Look at the harlequins!

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Title page of the American original edition

Look at the harlequins! ( Original English title: Look at the Harlequins! ) is the last completed novel by the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). It was published in 1974 and is an allusive parody of the author's biography.

Emergence

Nabokov wrote See the harlequins! from February 1973 to April 1974 in Montreux , Switzerland , where he had lived since 1961, and in the Italian towns of Cervia and Cortina d'Ampezzo , which he visited for entomological interests. The occasion was reading his biography from the pen of the American literary scholar Andrew Field, which the latter had sent him as a typescript. Nabokov was outraged that his biographer, whom he had trusted for a long time, was now writing "absurd mistakes, impossible opinions, vulgarities and inventions" about him. Therefore, he now began to write a biography of himself, which contained numerous errors and false claims about him. The book was published by McGraw-Hill in August 1974.

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Look at the harlequins! is the fictional autobiography of the first-person narrator Prince Vadim Vadimowitsch (the last name is never mentioned), a Russian-American writer. It covers the years from 1899 to around 1970 and focuses in particular on the love life, the medical history and the literary production of Vadim Vadimowitsch, whose biographical background she intends to shed light on. The first-person narrator comes from a noble Russian family. His unhappy childhood is overshadowed by the early death of his father and the psychiatric problems that have remained with him throughout his life. At times he grows up with a great-aunt who encourages him:

"'Stop moping [...] Look at the harlequins!' 'What kind of harlequins? Where?' 'Well, everywhere. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. [...] Come on! Game! Invent the world! Invent reality! '"

Vadim takes this advice to heart and, paradoxically, invents the great-aunt himself, which turns out to be an unreliable narrator : How much of what the first-person narrator reports the reader becomes real, how much he should consider error, imagination or lie never quite clearly. After the October Revolution , he fled Russia and killed a Red Army soldier while crossing the border illegally . He goes to Great Britain, where he is financially supported by the Russian Count Nikifor Nikodimowitsch Starov, who is perhaps his biological father. In the further course of the novel there are indications that Starov could also be the father of the three future wives of Vadim Vadimowitsch, i.e. that Vadim Vadimowitsch marries his own half-sister every time. He studied at Trinity College in Cambridge and met Iris Black, the sister of a fellow student , while on vacation on the Côte d'Azur . The two fall in love. Vadim Vadimowitsch reveals one of his psychological problems to her, which has to do with the imagination of space and time. He then makes her a marriage proposal, which she accepts. The couple moved to Paris, where Vadim established himself as a Russian-speaking writer. After a few years, Iris is murdered by the White Guard lieutenant Starov-Blagidze, apparently another child of Count Starov. Iris had an adulterous relationship with him.

A few years later, Vadim marries Annette Blagovo, who types his novels perfectly. To you, too, he admits his difficulties with spatial imagination. They move to the United States , where he becomes professor of literature at a university on the east coast. Vadim Vadimowitsch now writes his novels in English. In 1942 his daughter Isabel ("Bel") was born. He begins an affair with Dolly von Borg, whom he had met thirteen years earlier when he was eleven in Paris. His wife then leaves him. She dies in a cyclone. Vadim Vadimowitsch develops an erotic interest in his prepubescent daughter, with whom he travels across the United States. In order not to give in to this, he marries his former lover Louise Adamson. He also confesses his psychiatric problem to her beforehand. Bel is given to a boarding school in Switzerland. Vadim Vadimowitsch publishes a bestseller, which allows him to quit his job as a university lecturer. Bel has meanwhile married an American who is politically far left and moved with him to the Soviet Union . When Vadim Vadimowitsch learns that the couple has got into trouble there, he travels to Leningrad under conspiratorial circumstances , but cannot find his daughter. Back in the USA, he falls in love with a young woman who is just as old as his daughter for the day. He moves to Ticino with her, who is always referred to as “you” in the novel . When he admits to her that he has difficulties with mental orientation in space, she explains to him that his problem is based on a mix-up of space and time. - His wife agrees to the divorce, but before Vadim Vadimowitsch can marry again, he suffers another psychiatric crisis and then writes the novel See the harlequins! . The novel ends with a dialogue that Vadim Vadimowitsch leads with “you” from his sick bed, but which breaks off because he falls asleep and dies. In doing so, the novel violates the literary rule quoted in itself that the first-person narrator must not die in the novel.

