Nabokov Studies, 1 (1994), 69-82.

D. BARTON JOHNSON (Santa Barbara, CA, U.S.A.)

THE NABOKOVSARTRE CONTROVERSY Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) were, in their very different ways, leading figures on the Western intellectual scene during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The two men held radically divergent views of the world, and it is not surprising that they came into conflict. Their dispute arose from Sartre's 1939 re view of Nabokov's novel Despair and expanded, at least on Nabokov's part, to an attack on Sartre's views of literature, politics, and, ultimately, philosophy. While the Nabokov-Sartre controversy is less well known than the Nabokov-Wilson feud, it was no less elegantly acidulous. Brian Boyd and Andrew Field briefly discuss the Nabokov-Sartre exchange in their books, as does Simon Karlinsky in his notes to the Nabokov-Wilson correspondence and in a subsequent essay.' Both of the protagonists have published and republished their contributions.2 My purpose is to gather and summarize the available information and to suggest that an early Nabokov story may have some relevance to the imbroglio. In 1926 Nabokov wrote a short story called "Uzhas" or "Terror" about a world suddenly devoid of meaning.3 The first person poet-narrator is nameless, as is his mistress, the only other character of conse quence. There is no dialogue. Events take place in a nameless Russian city, and in an equally anonymous non-Russian city, all set in a featureless
1. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 138-39; Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 132-33, and VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986), pp. 167-68; Simon Karlinsky, ed. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: 1940-971 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 198, and Simon Kariinsky, "Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)," in Histoire de la Littrature Russe. Le XXe Sicle**. La Rvolution et les annes vingt, ed. Efim Etkind, Georges Nivat, llya Serman et Vittorio Strada (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 166-67. 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, "La Mprise," Europe, June 15, 1939, pp. 240-49; rpt. in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 58-61; Vladimir Nabokov, "Sartre's First Try," The New York Times Book Review, April, 24 1949, pp. 3 & 19; rpt. in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 228-30. 3. Vladimir Nabokov, "Uzhas," in Sovremennye zapiski (Paris), No. 30 (Jan. 1927), pp. 214-20; Terror," in Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), pp. 113-21. Page citations to Nabokov's works in the text of the article refer to both the Russian and the English versions, e.g. (R201/E118).

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present. The Russian poet-narrator tells of earlier, brief episodes of existential estrangement. He has survived these, thanks, in part to his relation-

ship with his beloved mistress whose gay simplicity seemingly protects
him from the abyss of a stark, unmediated reality. The narrator's affairs

require a solitary business trip abroad. On the fifth sleepless day, he goes
out for a stroll. His head feels as if it were made of glass. On the street he

suddenly sees "the world ... as it actually is" (R201/E118). Houses, trees, cars, people have all lost any connection with ordinary life: "My line of
communication with the world snapped, I was on my own and the world was on its own, and that worid was devoid of sense. I saw the actual essence of all things" (R202/E119). Floundering to regain his former, habitual "reality," he feels he is "no longer a man but a naked eye, an aimless glance moving in an absurd world" (R203/E120). At that moment he receives a telegram telling him that his mistress is dying. His existential

tenor instantly vanishes in the face of simple human grief. He travels back
to her bedside, where she dies without regaining consciousness. Her death has saved him, but what is to protect him now?4 Nabokov's tale of vastation was written in Berlin. Some eight years later in that same city a provincial French schoolteacher and student of philosophy completed a second draft of a novel to be called La Nause.5 When Jean-Paul Sartre published his inaugural novel in March 1938,6 it launched one of the twentieth century's most controversial intellectual careers. Set in the early thirties, La Nause purports to be the diary of one M. Roquentin who is engaged in historical research in a French orovincial city.7 The diary is an account of Roquentin's growing psychological and metaphysical despair as he undergoes a vastation very similar to that of Nabokov's narrator. He fears he is going mad. Roquentin's madness entails a catastrophic descent from the familiar world of "essence" into
the stark world of "existence."

Hayden Carruth's "Introduction" to Nausea provides necessary background (ix). The "essence" of an object is everything that permits us to recognize it Not only does this include obvious features such as size, weight, texture, color, but also function and history, all of which define objects in the human context. The "existence" of an object is simply that it isquite apart from its perceptual qualities, its past or anything that
discussions, see D. Barton Jonnson, ""terror': Pre-texts and Post-texts," in A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction, ed. Charles Nicol and G. Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 39-64. 5. Ronald Hayman, Sartre. A Life (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987), p. 108. 6. Ibid., pp. 132-33.

