Despair: Russian anti-mystery

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As it happens, the very first post on this blog was a review of a novel by Vladimir Nabokov: one far more famous than Despair, at least. I suppose it would have been the more pandering and popular thing to do a follow-up or post-mortem on the Umineko review, whose recent publication hangs over this smaller review like the memories of a gourmet steak dinner hangs over the obligatory breakfast of cereal and milk the next morning. Well, in that case I hope it is more a matter of quantity than quality—I don’t think the Umineko post is anything close to the prime cut of steak for this blog, anyway.

Regardless, Despair, is, in all likelihood, a novel most will have never heard of. Even among those that have, a substantial proportion will have only know of it in the context of its authorship and little more. Despair is a 1934 crime thriller novel by Vladimir Nabokov, an author most famous for writing Lolita, which I expect is a novel of considerably more notoriety. The plot nominally follows the actions of Hermann Karlovich, a man who concocts an insurance fraud scheme involving the “perfect crime” of faking his own murder.

This summary has the shadow of the setup of a golden era mystery novel of the 1930s hanging all over it, all the more so because Hermann’s plan essentially relies on murdering an apparent doppelgänger to serve as his body double. However, Despair is more fundamental than that, parodying crime novels of all kinds, including eras before the golden era boom. Most directly, it is intended as an ironic mirror of Dostoevsky’s style as exemplified in Crime and Punishment: While Crime and Punishment is generally held up in collective memory as one of the early representative modern classics, Nabokov as a defining leader of the late modernist movement found the work utterly insufficient. Nabokov saw Dostoevsky as a lingering symptom of the “sentimentalism” of Rousseauian romanticism:

Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother’s Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at a performance of ”Traviata.” A whole century of authors praised the simple life of the poor, and so on. Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky, we mean the nonartistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.

Vladimir Nabokov, “Lectures on Russian Literature”

Those experienced in the tropes of this blog might note Nabokov’s clear echo of the formalist structure of “familiar emotions” provoking “automatic” reactions—as opposed to the defamiliarised reactions indicative of true art as analysed in formalist literary theory. While some critics still hold up the characterisation of Raskolnikov, the leading character of Crime and Punishment, as representative of the early trends of modernism towards full “interior worlds” and literary independence, Nabokov’s view is the precise opposite: The sentimentalism of Dostoyevsky was instead indicative of the familiarisation of pre-modern literature. The stories of Dostoyevsky contained emotive symbols that were to be recognised automatically, in the same tradition of moralising didacticism as all pre-modern literature.

It is in this light that reviewing Despair, Nabokov’s parody of the “sentimentalism” of crime fiction at large, is an unexpectedly pertinent follow-up to reviewing Umineko, which is the embodiment of crime fiction so stuffed full of sentimentalism that it reverts to a work of pre-modernity. It also reveals the chief irony of Despair, which is that despite its achievements in parody and irony, as is often the case with Nabokov’s work, it is by way of Nabokov’s pure skill far more successful than it intends to be in capturing the sentimental potency of non-modern literature.

By sentimentalism, I of course mean familiarisation. Surveying the landscape of literature from the vantage point of modernity that Nabokov occupied, familiarisation was synonymous with pre-modern romanticism and traditional forms of genre fiction. At that point, he had yet to experience the reconstitution of familiarisation as a tool of postmodern literature, fundamentally separate to the sentimentalism he criticised. Nabokov was a famous critic of mystery fiction, signing on as the most prominent second to critic Edmund Wilson’s unrelenting polemics against the genre. How ironic it is that mystery fiction has returned as a force of postmodernism to attack the foundations upon which Nabokov’s theories stood, like a revenant seeking revenge from beyond the grave.

Mystery fiction is of course the other target of parody in Despair beyond just Dostoevskian sentimentalism. Hermann’s elaborate murder scheme is intentionally an echo of the Rube Goldberg plots of golden era mystery fiction, even specifically being built around the narrative trick of a twin trick. Hermann insists that his tried and true narrative trick scheme is a “work of art”, and even as the police close in on him he is solely focused on the perfection of his artistic creation. That Hermann’s thoroughly familiarised perfect crime, which pretends to be a work of art, is in fact seen through almost instantly, is no doubt a reflection of Nabokov’s own opinion on the artistic value of the familiarised mystery fiction that was being published alongside Despair.

