'That’s Not a Real Person': Automata and Mechanistic Reproduction in Nabokov’s 'The Defense'

• In Event: Around and about Nabokov's Defense

Abstract

One common approach to The Defense focuses on the device of repetition. Following Luzhin’s lead, who eventually sees life as a chess game wherein “move by move, the images of his childhood had been repeated,” readers have identified several episodes, figures, images, and word combinations from Luzhin’s youth that return in his adulthood under a new guise. This essay explores another kind of repetition that structures The Defense: how it repeats figures and events from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” Like Hoffmann’s story, The Defense makes use of the phenomenon of the false automaton to explore how authenticity can possibly arise in a world of mechanistic reproduction.

Author

• Meghan Vicks, Independent Scholar