Look at Valdemar! (a beautified corpse revived)

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 153-71. JEFF EDMUNDS (State College, PA, USA) LOOK AT VALDEMARl (A BEAUTIFIED CORPSE REVIVED)' Imagine, if you will, complicitous reader, a magic mirror standing upright on one edge at the year 1940 along an imaginary time line of Vladimir Sirin-Nabokov's life and work. Gazing into the glass from the prewar side we might just discern, through the mists of conjured time, the reflections of Sirin's Russian novels—their Englished counterparts. For some of these spectral pairs, such as Mashen'ka (1925)/Mary (1970)2 and Priglashenie na kazn' (1938)/Invitation to a Beheading (1959),3 the reflected and reflection would be almost as alike and as indistinguishable one from the other as Tweedles Dum and Dee. But for one of them the superficial resemblances of similar titles and parallel plots would be treacherously misleading. A hasty or careless gazer might easily mistake the English "version" for a double of the original Russian, the earlier incarnation would be obliterated by the later and a duality misapprehended as a unity which in reality does not, and never did, exist.4 It has become a commonplace in Nabokovian criticism to say King, Queen, Knave to mean King, Queen, Knave/Korol', dama, valet. Two reasons for this imprecision come to mind: not all of Nabokov's commenta1 . Page references are to the first editions of Komi', dama, valet (Berlin: Slovo, 1928) (hereafter KDV) and King, Queen, Knave (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968) (hereafter KQK). I am very grateful to Sandy Stelts of the Rare Books Room at the Pennsylvania State University 's Pattee Library for giving me access to a copy of KDV inscribed by VN. 2. Nabokov writes in the introduction to Mary: "...I realized as soon as my collaboration with Mr. Glenny started that our translation should be as faithful to the text as I would have insisted had that text not been mine" (p. xii). 3. In her Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov's Russian and English Prose (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), Jane Grayson notes that "IB suffers the least changes in the process of conversion" (p. 120) and supports this observation with a reference to Robert P. Hughes' article "Notes on the Translation of Invitation to a Beheading": "Of all the translations of Sirin-Nabokov's works ... this novel seems to have suffered least change in the process of conversion." Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), p. 284-92. 4. Marina Turkevich Naumann has called the later translations of Nabokov's work "literary anachronisms," making the point that the original Russian texts should be re-examined in their "proper historical perspective." {Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov's Short Stories of the 1920s ¡New York: New York Univ. Press, 1978), p. ¡x.) 154 Nabokov Studies tors have read the Russian, and an equivalence of the two books is tacitly assumed based upon the fidelity of the translations of VN's other works. (Matters are not helped by the unfortunate fact the Korol', dama, valet is almost universally considered a work of secondary importance, flanked as it is by Mashen'ka, an impressive first novel by any standard, and Zashchita Luzhina, a masterpiece. Few book-length studies of Nabokov's œuvre discuss it at length. Often it is not even mentioned.5 ) Brian Boyd, in his monumental study of VN, devotes less than ten pages to KDV/KQK under the heading King, Queen, Knave, and refers to the "hundreds of revisions large and small" only in a footnote. Even Jane Grayson, who has meticulously examined the differences between KDV and its English translation, implies that KQK is an improved version of KDV rather than a distinct book, asserting that Nabokov "tightens the plot's mechanism" (96), "creates more suspense" (97), and that in the English version "the main characters are considerably better drawn" (98). The point is that King, Queen, Knave was written by a sixty-nine-year-old famous American author named Nabokov comfortably installed in a palatial Swiss hotel, whereas Korol', dama, valet was written forty years previously in Berlin by an impoverished Russian émigré named Sirin. 5. Mention of both KDV and KQK...