1. Georg Simmel, “Berliner Gewerbeausstellung,” Die Zeit (Vienna), July 25, 1896; translation, slightly amended: Simmel, Georg, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition,” in Frisby, David and Featherstone, Mike, eds., Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London, 1997), 257Google Scholar.

2. Bouillon, Jean-Paul, “The Display Window,” in Clair, Jean, ed., The 1920s: Age of the Metropolis (Montreal, 1991), 181Google Scholar.

3. Ward, Janet, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, 2001), 2–10Google Scholar, 107.

4. Nabokov, Vladimir, Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999), 2:131–305Google Scholar (hereafter, SS). Nabokov's texts are taken from this edition. When an English translation of a Nabokov text exists, its page numbers are given for comparison with my translation of the original Russian, which for consistency maintains Nabokov's English phrasing and word choice wherever it plausibly translates the Russian. All other translations from Russian and German are my own, unless otherwise noted.

5. Following excerpts in Rul΄ in September, Slovo brought out the Russian book in October; on October 24, Ullstein bought the translation rights. Ullstein offered Nabokov 5000 Marks for serialization in the Vossische Zeitung newspaper and 2500 Marks (with 12% royalties) for the Ullstein book. See Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, 1990), 286–87Google Scholar; Nabokov, Vladimir, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Zimmer, Dieter E. (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1991), 547–48Google Scholar. For a facsimile of the original agreement, see Urban, Thomas, Vladimir Nabokov: Blaue Abende in Berlin (Berlin, 1999), 77Google Scholar.

6. Boyd, Russian Years, 277.

7. On this topic in the early American period, see White, Duncan, Nabokov and His Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (Oxford, 2017)Google Scholar.

8. Georg Simmel's phrase referred originally to the 1896 exhibition, which marked Berlin's turn of the century transition from city (Großstadt) to world metropolis (Weltstadt), a status it consolidated in Nabokov's time. See David Frisby, “Introduction,” in Simmel on Culture, 19.

9. See Proffer, Carl R., “A New Deck for Nabokov's Knaves,” in Appel, Alfred and Newman, Charles Hamilton, eds., Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes (Evanston, 1970), 293–309Google Scholar; Grayson, Jane, Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov's Russian and English Prose (Oxford, 1977), 90–116Google Scholar.

10. Edmunds's conclusion, that the novel presents “a world turned upside-down in which objects live while human beings are reduced to mechanical toys,” reiterates an established theme in existing scholarship, albeit a fruitful one. See Edmunds, Jeff, “Look at Valdemar! (A Beautified Corpse Revived),” Nabokov Studies 2 (1995): 153–71Google Scholar; here, 158. Edmunds does not, however, mention the work of Julian Connolly, which had already engaged with a long critical tradition of debating how lifeless or lifelike the characters are. See Connolly, Julian W., Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 54Google Scholar, 235–236n9.

11. Edmunds, “Look at Valdemar!,” 158, 171. Compare Marina's Grishakova's important survey of vision in Nabokov's Russian works: Grishakova, Marina, “Vizual΄naia poetika V. Nabokova,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 54, no. 2 (March 2002): 205–28Google Scholar.

12. For example: “the lack of emotional involvement and the fairytale freedom inherent in an unknown milieu answered my dream of a pure invention. I might have staged KQKn in Rumania or Holland. Familiarity with the map and weather of Berlin settled my choice.” Nabokov, Vladimir, King, Queen, Knave (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, viii (hereafter, KQK).

13. See Zimmer, Dieter, Nabokovs Berlin (Berlin, 2001), 66Google Scholar.

14. Wyllie, Barbara, Vladimir Nabokov (London, 2010), 45–46Google Scholar; Boyd, Russian Years, 263.

15. Nabokov, SS, 2:187; KQK, 88.

16. Nabokov, SS, 2:174; KQK, 67–68.

17. The English version habitually omits references to wax: here, the mannequin's “wax face” is replaced by “the face of an Oriental idol.” KQK, 68.

