Nabokov's seventh novel Despair, tells the story of a Russian emigre who encounters his perfect double, a German tramp, lolling on the side of a forested Czech road with a single violet in his breast pocket. The book was first published in Russian in 1936, and was translated into English by Nabokov the following year. The edition I have had the good fortune to read is Nabokov's heavily revised 1965 English translation. The changes the author chose to make after almost 30 years of literary maturing are unknown to me and I can't bring myself to care about the what or the why of them. Nabokov was merely taking advantage of the novelist's privilege of a revised edition, something Orson Welles often lamented the film director did not possess. I'm not interested in examining the differences in a text, what happens in one moment of artistic creation can have a thousand reasons, none of them relevant in the end to the work, or at least one's enjoyment of it.

The image of the violet in the tramps breast pocket is a powerful one that recurs throughout the novel. Our narrator Hermann theorizes that his double Felix has loved violets since his childhood in the faux backstory Hermann conjures up for him after murdering and assuming his identity. In his foreword Nabokov denies any similarities between Hermann and his more famous narrator Humbert Humbert. Superficially they are quite similar their prose styles however, are quite distinct. Humbert, to me, has always felt like a forest stream flowing by, when I think about reading Lolita I feel the urge to stoop down and take a drink of it's fresh, cool water prose from my palm. Hermann's prose feels more like constant stops and starts, he gets knocked down only to pick himself back up, dust off his shoulders and restart his ascension to glory and bliss, his perfect, idyllic future. Where Humbert is caught in the end and submits to his fate Hermann is not, he continues to reside in his incorruptible world of fantasy and delusion up to the end.

Nothing is exactly clear in the novel, Hermann is completely oblivious to his wife Lydia's infidelity. He is under the impression that his wife adores and is utterly devoted to him. The reality is more one of financial dependence and browbeaten timidity. Similarly, his so called "perfect double" proves in the end to be nothing of the kind and his plot to murder Felix in his stead is immediately seen for what it is by the police, much to Hermann's dismay. Even his own nervous breakdown is rationalized away by the narrator, though one can't help but be impressed by his escape plan in that tucked away French mountain town of claiming his imminent arrest has been staged for a film and that the townspeople should do everything in their power to aide his escape. Hermann's delusions are total, Humbert's delusions are merely to rationalize himself to himself. This won't stop people finding trace's of Hermann in Humbert, or prefiguration's of Humbert in Hermann, but I find the whole notion exhausting, despite the obvious attractions of the Hermann/Humbert doubling in a review of a book about doubles.

Memory, as always in a Nabokov novel, plays a big role in the plot and structure of the book. As we all do, Hermann is constantly mixing memories. The first time he visits his wife's cousin and lover Ardalion's plot of land on a lake it is summer, yet images of snow keep trickling in already recalling the murder that has yet to take place in the narrative. Memory has always featured heavily in Nabokov's works. Starting with his first novel Mary, whose narrator spends the novel nostalgically recalling his first love and anticipating her imminent arrival to join her husband(the narrator's fellow lodger), in Berlin. He plots to steal her away from her oaf of a husband but right as his plan has been executed and he can finally have her, something changes, it is no longer a fantasy, reality is here the veil is lifted, the spell broken and he walks off into his new life, leaving the past behind.

Hermann also leaves the past behind at the end of Despair, but rather than a clean break from it he merely sinks further into delusion, convincing himself that he is the star of a film. Hermann also makes a big deal of the ingeniousness and originality of his murder plot, not realizing he took it straight from one of his wife's detective novels which he constantly derides. In Despair it is never clear what is real and what is delusion, in the end it doesn't really matter. What Nabokov has written is it's own world, Hermann's world and so while what is "really" going on may be different from what Hermann perceives and remembers, it doesn't much matter. The matter of the book is Hermann's recollection of events, not the events themselves. Much like how in Ada or Ardor Van Veen is furious at the blackmailing photographer's poisoning of Van's "mind pictures" of his and Ada's youthful romps in the field, I feel a similar contempt for those who attempt to explain the book the book through the lense of what's "actually" happening. It spoils the magic of the book when you spend too much time on what's the "reality" of the plot is. What I find pleasurable in this book is Hermann's voice, his yellow gloves, Felix's violets, the driving of his car. His wife's infidelity, his likely lack of resemblance to Felix matters little to me though the understanding of these facts are admitted necessities.

The more I read the more I tire of literary criticism and connections and influence and all the rest. At first it seems fascinating to trace the lineage of a work, to weigh the influence of one giant against another, but over time it becomes almost schizophrenic, what matters is the work itself not its similarities to another or lines and scenes it has cribbed from somewhere else. Sure, it is interesting to see what a writer read and took from other writers, it can be very telling, but it has nothing to do with the work in the end. What a writer reads and steals from other writers is nothing more than the grain of sand which the oyster uses to form the pearl around, necessary of course, but more or less indifferent. What matters is what the writer sees in it, not what unquantifiable influence it may have had on the writer's own work which of course is far less than academia would have you believe. The great joy of reading has always been to see your own thoughts expressed far better than you could express them yourself, but fundamentally, your thoughts. I may appreciate a description or an image, but that doesn't mean I'd use it myself unless it was already one with my own taste. The image of Hermann shooting Felix in the back, the puff of smoke, the sound of gunshot emanating through the silent, snow covered forest, the twist of the body, the blood pouring out, the sudden finality of death, the immaculate groomed corpse, it speaks to me, but it was already speaking from within me before I ever read those pages, it was merely a vein for the blood of those thoughts and feelings to flow.

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