The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Modernist Impasse

Norman, Will.
Nabokov Studies, Volume 10, 2006, pp. 67-97 (Article)
Published by International Vladimir Nabokov Society and Davidson College

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Nabokov Studies 10 (2006)

WILL NORMAN (Oxford)

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Modernist Impasse

The question of how to locate Nabokov in relation to Modernist literary history has proved a problematic critical issue. His persistent resistance to virtually all suggestions of influence, either literary or socio-historical, together with an exceptionally long writing career in three languages, has meant that critics have applied various paradigms in attempts to assimilate him into different schools and styles. Nabokov has thus been linked to Russian Symbolism, European Modernism, and postmodernism, to name only three. Linking many of these efforts is a critical tendency to neglect the diachronic nature of Nabokovs relationship to his literary heritage. The Marxist cultural historian Fredric Jameson finds an ideological link between Nabokov and high Modernism, the poetic apparatus of which represses History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentered subject (The Political Unconscious 280). No matter that Nabokovs chronology considerably outlasts that of high Modernism, for Jameson sees him as a kind of untimely leftover, surviving the economic and political crises of the thirties and forties through having the luck to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms (Postmodernism 305). This image of the unseasonable Nabokov, safely encased in a time capsule, immune to the vicissitudes of history, has had immense power. It appeals to the authors own self-image as uninfluenced by his times, as well as to those critics who choose to play by Nabokovs own rules by regarding him as above subjection to historicist readings. That Nabokovs much-quoted list of greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century

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prose is made up of four novels written within twelve years of each other at the beginning of the century tells us much about his aesthetics.1 It does not, however, indicate that we can simply regard Nabokov as a belated Modernist and lay the matter to rest. Far from ignoring, or repressing, history, Nabokovs extraordinary formal experimentation can only be understood as a vigorous response to history. In this paper, I discuss The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the novel in which Nabokov most explicitly engages with the idea of social modernity and literary Modernism. My argument is that Nabokov perceived a historical crisis, or impasse, in the late 1930s, that threatened the autonomy of literary art. Sebastian the novelist is not simply a distorted reflection of his creator, but a paradigmatically Modernist writer, molded out of the fragments of a tradition of innovative aesthetic autonomists, including Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce. In contrast to Sebastians history-defying composition and aesthetic, however, there remains the jarring narrative of his awkward existence within a time-bound, historical moment. Modernity appears in many guises in the novelas a popular culture embracing cinema and genre-fiction, as the allure of fashionable, sexually available women, as the socio-literary criticism that insists on belaboring Sebastians status as the product and victim of our time (52), and ultimately, as the writers own mortality as he progresses inexorably towards death. As we will see, these aspects of modernity do not impede Sebastian Knight as a novel, but are assimilated into its narrative structure in a synthesis that attempts to resuscitate the autonomous, experimental tradition and ensure its survival of historical contingency. The Modernist Impasse If 1938 marks the end of Nabokovs Russian career, it came also at the end of a literary era. Those twentieth-century writers most admired by NabokovProust, Joyce, Kafka, and Belywere at their most productive during the years between the start of the First World War and the early 1920s. Proust had died in 1922, Kafka in 1924. Bely, having
1. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyces Ulysses; Kafkas Transformation; Bielys Petersburg; and the first half of Prousts fairy tale In Search of Lost Time (Strong Opinions 57).

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produced, and then reworked, his masterpiece, Petersburg, between 1913 and 1922, had returned to Soviet Russia (a move that Nabokov disapproved of) in 1923, to die in 1934.2 Joyce alone among these writers was still alive. Although Nabokov had met him socially and admired Ulysses greatly, Joyces Work in Progress (to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939, shortly after Sebastian Knights completion), which had been consuming his energies for many years, was regarded by Nabokov as a failure.3 Joyce, in failing health, had passed his artistic peak and was producing work that Nabokov was later to describe as nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore (Strong Opinions 71). That Nabokov should describe it as formless is particularly significant, for Finnegans Wake, thought by some to be not only the apex of Joyces own formal experiment, but also Modernisms final, unsurpassable achievement, was for him representative of a loss of direction, or dead end. European literary decline for Nabokov was also painfully manifest in his former homeland. He consistently execrated the literature produced in the Soviet Union, commenting in a letter to Edmund Wilson that looking for anything of quality there, he felt like a beggar rummaging in a garbage can (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 133). The 1930s though, were particularly depressing. The first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 sounded the death-knell of any remaining vestiges of aesthetic autonomy in the USSR, as the doctrine of Socialist Realism was officially espoused. A greater anathema to Nabokovs own aesthetic can hardly be imaginedan insistence not only on the positive presentation of a heroic proletariat, but also a perspective on formal experimentalism that rendered it degenerate and pessimistic. Even worse were the Stalinist purges of the literary intelligentsia that continued until 1938. Among the victims (in addition to Gumilev, who had been

2. In Strong Opinions, Nabokov explains that he saw Bely with Aleksey Tolstoy in a Berlin restaurant in 1924. However, both writers were at the time frankly pro-Soviet (and on the point of returning to Russia), and a white Russian would certainly not like to speak to a bolshevizan (8586). 3. On Nabokovs interactions with Joyce in Paris, see Boyd, Russian Years 425, 434, 504; Ellmann 616n, 699n. See also Nabokovs anecdotes about himself and Joyce, Strong Opinions 8687.

