Look at the Harlequins! New York, 1974

Still largely overlooked in critical circles, Look at the Harlequins! recounts the autobiography of Vadim Vadimych N., whose life and work seem to parody the biography a wayward scholar might create of Nabokov himself. (He wrote in 1973 of Andrew Field's research: "It was not worth living a far from negligible life . . . only to have a blundering ass reinvent it.") This also recalls a lecture, "Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible," that Nabokov delivered in 1937 on the evils of "fictionalized biographies." Reviews of Look at the Harlequins! were mixed; readers who had been put off or dismayed by Ada and Transparent Things were charmed by this readable tale, but to those who saw the merits of Nabokov's previous two novels, it seemed weak. Richard Poirier opened his somewhat narrow critique in The New York Times Book Review with a comparison between Nabokov's Vadim and both Joyce's Stephen and Proust's Marcel, deducing that "there are few reasons to be surprised, and many reasons to be disappointed, by the complicated interplay between Vladimir Nabokov and the narrator of this, his 37th book." Despite such criticism, it was nominated for the National Book Award but, like Pnin, Pale Fire, Transparent Things, and Tyrants Destroyed, did not win. Perhaps most interestingly, Look at the Harlequins! contains a realistic return to Russia that Nabokov never undertook. Though himself opposed to visiting countries where totalitarianism dominated, Nabokov gleaned information from friends and family who had returned to Russia and adapted their details into Vadim Vadimych's homecoming, just as Joyce had pumped relations in Dublin for some of the local color in Ulysses.

The items listed below pertain to Nabokov's life and career and are the contents of the exhibition at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, on view from April 23 through August 21, 1999. This checklist, primarily of items from the Library's Nabokov Archive, is included here to provide a sense of the rich holdings in this special collection.

Vladimir Nabokov
"Look at the Harlequins!"
Holograph manuscript on 807 index cards, signed and dated Montreux, April 1974
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Look at the Harlequins!
New York: McGraw-Hill, [1974]
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Box for Look at the Harlequins! index cards, signed and dated, Montreux, 1973
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
"Eggs à la Nabocoque"
Holograph manuscript, signed and dated Montreux, November 18, 1972
Berg Collection

Véra and Vladimir Nabokov, 1966
Photograph by Philippe Halsman
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Autograph anniversary note to Véra Nabokov, Montreux, Switzerland, April 15, 1975
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov's eyeglasses, ca. 1974
Lent by Dmitri Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov's Montblanc fountain pen, ca. 1960
Lent by Dmitri Nabokov