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) 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. 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 métamorphose appeared in La nouvelle revue française, and by that time many of my so-called ‘kafkaesque’ stories had already been published.”

In Bend Sinister (1947), the first novel Nabokov wrote in America, a beetle-shaped bootjack is referred to as Grégoire (the name Kafka’s protagonist bears in La métamorphose), and, more to the Kafkan point, the novel not only includes a miraculous transformation in its closing lines, but also depicts a nightmarish world of absurd bureaucracy that at certain shadowy moments recalls Kafka. And in Nabokov’s final novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), when the protagonist Vadim Vadimorovitch (a special refraction of Vladimir Vladimirovitich [Nabokov]) provides a list of his works that darkly mirrors Nabokov’s own, the novel corresponding to Invitation to a Beheading on the narrator’s CV is entitled The Red Topper, which tells of “the strange pangs of a strange transformation”—a description that displaces one Kafkan world (that of castle and court) for another (that of a metamorphosis).

Whether Nabokov was wrong in his estimations of Kafka’s influence, or mischievously misleading about the date of his first familiarity, cannot be answered with certitude. But they are not the only questions we might pose. Though critics have been most attracted by the sport of potential influence, in the following I argue that there are other and more interesting grounds for studying Nabokov’s reflections on Kafka and that these are to be found in Nabokov’s singular interpretation of The Metamorphosis and what that interpretation has to say about his rules for good reading and good writing.

2. Dwarves and Saints

Nabokov lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1937 and over the course of those eighteen years seems to have concerned himself as little as possible with German language, culture, politics—and Germany itself. Besides the lessons he gave in tennis, boxing, French, English, and Russian—lessons that allowed him and his family a precarious subsistence—his social and intellectual activity remained solidly within the sphere of Berlin’s Russian émigré community (then the largest in Europe and only to be eclipsed by that of Paris in the mid 1930s). Though as a youth Nabokov had known enough German to translate short poems by Heine and Goethe into Russian, he later claimed to have next to no working knowledge of the language and that he had resisted acquiring one out of fear that it might lead to his losing touch with his native Russian. “Upon my moving to Berlin,” he later remarked, “I was beset by a panicky fear of somehow flawing my precious layer of Russian by learning to speak German fluently.” Nevertheless, he notes that “I read Goethe and Kafka en regard.”

Despite his best efforts, Nabokov did not, however, remain indifferent to contemporary German literature. He developed strong—and mostly negative—opinions that he was not shy about voicing. His chief object of scorn was German literature’s most celebrated novelist, Thomas Mann, with the language’s most celebrated modern poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, a close second. In the years of his growing fame, Nabokov rarely neglected to include Mann—alongside such figures as Gide, Faulkner, Balzac, and Dostoevsky—in litanies of renowned novelists whom he deemed “mediocrities.”  In 1945, an indignant Nabokov wrote to his dear friend (later to become a bitter enemy) Edmund Wilson, “How could you name that quack Mann in one breath with P[roust] and J[oyce]? In “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” written in 1957, Nabokov refers to “topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas” and lists as examples of such Balzac, Gorki, and Mann. In an interview for the German weekly Die Zeit in 1959, after Nabokov had run down Mann once again, his interviewer asked him if there were any German authors he did like. The answer apparently “came without the slightest hesitation”: “Franz Kafka. But not the mystical image of Kafka that has been erected by his friends but the real Kafka. I consider him one of the greatest European authors of our time, and I can always read and reread works like The Metamorphosis or The Castle.”

Though Nabokov’s abuse was better known than his praise, he had been expressing this view of Kafka to the widening circles of his students at Wellesley, Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell for nearly twenty years. Nabokov said each year in his lectures on European masterpieces that Kafka was “the greatest German writer of our time” and that “such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him.” He even seemed to derive special pleasure from the vicinity in which they briefly lived—noting for his class how Kafka “in those last years of his short life . . . had a happy love affair and lived with his mistress in Berlin, in 1923, not far from me.” In an interview from 1965, after the success of Lolita and the conveniences of Switzerland led Nabokov permanently to suspend his lectures on literature, he drew up a personal list of “the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose,” wherein Kafka’s The Metamorphosis appeared in second place behind Joyce’s Ulysses.