A Mere Animal Need: King, Queen, Knave

Abstract

In his second novel, King, Queen, Knave (1928), Nabokov tells a story that Flaubert promoted to the rank of a near myth in Madame Bovary, but he gives it a very strange twist. In his Foreword to the English translation, he acknowledged that he had made deliberate reference to Flaubert’s novel: “my amiable little imitations of Madame Bovary, which good readers will not fail to distinguish, represent a deliberate tribute to Flaubert. I remember remembering, in the course of one scene, Emma creeping at dawn to her lover’s château along impossibly unobservant back lanes, for even Homais nods.”1 He vowed an authentic cult to this novel which he, like his father, considered as the “unsurpassed pearl of French literature.”2 He read it many times and taught it at Cornell. He confessed he had little admiration for Emma: “Emma Bovary is intelligent, sensitive, comparatively well educated, but she has a shallow mind: her charm, beauty, and refinement do not preclude a fatal streak of philistinism in her.”3 Yet, she, like Anna Karenina, stands head and shoulders above Martha, her counterpart in King, Queen, Knave, as he unambiguously points out in the novel, saying: “She was no Emma, and no Anna” (102).KeywordsMurderous PlanSexual ObjectSexual FantasySunday MorningAnimal PartThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.