62. 132. For Martha, see Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:229; King, Queen, Knave, 151. For the mannequins, see Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:271; [not in the En­glish]. Tellingly, Nabokov transferred the term “slow motion” to Franz in the En­glish version: King, Queen, Knave, 74.

NOTES TO PA GES 65– 69

211

133. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:190–191; King, Queen, Knave, 92 (translation amended). 134. Lara Delage-­Toriel has noted that it is only in Nabokov’s two German novels, King, Queen, Knave and Camera Obscura / Laughter in the Dark, that “male and female points of view alternate.” In both cases, of course, the female leads Martha and Magda are seen to self-­consciously script themselves according to cinematic culture—­bolstering Nabokov’s link to Kracauer’s gendered view of Weimar mass cinema. Lara Delage-­ Toriel, “­Women,” in Vladimir Nabokov in Context, ed. David M. Bethea and Siggy Frank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 38. 135. Nicely, Maurus went on to play a Rus­sian spy in Fritz Lang’s 1928 film Spionen (Spies). 136. Martha moves “slowly (as in a slowed down [zaderzhannom] film).” For Martha, see Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:229; King, Queen, Knave, 151. For the mannequins, see Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:271; [not in the En­glish]. In the original Rus­sian, the movement of the mannequin has “that certain tenderness which distinguished the gait of a sleepwalker or the movement of p­ eople in slowed down [zaderzhannom] film”). In the En­glish, the movement of the mannequin is removed and transferred to another scene with Franz, who now moves “with the slow motion of a sleepwalker called back” to his bed. King, Queen, Knave, 74. For the tortoises, compare Nabokov, “Putevoditelʹ po Berlinu,” 1:180; Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin,” in Stories, 158. 137. Martin, in an extended reverie, imagines a potential love affair with (in the En­ glish translation) “the w ­ oman’s eyes slowly closing as in a filmed scene.” Nabokov, Podvig, 3:157–158; Glory, 82 This image seems to be connected with the scene in the cinema watched and discussed by Darwin and Martin, which immediately follows the reverie (cited above). 138. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:83; Mary, 52. 139. Nabokov, Mashenʹka, 2:61; Mary, 21. 140. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:183; King, Queen, Knave, 81. 141. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:183; King, Queen, Knave, 81. 142. Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave, 48. The reader is updated on the pro­g ress of the construction on 137. 143. Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave, 216. 144. Kreimeier, “The Aesthetics of the Grandiose,” 118; Kreimeier, “Was ­There an Ufa Style? The Limits of Illusion,” in The Ufa Story, 156. 145. See Zinaida Shakhovskaia, V poiskakh Nabokova (Paris: La Presse Libre, 1979), 78. 2. The Man from the Movie Kingdom

1. Tsivian, Early Cinema, 20–23. 2. “Is it not better to say filʹma than filʹm, as has recently become customary? Rus­ sian is used to feminine words with endings such as -­lʹma and -­tʹma and so on. The ending -­lʹm is foreign to it. Besides, feminine filʹma is more con­ve­nient ­because its other names are also thus: lenta [lit. (reel of ) film] and kartina [lit. picture].” Georgii Adamovich [Sizif], “Otkliki,” Zveno, no. 136 (September 7, 1925): 3. 3. See the film historian Rashit Yangirov’s gloss on ­these changes in terminology, where he notes further that Zinaida Gippius’s argument in the 1920s with Nikolai Bakhtin (younger ­brother of the famous literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin) boils down

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to a generational divide: “If for Gippius the cinema [kino] is the ‘sinematograf,’ a fairground balagan, a ­children’s féerie, as it presented itself to the viewer of the 1900s, then for [Nikolai] Bakhtin, a viewer of the 1910s, it is the ‘kinematograf,’ a spectacle endowed with its own aesthetic system.” Iangirov, “Istoriia s ‘sinema,’ ” 102. 4. [Redaktsiia], editorial, Kino-­iskusstvo 1 (1922): 3. Kino-­could literally be translated as “cine-­,” but the resultant words (cine-­art, cine-­street, cine-­industry) sound more self-­consciously innovative than the Rus­sian originals. The term is better rendered by “film,” which in the case of “film art” is obviously preferable—as in Close Up (1927–1933), an “international magazine devoted to film art.” In other cases, “movie” would also be pos­si­ble (movie/film street, movie/film industry). 5. Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-­Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1978); “The ­Great Debates” [1925–1929], in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1988), 1:321– 436; Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Rus­sian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988). 6. Rashit Iangirov, “ ‘Sinefily’ i ‘antisinemisty’: Polemika russkoi emigratsii o kinematografe v 1920-kh gg. (Po stranitsam emigrantskoi presse),” Ezhegodnik Doma russkogo zarubezhʹia 1 (2010): 345–362. For a more diffuse se­lection, see the “From the History of Émigré Film Thought” anthology included in Natalʹia Nusinova, Kogda my v Rossiiu vernemsia . . . : Russkoe kinematograficheskoe zarubezhʹe: 1918–1939 (Moscow: Eizenshtein-­tsentr, 2003), 303–408. This compilation, moreover, is only partial, and the fuller se­lection likely to be supplied by Rashit Yangirov’s book “Antologiia russkoi zarubezhnoi kinomysli (Nemoe kino. 1919–1920-­e gg.)” still awaits a publisher. 7. Pavel Muratov [P. P. Muratov], “Kinematograf,” Sovremennye zapiski, no. 26 ­(December 1925): 287–312. 8. Iangirov, “ ‘Sinefily’ i ‘antisinemisty.’ ” 9. Znosko-­Borovsky also published a history of the early twentieth-­century Rus­sian theater: Evgenii Znosko-­Borovskii, Istoriia russkogo teatra nachala XX veka (Prague: Plamia, 1925). Still of interest for its firsthand accounts, it has been republished (Navona, 2014). 10. For part of this e­ arlier debate, see Roman Timenchik and Iurii Tsivʹian, “Kino i teatr. Disputy 10-kh godov,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 30 (1996): 57–87. 11. The question of the cinema’s significance for the émigrés took on increasing urgency beginning in the mid-1920s, as exile took on the appearance of permanence. 12. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 287. 13. Yangirov is correct in his characterization of Muratov’s essay: “Practically its entire content boils down to a polemic with the views of Levinson on film art.” Rashit Iangirov, “O kinematograficheskom nasledii Andreia Levinsona,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 43 (1999): 163n1. 14. Pavel Muratov [P. P. (Pavel Pavlovich) Muratov], “Anti-­iskusstvo,” Sovremennye zapiski 19 (April 1924): 250–276; “Iskusstvo i narod,” Sovremennye zapiski, no. 22 (December 1924): 185–209; “Kinematograf.” Some of Muratov’s émigré essays are reprinted in Pavel Muratov, Nochnye mysli: Esse, ocherki, statʹi 1923–1934, ed. Iu. P. Solovʹev (Moscow: Pro­gress, 2000). This collection contains the fullest biography of Muratov to date: Iu. P. Solovʹev, “Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva Pavla Pavlovicha Muratova,” 4–46. For a discussion that examines ­these essays in the context of Sovremennye zapiski and connects Muratov’s essay “The Art of Prose” (“Iskusstvo prozy,” 1926) to the ­earlier three pieces, see

NOTES TO PA GES 72– 76

213

E. Garetto and P. Deotto, “ ‘Ia seichas ne to chto zaniat, a sovershenno v plenu u raboty’: P. P. Muratov,” in Korostelev and Shruba, “Sovremennye zapiski,” 4:247–248. 15. Patrizia Deotto, “Pavel Muratov,” in Twentieth-­Century Rus­sian Émigré Writers, ed. Maria Rubins, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 317 (Detroit: Thompson Gale, 2005), 237–247. 16. Clive James, “Paul Muratov,” in Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 524–534. 17. Muratov left Rus­sia in fall 1922 and lived in Berlin u ­ ntil late 1923. Solovʹev, “Ocherk,” in Muratov, Nochnye mysli, 26–28. 18. Sergei Bocharov terms this a “one-­sided dialogue.” Sergei Bocharov, “ ‘Evropeiskaia nochʹ’ kak russkaia metafora: Khodasevich, Muratov, Veidle,” in Filologicheskie siuzhety (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kulʹtur, 2007), 389. 19. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 304–305. 20. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 298. 21. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 299. 22. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 288. 23. Muratov, “Anti-­iskusstvo,” 269. 24. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 288. For the continuation of this passage, see this chapter’s epigraph. 25. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 289. 26. “The recent war, thoroughly scientific, thoroughly mechanized, which placed millions of p­ eople face-­to-­face with a monstrous physics experiment, which transgressed all habits of organic life, has played a huge role in the remaking of the Eu­ro­ pe­an’s psyche and in the preparation of the post-­European’s psyche.” Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 290. His statement on the war’s effects recalls Walter Benjamin’s remarks in “The Storyteller” (“Der Erzähler,” 1936). 27. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 312. 28. Bocharov points out this link between Berdiaev and Muratov: Bocharov, “ ‘Evropeiskaia nochʹ’ kak russkaia metafora,” 395. It was Alexander Dolinin who first traced Nabokov’s dispute with Berdiaev: Dolinin, “Clio Laughs Last,” 200. 29. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 299, 309. 30. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 297. 31. Zinaida Gippius [Kr.], “Kholivud,” Zveno, no. 137 (September 14, 1925): 2–3. 32. The most famous of ­these pieces (and the only one to have been subsequently reprinted) is Nichols’s interview with Charlie Chaplin. Robert Nichols, “­Future of the Cinema. VII. Mr. Charles Chaplin,” The Times (London), September 3, 1925, 13. 33. Robert Nichols, “­Future of the Cinema. II. The ‘Hicks’ Decide,” The Times (London), August 28, 1925, 13–14. 34. Nichols, “The ‘Hicks’ Decide,” 13. 35. Nichols, “The ‘Hicks’ Decide,” 13. 36. “The opinions, prejudices, and peculiarities of the ‘hicks’ are of g­ reat importance to the Movie industry, ­because, while the sale of a ­great film in the ­great cities of the United States and anywhere in Eu­rope may yield a return to the investor of the money spent upon that film, the profit is made in the ‘hicks.’ ” Nichols, “The ‘Hicks’ Decide,” 13. 37. Curiously, Muratov seems to misread, or ­else disagrees with, Nichols’s judgment on the influence of ­women’s clubs. Nichols argues in fact that, despite their

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superficiality, they are a force for good, tempering the worst impulses of the “hicks.” Nichols, “The ‘Hicks’ Decide,” 13. Muratov, by contrast, sees them as equally culpable. 38. Note that Zveno is where Levinson’s reviews had been published. Mikhail Kantor, “V zashchitu kinematografa,” Zveno, no. 198 (November 14, 1926): 11–12. 39. Kantor, “V zashchitu kinematografa,” 11. Nichols’s original passage continues: “The stock comment on this subject is, ­There is a g­ reat deal of truth in this aphorism. A sort of vicious circle prevails. So many bad films ­were made that ­those who might have provided a nucleus of criticism and support have been ‘sicked off ’ the cinema. and now when an artistically valuable picture is made—as happens now and again—­ the picture does not receive support.” Robert Nichols, “­Future of the Cinema. IX. Gullibility of Hollywood,” The Times (London), September 5, 1925, 11. 40. Muratov extends Kantor’s complaint to the trade press: “In its illiterate film trade press they love to speak about the ‘art of the screen,’ but do not themselves of course value this art one bit, and worry only about how to spruce up their entertainment commodity with the trappings of bad theater or the profanation of literary works.” Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 308–309. 41. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 308. 42. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 307. 43. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 298. 44. The spelling of prikashchik is historical. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 297. 45. Nabokov, “Kinematograf,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:596. 46. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 308. 47. Sergei Volkonskii, “Khuliteliam kinematografa,” Zveno, no. 171 (May 9, 1926): 10. 48. See Rashit Iangirov, ed., “Zabytyi kinokritik Sergei Volkonskii,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 5–6 (1992): 99–112. 49. In 1921, for example, in Berlin’s Rulʹ Levinson wrote a series of articles u ­ nder the title “The Art of ­These Days,” including discussions of Romain Rolland and Joseph Conrad. Andrei Levinson, “Ob iskusstve etikh dnei,” Rulʹ, April 24, 1921; May 14, 1921; May 28, 1921. 50. Iangirov, “O kinematograficheskom nasledii,” 98. We could also note the con­ temporary engagement of the temporary exile Viktor Shklovsky, whose Lit­er­a­ture and Cinema (Literatura i kinematograf, 1923) is available in En­glish as Lit­er­a­ture and Cinematography, trans. Irina Masinovsky (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008). 51. Andrei Levinson, “O nekotorykh chertakh russkoi kinematografii,” Poslednie novosti, March 29, 1925; Iangirov, “O kinematograficheskom nasledii,” 125. 52. Andrei Levinson, “Chudesa ekrana,” Zveno, February 26, 1925; reprinted in Andrei Levinson, “Chudesa ekrana,” ed. Rashit Iangirov, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 42 (1999): 252. 53. Levinson, “Chudesa ekrana,” 252. 54. Andrei Levinson, “Teatr i miuzik-­khollʹ,” Dni, October 22, 1925; reprinted in Iangirov, “O kinematograficheskom nasledii,” 117–120. 55. Levinson, “Teatr i miuzik-­khollʹ,” 118. 56. Levinson, “Teatr i miuzik-­khollʹ,” 118. 57. Levinson, “Teatr i miuzik-­khollʹ,” 118. 58. Andrei Levinson, “Kinematograf kak ‘antiiskusstvo’—­K artina i klishe—­ Khudozhnik li fotograf ?—­Kniga i ekran,” Dni, January 26, 1926; reprinted in Iangirov, “O kinematograficheskom nasledii,” 159–163. 59. Levinson, “Kinematograf,” 159–160.

NOTES TO PA GES 81– 89

215

60. Levinson, “Kinematograf,” 163. 61. Levinson, “Kinematograf,” 162. 62. A reference to Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925). Levinson, “Kinematograf,” 162. 63. Levinson, “Kinematograf,” 163. 64. “That mass of work which a man must pull out of himself in order to live in Paris, provide for his ­family, educate his ­daughter, is so ­g reat that ­there is often not enough time or strength to do some work for a friendly Rus­sian newspaper. The French do feed me, it is true, but believe me, they get their m ­ oney’s worth from me.” Andrei Levinson, letter, December 27, 1923; reprinted in Iangirov, “O kinematograficheskom nasledii,” 103n22. 65. “Krupnyi plan” became “Eloge du ‘gros plan’ ”; “Soperniki Sharlo” became “Les rivaux de Charlot”; and “Duglas Ferbenks i ‘Morskoi’ roman” became “Le ‘Pirate Noir’ et le film maritime.” 66. Collected in André Levinson, André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties, ed. Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press; University Press of New ­England, 1999). See especially his summative self-­translation of 1929, “The Nature of the Cinema,” in André Levinson on Dance, 110–117. 67. Levinson, André Levinson on Dance, 18. 68. André Levinson, “Avant-­propos,” in La course du fou, by Vladimir Nabokov [V. Nabokov-­Sirine], trans. Denis Roche (Paris: Fayard, 1934), 7–13. 69. Vladislav Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” Poslednie novosti, October, 26, 1926; collected in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. I. P. Andreeva et al. (Moscow: Soglasie, 1996), 2:135–137. 70. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 135. On the po­liti­cal and artistic history of the term, see Livak, In Search of Rus­sian Modernism, 62–63, 66. 71. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 135. 72. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 135. 73. Levinson, “Kinematograf,” 159. 74. Robert de Beauplan, “Frénésie américaine,” L’illustration, September 11, 1926, 256. 75. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 135. 76. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 138. 77. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 137. 78. See Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Denise Youngblood, “ ‘Americanitis’: The Amerikanshchina in Soviet Cinema,” Journal of Popu­lar Film and Tele­vi­sion 19, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 148–156. 79. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 137. 80. Vladislav Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov (Paris: Vozrozhdenie, 1927). 81. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 136–137. 82. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 137. 83. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 137. 84. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 138. 85. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 138. 86. “­Were the cinema art—it would begin to empty, as the theaters are gradually emptying (with the exception of the entertaining m ­ usic halls), b­ ecause the appreciation [vospriiatie] of art is ­labor, not rest.” Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 137.

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87. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 135–136. 88. Khodasevich, “O kinematografe,” 138. 89. It was a concern that for Khodasevich predates emigration. See his 1921 talk “The Shaken Tripod”: “Already many do not hear Pushkin as we hear him, b­ ecause from the roar of the last six years their ears have become a bit deaf. They are forced to translate Pushkin into the language of their own sensations, which are dulled by the heartrending dramas of the cinema.” Vladislav Khodasevich, “Koleblemyi trenozhnik,” Vestnik literatury, no. 4–5 (1921): 18–20; Sobranie sochinenii, 2:77–85; “The Shaken Tripod,” trans. Alexander Golubov, in Modern Rus­sian Poets on Poetry, ed. Carl Proffer (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1976), 66–68. On the appearance of the cinema in Khodasevich’s poetry, see D. A. Sukhoeva, “Osmyslenie fenomena kinematografa v tvorchestve V. F. Khodasevicha perioda emigratsiia: Ot 1920-kh k 1930-­m gg.,” Artikulʹt 31, no. 3 (2018): 52–59. 90. Muratov, “Kinematograf,” 308; Levinson, “Kinematograf,” 163. 91. Evgenii Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” Volia Rossii, no.  7 ( June 1927): 85. 92. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 85. 93. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 86. 94. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 86. 95. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 86. 96. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 86. 97. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 86. 98. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 86. 99. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 86. 100. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 87. 101. Muratov, “Anti-­iskusstvo,” 269. 102. Znosko-­Borovskii, “Iskusstvo kinematografa,” 87. 103. A similar scope, equating sports stadiums and movie palaces, can be found in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1929 “Reconstruction of the Theater” (“Rekonstruktsiia teatra”) lectures, which ­were published the following year and therefore parallel Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense (1929–1930). Drawing on data from Hollywood and Weimar Berlin, Meyerhold argues that the theater should aim to compete for the attention of the masses, who currently attend sporting events and film showings. Intriguingly, Meyerhold contends that a newly “cinefied” theater w ­ ill win out over talking film (feminine: filʹma govoriashchaia), arguing that the recent arrival of sound is not a victory but a surrender. Vs. Meierkholʹd, Rekonstruktsiia teatra (Leningrad: Teakinopechatʹ, 1930), 9; Vsevolod Meyerhold, “The Reconstruction of the Theater,” in Meyerhold on Theater, trans. and ed. Edward Braun, 4th ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 319. 104. E. A. Znosko-­Borovskii, Kapablanka i Alekhin: Borʹba za mirovoe pervenstvo (Paris: L. Beresniak, 1927). 105. Nabokov, “E. A. Znosko-­Borovskii: Kapablanka i Alekhin,” Rulʹ, November 16, 1927; collected in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:644–645; “A. Znosko-­Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine,” in Think, Write, Speak, 59–60. 106. Nabokov’s letter, cited in chapter 1, is dated September 27, 1927; his poem appeared in November 1928. 107. Like Nabokov, Znosko-­Borovsky went on to have a successful ­career in En­ glish, writing a series of lively chess books aimed at the club player, all of which are

NOTES TO PA GES 93– 97

217

still in print, How Not to Play Chess, from 1931, being perhaps the most Nabokovian. Eugene Znosko-­Borowsky, How Not to Play Chess, ed. Philip Hereford (London: Frank Hollings, 1931). 108. See Luke Parker, “The Gambit: Chess and the Art of Competition in The Luzhin Defense,” Rus­sian Review 76 ( July 2017): 438–457. 109. ­There was also another “real-­life” Valentinov in the Rus­sian emigration: Nikolai Vladislavovich Valentinov (real name Volʹskii) was a well-­known Soviet former revolutionary and supporter of the New Economic Policy who arrived in Paris in 1928 and would defect ­there in 1930, writing in émigré outlets throughout the 1930s ­under the pen name E. Iurʹevskii. See, for example, the contents page of Sovremennye zapiski 49 (1932). 110. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:350–351; The Luzhin Defense, 81. 111. Yet unlike, for example, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s Ostap Bender, he is supremely unlikeable. See Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (Neobychainye pokhozhdeniia Khulio Khurenito i ego uchenikov, 1921); Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsatʹ stulʹev, 1928); and Gogol’s Government Inspector (Revizor, 1836). On the popularity of Soviet tricksters as a departure from ­earlier Rus­sian rogues, see Mark Lipovetsky, Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformation in Soviet and Post-­Soviet Culture (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 16–17. 112. “The yellow car I had seen ­under the plane trees had suffered a crash beyond Fialta, having run at full speed into the truck of a traveling circus entering the town, a crash from which Ferdinand and his friend, t­hose invulnerable rogues, ­those salamanders of fate, t­ hose basilisks of good fortune, had escaped with local and temporary injury to their scales, while Nina, in spite of her long-­standing, faithful imitation of them, had turned out ­after all to be mortal.” Nabokov, “Vesna v Fialʹte,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 4:582; “Spring in Fialta,” in Stories, 425. 113. Nabokov, “Vesna v Fialʹte,” 4:359; The Luzhin Defense, 93. 114. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:426; The Luzhin Defense, 195. 115. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:455; The Luzhin Defense, 240. 116. Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, 6. 117. Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina, 2:459; The Luzhin Defense, 247. On the influence of American slapstick on Weimar cinematic culture, see Thomas J. Saunders, “Comic Redemption: The Slapstick Synthesis,” in Hollywood in Berlin, 171–195. 118. Rus­sian literary tradition gives a pre­ce­dent for such eyewear’s diabolical associations. In Dostoevsky’s The ­Brothers Karamazov the Devil has a tortoiseshell (cherepakhovyi) lorgnette, as Yuri Leving points out in his commentary to Nabokov’s “A Nursery Tale” (“Skazka,” 1926), where the Devil ­causes a tram to nearly run over a man in tortoiseshell glasses. Iu. Leving, “Kommentarii,” in Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:719. As if following the same line, a Moscow cousin of that Berlin tram would, at the Dev­il’s behest, actually run over the editor Berlioz, with his black hornrimmed glasses, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita, 1929–1940). Mikhail Bulgakov, Master i Margarita, in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 5:48; Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin, 1997), 43. 119. Translation mine. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:159. Compare Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave, 45. 120. Nabokov, Korolʹ, dama, valet, 2:163; King, Queen, Knave, 50.

