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Why is Hermann Karlovich afraid of mirrors? On V. Nabokov’s/Sirin’s novel Despair [Otchayanie]
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2021-1-161-190
Abstract
In Despair[Otchayanie] Nabokov/Sirin tries his hand at portraying an antihero and anti-artist. This predetermines the special principle behind the character’s creation: the Ich-Erzahlung (first-person) narration and the algorithm of Hermann’s consistent and total negation and expulsion from reality. The article analyses the main types of the author’s position in the novel: a subjectified narration, the ‘two-voice word,’ etc. The author particularly draws our attention to Hermann’s mystical fear of mirrors. For many years the character was haunted by one and the same nightmare: he enters a room, which is completely bare, desolate and painted clean white. The dream appears to be a metaphor of the hollowness of his personality. It is this hollowness that the hero fears he might see reflected in a mirror. The scholar traces allusions to H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). The despair of the protagonist has a truly existential magnitude, his escape barred both into the ‘otherworldliness’ and the meta-reality. The latter has such a vague presence in the material world and is so devoid of distinctive parameters that it hardly justifies the description of being real.
About the Author
A. V. Zlochevskaya
Lomonosov Moscow State University
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Alla V. Zlochevskaya - Doctor of Philology.
1 Leninskie Gory, Moscow, 119991
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Review
For citations:
Zlochevskaya A.V. Why is Hermann Karlovich afraid of mirrors? On V. Nabokov’s/Sirin’s novel Despair [Otchayanie]. Voprosy literatury. 2021;(1):161-190. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2021-1-161-190
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