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

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serious and profound experiences of those characters
in Nabokov's later novels who find that it is not
for man to shape his own future and destiny. In
Martha's case their experience is again rendered in
ironical
terms.
She plans her husband's death with the aim of securing
her and Franz' happy future, but her plans miscarry.
Her spells do not work (128), nor her tricks
(146), and she herself cancels'a carefully workedout
plan at the last second because Dreyer happens to
mention that he is going to make "a hundred thousand
dollars at one stroke" (247) the next day, a sum that
"thrifty" Martha is of course not going to sacrifice.
"You see", she says, trying to introduce the idea
of murder to Franz, "people generally make all kinds
of plans, very good plans, but completely fail to
consider one possibility: death. As if no one could
ever die" (319). This is turned ironically against her.
Of course she applies it only to her husband and never
once to herself, and yet, ironically, it is Martha
in the end who dies, having caught a fatal pneumonia
on the rowing expedition that was to have been the end
of her husband's life.
The heroes of Nabokov's later novels, Luzhin, Shade
and Mr. R. will come to realize. that there is some
mysterious power at work, organizing, planning and
shaping human life and that it is impossible for man
to take any part in this shaping.
In this "gay" novel, it is of course a less mysterious
power that does the ordering and planning.