4. For an analysis of the philosophical antecedents of this story and a survey of prior

New Directions, 1969). Quotes in the text of my article are from this English translation and Hayden Carruth's "Introduction."

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Uoyd Alexander, intro. by Hayden Carruth (New York:

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71

gives it meaning. Perception of objects thus stripped of their humanizing

essence ends in existential horror and the "nausea" of Sartre's title. In the

novel's most famous scene, the distraught Roquentin collapses on a park bench under a chestnut tree. He notices the black root of the tree by his
foot.

I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision.... Never until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of "existence."... And then all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things,.... Or rather the root the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disordernaked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness (126-27). Like Nabokov's hero, Roquentin struggles to find words to express his loathsome vision (129 & 131). The entire world becomes ooze: "I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I knew it was the world, the naked world suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being" (134). Partially recovering from his vastation, Roquentin visits his ex-wife, but this proves ineffectual. The novel ends indeterminately with a hint that perhaps art, specifically a novel, shall be Roquentin's mode of accommodation with existence. Before proceeding, we must pause for a clarification. Sartre's hero is clearly undergoes the same experience as Nabokov's, but this is some what confused by matters of philosophical terminology and translation. Sartre, the philosopher, is using "essence" and "existence" in the technical
sense described above. Nabokov's term "essence" is his translation of

the Russian periphrastic [mir]...kakov on est' na samom dele" (202), i.e., '[the world] as it is in actual fact' Thus Nabokov's "essence" is identical
with Sartre's stark "existence."

The hom'fying existential illumination that Sartre assigns to his hero is loosely derived from an incident in his own life that he described in a 1931 letter to his companion Simone De Beauvoir: "...I looked at the tree. It was beautiful, and I have no hesitation in setting down two facts vital to my biography: it was at Burgos that I understood what a cathe-

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dral is, and at Le Havre what a tree is. Unfortunately, I am not sure what
kind of tree it was."" He enclosed a sketch and asked De Beauvoir to

identify what was apparently a chestnut tree. Nabokov would have been

perversely amused, for Sartre's blind eye to the natural world, both real
and metaphoric, evokes that of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the myopic utilitarian social and literary critic, whom Nabokov considered the bad seed in nineteenth century Russia's cultural and political development. Nabokov had recently incorporated into his novel The Gift a mocking biography of Chernyshevsky in which the radical martyr's myopia and ignorance of nature were a central metaphor. Nabokov was resident in France when Sartre's novel appeared in 1938 and was probably aware of it. Both writers had ties to the prestigious La Nouvelle Revue Franaise and to its editor Jean Paulhan, who

had admired La Nause in manuscript.^ in March 1937 Nabokov had

published his essay "Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable" in NRF, and Sartre's "Le Mur" appeared there in July. Sartre began to review for the journal the following year. Nabokov had already published three novels, The Defense, The Eye, and Laughter in the Dark in French translation dur-

ing the mid-thirties.'0 In eariy 1939, Despair, the Russian Otchaianie, appeared as La Mprise "The Mistake" (not "Contempt" as Juliar has it confusing the feminine mprise for the masculine mpris).u The French version was a translation of Nabokov's own 1937 English translation of the Russian original. Despair or La Mprise is a psychological detective story in which a Russian migr businessman, Hermann, discovers a tramp whom he recognizes as his double. Since his business is failing, he contrives an insurance swindle in which he trades identities with his double

and kills him. The fatal mistake (mprise) is that his 'double" does not re semble him in the least. If Sartre was not already familiar with Nabokov's work, he was soon to become aware of Despair. Fresh from the triumph of La Nause, Sartre reviewed Nabokov's Despair for the journal Europe on 15 June 1939. Terming Despair "a strange miscarriage of a novel," Sartre focuses on Nabokov's tendency to provide his tale with a built-in critique that causes it to self-destruct The critic remarks that the history of literature falls into two periods: one in which authors create their tools, and a second in which they reflect on those tools. Nabokov belongs to the second. The devices that Nabokov chooses to mock are those of Dostoevsky whose tormented heroes re
8. Hayman, Sartre, 90. 9. Ibid., pp. 133 & 125-26. 10. Michael Juliar, Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: Garland,
1986), D10.1, D12.1, & D14. 11. fbid., Dl 5.1.

