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Clancy, Laurie. 1984. The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, Ltd. de Vries, Gerard, and D. Barton Johnson. 2006. Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting. With an essay by Liana

Ashenden. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gardner, Martin. 2005. The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to

Superstrings. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Grabes, Herbert. 1993. “The Deconstruction of Autobiography: Look at the Harlequins! ” Cycnos, 10, no. 1, 151-58. ¯¯. 1995. “A Prize for the (Post-)Modernist Nabokov.” Cycnos, 12, no. 2, 117-24. < http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1469> Johnson, D. Barton. 1985. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis

Publishers. ¯¯= 1995. “Look at the Harlequins!” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov.

New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 330-40. ¯¯. 1999. “Vladimir Nabokov and Rupert Brooke.” In Nabokov and his Fiction: New Perspectives. ed. Julian W.

Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 92-108. Lee, Lawrence L. 1976. Vladimir Nabokov. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers. Maddox, Lucy. 1983. Nabokov’s Novels in English. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Nabokov, Dmitri, and Matthew J. Bruccoli, eds. 1989. Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977. San Diego:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Nabokov, Vladimir. 1989(1). Ada, or Ardor : A Family Chronicle. 1969, 1970; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1991. The Annotated Lolita. ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. 1970; rev.ed., New York: Vintage Books. ¯¯. 1989(2). Laughter in the Dark. 1938; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1981. Lectures on Russian Literature. Edited and with an introduction by Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark. ¯¯. 1990(1). Look at the Harlequins! 1974; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1989(3). Mary: A Novel. 1970; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1996(1). Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory. New

York: The Library of America. ¯¯. 1996(2). Novels 1955-1962: Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Lolita: A Screenplay. New York: The Library of America. ¯¯. 1996(3). Novels 1969-1974: Ada, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins! New York: The Library of

America. ¯¯. 1989(4). Pale Fire. 1962; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1989(5). Pnin. 1957; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1989(6). Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1967; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1990(2). Strong Opinions. 1973; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 2002. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. 1997; New York: Vintage International. ¯¯. 1989(7). Transparent Things. 1972; New York: Vintage International. Page, Norman, ed. 1982. Nabokov : The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge. Parker, Stephen Jan. 1987. Understanding Nabokov. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Proffer, Carl R. 1974. “Things about Look at the Harlequins! Some Marginal Notes.” In A Book of Things About

Vladimir Nabokov. ed. Carl R. Proffer. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis Publishers, 295-301. Raguet-Bouvart, Christine. 1999. óEuropean Art: A Framing Device?õ In Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical

Boundaries. ed. Lisa Zunshine. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Rampton, David. 1984. Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ¯¯. 1993. Vladimir Nabokov. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : The Macmillan Press, Ltd. Rowe, William Woodin. 1981. Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis Publishers. Stuart, Dabney. 1978. Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University

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Life and Fiction in Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!

SUZUKI Akira

Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins! (1974) is his last completed novel (i.e. his

seventeenth and eighth in English). This novel is frequently discussed as a fictional

autobiography narrated by Vadim Vadimovich, a Russian émigré professor and writer who has

slight biographical similarities (his exile from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, university

education in Trinity College, Cambridge, and immigration to the United States) to the novel’s

author, Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov, or, more precisely, as “a parody of (auto-) biography”

(Johnson 1995: 330). In fact, the narrator calls his text “this memoir” and himself a “memoirist,”

but the reader of Look at the Harlequins! will find that the novel is by no means an ordinary

memoir or autobiography. Although the book begins with a list of “Other Books by the

Narrator” which strongly reminds us of Nabokov’s own Russian and English novels, branchings

or differences from the author’s real life are already immanent in the opening sentence of the first

chapter of Part I: “I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd

circumstances . . . .” Ambiguous expressions (“three or four”) are typical in the narrator’s

discourse. Moreover, unlike his Christian name and patronymic that can be vaguely identified,

his surname never becomes clear even for himself.

If Vadim Vadimovich seems to be a double of the author, the relationship might be

interpreted in connexion with the main theme of the novel: the symmetrical coexistence of

possible worlds. Look at the Harlequins! is a text full of references to multifaceted and

multicoloured shapes (like lozenges suggested by the title itself) and shadings, including spectral

distribution of reality and imagination, of which the narrator’s dementia (according to the

narrator’s words, “one of the characters” in his story) possibly caused by his inability to

discriminate “direction and duration” (space and time) is a manifest example of realisation.