Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Nabokov, an outstanding Russian and American prose writer, poet, playwright and translator who became a unique phenomenon in 20th century literature. "My head speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear speaks French," the writer said of himself. What culture does his talent belong to? 

Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark is generally considered to be an English-language version of the novel Camera Obscura, published in December 1933 by Sovremennye Zapiski and Parabola (Berlin-Paris). 

The novel was then translated into English and a new English version was produced by Nabokov himself, entitled Laughter in the Dark, published by the American publisher New Directions on 6 May 1938. 

The novel is set in Germany in the 1920s. Art historian Kretschmar meets Magda, a 16-year-old girl with a dubious past. He leaves his wife and daughter and moves out of his home. After some time in Berlin, the hero learns that Magda has moved to another flat. He finds her and tries to shoot her. 

"This is my worst novel... The characters are hopeless clichés". In Camera Obscura, Nabokov envelops the central Flaubertian-Tolstoyan theme with many more or less explicit references to other classic texts about the doom of love’s passion, such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Prosper Mérimée’s short story Carmen, and Tolstoy’s novellas The Kreutzer Sonata and The Devil. 

Igor Smirnov, a well-known literary scholar, believes that Camera Obscura retells the story of the Mayakovsky and Briks families, which was previously reflected in the film Bed and Sofa by Abram Room, based on a script by Viktor Shklovsky. 

The fate of the novel, its adaptations and ways of reading it will be discussed in our next lecture. 

Lecturer 

Nina Scherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature. 

The lecture will be held online in Spanish with simultaneous translation into Russian as part of the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of Russia’s oldest university, SPbU.

Registration