Kafka’s Reality and Nabokov’s Fantasy. On Dwarves, Saints, Beetles, Symbolism, and Genius

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/318 Harvard University

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1. The Metamorphosis
It is not difficult to hear echoes of Kafkan steps in the early works of Vladimir Nabokov. Critics have detected faint echoes in his early Russian novels The Eye (1930) and Despair (1933) (see Hyde 104, 109; and Foster) and more definite sounds in Invitation to a Beheading (1938). In the latter novel, a harmless hero in an abstracted world is interred in a castle, brought before an incomprehensible
tribunal, and charged with the vaguest of crimes (“Gnostic turpitude”). This thematic similarity was strong enough for Nabokov to protest in a 1959 foreword to the English translation of the novel that he had not read Kafka until after he wrote it (Invitation 6). When asked about the matter in an interview ten years later, he replied: “I do not know German and so could not read Kafka before the
nineteen thirties when his La metamorphose appeared in La nouvelle revue franfaise, and by that time many of my so-called ‘kafkaesque’ stories had already been published” {Strong Opinions 151-52)

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