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murdered in 1921) were Isaak Babel, one of the few Soviet prose-writers Nabokov regarded as readable (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 13233) and Osip Mandelshtam, the greatest poet trying to survive in Russia under the Soviets (Strong Opinions 58), who was arrested early in 1938 and died during Sebastian Knights composition, in December. Mandelshtam was for Nabokov emblematic of the disastrous interference of historical forces with art, and later provoked one of the very few articulations of personal despair he ever put into print: When I read Mandelshtams poems composed under the accursed rule of those beasts, I feel a kind of helpless shame, being so free to live and write and speak and think in the free part of the world that is the only time when liberty is bitter. (Strong Opinions 58) In Western Europe, the 1930s had seen the demise of high Modernism and the succession of a polarized literary culture that Nabokov detested. A series of economic and political crises had left a great number of intellectuals with the conviction that a writer cannot, and should not, be apolitical. Very little can be said with certainty about Nabokovs views on British writers of the thirties. It can be safely assumed, however, given his strongly professed views on the necessary divorce of political conviction from artistic creation, that newly emerging figures such as Orwell, or Auden and his circle, would, if he read them, have attracted his censure. In France, where Nabokov was based from January 1937, communist writers seemed to dominate the literary scene, as novelists such as Aragon and Nizan, influenced by developments in the Soviet Union, experimented with socialist realism. Andr Gide, one of the literary giants of the decade, became one of Nabokovs most detested writers.4 Andr Malraux, who probed the uncertain ground between Marxism and Anarchism in La condition humain (1933) and Lespoir (1937) was to be the recipient of one of Nabokovs most sustained and scornful attacks.5 Another key figure in France was Franois Mauriac,

4. In 1947 the Wellesley College News ran a profile on Nabokov: Mann, Faulkner and Andr Gide receive the doubtful honor of being the three writers he most detests (Boyd, American Years 122). 5. Nabokov wrote a long letter in response to Edmund Wilsons recommendation of La condition humaine. Among other things, Malraux was labeled a

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who skirted political themes only to engage vigorously with religious and psychological ones in novels such as La fin de la nuit (1935). Both Mauriac and Malraux were eventually to become improbably entangled in Nabokovs mind with another thirties writer, William Faulkner. Although American, Faulkner was disproportionately popular in France, where his work resembled elements of the regional roman rustique that had developed since the First World War. In one of his most revealing letters to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov writes: Faulkners belated romanticism and quite impossible biblical rumblings and starkness (which is not starkness at all but skeletonized triteness), and all the rest of the bombast seems to be so offensive that I can only explain his popularity in France by the fact that all her own popular mediocre writers (Malraux included) of recent years have also had their fling at lhomme marchait, la nuit tait sombre. The books pseudo-religious rhythm I simply cannot standa phoney gloom which also spoils Mauriacs work. (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 23940) Nabokov was a writer with a keen sense of innovation, who continued to read contemporary fiction throughout his life. His perspective on literary culture in his three languagesEnglish, French, and Russian at the end of the 1930s can only have been bleak. The age of autonomous experimental Modernism seemed to have passed with Ulysses and A la recherche du temps perdu. In Russia, Stalin had crushed any possibility of free literary expression. Among the migr community, which had been dispersed by the rise and accompanying threat of Nazism, Nabokovs favorites (and friends), Khodasevich and Bunin, had fallen silent, the former dying in 1939. One of the most promising of the next generation, Boris Poplavsky, whom Nabokov described in Speak Memory as a far violin among near Balalaikas (220) had died young in 1935. Nabokov seemed to have taken little interest in English literature after he left Cambridge in 1922, while in France the scene was dominated by writers he disliked, who had allowed social concerns to impinge on their art while relying on discredited and outdated forms (in addition
third rate writer and one solid mass of clichs (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 202, 203).

