5 - Dimming the bliss of Narcissus

Summary

During the early 1930s Nabokov probes more deeply into the mercurial realm of personal identity, with its capacities for specular self-absorption and solipsistic projection. In his fiction of this period he invents a memorable series of characters who attempt to transcend their everyday positions by creating imaginary alter egos or projecting elements of identity onto external entities. Nabokov's work examines these core processes from several angles. While “Terra Incognita” provides a model of imaginative creation in what is almost its freest form, three other works depict the operation of personal projection channelled onto specific targets. “Lips to Lips” (“Usta k ustam”) features a would-be writer who projects elements of himself onto a character he creates in a work of literary fiction; “The Admiralty Spire” (“Admiralteiskaia igla”) depicts an individual whose projections are directed onto a literary character created in someone else's work of fiction; and Despair (Otchaianie) presents the chronicle of a man who combines both of these approaches. Hermann Karlovich engages in a massive episode of projection onto an external entity, but this entity is not a literary character in a work of fiction read by Hermann, it is a living person in Hermann's world. Hermann, however, treats this other as if he were his own literary creation. His proprietary attitude toward the external world both recalls the solipsistic visions of the narrator of The Eye and echoes the callous manipulations of Axel Rex.