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73

semble Hermann Karlovich more than the latter resembles his double, the

tramp Felix. Dostoevsky, however, believes in his characters while Nabokov does not. Although Nabokov borrows from Dostoevsky in order to mock him, he fails to replace the old techniques with anything new of his own. Why does Nabokov bother to write? Masochism? Simply the pleasure of catching himself in the act of trickery? His novel
dissolves in its own venom. Nabokov, the author, self-destructs. Like his hero, Nabokov is a man who has read too much. Both Nabokov and his

"hero," Hermann Karlovich, are "victims of the war and the emigration." Sartre concludes: "At the present time there exists a curious literature by Russian migrs and others who are dracins. Unlike his brilliant Soviet countryman, lurii Olesha, M. Nabokov is completely deracinated. Such writers "do not concern themselves with any society, not even to revolt against it, because they do not belong to any society. [Hermann] is consequently reduced to committing perfect crimes, and M. Nabokov to writing in English about gratuitous matters." Sartre was apparently unaware that Despair had been written in Russian. We do not know if Nabokov saw Sartre's original review. He probably did since he was living in Paris and well-connected in French literary circles. In any case, similar complaints had previously been voiced by Russian migr critics. At about the time Sartre's review appeared, Nabokov was apparently completing The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first English language novel.12 Nabokov reacted strongly to attitudes such as those expressed by Sartre and earlier critics in his novel-inprogress. In chapter 7, the narrator, Sebastian's Russian half-brother "V.", launches a diatribe against Mr. Goodman, Sebastian's former secretary, who has just written a biography, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight. The particular object of V.'s scorn is Goodman's insistence on seeing: "... 'poor Knight' as a product and victim of what he calls 'our time'though why some people are so keen to make others share in their Chronometrie concepts, has always been a mystery to me. 'Postwar Unrest,' 'Postwar Generation' are to Mr. Goodman magic words opening every door."'3 In high dudgeon, "V." declares that "... the very idea of [Sebastian! reacting in any special 'modern' way to what Mr. Goodman calls 'the atmosphere of postwar Europe' is utterly preposterous" (66). It is tempting to see this as Nabokov's response to Sartre, although much the same sentiments had been voiced by Nabokov's hero, Fyodor GodunovCherdyntsev, some years earlier in The Gift
12. Ibid., p. 165. 13. Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York: New Directions, 1977 [19411, p. 62.

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Nabokov Studies

The Sartre-Nabokov exchange receded into the background during World War II. Nabokov arrived in the United States on May 28, 1940. During the following decade he established himself as a well-regarded minor figure on the American literary scene and as an academic. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947) attracted a handful of mixed reviews. Some, like that of Diana Trilling, were remarkably similar in tone and content to Sartre's earlier review.'4 Sartre, on the other hand, emerged from the war as the undisputed leader of the French intellectual scene: novelist, playwright, and founder of Existentialism, that "metaphysical expression of the spiritual dishevelment of a postwar age."'5 Some lingering presence of Nabokov may have remained with Sartre even during the war years. Russian migr writer Nina Berberova, long-time Paris resident and acquaintance of Nabokov, has made the rather startling observation that the seed of Sartre's 1944 Huis clos "No Exit" may be found in Nabokov's The Eye which had appeared in French in 1935.16 The works share the idea that the self exists only as reflected in the eyes of others (L'enfer, c'est les autres), but the theme is scarcely original. The idea is not without its appeal, but Nabokov's hero, Smurov, is ultimately a refutation of the thesis since he succeeds, after a fashion, in reintegrating his scattered images. Nabokov was certainly on Sartre's mind in 1947 when the French philosopher republished his dismissive essay on La Mprise in a collection called Situations I. (An abridged English version, which mistranslates romanesque as "romantic" rather than "novelistic," may be found in Norman Page's invaluable Nabokov: The Critical Heritage.) The following year Sartre contributed a preface to Nathalie Sarraute's first novel Portrait d'un inconnu. Sartre opens his preface by introducing the term the "anti-

novel." These "penetrating and entirely negative works" look like ordinary novels but their "aim is to make use of the novel in order to challenge the
novel, to destroy it before our very eyes while seeming to construct it" Such works express the fact that "we live in a period of reflection and that the novel is reflecting on its own problems." Mme. Sarraute's novel is a sort of parodie existential detective story. As earlier exemplars of the anti-novel, Sartre cites the works of Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, and, partially, Andr Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs. Among the features that en14. Norman Page, ed. Nabokov: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1982), p. 23. 15. Paul Harvey & |. E. Heseltine, eds. The Oxford Companion to French Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 261. 16. Nina Berberova, "Nabokov i ego Lolita," Novyi zhurnal (New York), No. 57 (June 1959), pp. 92-115; D. Barton Johnson, "Eyeing Nabokov's Eye," Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 19, No. 3 (Fall 1985), 347.