Besides its more direct structure of parody, Despair is fundamentally built around the presentation of crime and mystery fiction in a purely defamiliarised manner. Nabokov’s endlessly delightful prose is as always focused on giving every stone and every table a sensation of seeing beyond mere recognition—as in the formalist conception of artistic language. Nabokov’s project in Despair is to insert the cruel logic of realism into what he saw as the overly sentimental logic of crime fiction, and thereby create one of the few truly “literary” crime novels. There is a scheme, narrative tricks, twists, and all of the mainstays of crime novels that Nabokov viewed as mere entertainment, but all contextualised around a more “artistic” kind of expression of the banality of reality. His achievement in doing so is more deconstructive than mere parody, making it a kind of early example of the so-called anti-mystery that we have previously discussed in the Japanese context.

While the familiarised presentation of mystery fiction “gamified” tragic narratives, which in turn gave readers a compelling sense of agency over death itself, Despair inverts and rejects this whole formula. The narrative is not one of solving a murder, but planning and committing one. And its murder is not a careful or well motivated reason for death, but a banal and petty reflection of actual death. For all of the attention Hermann pays to crafting the perfect crime, an unsolvable murder that would give even Sherlock Holmes pause, it is simply solved through the plain and regular work of the police force. His attempt at a narrative trick is nothing more than an illusion, since his doppelgänger is too small and subsequently easily distinguished from Hermann with no effort on the part of investigators. In fact, as Hermann remarks, it is as though the resemblance was never even considered.

The remarks and thoughts of Hermann are themselves key to the success of Despair. Another narrative trick of prime importance on display here is that of the unreliable narrator, an endlessly controversial taboo of mystery fiction. In a gamified mystery narrative, there is a constant paranoia about the power of the author, which a lying narrator—author—risks transgressing. The late Queen problem, as theorised by Rintarou Norizuki and Kiyoshi Kasai in the 1990s, implies a devastating and existential risk to the logic of mystery fiction if the author is too powerful in setting the parameters of the narrative “game”. A particular stroke of genius in Despair is the ways in which it completely erases the presence of the “author”, Vladimir Nabokov, whilst empowering the diegetic “author”, Hermann Karlovich, to smoothly preclude gamification without reducing the work to a “fake metafiction” where the author can create any outcome they desire by asserting their own power. Hermann can direct and bias the story as he pleases, but Nabokov is meaningfully (as opposed to superficially) constrained by the internal logic of Hermann’s characterisation; this layer of segregation is crucial for separating Despair from later styles of metafiction that transgress that barrier all too easily.

Its deconstructive streak, its specific attempt to invert genre and build new forms out of ideas that the audience would recognise, actually serves as a source of brilliance for Despair that was even hidden from its author. As with much of his work, even though Nabokov sought to create the perfect modernist novel, his work was too far ahead of its time for that task. It is never content with straightforward and independent meaning, instead using the audience’s experience with prior conventions and genres as a weapon to twist and recontextualise into a parodying rejection of commonplace assumptions. Deconstruction is, after all, a deeply postmodern word, and Nabokov’s work is always deceptively and unintentionally postmodern. Hidden behind his attempts to artistically portray the banal realities of the human condition, Nabokov is always engaging in metatextual polemics which makes his work more of an intertextual network of familiarised ideas rather than pure defamiliarised art.

In its attempts to mock a genre in particular, Despair was an even more compelling example of this paradox than most of Nabokov’s other work: While Lolita and Pale Fire are famously dense with metatext and intertextual meaning, they are always operating in a space of so-called “pure literature” as their primary genre. Despair, on the other hand, is thoroughly and unmistakably an example of crime fiction—an inverted mystery novel in specific. It takes the form of a mystery novel, inverts it, and stuffs its insides with the aesthetics and logic of artistic, modernist fiction. In this sense, it might well be the first true “anti-mystery”, reaching audiences a year before the original anti-mysteries from Japan. However, while those anti-mystery works were breathtaking in scope and ambition, Despair is a more particular and subtle kind of deconstruction particular to the genius of Nabokov. He manages to not only deconstruct mystery fiction alone, but the entire purpose of “genre” as present in crime fiction going back to Crime and Punishment. At least so far, Despair is my favourite novel I have read this year. It is an unrelenting example of why Nabokov is an unavoidable candidate for the most skilled writer in all of human history.