Biographical parallels

Nabokov lets his first-person narrator lead a life that essentially resembles his: Born in Saint Petersburg in 1899 , fleeing from the Bolsheviks , writing first in Russian, then in English, staying in Paris, teaching at an American university, the he gave up after a bestseller success (Nabokov wrote Lolita , Vadim Vadimowitsch writes A Castle by the Sea , which had been the working title of Lolita for a while) and moved to Switzerland. Further indications of the identity of the author and protagonist are his nicknames "McNab" and "Vivian" - Vivian Darkbloom is the anagrammatic name that Nabokov chose for the fictional editor of his Lolita . Vadim Vadimowitsch publishes his Russian-language novels under the pseudonym V. Irisin, Nabokow his as V. Sirin.

Nevertheless, it becomes clear that both are not identical. The novel begins with a fictional publishing notice "More Books narrator (not significantly, the" author , after all it is Nabokov), which prove to be humorous variations of real novels Nabokov: Vadim Vadimowitschs Bauer suggests Dame corresponds approximately to Nabokov's King Queen Jack along with his chess novel, Lushin's Defense ; the fictional gift to the fatherland with the sub-title venture is a play on the real novel Die Gabe , whose original Russian title Дар Dar resembles the English dare ("venture"). The seemingly puzzling title See under True makes sense when you know that Nabokov's first English-language novel The True Life of Sebastian Knight was often searched for in library catalogs under Sebastian Knight , where you then came across the reference See under True . Vadim Vadimowitsch is also tormented again and again by the vague idea that he could only be a parody, a weak version of a far more talented and cruel Russian-American writer. At one point a fictional character confuses Vadim Vadimowitsch with his author: He congratulates him on two of his books and remembers seeing him as a child with his brother and both parents in a box at the Saint Petersburg Opera House : Vadim Vadimowitsch has to make it clear that his books are called differently and that as a half-orphan and only child he never went out with father and brother.

Finally, the differences that Nabokov marks between his own life and that of his protagonist are striking: he came from a high-ranking family, but not, as his biographer Andrew Field said, from a noble family. Unlike his protagonist, his childhood was extremely happy. Nabokov had also not committed any murder when he left Soviet Russia. Rather, this episode parodies Nabokov's own works, such as The Bastard Sign and Pale Fire . The incestuous relationship that Vadim Vadimowitsch cultivates with his underage daughter is ultimately a satirical echo of the naive, biographical reading of Lolita , which Nabokov assumed that he felt very much like his pedophile first-person narrator Humbert Humbert or was guilty of comparable crimes. In contrast to the polygamous Vadim Vadimowitsch, Nabokov was only married once. The title of the novel contains a discreet allusion to the first meeting with his future wife Véra in 1920. Like all books by Nabokov, the novel is dedicated to her. The German Anglist Herbert Grabes sees the central point of the novel in the polemics against biographical interpretations of literature: If Vadim Vadimowitsch writes novels similar to Nabokov, but leads a completely different private life, then literary works cannot be explained by the biographical details of their authors.

reception

Look at the harlequins! was mostly received negatively by the critics: It was narcissistic , solipsistic and overall disappointing. Richard Poirer's comparison in the New York Times with In Search of Lost Time and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man came to the conclusion that Nabokov, unlike Marcel Proust and James Joyce , never used his alter ego for his own to seriously question one's own identity. It is an often amusing game with allusions to one's own life and work. Andreas Isenschmid calls it See the Harlequins! in the time of "Nabokov's most unpleasant novel" and instead praises the clever commentary by the editor Dieter E. Zimmer .

