Nabokov's Card Trick

by Vladimir Nabokov translated by Dmitri Nabokov
(McGraw-Hill, $5.95)

This may be considered as the brilliant second novel of a twenty-eightyear-old Russian expatriate, the brilliant translation of that fortyyear-old novel by the author’s son, Dmitri, or as the not quite so brilliant new novel by an aging American citizen now residing in Switzerland.

Here then is a work of Nabokov’s youth, and the early Nabokov is no mean author; we are indeed in the presence of the same man who wrote Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire. We find the same magic language, as this description of a passenger train’s arrival testifies: “Slowly, surely, smoothly, the huge iron cavity of the station drew in the train, which at once grew sluggish, and then, with a jolt, redundant.” However, a word of caution on old and new Nabokov is in order here, since the best elements of that sentence, the last six words, seem to be newly added, an admirable second thought forty years after the fact (I am comparing not the unobtainable original, but a German translation of that original, which Nabokov believes to be “competent”). The plot and the movement of the prose are mainly the creation of a younger Nabokov, bravely experimenting with an original, highly mannered approach to fiction.

King, Queen, Knave is about a love triangle, where two of the members attempt to murder the third. The plot is deliberately standard fare, and the three characters, young Franz, Dreyer the financier, and Dreyer’s wife, Martha, are deliberately kept to simple proportions. The story is less concerned with psychology than with performing a rather marvelous set of variations on a familiar theme. The plot is, paradoxically, not only dangerously simple but also dangerously elaborate, yet Nabokov keeps his skis together and skims downhill with ease.

According to Andrew Field’s biography, the novel draws its title from a Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name, where a pack of cards engages in a palace revolution. While Nabokov’s story apparently has little to do with Andersen’s, it is presumably no accident that the novel has thirteen chapters, the number of cards in a suit. The characters are two-dimensional, like cards, and the variations on a conventional plot suggest that the novel is one permutation of dealing a hand. Nabokov, of course, adds certain mystifications in his foreword, and because his art involves an aesthetic resonance between the parts of his composition, this preface is an integral part of the book.

The most structured situation in fiction is the duel, a “slow dance on the killing ground.” The ritual is standard and accepted, and only the variation is important. In dueling stories (written by, among others, Dumas, Lermontov, Pushkin, Chekhov, Mann), character is always secondary to the surprise ending. In Nabokov’s dueling story, “An Affair of Honor,” the protagonist never even shows up. The love triangle is the second most structured form, and the young Nabokov flexes his muscles in tracing its convolutions. And the challenges he sets himself are numerous; for instance, in the second chapter nearsighted Franz breaks his glasses and we find ourselves wandering in a bright, impressionist haze, dazzled by unexpected stabs of sunlight.

Most comparable with this latest novel is Laughter in the Dark. Both novels are set in Germany, and while the one takes its title from a “fairy-tale,” the other actually starts, “Once upon a time. . .” Laughter is a different set of variations on the love triangle, again culminating in death. In these artificial stories, the reader is taught to relish the author’s surprises, the carefully set up situations, complete with conventional foreshadowing, where the reader’s initial recognition of a situation he is familiar with from countless thirdrate novels suddenly explodes when the plot abruptly, drunkenly swerves in an unpredictable direction. As the reader hurries after this wandering monster, it settles down to a familiar pace, again throwing the (always gullible) reader off his guard.

In the foreword, Nabokov mentions his “amiable little imitations of Madame Bovary.” Anna Karenina is also dropped into the discussion, and at one point in the novel Martha is described as being “no Emma, and no Anna.” In Nabokov’s peculiar logic this is an admission that Martha’s character is to some extent borrowed from both of these heroines. Certainly Nabokov has taken more from Flaubert than his heroine’s hairstyle (center part, chignon). Flaubert was often accused of being a cruel, inhuman author, because of the impartial observations and apparent objectivity of his lucid novel. Much the same charge has followed Nabokov throughout his writing career. It is important to realize that this objectivity is a learned part of Nabokov’s art, and King, Queen, Knave, written in 1928, was the laboratory where he first tried out his lessons.

In an admission that for once is neither mystifying nor coy, Nabokov explains that this second novel of his career used German characters in a German setting as a “subtle protective device”:

At a stage of gradual inner disentanglement, when I had not yet found, or did not yet dare apply, the very special methods of recreating a historical situation that I used ten years later in The Gift, the lack of any emotional involvement and the fairytale freedom inherent in an unknown milieu answered my dream of pure invention.

That is to say, wrestling with the problem of total control, probably the most distinguishing and admirable feature of his art, Nabokov found it necessary to deal with the unfamiliar because he could not yet handle the familiar with objectivity and confidence. His first novel, set in his own émigré society, apparently had escaped that control. To venture a dictum, he was not yet able to make the familiar strange; he could not yet transform reality, he had to create it anew; he was not yet able to accomplish what Flaubert accomplished. Nabokov had not yet mastered that dual role of actor and observer in his own life, would not yet have been capable of his later, marvelous autobiography, or of The Gift, or of Pnin — novels close to his own experience. In this sense, King, Queen, Knave is a minor novel in the Nabokov canon.

The surprise appearance of Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov in the last two chapters seems to belie the above statements. Calmly sitting at a restaurant table, speaking Russian and staring “arrogantly” at the book’s main characters, Nabokov is insisting not only on his control of events but on his control of himself. He has, however, only now been added to his novel; he was not in the 1928 version.

The brief appearance by the Nabokovs is a pleasant idea, for they culminate the small galaxy of unlikely characters who circle around the main story. Franz’s landlord, for instance, believes he has invented his lodger and can change himself into anything he wants; his name is Enricht, and he calls himself Menetek-El-Pharsin. We know he is mad. because the handwriting is indeed on the wall: there is only one creator, Nabokov. But Enricht may not be a completely false Proteus, for when a large dog becomes a character in the novel, we occasionally have the strange feeling that it may be this lunatic landlord, getting kicked for performing the impossible. And an inventor creates some lifelike robots (which break down in a hilarious scene), echoing the incomplete life of the novel’s main characters. It is a madcap world, indeed, that floats just on the periphery of our perception, and though the characters of this novel are too thin to cast shadows, bright shades are here anyway, dancing.

Leon Edel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for Volumes Two and Three of his biography of Henry James.

John Updike’s newest novel, Couples, was published in April.

Robert Coles is the author of Children of Crisis.

Charles Nicol is at work on a study of Nabokov.

Peter Avery, a student of Persian literature, is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Marshall Cohen is on the philosophy faculty of Rockefeller University.

Edward Weeks, Herbert Kupferberg, and Phoebe Adams contribute to the Atlantic every month.