Despair (novel)

Nabokov began to compose Despair while he was living in Berlin beginning in July 1932 and managed to complete the first draft on September 10 of the same year. The year in which Nabokov was writing Despair was a turbulent one for Germany. In June 1932, the Reichstag had collapsed. Incumbent President President Paul von Hindenburg called for elections, leading to violence between the Nazis and Communists. The Nazi party was becoming more prominent; Hitler would be appointed chancellor in 1933.[1] This would only fuel Nabokov's hatred for totalitarian governments, and this disdain was incorporated somewhat into Despair (Hermann is pro-Communist) and more prominently later on in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), Nabokov's next novel.

By 1935, Nabokov had become increasingly intrigued with the English language, and he elected to translate his two most recently written novels at the time, Laughter in the Dark (1932) (first translated as Camera Obscura) and Despair. Nabokov remarked that translating Despair was his "first serious attempt ... to use English for what may loosely termed an artistic purpose". The translation was finished on December 29 of that year.[2] Nabokov sent the manuscript to Hutchinson & Co. in April 1936; the company had initial reservations, but eventually agreed to publish the book. The translation was checked by a Molly Carpenter-Lee, a student of Nabokov's friend Gleb Struve. The book was a complete flop commercially and Nabokov only earned €40, a minuscule amount even in the 1930s. The issue was that Hutchinson's only published cheap, "popular" novels, which Despair was not, and thus it was distributed to the wrong audience. Nabokov would later lament that Despair was "a rhinoceros in a world of hummingbirds".[3]

Nabokov intended Hermann, and the novel in general, to be kind of a Dostoevskian (who is referred to as "Dusky and Dusty" in the novel) parody; this is even more evident as the original working title for the novel was to be Zapiski mistifikatora (Notes of a Hoaxer), akin to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.[4] At one particular, Hermann even contemplates titling his narrative The Double, before he realizes it has been used, and opts for Despair instead. Nabokov infamously despised Dostoevsky's writing, with its excessive soul-searching and glorification of criminals and prostitutes and this is reflected in Despair and Hermann, who carries certain similarities to Raskolnikov, who had also planned a perfect murder in Crime and Punishment.[5] Additionally, the book is rich in intertextual connections to other authors such as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle.[5]

Despair is generally acclaimed as one of Nabokov's better Russian novels, along with Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift (1938), and has a reasonable volume of literary criticism. British author Martin Amis ranked it second on his list of best Nabokov novels, with it trailing only Lolita (1955).[6] However, Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd seemed to have ambivalent feelings toward Despair, noting that although "Nabokov's sheer intelligence crackles in every line ... the book's style ... seems sadly lacking in its structure ... It never quite convinces, and page after page that would make one tingle with excitement in another context can here only intermittently overcome one's remoteness from a story whose central premise fails to merit the suspension of disbelief".[7]

Despair is the second Nabokov novel to feature unreliable narration from a first-person point of view, the first being The Eye with the character Smurov. However, The Eye was more of an experiment condensed in a hundred-page novella, whereas Despair takes the unreliable first-person narrator to its fully fledged form, rivaling Humbert Humbert from Lolita, and Hermann is in a sense Humbert's Russian cousin. Nabokov comments on this in the foreword to the later edition of Despair, where he remarks that "Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann".[8] To put it simply, the reader can never be positive if Hermann is accurately narrating the events because he tends to overestimate his own skills and talents while ignoring reality around him.

Additionally, Despair is also a tale of false doubles, one of Nabokov's favorite themes. In it, doubling seems to be only an obsession with physical resemblances. Almost all of Nabokov's fictions make ample use of doubling, duplication, and mirroring, such as in Pale Fire and Lolita.

Vladislav Khodasevich pointed out that Nabokov is obsessed with a single theme: "the nature of the creative process and the solitary, freak-life role into which a man with such imagination is inevitably cast."[9] Hermann, who sees himself as an artist composing the 'perfect murder', fits this description. In a similar fashion, Julian Connolly calls Despair "a cautionary tale of creative solipsism".[10]