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to belated romanticism Faulkner and Malraux also practice stale romanticism [Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 239]). Against this backdrop, Nabokovs evocations of Flaubert, Joyce, and Proust in the figure of Sebastian are echoes of a literary tradition destroyed by the pressure exerted by political history on literary art. Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Knight Within Sebastians literary identity there can be discerned a number of literary antecedents. The books on Sebastians bookshelf, including novels by a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists from Britain, France, America, and, conspicuously, one particular Irishman, provide one way into this question. In addition, Sebastians Cambridge days also echo themes and images from Tennyson, Brooke and Housman. He even, according to Lost Property, had his Kipling moods (58). Here, however, I examine traces of Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce in Sebastians aesthetics, style and persona, and demonstrate how his own demise can thereby be seen to reflect that of autonomous experimentalism in the novel, and thereby the Modernist impasse. Flaubert can hardly be said to have participated in the era of high Modernism, and yet it is important to realize how Nabokov viewed him as a progenitor of the autonomous aesthetic he came to value in the high Modernist work of Proust and Joyce. Of all Flauberts works, Madame Bovary was the one Nabokov valued most highly, a novel that, by 1932, he claimed to have read for the hundredth time.6 It was also a novel he chose to teach for his Cornell course Masterpieces of European Literature, the lectures for which became published as Lectures on Literature, and it is here that we find the crucial statement that without Flaubert there would be no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland (147). Although all three authors are found on Sebastians bookshelf, it is Madame Bovary that lies at the exact center of this list. V describes the books as forming a kind of sequence or melody, thus placing emphasis on their order, and conferring particular importance on Flauberts novel. Indeed, Flaubert is central to Sebastians very identity, especially with regard to time, history, and
6. Nabokovs letter to Vra Nabokov, April 819, 1932, Vladimir Nabokov Archives. Cited in Boyd, Russian Years 378.

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society. When, for instance, V says that Sebastian belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except the perfect achievement (30), he echoes a distinctly Flaubertian artistic sensibility in the idea of the work of art sans attach exterieur. There are also several references to the ivory tower at the top of which Flaubert famously placed himself and watched the rising tide of shit: Sebastians first biographer, Goodman, remarks that his ivory tower cannot be suffered unless it is transformed into a lighthouse or a broadcasting station (97), while Sebastian himself defends his right to parody an unnamed author and let him drop from the tower of my prose to the gutter below (46). Elsewhere, Sebastian is to be found sprawled on the floor of his study, in a hyperbolic homage to Flauberts notorious pronouncement that the novelist is to be found everywhere in his work, as God in his creation: No, Leslie, said Sebastian from the floor. Im not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest (75). This hyperbolic treatment of Flauberts presence in Sebastian is typical of Nabokovs method as he designs his ridiculous authorial caricature. Sebastian not only parodies other authors, using that technique as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion (76), but is a parody himself. Nowhere is this more evident than in his pathological refusal to take any note of his historical moment or the society that surrounds him: Newspaper headlines, political theories, fashionable ideas meant to him no more than the loquacious printed notice (in three languages, with mistakes in at least two) on the wrapper of some soap or toothpaste. The lather might be thick and the notice convincing but that was the end of it the very idea of him reacting in any special modern way to what Mr Goodman calls the atmosphere of post-war Europe is utterly preposterous. (5556) This passage resonates very strongly with Flauberts letters, written around the time of Madame Bovarys composition, with which Nabokov was well familiar. These pieces bristle with contempt for ideas of modernity and progress, or the possibility that the writer should be influenced by the current climate. In one particular letter, Flaubert responds to Maxime du Camps exhortations to take advantage of the

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current literary fashion and position himself among the Parisian artistic sets: I shall merely tell you that all the words you usehurry, this is the moment, it is high time are for me a vocabulary devoid of sense (Letters 221). V claims that Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936it was always year 1 (55), and consequently we should not be surprised at Sebastians dismissal of those readers who are shaken up in a modern way with a dash of Freud or stream of consciousness or whatnot (46). Similarly Flaubert, in his letter to Du Camp, goes on, as for the waxing and waning of literary quarrels, I dont give a damn (223). What makes this autonomous posturing all the more interesting is that, discernable in Sebastians parodic refraction of Flaubert, there is also a strong element of Nabokovs own attitudes, as this letter to Khodasevich from 1934 demonstrates: I find unbearable any talk intelligent or not, its all the same to meabout the modern era, inquitude, religious renaissance, or any sentence at all with the word postwar. I sense in this ideology the same herd instinct, the all-together-now of, say, yesterdays or last centurys enthusiasm for worlds fairs I am writing my novel. I do not read the papers.7 The echoes of Flauberts letter, quoted above, may or may not be intentional. What is certain, however, is that Nabokov endowed his creation with the same legacy of aesthetic autonomy that he himself had inherited from Flaubert. The Proustian work that V finds on Sebastians bookshelf is not simply A la recherche du temps perdu, but emphatically the last part of that series, Le temps retrouv (Time Recovered), in which the novels narrator finally realizes that the true mechanism by which time is recovered is through involuntary memory, through accident rather than conscious intention. Sebastians project of creating an art safe from the impingements of history and time resonates strongly with Nabokovs own reading of Proust. The binding together of present sensation and past memory, embodied in the madeleine episode, remains contingent

