The Shop Window Quality of Things

1920S Weimar Surface Culture in Nabokov'sKorol ́, dama, valet

Bibliographic Data

ID4205993
AuthorsLuke Parker (0000-0002-1881-6898, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume77
Issue2
Pages390-416
Publication date2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSlavic Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/slr.2018.128
OpenAlexW2870381383
LanguageEN
References cited35

By resituating the original 1928 Russian version ofKorol ́, dama, valet(King, Queen, Knave) in the context of Weimar Berlin, this article shows that Vladimir Nabokov's second novel is the culmination of a serious engagement with a flourishing German visual and commercial culture. The appeal ofKorol ́, dama, valetto both native Germans and Russian émigrés based in Berlin is shown to be a sympathetic yet strategic manipulation of the tropes and commonplaces of Berlin's renowned "surface culture." The article presents Nabokov as an entrepreneurial figure, exploiting his ambivalent status as both an insider and outsider in Berlin for success in translation as well as among the Russian émigrés. Uncovering Nabokov's complex relations to European visual culture, I show that the fusion of materiality and display inKorol ́, dama, valetcan be understood through the concept of the "shop window quality of things." Drawing on contemporary German sources, this article reveals the Russian novel, so thoroughly repurposed thirty years later in the 1968 English translation, to be a perceptive, even prophetic, analysis of a dynamic and attractive Weimar culture already beginning to spin out of control

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Culmination · Flourishing · German · Insider · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Political science · History · Law · Visual Culture and Art Theory · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies

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