Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kamera obskura

Abstract

Unlike Dostoevsky ("old Dusty," with his "dusty-and-dusky" ways, as the hero of Despair puts it), Tolstoy typically comes in for high praise in Nabokov's remarks on his Russian predecessors.1 One early work in particular (Kamera obskura, 1933; Laughter in the Dark, 1938/1965) dwells on Tolstoy with a concentration that might induce us to wonder about the nature of the Tolstoyan influence on Nabokov's early fiction—and thus also, in a broader context, of the reception of Russia's nineteenth-century fiction by the modernist emigration. With Kamera obskura something much more central to Nabokov's poetics is involved than is usually the case in his prolifically allusive works, and this essay is an attempt to speculate on what that something might be.2 The most prominent Tolstoyan references in this novel point to Anna Karenina and do so in a way which suggests not a casual lifting of motifs but