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121. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:311; Camera Obscura, 122; Laughter in the Dark, 128. 122. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (1999), trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 138–139. 123. Despite the ambivalent reaction of Adamovich (and the outright hostility of the personally motivated G. Ivanov), as Nikolai Melʹnikov points out, The Luzhin Defense can be considered “the novel that made Nabokov a famous literary name and advanced him to the first rank of Rus­sian émigré writers.” Nikolai Melʹnikov and Oleg Korostelev, eds., Klassik bez retushi: Literaturnyi mir o tvorchestve Vladimira Nabokova (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 52–53. 124. In a passage particularly relevant to the role of émigrés like Levinson, Muratov, Volkonsky, and Znosko-­Borovsky, Marijeta Bozovic points out the limitations of purely literary accounts like Casanova’s, noting that “film and the visual arts cross language borders in ways that interact with but complicate the cultural capital of power­ ful literary traditions.” Marijeta Bozovic, “Nabokov’s Visual Imagination,” in Bethea and Frank, Vladimir Nabokov in Context, 175n4. 125. André Levinson, “V. Sirine et son joueur d’échecs,” Les nouvelles littéraires, ­February 15, 1930, 6. 126. Levinson, “V. Sirine et son joueur d’échecs,” 6. 3. A Cinematic Genius

1. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, February 25, 1931, Berg Collection. Note that the “Institut de Beauté” was a real store with numerous locations, including one around the corner from his former residence on Passauer Straße (1926–1928), at Joachimsthaler Straße 40. See advertisement in Rulʹ, January 1, 1927. The ser­vices offered by another outlet in Berlin (“opened by a Rus­sian lady”) in an advertisement for the film trade journal Ekran (Screen) strikingly match ­those he has performed on his novel: “Manicures,” “Facial Massage: By Hand and with Electricity, Ultraviolet Lights,” and “Hair Care, Steam Baths: Removal of Freckles and Skin Defects.” See “Institut de beauté,” Ekran 4 (1924): 40. For the novel, see Nabokov, Kamera obskura, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:250–393. 2. For a comparison of the two novels, see Dolinin, Istinnaia zhiznʹ, 117–118. 3. See Parker, “Shop Win­dow Quality,” 412. 4. Parker, “Shop Win­dow Quality,” 391. 5. Ullstein to Vladimir Nabokov, July 24, 1935, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as Library of Congress). 6. Robert C. Williams reports that from a high of nearly half a million Rus­sians in Germany in 1922–1923 (the overwhelming majority in Berlin), by 1929 ­there ­were around 100,000 and by spring 1933 only 50,000 (with a minority of 10,000 in Berlin). Robert C. Williams, Culture in Exile: Rus­sian Émigrés in Germany, 1881–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 111, 284–285. 7. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Fra Diavolo,” Rulʹ, March 22, 1931, 10. 8. As Williams points out, its successor Nash vek (Our Age) only lasted two years and “confined itself to reporting the news of the day and the deteriorating life of the Rus­ sian colony during the depression.” Williams, Culture in Exile, 297. 9. Vladimir Nabokov to Gleb Struve, March 23, 1931, Berg Collection.

NOTES TO PA GES 101– 107

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10. Nabokov, Camera Obscura. 11. The word “Cheepy” is in En­glish in the first book publication; in the e­ arlier serial version in Sovremennye zapiski, it is “Cheapy.” All following mentions in both versions are in Cyrillic: “Чипи” (Chipi). 12. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:253–254; Camera Obscura, 5–7. 13. ­Here Nabokov is hewing closely to the historical context of Amerikanismus and what has been called the “invasion” of Weimar Germany by American mass and cinematic culture. See Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: Amer­i­ca’s Advance through Twentieth-­Century Eu­rope (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 14. As Alexander Dolinin has pointed out, “With the exception of Ganin in Mary (who has some dim military past), all the central characters of Nabokov’s Rus­sian novels ­either are revolution-­and war-­dodgers or, like the characteristically non-­Russian Dreyer (King, Queen, Knave), Krechmar/Albinus (Camera obscura/Laughter in the Dark), and Darwin (Glory), return from the trenches unscorched and unremembering.” Dolinin, “Clio Laughs Last,” 204–205. 15. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:316–317; Camera Obscura, 133–134. 16. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:253; Camera Obscura, 5. The prominent place of the word “now” (teperʹ), emphasizing a change from the past, in the novel’s opening establishes a common space of memory between the narrator and the reader. 17. Brian Boyd, “On the Original of Cheepy: Nabokov and Popu­lar Culture Fads,” The Nabokovian 63 (2009): 70–71. 18. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:253–254. 19. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:254–255; Camera Obscura, 7–8. 20. As commentators have pointed out (see A. Ianovskii, “Kommentarii,” in Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 3:745–746), the name Dorianna Karenina refers, in addition to Tolstoy’s heroine and (perhaps) Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, also to the Ukrainian-­born émigré actress Diana Karenne, wife of the critic and Chisla editor Nikolai Otsup (Gessen reviews: Die Frau von vierzig Jahren, April 21, 1925, and The Loves of Casanova, November 4, 1927). We might also add the émigré actresses Véra Korène and Xenia (Kseniia) Desni (Gessen reviews: Der Turm des Schweigens, February 3, 1925; Familie Schimek, March 24, 1926; Die Bräutigame der Babette Bomberling, April 8, 1927). In this, the name follows Pia Mora from The Man from the U.S.S.R. as a deliberately overdetermined amalgam. 21. In his inclusion of the lawsuit, Nabokov makes sure to include the ele­ment of litigious legalism, which restricted rights and concentrated profits, again in ways distasteful to the émigré critics. 22. For details of Disney’s German campaign, see J. P. Storm and M. Dreßler, Im Reiche der Micky Maus: Walt Disney in Deutschland 1927–1945 (Berlin: Henschel, 1991). 23. Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Der Jazzsänger,” Rulʹ, November 27, 1929, 6. See also, on the delays to its showing, the anonymous review “Zvukovoi filʹm v Berline,” Rulʹ, June 5, 1929. 24. Antony Beevor places her in Germany at the latest by August 1920 and argues that on her arrival she “hardly spoke German at all.” See Antony Beevor, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (New York: Viking, 2004), 81, 78. 25. Minutes of the Ufa Board of Directors, March 28, 1930, and April 16, 1930; cited in Chris Wahl, “Babel’s Business: On Ufa’s Multiple Language Film Versions, 1929–1933,”

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in The Many ­Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy, ed. Christian Rogowski (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 239. 26. For example, Oswald’s 1928 Oh What a Knight was remade with Mickey Mouse in 1933 as Ye Olden Days. It is impor­tant to an understanding of the media ecol­ogy to note that Oswald’s biggest hit, Trolley Trou­bles (1927), was itself a remake or pastiche of Harold Lloyd’s Luke’s Trolley Trou­bles (1917). 27. Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5. 28. For an example of such a franchised item, see the plush Felix, ca. 1920s, in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum collection: https://­collections​.­vam​.­ac​.­uk​/­item​ /­O1223170​/­felix​-­the​-­cat​-­soft​-­toy​/­. Brian Boyd’s suggestion for the “original of Cheepy,” Bonzo, was a British imitator of Felix the Cat, whose renown was far smaller, especially on-­screen. Boyd, “Original.” 29. Storm and Dreßler, Im Reiche der Micky Maus, 16. 30. Felix the Cat’s master needs help solving a crossword puzzle clue, seven letters vertical, “found chiefly in Rus­sia.” ­After a quick and dangerous trip to Rus­sia, involving bombs, revolvers, and accusations of espionage, Felix realizes the answer is “trou­ble.” 31. By 1931, then, Mickey Mouse was already what, as Alfred Appel points out, he had not been in 1928: “an international star or a wellspring of merchandise.” Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 265. For a wide variety of instantiations, see Storm and Dreßler, “Walt Disneys Zeichenfilme in Deutschland 1927–1932,” in Im Reiche der Micky Maus, 22–64. 32. Appel is an exception: “Cheepy’s reappearance throughout Camera Obscura underscores the powers wielded so cynically by the Rex-­Horns of the ‘media.’ ” Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 265. 33. The Rus­sian novel contains thirty-­three mentions of Cheepy: the first time in Latin letters as “Cheepy” (“Cheapy” in the journal version, likely a misprint), the rest as the Cyrillic “Чипи” (Chipi) or as “guinea-­pig” (morskaia svinka). 34. The first publication of the novel in the journal Sovremennye zapiski called her “Cheapy”—­but Horn’s use of the verb pishchatʹ (to squeak or cheep) confirms that Cheepy is the original form, which was followed in the book publication. 35. “The man who in­ven­ted the famous guinea-­pig [Chipi]”; “may I introduce you to the inventor of the guinea-­pig [sozdatel’ Chipi]”; “May I introduce you to the creator of the famous guinea-­pig [zver’ka]”; “He’s a celebrity; he in­ven­ted [pustil modu na] the guinea-­pigs.” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:309, 311, 311, 383; Camera Obscura, 118, 122, 123, 269. 36. “Dorianna Karenina (the same who, a year before, had been painted with a plush guinea-­pig [s Chipi] in her arms).” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:309; Camera Obscura, 117. 37. “He took her to gay restaurants and large cinemas, where she laughed till she cried over the adventures of the guinea-­pig [Chipi].” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:267; Camera Obscura, 31. 38. Mass culture has the effect on the individual that it does on the market as a whole—­initial enthusiasm, then drained by overexposure. 39. “On the screen a guinea-­pig [morskaia svinka Chipi] was skipping about, dressed up [in a tutu] as a Rus­sian ballet-­dancer [izobrazhaia russkii balet].” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:260; Camera Obscura, 17–18.

NOTES TO PA GES 109– 110

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40. Magda rushes into I­ rma’s bedroom, where Kretschmar finds her “already holding a fat plush guinea-­pig in her hands. He took it away from her and threw it into the corner. Magda laughed.” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:279; Camera Obscura, 56. 41. “Take that guinea-­pig off the sofa. Hide it or destroy it—it is the one object in your flat which seems to me insufferable.” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:319; Camera Obscura, 138. 42. “In the l­ittle win­dow at the back hung a fat guinea-­pig [tolstaia Chipi] gazing ­towards the North from which they ­were speeding away.” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:345; Camera Obscura, 193. 43. Moses relies mainly on Kracauer’s 1960 retrospective Theory of Film. I look at Kracauer’s original reviews of the 1920s ­later in the discussion. “Are we too far off in suggesting that this ste­reo­type movie plot . . . ​is but a variation on the story of Albinus Kretschmar? He too is dragged to his doom by the glittering attractions of the ‘street’ and its inhabitants.” Moses, The Nickel Was for the Movies, 72; see also 284n8. 44. Anton Kaes, “Urban Vision and Surveillance: Notes on a Moment in Karl Grune’s Die Strasse,” German Politics and Society 23, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 81. On this early alternative ending, dated March 21, 1931, see Olga Voronina, “ ‘No na chto etu zhivuiu vodu upotrebit’?’ (zacherknuto): Ot chernovoi redaktsii okonchaniia ‘Kamery obskura’ k ‘Lolite’.” Literaturnyi fakt 9 (2018): 8–56; Olga Voronina, “Dark, Velvety Dark: Nabokov’s Discarded Ending to Camera Obscura,” Times Literary Supplement, June 14, 2019, 3–4. 45. Kaes, “Urban Vision and Surveillance,” 80. 46. Kaes, “Urban Vision and Surveillance,” 81. 47. This image is featured on the cover of Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 48. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:259–260. The chromatic intensity of Camera Obscura captures the historical point that, while the palette of silent film may have been restricted, cinematic culture was colorful. See Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe’s intermedial account of cinematic culture’s central place in the “chromatic world of the twenties” in their Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 49. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:338; Camera Obscura, 177; Laughter in the Dark, 185. 50. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:262; Camera Obscura, 22; Laughter in the Dark, 27. Note that the American version adds “the film actor Veidt” to clarify what in the Rus­ sian and British versions was obvious to its readers. 51. John T. Soister, Conrad Veidt on Screen: A Comprehensive Illustrated Filmography ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 177–178. 52. Siegfried Kracauer, “Filmbild und Prophetenrede,” Frank­furter Zeitung, February 3, 1924; collected in Kleine Schriften zum film, pt. 1, 138–139; translation from Kaes, “Urban Vision and Surveillance,” 83. 53. Lang’s film was based on a real series of sensational child murders. As Khodasevich pointed out in his review, in contrast to the cinematized style and spirit of Horn and Magda, “the real-­life drama of Kretschmar’s wife and ­daughter plays out in a regular ­human style.” Vladislav Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” Vozrozhdenie, May 3, 1934; Sobranie sochinenii, 2:301. 54. Dieter E. Zimmer, editor of the German edition of Nabokov’s collected works, disagrees with Appel’s assessment that “local color is minimal” in Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 259–260): “On the contrary, Laughter in the Dark has the most ‘local

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color’ of Nabokov’s Berlin novels, so much that the h ­ ouse in which the Hochenwart apartment is found can be located in Kleiststraße, on the right-­hand side between Wittenbergplatz and Nollendorfplatz; and the quite feudal apartment building on Kaiserallee, ­today’s Bundesallee, where Albinus lives, is still t­ here even seventy years l­ ater.” Dieter E. Zimmer, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” in Frühe Romane 3, vol. 3 of Gesammelte Werke, by Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Dieter E. Zimmer (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1997), 560–561. I would add that in the Rus­sian version, Kamera obskura, such details abound even more. 55. Thus Garbo was “discovered” by Louis B. Mayer during a 1925 screening in Berlin of another classic street film, Die freudlose Gasse, which set in motion her transition to Hollywood; Veidt similarly, but less successfully, left Berlin (­after his film Liebe macht blind) in late 1927 for Hollywood. Whereas Veidt would return soon thereafter, Garbo made the transition to sound with her 1930 film Anna Christie, promoted with the tag­line “Garbo Talks!” 56. Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 265. 57. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:260, 355; Camera Obscura, 19, 212. 58. Leona Toker’s re­sis­tance to this idea is an exception. Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 57. 59. Levinson, “Chudesa ekrana,” 252. 60. Khodasevich’s “inflationary period” is a paraphrase of the German Inflationszeit. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:297. 61. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:270; Camera Obscura, 36–37. ­These references are removed in the American version: “It was, of course, a l­ittle humiliating to start her film ­career in that way.” Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 41–42. 62. Translation mine. Note that both the British and American versions differ from the Rus­sian. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:262; Camera Obscura, 22–23; Laughter in the Dark, 27. Note the overlap between Kracauer and Nabokov’s poem on the cinema: the sales clerk, his girlfriend, and the rich man who rescues homeless girls. In the Rus­sian, more attention is paid to the “usherette” (kapelʹdinersha) status. The British translation omits the following: “It was strange to think that ­these incomprehensible characters and their incomprehensible actions would become comprehensible and be perceived utterly differently if he ­were to watch the film from the beginning. ‘I would be interested to know,’ thought Kretschmar suddenly, ‘do ­these usherettes even look at the screen or are they sick of it all?’ ” Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:259. 63. See Gessen’s comments on this film cliché even by 1926: Gessen, “Madame Sans Gêne,” 5. 64. Zhak Nuar, “Kino-­Nina: Bezhenskaia povestʹ,” Rulʹ, February 23, 1930, 7. 65. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:269; Camera Obscura, 35–36; Laughter in the Dark, 40–41. See Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 238. 66. Initially Horn had paid for her apartment ­until June 1927, an old man had kept her ­until October, and the sale of a fur coat paid the rent through February 1928. 67. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:259; Camera Obscura, 15. 68. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:308; Camera Obscura, 116–117. 69. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:368; Camera Obscura, 239. 70. For a sample of such debates in translation, see “Sound Waves,” in The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, ed. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael J. Cowan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 549–577.

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71. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 122–123. As Moses has pointed out, this was a position defended by Arnheim—­although it was far more plausible in 1928, when Albinus is speaking, than 1938, when Laughter in the Dark appeared. Moses, The Nickel Was for the Movies, 67, 86. The idea of “killing the cinema,” however, can be traced also to Tynianov’s 1924 quip that sound film (kinetofon) is the “antidote that could kill the cinema.” Iurii Tynianov, “Kino—­slovo—­muzyka,” in Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 322. 72. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 8. 73. Gessen, “Tartüff,” 5. 74. Rudolf Arnheim, “Sound Film,” in Film Essays and Criticism, 32. His best-­known statement of this position is found in Film als Kunst (1932, 1957 in a revised En­glish version as Film as Art). 75. On the reactions of mainly British modernists, see Laura Marcus, “Coda: The Coming of Sound,” in The Tenth Muse, 408–437; Michael North, “Close Up: International Modernism’s Strug­gle with Sound,” in Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-­Century Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83–105. 76. Greene, The Graham Greene Film Reader, 447. Also typical of the time is his initial stance on color: “I had regretted the ­silent films when the talkies moved in and I had regretted black and white when Technicolor washed across the screen” (456). 77. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:339; Camera Obscura, 181–182. Only in Laughter in the Dark does Horn (as Rex) make a film himself, an animated Persian fairy tale (perhaps Rex’s attempt to profit from Lotte Reiniger’s remarkable 1926 silhouette film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed), pleasing Paris highbrows and ruining his backer. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 10. 78. Dolinin, Istinnaia zhiznʹ, 123. 79. Naiman, “When Nabokov Writes Badly,” 567. 80. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? And Essays on Art, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 181–192; cited in Naiman, “When Nabokov Writes Badly,” 567. 81. Note that for Khodasevich, the cinema is no longer the “kinematograf ” but the Gallic “sinematograf.” 82. Georgii Adamovich, “Sovremennye zapiski 50,” Poslednie novosti, October 27, 1932, 3. 83. “To say that Sirin’s novel resembles the cinema is saying too ­little about it and makes too ­little sense of what it prompts in the mind of an attentive person.” Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:297. 84. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:298–299. 85. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:299 (italics in original). 86. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:299. 87. Ivanov, “V. Sirin,” 235. 88. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:301. 89. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:301. 90. The unspoken assumption is that this culture has already “died” in the Soviet Union. 91. See for instance Vladimir Veidle, Umiranie iskusstva: Razmyshleniia o sud’be literaturnogo i khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva (Paris: R.S.Kh.D. and “Put’ zhizni,” 1937).

