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As a non-academic Nabokovian, I am not in the position to produce a wholly scientific analysis of German influences in VN's work. There are distinguished scholars who can do this much better than me (and in a more elegant English)! What I would like to propose is just a few stray comments.

In my opinion, Nabokov's knowledge of German 19th century and contemporary authors (especially in his mature years) was deeper than it is usually thought to be. In his youth, he would read Goethe, Schiller, Uhland in Zhukovski's wonderful translations (which he even preferred to the originals), but, I think, he could now and then consult the original (especially when he felt that a translation - by some minor Russian poet - is unsatisfactory). I suspect, he had an extremely high opinion of Heine (to me, Germany's greatest poet, so much spoiled by his Russian translators and popularizers: even Lermontov and Fet failed sometimes in their attempts to render his early lyrics, not to speak of later paraphrasts). I believe, it was still in the Crimea, when Nabokov attempted to translate a little piece of Heine ("Ich grolle nicht..." if I'm not mistaken) into Russian, so that it could be put to music composed by a friend. I wonder, if VN knew Heine's magical poem Die Libelle ("The Dragon-Fly," 1853)? Certainly, he was the only Russian poet and translator of genius, who could have turned it, by some entomological miracle, into a totally Russian insect. Pity, he never tried it...

 

Nabokov's translation (1932) of Goethe's "Zueignung" that opens Faust is practically immaculate and probably the best of all existing Russian versions.

 

I think, Nabokov might have read Hoffmann, Hoelderlin and Eichendorf, some of them probably in the original.

 

German philosophers played even more important part than German writers in the 19th century, strongly influencing the literatures of other countries. In fact, all Russian 19th century literature (that Nabokov knew so phantastically well and the knowledge of which he used even in his late English fiction) would have been impossible as a unique phenomenon without the ideas provided by German thinkers. Hegel and Schelling were probably the two most influentual figures. "Forget about the French and read only the Germans," said Turgenev to the young poet Sluchevski in Paris or Heidelberg where the latter was a student of philosophy in the early 1860's. I don't know what about Schelling (BTW, Bonaventura mentions somewhere in his early fiction the drug aqua tofana), but Nabokov would certainly study (probably at the time when he was writing The Gift), with a much more critical eye than his predecessors, the whole set of German sages. I prefer to think that his favorites were Kant and Schopenhauer. Kant is directly mentioned once in Ada (2.5), but I'm ashamed to confess that I have not read a single page of him (except for a long passage taken as an epigraph to Tolstoy's treatise "About the Life"), so I cannot trace the allusion, if there is one here. But I happened to read Schopenhauer's Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (it is part of his larger book Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851) and discovered that some of its ideas, namely the thoughts on duels and venereal disease, play a significant part in Ada. I wrote a brief note about it for The Nabokovian, "Amor's Poisoned Arrows," that I hope will soon appear in it. I would like to add here (I don't say it definitely in my note) that I have a strong feeling that Nabokov has at least consulted Schopenhauer's original (I cite in my note a remarkable alliteration that would please Nabokov in a philosopher's text and that has probably made him remember the whole important passage when he was composing Ada).   

 

Nabokov' s favorite German-language writer was, as is well-known, Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Nabokov lectured on him at Cornell and his lecture on Kafka's short story Die Verwandlung (1912, "The Metamorphosis") is included in VN's Lectures on Literature, 1980.

By a coincidence, there will be a seminar on Kafka and the problems of literary text (specifically, of an unfinished text - so I am told) on April 4 at the Nabokov Museum (the Nabokov House on Bol'shaya Morskaya Str. 47).

I think, Tanya Ponomaryova, who knows the exact time of the seminar's beginning, will join me in inviting everybody who might turn up in St. Petersburg on this day to come and to partake in the seminar.      

 

Alexey Sklyarenko