18. Nabokov, SS, 2:178; KQK, 74.

19. In addition to “Pis΄mo v Rossiiu” (1925), “Putevoditel΄ po Berlinu” (1925), and “Skazka” (1926), all published in Rul΄, notice should also be taken of the 1924 “fairy-tale” about dueling advertising companies, “Drakon,” unpublished in Nabokov's lifetime: Nabokov, Vladimir, “Drakon,” Zvezda 4 (1999): 3–6Google Scholar; Nabokov, Vladimir, “The Dragon” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 2008), 125–30Google Scholar. As Brian Boyd has discovered, Rul΄ had a very limited circulation outside Berlin, if any: Boyd, Brian, “New Light on Nabokov's Russian Years,” Cycnos 10, no. 1 (1993): 3–9Google Scholar.

20. For Berlin in Nabokov's stories, see Shrayer, Maxim, The World of Nabokov's Stories (Austin, 1999)Google Scholar; Williams, Robert C., “Memory's Defense: The Real Life of Vladimir Nabokov's Berlin,” The Yale Review 60, no.2 (December 1970): 241–50Google Scholar; Meyer, Priscilla, “The German Theme in Nabokov's Work of the 1920s,” in Nicol, Charles and Barabtarlo, Gennady, eds., A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction (New York, 1993), 3–14Google Scholar.

21. Vladimir Nabokov, “Iubilei,” Rul΄, November 18, 1927; SS 2:645–47.

22. Nabokov, Vladimir, “On Generalities,” in Dolinin, Alexander, ed., Zvezda 4 (1999): 12–14Google Scholar. For an annotated translation and commentary see Nabokov, Vladimir, “On Generalities,” ed. and trans. Parker, Luke, Times Literary Supplement, May 13, 2016: 17–18Google Scholar.

23. Alexander Dolinin's two wide-ranging articles are foundational: Dolinin, Alexander, “The Stepmother of Russian Cities: Berlin of the 1920's Through the Eyes of Russian Writers,” in Barabtarlo, Gennady, ed., Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia (New York, 2000), 225–40Google Scholar; “Clio Laughs Last: Nabokov's Answer to Historicism,” in Connolly, Julian W., ed., Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 197–215Google Scholar. In Dolinin's terms, Nabokov's Berlin was neither “that depressing, gray, boring city . . . which its temporary Russian inhabitants loved to curse” nor “that brilliant, multifaceted, constantly changing capital of ‘modernism’ in all its forms—in art, music, theater, architecture, in the tempestuous ‘low’ cabaret culture, jazz, fashionable dances, nudism and professional sport, in the ‘Americanization’ of everyday life, in the emancipated sexual mores.” Alexander Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn΄ pisatelia Sirina,” in Nabokov, SS, 2:47–48.

24. Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn,’” in Nabokov, SS, 2:48. For a rich development of this latter theme, see Karshan, Thomas, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford, 2011), 83–90Google Scholar.

25. Luther, Arthur, “Geistiges Leben,” Osteuropa 4 (1928–1929): 286–87Google Scholar.

26. Arthur Luther, “Geistiges Leben,” 286–87.

27. Only two of the at least nine reviews were published in Berlin, only one of which (by Iulii Aikhenval΄d) focused on Korol΄, dama, valet exclusively. See Boyd, Brian, “Emigré responses to Nabokov (I): 1921–1930,” The Nabokovian 17 (Fall 1986): 21–41Google Scholar.

28. Tsetlin, Mikhail, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” Sovremennye zapiski 37 (December 1928): 536–538Google Scholar; here, 536. Mikhail Osorgin, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” Poslednie novosti, October 4, 1928: 3.

29. Osorgin, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” 3.

30. Osorgin, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” 3.

31. See Edmunds, “Look at Valdemar!,”161–62.

32. Iulii Aikhenval΄d, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” Rul΄, October 3, 1928, 2.

33. Aikhenval΄d, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” 2.

34. Aikhenval΄d, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” 3.

35. Nabokov, SS, 2:183; KQK, 79. Julian Connolly's remark is apt: “the process of “dehumanization” accelerates as the characters become enmeshed in the obsessions which enslave them.” Connolly, Early Fiction, 54.

36. See Marina Grishakova's discussions of “denudation” and reflections: Grishakova, “Vizual΄naia poetika,” 216–17.

37. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch's discussion of the railway's “panoramic perception”: Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 2014), 62–64Google Scholar. See also Leving, Iurii, Vokzal–Garazh–Angar: Vladimir Nabokov i poetika russkogo urbanizma (St. Petersburg, 2004)Google Scholar.

