“A Man from the Movie Kingdom”: Nabokov on Literature and Film in the Interwar Culture Industry-- Lecture by Luke Parker (Oberlin)
Abstract
During his exile in Berlin from 1922 to 1937, the Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov was drawn irresistibly to the cinema. After contemplating a career as an actor and screenplay writer, and instead turning to literature as a profession, Nabokov never severed his links with the movie industry, which is pervasive in his Russian fiction and was instrumental to his own entrepreneurial efforts at self-promotion. In this talk, I show that Nabokov displayed a sophisticated understanding of cinema and literature’s mutual dependence in the context of American and European mass culture. Reading Nabokov alongside his German contemporary, the great Berlin-based film critic and theorist Siegfried Kracauer, I uncover how Nabokov responded similarly to the emergence of an interwar “culture industry” and “cult of distraction.” In my exploration of Nabokov’s complex theorization of the cinema – at once aesthetic, sociological, and economic – I argue that his idiosyncratic appreciation of German and American film art was conditioned by his status as one of the foremost writers of the Russian emigration.
Bio
Luke Parker is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Oberlin College. He is currently working on a book entitled Nabokov Noir: Mass Culture and the Art of Exile, and has authored articles on The Luzhin Defense and professional chess of the 1920s, and King, Queen, Knave and the commercial and visual “surface culture” of Weimar Berlin. He recently published the first English translation of Nabokov’s 1926 talk “On Generalities.”