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75

chant M. Sartre is Sarraute's "protoplasmic vision of our interior universe: roll away the stone of the commonplace and we find running discharges, slobberings, mucous; hesitant amoeba-like movements." Her characters are on the verge of terror: "something is about to explode that will illuminate suddenly the glaucous depths of a soul." (One cannot but remark certain similarities to La Nause.) Her admiration for Dostoevsky is also
mentioned.

Sartre's preface not only cites Nabokov as a forerunner of the antinovel but exalts Nabokov's fellow ex-Russian, Nathalie Sarraute, for pre cisely those qualities that he had condemned in his 1939 review of Despair. Apparently Sarraute's parodie detective story succeeds where Nabokov's had failed. Her "stumbling, groping style, with its honesty and misgivings" creates a psychology of "authenticity" that Nabokov had presumably failed to achieve. Nonetheless, Sartre's view of Nabokov was apparently changing for the better. He was important as a predecessor, although not an innovator.
Nabokov's friend Edmund Wilson had meanwhile become interested

in Sartre and had done a New Yorker review essay of the novel, The Age of Reason, accompanied by a discussion of Existentialism.'7 Nabokov wrote Wilson that he had liked the essay.' The following April, Wilson inquired whether Nabokov had seen the republished Sartre review of Despair.19 The published correspondence does not contain Nabokov's answer, if any, but on June 1 Wilson writes that he is sending the Sartre. In the spring of 1949 New Directions brought out Sartre's La Nause in English and The New York Times asked Nabokov to review it The re view does less than justice to Sartre's novel, even conceding Nabokov's point that it is badly written and translated.20 Nabokov opens with a broadside against Sartre and existentialism which he terms "a fashionable brand of caf philosophy" whose practitioners inevitably seem to attract 'suctorialists'." He doubts whether La Nause was worth translating in the first place, and hints that Dostoevsky at his worst lurks in the novel's background. Sartre avers that the alkoo-real world is nauseatingry absurd and amorphous. The novel's fatal flaw, according to Nabokov, is that Roquentin's illumination is not artistically integrated into the work. Any revelation would have done as well without affecting the rest of the book in the slightest. Sartre's artistry is inadequate to his message. Much
17. Edmund Wilson, "Jean-Paul Sartre: The Novelist and the Existentialist," The New

Yorker, Aug. 2 1947; rpt. in Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), pp. 393-403. 18. Karlinsky, Letters, p. 192. 19./bid., p. 198. 20. Nabokov, "Sartre's First Try," pp. 3 & 19.

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of the review is devoted to making fun of Sartre's misapprehensions about Sophie Tucker's "Some of these Days," and to complaints about the translation which, if nothing else, show that Nabokov had examined
the French text.

Nabokov's comments about the inadequacies of Sartre's novel as art are well taken, but perhaps do not fully account for his reaction. The mention of Dostoevsky suggests a reaction to Sartre's charge that Despair was a sickly descendant of Dostoevsky whom Nabokov intensely disliked. The post-war !ionization of Sartre and the reprinting of his review of Despair could not have helped matters. Worst yet, some of Sartre's comments had been echoed by English reviewers of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister. The 1947 reviewers had been particularly hard on the latter.21 More likely, however, is that Nabokov's was, in part, a visceral reaction to Sartre's apologias for Soviet communism and advocacy of littrature engage. Nabokov may have found it particularly galling when La Nause was selected as one of the one of the twelve best novels of the first half of the century in 1950. Sartre's star continued to rise, culminating in the 1964 Nobel Prize which he rejected.22 Nabokov's modest reputation continued to grow slowly until the American publication of Lolita in 1958 when he, like Sartre, became a public figure. Nabokov now returned to the attack. A 1962 letter to the London Times objected strongly to the unauthorized use of Nabokov's name in the program of the Edinburgh International Festival Writers' Conference. Nabokov was appalled to find himself listed alongside llya Ehrenburg, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre "with whom I would not consent to take part in any festival or conference whatsoever."21 Nabokov's opportunity for a major riposte came with the American reissue of Despair.24 Nabokov's "Introduction," dated March 1, 1965, tacitly devotes two of its ten paragraphs to M. Sartre (8-9). Although Sartre's name does not appear in the text, Nabokov is obviously responding to the Frenchman's 1939 review: "Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth. It does not uplift the spiritual organ of man, nor does it show humanity the right exit." The allusion to Sartre's play No Exit is unmistakable. After dismissing Freudians and critics who will discover "the influence of German Impressionists," whom the Germanless Nabokov
had never read, he continues: "On the other hand, I do know French and

