Gassin, Alexia. Nabokov, a writer of Simmelian modernity? 2021

This essay revolves around Nabokov and Georg Simmel (1858-1918). Because of its dazzling development at the end of the 19th century and its paradoxes, Berlin stimulates the imagination of the artists and the thought of philosophers and sociologists, like Georg Simmel. This founder of formal and urban sociology points out the ambivalence of modernity and the big city, which he associates with objectification, depersonalization, alienation, and individual fulfillment. Even if it is not possible to categorically affirm that Vladimir Nabokov read Simmel’s work, there is a link between the two men, highlighted, for example, by Gavriel Shapiro. So our article aims at analyzing Simmel’s notion of modernity through the second Russian novel of Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave (1928), which stages characters of German nationality in the space of the Berlin metropolis, in order to show the presence of another intertext in Nabokov’s work as well as a parodic rewriting of the sociological, philosophical, and psychological modernity.