Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark (1938) is known as a novel he wrote originally in Russian and made undergo considerable revision in his own translation into English. The Russian version of the novel (Camera Obscura or Kamera Obscura) was written in 1931, and after being serialised between May 1932 and May 1933 in the Russian émigré journal, Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), published in a book form in December 1933. Then, this became the first novel by the author translated into English, but the translator's work was unsatisfactory for Nabokov's aesthetic standard. Because of the urgent need for better translation, he proposed a plan of retranslation when he contracted with an American publisher, Bobbs-Merrill. On this occasion, Nabokov renamed most of the central characters, and replaced the introductory episode about a fictional cartoon character (a guinea pig) named Cheepy with a quite different one (the protagonist's idea of coloured animation film inspired by well-known Renaissance paintings). Moreover, the author or narrator of Laughter in the Dark announces that the narrative as a whole contains nothing significant in opening sentences.
"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. / This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome." (p.7)
As the reader could readily understand, the mode of telling details in Laughter in the Dark variously make use of the references to and techniques imported from the cinema (cutback, flashback, flash-forward, bird's-eye view), and the verbal gradation from darkness to brightness in this text is strongly imbued with the imaginative and evocative power of urban technology. For this world of artificial contrasts the protagonist's intellectual and material blindness functions as a vanishing point as well as a climactic moment, and in order to interpret the contrast between his (Albinus's) credulity and his antagonist's (Axel Rex's) cruelty which constitutes the black comical side of the novel, we must take the theory of laughter propounded by Henri Bergson into consideration.