shall be interested to see if anyone calls my Hermann 'the father of exis21. Page, Nabokov, pp. 7-9 & 23. 22. Harvey and Heseltine, Oxford Companion, pp. 662 & 576. 23. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, p. 212. 24. Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).

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77

tentialism.'" Sartre's name is introduced in a quite different context, and, pointedly, through an asterisked footnote. In the main text of his "Foreword" Nabokov remarks that Despair "... has less White-Russian appeal than my other migr novels:* hence it will be less puzzling and irritating to those readers who have been brought up on the leftist propaganda of the thirties." Nabokov's footnote reads: "This did not prevent a Communist reviewer (J. P. Sartre), who devoted in 1939 a remarkably silly article to the French translation of Despair, from saying that 'both the author and the main character are victims of the war and the emigration'." Notice that the footnote asterisk is attached to the text's relatively innocuous introductory clause. After reading the note, the reader's eye re turns to the text and completes the sentence which now, by inference, has Sartre as the author of "the leftist propaganda of the thirties." Nabokov had taken his revenge. Sartre returned to haunt Nabokov once again in Edmund Wilson's famous review of the Eugene Onegin translation.25 Wilson did not approve of Nabokov's literalist approach to Pushkin's masterpiece: given the inventiveness and virtuosity of Nabokov's English style, his bald, unrhymed translation can be explained only as perversity: "... one suspects that his perversity here has been exercised in curbing his brilliance; that with his sado-masochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre he seeks to torture both the reader and himself by flattening Pushkin out and denying to his own powers the scope for their full play." The critic could scarcely found a more effective way of outraging
Nabokov.

Wilson's July 1965 resurrection of Sartre's comment seems to have fallen on fertile soil. At the end of October the English translation of The Eye appeared.26 One of the most substantial reviews was by Stephen Koch in The Nation.27 Nabokov is caught in the tension between "modernity and nostalgia." Although admiring in some ways, the review is ultimately dismissive, holding Nabokov to be "a virtuoso, rather than an original genius." In an attempt to locate Nabokov historically, Koch cites Sartre's introduction to Portrait d'un inconnu in which the philosopher speaks of novels that demote plot and character to mere technical de vices while their subject matter becomes fiction itself. Sartre is, Koch thinks, "at least partly right" in assigning Nabokov to this dubious cate
25. Edmund Wilson, The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov," The New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965, pp. 3-6; revised rpt. in Edmund Wilson, A Window on Russia (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1972), pp. 209-37. 26. Juliar, Vladimir Nabokov, pp. 87-88. 27. Stephen Koch, Rev. of The Eye. The Nation. Jan. 17, 1966, pp. 81-82; rpt in Page, Nabokov, pp. 183-87.

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gory. Like Sartre in his review of Despair, Koch sees Nabokov's chief theme as self-consciousness. Although Koch does not refer to the on-going Eugene Onegin feud between Nabokov and Wilson, the latter's re cent reference to Sartre may well have caught the reviewer's eye. Or perhaps he may have noticed that The Eye shares certain thematic concerns
with Sartre's No Exit.

Nabokov's connection with the Sartrean category of the "anti-novel" came up again in a 1970 interview in which Nabokov commented upon several French writers, including Nathalie Sarraute.28 The interviewer, Alfred Appel, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, posed the following question: I have a "theory" that the French translation of Despair (1939)
not to mention the books she could have read in Russianex-

erted a great influence on the so-called New Novel. In his Preface to Mme. Sarraute's Portrait d'un inconnu (1947), Sartre includes you among the antinovelists, a rather more intelligent remarkdon't you thinkthan his comment of eight years before when, reviewing Despair, he said that as an migr writerland lessyou had no subject matter. "But what is the question?" you might ask at this point. Is Nabokov precursor of the French New
Novel?

