The shop window quality of things: 1920s weimar surface culture in Nabokov's Korol', dama, valet

Abstract

By resituating the original 1928 Russian version of Korol?, dama, valet (King, Queen, Knave) in the context of Weimar Berlin, this article shows that Vladimir Nabokov's second novel is the culmination of a serious engagement with a flourishing German visual and commercial culture. The appeal of Korol?, dama, valet to both native Germans and Russian émigrés based in Berlin is shown to be a sympathetic yet strategic manipulation of the tropes and commonplaces of Berlin's renowned "surface culture." The article presents Nabokov as an entrepreneurial figure, exploiting his ambivalent status as both an insider and outsider in Berlin for success in translation as well as among the Russian émigrés. Uncovering Nabokov's complex relations to European visual culture, I show that the fusion of materiality and display in Korol?, dama, valet can be understood through the concept of the "shop window quality of things." Drawing on contemporary German sources, this article reveals the Russian novel, so thoroughly repurposed thirty years later in the 1968 English translation, to be a perceptive, even prophetic, analysis of a dynamic and attractive Weimar culture already beginning to spin out of control.