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92. It is this dimension of the novel that is customarily ignored by scholarly readings of the novel. For example, Nora Buhks’s closely argued and perceptive reading of the original Rus­sian novel as a “film novel” suffused with Soviet theories of “film poetics”—­K amera obskura as a literary “­silent film,” an example of the cinematization of fiction—­leaves out the crucial dimension of the novel as a product of exile. Nora Buks, “Volshebnyi fonarʹ, ili Kamera obskura,” in Eshafot v khrustalʹnom dvortse: O russkikh romanakh Vladimira Nabokova (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998), 87–114. An account similarly focused on the “poetics” of vision, especially the figure of the camera obscura itself, can be found in Grishakova, Models of Space, 203–208; see also Grishakova, “Vizualʹnaia poetika V. Nabokova,” 221–224. 93. Nabokov, Priglashenie na kazn’, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda 4:47–187; Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989). For this interpretation, see Luke Parker, “All the World’s a Scaffold: More’s Utopia, Nabokov’s Invitation,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture (forthcoming). 94. See Marijeta Bozovic, Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 95. “Alle Rechte, insbesondere die der Übersetzung und der Verfilmung, vorbehalten.” Vladimir Nabokov [V. Sirin], Kamera obskura (Berlin: Sovremennye zapiski / Parabola, 1934), n.p. 96. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:300–301. 97. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:264; Camera Obscura, 25; Laughter in the Dark, 30. 98. Vladimir Nabokov [V. Nabokov-­Sirine], Chambre obscure, trans. Doussia Ergaz (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1934), 26–27. I cite the first publication, as the editors of the Pléiade edition of Nabokov’s collected works have revised the translation of Chambre obscure. 99. Khodasevich, “Kamera obskura,” 2:300. 100. Nabokov, “Les écrivains et l’époque,” 137; “Writers and the Age,” in Think, Write, Speak, 105. 101. Nabokov’s account ­here has intriguing parallels with Kracauer’s 1927 essay “Photography” (“Die Photographie,” 1927), which makes many of the same points. 102. [Gleb Struve], “Un portrait. Vladimir Nabokoff Sirin, l’amoureux de la vie,” Le mois, no. 6 ( June–­July 1931): 140–142. 103. [Struve], “L’amoureux,” 141. 104. Struve, “Tvorchestvo Sirina,” 3. 105. [Gleb Struve], “Les ‘romans-­escamotages’ de V. Sirine,” Le mois 4 (April–­May, 1931): 145–152. On the French reception of Nabokov, see Agnès Edel-­Roy, “The Nabokovian Hereafter of French Exile,” Nabokov Online Journal, no. 8 (2014), https://­www​ .­nabokovonline​.­com​/­volume​-­8​.­html. Edel-­Roy mentions both “L’amoureux de la vie” and “Les ‘romans-­escamotages,” without attributing the second one to Struve or noting their connection to the cinema or Chambre obscure. 106. Nabokov’s puns ­were a per­sis­tent and openly stated source of irritation for Struve. Vladimir Nabokov to Gleb Struve, February 24, 1931, Library of Congress. 107. Struve, “L’amoureux,” 142. 108. “Paris is full of conversations about me already, and already t­hey’re coming back to me. They find me ‘an En­glishman,’ ‘quality goods.’ They say I always travel with a tub, in line with Martin [Edelweiss, the hero of Glory], perhaps.” Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, October 28/29, 1932, in Letters to Véra, 198.

NOTES TO PA GES 122– 125

225

109. Struve, “L’amoureux,” 141. 110. Struve, “L’amoureux,” 141. 111. Struve, “L’amoureux,” 142. On the extent and desirability of the reader’s closeness to the author in Nabokov’s fiction, see Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely. 112. Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli. The archivist gives the date as a query (“Oct. 1935?”), which is surely more accurate than the date (“November 16, 1938?”) given in Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940–1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 28. 113. Nabokov to Jannelli, [October 1935], 28. 114. As Don Barton Johnson points out, ­there is no other rec­ord for Winifred “Roy,” but Winifred “Ray” is credited with numerous other translations from German, including another one with John Long, the publisher of Camera Obscura. Johnson, “Sources of Nabokov’s Despair,” 15n14. 115. See Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 393: “He visited Grasset and Fayard, his two forthcoming French publishers. He met Doussia Ergaz, about to translate Camera Obscura, and found her very charming. With her excellent contacts within literary Paris, she soon became his main Eu­ro­pean literary agent.” Laure Troubetzkoy follows Boyd’s lead in claiming Ergaz as his main Eu­ro­pean agent, but I would argue that the contributions of Marc Slonim, Otto Klement, and Struve w ­ ere at least as impor­tant. The salient fact, in any case, is the multiplicity, rather than singular identity, of Nabokov’s agents and promoters. As he joked during ­these years to Nina Berberova, he had “more agents than readers” (see introduction). Laure Troubetzkoy, “Notice,” in Oeuvres romanesques complètes, by Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Maurice Couturier et al. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1:1582. 116. “This translation, on the ­whole very awkward [fort gauche], was obviously made on the basis of the periodical text, supplemented in the missing episodes by a manuscript supplied by the author, for the passages display several minor departures with regard to the definitive edition of December 1933.” Troubetzkoy, “Notice,” 1582. 117. “I gave them ‘La Course du fou,’ in French, as I know better than anyone that no publisher reads Rus­sian. When they have accepted a Rus­sian script from me, it was to please me, as it costs them an average of $15.00 to have it read outside by one of their readers. They ­don’t read French ­either, but, French being a universal language, it is easier.” Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, August 5, 1936, Berg Collection. 118. Vladimir Nabokov to Éditions Bernard Grasset, February  13, 1935, Berg Collection. 119. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, August 24, 1934, Berg Collection. 120. Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, January 30, 1935; Vladimir Nabokov to A. M. Heath & Co., May 22, 1935, Berg Collection. 121. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, November  10, 1932, in Letters to Véra, 216. 122. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, October 25, 1932, in Letters to Véra, 196. 123. She was also familiar with the Franco-­Russian film world through her brother-­ in-­law, Paul Epstein. 124. Éditions Bernard Grasset to Vladimir Nabokov, June 14, 1934, Berg Collection. 125. Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 64–65. 126. Éditions Bernard Grasset to Nabokov, June 14, 1934.

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127. Vladimir Nabokov to Éditions Bernard Grasset, [late March / early April] 1934, Berg Collection. 128. Éditions Bernard Grasset to Vladimir Nabokov, June 22, 1934; Vladimir Nabokov to Éditions Bernard Grasset, July 12, 1934, Berg Collection. 129. Mark Lʹvovich Slonim to Vladimir Nabokov, March  7, 1935, Library of Congress. 130. Verso of Slonim to Nabokov, March 7, 1935. 131. Slonim to Nabokov, March 7, 1935. 132. As Slonim concluded his letter, “Do not be surprised that every­thing goes so slowly and with such difficulty—­such are the times—­and books require promoting with such ­g reat difficulty and stubbornness.” Slonim to Nabokov, March 7, 1935. 133. Vladimir Nabokov to Gleb Struve, April 29, 1933, Library of Congress. 134. Vladimir Nabokov to Gleb Struve, July 30, 1934, Library of Congress. 135. Vladimir Nabokov to Hutchinson, November 28, 1936, in Selected Letters, 17. 136. Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, September 8, 1935, Berg Collection. 137. Vladimir Nabokov to Otto Klement, January 25, 1935, Berg Collection. 138. As Nabokov put it at the letter’s conclusion, “The fact that our previous written relationships so often lead to misunderstandings is perhaps due to the fact that, unfortunately, we have never met in person and have not had the opportunity to communicate personally, so that you misunderstand my main demands.” Nabokov to Klement, January 25, 1935. 139. Vladimir Nabokov to Otto Klement, August 11, 1935, Library of Congress; Vladimir Nabokov to Hutchinson, May 22, 1935, in Selected Letters, 13. 140. Vladimir Nabokov to Hutchinson, April 8, 1935, Berg Collection. 141. Vladimir Nabokov to Hutchinson, April 28, 1935, Berg Collection. 142. Nabokov to Hutchinson, May 22, 1935, 13. 143. Vladimir Nabokov to Hutchinson, May 31, 1935, Berg Collection. 144. Vladimir Nabokov to Hutchinson, June 14, 1935, Berg Collection. 145. Vladimir Nabokov to Gleb Struve, August 13, 1935, Library of Congress. 146. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 27, 1937: “By the way Gubsky told me that he had written twice to me (detailed, impor­tant letters) about the translation of ‘Camera’ (during the first raving of the translatress), but he sent them to me . . . ​ through Otto K. No won­der I never received them!” Nabokov, Letters to Véra, 309. 147. Vladimir Nabokov to Hutchinson, July 21, 1935, Berg Collection. 148. Nabokov to Klement, January 25, 1935. 149. Cinematograph Weekly, July 18, 1935; cited in Charles Drazin, “Film Finances: The First Years,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Tele­vi­sion 34, no. 1 (2014): 5. 150. Drazin, “Film Finances,” 5. 151. Vladimir Nabokov to A. M. Heath & Co., May 11, 1935, Berg Collection. 152. A. M. Heath & Co. to Nabokov, May 20, 1935, Berg Collection. See ­later comments by Altagracia de Jannelli and Nabokov himself to his ­mother (chapter 4). 153. A. M. Heath & Co. to Nabokov, May 20, 1935. 154. Greene, review of The Marriage of Corbal, in The Graham Greene Film Reader, 109. 155. Greene, review of The Marriage of Corbal, 108. 156. Greene, review of The Marriage of Corbal, 107. 157. Greene, review of The Marriage of Corbal, 107.

NOTES TO PA GES 132– 135

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158. Kevin Gough-­Yates, “Exiles and British Cinema,” in The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy, 3rd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 125. 159. See Tobias Hochscherf, “Transnational Developments and Mi­g rants: The Internationalisation of British Studios, 1927–1933,” in The Continental Connection: German-­ Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1927–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 17–55. 160. Gough-­Yates, “Exiles,” 126. 161. Gough-­Yates, “Exiles,” 126. 162. According to the film historian Naomi Collinson, “Foreign producers, directors and actors ­were all the vogue. It was considered that continental Eu­rope had far more to offer . . . ​and strange-­sounding names appearing on the credits lent a certain cosmopolitan cachet and air of mystique to a film.” Naomi Collinson, “The Legacy of Max Schach,” Film History 15, no. 3 (2003): 378. 163. According to Collinson, the expensive production was a commercial, if not an artistic, success: “It was sheer unadulterated hokum but had all the advantages of exotic scenery, lavish and costly sets, big crowd scenes, dancing girls and romance.” Collinson, “Legacy,” 378–379. 164. Or, rather, Chambre obscure—­note that Nabokov was forced to send the French novel, as no published German translation existed, and the British version was still being revised. 165. A. M. Heath & Co. to Vladimir Nabokov, July 6, 1935, Berg Collection. 166. The next German translation did not appear ­until Lolita in 1959. 167. Vladimir Nabokov to A. M. Heath & Co., August 11, 1935, Berg Collection. 168. Nabokov to A. M. Heath & Co., August 11, 1935. 169. See Gessen’s review: Georgii Gessen [G.G.], “Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff,” Rulʹ, February 10, 1931. 170. A. M. Heath & Co. to Vladimir Nabokov, October 1, 1936, Berg Collection. 171. “I regret that you should have gathered the impression that someone wished to ‘go above your heads in the negotiations’ and do not think this ever entered anybody’s mind.” Vladimir Nabokov to A. M. Heath & Co., November 1, 1936, Berg Collection. 172. “It is on the basis of this new treatment that negotiations have been renewed, but Mr. Kortner feels that, owing to the impor­tant part he has played and the modifications of the story which he has made, he should share in the author’s remuneration, and suggest that if the price is as previously discussed, he should receive £200 of this amount. If the price fi­nally agreed should be lower than £700, he should be paid one-­third thereof.” A. M. Heath & Co. to Nabokov, October 1, 1936. 173. Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 435. 174. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 4, 1937, in Letters to Véra, 287. 175. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 15, 1937, in Letters to Véra, 297. 176. Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 27, 1937, 309–310. 177. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, March 4, 1937, in Letters to Véra, 315. The connection between Nabokov’s dramatic work and his work with the cinema is worth exploring at greater length, given the prominence in both cases of the commercial ­factor in exile. See Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination, 38–42. 178. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, March 7, 1937, in Letters to Véra, 317. 179. Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, March 7, 1937, 317.

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180. The eventual fate of Nabokov’s screenplay of Lolita would seem to have proved him right about how l­ittle authorial input was needed in filming his fiction. 181. He refers privately to the “raving of the translatress [besnovaniia perevodchitsy].” Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 27, 1937, in Letters to Véra, 309. 182. Nabokov to A. M. Heath & Co., November 1, 1936. 183. A. M. Heath & Co. to Vladimir Nabokov, November 3, 1936, Berg Collection. 184. Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 137. See also Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1973; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 162. 185. Yuri Tsivian, private correspondence, March 16, 2021. 186. Vladimir Nabokov to F. Kortner, November 5, 1937, photocopy, Library of Congress, in Berg Collection. 187. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 2, 1936, in Letters to Véra, 243. 188. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 8, 1936, in Letters to Véra, 251–252. 189. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, February 13, 1936, in Letters to Véra, 257. 190. Andrei Babikov has pointed out that t­hese plays, written for the Rus­sian Dramatic Theater in Paris, testify to the continued vitality of the Rus­sian stage in emigration, especially given the parlous state of Soviet theater (following the death of Stanislavsky and the suppression of Meyerhold) on display during the 1937 Paris tour of the Gorky Moscow Art Academic Theater (Moskovskii khudozhestvennyi akademicheskii teatr SSSR imeni M. Gorʹkogo). Babikov, “Izobretenie teatra,” in Nabokov, Tragediia gospodina Morna, 39–40. For more on the émigré responses to the 1937 Soviet tour of Paris, see Luke Parker, “Gorʹkii in Paris: Vladislav Khodasevich on Silver Age and Soviet Theater,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 62, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 685–705. 191. Lewis Milestone left Hamburg for the United States in 1913 (just like Camera Obscura’s Robert Horn), changing his name soon thereafter from Lieb Milshtein. See Harlow Robinson, Lewis Milestone: Life and Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019), 8–13. 192. Sergei Bertenson, diary, January 3, 1932, in Pisʹma v Khollivud: Po materialam arkhiva S. L. Bertensona, ed. K. Arenskii (Monterey, CA: K. Arensburger, 1968), 161. 193. Cf. Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 376. 194. Bertenson, diary, January 7, 1932, in Pisʹma v Khollivud, 161. 195. In December 1932 he suggested his new novel Otchaianie (Despair), but again no deal was struck. Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 376. 196. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, October 31, 1932, in Letters to Véra, 200. 197. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, November 8, 1932, in Letters to Véra, 211. 198. Alexander Nazaroff, “New Rus­sian Books in Varied Fields,” New York Times, December 17, 1933, 8, 20. 4. Amer­i­ca Obscura

1. Albert Parry, “Belles Lettres among the Rus­sian Émigrés,” American Mercury, July 1933, 319. 2. The novel was published in En­glish two years ­later in Nabokov’s own translation: Nabokov [Vladimir Nabokoff-­Sirin], Despair (London: John Long, 1937). Alexander Nazaroff, “Recent Books by Rus­sian Writers,” New York Times, August 18, 1935, 8.

NOTES TO PA GES 140– 143

229

3. Vladimir Nabokov to Peter Pertzoff, August 21, 1933; cited in Maxim Shrayer, “Nabokov: Letters to the American Translator,” Ag­ni 50 (1999): 133. 4. Postcard from Vladimir Nabokov to Elena Nabokova, September 8, 1935, Berg Collection. Nabokov sent a clipping of Nazaroff ’s review to the British publisher of Camera Obscura, John Long, to aid in the preparation of publicity materials for his planned translation of Despair in 1935: “You ­will have the translation of Despair about Christmas. I enclose part of an article by Nazarov published some months ago in the Book Review of the New York Times. I hope it ­will help you to make the blurb you require for your list; surely, you ­will do it far better than I, as I am not much good at composing that sort of ­thing.” Vladimir Nabokov to John Long, December 9, 1935, Berg Collection. 5. Alexander Nazaroff, “A New Rus­sian Writer of ­Great Talent,” New York Times, May 20, 1934, 8. Nazaroff ’s review covers the Rus­sian versions of The Luzhin Defense, Glory, Camera Obscura, and Despair. 6. Parry, “Belles Lettres,” 317. Note that the “fossil” Ivan Bunin went on to win the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture ­later that year, on November 9, 1933. Thomas Gaiton Marullo, ed., Ivan Bunin: From the Other Shore, 1920–1933: A Portrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 269. 7. Parry, “Belles Lettres,” 319. 8. Parry, “Belles Lettres,” 317. 9. Parry, “Belles Lettres,” 317. 10. Nazaroff himself was a published author in En­glish by this point, having translated Nikolai Evreinov’s The Theater in Life in 1927 and then authored a study of Tolstoy (Tolstoy, the Inconstant Genius) in 1929. N. N. Evreinov, The Theatre in Life, trans. Alexander I. Nazaroff (New York: Brentano’s, 1927); Alexander Nazaroff, Tolstoy, the Inconstant Genius: A Biography (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929). For an overview of Parry’s ­career, see his obituary: Lee A. Daniels, “Albert Parry, Rus­sia Expert, 92; Predicted Sputnik 1 Launching,” New York Times, May 8, 1992. We could also add that Parry, as “Victor LeClerc,” went on to coauthor The Scandalous Mrs. Blackford (1951), “the fabulous story of an American ­woman’s empire-­shaking love affair with ­Grand Duke Nicholas”—­a story “based upon facts uncovered by the Rus­sian historian Victor Leclerc.” Harnett T. Kane and Victor Leclerc, The Scandalous Mrs. Blackford (New York: Julian Messner, 1951). 11. Parry, “Belles Lettres,” 319. 12. Nabokov [Vladimir Nabokoff-­Sirine], “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable,” Nouvelle revue française, March 1937, 362–378; “Pushkin, or the True and the Seemingly True,” in Think, Write, Speak, 118–132. 13. Parry was equally mistaken in his assessment of the role of psychoanalysis. Nabokov may have appreciated Parry’s statement (made apparently without irony) that Nabokov “is an adroit, unostentatious follower of Dr. Freud,” although clearly the amusement of such interpretations began to wear off during his American years. Parry, “Belles Lettres,” 318. 14. Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, [October 1935], in Selected Letters, 28. 15. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, May 9, 1938, Berg Collection. 16. Robert Roper, Nabokov in Amer­i­ca: On the Road to Lolita (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 20. Perhaps most useful to Nabokov ­after his arrival in the United States was the assistance of Edmund Wilson (as Duncan White has shown), in addition to the equally

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vital role, at least in the short term, of Mikhail Karpo­vich (as Andrei Babikov has established). White, Nabokov and His Books, 33–34; Babikov, Prochtenie Nabokova, 314. 17. Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, December 10, 1934, Berg Collection. Nabokov refers to her (lost) letter of June 23, 1934. See also Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, March 23, 1935, in Selected Letters, 12. She ­later explains this situation: “John Day had read the Rus­sian to please me, as I did not have the French copy at the time.” Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, August 5, 1936, Berg Collection. 18. This concern surfaced again the following year, and again Nabokov parried: “You tell of someone interfering with your activities. I want to make it perfectly clear to you that I have no other agent in Amer­i­ca.” Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, March 2, 1936, Berg Collection. 19. Nabokov to Jannelli, March 23, 1935, 12. 20. Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, August 11, 1935, in Selected Letters, 14. 21. Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, September  20, 1935, Berg Collection. 22. Vladimir Nabokov to Otto Klement, March 11, 1935, Berg Collection. 23. Nabokov to Jannelli, March 2, 1936. By March 1936, Jannelli had still not received a copy of Despair or Camera Obscura. Nabokov asked her to reply on his behalf to an inquiry from Robert McBride and requested that she send his publishing h ­ ouse (Robert M. McBride & Com­pany) a copy of the Rus­sian Otchaianie (the En­glish translation would follow). The question of copyright was long and painful for Nabokov, Jannelli, and Bobbs-­Merrill. Nabokov’s allegedly insufficient revision of Camera Obscura into Laughter in the Dark (what Jannelli called “not making the translation” and “the translation that was not a translation”) cost Nabokov a fine of $75 of his $600 advance and perhaps the goodwill of more than one party. See Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, January 31, 1938, Berg Collection, quoting her (lost) letter to him of January 19, 1938; see also Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, April 16, 1938, Library of Congress. 24. As Jannelli ­later told Nabokov, “The change which made their interest in your books pos­si­ble was that their policy changed with this new, splendid young editor—­ the type of American you would love to know. When he speaks of you, his broad smile shows that he already likes you personally.” Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, June 26, 1937, Berg Collection. 25. Jack O’Bar, The Origins and History of the Bobbs-­Merrill Com­pany, Occasional Paper 172 (Champaign: University of Illinois, Gradu­ate School of Library and Information Science, 1985), 22. 26. O’Bar, Bobbs-­Merrill, 22. 27. O’Bar, Bobbs-­Merrill, 26–27. 28. O’Bar, Bobbs-­Merrill, 27. 29. Graham Greene, review of Oil for the Lamps of China, dir. Mervyn Le Roy, in The Graham Greene Film Reader, 45. 30. George Burford Lorimer to [Jerry?] Laing, memorandum, May 18, 1937, box 125, Bobbs-­Merrill Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University (hereafter cited as Bobbs-­Merrill MSS). 31. Lorimer to Laing, memorandum, May 18, 1937. 32. Thomas S. Hansen, Classic Book Jackets: The Design Legacy of George Salter (New York: Prince­ton Architectural Press, 2005).

