Books: Face Value

DESPAIR by Vladimir Nabokov. 222 pages. Putnam. $5.

The novelist’s past has surpassed his present; there is now more old Nabokov around than new. The new Nabokov is represented by the man who has written five novels in English, the old by the Russian émigré, who, cast into exile by the Revolution, wrote eight novels in his mother tongue. Six of these have so far been translated into English, putting the old Nabokov one up on the new. Despair, the sixth, has been published in English twice.

Nabokov’s original translation in 1937 fell upon an indifferent market (he had yet to write Lolita, which was to make him famous). Most of the copies of Despair remained in the London publisher’s custody; in 1940 a Luftwaffe bomb reduced them to confetti. Nabokov explains all this in a foreword to this revised translation—also his own —and enters his usual caveat against reading anything into the book that isn’t there: “Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth.”

In that case, Despair is a murder story, although it is not one to be found in the racks of every bus station. On a trip to Prague in 1930, Hermann Karlovich, a Russian émigré in the chocolate-manufacturing business based in Berlin, meets a vagrant whose face is astonishingly like his own. Or so it appears to Hermann; Felix Wohlfahrt, the tramp, does not notice the resemblance. Back in Berlin, Hermann broods. It soon becomes clear that he is a schizophrenic and that his thoughts are murderous. As innocent accomplices to his plot he recruits three people—including his wife—lures Felix to a little lakeside wood near Berlin, and after some elaborate preliminaries, shoots him.

The crime is solved almost at once. Not for a moment does anyone mistake the dead man for his killer. Hiding out in France awaiting arrest, Hermann sets down in his last weeks the narrative that constitutes Nabokov’s book, and rages at the perversity of the world, which will not accept at face value—refuses even to recognize—his work of deceptive art.

Since Nabokov fans seem irresistibly drawn toward his books in search of deep commentary, it would seem that the author’s protestations for once ought to be respected. Accordingly, Despair rates as follows:

> As a general novel by Nabokov: soso.

> As crime literature: better than average.

> As the study of a schizophrenic mind: completely valid, fascinating and successful.

> As a bag of literary tricks (puns, worldplays, etc.): full.

> Hidden meanings: none.

*The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Bend Sinister (1947), Puin (1957), Lolita (1958) and Pale Fire (1962).