Allow me
to quote myself, from an article published in Nabokov Studies #2
(1995):
"In KQK, on the other hand [i.e., in the English version of King,
Queen, Knave as opposed to the original Russian], there is no mistaking the
mature Nabokov's stylistic virtuosity in the imagery, word-play, and
alliterative language as well as in the self-referentiality (or what Maurice
Couturier calls autotextualité) of the text. In more than one instance
VN's revamping of KDV seems overdone. Frants' "izbegat' mestoimeniia i
obrashchenie" [avoid pronouns and forms of address] (35) becomes "Avoid
vocatives" (34), an unconvincingly precise vocabulary in the mind of a nervous
twenty-year-old German yokel, and the simple and evocative "frukt" whose lack at
the station's sandwich stall Dreier bemoans is transformed into the absurdly
overwrought "nice, plump, lumpy, glossy red strawberries positively crying to be
bitten into, all their achenes proclaiming their affinity with one's own
tongue's papillae" (2).* It is difficult not to reproach the master (like the
elder Luzhin's composer father-in-law) for sometimes being inclined, "v zrelye
gody, k somnitel'nomu blistaniiu virtuoznosti."
*I explained the presence
of this image in a footnote:
The strawberry/tongue relationship may have
bled into the English version of KDV from Ada, which Nabokov was composing at
the same time he was revising KQK. In chapter 17, Van and Ada are exchanging
sloppy kisses: "'I can lend you my tongue,' she said, and did. A large boiled
strawberry, still very hot." (p. 103).
Of course, it is a matter of
opinion whether the passage quoted (or any other) is or is not a gratuitous
display of virtuosity.