38. Nabokov, SS, 2:131; KQK, 1.

39. Nabokov, SS, 2:139; KQK, 13–14.

40. Nabokov, SS, 2:160; KQK, 46–47.

41. Nabokov, SS, 2:178; KQK, 74.

42. Nabokov, SS, 2:178–79; KQK, 74–75.

43. Janet Ward refers to “the paralysis of the poor majority during the Weimar German years, which had to look but never buy.” See Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 226.

44. “At the fairs the crowds were conditioned to the principle of advertisements: ‘Look, don't touch,’ and were taught to derive pleasure from the spectacle alone.” See Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 85Google Scholar.

45. Bouillon, “The Display Window,” 181.

46. M.O., “Mannequins oder Wachspuppen?,” Die Dame 23 (August 1925): 6–9Google Scholar. “Die Dame was . . . the German luxury magazine with the highest circulation: 50,890 in 1929 . . . Die Dame targeted the society woman with time on her hands and money in her pocket.” King, Lynda J., Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit, 1988), 84Google Scholar. For more on the magazine, see Petro, Patrice, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1989), 110–27Google Scholar.

47. The reader is the protagonist Kretschmar's wife Annelisa. Nabokov, Kamera obskura, SS, 3:260. The reference was deleted in the 1938 American version, Laughter in the Dark, along with other references to Berlin.

48. M.O., “Mannequins oder Wachspuppen?,” 8–9.

49. Nabokov, SS, 2:255–256; compare KQK, 194.

50. M.O., “Mannequins oder Wachspuppen?,” 8–9.

51. Ibid., 6.

52. Ibid., 9.

53. Ibid., 6.

54. Ibid., 6.

55. Ganeva, Mila, “The Mannequins” in Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918–1933 (Rochester, 2008), 157–158Google Scholar.

56. Nabokov, SS, 2:182.

57. Compare KQK, 80. For example, while changing for tennis, Franz now stinks “like a goat” and has dirty underwear that threatens to give away “the messy secrets of adultery.” Nabokov, SS, 2:251; KQK, 185–86.

58. Compare the additional references to wood, putrefaction, and a “parody of pastoral appeal” in the English: Nabokov, SS, 2:183; KQK, 81. Indeed Dreyer himself, after contemplating the wax mannequin holding a tennis racquet, turns to Franz and can only barely tell that he is a real person, and not another well-groomed mannequin: “another young man (judging by external signs—alive and even wearing glasses), nodded and listened to his brief instructions.” Nabokov, SS, 2:241; KQK, 169.

59. As Mila Ganeva points out, to Siegfried Kracauer in the Ka De We: “the uniformed female employees of the department store appeared as ‘its little machines’ (seine Apparätchen) and the mannequin in the ‘sales temple’ seemed to be easily confused with a bored little shop girl.” Ganeva, “The Mannequins,” 158.

60. See Ganeva, “The Mannequins,” 156.

61. Gordon, Mel, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles, 2006), 31Google Scholar.

62. Ellen Pifer has argued that Martha's sexual bartering with Dreyer in their marriage is worse in Nabokov's eyes than adultery; this reading is more problematic in the Russian, where such a description of her granting “favors to her wealthy protector” is missing. Pifer, Ellen, Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 29Google Scholar.

63. In English, see: von Ankum, Katharina, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar; McCormick, Richard W., Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity” (New York, 2001)Google Scholar.

64. See Bowlby, Rachel, “‘Traffic in her desires’: Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames,” in Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York, 1985), 66–82Google Scholar; Ross, Kristin, “Introduction,” in Zola, Emile, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Vizetelly, Henry (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar; Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, 1993)Google Scholar; Rappaport, Erika D., Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; Huyssen, Andreas, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other,” in his After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, 1986), 44–62Google Scholar.

65. See, for example, the study of the commonplace and “high-art” aestheticization of sexual violence in: Tatar, Maria, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar.

66. See Mark Sandberg's discussion of the “corpse as the hidden secret of the wax museum,” connected not only to the dissembled truth of mannequins as “dead matter,” but also to the waxworks’ historical emergence from the violent spectacle of the French Revolution. Sandberg, Mark, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton, 2003), 22Google Scholar.

