{"product_id":"the-tragedy-of-mister-morn-isbn-9780307950666","title":"The Tragedy of Mister Morn","description":"\u003cb\u003eVladimir Nabokov’s earliest major work, written when he was twenty-four, is a full-length play in verse of Shakespearean beauty and richness.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent, this five-act play was never published in Nabokov’s lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer’s major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. \u003ci\u003eThe Tragedy of Mister Morn\u003c\/i\u003e is Nabokov’s major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eTranslated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan“An extraordinary confection of a play about happiness and its enemies. . . . \u003ci\u003eMister Morn\u003c\/i\u003e pulses with verbal brilliance. . . . It puts us in the head of eternal Nabokov.” —\u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A road map to what this dazzling sorcerer of words would later create.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Its speeches are bright with Nabokovian gems. . . . \u003ci\u003eMister Morn\u003c\/i\u003e [is] enticingly predictive of Nabokov’s great work. The flutter of magic, the avuncular twinkle, the B-movie danger—it’s all here.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If the unfinished novel \u003ci\u003eThe Original of Laura\u003c\/i\u003e revealed to the world the last embers of Nabokov’s genius, \u003ci\u003eThe Tragedy of Mister Morn\u003c\/i\u003e shows the first sparks of brilliance that would evolve in later works such as \u003ci\u003ePale Fire\u003c\/i\u003e. But . . . \u003ci\u003eMorn\u003c\/i\u003e also shows that instead of just hiding historical material, Nabokov utterly transforms it through the prism of theater.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A whimsical, largely allegorical tragicomedy. . . . As in much of Nabokov, love is both necessary and impossible, a delicious and inescapable torture. . . . Nabokov explores more fully and explicitly than he ever would again what he saw as the origins of the revolutionary impulse in a death-instinct and passion for destruction.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Contains swerving turns of phrase and ringing contrasts that hint at the glorious writing of the mature Nabokov. . . . The story of revolt for revolt’s sake is powerful, and the play’s strength is how it dramatizes this excruciating truth.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A kind of primer to Nabokov’s later work, an index of the motifs and preoccupations that will surface again and again: the elusiveness of happiness, the beauty of the world, the stubborn fact of death, the transformative possibilities of art, and the blurring of reality and make-believe. . . . Loss and death are the two electrical currents that run beneath his polished, magical prose, and those themes—as well as the subject of revolution and its consequences—are the animating forces behind his first major work.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The dynamism of the play’s romantic relationships makes it a firmly modernist work. . . . An intriguing riff on Elizabethan drama.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A gem. The imagery is stunning, metaphor opening out of metaphor. . . . It is visionary and musical. . . . In theme and texture it gives little sense of being early work. With a text whose lexicon seems to contain so many of the novels to come, from \u003ci\u003eBend Sinister\u003c\/i\u003e to \u003ci\u003eLaughter in the Dark\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eTransparent Things\u003c\/i\u003e, it puts us in the head of eternal Nabokov.” —\u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e (London)VLADIMIR NABOKOV studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for the United States, where he wrote some of his greatest works––\u003ci\u003eBend Sinister\u003c\/i\u003e (1947),\u003ci\u003e Lolita\u003c\/i\u003e (1955), \u003ci\u003ePnin \u003c\/i\u003e(1957), and \u003ci\u003ePale Fire\u003c\/i\u003e (1962)––and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHOMAS KARSHAN is the author of \u003ci\u003eVladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play\u003c\/i\u003e and editor of Nabokov’s \u003ci\u003eSelected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e.  Previously a research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and Queen Mary, University of London, he is now a lecturer in literature at the University of East Anglia. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eANASTASIA TOLSTOY is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford, where she is writing a thesis on Nabokov. She is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Tragedy of Mister Morn was  Vladimir Nabokov’s first major work, and the laboratory in which he  discovered and tested many of the themes he would subsequently develop  in the next fifty-odd years: the elusiveness of happiness; the creative  and destructive playfulness of the imagination; courage, cowardice, and  loyalty; the truth of masks; the struggle of freedom and order for  possession of the soul; the sovereignty of desire and illicit passion;  and what one character calls ‘that likeness which exists \/ between truth  and high fantasy’ (I.ii.59–60), a likeness under whose inspiration  Nabokov would take reality, fancy, art, and impossibility, and twist  them together into the four-dimensional knots of Lolita, Pale Fire, and  his other great novels.