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

In epistemological terms this anxiety over enclosure within a box represents the undermining of the Tolstoyan conviction that, barring willful blindness (Anna is always squinting), the eye can see the world clearly and directly ascertain its truth. As a symbol for the human predicament, which is how it tends to function in Nabokov's works, this enclosing box is further complicated by that characteristic suspicion of his that outside the given box entrapping us there exists a further box or even a series of boxes, raising doubts about whether in the end one ever could truly escape the camera obscura. Kretschmar is not a solitary, privileged viewer in the cinema, since, as he should well have noticed, it is named after “Argus,” in Greek myth the hundred-eyed guardian of Io. As he watches he is being watched, and what he thinks is carried out in darkness is seen by myriad eyes. This is part of the “Cartesian nightmare” described so well by William Carroll in the context of Despair, and it was to be rewritten soon after as the literally incarcerating cell (“kamera”) of Priglashenie na kazn' (Invitation to a Beheading), out of which Cincinnatus attempts several times to look, and into which there gazes on him through a peephole a mysterious (and, we suspect, authorial) eye. But Nabokov's treatment of this symbol does not remain on the level of anxieties over what we can or cannot see, or even whether we are seen from without; for in his works the puppet-like victim's blindness typically generates as its corollary the superior vision of an observer whose presence is more or less explicitly registered in the text. In Kamera obskura one such observer is Gorn, who delights in pointedly voyeuristic forms of cruelty (as when he torments poor blind Kretschmar, or in the sadistical practical jokes he enjoys, such as watching a blind man sit down on a freshly painted bench, 98); but the principle is also realized in our own readerly participation in the viewing of such tragedies, including the central one involving Kretschmar. To the extent that a figure like Gorn stands outside of the “boxes” in which his victims are trapped, and enjoys or even orchestrates that entrapment, he assumes the position of author in relation to their world.

The situation in which a character is, as it were, displayed within an epistemological chamber which both author and reader transcend and view from without in fact occurs often in Nabokov's works and forms one of the cardinal features of their metapoetic self-awareness.10 A particularly vivid example is the scene in chapter five of Dar (The Gift) in which the émigré Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski lies dying, bedridden and thus entrapped within his room. Pondering the possibility of an afterlife but convinced that it is gloomy and raining outside, Chernyshevski lets his thoughts reach the despairing conclusion that, “'There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining'" (312) (“'Nichego net. Eto tak zhe iasno, kak to, chto idet dozhd'”; 353). But Nabokov then steps back to reveal the boundaries of the box within which these ruminations take place: it is in fact not raining, the springtime sun is playing on the roof tiles, it is just that the woman upstairs is watering the flowers on her balcony and the water is dripping down. It is our superior vision, thus granted, which reveals knowledge from which the entrapped Chernyshevski is barred, and the scene as a whole becomes a metapoetical analog to Gorn's blind man sitting down on a painted bench. Entire works can be given over to this device, such as Otchaianie (Despair), whose narrator Herman we watch stumble blindly through a veritable gallery of literary allusions--accessible to us as readers if we have done our homework--that ought to have warned him off his path of crime (Carroll). So, too, is Humbert Humbert in Lolita only dimly aware, and that in retrospect, of the shouting chorus of clues to Quilty which has surrounded him from day one ("But somewhere behind the raging bliss, bewildered shadows conferred--and not to have heeded them, this is what I regret!" 124).

Or the following example, which brings the Tolstoyan borrowing around full circle to deposit it, once again, in a train: at one point in “Vesna v Fial'te” ("Spring in Fialta," 1938) the narrator (Viktor) is seeing off his peripatetic love (Nina) at a Vienna railway station. Nina disappears into the carriage, then reemerges at the compartment window behind whose glass she appears the imprisoned inhabitant of another world, who moreover is the unwitting object of voyeurism from without:

a zatem skvoz’ steklo ia videl, kak ona raspolagalas’ v kupe, vdrug zabyv o nas, pereidia v drugoi mir, i bylo tak, slovno vse my, derzhavshie ruki v karmanakh, podgliadyvali nichego ne podozrevavshuiu zhizn’ za oknom, pokuda ona ne ochnulas’ opiat’, po steklu barabania, zatem vskidyvaia glaza, veshaia kartinu, no nichego ne poluchalas’; kto-to pomog ei, i ona vysunulas’, strashno dovol’naia; odin iz nas, uzhe vynuzhdennyi shagat’, peredal ei zhurnal i Taukhnits (po-angliiski ona chitala tol’ko v poezde). (16-17)

[and then I saw her through the glass settling herself in her compartment, having suddenly forgotten about us or passed into another world, and we all, our hands in our pockets, seemed to be spying upon an utterly unsuspecting life, moving in that aquarium dimness, until she grew aware of us and drummed on the windowpane, then raised her eyes, fumbling at the frame as if hanging a picture, but nothing happened; some fellow passenger helped her, and she leaned out, audible and real, beaming with pleasure; one of us, keeping up with the stealthily gliding car, handed her a magazine and a Tauchnitz (she read English only when traveling). (414-5)]

Even within Kamera obskura the entrapping box does not exhaust the novel's visual theme. Next to Kretschmar's blindness and Gorn's cruelty we must set Anneliza's telepathic instinct, which derives from an equally strong but countervailing tendency in Nabokov's thought toward the transcendence of barriers to vision (elsewhere represented, inter alia, in the 1939 poem “Oko” [“The Oculus”] and the opening passage of “Spring in Fialta,” both of which compare man with a giant, all-seeing eye).11 In the end Kamera obskura poises itself between these two options, so that the image best summarizing its visual theme may be one offered in passing: that of the monkey Maks and Anneliza see at the Tiergarten, which has escaped its cage to a treetop while its keeper attempts to lure it back down with a mirror (75). To ask the identity of that keeper is simply to raise again all the issues surrounding the epistemology of authorship in Nabokov's world; and one cannot help but recall in this auctorial connection the “initial shiver of inspiration” to which Nabokov attributes Lolita in his afterword to that work: “a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage” (311).

If the issues I have outlined here are not in themselves new in Nabokov scholarship, what I hope to have shown is how Nabokov manages to tease his theme of regressing and entrapping visual frames out of that Tolstoyan constellation of concerns in Anna Karenina (light, vision, seduction, knowlege, and sin); and more specifically, how Nabokov turns Tolstoy's moral and aesthetic theme into an epistemological and metapoetic one, without in the least erasing its origins.

Copyright © 1996 Board of Trustees of Davidson College. This article, which originally appeared in Nabokov Studies #3 (1996), is reprinted here by kind permission of the author and the editors of Nabokov Studies. This material may not be duplicated or used in any way without prior permission.

10. Vladimir Alexandrov notes, as a possible parallel between Nabokov's thought and Petr Uspenskii's (Ouspensky) Tertium Organum, the idea of the “possible perspective of a higher dimensional being onto a lower world...which is relevant for Laughter in the Dark and Transparent Things” (254, n.40).

11. For a similar account of the opposed visual tendencies in Kamera obskura see Connolly 128. Connolly, however, stresses Kretschmar's blindness rather than the “enclosure” I discuss here.

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_____. Kamera obskura. 1932. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978.

_____. Laughter in the Dark. 1938. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

_____. Lolita. 1955. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

_____. “Spring in Fialta.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 409-25.

_____. “Vesna v Fial'te.” Vesna v Fial'te. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978. 7-35.

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