NOTES TO PA GES 147– 150

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33. The report exists in both handwritten and typewritten versions. Corrections to the handwritten version are noted in my quotations. Jerry [Laing?] to George Burford Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 34. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 35. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 36. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 37. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 38. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 39. For the most sophisticated readings of this link in the novel, see Seifrid, “Nabokov’s Poetics of Vision”; Naiman, “When Nabokov Writes Badly.” 40. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 41. Richard E. Ralston, “Publishing The Fountainhead,” in Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” ed. Robert Mayhew (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 68. 42. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. As Andrew Field has noted, “It was only in ­England itself that Nabokov was a Rus­sian.” Field, VN, 200. 43. Nabokov, Dar, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 4:514; The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 339. See Naiman, “When Nabokov Writes Badly,” 553. 44. It was an achievement that perhaps only came with Lolita: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Putnam Publishing, 1958; repr., New York: Vintage, 1997), 9. 45. [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 46. Jane Grayson, Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Rus­sian and En­glish Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 39–43. See also Julian W. Connolly, “Laughter in the Dark,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 215; Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 445. Of the many other, minor changes made by Nabokov, the most intriguing might be the addition of “Nonnenmacher’s History of Art” (Laughter in the Dark, 67). Leona Toker has pointed out that this appears to be an autoreference (much like the inclusion of the Dreyers in Camera Obscura) to the maker of “nonnons” (netki) in Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kaznʹ, 1936). See Toker, Nabokov, 119–120. Yet it could be a tribute to Hermann Nonnenmacher, a prominent German sculptor and con­temporary of Nabokov, married to a Jewish wife, with whom he fled Nazi Germany for Britain. Then, again, reading the surname perversely (Nonnenmacher is “the occupational name for a gelder of hogs”—­literally, if distantly, “nun-­maker”) suggests that the name is as overdetermined as Pia Mora or Dorianna Karenina. See Patrick Hanks, ed., Dictionary of American ­Family Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 47. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, June 28, 1937, Berg Collection. 48. Jannelli to Nabokov, June 28, 1937. 49. Jannelli to Nabokov, June 26, 1937. 50. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, August  17, 1936, Library of Congress. 51. See for example, Jannelli to Nabokov, June 28, 1937. 52. ­These plays are I Promise Not to Love You and By Any Other Name, in “Dramatic Compositions, Motion Pictures, Part. 1, Group 3,” Cata­logue of Copyright Entries 5, no. 8 (1932): 240 and 5, no. 9 (1932): 259. The copyright office also lists numerous plays (e.g., Washington Square, 1920; The Sea, 1922; Something Else Besides, 1934) by Jannelli.

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53. Undated reply in Nabokov’s handwriting in Rus­sian on verso of Jannelli to Nabokov, June 28, 1937. 54. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, August 24, 1937, Berg Collection. 55. Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 445. 56. Nazaroff, “New Rus­sian Books,” 20. 57. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 7. 58. Nazaroff, “A New Rus­sian Writer,” 17. 59. Following his French reviews of Nabokov in 1931, Struve wrote for a British audience, again promoting Nabokov as a translatable man. Gleb Struve, “Current Rus­ sian Lit­er­a­ture: II. Sirin,” Slavonic and East Eu­ro­pean Review 12, no. 35 ( January 1934): 438. 60. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 7. 61. Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 445. 62. Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 265. 63. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, 3:282; Camera Obscura, 62–63; Laughter in the Dark, 69. 64. The handwritten correction is to the original British Camera Obscura, from which he worked. Camera Obscura, Nabokov’s copy, Berg Collection. See a similar cameo written into the screenplay of Lolita: “The Butterfly Hunter. His name is Vladimir Nabokov.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: Vintage, 1961), 128. 65. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 230. 66. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, November 1, 1937, Library of Congress. 67. Miriam Lyman, review of Laughter in the Dark, January  18, 1938, Bobbs-­ Merrill MSS. 68. Jannelli to Nabokov, April 16, 1938, Library of Congress. 69. Lyman, review, January 18, 1938. 70. Lyman, review, January 18, 1938. 71. Lyman, review, January 18, 1938. 72. Lyman, review, January 18, 1938. 73. Jannelli to Nabokov, May 9, 1938. 74. ­These two ­were combined and reprinted as Vladimir Nabokov, “Bobbs-­Merrill Author Questionnaire,” in Think, Write, Speak, 133–135. 75. The document addresses itself to the writer and explains its own importance: “Book sales, as you know, depend in large mea­sure upon publicity. We are certain the writing of your book, the gathering of material, the places and events mentioned in it must conceal a g­ reat deal which can be turned into news stories—­from which we can gain valuable publicity. We have tried to make the questions below serve only to stimulate your attention to the type of material best suited to gain that end. (Please answer ­these questions in as g­ reat detail as time and material permit.)” Bobbs-­Merrill, “Publicity Questionnaire,” n.d., Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 76. In response to the question, “­Will you list the newspaper men and w ­ omen you know and the publications with which they are connected? ­Will you do the same for critics?,” Nabokov wrote: “I know no one in Amer­i­ca. Among critics Mr. A. Nazaroff (New York Times) and Mr. A. Parry (American Mercury) wrote very nicely of my work. Generally speaking, I ­don’t keep in touch with critics, my practice being never to ask anyone to review any book of mine, though I am always grateful for appreciation.” Vladimir Nabokov, “Publicity Questionnaire,” November 19, 1937, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS.

NOTES TO PA GES 156– 159

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77. To the following questions about material and audiences—­which rely on information about the American public—he gave no answer whatsoever: “What material in the book (­either of an historical, scientific or biographical nature) do you feel is least known to the general public?” and “Please give us the names of cities, towns or communities that you feel w ­ ill have special interest in the book. This information w ­ ill be passed on to our salesmen who cover this territory and ­will be particularly helpful.” And to the following questions he simply answered “No”: “Do you think of any organ­ izations, publications, socie­ties, ­etc. which might be expected to have a par­tic­u­lar interest in this book—­either a favorable or unfavorable interest?” and “Do you think of persons in the public eye or of recognized reputation in some field of endeavor who (1) might be especially interested in the characters, places or events in the book [or] (2) who might be expected to take issue with the book’s treatment of characters, places or events? Explain.” Nabokov, “Publicity Questionnaire.” 78. Nabokov, “Publicity Questionnaire.” Nabokov’s answer is included in Think, Write, Speak (135), although the question is misleadingly approximated as “What was its source?” 79. Nabokov, “General Questionnaire,” November 19, 1937, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 80. Nabokov, “General Questionnaire.” 81. Nabokov, “General Questionnaire.” 82. Bobbs-­Merrill, promotional material, in [Vladimir Nabokoff], Laughter in the Dark (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1938) Reproduced as written. 83. What is not cited h ­ ere is Nazaroff ’s in­ter­est­ing parsing of how Rus­sian or un-­ Russian Nabokov might be said to be. For Nazaroff, Nabokov is utterly sui generis, for he “stands outside of the Rus­sian literary tradition—­there is no Rus­sian writer, classical or modern, whose kinsman or disciple he might be said to be,” while, at the same time, he can be said to make use of typical Rus­sian features: “In this he is thoroughly Russian—he is an excellent psychologist. . . . ​And he plunges into their souls with a typically Rus­sian ‘instinctiveness’ and thoroughness.” Nazaroff, “A New Rus­sian Writer,” 8, 17. 84. Bobbs-­Merrill, promotional material, Laughter in the Dark. 85. Nazaroff, “A New Rus­sian Writer,” 8. 86. See Bulgakowa, “The ‘Rus­sian Vogue’ ”; “Russische Film-­Emigration”; “Typologie des russischen Emigrantenfilms.” 87. The Film Daily, surveying film critics, and the Motion Picture Herald, tracking box office receipts, both include Rasputin and the Empress (released in December 1932) in their top ten for 1933. Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood, 370, 372. 88. Samuel Nock, “Tragicomedy in Berlin,” review of Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokoff, Saturday Review, June 18, 1938, 16. 89. Clifton Fadiman, review of Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokoff, New Yorker, May 7, 1938, 92–93. 90. Fadiman, review of Laughter in the Dark, 93. One wonders what Fadiman would have made of Nabokov’s visceral alternative ending to the Russian Camera Obscura, even less filmable under the Code, where the blind Kretschmar shoots Magda then palpates her lifeless body: “Beneath his palms, all was wet and warm; her smooth stomach, breasts and especially her face were like some kind of porridge [kasha].” Voronina, “Ot chernovoi redaktsii,” 51; “Dark, Velvety Dark,” 4. 91. Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Fredson T. Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 6.

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TO PAGES 159– 163

92. Harold Strauss, “The Dangerous Age,” review of Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokoff, New York Times, May 8, 1938, 7. 93. Strauss, “The Dangerous Age,” 7. 94. Peter B. Flint, “Harold Strauss, Editor, Dead; Brought in Japa­nese Lit­er­at­ ure,” New York Times, November 30, 1975, 73. On Knopf ’s promotion of Mann, see Boes, Thomas Mann’s War, esp. 60–76. 95. As we saw in chapter 3, immediately ­after signing his contract with Bobbs-­ Merrill, Nabokov wrote to the German actor Fritz Kortner: “This does not signify by any means that I have given up the hope of seeing you some day performing the part of Kretchmar. Far from that, should I ever succeed in selling ‘Camera Obscura’ to a film com­pany, I ­shall let them know that I should love to have you play the chief character.” Vladimir Nabokov to F. Kortner, November 5, 1937, photocopy, Library of Congress, in Berg Collection, 96. Jannelli gives May 6 as the slated date of publication. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, April 23, 1938, Library of Congress. Boyd gives April 22. Boyd, Rus­ sian Years, 486. 97. Altagracia de Jannelli to Angus Cameron, March 24, 1938, Library of Congress. 98. Jannelli to Nabokov, May 9, 1938. 99. Henry La Cossitt (Twentieth ­Century Fox Film Corporation, New York Story Department) to Altagracia de Jannelli, May 12, 1938, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 100. Eve Ettinger (Columbia Pictures Corporation, Office of the Eastern Story Editor, New York) to Altagracia de Jannelli, June 8, 1938, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 101. Miriam Howell (Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., Eastern story editor, New York) to Altagracia de Jannelli, June 7, 1938, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 102. F. Dearstyne (Republic Pictures Corporation, Story Department, New York) to Altagracia de Jannelli, July 7, 1938, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 103. D. L. Chambers to Altagracia de Jannelli, June 21, 1938, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 104. “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930.” For the full document, see Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood, 347–360; 351 (quotation). Doherty makes a convincing case for his version, based on the book by Breen’s former secretary Olga J. Martin, Hollywood Movie Commandments (1937), as the most likely to resemble the working version used by the Production Code Administration. 105. See Tatyana Gershkovich’s comparison of Kamera obskura to Tolstoy’s The Dev­il (Dʹiavol, 1889/1911) as two attempts to “compel a more self-­conscious readerly response.” Tatyana Gershkovich, “Self-­Translation and the Transformation of Nabokov’s Aesthetics from Kamera obskura to Laughter in the Dark,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 63, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 206–224. 106. “Production Code,” in Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood, 353–354. 107. La Cossitt to Jannelli, May 12, 1938; Dearstyne to Jannelli, July 7, 1938. 108. Ettinger to Jannelli, June 8, 1938; La Cossitt to Jannelli, May 12, 1938; Howell to Jannelli, June 7, 1938; Dearstyne to Jannelli, July 7, 1938. 109. Lorimer to Laing, memorandum, May 18, 1937; [Laing?] to Lorimer, memorandum, May 26, 1937. 110. “Production Code,” in Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood, 349. 111. “Understanding that it is entirely agreeable with Mr. Vladimir Nabokoff-­Sirin, we hereby license you to make a dramatization of his novel, Laughter in the Dark (Camera Obscura). This is with the understanding also that your compensation therefore

NOTES TO PA GES 163– 167

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­ ill be paid you by him out of his one-­half share of any moneys which may accrue to w us as o ­ wners of the literary property.” David Laurance Chambers to Altagracia de Jannelli, June 16, 1938, Library of Congress. 112. This agreement is based on the terms discussed by Jannelli and Bobbs-­Merrill in May 1938: “Mr. Cameron talked over with me the lines of the contract the firm wants to draw with me for the making of the play. I ­shall send you a copy of it. Now that they have the rights, they have a right to 50% of the play proceeds. The other 50% ­will be divided between you and me. I was discussing with Mr. Cameron the manner in which I expect to do the play, and he was quite impressed. Of course, t­ hese ­people are aware that I am more than anyone conversant with the theater.” Jannelli to Nabokov, May 9, 1938. 113. Altagracia de Jannelli to David Laurance Chambers, June 14, 1938, Bobbs-­ Merrill MSS. 114. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, March 14, 1939, Berg Collection. 115. Lynda J. King, in her book Best-­Sellers by Design (which offers a fascinating insight into the Eu­ro­pean culture industry), charts the pro­gress of Baum’s work from Ullstein novel to stage success in Berlin (Theater am Nollendorfplatz) and subsequently elsewhere in Eu­rope, which prompts an En­glish translation in Britain (Doubleday having refused all three offered by Ullstein). The British version was used as the basis for an American Broadway production, which at last ­causes Doubleday to reconsider—­they negotiate with Geoffrey Bles Publishing. As King puts it, Baum benefits from the “media package.” In this case, it was “the dramatization of the novel and its translation into En­glish” that supplied the “turning point in Baum’s ­career.” King, Best-­Sellers by Design, 113. 116. “Vicki Baum Visits Studio,” in Souvenir Programs of Twelve Classic Movies, 1927– 1941, ed. Miles Kreuger (New York: Dover, 1977), 99. 117. Altagracia de Jannelli to David Laurance Chambers, July 11, 1938, Bobbs-­ Merrill MSS. 118. Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2009), 144. See also Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82. 119. Ayn Rand, “Ayn Rand’s Movie Diary,” in Rus­sian Writings on Hollywood, ed. Michael  S. Berliner ([Marina del Rey, CA]: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999), 109–214. Nabokov did the same for the actors’ per­for­mances in his play The Event. See “Annotated Program for the 1938 Production of The Event,” in Nabokov, The Man from the U.S.S.R., 124. 120. Pola Negri (Moscow: Kino-­izdatelʹstvo RSFSR, 1925); A. Rozenbaum, Gollivud: Amerikanskii kino-­gorod (Moscow: Kinopechatʹ, 1926); both texts are reproduced and translated in Rand, Rus­sian Writings on Hollywood. 121. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 68. 122. Heller, Ayn Rand, 106; Burns, Goddess of the Market, 52. 123. Film rights to The Night of January 16th ­were purchased twice. 124. Rand’s play was The Unconquered. See Burns, Goddess of the Market, 49. 125. Jannelli to Chambers, July 11, 1938. 126. Jannelli to Nabokov, March 14, 1939. 127. Jannelli to Nabokov, May 9, 1938. 128. Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, May 18, 1938, Berg Collection; reprinted in Brian Boyd, “ ‘Welcome to the Block’: Priglashenie na kaznʹ / Invitation to a

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TO PAGES 167– 170

Beheading, a Documentary Rec­ord,” in Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading”: A Critical Companion, ed. Julian W. Connolly (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 149. 129. Boyd, Rus­sian Years, 428–429. 130. C. Huntington to Vladimir Nabokov, March 17, 1937, Berg Collection. 131. Jannelli to Nabokov, May 9, 1938. 132. Huntington to Nabokov, March 17, 1937. 133. Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, November 1, 1937, Library of Congress. 134. Saturday Eve­ning Post to Altagracia de Jannelli, September 8, 1938, Library of Congress. Yuri Leving draws attention to Nabokov’s hundred-­plus rejection slips from American publishers in the 1930s held at the Library of Congress. Leving, “Nabokov and the Publishing Business,” 107. 135. “I wanted to find out if they would help me in writing letters showing that they needed your presence ­here, for the Immigration Department. Mr. Cameron at once told me he would write anything I liked, besides, that they did want you ­here.” Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, April 26, 1938, Berg Collection. She then followed up two weeks ­later: “The firm wants you ­here, hence I started to speak about the immigration question. As you know, they have a clever ­lawyer, so I suggested to Mr. Cameron that he broach the subject to his ­lawyer, find out some information, and I would go and see him, if necessary, as, I repeat, you must be ­here.” Altagracia de Jannelli to Vladimir Nabokov, May 8, 1938, Berg Collection. 136. Altagracia de Jannelli to David Laurance Chambers, October 15, 1939, Bobbs-­ Merrill MSS. 137. Vladimir Nabokov to David Laurance Chambers, September 30, 1939; appended to Jannelli to Chambers, October 15, 1939. 138. David Laurance Chambers to Consul General, November 6, 1939, Bobbs-­ Merrill MSS. 139. Altagracia de Jannelli to David Laurance Chambers, June 1, 1940, Bobbs-­Merrill MSS. 140. David Laurance Chambers to Altagracia de Jannelli, November 22, 1940, Bobbs-­ Merrill MSS. 141. See Babikov, Prochtenie Nabokova, 318. 142. Chambers to Jannelli, November 22, 1940; Nikolai All. [Nikolai Nikolaevich Dvorzhitskii], “V. V. Sirin-­Nabokov v Nʹiu Iorke chuvstvuet sebia svoim,” Novoe russkoe slovo, June 23, 1940, 3. 143. Vladimir Nabokov to Elizabeth Marinel Allan and Marussya Marinel, August 25, 1940, in Selected Letters, 33–34. 144. Babikov suggests that this unfinished and untraceable initial novel served as material for Lolita. Babikov, Prochtenie Nabokova, 319. Coda

1. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” Atlantic Monthly; Nabokov, Stories, 546–559. 2. His re­sis­tance to producing a new work suited to the Bobbs-­Merrill reader, at least in principal, is on display in a talk given (of all places) at the New England Modern Language Association in 1941: in leaving a writer alone at his work, we should “firmly push

NOTES TO PA GES 170– 173

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out of the h ­ ouse as we go the monster of grim commonsense that is lumbering up the steps to whine that the book is not for the general public, that the book ­will never never—­And right then just before it blurts out the word s, e, double-­l, false commonsense must be shot dead.” Nabokov, “The Creative Writer,” in Think, Write, Speak, 202. 3. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 40. 4. In response to Alexander Nazaroff ’s astute observation in a 1938 reader report for Bobbs-­Merrill that “this type of a work can appeal only to a very ­limited group of not only exceptionally cultured, but also ultra-­sophisticated readers,” Nabokov unsuccessfully attempted to convince the publisher that he could “translate the book in such a way as even to avoid the necessity of footnotes.” See Yuri Leving, “ ‘The Book Is Dazzlingly Brilliant . . . ​But.’ Two Early Internal Reviews of Nabokov’s The Gift,” in The Goalkeeper: The Nabokov Almanac, ed. Yuri Leving (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 255–256. 5. Nabokov, “Cloud, ­Castle, Lake,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1941, 737–741; “The Aurelian,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1941, 618–624; “Ma­de­moi­selle O,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1943, 66–73. 6. See Boyd, American Years, 61. 7. “Only Ma­de­moi­selle O and First Love are (except for a change of names) true in ­every detail to the author’s remembered life. The Assistant Producer is based on a­ ctual facts. As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating ‘real life’ than ‘real life’ is responsible for plagiarizing me.” Vladimir Nabokov, “Bibliographical Note,” in Nabokov’s Dozen (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 214. 8. Charles Nicol, “Finding the ‘Assistant Producer,’ ” in A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction, ed. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1993), 155–165. Nicol’s account has been supplemented and updated by Barabtarlo, who uses more recent Rus­sian archival revelations about the fate of General Miller (the real Fedchenko): Gennady Barabtarlo, “Life’s Sequel,” Nabokov Studies 8 (2004): 1–21. 9. Their Rus­sian names in current En­glish transliteration are Georgii Illarionovich Vasilʹchikov and Mariia Illarionovna Vasilʹchikova. Marie Vassiltchikov, Berlin Diaries 1940–1945, ed. George H. Vassiltchikov (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985). 10. Biographical note, in Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” Atlantic Monthly, 68. 11. Vladimir Nabokov to Vera Nabokova, November 9, 1942, in Letters to Véra, 481–482. 12. Nabokov, “Opredeleniia,” [June 1940]; reprinted in Babikov, Prochtenie Nabokova, 333; Nabokov, “Definitions,” in Think, Write, Speak, 141. 13. The stance a­ dopted by the twenty-­year-­old Nabokov on the wars of 1914–1921 could not be maintained by the forty-­year-­old Nabokov confronted with the wars that had contrived to close the Continent. Nabokov, “Opredeleniia,” 333; “Definitions,” 141. 14. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, 7. 15. Nabokov, “Opredeleniia,” 332; “Definitions,” 141. 16. Although Nabokov sold the rights to Laughter in the Dark in 1945 for nearly $2,500, more than his salary at Wellesley, this version was never produced. Boyd, American Years, 89. 17. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer” Atlantic Monthly, May 1943; Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 546.

