Nabokov, Vladimir - Thomas Seifrid (essay date 1996)

Thomas Seifrid (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: “Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina Is Doing in Kamera obskura,” in Nabokov Studies, Vol. 3, 1996, pp. 1-12.

[In the following essay, Seifrid argues that visual and thematic elements in Nabokov's fiction correspond to passages in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.]

“A mysl' liubit zanavesku i kameru obskuru.”

Dar (383)

“But thought likes curtains and the camera obscura.”

The Gift (338)

Unlike Dostoevsky (“old Dusty,” with his “dusty-and-dusky” ways, as the hero of Despair puts it), Tolstoy typically comes in for high praise in Nabokov's remarks on his Russian predecessors.1 One early work in particular (Kamera obskura, 1933; Laughter in the Dark, 1938/1965) dwells on Tolstoy with a concentration that might induce us to wonder about...

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