Read an excerpt from Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile (Cornell University Press, November 2022), in which Parker, a visiting assistant professor of Russian, examines Russian émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov’s “sustained engagement with silent and early sound cinema.”
Parker describes how Nabokov “was born three years after the first film screening in Russia, and his childhood in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg paralleled the nascent medium’s development.” The young writer then fled with his family to Weimar Berlin, where he frequented movie theaters as a friend of film critic Georgy Gessen. Nabokov also appeared in front of the camera as a film extra and tried writing film scripts.
“Russian émigrés with occupations in the cinema feature across Nabokov’s Russian fiction and drama—the extra Ganin in Mary (1926), the actress Marianna in The Man from the U.S.S.R. (1927), and the producer Valentinov in The Luzhin Defense (1929–1930),” notes Parker. “To Nabokov, the spectrality of film seemed not to distort reality but to hold a mirror up to the ghostlike and insubstantial existence of dispossessed Russians in cities like Berlin and Paris.”
Original source can be found here.
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