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TO PAGES 173– 176

18. Nabokov, “Passazhir,” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 2:481; “The Passenger,” in Stories, 183. 19. As Maria Belodubrovskaya points out in her account of the “director-­centered” Soviet film industry, t­ here ­were no Hollywood-­style producers, and though the Western concept of prodʹiuser was known, even the attempt to introduce a similar kind of oversight in the 1930s—­the direktor—­was a failure. Maria Belodubrovskaya, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking u­ nder Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 91–92, 98. In German cinema, of which Nabokov had direct experience, Ufa continued the director-­ unit mode of production ­until 1927, when its new head, Ludwig Klitzsch, belatedly converted it to the “central producer system,” in place in Hollywood since 1914. Thomas Elsaesser, “Erich Pommer, ‘Die UFA,’ and Germany’s Bid for a Studio System,” in Weimar Cinema and ­After, 117–118, 130–131. On the continuing “producer power” of figures like Erich Pommer on the international market, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Lifestyle Propaganda: Modernity and Modernisation in Early Thirties Films,” in Weimar Cinema and ­After, 406. 20. Confusingly, the standard Rus­sian title of the story “The Assistant Producer” is “Pomoshchnik rezhissera.” But this accurately reflects the language Nabokov would have used at the time, as we saw in Gleb Struve’s 1934 translation of “filʹmovyi rezhisser” as “film-­producer” in “The Passenger.” Vladimir Nabokov, “Pomoshchnik rezhissera,” trans. Sergei Ilʹin, in Sobranie sochinenii amerikanskogo perioda v piati tomakh, ed. S. B. Ilʹin et al. (St. Petersburg: Simpozium, 2004), 3:188–205. See also A. Liuksemberg and S. Ilʹin’s commentary on the correspondences between the story and historical fact: A. Liuksemberg and S. Ilʹin, “Kommentarii,” in Sobranie sochinenii amerikanskogo perioda, 3:640–643. 21. Nabokov, “Passazhir,” 2:481; “The Passenger,” 183. 22. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 552; “Passazhir,” 2:481; “The Passenger,” 183. 23. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 557. 24. Sirkeci: one of Istanbul’s main transport hubs including the ferry and terminus of the Orient Express. Motzstraße: a street in Schöneberg, Berlin (west Berlin, home of Rus­sian émigrés and of Nabokov for several years, as well as several movie palaces). Rue Vaugirard: in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, southwest of the city—­again where émigrés lived. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 548. 25. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 551. 26. For example, the narrator pre­sents the subject of a covert return to Rus­sia, which had been turned from a feat in Glory to a nightmare in “A Visit to the Museum” (“Poseshchenie muzeiia,” 1939): “I am thinking of t­ hose adventurous souls who . . . ​crossed the frontier through some snow-­muffled fir forest, to potter about their native land in the vari­ous disguises worked out, oddly enough, by the social revolutionaries of yore. . . . ​A few went a-­scouting for the fun of the ­thing. One or two perhaps ­really believed that in some mystical way they ­were preparing the resurrection of a sacred, if somewhat musty, past.” Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 548–549. 27. Nabokov himself gives an even longer list of his Rus­sian and En­glish publication dates. Nabokov, Glory, ix. 28. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 547–548. 29. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 548. For example, in Clarence Brown’s 1935 hit Anna Karenina. Bulgakowa, “The ‘Rus­sian Vogue,’ ” 228–230. 30. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 551.

NOTES TO PA GES 176– 181

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31. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 551. 32. Aikhenvalʹd, “Smysl pustoty,” 7. 33. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 546. As Nabokov put it in his notes for a Wellesley composition class of May 1943, “by projecting that so-called real life on to my special screen I have disclosed its fundamental irreality.” Nabokov, “Notes on ‘The Assistant Producer’” [1943], Library of Congress; Boyd, Russian Years, 71. 34. Most of Nabokov’s documents w ­ ere destroyed in World War II, as was the Berlin he knew—­most of the addresses he lived at, and many of the cinemas, ­were completely destroyed. The same fate befell his last apartment in Paris, bombed shortly a­ fter his departure for the United States. See his early American interview with Nikolai Dvorzhitskii for the New York émigré newspaper Novoe russkoe slovo (New Rus­sian Word): All. [Dvorzhitskii], “V. V. Sirin-­Nabokov v Nʹiu Iorke,” 3; “[Interv’iu Nikolaiiu Allu],” in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 5:643–646. 35. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 559. 36. Readers have noticed, of course, that Golubkov’s eventual fate is that of his narrator and his author: he has emigrated to Amer­ic­ a and is seen exiting the cinema ­after the movie is over. Nicol, “Finding the ‘Assistant Producer,’ ” 160. 37. Nabokov, foreword to The Gift, n.p. 38. Nabokov, foreword to The Gift, n.p. 39. Boyd, American Years, 16. 40. Boyd, American Years, 43. On the later fortunes of Nabokov’s liberal politics during the Cold War, see Dana Dragunoiu, “Lolita and the Communists,” in Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 82–141. 41. Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 129–147. 42. Boyd, American Years, 16. See also his story “Double Talk,” renamed “Conversation Piece, 1945” in book form. Nabokov, “Double Talk,” New Yorker, June 23, 1945; “Conversation Piece, 1945,” in Stories, 587–597. 43. Kracauer received the funding in March 1943. Jörg Später, Kracauer: A Biography, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020), 324. See also Martin Jay, “The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer,” Salmagundi 31–32 (Fall 1975–­Winter 1976): 69–70. 44. See Später’s contention that the unconventionality of From Caligari to Hitler is due to its attempt to explain what standard social-­scientific argumentation could not: “It should not be forgotten that while Kracauer was working on the book something incomprehensible actually did happen: the murder of millions of Eu­ro­pean Jews. His own ­mother and aunt among them. . . . ​The Caligari book should therefore also be read as a settling of scores.” Später, Kracauer, 343. Also, Boes, Thomas Mann’s War, 231–238. 45. See Graham Greene’s appreciative 1936 review, in which he points out that “M, ­until Fury Herr Lang’s best film, the study of a child-­murderer, could hardly have passed the Hollywood executives.” Graham Greene, review of Fury, dir. Fritz Lang, The Spectator, July 3, 1936; The Graham Greene Film Reader, 116. 46. For a reading of this novel in terms of that other Germanophone émigré, Adorno, see ­Will Norman, “Totalitarian Time: The Strug­gle for Autonomy in Bend Sinister,” in Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (New York: Routledge, 2012), 78–103.

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TO PAGES 181– 185

47. Thomas Elsaesser, “Caligari’s Legacy? Film Noir as Film History’s German Imaginary,” in Weimar Cinema and ­After, 431. 48. In his first years in Amer­ic­ a, Nabokov kept as many plates spinning as he had in Eu­rope: entomologist, literary critic, librettist, collaborator with director Michael Chekhov, fiction writer, poet, translator, and lecturer. 49. “Since being an auteur in the cinema also implies having to survive, and remain close to the technological-­economic means of production, this ‘staying in the game’ represents a director’s true working capital, his currency within the industry and for the critics.” Elsaesser, “To Be or Not to Be,” in Weimar Cinema and A ­ fter, 378. 50. Elsaesser, “To Be or Not to Be,” 372. 51. Nabokov told Dvorzhitskii at Novoe russkoe slovo in 1940 that he was currently working on an En­glish “crime novel” (nad ugolovnym romanom) and finishing the Rus­ sian Solus Rex, which had begun serialization in Sovremennye zapiski in Paris. All., “V. V. Sirin-­Nabokov v Nʹiu Iorke,” 3. 52. Elsaesser, “Caligari’s Legacy?,” 420–421. 53. Elsaesser, “Caligari’s Legacy?,” 428. 54. Elsaesser, “Caligari’s Legacy?,” 435, 436. 55. Elsaesser, “Caligari’s Legacy?,” 436. 56. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 557. 57. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 557. 58. Barabtarlo, “Life’s Sequel,” 3–4. 59. See Nabokov’s letter of 1938, the year the story is set, to his American agent: “Incidentally I ­don’t see much difference between Sov[iet] Rus­sia and Germ[any]: it is the same kind of boot with the nails somewhat bloodier in the former one. On the other hand in my novels ‘Invit[ation]’ and my last one the ‘Gift’ I had in my own way reflected ­things and moods which are in direct connection with the times we live in.” Vladimir Nabokov to Altagracia de Jannelli, May 18, 1938, Berg Collection; reprinted in Boyd, “ ‘Welcome to the Block,’ ” 149. 60. Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” in Stories, 550. 61. As Eric Naiman points out (noting that only in Look at the Harlequins! [1974] does a protagonist’s child survive ­until the end of the story), ­there is also a metafictional moment to this theme for Nabokov: art’s ultimate re­sis­tance to any form of historical or even temporal contingency. Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely, 72–73. 62. Thomas P. Doherty gives Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) as one of the films that “vied to deliver the coup de grâce” to the Code. Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood, 344–345.

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Index

Page numbers followed by letters f and t refer to figures and t­ ables, respectively. Abdul the Damned (film), 133 Adamovich, Georgy: on Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 115; on filʹma, use of term, 69, 211n2; on The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov), 218n123 adaptation(s), for screen/theater: of Baum’s fiction, 68, 164, 235n115; Bobbs-­Merrill and, 145–46, 160; of Camera Obscura (Nabokov), efforts to secure, 29, 125, 126, 130, 132, 133–35, 160; in King, Queen, Knave (Nabokov), 67, 68; of Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), efforts to secure, 68, 160–64; ­limited authorial input in, Nabokov’s awareness of, 4, 5, 135, 228n180; Nabokov’s focus on, 5, 27, 68, 138; of Némirovsky’s fiction, 124; of Rand’s fiction, 166 Adorno, Theodor W., 179 advertisement(s): film, in Rulʹ (newspaper), 32, 36, 37f; lawsuit over, in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 105–6; on screen, Nabokov’s descriptions of, 44, 66–67. See also promotion agent(s), Nabokov’s: American, 126, 143–44; Eu­ro­pean, 125–26, 132–33, 144, 225n115, 226n132, 226n138; frustrations in dealings with, 127–28, 135, 144, 226n138; multiplicity of, 4, 225n115; promotion by, 125–26 Aikhenvald, Yuly: and cinema debates, 55; on émigré existence mirrored in ghostly on-­screen images, 38, 62; on history as assistant producer, 177; on Mary (Nabokov), 46, 48; Nabokov’s character modeled on, 5; and poshliak, use of term, 7 Albatros studio, 79 Aldanov, Mark, 141 Alekhine, Alexander, 92, 93

American audience: Camera Obscura (Nabokov) rewritten for, 3, 12, 29, 101, 110–11, 117, 135, 138, 140, 142, 149–55; Hicks Land as meta­phor for, 75–76, 172, 213n36; Nabokov’s strategy of self-­ presentation for, 155–56; Nabokov’s successful adaptation to, 184; Rands appeal to, 166 American cinema: and Eu­ro­pean cinema, interplay in interwar years, 36–37, 84, 182; and worldwide diffusion of mass culture, 2, 75–76. See also Hollywood “American Frenzy” (Beauplan), 84 American Mercury (magazine), review of Nabokov’s fiction in, 139, 141–42, 155–56 “L’amoureux de la vie” (“The Lover of Life”) (Struve), 121, 122–23 Andreev, Nikolai, 7 animated film: franchised items based on, 108, 220n31; references in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 28, 100, 102–9, 138, 220n33; sound and, 107–8 Anna Karenina (film), 158 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), references in Mary (Nabokov), 48, 206n64 Annales contemporaines (journal). See Sovremennye zapiski Annenkov, Yuri, 150 “Anniversary” (“Iubilei”) (Nabokov), 16, 173 anti-­art: Khodasevich on, 83, 89; Levinson on, 81; Muratov on, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 83 “Anti-­Art” (Muratov), 72, 74 Antoine, André, 60 Appel, Alfred, 11, 136; on Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 110, 221n54; on Mickey Mouse, 220n31 aristocratic lineage, Nabokov’s, 156; promotional strategy focusing on, 158, 159 255

25 6 I n d e x

Arnheim, Rudolf, 54, 93; on close-up in ­silent film, 39; on sound film, 113, 223n71 art: cinema as, Soifer on, 70; death of, Khodasevich on, 83, 216n89; vs. entertainment, cinema as, 71, 79, 80, 88; as ­labor, Khodasevich on, 88, 91, 215n86; movie industry’s self-­promotion as, Khodasevich on, 89; place in postwar era, Muratov on, 72; universal, ­silent cinema as, 2. See also anti-­art; avant-­garde art; pseudo-­art “Art and the ­People” (Muratov), 72 L’art vivant (journal), 82 assistant director/producer (pomoshchnik rezhissera), 173; in “The Cinema” (Nabokov), 50, 51, 62, 173; history compared to, Aikhenvald on, 177; in “How I Was a Film Extra” (Lapiner), 42; life compared to, Nabokov on, 5; in The Man from the U.S.S.R. (Nabokov), 50, 62, 173; in Mary (Nabokov), 5, 50, 62, 173 “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov), 158, 170, 171–78; audience for, 172; as backhanded compliment to Hollywood, 183; cinema as structural device in, 1, 29, 175; final paragraph of, 177–78; history of Rus­sian émigrés in, 29, 172, 174, 176, 178, 238n26; Nabokov’s untranslated Rus­sian fiction referenced in, 174–75; parody of Hollywood’s portrayal of Rus­sianness in, 175–77; Rus­sian title of, 238n20; war­time Amer­i­ca and, 179 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), Nabokov’s short stories in, 1, 170, 172 audience: authors’ consideration of, Paine on, 198n48; bourgeois, danger of playing to, Rus­sian critics on, 7. See also American audience; audience, film; audience, for Nabokov’s fiction; ­women, as film audience audience, film, 5, 63–64; Kracauer on, 63, 210n119; Muratov on, 76, 77, 213n37; Nabokov on, 5, 58, 63–64; Nichols on, 213n37 audience, for Nabokov’s fiction: American, Camera Obscura rewritten for, 3, 12, 29, 101, 110–11, 117, 135, 138, 140, 142, 149–55; American, strategy of self-­ presentation for, 155–56; American, successful adaptation to, 184; cinema as common language for, 65–68; dual, King, Queen, Knave and, 64, 65, 67, 68, 100; ­f uture, orientation ­toward, 14–15, 68;

initial/primary, 6, 68; international, Camera Obscura and, 99, 100, 101, 105, 117–18; new, continual pro­cess of rewriting for, 12; sophisticated, “The Assistant Producer” and, 172; Western, importance of, 6 Aumont, Charles, 20, 201n83 auteur film theory, 54, 182 autobiography, Nabokov’s, 167, 184, 195n2; fictional works with ele­ments of, 6, 8, 16, 200n79; publishers’ interest in, 156, 166–68, 181 avant-­garde art: cinema and, 182, 185; Khodasevich on, 83; Soviet, 25 Babikov, Andrei, 228n190, 229n16 Bailey, Geoffrey, 171 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 211n3 Bakhtin, Nikolai, 211n3 balagan (fairground): connotations of term, 51; in German cabarets, 51; in Nabokov’s descriptions of cinema, 42, 43, 50, 56, 58, 177 Balázs, Béla, 93; on beauty of film, 61; on close-up in s­ ilent film, 39 Balzac, Honoré de, 96 Barabtarlo, Gennady, 183, 237n8 Baum, Vicki, 4, 68, 114, 164, 235n115 Beauplan, Robert de, 84 Belodubrovskaya, Maria, 238n19 Bend Sinister (Nabokov), 169, 181, 184 Benjamin, Walter, 213n26 Berberova, Nina, 15; Nabokov’s correspondence with, 4, 225n115; Parry on, 141 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 75, 121 Berlin: cinemas in 1920s–1930s, 5, 30, 32–35, 33f, 34f, 203n12; Muratov’s residence in, 72; Nabokov’s residence in, 2, 5, 13, 27, 30, 32, 34, 34f, 68; polyglot world of, 32 Berlin, cinematized world of: American influences and, 36–37, 106–8, 107f; Gessen’s film reviews as reflection on, 53; Jünger on, 43; Kracauer on, 63; Nabokov on, 24, 27, 28, 36–37, 38, 39, 45, 64–65, 100; Rulʹ (newspaper) on, 31–32 Berlin, Rus­sian émigrés in, 1, 13, 97; “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov) on, 173, 174, 176; cinema debates and, 70, 71; cinematic culture and, 31–32, 36; ghostlike existence of, 38, 40, 62; Mary (Nabokov) on, 45–46; Nabokov’s play performed by, 49; newspaper of, 5, 30, 31; shrinking presence of, 100–101, 218n6

I n d e x Berlin Diaries (Vassiltchikov), 171 Bertenson, Sergei, 137, 165 Bobbs-­Merrill (publishing com­pany), 145; and film adaptations, 145–46, 160; and The Fountainhead (Rand), 165, 166; interest in Nabokov’s autobiography, 166–67, 181; Nabokov’s contract with, 29, 140, 143, 145, 149, 151; Nabokov’s editor at, 143, 146, 230n24; and Nabokov’s immigration to United States, 143, 168–69, 236n135; and option on translating Nabokov’s fiction, 164–65, 170, 181; and promotion of Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 155–58, 160, 163; reader’s report on Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 147–49; reader’s report on Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 154–55, 158, 159; reader’s report on The Gift (Nabokov), 237n4; and theatrical adaptation of Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 163–64 Boborykin, Petr, 203n7 Boeger, Peter, 203n12 boxing: cinema compared to, 22, 32; Nabokov and, 27, 32, 122; professionalization and commercialization of, 93 Boyd, Brian, 105, 152, 195n2 Bozovic, Marijeta, 218n124 Brecht, Bertolt, 179, 180 Breen, Joseph, 161 Breuer, Bessie, 146–47 British cinema: foreign influences on, 131–32; Greene on, 131; Weimar exiles and, 130, 132 British version: of Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 28, 101, 111, 117, 123, 124, 126–29, 134, 138, 143, 147; of Despair (Nabokov), 126, 129, 134, 228n2 Brodsky, Boris, 49 Brodsky, Joseph, 30 The ­Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 217n118; film adaptation of, 133 Brown, Clarence, 158 Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) (film), 136 Buhks, Nora, 224n92 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 217n118 Bunin, Ivan, 9 cabarets, German: Nabokov’s scripts for, 41; Rus­sian folk art in, 51 Cain, James, 25, 159 camera: affective possibilities of, 53; unintentional, intentional, and partly intentional effects of, 49

257

Camera Obscura (Kamera obskura) (Nabokov): adaptation for screen, efforts to secure, 29, 125, 126, 130, 132, 133–35; American prospect for, Nabokov on, 137–38; Berlin cinematic culture in, 28, 109–10, 111; Bertenson on, 137; Bobbs-­Merrill’s reader’s report on, 147–49; British translation/version of, 28, 101, 111, 117, 123, 124, 126–29, 134, 138, 143, 147; cartoon character (Cheepy) in, 28, 100, 102–9, 138, 220n33; characters in, 8, 9, 63, 111–14; cinema as animating force in, 37, 111, 115; cinema debates and, 115, 116; cinema theory represented in, 111; copyright issues regarding, 230n23; culture criticism represented in, 111; as exportable commodity, 28–29, 100, 101, 105; film director in, 62; and film noir, 180; film theory represented in, 111; French translation of, 3, 28, 117, 118, 123–24, 137, 138, 143, 179, 225n115; intended audience for, 100, 101, 105, 117–18; Khodasevich on, 10, 114–18, 221n53, 223n83; Kortner’s adaptation of, 134, 135, 227n172; as liminal work, 99; linguistic-­cultural references in, 6; objections to, 125, 134; opening of, 101–9, 154; private film viewing in, 52; reviews in American press, 138, 139, 144, 157–58; as reworking of King, Queen, Knave, 28, 100, 111, 152; rewritten for American audience (Laughter in the Dark), 3, 12, 29, 101, 110–11, 117, 135, 138, 140, 142, 149–55; Rus­sian critics on, 101; Die Straße (film) compared to, 109, 110, 111; symbolic blindness in, 97, 110; time frame of, 99–100; US publication of, efforts to secure, 144–45, 147–49; What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?) (Tolstoy) and, 114 Cameron, Angus, 165, 167, 236n135 Capablanca, José Raúl, 92 Capablanca and Alekhine: The ­Battle for World Supremacy in Chess (Znosko-­Borovsky), 92–93 Capitol Film Productions: managing director of, 132, 133; and screen rights to Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 29, 125, 130, 132, 133, 135, 160 Casanova, Pascale, 97 censorship: freedom of, Rus­sian émigrés’ experience of, 173; Hollywood of early 1930s and, 161–62, 163, 173 Chambers, David Laurance, 145, 146, 161, 163, 165, 168–69

