Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker Roman Utkin Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile. By Luke Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2022. xiii+ 272 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978–1-50176652–7. Luke Parker masterfully blends literary criticism and history of film in his book on Vladimir Nabokov's wide-ranging engagement with cinema. Nabokov Noir shows how the experience of filmgoing, participating in film production, and contending with the narrative possibilities of film converge into a pivotal force in Nabokov's famously transnational career. Although Nabokov is the book's central figure, Parker situates his inter-war œuvre and his tactics of self-promotion in the broad discursive environment of 'cinematic culture' and 'the art of exile', reminding the reader that 'Nabokov's coming-of-age paralleled the linguistic and conceptual working out of cinema' (p. 65). 'Cinematic culture' here stands for a historicized [End Page 643] understanding of a cultural environment profoundly influenced by the burgeoning film industry. Parker frames film as 'the art of exile' because it 'supplied the means not only of thinking through and representing exile but of surviving it' (p. 185). A statement Parker makes about the role of film in The Luzhin Defense can be applied to Parker's own project: whereas in the novel 'Nabokov brings into focus questions of celebrity, international markets, the role of the print media, the power of spectacle, and the variety of occupations open to Russian émigrés' (p. 93), Parker methodically elucidates all those aspects in Nabokov Noir. Accordingly, Parker discusses film's impact on literary poetics not in isolation but with equal attention to the pragmatic considerations of a given novel's adaptability for the screen. Supported by impressive archival research, Parker traces Nabokov's 'strategic involvement with the promotional apparatus of the international movie industry', aiming to 'reconstruct a practical answer to the paradox of exile' (p. 119). It is Parker's focus on exile and his use of archival materials that make the book such a qualitative leap forward from the earlier generation of scholars who have written on Nabokov and film. Parker is less interested in the formal aspects of film influences and the impact of cinematic devices on fiction and essays. He tells instead the story of Nabokov's career trajectory from Berlin to New York, via Paris and London, as a journey thoroughly conditioned by film as artistic medium and a form of popular entertainment. Consisting of four chapters, an Introduction, a Coda, and an Appendix, Nabokov Noir is as much about Russian émigré culture as it is about Nabokov. The first two chapters reveal both familiar and forgotten émigrés, such as Georgy Gessen, Pavel Muratov, Andrei Levinson, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky, as astute film critics grappling with the significance of cinema for the émigré cultural identity. Parker elucidates how Nabokov and his fellow émigrés were trying to answer the same fundamental questions about the cinema as the French, German, and, to an extent, Soviet cultural producers: 'whether the cinema is art or entertainment, a force for acculturation or dissipation, a natural ally of literature or its parasite, deeply national or inherently cosmopolitan' (p. 71). The key Nabokov texts discussed in the book are the poem 'Kinematograf' (1927), the short story 'The Assistant Producer' (1943), the novels Mashen'ka (1926), Zashchita Luzhina (1930), and, most of all, Kamera obskura (1934). I cite these titles here in their original languages not least because, as Parker demonstrates, the transformations occurring during translation often amount to rewriting, and therefore it is essential to reference the version that is being analysed. This translation process is shown poignantly in the book's last two chapters, which follow the transformations of Kamera obskura into Chambre obscure (French translation by Doussia Ergaz, 1934), Camera Obscura (British translation by Winifred Roy, 1936), and Laughter in the Dark (a version in English for publication in the US done by Nabokov himself, 1938). By analysing the iterations of this novel across languages and countries, Parker reconstructs Nabokov's route from Europe to the United States. Along the way we learn just how...