67. See Siggy Frank's exploration of an even earlier form of theatrical culture in the passage's mystery play imagery: Frank, Siggy, Nabokov's Theatrical Imagination (Cambridge, Eng., 2012), 136–37Google Scholar.

68. Friedrich, Ernst, Krieg dem Kriege (Berlin: 1924)Google Scholar.

69. Nabokov, SS, 2:132; KQK, 3. Note that the English elides the allusion and precise topography, replacing panoptikum with the generic “gallery of waxworks.”

70. See Boyd, Russian Years, 84–85.

71. Benjamin, Walter, Gessamelte Schriften, ed., Tiedemann, Rolf and Schweppenhäuser, Hermann, vol.5, Das Passagen-Werk (Berlin, 1982), 660Google Scholar; Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin (Harvard, 1999), 531Google Scholar.

72. Mark Sandberg has emphasized the distinction between the “elevated tradition” of the museum proper's “body consolidated,” and the Chamber of Horrors, where “the body in pieces is the main attraction”—a split conventionally marked by an “upstairs-downstairs segregation.” Sandberg, Living Pictures, 20–21.

73. Sandberg, Living Pictures, 23.

74. Note the English version's elision of the uncanniness of the individual body parts, which omits the cigarette and any hint of torture, primarily by fixing the location workshop in a former medical laboratory, where “ribald students . . . frequently used to place [the bodies and body parts] in various attitudes and reciprocal positions suggestive of an orgy.” Nabokov, SS, 2:255–56; compare KQK, 192–94.

75. Nabokov, SS, 2:264. The allusion is again omitted in the English: compare KQK, 206.

76. See Ellen Pifer's comment on Nabokov's implied ethical condemnation of would-be murderers like Franz and Martha as already dead to life: “The victim's corpse is the murderer's true twin, a palpable reflection of his deathly condition.” Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel, 37.

77. Nabokov, SS, 2:264; KQK, 206–7. Compare the English, which is more explicit and elaborate in its details: “she could walk, wring her hands, and make water . . . a clockwork device permitted her to close her glass eyes and spread her legs. They could be filled up with hot water. Her body hair was real, and so were the brown locks falling over her shoulders.” The superfluity of artistry introduces sadism to the already seedily selective realism: why else should she wring her hands?

78. For an influential reading of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, see Huyssen, Andreas, “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” in his After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, 1986), 61–85Google Scholar.

79. Bellmer, Hans, Die Puppe (Karlsruhe, 1934)Google Scholar. For an English translation, with Figure 2 in context, of the revised 1962 edition, see Bellmer, Hans, The Doll, trans. Green, Malcolm (London, 2005), 67Google Scholar.

80. Lichtenstein, Therese, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (Berkeley: 2001), 40Google Scholar.

81. Hans Bellmer, “Memories of the Doll Theme” (Erinnerungen zum Thema Puppe), trans. Peter Chametzky, Susan Felleman, and Jochen Schindler, in Behind Closed Doors, 174.

82. Tatar, Lustmord.

83. Nabokov, SS, 2:297; not in the English. See Jeff Edmunds's brief comments on Poe and the Turk: Edmunds, “Look at Valdemar!,”162.

84. The Turk, wrote Poe, presents an “artificial and unnatural figure,” deliberately exaggerating its “awkward and rectangular manoeuvres” in order to “convey the idea of pure and unaided mechanism.” Edgar Allen Poe, “Maelzel's Chess-Player,” Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836: 2:318–26; reprinted as Poe, Edgar Allen, “Maelzel's Chess Player,” in Edgar Allen Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. Thompson, Gary R. (New York, 1984), 1270Google Scholar.

85. See Hooper, David and Whyld, Ken, The Oxford Companion to Chess, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar, 197, 431.

86. Significantly, in the scene (cited above) where Franz observes the store's series of display windows, Dreyer immediately whisks him away, leading Franz through an employees’ entrance into the dark bowels of the store. There, among headless mannequins, illuminated only by a single lamp, Dreyer gives Franz a fantastical night lesson in salesmanship. The “terrifying” darkness and the “as if beheaded” mannequins again link to the historical Chamber of Horrors and its origins in the French Revolution. Nabokov, SS, 2:174–75; KQK, 68–70.

