Review: Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov

Review: Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov

by Rich Horton

Laughter in the Dark was originally published in Russian in serialized form in 1932-1933, and in book form in 1933, as Kamera Obskura. The first English translation, by Winifred Roy, was published in England in 1936, under the title Camera Obscura. Nabokov was disappointed with the translation, and he revised it himself, as Laughter in the Dark. This version appeared in 1938. It was radically revised from the original translation, but also from the original Russian version. The original translation did not sell well, and the remaining copies were lost when the warehouse in which they were stored was bombed in WWII, so it is an extremely rare book. But John Colapinto in the New Yorker compared the two versions -- using a copy which was apparently Nabokov's own, which he used to prepare his own translation. It's clear that many of the changes are more due to Nabokov reconsidering his earlier Russian version, rather than simply improving Roy's translation (and it seems fairly clear that the eventual English Laughter in the Dark owes a fair amount to Roy's Camera Obscura.) Nabokov changed character names, removed scenes that didn't work, and altered the ending, in addition to changes at the line/paragraph level.

In this sense Laughter in the Dark is in some ways a new novel, written in English (though to be sure similar in overall shape to the original Russian version.) I don't know if another Russian version, translated from the English, has ever been made, but I do know that there was a 1930s French translation of Kamera Obskura, and a much later French translation of Laughter in the Dark. At the same time, more or less, Nabokov translated his last Russian novel, Despair, into English. Those two efforts, it seems to me, serve as a sort of practice for his subsequent novels, which were all written in English.

Laughter in the Dark has a somewhat famous opening passage (as famous as a not all that well known novel could have): "Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster." Albinus is middle-aged, with a wife and young daughter. He's an expert in art, and not an expert in love -- he had a couple of unsatisfying relationships before his marriage, and he seems to love his wife well enough but find her a bit -- boring, I suppose, or insipid. One day he stops in a cinema to waste an extra hour, and he conceives an obsession with the girl who is serving as usher.

This girl, Margot Peters, is about 17 or 18. A year or two earlier she had left her unhappy and somewhat abusive parents, had become a nude model for painters, and, without quite realizing it, had fallen into the hands of a procuress, who arranges eventually for her to go off with a young man, which pleases Margot enough -- she finds she enjoys sex. But that comes to an end, and Margot can't conceive of any future except to continue to be kept by different men, or to become a movie star. And by the time Albinus encounters her, the closest she's got to the movie business is her job as an usher.

As Albinus clumsily begins to pursue Margot, hoping for a short fling and some excitement and sex, she maneuvers to get more than that out of him. She knows he's well off, and she finds him a tolerable companion. And Albinus, to some extent against his will, is manipulated into a situation where his wife leaves him, and he and Margot live together. This is a scandal, of course, though in Weimar Germany perhaps less than it might have been, and as Margot pushes him to get a divorce he resists -- until a terrible crisis involving his daughter forces events. And Albinus' fate is sealed, in the Greek tragedy sense, especially when Margot decides she likes another man's attentions more, though Albinus' money remains necessary. And so things go to the eventual conclusion -- told us in the first lines of the book, foreshadowed too by the movie Albinus was watching when he first saw Margot, alluded to by such things as a cunning reference to Anna Karenina.

It's a striking novel, blackly comic but legitimately tragic. I haven't mentioned the chief villain, Margot's other lover, an artist of some talent but no morals named Axel Rex, whom Albinus already knew (due to his art connections) but hardly understood. Margot's cupidity, Rex's outright capricious cruelty, and Albinus' weakness collide dreadfully. The prose is excellent, if not quite at the sumptuous levels of Nabokov's great later novels in English. The characters are well depicted. Nabokov's way with the surprising but perfect image is on display. There are no overt sex scenes but there are erotic passages of considerable effect, due to his depiction of character -- and of bodies. It is impossible not to see distorted pre-echoes of Lolita here -- the middle-aged man with a teenaged girl, though in this case the girl is in control and the man the victim. The construction is intricate and effective, the foreshadowing, as I've hinted, remarkable, and not really apparent until the end. It's a slim novel (perhaps 55,000 words) and something of a genre novel, and perhaps a bit slight. (Though slimness doesn't need to imply slightness -- Pnin is very slim but not slight at all.)

I've only read a few of Nabokov's Russian novels, though most of his Russian short stories. I think very highly of Invitation to a Beheading, and I enjoyed King, Queen, Knave and The Defense. I have not read The Gift, nor Despair -- each considered among the best of his Russian books. I'd place Laughter in the Dark below Invitation to a Beheading, but just ahead of The Defense.