Summing up, references will be made also to Conclusive Evidence, or Speak, Memory, as it was renamed when published in the United States. Focusing on a cinematic scene in Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1926), the analysis traces how the themes of cinematic deception techniques and mimetic violence are developed further by Nabokov in some of his texts from the 1930s and ’40s: The Eye, Kamera Obskura/Laughter in the Dark, Nikolai Gogol, and “The Assistant Producer”. His relation to cinematic art, on the other hand, was ambivalent and charged with a highly potent dynamic.1 The aim of this article is to show to what extent Nabokov’s relations to these two phenomena - Soviet art and cinematic art - were interrelated and subtly intertwined. Vladimir Nabokov’s negative judgment of socialist realism was unequivocal and consistent over the years.

KEY WORDS: Nabokov, sociaist realism, Soviet art, cinematic realism. It is shown how cinematic effects in Nabokov addresses the violence inherent in socialist realist aesthetics: political censorship and manipulation on the one hand, and the programmatic extinction of artists labeled as “bourgeois” on the other.

Focusing on a cinematic scene in Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1926), the analysis traces how the themes of cinematic deception techniques and mimetic violence are developed by Nabokov. The aim of this article is to show to what extent Nabokov’s relations to the two phenomena Soviet art and cinematic art were interrelated and subtly intertwined.

Mary by vladimir nabokov