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet Morn, which Nabokov wrote in Prague  in the winter of 1923 to 1924, when he was only twenty-four years old,  was never performed or published in his lifetime, though several  readings of the play did take place in Berlin, then Nabokov’s home, in  the spring of 1923. The opportunities in Berlin for staging a Russian  play by a nearly unknown writer were limited, and publication cannot  have seemed financially attractive to the émigré publishing houses that  would later print Nabokov’s novels. In America, and then in Switzerland,  Nabokov translated most of his Russian fiction, but not his early  plays, and when he died, in 1977, the typescript and fair copy of Morn  still lay dormant in his ­personal archive in Montreux. Then, in 1997,  Zvezda, a Russian literary journal, published the complete Russian text  of Morn; and in 2008 the play finally became available to a wider  (Russian-reading) audience when a revised version of the text was  published in book form by Azbuka Press of St Petersburg. These  publications have in turn made possible this current edition – the first  translation of Morn into English.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile Morn is in many respects  the seedbed for Nabokov’s major novels, there are also elements in it  which are fascinatingly unlike anything in his later work, and which  reflect issues in Nabokov’s life at the time of writing. Most prominent  of these is revolution. Nabokov came from a distinguished liberal family  in St Petersburg: his father, V. D. Nabokov, had been one of the  ministers in the short-lived Kerensky government which ruled between the  fall of the Tsar and the ascent to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in  1917. That year, the Nabokov family fled St Petersburg, first for  Yalta, then for London, and, eventually, Berlin – where the young  Nabokov would rejoin them in 1922, after completing his degree at  Cambridge. Even in Berlin, however, the Nabokov family was not safe from  the extremist ideologies of right and left which had vied for power in  Russia after the failure of the liberal centre, and on 28 March 1922  Nabokov’s father was shot dead by a Monarchist assassin who was in fact  aiming not at him but at another émigré politician.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNabokov’s  hatred of the Soviet regime is directly expressed in much of his  writing, most prominently his novels Invitation to a Beheading (1935\/6)  and Bend Sinister (1947). But he would never again write anywhere nearly  so directly about the moment of revolution itself, or so probingly  about ideology, as he did in Morn. In the play’s two main  revolutionaries, Tremens and Klian, Nabokov depicts a politics and  poetics of nihilism which, it is implied, was the driving force behind  the Russian Revolution. In this Nabokov was refining a critique of  revolutionary ideology which can be traced back as far as Turgenev’s  Fathers and Sons (1862) and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1872). He would  articulate this critique again in his last, and greatest, Russian novel,  The Gift (1937\/8), whose fourth chapter is a mocking biography of  Nikolai Chernyshevsky – the revolutionary thinker of the 1860s who was  the object of Turgenev’s and Dostoevsky’s conservative critiques, and  would become Lenin’s hero. But in Morn Nabokov explores more fully and  explicitly than he ever would again what he saw as the origins of the  revolutionary impulse in a death-instinct and passion for destruction.  When Ganus, who had once been a revolutionary, returns from exile and  discovers the happiness that the masked King has brought to the kingdom,  he asks Tremens why he is not now satisfied. Tremens pours scorn on  him. Neither happiness nor equality is Tremens’s purpose, he explains;  rather, he is seeking to imitate the violent destructiveness of life  itself, which ‘rushes headlong \/ into ash, [and] destroys everything in  its way’ (I.i.287–8). ‘Everything,’ Tremens explains, ‘is destruction.  And \/ the faster it is, the sweeter, the sweeter . . .’ (I.i.295–6). To  him, this destruction is beauty:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDid you see,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eone windy night, by moonlight, the shadows\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eof ruins? That is the ultimate beauty –\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand towards it I lead the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(I.i.267–70)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTremens  cites as one aspect of that destructiveness the sexual drive itself, in  the figure of ‘the maiden, who prays for the blow of a man’s love’  (I.i.294), and one distinctive quality of the play is an unblushing  erotic candour to which Nabokov would not fully return until Lolita  (1955). Thus Klian, the violent-minded revolutionary poet who serves as  Tremens’s factotum, tells his fiancée Ella that\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e . . . To enter you, oh, to enter,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewould be like entering a tight and searing\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003esheath, to gaze into your blood, to break\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethrough your bones, to learn, to grasp, to touch,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eto press your being in between my palms! . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (I.ii.122–6)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis  anticipates Humbert Humbert in Chapter 2, Part Two of Lolita saying  that ‘my only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita  inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown  heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin  kidneys.’ Yet, as with so many aspects of the play, in the sphere of  desire Nabokov explores opposite poles of experience. Against Klian’s  dark vision of sexual appetite is set a more salubrious expression of  love’s idealizing power – in the faith that Midia, and the other  citizens, place in Morn’s nearly magical beneficence, and in Ella’s idea  of love as a force that coalesces experience:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e . . . all is one: my love and the raw sun,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eyour pale face and the bright trickling icicles\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ebeneath the roof, the amber spot upon\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe porous sugary snow mound, the raw sun\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand my love, my love . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (III.ii.190–94)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis,  and the tenderly specific attention paid to the minutiae of Ella’s  hair, clothes, and make-up, seem to attest to the fact that Nabokov  wrote Morn soon after meeting and falling in love with Véra Slonim, who  would become his wife – and the play’s typist. With her girlishness,  humour, and idealism, Ella ranks alongside Lolita as one of Nabokov’s  few fully realized female characters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf, in its treatment of  revolutionary ideology, death, and desire, Morn shows us elements that  Nabokov would not develop again, or not for a long time, there is one  respect in which it stands very obviously as the source of Nabokov’s  immediately subsequent writing, and this is in its exploration of the  twin themes of happiness and make-believe. In 1924, Nabokov would begin  writing his first novel, Happiness. The novel was aborted and its drafts  are now lost, but there is no question that its title expresses one of  the central themes of Nabokov’s oeuvre, in which happiness is a  mysterious variable, ‘the zany of its own mortality’, as Sebastian  Knight calls it, no sooner found than lost, but always something much  more profound than anything ‘happiness’ means in modern use, where it  merely names the mirage evoked by the goals we set ourselves. As for  make-believe, it is central to Nabokov’s work that any reality worth  caring about is one freshly imagined, that, as he puts it in Strong  Opinions (1973), ‘average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the  act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived  texture’, and therefore that, as Vadim’s aunt tells him in Chapter 2 of  Nabokov’s final complete novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), it is a  fundamental imperative for every person that in art and life he should  ‘Play! Invent the world! Create it!’ The theme of make-believe also  links Morn to two other verse-plays which Nabokov had written in 1923  before embarking on Morn, the one-act closet dramas Death and The Pole,  which together mark out the two poles between which Morn moves: in the  first, a cynical intellectual related in mentality to Tremens presses  the view of illusion as arrant deceit; while the second heroizes Captain  Scott, the quixotic Antarctic explorer, a Morn-like figure whose  steadfast courage inspires and sustains his followers, who always seems  to be playing, even in the face of death, and who is, like Morn,  recognized by his laughter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Morn Nabokov gave these themes a  political significance more explicit than any we find in his later work.  Against the revolutionary politics, grounded in the ideals of equality,  sameness, and even death, that Tremens and Klian embody, Nabokov  postulates a conservative politics, animated by an ideal of happiness.  As Morn says, he\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e. . . created\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ean age of happiness, an age of harmony . . . God,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003egive me strength . . . Playfully, lightly I ruled;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI appeared in a black mask in the ringing hall,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ebefore my cold, decrepit senators . . . masterfully\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI revived them – and left again, laughing . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (III.i.131–6)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMorn’s  example has aestheticized the world, restoring order by turning it into  a fairy tale or a play: if even the King is an actor, then all identity  is not something sovereign but something performed, and he shows people  how to act as they would wish to be. He is a fantasy of the Foreigner, a  mysterious figure who enters at the beginning and the end of the play  and comes from the real world of revolutionary Russia:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e. . . In our country all is not well,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003enot well . . . When I wake up, I will tell them\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewhat a magnificent king I dreamt of . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (V.ii.98–100)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  implicit argument of Morn is that for the sake of order, ­morality, and  happiness in the real world, people must make-believe in the  possibility of an ideal world. The play takes place in an imaginary  kingdom repeatedly described as having the air of a skazka or fairy  tale. In a synopsis of the play, Nabokov described this atmosphere as  ‘neoromanticism’, saying that the setting of the play took ‘something  from the 18th Century Venice of Casanova and from the 30s [the 1830s] of  the Petersburg epoch’. It also borrows from Shakespeare, for in Morn,  as in Shakespeare’s history plays such as Richard III, the state is,  necessarily, a play or pageant; a secret passage leads from the  throne-room to the theatre. This is one of the many details that Nabokov  would reuse nearly forty years later in his most metafictive work, Pale  Fire (1962), in which an imaginary poet and imaginary king conjure with  each other’s existences. Kinbote, the imaginary King of Zembla, or  semblance, may have assassinated Shade, the imaginary poet, just as in  Morn Tremens says: ‘it’s a shame, Dandilio, that the imaginary \/ thief  did not destroy the made-up king!’ (V.i.188–9). But in Morn, as later in  Pale Fire, this kingdom of imagination is all too precarious: Tremens  is determined to unmask Morn’s happy reign of make-believe as a cynical  fraud, and to tear down the civic order it supports. He succeeds in  doing so, until a false rumour that Morn fled for love, not cowardice,  reignites the romanticism of the people. It is to defend that illusion  that Morn, ultimately, must kill himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis idea of kingship  as theatre, or as a work of imagination, is one of the many respects in  which Morn is indebted to Shakespeare. The heavy crown is a symbol of  the burdensomeness of power, as it is in Shakespeare’s history plays,  such as Henry IV, Part 2, towards the end of which Prince Henry stares  uneasily at the crown lying on his dying father’s pillow, ‘so  troublesome a bedfellow’, which, he says, ‘dost pinch thy bearer’, and  ‘dost sit \/ Like a rich armour worn in heat of day, \/ That scalds with  safety’ (IV.v.22, 29–31). In Morn, too, the ‘fiery crown’ burns and  squeezes with ‘its diamond pain’, and Morn complains that\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e. . . The stupefied mob\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003edoes not know that the knight’s body is dark\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand sweaty, locked in its fairy tale armour . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (V.ii.124–6)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom  Shakespeare, too, Nabokov drew a series of metaphors for civic order  which could be deployed to warn against the rash alterations of  Bolshevism. The kingdom is like the human body, so that Tremens’s fever  symbolizes the convulsions he wishes upon the state, as, again, in Henry  IV, Part 2, where the Archbishop of York declares that\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e. . . we are all diseased,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd with our surfeiting and wanton hours\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHave brought ourselves into a burning fever,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd we must bleed for it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (IV.i.54–7)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr  the kingdom is like music, as Ganus argues when he says that ‘The power  of the King \/ is living and harmonious, it moves me now \/ like music’  (I.i.231–3), echoing an idea most famously expressed in a speech given  by Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The same idea is  implicit in The Tempest, a play with which Morn is associated through  the kinship between Prospero and Morn, both of them magician-kings. But  the Shakespeare play most obviously linked to Morn is Othello: Ella  dresses Ganus up as Othello so that he can visit Midia unobserved, and  she twice quotes the lines Desdemona utters when Othello is about to  smother her (the first time slightly misquoting them). The Tragedy of  Mister Morn is less concerned with doubling, and with the duality of  human nature, than Nabokov’s later works. But here already, it is clear  that when Ganus wears Othello’s face, he discovers in himself a shadow  side, a dark jealousy like that which blackened and distorted Othello.  Conversely, Morn, by wearing a mask, becomes a nameless sovereign, King  X, as Nabokov calls him in the synopsis, the variable upon which a lucky  people can project their fantasies of happiness and order; and when he  is unmasked by his cowardice, he betrays not only the ideals of his  people and his own self-respect but even the identity and integrity he  had once seen when he gazed into the healing silver of the mirror.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut  in Morn Nabokov was trying to emulate Shakespeare not only at the level  of image and symbol, but also of character and drama, register and  rhythm. The simplest expression of this is that Morn is written in the  iambic pentameter of Shakespearean tragedy, though Nabokov is more  strictly regular in his rhythmic patterns than Shakespeare. Though  Morn’s prosody alludes to Shakespeare, it does so through the mediation  of Pushkin’s ‘little tragedies’ (all written in 1830, the most famous of  which is Mozart and Salieri). More specifically Shakespearean – and  ­un-Pushkinian – is the language of Morn, which, especially in the  philosophic speeches of Tremens, Klian, Morn and Dandilio, is densely  metaphorical and highly compressed in the manner of late Shakespeare. So  Morn, saying farewell to Midia, justifies the aberrations of fate by  comparing life to music, before suddenly shifting the already difficult  metaphor into another key, comparing the music of existence to the  structure of a building whose details can detract from an appreciation  of its overall harmony:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut, you see – the moulded whimsy of a frieze\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eon a portico keeps us from recognizing,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003esometimes, the symmetry of the whole . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (IV.235–7)","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301384704229,"sku":"NP9780307950666","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307950666.jpg?v=1767741884","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-tragedy-of-mister-morn-isbn-9780307950666","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}