Studies in Obsession: The Defense, The Eye, Laughter in the Dark, and Despair

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to four of Nabokov’s Russian novels, The Defense, The Eye, Laughter in the Dark, and Despair. They were all published in the 1930s, and I propose to discuss them as studies of obsession. This schematic way of proceeding has the advantage of isolating what eventually came to be the central feature of Nabokovian narrative: the plot that organizes itself around one all-consuming idea of the central character. The limitation of this sort of criticism is that at times it can require its practitioners to do so much hacking away at ill-fitting details that they make Procrustes look like a masseur, but I have tried to avoid that in what follows by discussing some of the features that differentiate the novels as well.