The literary scholar Carl Carsten Springer, on the other hand, judges that Nabokov in Sieh the Harlequins! deliberately writing unoriginal. Using the means of self-reflection and self-parody, he masterfully mixes up his previous themes and motifs (especially the relationship between art and life) and thus creates a post-modern work of art.

expenditure

English:

German:

  • Look at the harlequins! German by Uwe Friesel . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979 ISBN 978-3-498-04618-7
  • Look at the harlequins! German by Uwe Friesel. In: See-through things. Look at the harlequins! Late novels . (= Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Works . Ed. By Dieter E. Zimmer , Vol. XII). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, ISBN 3-498-04650-0 , text pp. 171-500; Afterword and apparatus pp. 501-546

literature

  • D. Barton Johnson: Look at the Harlequins! In: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov . Routledge, New York 1995, pp. 330-340.
  • Herbert Grabes: Fictitious Biographies. Vladimir Nabokov's English novels . Mouton, The Hague / Paris 1977.
  • Carl Carsten Springer: Nabokov's Memory at Play. Look at the Harlequins! In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, Heft 3 (2002), pp. 359–374.
  • Norman Page: Nabokov: the critical heritage . Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1982, ISBN 0-7100-9223-7 . Contains an overview of the reception on p. 39 and these reviews and comments on the "Harlequins":

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer : Afterword by the editor . In: Vladimir Nabokov: Transparent things. Look at the harlequins! Late novels (= Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Works . Ed. By Dieter E. Zimmer, Vol. XII). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, p. 502.
  2. ↑ Andrew Field: Nabokov. His Life in Part . Viking Press, New York 1977.
  3. ^ Nabokov's diary of February 6, 1973, quoted in Brian Boyd : Nabokov. The American Years . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991, p. 614.
  4. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: Transparent Things. Look at the harlequins! Late novels (= Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Works . Ed. By Dieter E. Zimmer, Vol. XII). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, p. 188.
  5. ^ Carl Carsten Springer: Nabokov's Memory at Play. Look at the Harlequins! In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, Heft 3 (2002), p. 365 f.
  6. ↑ D. Barton Johnson: Look at the Harlequins! In: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov . Routledge, New York 1995, p. 332 ff.
  7. ^ Herbert Grabes: Fictitious Biographies. Vladimir Nabokov's English novels . Mouton, Den Haag / Paris 1977, p. 108 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  8. ^ Herbert Grabes: Fictitious Biographies. Vladimir Nabokov's English novels . Mouton, Den Haag / Paris 1977, p. 120 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  9. ↑ D. Barton Johnson: Look at the Harlequins! In: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov . Routledge, New York 1995, p. 336.
  10. ^ Herbert Grabes: Fictitious Biographies. Vladimir Nabokov's English novels . Mouton, Den Haag / Paris 1977, p. 125 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  11. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Notes . In: Vladimir Nabokov: Transparent things. Look at the harlequins! Late novels (= Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Works . Ed. By Dieter E. Zimmer, Vol. XII). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, pp. 524, 531 f. and 535.
  12. ↑ D. Barton Johnson: Look at the Harlequins! In: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov . Routledge, New York 1995, p. 336.
  13. ^ Carl Carsten Springer: Nabokov's Memory at Play. Look at the Harlequins! In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, Heft 3 (2002), p. 370.
  14. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Notes . In: Vladimir Nabokov: Transparent things. Look at the harlequins! Late novels (= Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Works . Ed. By Dieter E. Zimmer, Vol. XII). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, p. 530.
  15. ^ Carl Carsten Springer: Nabokov's Memory at Play. Look at the Harlequins! In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, Heft 3 (2002), p. 362.
  16. ^ Carl Carsten Springer: Nabokov's Memory at Play. Look at the Harlequins! In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, Heft 3 (2002), p. 363.
  17. ↑ D. Barton Johnson: Look at the Harlequins! In: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov . Routledge, New York 1995, p. 336.
  18. ^ Herbert Grabes: Fictitious Biographies. Vladimir Nabokov's English novels . Mouton, The Hague / Paris 1977, p. 128 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  19. ^ Carl Carsten Springer: Nabokov's Memory at Play. Look at the Harlequins! In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, issue. 3 (2002), p. 359.
  20. ↑ Richard Poirer: Look at the Harlequins! In: New York Times, October 13, 1974 ( online , accessed August 9, 2016).
  21. ↑ Andreas Isenschmid: Last words. Nabokov's “late novels” show that the all-rounder was not always able to do everything. In: Die Zeit vom November 20, 2003 ( online , accessed August 9, 2016).
  22. ^ Carl Carsten Springer: Nabokov's Memory at Play. Look at the Harlequins! In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, Heft 3 (2002), p. 359.
  23. ↑ The translator and publisher have taken the liberty of adopting the plural harlequin with the Nabokovian meter, which is not in the Duden. Note on p. 7