Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kamera obskura
by Thomas Seifrid
page two of three

That visual imagery saturates Nabokov's oeuvre hardly needs elaborating here. With his copiously proliferating scintillations, semblances, Zembla, mirrors, window panes, mimicry, and so forth, Nabokov is, if anything, even more self-consciously visual than Tolstoy. Kamera obskura manifests this preoccupation in a variety of ways. It makes frequent descriptive reference to light and its effects: anxious as his wife gives birth—itself an episodic borrowing from Tolstoy—Kretschmar sees before his eyes “a fine dark rain like the flickering of some very old film” (18) (“melkii chernyi dozhd’, vrode mertsaniia ochen’ starykh kinematograficheskikh lent,” 11-12; compare the “wavering halflight,” “kolebliushchiisia polumrak,” in Anna's passage); it positions mirrors to reflect goings-on, as when Magda visits Kretschmar's apartment (41; this is upgraded in the English to “mirrors were having plenty of work that day” 61); it even offers coherent pronouncements on the ethics of viewing (which generally appears in negative form, as in the example of Kretschmar's voyeuristic designs on Magda—at one point he imagines that even if he were to be executed the next day, he still could not resist ogling her; 33) and, under the influence of Wilde, of portraiture (from the “voguish artist Kok,” who has done a portrait of “the film actress Dorianna Karenina” [7] to Gorn's pornographic drawings of Magda).

All this adds up to a familiar Nabokovian gesture. But whereas Nabokov's visualism is often thought of as either peculiar to his form of “genius” or a reflection of the esoteric modernist culture that surrounded him in the Russia of his youth, the Tolstoyan link suggests that at least some of this phenomenon may derive from a rather unexpected nineteenth-century predecessor. For the visual episodes in Kamera obskura, of formative importance for the later poetics and metapoetics of vision in Nabokov's works, turn out to revolve around the Tolstoyan complex worked out in Anna Karenina; or to phrase it as a more specific intertextual claim, the “seduction” scene in Nabokov's novel, in which Kretschmar meets Magda in the Argus cinema, is a direct borrowing of the scene in Tolstoy's novel in which Anna reads on the train (and which in turn constitutes her real seduction scene).

Like Anna's, Kretschmar's seduction takes place within a dark chamber evocative of Plato's cave—pointedly so in his case, given the novel's identification of the cinema with the camera obscura—and like Anna he there encounters a sequence of fictitious events which he finds hard to follow ("Now there was no longer any point in watching the screen— “Gliadet’ na ekran bylo seichas ni k chemu” 14; the English version simply has him come in at the end of the film). If anything the technological upgrading of the scene from railway carriage to cinema, and along with that to the visual culture of modernism, strengthens the episode's Platonic and metaphysical overtones. As Yuri Tsivian points out, one difference between magic lantern shows and the cinematic experience which supplanted them was that, whereas in the former light was projected from behind the screen, in the latter it came from behind the viewer, and this combination of darkness with a ray of light projecting from behind the “shadows” of another reality strongly suggested the spatial arrangement of Plato's cave. For the Russian Symbolists this association augmented a belief that artistic images were a more genuine form of reality than the material world or human society, whose forms were but “pale shadows, like cinematic apparitions.” Hence the cinematic space with its “shadows on the wall” served as a compelling index to the existence somewhere else of another, more “authentic” space (69-70; English 49-50).8

Like Anna, Kretschmar further supplants the film episodes with shadow-imagery drawn from his own life: his budding fantasies about Magda, sparked by his belief that she looks like an Old Master portrait, just as Anna thinks of Vronsky as the hero of a novel. Moreover, in the scene's most telltale intertextual sign, Kretschmar's journey into the chamber is guided by a lantern—in Russian it is Magda's “[elektricheskii] fonarik,” the very same word as for Anna's lantern—whose resemblance to any light of truth (Magda appears a vestal guardian of mysteries who parts the curtain for Kretschmar [14]) is quickly revealed as a sham, while in both works the fonarik ultimately resolves itself into the torch lighting expulsion from Eden (Anna's candle, whose harsh light illuminates her life just before her suicide; and the ironically literal Eden of Nabokov's novel, in which a naked Gorn maliciously cavorts in the garden before the blind Kretschmar).9

