And at night, I have noticed on my insomniac rambles, the moon casts slivers of silvery light upon the ink-black waters. Do remind me to say more of this later. The original contract for this book signed three years ago with a then noticeably more solicitous publisher whose name I am legally bound not to mention stipulated that the text be comprised not only of biography proper of which the reader has already enjoyed, I trust, a taste but also of criticism of each of Nabokov's books.
In lieu of any sensible reason not to proceed in any but a chronological, or pseudo-chronological, fashion, I turn now to Korol', dama, valet , 2 a novel quite different from Mashen'ka , strangely lacking in luster, which a year-old Sirin began in July of and a year-old Sirin completed in June of the following year, not very far from here, I'm told. The plot, though banal, perhaps bears repeating. A brooding, not unattractive boy named Frants arrives in a large German city--manifestly Berlin though unnamed in the book--with the hope that his maternal uncle, a wealthy speculator and businessman who owns, among other things, a large department store, will assist him in making his fortune.
Dreyer's callous wife, Marta, manages to seduce and ensnare the poor lad and subsequently convince him that the sole obstacle to their conjoined and connubial bliss is her husband and that he, the husband, should be done away with as quickly as possible. Much of the book revolves around their miserable affair and the plan to kill Dreyer. It is a pity that Sirin chose to have Frants copulate with puffy, toad-like Marta, 3 rather than explore a more manly, and more salubrious, relationship with the older, wiser, kinder Dreyer.
The increasingly half-hearted couplings of the two 'lovers' are the book's worst passages, with elaboratedly contrived metaphorical orgasms, 4 barely bearable, liable to make readers like myself fidget uncomfortably in their chairs. This being Sirin's weakest book, it might be useful to point out those passages wherein a glimmer of better things can be glimpsed rather than attempt to explicate a narrative technique that is transparently jejune.
There are fore-echoes of nearly all the later novels in Korol', dama, valet and at least a few after-echoes of Mashen'ka. What I propose to do is simply to list them, more or less in the order that they appear, with as little superfluous commentary as coherence will allow. I have often felt that modern literary criticism, especially the 'scholarly' kind, suffers from a surfeit of 'interpretation' at the expense of simple facts.