25 8 I n d e x

Chamisso, Adelbert von, 43, 47 chance: film’s ability to capture, Nabokov on, 21, 39, 40, 49, 53–54, 58; Nabokov’s poetics of, 21, 40 Chaplin, Charlie, 2, 79, 81, 213n32 Cheepy (cartoon character): in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 28, 100, 102–9, 138, 220n33; removal from Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 154, 155 Chekhov, Anton: Nabokov compared to, 159; and Rus­sian prewar theater/film, 60, 79; Znosko-­Borovsky on, 91 Chekhov, Michael, 134, 240n48 Chelovek iz SSSR (Nabokov). See The Man from the U.S.S.R. chess: and cinema, in The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov), 28, 59, 61, 93, 94, 95; cinema compared to, 22, 32; Nabokov’s engagement with, 31, 92; as universal language, 93; Znosko-­Borovsky’s contribution to, 71, 92–93 Chess Fever (Shakhmatnaia goriachka) (Pudovkin), 59 “The Chinese Screens” (“Kitaiskie shirmy”) (Nabokov), 41 Chisla (journal), Ivanov’s essay in, 7–8 Chto takoe iskusstvo? (What is Art?) (Tolstoy), 114 “Chudesa ekrana” (“Won­ders of the Screen”) (Levinson), 79–80 chuvstvo filʹma (“film sense”), 10 cinema: as anti-­art, Muratov on, 72, 73, 75, 77, 83; as beautiful but compromising lover, Soifer on, 70; commercial nature of, intellectual suspicion of, 5, 20; as common language, 2, 13, 21, 65–68; early, as per­for­mance, 35; early development of, parallels with Nabokov’s life and ­career, 1–2, 3; as entertainment, Levinson on, 80; as entertainment, Muratov on, 73–74; as entertainment, Nabokov on, 55, 58; as entertainment vs. art, debates on, 71, 79, 80; as essential for con­temporary Eu­ro­pean, Muratov on, 74; exile navigated through, 2, 13, 29, 185; exile represented in, 38, 71, 185, 206n61; fairground origins of, 20, 21, 58; false imitation of real­ity in, Nabokov on, 58, 59–60, 178; figure of false count in, Nabokov compared to, 7–8, 116; Gorky’s reflections on, 19–20, 38, 40; historical/archaeological approach to, 10, 12, 16–17; as historical technique, 16–17, 177; as industry, 76–77, 79; inherent frivolity of, Muratov on, 73; as

leisure, 22, 62, 74, 87, 88; vs. lit­er­a­ture, Nabokov on, 18, 23, 49, 119–20; lit­er­a­ture altered by, Nabokov’s understanding of, 5, 135; mass tastes guiding, Rus­sian émigrés on, 75–76, 77, 79–80, 172; as mechanism of mass exposure, 51–52; as metonym for modernity, 12–13; Nabokov’s engagement with, 2, 6, 9–10, 11, 20, 23–24, 25, 28, 36, 185; Nabokov’s portrayal of, 1, 5, 10, 37–38, 39, 175–76; and Nabokov’s work, scholarship on, 11; paradoxes of identity of, 84; parody of, in Nabokov’s fiction, 46, 117–18, 149; photography compared to, 2, 17, 22, 54, 81; production vs. reception of, Nabokov’s fiction on contrast between, 38–39, 44–46, 51–52; projection of real­ity in, Levinson on, 80; as pseudo-­art, Khodasevich on, 115; role in rise of Nazism, suspicions about, 54; Rus­sian émigré, Levinson on, 79; Rus­sian émigrés’ engagement with, 2, 10, 13, 31, 37; Rus­sian terms for, 32, 69, 203n7, 211nn2–3; and sport, comparisons of, 84, 89, 91, 216n103; as symptom, Khodasevich on, 83; as urban mass culture phenomenon, 22, 32. See also American cinema; British cinema; cinema debates; German cinema; moviegoing; ­silent films; sound films; specific films “The Cinema as ‘Anti-­Art’ ” (Levinson), 81 cinema debates, among Rus­sian émigrés, 28, 70–72, 209n99; Aikhenvald and, 55; broader cultural context of, 12; Khodasevich and, 28, 55, 71, 74, 82–90, 95; Levinson and, 28, 71, 73, 78–82; lexical instability and, 69–70; Muratov and, 28, 69, 70, 71, 72–78, 209n99; Nabokov and, 28, 55, 71, 93, 115, 116; vantage of exile and, 71; Volkonsky and, 73, 78, 209n99; Znosko-­Borovsky and, 28, 71, 73, 90–92, 93, 209n99 “Cinema” (“Sinema”) (Gippius), 40, 51 “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf ”) (Muratov), 69, 70, 72–78, 81, 209n99; as response to Levinson, 72, 81, 212n13 “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf ”) (Nabokov), 27, 55–62, 93; assistant director in, 50, 51, 62, 173; “The Assistant Producer” recapitulating, 177–78; criticism of film’s inauthenticity in, 58, 59–60; as “metropolitan miniature,” 31, 55; plea­sure of moviegoing in, 58, 63; plot parody in, 56, 59–60, 64; proto-­sociological analy­sis in, 62

I n d e x cinema praxis, Nabokov’s, 24, 123, 129, 135, 155–56; Camera Obscura and, 101, 123, 129; and film noir, 26, 29 cinemas, in Berlin of 1920s–1930s, 5, 32–35, 33f, 34f, 203n12. See also film palaces cinema theory, 20, 23; in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 111; Khodasevich’s, 89; Nabokov’s, 22–23, 60 cinematic commonplace, 13 cinematic culture: Americanization of, 36–37, 75–76, 106–8; American middlebrow vs. Soviet avant-­garde, 25; Berlin’s, Nabokov on, 24, 27, 28, 36–37, 38, 39, 45, 64–65, 100; mass consumption and, 35–36, 106, 108, 220n31; modern urban culture as, 12–13, 22; Nabokov’s instrumentalization of, 19, 24, 99, 114, 118, 119; promotional genius of, 36, 106, 107f; in Rulʹ (newspaper), 5, 31–32; and Rus­sian émigrés, 13, 36, 176, 178; social character of, Nabokov’s exploration of, 22; transnational nature of, 36, 116; use of term, 10. See also Berlin, cinematized world of “Cine-­Nina: An Émigré Tale” (“Kino-­Nina: Bezhenskaia povestʹ”) (Noir), 112 close-up, in film: Nabokov on, 61, 64; ­silent, 39 Columbia Pictures, response to Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 160, 163 Conclusive Evidence (Nabokov), 184 Conrad, Joseph, 142 The Conspirators (Bailey), 171 Con­temporary Annals (journal). See Sovremennye zapiski Cooper, Gary, 147 cosmopolitanism: of German émigrés, and success in Hollywood, 181; of Nabokov’s characters, 8, 104. See also cosmopolitanism, Nabokov’s; transnationalism cosmopolitanism, Nabokov’s, 24; Levinson on, 98, 117, 141; Nazaroff on, 141; Parry on, 141–42; Struve on, 122, 141; used as promotional device, 29, 123, 141–42, 158 La course du fou (Nabokov): offered to US publisher, 144, 225n117; publisher of, 124; translator of, 123. See also The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov), French translation of Coward, Noël, 147 “The Creative Writer” (Nabokov), 236n2 Crime and Punishment (film), 158 Cultural Amnesia ( James), 72 culture industry, interwar, 136–37; cinema as part of, in The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov),

259

94–95; and multilingual c­ areer, 28; Nabokov’s cosmopolitan characters in relation to, 8; Rus­sian exiles’ concerns about, 3; as way of transcending limitations of exile, 3, 5 culture theory (culture criticism), 20, 23; in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 111; Muratov and, 77; Nabokov and, 23, 24, 118 Curtis, John Jay, 145 Dagover, Lil, 110, 206n56 Dar (Nabokov). See The Gift Darling of the Gods (Der Liebling der Götter) (film), 106, 107 David Golder (Némirovsky), 124–25 death, image of: in Nabokov’s description of film shoot, 42, 43, 44. See also ghostly images de Certeau, Michel, 24, 26 The Defense (Nabokov), 6 “Definitions” (Nabokov), 172–73 Delage-­Toriel, Lara, 211n134 Der Demütige und die Sängerin (The ­Humble Man and the Singer) (film), 206n56 Design for Living (Coward), 147 Despair (Otchaianie) (Nabokov): American reader reports on, 166; American review of, 139; British translation of, 126, 129, 134, 228n2; as crime story, 6; criticism of cinema’s inauthenticity in, 60; French translation of, 3; German translation of, 133; reworked in 1960s, 142; Rus­sian literary tradition and, 14; US publication of, efforts to secure, 144 director. See film director/producer Disney, Walt, 106, 107 distraction: cult of, Weimar theorists of, 22–23. See also entertainment Dni (newspaper), 78 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 180 Dolinin, Alexander, 14; on Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 114; on characters of Nabokov’s Rus­sian novels, 219n14; on Nabokov’s engagement with émigré community, 24, 201n87; on Rus­sian émigrés, 199n64; on Rus­sian literary tradition, influence on Nabokov, 14, 199n60 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The ­Brothers Karamazov, 217n118; film adaptations of works of, 133, 158; Nabokov compared to, 121, 122, 158, 160 Doubleday (publishing com­pany), 164, 235n115

26 0 I n d e x

Double Indemnity (film), 180 “Draka” (“The Fight”) (Nabokov), 199n69 Dupont, E. A., 26, 114, 206n56 Duschinsky, Richard, 150 Duse, Eleonora, 73 Dvorzhitskii, Nikolai, 239n34, 240n51 economics of cinema: Khodasevich on, 90; Levinson on, 82, 90; Muratov on, 74, 90; Nichols on, 76 “Les écrivains et l’époque” (“Writers and the Age”) (Nabokov), 82, 119–20, 142, 178, 196n12; Levinson’s influence and, 120; “Tolstoy” compared to, 49, 120 Ederle, Gertrude, 84 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 94 Eisenstein, Sergei, 93 Eisner, Lotte, 54 Ekran (journal), 41; editor of, 42; on Jupiter lights, 44 Elsaesser, Thomas, 20, 26, 54, 180, 181, 202n92, 202n94; on film noir, 181, 182–83 Emelka Studios, Munich, 132, 133 “En­glish Games in Rus­sia” (Nabokov), 167, 168 En­glish language: Nabokov’s self-­translations in, 27, 97, 134, 142; Nabokov’s works written in, 142, 196n12; translations of Nabokov’s fiction in, adjustments in, 39, 67–68, 175, 204nn28–29; translations of Nabokov’s fiction in, scholarship focusing on, 12. See also British version; specific titles entertainment, cinema as: vs. art, debates on, 71, 79, 80, 88; Khodasevich on, 84, 88; Levinson on, 80; Muratov on, 73–74; Nabokov on, 55, 58 entomology, Nabokov and, 171 Epstein, Michel, 125 Ergaz, Doussia (Ida Mikhailovna), 118, 123, 124, 225n115 “Der Erzähler” (“The Storyteller”) (Benjamin), 213n26 Eu­rope: Nabokov’s exile in, 4, 13–14. See also Eu­ro­pean culture; post-­Europe/ post-­European(s); specific countries and cities Eu­ro­pean culture, interwar: Americanization of, 23, 25, 74, 75–76; and cinema, paradoxes of identity of, 36–37, 84; decline of, diagnoses of, 72–73; “film sense” (chuvstvo fil’ma) in, 10; Nabokov’s insider-­outsider portrayals of, 25, 27, 172; Nabokov’s works about, 9

Eu­ro­pean Night (Evropeiskaia nochʹ) (Khodasevich), 88 Eu­ro­pean Writers Bureau, 125 evanescence (unrepeatability, nepovtorimostʹ), cinema and sense of, 22, 45, 47 The Event (Sobytie) (Nabokov), 136, 150 exile: and assimilation vs. transnationalism, 3; cinema as repre­sen­ta­tion of condition of, 38, 71, 185, 206n61; cinema’s universalism as way to navigate, 2, 13, 29, 185; “cinematized” environment of, 10; creative, Nabokov’s fiction addressing, 8; definition of, 1; film as meta­phor for, Nabokov on, 27; interaction of film studio and screen as meta­phor for, 21; limitations of, culture industry as way to transcend, 3, 5; loneliness of, Nabokov on, 40; and Nabokov’s artistic devices, 7, 9; Nabokov’s art of, 6, 11–12, 24, 26, 145; “total,” Mann on, 14; vantage of, and cinema debate among Rus­sian émigrés, 71; writers in, Brodsky on, 30. See also German émigrés; Rus­sian émigrés Expressionism. See German Expressionism extra(s), film: in “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov), 174; daily selves vs. on-­screen selves of, 45, 47; in “A Film Night” (Urvantsov), 43; in “How I Was a Film Extra” (Lapiner), 42; importance of assistant director for, 50; lack of agency and participation in creative pro­cess, 47–48; in “Mary” (Nabokov), 42–44, 45, 46, 47–48, 176, 206n60; Nabokov’s experience as, 21, 40–41, 42, 62; payment received by, 205n35; Rus­sian émigrés as, 42, 43, 45, 46, 174 “Extras” (“Figuratsiia”) (Felsen), 43 The Eye (Sogliadatai) (Nabokov), 120; Struve on, 121; themes of, 6 Fadiman, Clifton, 159 Fairbanks, Douglas, 2, 79 fairground(s): cinema’s origins in, 20, 21, 58. See also balagan Fayard (publishing com­pany), Nabokov and, 82, 97, 120, 124, 127 Feigin, Anna, 179 Felix All Puzzled (film), 108, 220n30 Felix in Hollywood (film), 108 Felix the Cat (cartoon character), 108 Felsen, Yuri, 43 feuilletons, as “metropolitan miniatures,” 31 “The Fight” (“Draka”) (Nabokov), 199n69

I n d e x “Figuratsiia” (“Extras”) (Felsen), 43 film. See cinema; ­silent films; sound films; specific films filʹm (term), 69 “Film 1928” (Kracauer), 210n119 filʹma (term), 69 film adaptation. See adaptation(s) film advertisements, in Rulʹ (newspaper), 32, 36, 37f “Film and Society” (Kracauer), 63 Film Art (journal). See Kino-­iskusstvo film criticism: absence of, Kantor on, 76–77; Levinson and, 78. See also film reviews film director/producer (rezhisser): in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 62; in “The Cinema” (Nabokov), 56, 62; in Soviet film industry, 238n19; in “The Passenger” (Nabokov), 5, 135, 173. See also assistant director/ producer (pomoshchnik rezhissera) film genres, Gessen’s typologies of, 53 film meta­phors, in Nabokov’s works, 65–67 “A Film Night” (“Filʹmovaia nochʹ”) (Urvantsov), 43 film noir: as art of exile, 26; coining of term, 180; Elsaesser on, 181, 182–83; German émigrés and, 26, 180, 181; Lolita (Nabokov) compared to, 184; Straßefilm and, 109, 110, 180; Weimar cinema and, 181, 182 film palaces: art galleries compared to, 89; in Berlin, in 1925, 32, 33–35; movie premier at, Gessen on, 34–35; near Nabokov’s residence in Berlin, 5, 34, 34f, 34t; orchestra at, 35 film reviews, 23; Gessen’s, 27, 30, 31, 34, 50, 55, 100, 187t–­194t; as “metropolitan miniatures,” 31 “film sense” (chuvstvo filʹma), 10 film theory, 20, 23; in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 111; cinema theory compared to, 22, 23; Nabokov’s, 20–22, 38–40, 49, 58 “First Love” (Nabokov), 237n7 Flaubert, Gustave, 7 Fletcher, Inglis, 145 Flickinger, Brigitte, 32 The Fountainhead (Rand), 165, 166, 179, 184 Francis, Kay, 147 Frank, Siggy, 207n71, 207n75 Frank­furter Zeitung (newspaper), 63 French language: Levinson’s adoption of, 82; Nabokov’s fiction reading as translation

261

from, criticism of, 6; Nabokov’s works written in, 142, 196n12; translation of Camera Obscura (Nabokov) in, 3, 28, 117, 118, 123–24, 137, 138, 143, 179, 225n115; translation of The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov) in (La course du fou), 3, 68, 82, 97, 123, 124, 144, 225n117 Frenke, Eugene, 130 Freund, Karl, 26–27, 202n95 From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer), 180, 239n44 Frumkin, Yakov, 127 Fury (film), 180 “­Future of the Cinema” (Nichols), 76, 213n32, 213n36, 214n39 ­f uture perfect: poetics of, in Nabokov’s early fiction, 15. See also historian/history, ­f uture Garbo, Greta, 4, 110, 222n55 Garrett-­Klement Pictures, 130, 132 Gazdanov, Gaito, 15 German cinema: and American cinema, interplay in interwar years, 36–37, 182; and Rus­sian experience of exile, 174. See also Weimar film; Weimar filmmakers German émigrés: in Britain, 130, 132; in United States, 26, 179–81 German Expressionism: as model for Nabokov’s fiction, 9; and Weimar film, 54 German language: Nabokov’s fiction reading as translation from, criticism of, 6; translations of Nabokov’s works in, 3, 65, 66f, 67, 68, 100, 133, 143, 196n10 Gessen, Georgy, 13, 15, 141; as film critic, 52–54, 60; film reviews by, 12, 27, 30, 31, 50, 55, 100, 187t–­194t, 208n83; on film typologies, 53; on movie hopefuls, 112; Nabokov’s friendship with, 27, 30, 63, 68, 179, 203n8; and Nabokov’s moviegoing, 30, 63, 68; on premier at Ufa-­Palast am Zoo, 34–35, 36; on ­silent film, 113; venues for first-­run viewings by, 34, 34t; during World War II, 179 Gessen, Iosif, 30, 203n8 ghostly images, in film: Aikhenvald on, 38, 62; diasporic dispersal of, Nabokov on, 38, 42, 43; émigré existence mirrored in, 38, 40, 62; Gippius on, 40, 62; Gorky on, 19, 38, 40; Nabokov on, 38–39, 42, 43, 56, 62 Gide, André, 151, 157

26 2 I n d e x

The Gift (Dar) (Nabokov), 170; En­glish translation of, 178–79; Nabokov’s childhood memories and, 8; Nazaroff ’s report on, 237n4; Rus­sian literary tradition and, 14; self-­criticism in, 149; themes of, 6 Gippius, Zinaida: “Cinema” (“Sinema”), 40, 51; on cinema terminology, 211n3; on ghostliness of film, 40, 62; on Hicks Land, 172; Zveno article of, 76 Giraudoux, Jean, 121, 122 Girodias, Maurice, 184 Glory (Podvig) (Nabokov), 99; American reader reports on, 166; on cinema as entertainment, 58; En­glish translation of, 175; film meta­phors in, 65; French translation of, 120; on lit­er­at­ ure as ultimate recording medium, 49; Nabokov’s childhood memories and, 8; as polemic with older generation of Rus­sian émigrés, 15; semiautobiographical protagonist of, 16; themes of, 6; US publication of, efforts to secure, 144 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 70 Gogol, Nikolai, 94, 96; Nabokov compared to, 121, 152 Gold Rush (film), 79 Gollivud: Amerikanskii kino-­gorod (Hollywood: City of Movies) (Rozenbaum), 165 Gorky, Maxim: “Brief Notes,” 201n81; reflections on cinema, 19–20, 38, 40, 48, 131 Gough-­Yates, Kevin, 132 gramophone, film compared to, 22 ­Grand ­Hotel (film), 4, 68, 164 Grant, Gary, 130, 147 Grasset (publishing com­pany): Nabokov and, 123, 124–25, 128, 135; objections to Camera Obscura, 125, 134; rights to Camera Obscura, 150 Grasset, Bernard, 124–25 Grayson, Jane, 149 Greene, Graham: on British cinema, 131, 132; as film critic, 36; on Lang’s films, 239n45; on Lolita (Nabokov), 131, 184; on Oil for the Lamps of China (film), 146; on sound film, 113, 223n76 Griffiths, D. W., 79 Grishakova, Marina, 206n63, 209n100 “grotesque” films, American, Gessen on, 53 Grune, Karl, 109, 111, 132, 133 Gruppa (émigré troupe), 49 Gubsky, Nikolai, 127, 129, 226n146

Guggenheim Fellowship: Kracauer as recipient of, 180; Nabokov as recipient of, 170–71 “A Guide to Berlin” (“Putevoditelʹ po Berlinu”) (Nabokov), 15, 65 Hall of Mirrors: Hollywood as, 183; Rus­sian experience of exile as, 174 Hangmen Also Die (film), 179–80 Hansen, Miriam, 2 “Happiness” (“Schastʹe”) (Nabokov), 40 Heath agency, and adaptation rights for Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 130, 133, 134, 135 L’heureuse mort (film), 79 Heydrich, Reinhard, 179 Hicks Land, and cinematic culture: Muratov on, 75–76, 172; Nichols on, 76, 172, 213n36 historian/history, f­ uture: cinema and, 16–17, 177; Gessen’s orientation to, 54; Nabokov’s orientation to, 14–16, 47, 68, 119–20 historical contextualization, and Nabokov scholarship, 11 Hitchcock, Alfred, 185 Hitler, Adolf: comparison with Stalin, Nabokov on, 179, 183–84; rise of, 116 Hobart, Alice Tisdale, 145, 146 Hollaender, Felix, 206n56 Hollywood: backhanded compliment to, in “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov), 183; vs. Eu­ro­pean national film production, 36; German émigrés in, 179–81; Hicks Land and, Muratov on, 75–76, 172; middlebrow American publishing and, 29; Nabokov’s early contacts with, 137; parody of, in “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov), 175–77; Production Code of 1930–1934, 161–62, 163, 173, 185, 240n62; Rand’s success with, 165–66; response to Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 160–63; response to Lolita (Nabokov), 185; and worldwide diffusion of mass culture, 2, 75–76 Hollywood: City of Movies (Gollivud: Amerikanskii kino-­gorod) (Rozenbaum/ Rand), 165 horn-­rimmed (tortoiseshell) spectacles: in Nabokov’s works, 96–97; in Rus­sian literary tradition, 217n118 “How I Was a Film Extra” (Lapiner), 42 The H ­ umble Man and the Singer (Der Demütige und die Sängerin) (film), 206n56

