Shape-Shifters, Charlatans, and Frauds: Vladimir Nabokov’s Confidence Men

In May 1950, as part of his self-appointed mission to educate Nabokov in the ways of modern America, Edmund Wilson sent his Russian friend a batch of books, one of which was David Maurer’s popular study of card-sharps, swindlers, and sting operators, The Big Con, first published in 1940. Wilson’s description of the book is, in itself, revealing of how he anticipated Nabokov would react to it:

The Big Con [is] a very curious book by an authority on the underworld.... It throws a good deal of light on certain aspects of American life. There are some incredibly funny stories ... especially about pickpockets and such people who unsuccessfully aspired to be confidence men.¹

Nabokov responded with a dismissive quip – ‘For one instant I had the wild hope that the big Con was French’² – and, as far as the letters show, made no further mention of it. It would be easy to conclude, therefore, that he shared Wilson’s rather casual opinion of the book – Wilson wryly denigrates it by focusing on its failed characters and Maurer’s rather eccentric research methods³ – but there are two elements of Nabokov’s response which demonstrate that he did not. First, his comment was evidently made before he had even opened the book – it is about his expectation of what it might be, not what it actually is. Second, if he had in fact read the book he would have very quickly realised that the ‘funny stories’ Wilson alludes to are overshadowed by lengthy accounts of systematic, sophisticated, and successful large-scale scams which comprise the bulk of Maurer’s study. Nevertheless, that Wilson sent Nabokov the book at all suggests he hoped it would have some kind of revelatory impact, that it would be an aspect of American life entirely new to his friend and thus further cement his role as Nabokov’s cultural mentor. Yet, while the organised extent of the crimes Maurer details would probably have been a revelation, the phenomenon of the con artist was not new to Nabokov, as several of his Russian works featured charlatans, embezzlers, and cynical manipulators. Hermann Karlovich, in the 1934 novel Despair, for example, engineers a life-insurance fraud by murdering a man whom he believes to be his double. Martha Dreyer of King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov’s second novel published in 1928, persuades her lover to assist her in murdering her husband so that they can run off together with his money, and in the 1938 Laughter in the Dark, a middle-aged art-dealer’s blindness is callously exploited by his mistress, Margot Peters, and her secret lover, Axel Rex, who, in their malicious game of extortion, sadistically abuse his trust and his vulnerability.

Wilson knew both Laughter in the Dark and Despair,⁴ but he does not apparently make the connection between them and Nabokov’s likely interest in a serious study of the American confidence man, for Nabokov was already familiar with a range of writers beginning, from his childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, with Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain,⁵ and continuing in emigration with, amongst others, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser.⁶ Nor does Wilson, despite his knowledge of Russian literature, demonstrate any awareness of a parallel tradition that can be traced back from the tricksters of the early Soviet era, through the Silver Age to the early nineteenth century, from which Nabokov was undoubtedly drawing. What he could not have known in May 1950, however, as his friend was winding up his teaching year at Cornell, was that Nabokov was planning to return that summer to The Kingdom by the Sea, the ‘short novel about a man who liked little girls’ that he had mentioned to him some three years earlier.⁷ In the light of this, Wilson’s gift of Maurer’s study, which initially seems to have been a miscalculation, takes on an inadvertent but timely significance, emerging as key to the elaboration of themes of extortion and complicity in...