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biography of Nabokov],”insists Brian Boyd, can Nabokov’s last completed novel, the oft neglected Look at the Harlequins! (1974) be understood. As the narrator-protagonist of Look at the Harlequins! notes, “The Russian term for any kind of betrayal, faithlessness, breach of trust, is the snaky, watered-silk word izmena which is based on the idea of change, shift, transformation” (74). Field’s “betrayal” of his one-time benefactor and friend, a

“transformation” of Nabokov’s life and character and body of work, “inspired the real Nabokov to make his next novel a deliberate travesty of his own life and of Speak, Memory [Nabokov’s autobiography] in particular” (Boyd The American Years, 614). A comment that Nabokov made in the summer of 1973 to his lawyer in New York concerning the latest draft of Field’s book that he had reviewed is particularly telling. As he prepared to leave Montreux to work in earnest on the novel that would become Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov

confessed, “I cannot tell you how upset I am by the whole matter,” he said. “It was not worth living a far from negligible life… only to have a blundering ass reinvent it” (Qtd. in Boyd, The American Years 616). If his life was to be reinvented at all, or so is the implication, it is not to be by “a blundering ass,” but by someone capable of doing it artistic justice: Nabokov himself.

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A. Antithesis: Look at the Harlequins! and Field’s Biographical Project

Often written off as little more than an extended and self-indulgent “inside joke”—one that only the author himself could find funny—by even Nabokov’s admirers, Look at the

Harlequins! is the most profoundly self-conscious novel of an author who excelled in the art of self-conscious fiction. To many, it suggests a disarming degree of self-satisfied self- preoccupation in an author for whom solipsism, which he regarded as the greatest of moral and artistic failings, was a career-spanning theme. It is also amongst Nabokov’s slimmer, though not necessarily slighter, novels—another probable cause of its generally being overlooked in favor of many of its more forebears. Few attempts have been made to justify the novel’s place in what is widely regarded as one of the most staggeringly original and accomplished literary bodies of work of the twentieth-century; and so it remains one of the least studied and written about of Nabokov’s English-language novels.

Look at the Harlequins! can be understood as the synthesis in a dialectical relation, the product of the resolution of Field’s antithetical gross distortions of the “thesis” of Nabokov’s own self-representations. It is the fictional autobiography (the roman autobiographique from which Lejeune seeks to distinguish true autobiography) of one Vadim Vadimovich (the patronymic often shortened to “Vadimych”) N.—a funhouse-mirror- image of his creator who may be described as the bastard son fathered upon Nabokov by Andrew Field. The same qualities that mark him as a typical Nabokovian anti-heroic

protagonist along the lines of Hermann in Otchayanie (1934) [Despair (1937, revised 1966), Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962) and Van Veen in Ada’(1969)—all, to a greater or lesser extent, (second-rate) artist-figures; self-absorbed and egocentric to the point of solipsism, ignorant and mindless of the real lives of others,

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carelessly and casually cruel, blind to the true nature of reality—are qualities that Nabokov came to see in Field. Had he not actually existed, Nabokov might have easily invented him for one of his novels. Look at the Harlequins! is in part a response to and critique of Field’s biographical project and the deadly sins of carelessness, imprecision, sloppy scholarship, misreading and mistranslations, eisegetic autobiographical and Freudian/psychoanalytical interpretations, and countenancing of idle gossip and slanderous rumor—the master’s habitual bugbears—that Nabokov found there.

Part of the problem, as Boyd and Stacy Schiff, Véra Nabokov’s biographer, suggest, is that Field was insensitive to Nabokov’s sense of humor and playful teasing—and Nabokov was, writes Boyd, “an expert tease” (The American Years 581). Nabokov gently toyed with Field throughout their early interactions and informal interviews, jokingly alluding to nonexistent family secrets and scandals.

One day Nabokov mocked Field’s solemn harping on the myth that Nabokov’s father was an illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander II. He danced a little jig: “Yes, sometimes I feel the blood of Peter the Great in me!” Véra, who had already observed Field’s failure to understand her husband’s jokes, shouted out that he must not say such things—and Field took that as confirmation that the Nabokovs feared this supposed family secret. (581) [see also 721 n58]

This alleged infidelity of Nabokov’s maternal grandmother and his father’s consequent supposed bastardy are parodied in Look at the Harlequins! as the possibility of Vadim’s having been actually fathered by the Russian émigré noble Count Nikifor Nikodimovich Starov (who may also have fathered some or even all of Vadim’s first three wives—an argument elaborated by D. Barton Johnson in his essay “Dementia’s Incestuous Children in Look at the Harlequins!). And according to Schiff, “Vladimir had enjoyed pulling Field’s leg about his previous wives and now”—in Look at the Harlequins!—“gave full rein to the idea,

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providing a familiar catalogue of Nabokovian women” in the figures of Vadim’s four wives (354).

B. Thesis: Nabokov’s Autobiographical Self-Representations: Speak, Memory: An