I n d e x Huntington, C., advice to Nabokov, 167–68 Hutchinson (publishing com­pany): Nabokov and, 123, 126, 127, 128, 137, 144, 145; rights to Camera Obscura, 150 Huxley, Aldous, 147 Huyssen, Andreas, 31 Iangirov, Rashit. See Yangirov Illusions perdues (Balzac), 96 L’illustration (journal), 83, 84, 111 image(s), in film: diasporic dispersal of, 42, 43, 46, 47, 52, 206n60; embarrassment at one’s own, 51–52. See also ghostly images Images of Italy (Obrazy Italii) (Muratov), 72, 73 “In Defense of the Cinema” (“V zashchitu kinematografa”) (Kantor), 76–77 industry: cinema as, perspectives on, 76–77, 79. See also culture industry In Name Only (film), 147 insider-­outsider position, Nabokov’s, 11–12, 27, 172 Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kaznʹ) (Nabokov), 117, 133, 231n46 “Iubilei” (“Anniversary”) (Nabokov), 16, 173 Ivanov, Georgy, attack on Nabokov, 7–8, 114, 116; Struve’s response to, 8–9 James, Clive, 72 Jannelli, Altagracia de, 143–44; defense of Nabokov’s work, 164–65, 166; Nabokov’s contract with, 138, 151; Nabokov’s correspondence with, 29, 124, 139, 145, 155, 230nn17–18, 230nn23–24, 240n59; and Nabokov’s immigration to United States, 143, 168–69, 236n135; as playwright, 150; and promotion of Nabokov’s work, 140, 143–44, 145, 149, 160, 225n117; and theatrical adaptation of Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 150, 161, 163–64, 234–35nn111–12 Jannings, Emil, 107 The Jazz Singer (film), 106 John Day (publishing com­pany), 144 John Long (publishing com­pany), 123, 126, 129, 229n4 Johnson, Don Barton, 6 journals, serialization in: of Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 123, 124; of The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov), 27, 97, 99; as promotional strategy, 124. See also specific titles Jünger, Ernst, 43 Jupiter lights, 42, 44

263

Kaes, Anton, 109 Kamera obskura (Nabokov). See Camera Obscura Kaminka, Avgust, 203n8 Kantor, Mikhail: in cinema debate, 209n99; “In Defense of the Cinema,” 76–77 Karenne, Diana, 219n20 Karpo­vich, Mikhail, 229n16 kartina (term), 69 Kaun, Alexander, 137–38 Keaton, Buster, 2, 79 Kermen, Victor L., 150. See also Jannelli, Altagracia de Khodasevich, Vladislav, 71, 72, 114; on Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 10, 114–18, 221n53, 223n83; in cinema debate, 28, 55, 71, 74, 82–90, 95; on death of Rus­sian émigré culture, 101; Eu­ro­pean Night (Evropeiskaia nochʹ), 88; and ­f uture audience, orientation ­toward, 15; influence on Nabokov, 83; “On the Cinema” (“O kinematografe”), 82–90, 114; Znosko-­Borovsky’s response to, 90–91 “Khuliteliam kinematografa” (“To the Revilers of Cinema”) (Volkonsky), 78 “Kinematograf.” See “The Cinema” (Muratov); “The Cinema” (Nabokov) kinematograf (term), 32, 69, 203n7 King, Queen, Knave (Korolʹ, dama, valet) (Nabokov), 64–65; adaptation to modern urban life in, 96–97; American reader reports on, 166; Camera Obscura as reworking of, 28, 100, 111, 152; characters’ creative engagement with modernity in, 9; as crime story, 6; dual audience for, 64, 65, 67, 68, 100; En­glish translation of, 67–68, 175; on exaggeration as key quality of film experience, 61; film meta­phors in, 65, 66, 67, 211n136; German translation of, 3, 68, 100, 143, 196n10; insider-­outsider account of cinematic culture in, 27; layered linguistic-­cultural references in, 6; predictions about Weimar culture in, 100; prikazchik (shop clerk) in, 64, 88; rewritten for American audience, 12; stage adaptation of, 67, 68; Struve’s review of, 152; US publication of, efforts ­toward, 144; Western models for, charges regarding, 7, 9 kino (term), 32, 69, 203n7 Kino-­iskusstvo (Film Art) (journal), 70, 212n4

26 4 I n d e x

“Kino-­Nina: Bezhenskaia povestʹ” (“Cine-­Nina: An Émigré Tale”) (Noir), 112 Kino-­Pharus-­Plan Berlin, 32–33, 33f, 203n13 “Kitaiskie shirmy” (“The Chinese Screens”) (Nabokov), 41 Klement, Otto: and British translation of Camera Obscura, 127–28, 129–30; as film producer, 130, 132; as Nabokov’s literary agent, 126, 129–30, 143, 144, 225n115, 226n138 Klitzsch, Ludwig, 238n19 Knopf (publishing com­pany), 160, 166 Korda, Alexander, 132 Korolʹ, dama, valet (Nabokov). See King, Queen, Knave “Korolek” (“The Leonardo”) (Nabokov), 61 Kortner, Fritz, 126, 133, 136; and adaptation of Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 134, 135, 227n172; Nabokov’s correspondence with, 234n95 Kracauer, Siegfried, 54, 62–63, 93, 201n88; From Caligari to Hitler, 180, 239n44; on cinema as force for social change, 77; emigration to United States, 179; “Film 1928,” 210n119; on film audience, 63, 210n119; “Photography,” 224n101; “symptomatic” approach of, 74; Theory of Film, 208n96 “Krasavitsa” (“A Rus­sian Beauty”) (Nabokov), 64 Kreimeier, Klaus, 203n12 Kubrick, Stanley, 185, 240n62 Kuprin, Alexander, 62 Kyandzhuntsev, Savely, 136, 204n25 ­labor: Americanization of, 87–88; exhaustion from, cinema born of, 88, 89; as model of artistic reception, Khodasevich on, 88, 91, 215n86 Lang, Fritz, 110, 114, 179, 180–81, 211n135 language(s): common, cinema as, 2, 13, 21, 65–68; culture industry and, 28; international, ­silent cinema as, 2; surface, in Nabokov’s fiction, 6; universal, chess as, 93. See also En­glish language; French language; German language Lapiner, Alexander, 42 The Last Command (film), 50, 206n58 Laughlin, James, 170 Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 3; American audience considered in, 149–55; autoreferences in, 231n46; Camera

Obscura rewritten as, 3, 12, 29, 101, 110–11, 117, 135, 138, 140, 142, 149–55; as crime story, 6; dust jacket for, 157–58, 160; early American response to, 25, 154–55, 158–60, 161, 164, 169; film adaptation of, efforts to secure, 68, 160–63, 237n16; film director in, 62; Hollywood’s response to, 160–63; “local color” in, 221n54; Nabokov’s experience and fears as parent refracted in, 184; opening of, 151–53; references to “Tolstoy” (poem) in, 17, 200n74; revisions in, reviews in American press and, 29, 140, 151–53; stage adaptation of, efforts to secure, 68, 150, 161, 163–64 Laura (film), 180 leisure, or­ga­nized: cinema and, 22, 62, 74, 87, 88; rise of lower-­middle class and, 63, 64 “The Leonardo” (“Korolek”) (Nabokov), 61 “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia” (“Pisʹmo v Rossiiu”) (Nabokov), 38–40; “The Cinema” compared to, 57; “Les écrivains et l’époque” compared to, 120; King, Queen, Knave compared to, 64; Nabokov’s ­mother’s response to, 205n34 Levinson, Andrei, 13, 71, 78; “The Cinema as ‘Anti-­Art’  ”, 81; in cinema debate, 28, 71, 73, 78–82; on economics of cinema, 82, 90; and “Les écrivains et l’époque” (Nabokov), 120; on German academics’ film aesthetics, 111; “The Magic of the Screen” (“Volshebstvo ekrana”), 72, 78, 81, 82; as model for Nabokov, 78, 82, 98; multilingual ­career of, 28, 78, 98; Muratov’s “The Cinema” as response to, 72, 81, 212n13; on Nabokov’s cosmopolitanism, 98, 117, 141; review of The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov), 82, 97, 98, 120; Rulʹ articles of, 214n49; “The Theater and the M ­ usic Hall” (“Teatr i miuzik-­kholl”), 79; “Won­ders of the Screen” (“Chudesa ekrana”), 79–80; Zveno reviews of, 214n38 Liebe macht blind (film), 110, 222n55 Der Liebling der Götter (Darling of the Gods) (film), 106, 107 life: cinema’s ability to capture, Nabokov on, 21, 39, 40, 49, 53–54, 58; cinema’s pervasive penetration in, Khodasevich on, 89–90; con­temporary, cinema as reflection of, Levinson on, 80; con­

I n d e x temporary, cinema as reflection of, Muratov on, 77; evanescence (unrepeatability, nepovtorimostʹ) of, in Mary (Nabokov), 45, 47; suffusion with cinema, in Nabokov’s fiction, 65–67, 115 literary criticism, origins of, MacCabe on, 198n46 lit­er­a­ture: vs. cinema, Nabokov on, 18, 23, 49, 119–20; movie industry’s impact on, Nabokov’s understanding of, 5, 135; power to make chance fatidic, Nabokov on, 5, 196n18 “The ­Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” (Kracauer), 63 “Liubovʹ karlika” (Nabokov). See “The Love of a Dwarf ” Livak, Leonid, 197n35, 202n91 Lloyd, Harold, 79, 96 Lolita (film), 185, 240n62 Lolita (Nabokov): “The Assistant Producer” and, 173; Eu­ro­pean reception of, 184; Greene on, 131; Hollywood’s response to, 185; interplay of Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope in, 29; screenplay of, fate of, 228n180; success of, 165, 166, 182, 184 Lombard, Carole, 147 Lorimer, George Buford, 146, 149–50, 151, 155, 163, 165 “The Love of a Dwarf ” (“Liubovʹ karlika”) (Nabokov), 41, 137, 205n42 “The Lover of Life” (Struve). See “L’amoureux de la vie” lower-­middle class, as consumers of mass culture, 5, 63–64; Kracauer on, 63; Nabokov on, 5, 58, 63–64; Znosko-­ Borovsky on, 92 Lubitsch, Ernst, 114, 181 lubok (term), in Nabokov’s descriptions of cinema, 51, 177 Lukash, Ivan, 41 The Luzhin Defense (Zashchita Luzhina) (Nabokov): American reader reports on, 166; audience for, 27; characters engaging with cinema in, 37, 90; cinema debates and, 28, 78, 93; cosmopolitan character in, 8; creative engagement with modernity in, 9; description of émigré apartment in, 51; engagement with culture theory in, 71, 89; on exaggeration as key quality of film experience, 61; French translation of (La course du fou), 3, 68, 82, 97, 123, 124, 144, 225n117; interplay of cinema and chess in, 28, 93,

265

94, 95; Levinson’s review of, 82, 97, 98, 120; mocking of cinema’s inauthenticity in, 61; Nabokov’s childhood memories and, 8; protagonist of, 93–97; Rus­sian émigré critics on, 97, 218n123; screenplay in, 58–59, 60; serialized in Paris, 99; US publication of, efforts ­toward, 144, 225n117; Western models for, charges regarding, 7, 9 Lyman, Miriam, 154–55, 158, 159 M (film), 110, 180, 221n53, 239n45 MacCabe, Colin, 11, 198n46 “Ma­de­moi­selle O” (Nabokov), 142, 196n12, 237n7 “The Magic of the Screen” (“Volshebstvo ekrana”) (Levinson), 72, 78, 81, 82 The Man from the U.S.S.R. (Chelovek iz SSSR) (Nabokov), 49–50, 150; advertising for, 5, 207n72; assistant director in, 50, 62, 173; characters engaging with cinema in, 37, 40; “The Cinema” compared to, 58; depiction of film studio in, 42, 49–50; En­glish translation of, 175; on-­screen image in, embarrassment at seeing one’s own, 51–52 Mann, Thomas: Doctor Faustus, 180; emigration to United States, 179; promotion of works of, 160; on “total exile,” 14; on translations, 12 Mara, Lya, 208n83 The Marriage of Corbal (film), 132 Marx, Karl, 7 Mary (Mashen’ka) (Nabokov), 42–49; American reader reports on, 166; assistant director in, 5, 50, 62, 173; characters engaging with cinema in, 37, 40; “The Cinema” compared to, 57, 58; creative engagement with modernity in, 9; En­glish translation of, 67, 175; film as meta­phor in, 65–66; film extras in, 42–44, 45, 46, 47–48, 176, 206n60; film production vs. reception in, 44–46; German translation of, 3, 65, 66f, 196n10; Ivanov on, 7; The Man from the U.S.S.R. compared to, 52; memory vs. film screen in, 45–46; memory vs. pre­sent in, 48; Nabokov’s childhood memories and, 8; protagonist in, 42, 48; references to Tolstoy in, 48, 206n64; themes of, 6; work on, Nabokov’s description of, 18 mass consumption, and cinematic culture, 35–36, 106, 108, 220n31

26 6 I n d e x

mass culture: Americanized, 36, 84, 87–88, 106; cinema’s place in, debates on, 20, 23, 71; and cinematic culture, synergistic relationship in Camera Obscura, 106, 118; confrontation with, in Nabokov’s fiction, 6; effect on individual/market, 220n38; impact on lit­er­a­ture, Nabokov’s understanding of, 5; Khodasevich on, 84, 116; Nabokov’s work within, 25, 117–18; paradoxes of, 84; temporal dynamics of, Nabokov’s attention to, 104–5; urban, phenomena associated with, 22, 32; worldwide diffusion of, Hollywood and, 2, 75–76 mass exposure, cinema as mechanism of, 51–52 mass tastes, and cinema: Levinson on, 79–80; Muratov on, 75–76, 77 The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov), 217n118 Maurus, Gerda, 65, 66f, 211n135 Mayer, Louis B., 222n55 Megaphone (Rupor) (newspaper), 50 Meiningen Players, 60 Memory of Love (Breuer), 146–47 Menschen im H ­ otel (Baum), 4, 68, 164 meta­phors, film, in Nabokov’s works, 65–67 Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer: response to Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 161; ­union with Ufa, 36 metropolitan miniatures, 31; Kracauer’s, 63; Nabokov’s, 31, 55 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 216n103, 228n190 Mickey Mouse, 106, 107, 107f, 220n31; omnipresence in Berlin, 108 migration: centrality to film industry, 202n92, 202n94; film noir as phenomenon of, 26. See also exile Milestone, Lewis, 137, 165, 205n42, 228n191 modern urban culture, as cinematic culture, 12–13, 22 Le mois (journal): “Les écrivains et l’époque” (Nabokov) in, 119–20; Struve’s portraits of Nabokov in, 121–23 montage, Soviet, 25 Moscow Art Theater, 61 Moses, Gavriel, 109, 221n43, 223n71 Mosjoukine (Mozzhukhin), Ivan, 79, 107 Motalka (Shklovsky), 205n47 Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, 161–62, 163, 173 Mouthpiece (Rupor) (newspaper), 50 moviegoing: “average” experience of, vs. auteur film theory, 54; Nabokov and, 13, 30, 34, 36, 63, 68, 199n57, 202n2, 204n15;

plea­sure of, in “The Cinema” (Nabokov), 58, 63; Rand and, 165 movie theaters, in Berlin of 1920s–1930s, 5, 32–35, 33f, 34f, 203n12. See also film palaces Muratov, Pavel, 71, 72; “Anti-­Art,” 72, 74; “Art and the ­People,” 72; “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf ”), 69, 70, 72–78, 81, 209n99, 212n13; in cinema debate, 28, 69, 70, 71, 72–78, 209n99; on economics of cinema, 74, 90; on Hicks Land, 75–76, 172; Images of Italy (Obrazy Italii), 72, 73; Khodasevich and, 82–83; Znosko-­ Borovsky’s response to, 90 Murnau, F. W., 54 Nabokov, Dmitri, 50 Nabokov, Sergei, 179, 195n2 Nabokov, Vladimir: adaptability and versatility of, 181; aristocratic lineage of, 156, 158; art of exile, 6, 11–12, 24, 26, 145; in cinema debate, 55, 71; and cinema praxis, 24, 123, 129, 135, 155–56; and cinematic culture, instrumentalization of, 19, 24, 99, 114, 118, 119; and continual pro­cess of rewriting for new audiences, 12; cosmopolitan identity of, 24, 98, 122; culture theory of, 23, 24, 118; engagement with cinema, 2, 6, 9–10, 11, 20, 23–24, 25, 28, 36, 185; Eu­ro­pean exile of, 4, 13–14; experience and fears as parent, 184; film palaces near residence of, 5, 34, 34f, 34t; friendship with Gessen, 27, 30, 63, 68, 179, 203n8; and ­f uture audience, orientation ­toward, 14–15; historical position between literary pre­de­ces­sors and ­f uture readers, awareness of, 15–19; insider-­outsider position of, 11–12, 27, 172; interwar ­career of, 23–24; Khodasevich’s influence on, 83; Levinson as model for, 78, 82, 98; and mass culture, work within, 117–18; and moviegoing, 13, 30, 34, 36, 63, 199n57, 202n2, 204n15; multilingual ­career of, 3, 142; non-­ Russianness of, charges regarding, 7–9, 97, 141; pseudonyms of, 30; relocation (escape) to United States, 1, 26, 29, 143, 168–69, 195n2, 236n135; residences in Berlin-­West, 32, 34, 34f; and Rulʹ (newspaper), 30, 31; and Rus­sian émigré community, 22, 24, 201n87; and Rus­sian literary tradition, engagement with, 14, 199n60, 217n118; tactical nature of literary engagements of, 24, 25; transnationalism

I n d e x of, 97, 98, 114, 117; in United States, activities of, 170–71, 182, 240n48. See also specific topics and titles of works Nabokov, Vladimir D. (­father), 30, 98, 179 Nabokova, Elena (­mother): correspondence with, 18, 31, 40–41, 55, 99, 124, 127, 205n34; death of, 195n2 Nabokova, Vera (wife): correspondence with, 134–35, 137–38, 171, 199n57, 224n108; support for husband’s work, 127 Naiman, Eric, 13, 114, 149, 240n61 Nash vek (newspaper), 218n8 Nazaroff, Alexander, 229n10; reader’s report on The Gift (Nabokov), 237n4; review of Nabokov’s fiction, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 151, 152, 155–56, 233n83 Nazis/Nazism: cinema’s role in rise of, 54; French collaboration with, 179; German intellectuals/filmmakers fleeing from, 132, 179; invasion of France, Nabokov’s escape prior to, 29, 169, 195n2. See also Hitler, Adolf Negri, Pola, 208n83 Némirovsky, Irène (Irina Lʹvovna Nemirovskaia), 124–25, 179 nepovtorimostʹ. See evanescence New Criticism, 11 New Directions Publishing, 169, 170 New ­Middle Ages (Novoe srednevekovʹe) (Berdiaev), 75 New Rus­sian Word (newspaper). See Novoe russkoe slovo New Yorker (magazine), review of Laughter in the Dark in, 159 New York Times (newspaper): review of Camera Obscura in, 138, 139, 144, 157–58; review of Laughter in the Dark in, 159–60 Nichols, Robert, 76, 172, 213n32, 213n36, 214n39 Nicol, Charles, 171, 237n8 The Night of January 16th (Rand), 166 Nikolai Gogol (Nabokov), 169; on “minor devil,” 96; on “poshlust”/poshlyi, 7, 59, 177 Nimzowitsch, Aaron, 93 Nock, Samuel, 159 Noir, Jacques, 112 Nonnenmacher, Hermann, 231n46 Nosferatu (film), 110, 133 Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski) (journal), 9 Les Nouvelles Littéraires (journal), 97 Novoe russkoe slovo (New Rus­sian Word) (newspaper), Nabokov’s interview for, 239n34, 240n51

