Despair by Vladimir Nabokov: Review
Book: Despair. Date of Publication: January 1, 1934. Pages: 222. Genre: Crime, Mystery
A few weeks ago I arrived in Berlin, coincidentally the city where Despair was written. Slightly delirious, having not slept in 24 hours I settled in to my double bed in the hotel room I was sharing with two friends. After tossing and turning fitfully for an hour I opened my eyes to get a drink of water. What I saw paralyzed me. I was staring into my own sleeping face. I was filled with anxiety. Looking for some confirmation I moved my arms cautiously but I did not move in response. Then I opened my eyes and asked “is everything okay?”. I responded, “oh it’s nothing, I thought you were my reflection.”
Doppelgängers have always played on the human imagination. It seems to be one of those uncanny occurrences where the boundary between reality and unreality grows thin. In Despair Nabokov presents his treatment on the concept. Hermann Karlovich comes across a tramp who while sleeping perfectly resembles his dead body. Naturally, he concocts an elaborate scheme to murder the tramp, stage it as his own murder, and assume the tramp’s identity in order to collect on his life insurance policy and escape his failing chocolate business.
Despair is more multi-faceted than that brief description of a black comedic crime novel though. We have the commentary on communist ideology with the capitalist exploitation of the working class through Hermann’s scheme. Hermann is outwardly rich but beset by debts and exhausted by decadence while his double, Felix, is happy and penniless. But it is clearly a subject that Nabokov does not care to treat with too much sincerity:
“I like squirrels too” (again that wink). “It’s good when a wood is full of squirrels. I like ’em because they are against the landowners. And moles.”
“What about sparrows?” I asked with great gentleness. “Are they ‘against’ as you put it?”
“A sparrow is a beggar among birds — a real street-beggar. A beggar,” he repeated again and again, now leaning with both hands on his stick and swaying a little. It was obvious he considered himself to be an extraordinarily astute arguer.
- Pg. 85
We have the wholesale mocking of Dostoevsky (nicknamed Dusty by Hermann) and his examinations of the Russian “Soul”. Hermann is a far less repentant criminal whose primary motivations are selfish gain and the aesthetic triumph of staging the perfect murder. Compared to a high-minded Raskolnikov whose guilt eventually consumes him. As someone who had to read the tortured hemming and hawing of Crime and Punishment for school this was highly entertaining. You get the sense that Hermann’s disdain for dull-witted critics and his espousal of art for art’s sake is Nabokov’s own:
An author’s fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator: is this ever attained? The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that — not very appetizing — food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
- Pg. 26
And finally, we have the lively writing that the author is famous for. It is prose that sounds like poetry with rhythm and rhyme:
In the meantime night was approaching; the sparrows had long disappeared; the monument loomed darker and seemed to have grown in size. From behind a black tree there came out noiselessly a gloomy and fleshful moon. A cloud slipped a mask over it in passing, which left visible only its chubby chin.
- Pg. 88
Despair reads like the product of a randomly generated writing challenge. The kind of writing challenge where you’re asked to develop a criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy symbolized by a community of rabbit warrens in the format of a Shakespearean sonnet. For better or worse you can almost imagine Nabokov kicking his legs up in glee after finishing the first draft.