Both Anna and Kretschmar, however, are only fooling themselves as they rush headlong into a moral trap, and for all the differences between the two authors Nabokov's indictment of cinema as cheap deceit is on the whole carried out in a very Tolstoyan spirit. In fact, the Tolstoy-cinema link here may not be fortuitous at all. It is interesting to note that in a discussion of Anna Karenina Saul Morson comments that, “For Anna, everything seems to fit a melodramatic plot centering around a grand and fatal passion. . . . This is why she so often seems to resemble Greta Garbo playing Anna Karenina” (142). As we have seen, Nabokov's novel makes overt reference to Tolstoy's; but Greta Garbo also appears when Kretschmar catches Magda looking at a photo in a book in which Garbo is shown putting on makeup in front of a mirror (53)—Magda presumably imagining herself as Garbo playing Anna? Nabokov may well have seen one of the earlier film adaptations of Tolstoy's novel, the 1927 Love, in which Garbo played Anna opposite John Gilbert (Morson 142). Is it possible that Kamera obskura was born precisely out of this cinematic refraction of Tolstoy's novel? In any event, if one puts the word “love” in quotes, as the title of that film, the postman's trite comment on Kretschmar's affair neatly sums up Nabokov's handling of cinema in the novel: “Love is blind” (185; “Liubov slepa” 126). Moreover, a distinctly cinematic Tolstoy does make an appearance in the novel, not in the Argus scene proper, but in the passage comparing Kretschmar's emotional state before Anneliza gives birth with the jumpiness of “very old movies” (11-12). The English version adds a parenthetical remark identifying just which film it is that flickers: “(1910, a brisk jerky funeral procession with legs moving too fast)” (18). The notable Russian funeral of that year was Tolstoy's, and if one wants to get Bloomian about it, Nabokov here buries his influential predecessor.

In Tolstoy the deceptive shadow-theater is a transient, if consequential, way of seeing; other ways predominate. In Kamera obskura, however, it supplies the text's central metaphor for human knowledge. Nabokov dwells particularly on its theme of false vision, or to be more precise, on forms of vision that are really blindness, which he literalizes in Kretschmar's sorry fate. But what especially marks the distance Nabokov has travelled from Tolstoy, just as it marks an aesthetic shift from late realism to modernism, is Nabokov's parsing of the camera obscura as a symbol not just for reading, for the reception of artistic images, but for their production or authorship as well.

This awareness arises out of what could be described as an often undertaken, but never completed, attempt within Nabokov's works to exit the camera obscura and gain a vantage point from without. On the one hand this impulse intensifies the enclosing aspect of Plato's cave, which in Nabokov's handling comes to resemble a trap. This is what the novel's title directly implies about the cinema, since in Nabokov's cross-linguistic pun “kamera” also means (in Russian vs. Latin) “prison cell,” but the motif also ramifies widely through the text's assorted episodes of entrapment: most obviously Kretschmar's imprisonment at the villa, where he is taunted by the unseen and ironically naked Gorn, and is lied to about the disposition of the villa's rooms and even the very colors of the walls (a neat inversion of Plato's cave, since real things are there but the observer is blind); but also Magda's visit to the apartment, in which she locks Kretschmar up in his daughter's room; and before that—ur-source of all this trapping—Gorn's locking up of the landlady Levandovskaia in order to steal Magda.

8. Appel also comments on the relation between the Renaissance camera obscura and Nabokov's portrayal of the cinema. Calling cinema “the preeminent illusionistic art,” he remarks that “the cranium is a lonely projection booth, and it is appropriate that Nabokov's first attempt at a cinematic fiction should have been entitled Camera Obscura” (255).

9 Appel notes that in this passage “Margot guards the enchanted cave of myth and legend” (266). Proposing, in his lecture on Anna Karenina, to analyze Anna's and Vronsky's dreams about the weird peasant without resorting to Freudian banalities, Nabokov's quips, “I shall go with my little lantern through those murky passages of the book where three phases of Anna's and Vronski's nightmare may be traced” (175).