87. See Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel, 39, and Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn΄” in Nabokov, SS, 2:20. See also Naiman, Eric, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, 2010)Google Scholar, 238: “it is one of the originalities of the book to portray an entrepreneur so positively; in very few places in European fiction of the 1920s would one find a capitalist depicted in such bright colors.” Brian Boyd has suggested that, in the light of Nabokov's reading of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in the mid-1920s, Dreyer could be an “anti-Babbitt.” See Boyd, “New Light.”

88. Nabokov, SS, 2:294; KQK, 259.

89. Compare Nabokov, SS, 2:304–5; KQK, 270–71. Here, Nabokov, SS, 2:304; not in the English.

90. See for example “Rozhdestvo” and “Vozvrashchenie Chorba,” both published in Rul΄ in 1925.

91. Franz is surprised when he first hears Dreyer, as yet unknown to him, speaking German, despite his foreign dress and manner. See Nabokov, SS, 2:134; KQK, 6. The inventor is also cosmopolitan, yet unlike Dreyer is not specifically linked to Berlin.

92. Nabokov, Vladimir, Letters to Véra, ed. Boyd, Brian, trans. Voronina, Olga (New York, 2015), 117Google Scholar.

93. See Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn΄,” 2:21–23. Critics have varied over how “amiable” this solipsism really is. See Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel, 42; Connolly, Early Fiction, 237n21.

94. Nabokov, SS, 2:204; KQK, 113.

95. See the discussion of the German cultural impact of the trauma of inflation as integral to modernity's three processes of massification, devaluation, and increased circulation in Widdig, Bernd, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 2001), 23Google Scholar.

96. Nabokov, SS, 2:256; KQK, 195.

97. Dreyer even reads English literature in the original with considerable help from the dictionary. Nabokov, SS, 2:222; KQK, 263–64.

98. König, Dame, Bube appeared in serial form in Vossische Zeitung (March 15–April 1, 1930), then as a book later in 1930. See Zimmer, Frühe romane I, 548.

99. Boyd, Russian Years, 290–91.

100. “Sensuality here has not become feeling, and the body is not transformed into soul.” Aikhenval΄d, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” 2–3.

101. Aikhenval΄d, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” 3.

102. See Boyd, Russian Years, 288. Nabokov offers a wry tribute to Aikhenval΄d in the foreword of 1968: “the ‘coarseness’ and ‘lewdness’ of the book that alarmed my kindest critics in émigré periodicals have of course been preserved.” KQK, ix.

103. “And if these new devices, which Sirin with such talent has now introduced to our literature, were applied to an old theme, an important theme, the theme of true love, his novel would charm not only through its parts, set in as miniatures, and through its separate splendors, but overall in its aggregate.” Aikhenval΄d, “Korol΄, dama, valet,” 3.

104. Nabokov, SS, 2:291; KQK, 254. On the encoding of the author's name into the Russian descriptions, see: Dolinin, “Istinnaia zhizn΄,” 2:25–26.

105. Leona Toker has pointed out this scene's contrast between love and lust. See Toker, Leona, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, 1989), 63Google Scholar.

106. Nabokov, SS, 2:294; KQK, 259.

107. The novel was first conceived in July and August 1927 on a visit with Vera to the Baltic resort of Binz. See Boyd, Russian Years, 274.

108. An impression strengthened in the novel's final scenes, where Dreyer's focus on the afterimages of Martha puts into relief Franz's grotesque glee as he looks ahead to a newly-recovered liberty in Berlin.

109. Other than the Russian émigré perspective on Berlin of Podvig (Glory) and Dar (The Gift), Nabokov returned to the German capital only once more at length. In Kamera obskura (rewritten as Laughter in the Dark), Nabokov explored the cinema, a cultural formation that had thrived within and eventually outgrown Weimar surface culture. Present in Korol΄, dama, valet as an extension of Weimar surface culture, the movie industry is used in Kamera obskura as a development of Nabokov's concern with nearsightedness and sharp-sightedness, both literal and metaphorized. I explore this theme elsewhere in a larger project on the interactions of Nabokov and the Russian emigration with the international movie industry of the 1920s and 30s.

110. See Boyd, Russian Years, 288–90.