267

Novoe srednevekovʹe (New ­Middle Ages) (Berdiaev), 75 Nuremberg ­Trials, 171 “A Nursery Tale” (Nabokov), 217n118 Obrazy Italii (Images of Italy) (Muratov), 72, 73 O’Brien, Pat, 146 Ofrosimov, Yuri, 49 Ogden, Archibald, 165 Oil for the Lamps of China (Hobart), 146 “On Generalities” (Nabokov), 16, 75, 120 “On the Cinema” (“O kinematografe”) (Khodasevich), 82–90, 114 Ortega y Gasset, José, 73 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (cartoon character), 107, 220n26 Otchaianie (Nabokov). See Despair otdykh. See rest Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) (journal), 9 The Oyster Princess (film), 181 Pabst, G. W., 136 Paine, Jonathan, 198n48 “Painted Wood” (Nabokov), 51 Pale Fire (Nabokov), 173 Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (film), 136 Paramount Studios: Rand and, 166; response to Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 161; ­union with Ufa, 36 Paris: Nabokov’s escape from, prior to Nazi invasion, 29, 143, 168–69, 195n2; Nabokov’s visits to, 122, 124, 126, 136, 137; Rus­sian Dramatic Theater in, 150, 228n190; Théâtre Concerto Parisienne in, 20 Paris, Rus­sian émigrés in, 1, 13, 78, 90, 97; “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov) on, 173, 174, 176; cinema debates among, 27; cinema mirroring existence of, 38; journals of, 7, 9, 72, 76, 78, 97, 114, 171; support for Nabokov, 28, 97, 98, 121–23, 124, 126, 129, 136, 138; terms for cinema among, 203n7; during World War II, 29, 195n2. See also cinema debates; specific names parody: in “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov), 172, 175–77; in “The Cinema” (Nabokov), 56, 59–60, 64; of cinema, in Nabokov’s fiction, 46, 117–18, 149; Dolinin on Nabokov’s strategy of, 14; in translation, risks associated with, 123, 143, 149, 154–55

26 8 I n d e x

Parry, Albert, 141; review of Nabokov’s fiction, 139, 141–42, 155–56 Parufamet, 36 “The Passenger” (“Passazhir”) (Nabokov): dialogue between writer and literary critic in, 4–5, 55; film audience in, 5, 63; film producer in, 5, 135, 173; on lit­er­a­ture’s power to make chance fatidic, 5, 196n18 Pertzoff, Peter, 140 Peter Schlemihl (Chamisso), 43 The Phantom Lady (film), 180 phonograph, in “Tolstoy” (Nabokov), 17 photography, cinema compared to, 2, 17, 22, 54, 81 “Photography” (Kracauer), 224n101 Pickford, Mary, 2 Piscator, Erwin, 207n71 “Pisʹmo v Rossiiu” (Nabokov). See “A Letter That Never Reached Rus­sia” playwriting: Jannelli and, 150; Nabokov and, 136, 150; Rand and, 166. See also screenplay(s); screenwriter(s) Pnin (Nabokov), 173 Podvig (Nabokov). See Glory Pola Negri (Rozenbaum/Rand), 165 Pommer, Erich, 114, 132 pomoshchnik rezhissera. See assistant director/ producer popu­lar culture. See mass culture poshliak (philistine/vulgarian): in The Cinema (Nabokov), 57, 59; figure of, in Nabokov’s Rus­sian work, 7 poshlostʹ (vulgarity), film and dangers of, Nabokov on, 21, 177 Poslednie novosti (newspaper), 78 post-­Europe/post-­European(s): Khodasevich on, 84; in The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov), 97; Muratov on, 73, 74, 75, 83, 213n26; Nabokov as, 98 “The Potato Elf ” (Nabokov), 137 “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable” (Nabokov), 142, 196n12 Prague, Rus­sian émigrés in, 1, 70, 195n2, 205n34 Preminger, Otto, 114, 180 pre­sent: cinema as dominant symbol of, 9; commitment to, in Nabokov’s fiction, 6, 9, 24; fleeting, Nabokov’s interest in, 40; vs. memory, in Mary (Nabokov), 48; overlaying of past on, film capturing, 47 Priglashenie na kaznʹ (Nabokov). See Invitation to a Beheading

prikazchik (shop clerk), in Nabokov’s works, 210n126; in “The Cinema,” 57, 77; in King, Queen, Knave, 64, 88 printing press, cinema compared to, 81 The Private Life of Henry VIII (film), 132 production, cinema: vs. reception, Nabokov’s fiction on, 38–39, 44–46, 51–52. See also film director/producer Production Code, Hollywood (1930), 161–62, 163, 173; demise of, 185, 240n62 promotion: cinematic culture and, 36, 106, 107f; journal serialization as strategy for, 124. See also advertisement(s) promotion, of Nabokov’s fiction, 4; ambition regarding (cinema praxis), 24, 123, 129, 135, 155–56; American literary agent and, 140, 143–44, 145, 225n117; American reviews and, 138, 139–42, 144, 155–56; Eu­ro­pean literary agents and, 125–26, 226n132; French publisher (Grasset) and, 124–25; German cinematic culture and, 65, 66f; Nabokov’s cosmopolitan identity used for, 29, 123, 141–42, 158; Rus­sian émigrés in Paris and, 97, 98, 121–23, 126, 138 Proust, Marcel, 9 pseudo-­art, cinema as, Khodasevich on, 115 pseudonyms, Nabokov’s, 30 Psycho (film), 185 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 59 Pushkin, Alexander, 24, 114; Nabokov compared to, 122 “Putevoditelʹ po Berlinu” (Nabokov). See “A Guide to Berlin” Putti, Lya de, 208n83 Rachmann, Sam, 35 Rand, Ayn, 165–66; The Fountainhead, 165, 166, 179, 184 Rasputin and the Empress (film), 158 Ray, Winifred, 225n114; translation of Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 111, 123, 126–29 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Nabokov), 142, 169, 170, 196n12 recreation (rekreatsiia): cinema and, Muratov on, 74; newly established forms of, 77 Republic Pictures Corporation, response to Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 160–61, 163 rest (otdykh): active, spectatorship as, Znosko-­Borovsky on, 91, 92; cinema as, Khodasevich on, 87, 88; cinema as, Muratov on, 74

I n d e x rezhisser. See film director/producer RKO Radio Pictures, 147, 161 Roche, Denis, 123 Roper, Robert, 143 Rossiia Nikolaia II i Lev Tolstoi (film), 200n73 Roy, Winifred. See Ray, Winifred Rozenbaum, Alisa, 165. See also Rand, Ayn Rubins, Maria, 2 Rulʹ (The Rudder) (newspaper), 30; “The Cinema” (Nabokov) published in, 55; cinematic culture in, 5, 31–32, 36; “Cine-­Nina: An Émigré Tale” (Noir) in, 112; closing of, 100–101; film advertisements in, 32, 36, 37f; “A Film Night” (Urvantsov) in, 43; Gessen’s film reviews for, 27, 30, 31, 50, 55, 100, 187t–­194t; “How I Was a Film Extra” (Lapiner) in, 42; Levinson’s articles in, 214n49; The Man from the U.S.S.R. (Nabokov) in, 49; Nabokov’s contributions to, 31; “The Passenger” (Nabokov) in, 5; successor to, 218n8; theater critic for, 49 Rupor (Mouthpiece/Megaphone) (newspaper), 50 “A Rus­sian Beauty” (“Krasavitsa”) (Nabokov), 64 Rus­sian Dramatic Theater, Paris, 150, 228n190 Rus­sian émigrés, 1, 13, 97; archaeology and anthropology of, Nabokov’s Rus­sian fiction as, 178–79; Camera Obscura (Nabokov) on plight of, 116–17; cinematic culture and, 13, 36, 176, 178; clothing of, memories of former life preserved in, 46; “Definitions” (Nabokov) on, 172–73; Dolinin on, 199n64; engagement with cinema, 2, 10, 13, 31, 37; as film extras, 42, 43, 45, 46, 174; “film sense” (chuvstvo filʹma) in writing of, 10; film’s historical value for, 21; German émigrés during World War II compared to, 179, 180; history of, in “The Assistant Producer” (Nabokov), 29, 172, 174, 176, 178, 238n26; as initial/primary audience for Nabokov’s fiction, 6, 68; as lost shadows (teni), in Mary (Nabokov), 42, 47, 48; mobility and self-­organization of, Yangirov on, 197n33; Nabokov’s address to (“Anniversary”), 16; Nabokov’s engagement with, 6, 22, 24, 201n87; older generation of, Nabokov’s polemic with, 15; perception of foreign environment as film shoot, in Mary (Nabokov), 65–67; plight during World War II, 179, 183, 195n2; self-­adaptation

269

and self-­translation among, 27; transnationalism of, 2–3, 199n64; younger, 15, 30–31. See also Berlin; cinema debates; Paris; specific names Rus­sian language: choice to publish in languages other than, 78, 82, 98; émigré usage of, external pressures on, 69; Nabokov’s inability to write in, grief and bitterness over, 171; as surface language in Nabokov’s fiction, 6; terms for cinema in, instability of, 32, 69, 203n7, 211nn2–3 Rus­sian literary culture: as international, Nabokov’s view on, 117; Nabokov in relation to, Nazaroff on, 233n83; Nabokov in relation to, Struve on, 121, 122; Nabokov’s engagement with, 14, 199n60, 217n118; threat to, Khodasevich on, 116 Safety Last (film), 96 Salter, George, 146 Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., response to Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 160, 163 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 2 Saturday Review (magazine), review of Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov) in, 159 Saunders, Thomas J., 36 Schach, Max: as film producer, 132–33; as Nabokov’s agent, 126, 133 “Schastʹe” (“Happiness”) (Nabokov), 40 Schreck, Max, 110, 133 Screen (journal). See Ekran screenplay(s): demand for, 41; ele­ments of, Nabokov on, 4; in The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov), 59, 60; mass-­produced, Gessen’s complaints regarding, 54; Nabokov’s engagement with, 24, 41, 136–37, 150; Rand and, 165; Rus­sian term for, 205n38; Rus­sian writers and, 41. See also adaptation(s), for screen/theater screenwriter(s): dearth of, Gessen on, 54; Nabokov’s work as, 21 Sebastian Knight (Nabokov). See The Real Life of Sebastian Knight self-­adaptation, Nabokov and, 27 self-­definition, exilic, 69 self-­translation, Nabokov and, 27, 97, 134, 142 sensatsiia (sensation), in film, Gessen on, 53 shadows (teni): boarding­house of, in Mary (Nabokov), 47; selling of, film extras and, 42, 46, 206n60; selling of, in Peter Schlemihl (Chamisso), 43, 47

27 0 I n d e x

shadows (teni) (continued) in film: diasporic dispersal of, 42, 43, 46, 47, 206n60; vs. evanescence (nepovtorimostʹ) of ­human life, 45, 47; Gorky’s reflections on, 19, 43; Nabokov’s reflections on, 42, 43, 46, 47; spectrality of émigré existence reflected in, 42, 47, 48; vio­lence ­toward, 44. See also ghostly images, in film Shakhmatnaia goriachka (Chess Fever) (Pudovkin), 59 Shakovskoi, Zinaida, 68 Shdanoff, George, 134, 135 Shifrin, Semyon, 136 Shklovsky, Viktor: on Berlin’s “Film Street,” 112; Motalka, 205n47 shop clerk. See prikazchik Shub, Esfirʹ, 200n73 “The ­Silent Danger” (“Nemaia opasnostʹ”) (Volkonsky), 78 ­silent films: close-up in, 39; Gessen on, 113; international language of, 2; loss of, 12, 198n49 Simmel, Georg, 62 Simon & Schuster (publishing com­pany): and Memory of Love (Breuer), 146; and Nabokov’s works, 144 “Sinema” (Gippius). See “Cinema” sinema (term), 69, 203n7 sinematograf (term), 69, 203n7 Siodmak, Robert, 114, 179, 180 Slonim, Marc, 125, 225n115, 226n132 Sobytie (Nabokov). See The Event Sogliadatai (Nabokov). See The Eye Soifer, Iosif, 70 Solus Rex (Nabokov), 240n51 sound films (“talkies”): debates on, 113; mocking of, in Nabokov’s fiction, 61; rapid rise of, 100, 106–7 Soviet montage, 25 Sovremennye zapiski (Annales contemporaines) (journal), 9, 97, 197n35; Camera Obscura (Nabokov) in, 123, 124, 137; “The Cinema” (Muratov) in, 72; The Luzhin Defense (Nabokov) in, 27, 97, 99; Nabokov’s relationship with, 9, 197n36, 240n51 Speak, Memory (Nabokov), 195n2 Spengler, Oswald, 73 Spionen (film), 211n135 sport: as anti-­art, Muratov on, 74, 75; chess as, 93; comparison with cinema, Khodasevich on, 84, 89, 91; comparison with cinema, Meyerhold on, 216n103

“Spring in Fialta” (“Vesna v Fialʹte”) (Nabokov), 4, 8, 94, 217n112 Stalin, Joseph, 179, 183–84 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 61, 228n190 Steamboat Willie (film), 106, 107 Sten, Anna, 130, 133 Sternberg, Josef von, 50, 158, 206n58 “The Storyteller” (“Der Erzähler”) (Benjamin), 213n26 Die Straße (film), 109–10, 111, 132 Straßefilm (street film), 28, 109; in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 28; and film noir, 109, 110, 180 Strauss, Harold, 159–60 Struve, Gleb, 141; defense of Nabokov, 8–9; and “Les écrivains et l’époque” (Nabokov), 119; Nabokov’s correspondence with, 101, 122, 126, 224n106; portraits of Nabokov, in Le mois (journal), 121–23, 141, 155; review of King, Queen, Knave (Nabokov), 152; suggested as translator for Camera Obscura, 127, 129 Symbolists/Symbolism: cultural reception of cinema and, 12, 198n54; spats among, 7; theatrical culture of, 51 “talkies.” See sound films Tartakower, Savely, 93 Tartüff (Tartuffe) (film), 54 Tauentzien-­Palast, Berlin (movie theater), 5, 34 teni. See shadows theater: cinema compared to, Znosko-­ Borovsky on, 90; used as conduit to cinema, 163–64. See also adaptation(s), for screen/theater; playwriting “The Theater and the ­Music Hall” (“Teatr i miuzik-­kholl”) (Levinson), 79 Theatre Arts Monthly (journal), 82 Théâtre Concerto Parisienne, 20 Théâtre Libre, 60 The Times (newspaper), “­Future of the Cinema” (Nichols) in, 76, 213n32, 213n36, 214n39 Toker, Leona, 231n46 Tolstoy, Alexandra, 168 Tolstoy, Lev: Nabokov compared to, 121, 122, 148, 234n105; references to, in Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 114; references to, in Mary (Nabokov), 48, 206n64 “Tolstoy” (“Tolstoi”) (Nabokov), 17–19; “Les écrivains et l’époque” compared to, 120;

I n d e x Levinson’s views reflected in, 81; on lit­er­a­ture as ultimate recording medium, 49, 120; media focus of, 17, 176, 178, 200n73 topical poems, as “metropolitan miniatures,” 31 “To the Revilers of Cinema” (“Khuliteliam kinematografa”) (Volkonsky), 78 translation(s): of Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 28, 117; cinema’s presence reduced in, 67; and film adaptations, 125; as integral ele­ment of Nabokov’s ­career, 3, 24, 27; literary creation conceived as, Nabokov on, 18; Muratov and, 72; Nabokov’s complaints regarding, 123, 124, 126, 127–28, 143; Nabokov’s fiction reading like, criticism of, 6–7, 68; Nabokov’s practice of self-­translation, 27, 97, 134, 142, 143; as Nabokov’s response to limitations of exile, 5; parody in, risks associated with, 123, 143, 149, 154–55; and promotion of Nabokov’s work, 142, 225n117; writers’ complaints regarding, 12. See also En­glish language; French language; German language transnationalism: cinematic culture and, 36, 116; and film noir, 26; Nabokov’s, 97, 98, 114, 117; of Rus­sian émigrés, 2–3, 199n64 Troubetzkoy, Laure, 225n115 Tschechowa, Olga, 106, 107, 107f Tsivian, Yuri, 11, 12–13; on Camera Obscura (Nabokov), 136; on first Rus­sian film spectators, 198n52; on prerevolutionary Rus­sian culture, 69; on “Tolstoy” (Nabokov), 200n73 Twentieth ­Century Fox Film Corporation, response to Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov), 160, 163 Tynianov, Yuri, 113, 223n71 Ufa (Universum-­Film Aktiengesellschaft): director-­unit mode of production in, 238n19; German émigré directors associated with, 180, 181; reopening of flagship theater of, 35; Schach at, 132; ­union with American companies, 36 Ufa-­Palast am Zoo, Berlin, movie premier at, 34–35, 36 Ukhtomsky, Nikolai, 50 Ullstein (publisher): and Baum’s ­career, 4, 164; and German translations of Nabokov’s novels, 65, 66f, 67, 100, 133

271

United States: audience in (Hicks Land), spread of tastes and habits of, 75–76, 172, 213n36; and cinematic culture, 36–37, 75–76, 106–8; German émigrés in, 26, 179–81; horn-­rimmed (tortoiseshell) spectacles as symbol of, 96–97, 217n118; influence on Eu­ro­pean culture, Rus­sian émigrés on, 23, 74, 75–76; Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov) rewritten for, 29, 140; and mass culture, 36, 84, 87–88, 106; Nabokov’s activities in, 170–71, 240n48; Nabokov’s first fictional response to experience in, 170; Nabokov’s relocation (escape) to, 1, 26, 29, 143, 168–69, 195n2, 236n135; promotion of Nabokov’s fiction in, 138, 139–42, 140, 143–44, 145, 155–58, 225n117; reviews of Nabokov’s fiction in, 138, 139–42, 151, 152, 155–58, 166; typology of films produced in, 53. See also American audience; American cinema Urvantsov, Lev, 43 Usai, Paolo Cherchi, 198n49 Valentino, Rudolph, 2, 79, 93; mass adoration following death of, 83, 84f–86f, 89 Valentinov, Nikolai Vladislavovich, 217n109 Vassiltchikov, George, 171 Vassiltchikov, Marie “Missie,” 171 Veidt, Conrad, 110, 222n55 “Vesna v Fialʹte” (Nabokov). See “Spring in Fialta” vio­lence: of film shoot, Ekran article on, 44; of film shoot, Nabokov on, 42, 43; of Weimar culture, Nabokov’s predictions about, 100 Volkonsky, Sergei, in cinema debate, 73, 78, 209n99 “Volshebstvo ekrana” (Levinson). See “The Magic of the Screen” Vozrozhdenie (The Re­nais­sance) (newspaper), 114 vulgarity. See poshlostʹ “V zashchitu kinematografa” (“In Defense of the Cinema”) (Kantor), 76–77 Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (film), advertisement for, 36, 37f The Waltz Invention (Nabokov), 136 Warner ­Brothers, 106 Weidlé, Vladimir, 116 Weimar culture: Nabokov’s predictions about, in King, Queen, Knave, 100; Rus­sian émigré perspective on, 31–32

27 2 I n d e x

Weimar film: American influences on, 36–37; and film noir, 181, 182; German Expressionism and, 54; self-­reflexivity of, 109 Weimar filmmakers: in Britain, 130, 132; parallels with Nabokov’s c­ areer, 26–27, 180; in United States, 26, 179–81 Western models and readers: importance for Nabokov’s fiction, criticism of, 6–8. See also American audience We the Living (Rand), 166 What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?) (Tolstoy), 114 White, Duncan, 229n16 white-­collar workers: as film consumers, 63–65; repetitive daily schedule of, 88; rise of, Weimar theorists on, 23. See also prikazchik (shop clerk) Wilde, Oscar, 219n20 Wilder, Billy, 180 Williams, Robert C., 218n6, 218n8 Wilson, Edmund, 229n16 Witte, Karsten, 63 The ­Woman in the Win­dow (film), 180 ­women, as film audience: Kracauer on, 63; Muratov on, 76, 213n37; Nabokov on, 63, 64; Nichols on, 213n37; Weimar theorists on, 64 “Won­ders of the Screen” (“Chudesa ekrana”) (Levinson), 79–80 Woolf, ­Virginia, 157 The World of Yesterday (Zweig), 180 The World Republic of Letters (Casanova), 97

World War I: and anti-­art, Muratov on, 75; and post-­European psyche, Muratov on, 213n26; spread of American mass culture ­after, 36 World War II: Nabokov during, 179, 183–84; plight of Rus­sian émigrés during, 179, 183, 195n2. See also German émigrés “Writers and the Age” (Nabokov). See “Les écrivains et l’époque” Yangirov (Iangirov), Rashit: archival discoveries of, 14; on figure of film extra, 43; on Levinson, 78; on Muratov’s “The Cinema,” 212n13; on Nabokov’s engagement with cinema, 9–10; on Rus­sian émigrés, 42, 43, 197n33, 206n61 Zashchita Luzhina (Nabokov). See The Luzhin Defense Zeisler, Alfred, 130 Zimmer, Dieter E., 221n54 Znosko-­Borovsky, Evgeny, 71, 90; Capablanca and Alekhine: The ­Battle for World Supremacy in Chess, 92–93; in cinema debate, 28, 71, 73, 90–92, 93, 209n99; on close-up in s­ ilent film, 39; on history of Rus­sian theater, 212n9; on ­labor as model of artistic reception, 88; multilingual ­career of, 28, 93, 216n107 Zveno (journal): film review section in, 78; “­Future of the Cinema” in, 76; Levinson’s reviews in, 214n38 Zweig, Stefan, 114; The World of Yesterday, 180