‘Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.’ With this epitome, Nabokov opens his novel Laughter in the Dark. The title of the Russian original version of this novel, Camera Obscura, Latin for ‘dark room’, possibly refers to the dark room – a cinema – where Albinus first meets his mistress, and the room where she kills him. The last room is ‘dark’ because he has become blind during the affair. ‘Camera obscura’ might also be related to the device used by painters: a darkened room with a small hole in one of its walls through which external well-lit objects are projected – in an inverted way – onto the opposite wall. Renaissance painters used such a contrivance to be able to copy as precisely as possible the outline of the image they selected for their paintings. A ‘camera obscura’ operates like an eye, the hole being the lens and the wall the retina. Nabokov said of Laughter in the Dark that, ‘in that novel… I tried to express a world in terms as candid, as near to my vision of the world, as I could’. The sinister undertone produced by the darkness, implied in both the Russian and English titles, should not be neglected. The obscurity of the characters of Margot, the mistress, and of Rex, her clandestine lover, can be noticed only in the light of moral values. Margot's vile nature is in sharp contrast with her physical beauty. To Albinus, an ‘art critic and picture expert’, Margot had been ‘his most brilliant discovery’ (8; 257). His first impression of her reminds him of beauty as exquisite as that rendered by a famous painter: ‘the melting outline of a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background‘(20). Her long eyes strike him as ‘Luini-esque‘(22). (See colour illustration 1.)

Laughter in the Dark has many overt references to the arts. Wagner's Lohengrin is mentioned, as well as music by Hindemith. Literary allusions include Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Butler's The Way of All Flesh and Shakespeare's Othello. Proustian resonances ring as well.