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In Pale Fire, Lolita, and Despair we were presented with deluded artist figures who used their art actively to distort reality and who were, to varying degrees, automatized beings. I now wish to turn to a second group of novels in which Nabokov inverts this scheme. In King, Queen, Knave, Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend Sinister, we encounter undeluded, non-automatized artist figures, each of whom is accommodated to reality but is unfortunate enough to inhabit a kind of deluded puppet world where, outside of themselves, automatism proliferates. I begin by discussing King, Queen, Knave in which Nabokov fashions a conventional tale of adultery with the deeper purpose of dramatizing the clash between the artistic vision and the inimical forces of automatism. Here, Nabokov's artist figure is Kurt Dreyer, a middle-aged Berlin businessman who, as a child, had longed to create art "but instead had spent many dull years working in his father's shop."¹ As the wealthy and somewhat complacent proprietor of a gentlemen's outfitters, Dreyer is an unlikely embodiment of the Bergsonian/Shklovskyite artistic vision. Certainly, some critics have responded unfavourably to Dreyer, seeking to cast him as affectless automaton rather than artist. G.M. Hyde writes of Dreyer's "real nastiness"² and lack of humanity and Julian Connolly allies Dreyer with the automatous Martha and Franz and sees him as, potentially, "an indifferent aesthete or even a callous bully."³ Jeff Edmunds

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-10907-1_8

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