Nabokov, Odon Horvath and   L’inconnue de la Seine

                Nassim Balestrini sketches some similarities between the bridge-crossing episodes  in Nabokov’s 1947 Bend Sinister and Von Horvath’s  1933/4 play Hin und Her (Back and Forth) in an interesting essay (pp.  44-50) in The Nabokovian (no. 60; Spring 2008). Nassim is rightly circumspect about the striking parallels, although she remarks the presence of the two authors and their co-presence in Berlin of the 20s and 30s.

                I would append yet another intersection between the two writers. At about the same time as his  Hin und Her, Horvath also wrote a play entitled Die Unbekannte aus der Seine (1934) based on a story by his friend Hertha Pauli, sister of the Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang  Pauli.  Horvath’s play was not produced, however, until after WWII, so it is unlikely that VN was aware of the play during his European years. It is remotely possible that it came to his attention when it was produced in the post-war period, conceivably during his composition of the 1947 Bend Sinister.  

The “L’inconnue de la Seine” theme (arising from a death mask made of a drowned girl) was very popular during the pre- & interwar years in Europe. Nabokov himself published  a 32-line poem under the title in 1934 and there are scattered references to the L’inconnue in several of his writings. A survey of Nabokov’s exploration of the theme and its context may be found in my article “L’Inconnue de la Seine’ and Nabokov’s Naiads” PP. 225-248 in Comparative Literature Summer 1992, v. 44, no. 3. The article includes a picture of “I’ínconnue’s” death mask as well as the Russian and English texts of VN’s poem.

                                                         D. Barton Johnson