“But how can this living water be used?” (crossed out): From the castoff ending of “Camera Obscura” to “Lolita”

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Camera Obscura” famously ends with the death of its blind protagonist, Bruno Kretschmar, from the hand of Kretschmar’s former mistress, Magda Peters. In the little-known version of the novel’s ending, which the author abandoned in 1931, but nevertheless preserved among his papers, now on hold at the Library of Congress (USA), the blind man fiercely shoots Magda in revenge for her unfaithfulness and cruelty as well as in the hope of regaining his vision after the girl’s demise. This first-time publication of the castoff ending of “Camera Obscura” is preceded with an essay that compares the two versions, along with the last pages of “Laughter in the Dark”, the author’s translation of the novel to English. It also investigates the moral choices and narrative devices Nabokov relied on when choosing the more predictable, but also less brutal finale. Furthermore, the analysis draws parallels between the ending Nabokov chose not to publish and the intriguing scene of Quilty’s murder in “Lolita”, with its motifs of blindness and references to camera obscura as an artist’s tool used for creating an optical illusion. The comparison leads to conclusions about such aspects of Nabokov’s art as his visual poetics, strategies of intertextual concealment, and metaphysical imagination.

Keywords

• vladimir nabokov
• archival discoveries
• text variants
• “camera obscura”
• “laughter in the dark”
• “lolita”'s prototexts
• nabokov’s metaphysics
• visual poetics