Vladimir Nabokov: Laughter in the Dark

"Laughter in the Dark" (1933) is the fifth novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written in Berlin and published under the pseudonym V. Sirin. The blind passion of wealthy art critic Bruno Kretschmar for Magda, a sixteen-year-old artist's model who dreams of a life of luxury and a film career, leads the protagonist to the loss of his family, moral catastrophe, and physical blindness. Deceived and helpless, Kretschmar becomes a toy for Magda's cruel lover, the caricaturist Robert Horn.
No matter how beautiful the image in a camera obscura may be, it is merely an inverted picture of the real world. This is a great novel by Nabokov, many ideas of which were further developed twenty-two years later in his "Lolita." One of the key themes of this novel is the representation of life. And one of the main means of representing life is art, and above all, since we are talking about the 20th century, cinema. Art critic Bruno Kretschmar, a successful connoisseur of painting and a respectable head of a family, meets Magda Peters in a movie theater—a poor young girl who works as an usherette and dreams of a career as an actress. The passion that flares up in him seems like a breath of fresh air, the only real feeling in a world of eternal lies, dogmas, conventions, and rules. But in reality, it is only an illusion, a distorted and inverted image of reality in a camera obscura. And Bruno will have to pay too high a price for this knowledge. The era of great illusions offers boundless opportunities for contemplation and fantasy, but sooner or later the magical film screening ends, the beam of the film projector goes out, and the audience is left in total darkness.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Pages: 256 (typographic). Hardcover

Dimensions: 207x132x23 mm