''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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DESPAIR
Despair1, though written long before The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight, Pale Fire and Transparent Things,
can be better understood in the light of these novels.
To understand it, it is also helpful to remember two
novels written before it, namely, The Eye and The
Defence, for Hermann, the hero of Despair, is seen to
fail as badly as their heroes, in fact, his problems
and his subsequent failures combine those of Smurov
and Luzhin.
Ostensibly Despair tells the story of one Hermann
Karlovich, a chocolate manufacturer who faces bankruptcy.
On a business trip to Prague he meets a tramp,
Felix Wohlfahrt, in whom he thinks he recognizes his
perfect double. After careful preparations he executes
a plan which, he claims, originated in all its details
the moment he laid eye on Felix: he induces Felix to
exchange clothes with him and then murders him, in
order to change places with him, to have his wife collect
the insurance money and join her after some time
for a cosy and peaceful life. The ingenious plan miscarries
for the simple reason that the two men are
really not at all alike. Not for a single moment does
anyone take the murdered Felix for Hermann. The victim's
identity is established as well as that of the
murderer, and even while Hermann is sitting writing
his last page, the police come for him.
This "pleasing plot"2 is narrated by Hermann himself,
and he turns it into something quite extraordi-