SOURCE: “King, Queen, Knave, or Lust Under the Linden,” in Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures, Cornell University Press, 1989, pp. 47-66.

In the following essay, Toker compares the plot, characters, and situations in the Russian and English versions of King, Queen, Knave.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. 

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1

Nabokov's second novel, King, Queen, Knave (Korol', dama, valet, 1928) [hereafter abbreviated as KQK], a self-reflexive satirical version of the novel of adultery, asserted his intellectual and artistic independence, his refusal to restrict himself to the genre of the “human document” (KQK, viii), or to cater to the émigré readers' need for explicit moral and ideological support.

The characters of King, Queen, Knave are Germans, people whom Nabokov during his stay...