Japanese translation available upon request.
Rabbit Nabokov is a fictional high-stakes gambling card game invented by a character named Aleksandr Nabokov.
The creator is a hybrid of two Russian authors: Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Nabokov.
This isn’t the first time Urasawa used a real-world author’s name to create a fictional character; Monster introduced two characters named after one author: Karel Ranke and Petr Čapek.
So why is the fictional creator of a fictional gambling game named after two Russian authors?
For starters, card games are referenced in Pushkin (The Queen of Spades) and Nabokov (King, Queen, Knave).
But there’s something more interesting and of substance, and it’s about Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a milestone of Russian literature. Nabokov thought it was impossible to translate it faithfully while keeping the rhymes1 and he was dissapointed and disgusted with the already existing English translations of it.
So his wife, Véra, suggested he should create his translation of the sacred text.
These were the beginnings of a work with the following title:
Yes, this should be treated as a full title, because this isn’t just a translation of Eugene Onegin. Most of the text here is not, as one might think, the translation of the poem itself, but Nabokov’s commentary.
The commentary turned a book of around 350 pages into a beast of around 1850 pages (dare I say, Charles Kinbote style?).
He also apologized for his own translation (!) in the form of a poem.2
Taking all of this into account, one question arises: is this version of Eugene Onegin still only Pushkin’s work? Or did it evolve into its own thing?
Could we say this is the work of Aleksandr Nabokov?
Why did Aleksandr Nabokov create a gambling game? One clue can be found in Nabokov’s response to Edmund Wilson (someone Nabokov corresponded with for years), who was critical of Nabokov’s translation:
What does [N.] mean when he speaks of Pushkin’s ‘addiction to stuss’? This is not an English word, and if he means the Hebrew word for nonsense, which has been absorbed into German, it ought to be italicized and capitalized. But even on this assumption it hardly makes sense.”
This is Mr. Wilson’s nonsense, not mine. “Stuss” is the English name of a card game which I discuss at length in my notes on Pushkin’s addiction to gambling. Mr. Wilson should have consulted my notes (and Webster’s dictionary) more carefully.3
Here we have it: a card game and a gambling addiction. And it turns out that playing the game can turn into a scene that resembles your average discussion about Nabokov and/or his work!
The Eugene Onegin shenanigans don’t end with 20th Century Boys. They don’t even start here; they start with Monster.
Remember Konrad? The lingonberry jam-maker from Ruhenheim? Aren’t the lingonberries an oddly specific choice for a character from a far-away background?
Lingonberries are present in Eugene Onegin and in his commentary, Nabokov devotes more than one page to explaining why he translated the Russian word Brusnika into lingonberry and why the other translations of brusnichnaya voda were, to say the least, inaccurate. Lingonberries can be deceitful.
In short: Nabokov explains the confusing nature of lingonberries, shows no mercy to his translation predecessors, and expects his successors to do better.
Konrad has other traits that make him a suspiciously Nabokovian character. His birthday date seems to have some special powers:
Is he telling the truth or just poking fun at Mrs. Heinich and her superstitions (to the amusement of the shopkeeper)? Was it a mere coincidence that the numbers were a success? I guess we’ll never know!
Konrad’s birthday combines three things: the gambling, the coincidences and patterns, and the significant number.
Coincidences and patterns are important motifs in Nabokov’s work. To quote Lolita: Those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love.
While reading Nabokov’s works, it can be useful to pay attention to the numbers; for example, 342 is a recurring number in Lolita.
And the gambling? Deception is an inherent part of gambling; deception was also something Nabokov was fascinated with.
Q: You say that reality is an intensely subjective matter, but in your books it seems to me that you seem to take an almost perverse delight in literary deception.
A: The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror’s magic: I used to be a little conjuror when I was a boy. I loved doing simple tricks—turning water into wine, that kind of thing.4
*
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.5
And of course, his stories are full of (lonely, misunderstood, and often very dangerous) deceivers.
Additionally, the month March and the year 1945 are important for the Nabokov family. Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, was assassinated on March 28, and Nabokov’s younger brother, Sergey, was born on March 12, and died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.
Let’s get back to Konrad, a good friend of Mr. Poppe, the Freud-lookalike:
One of the first things you might learn about Nabokov is that he despised Freud. So much that the traces of the Viennese quack can be tracked in his books everywhere; for example, Lolita opens with a fictional foreword written by a fictional Freudian psychologist called John Ray (Jr.).
*
Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.6
Making the Nabokov-coded character friends with someone who turned into a Freud-lookalike in his old days (and who’s Monster’s greatest deceiver and a very Nabokovian character himself)? Letting them play Nabokov’s beloved chess?
It’s like using Nabokov’s tricks against him, which is hilarious.
Another fun fact about Nabokov: he loved anagrams and wordplay. For example, he inserted himself into Lolita using an anagram of his name, Vivian Darkbloom (of course the anagram of Nabokov’s name would be a dramatic and fabulous one; come on, it sounds like a drag queen name).
And while this is only partially an anagram, it’s still interesting that you can take some letters from Vladimir Nabokov to create a Konrad.
His corpse in the anime also looks to me like a middle-aged Nabokov.
Another interesting thing about Konrad is that he was murdered by Roberto.
How do I know this since his face is never shown? It might as well be one of Roberto’s colleagues. But remember when Lunge noticed something was off while looking at the shoes of the man in the wheelchair? I decided to compare these two panels using the same method.
Before killing Konrad:
While fighting with Lunge:
Roberto and Nabokov share a fascinating similarity: when they were children, they wanted to be entomologists. And while Nabokov turned this childhood fantasy into reality, Roberto wasn’t as fortunate.
We know that Roberto—then Adolf—ended up in Kinderheim because Ranke thought it was a good opportunity for his nephew after his parents were killed when they tried to escape through the Berlin Wall.
Nabokov once said: It is not improbable that, had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.7
Who knows: maybe if Adolf’s parents weren’t killed while trying to escape, then he would devote himself entirely to entomology and never murder anyone, including the Nabokovian lingonberry jam maker from Ruhenheim?
All the examples are something I thought about earlier but weren’t sure enough to post it anywhere; the lingonberry seemed too general, the anagram wasn’t a full one, and the birthdate was the most suspicious thing to me, but still not enough to share it.
But the obscure Aleksandr Nabokov and his gambling card game are a solid clue that binds it together.
And since we’re talking about deceivers and translations, let me add a small easter egg: please get back to the The Secret Woods episode, pay close attention to Edmund Fahren, his suicide note, and see if there’s something possibly wrong with the translation of the passage found by Richard Braun.
- https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/28/archives/a-nabokov-guide-through-the-world-of-alexander-pushkin.html ↩︎
- https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/on-translating-eugene-onegin ↩︎
- https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/08/26/letters-the-strange-case-of-nabokov-and-wilson/ ↩︎
- https://www.lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter02.txt_with-big-pictures.html ↩︎
- https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/21/vladimir-nabokov-on-storytelling/
↩︎ - https://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt ↩︎
- https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov ↩︎
teach me how to play Rabbit Nabokov 