Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile

by Luke Parker

Overview

Nabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov's early literary career—from the 1920s to the 1940s—in the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov's engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy.

Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, Nabokov's Russian-language fiction and essays, written in Berlin, present a compelling rethinking of modernist-era literature's relationship to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon. Parker examines how Nabokov's involvement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of the cinematized culture of interwar Europe enabled him to flourish as a transnational writer. Nabokov, Parker shows, worked tirelessly to court publishers and film producers for maximum exposure for his fiction across languages, media, and markets. In revealing the story of Nabokov's cinema praxis—his strategic instrumentalization of the movie industry—Nabokov Noir reconstructs the deft response of a modern master to the artificial isolation and shrinking audiences of exile.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501766527
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Luke Parker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Amherst College. Follow him on X at @Luke_P_Parker.

What People are Saying About This

Thomas Seifrid

This important contribution to Nabokov scholarship excels as a study of the modern cultural conditions within which Nabokov's literary art evolved. Drawing on insightful readings of Nabokov's early works and impressive archival research, Luke Parker argues that cinematic culture influenced Nabokov's oeuvre and shaped his career to a far greater extent than previously understood. Nabokov is known for being self-consciously and allusively literary. Parker convincingly shows how deliberately Nabokov also processed experience through the prism of the cinema.

Lilya Kaganovsky

Wonderfully researched, Nabokov Noir gives us a real sense of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and what Nabokov's life there might have looked like. The rich fabric of intersecting lines of inquiry and attention to street maps, journals, reviews, placement of theaters, émigré occupations, and preoccupations describe a complete world, not filled with specters or ghosts, but with real people in their historical context. Nabokov Noir goes deep into Nabokov's world but in a different way than most: it shows us the world that constructed Nabokov, rather than the other way around.

Yuri Tsivian

Nabokov Noir is an exceptional book: well written, cleverly designed, and impeccably researched. The Nabokov who emerges from these pages is a struggling Russian writer in exile, eager to inscribe his work into contemporary European literature and recognizing in the new medium of cinema a universal translator that could help him achieve his relentless pursuit of worldwide recognition.

Eric Naiman

Luke Parker's book fundamentally alters our understanding of Nabokov's literary career and his aesthetics in the period before and just after his emigration to America. In addition, it casts important new light on Russian émigré culture and shows how deeply it was embedded in the cinema of the 1920s and 30s. What is perhaps most remarkable about Nabokov Noir is that it shows how Nabokov's cinema theory and 'cinema praxis' shaped the writing and the revising of his fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Luke Parker's book is a rich offering that adds a great deal of texture to what we thought we knew about Nabokov's activities in the 1920s and 1930s. The book is part biography and part cultural history, looking closely at the world of Russian émigré life, mainly in Berlin during the decades in question.

The Russian Review

Luke Parker masterfully blends literary criticism and history of film in his book on Vladimir Nabokov's wide-ranging engagement with cinema. Nabokov Noir is a significant contribution to the fields of Nabokov studies and émigré culture.

Modern Language Review

Luke Parker's Nabokov Noir brings to this subject a depth of research nearly unparalleled in Nabokov studies. Parker's book is nonetheless a ground-breaking piece of research into Nabokov's early visual world and cultural self-fashioning.

Slavic Review

Nabokov Noir provides an engaging and stimulating look at one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Parker argues that Vladimir Nabokov's connections to US and European film industries illuminates his experience in exile.

Choice

Luke Parker presents a ground-breaking analysis of Nabokov's engagement with cinema culture in interwar Europe.

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