Nabokov replied: "The New French Novel does not really exist apart from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole." When pressed for his opinion about Sartre's remark, he added: "I'm immune to any kind of opinion and I just don't know what an 'anti-novel' is specifically. Every original novel is 'anti-' because it does not re semble the genre or kind of its predecessor" (173). Given the time of the interview just a year after the publication of Ada, that lush portrait of Antiterra, one might wonder whether Ada is, in part,
Nabokov's massive response to the French New Novel and to his old

arch-enemy to whom he refers later in the interview as "that... awful M. Sartre" (175).29 That Ada is permeated with French subtexts has been admirably shown by Annapaola Cancogni's The Mirage in the Mirror:
28. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, pp. 159-76. 29. A new French study asserts that Nabokov parodies La Nause in both Ada and Pnin. Isabelle Poulin, "La Nause de Nabokov et La Mprise de Sartre," in Vladimir

Nabokov et l'migration, ed. Nora Buhks. (Paris: Institut d'tudes slaves, 1993), pp. 10717.

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Nabokov's Ada and Its French Pretexts, but these subtexts are from the
French Romantic and Realist traditions rather than the New Novel.30

Perhaps Ada is an "anti-anti-novel"? Appel returns to Despair and the French New Novel when he notes that someone has called the New Novel "The detective story taken seriously," and suggests again the possible influence of La Mprise (174). The question is particularly piquant, for Sartre was not only a fan of detective fiction, but explicitly drew upon its techniques in La Nause which has been described as "a kind of whodunit in which contingency would turn out to be the villain"3' Given that Sartre's review of Despair followed hard upon the success of La Nause, it is interesting that he makes no mention of the prominent detective aspect of Nabokov's novel. Nabokov's dislike of Sartre is not surprising. The French intellectual
won his first fame for a bad novel that chanced to echo the theme of the

1926 Nabokov story "Terror" describing an attack of existentialist horror. His 1939 review of Despair attacked Nabokov for qualities that he later praised in Nathalie Sarraute and the French New Wave. More generally, Nabokov despised Sartre for his neo-Chernyshevskian view of literature (engage), and for his political stance. Nabokov's relationship with his French coeval comes full circle in his introductory remarks to the 1975

English translation of Tenor," which he closes by remarking "It preceded

Sartre's La Nause, with which it shares certain shades of thought, and none of that novel's fatal defects, by at least a dozen years" (112). Over

the years Nabokov missed few opportunities to express his opinion of

Sartre, who, like Freud, became one of Nabokov's btes noires.

The controversy was over much more than personal and political differences. It was ultimately philosophical. To put the matter in existentialist
terms, Nabokov was a writer of essences, those sensual textures that en-

rich the world; Sartrea writer of existences, an abstract universe lacking human features. In his early story, "Terror," Nabokov graphically portrayed existential terror arising from "the world as it is," an idea that anticipates much of Sartre's work, French Existentialism, and the French New Novel. For Nabokov, the image was just thatan artistic speculation. Moreover, it was one that ran counter to the general tenor of his work. In any case, it is virtually certain that Sartre never saw the story. There was apparently no contemporary French translation. Sartre did not know Russian, and although the story reportedly appeared in a German translation in 1928,32 it is most unlikely that he encountered it. On the other
30. New York: Garland, 1985. 31. Hayman, 5arre, pp. 89 & 92-93.

32. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), p. 262.

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hand, Appel's hypothesis about the role of Despair in the French New Novel may have some merit as may the thought that Ada is a reaction to
that "school."33

Nabokov and Sartre were polar opposites in almost every respect. The oddity is that they shared at least one central idea. Both men agreed on the primacy of consciousness and fiercely held man capable of free
choice.

University of California at Santa Barbara

33. Appel's hypothesis finds confirmation in the work of at least one French writer. Drawing upon an unpublished paper by Michel Sirvent"Doublures hypertextuelles: rcits rcrits de Jean Lahougue", Susan Elizabeth Sweeney reports that Lahougue, a literary descendant of Robbe-Grillet, published a 1977 novel called Non-lieu dans un paysage (Paris: Caillimard) which uses The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as its subtext. A dozen years later, Lahougue published a story, "La ressemblance," (/.a Ressemblance et autres abus language (Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 1989) which , Sweeney says, "features a firstperson narrator, writer, and would-be murderer named Vladimir N.' who is going to be killed by his double. The story uses the plot of Despair to tell the story of Lahougue's own previous borrowing from VN in Nonlieu." My thanks to Professor Sweeney for this
information.

The Nabokov-Sartre Controversy

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Nabokov Studies