"Death, Reimagined: Nabokov's Berlin Tragedies and the Art of Redemption." (original) (raw)

2023, Christine Frank, ed. Berlin im Krisenjahr 1923: Parallelwelten in Literatur, Wissenschaft und Kunst. Berlin: Königshausen and Neumann.

On March 28, 1922, the renowned politician, journalist, and newspaper editor Vladimir D. Nabokov was murdered at Berlin Philharmonic by two Russian monarchists aiming to assassinate his former party affiliate and prominent historian Pavel Miliukov. The death of his father dealt a devastating blow to Vladimir Nabokov, Jr., then 22 years old and writing under the pen-name of V. Sirin. In a diary entry about the events of that night, Nabokov recalled the car trip to the site of the crime as something “outside life, monstrously slow, like those mathematical puzzles that torment us in feverish half-sleep.” Nabokov dedicated most of 1923 both to processing this loss and to dealing with the sudden break-up with his fiancé, Svetlana Siewert. This paper explores the writer’s life in Berlin in 1923 as a moment of of personal and creative recovery, with dozens of poems, several short dramatic works, and The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, emerging from under his pen. At the core of this investigation are the poems from Nabokov’s 1923 handwritten album, currently preserved at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. Some of them, yet unpublished and translated here for the first time, are analyzed as as a lyrical response to two traumas as well as a foundation for mature Nabokov’s poetics of redemption and otherworldly hope.