7. Nabokov to Khodasevich, July 24, 1934. Cited in Boyd, Russian Years 409.

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upon circumstance until transformed by art into what Proust describes as lessence des choses, located extra-temporel. In his lectures on A ct du chez Swann Nabokov selects the following quotation from Marcels narration, which actually comes not from that novel, but from midway through Le temps retrouv, explaining how the writer should go about this process of catalytic artistic transformation: truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, and encloses them in the necessary rings of his style (art), or even when, like life itself, comparing similar qualities in two sensations, he makes their essential nature stand out clearly by joining them in a metaphor in order to remove them from the contingencies (the accidents) of time, and links them together by means of timeless words. (Lectures on Literature 211) Nabokov evidently feels it necessary to clarify a few points for his students in this translation. One of these is that style (the word Proust uses in French) effectively means art. This, together with his choice of this particular passage with which to introduce his discussion of Proust, is indicative of his resolve to treat A la recherche as a stylistic monument in defiance of times attempt to compromise the artists autonomy. That this passage is from Le temps retrouv, the volume most explicitly devoted to arts unique ability to recover that which is lost to time, explains why Sebastian should have only the last volume on his bookshelf. For Nabokov, Prousts almost talismanic ability to deploy his refined style to the dissolving of the barrier between past and present is crucial to Sebastians identity as a writer. To begin with, Sebastians style is likened to Prousts on two interrelated occasions. At one point, in an irate mood, and having used a digressive bracket earlier, Sebastian writes to Mr. Goodman, you seem to wonder, let me repeat (and that does not mean I am apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis) (46). In his role as incompetent and meddling literary critic, Goodman later complains about M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied (96). Typically, Goodman has happened upon a truth without intending it, for although it seems unlikely that Sebastian as character would consciously copy Proust, yet it is nevertheless true that as Nabokovian creation,

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and as composite Modernist novelist, he (subconsciously) does copy Proust, and in both his style and his identity. In connection with Sebastians resistance to linear time within his work, there are two explicit references. In the first, V quotes a passage from Albinos in Black, remarking on his ability to evoke a queer expansion of time, time gone astray, asprawl (8). In the same passage V (unknowingly) paraphrases Prousts description of a raindrop sliding down a leaf in A ct du chez Swann, as if to reinforce the linkage.8 In the second direct allusion to the disruption of temporality, V quotes from The Prismatic Bezel, in which the idea of time now seems to curl up and fall asleep (78). In addition to this evidence, a further observation on Sebastians Proustian aesthetics has it that time and space were to him measures of the same eternity (56). In the light of these evocations, Sebastians novel Lost Property can only echo the idea of lost time, with the author reclaiming the past as his own. The quoted passage deploys a Proustian style, with long meandering sentences and digressive subordinate clauses that span years of time before returning to their original subject. This, his most autobiographical work, with its first-person narration of childhood memories, lonely urban perambulations, and lost loves, does appear as an anglicized A la recherche, with Sebastians Chums magazine standing in for Marcels boyhood reading and lyrical descriptions of London (I seem to pass with intangible steps across ghostly lawns and through dancing halls [RLSK 58]) replacing the parks, cafes, and restaurants of Paris. Proust is not only important in forming Sebastians aesthetics, for the very identity of the precocious novelist is also derived largely from Nabokovs manipulation of the Proustian myth. As is well known, Proust spent his later years in writerly seclusion, shunning society and devoting himself entirely to his novel. His cork-lined residence at 102, Boulevard Haussman was carefully sealed and cleaned to appease his

8. Many a stray drop, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening on the point if it, until suddenly they splashed on to our upturned faces from the top of the branch (Proust, Swanns Way 180). Compare Vs allusion: she left husband and child as suddenly as a raindrop starts to slide tipwards down a syringa leaf. That upward jerk of the forsaken leaf, which had been heavy with its bright burden (8).

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asthma, while his occasional social ventures elsewhere, despite poor health, found him wrapped in overcoat and scarf whether inside or not. Proust was, and is, the ultimate symbol of the writer sacrificing life for art. Aristocratic, self-conscious, sickly, and whimsical, this image of the great novelist is most appropriate to the paradigm of the decadent artist found in Edgar Allen Poes The Fall of the House of Usher or Oscar Wildes The Portrait of Dorian Gray. In Sebastian Knight, Nabokov gives his novelist a similarly decadent aspect through various Proustian elements connected to his mortality and demise. Firstly, Sebastians acute sense of mortality which had begun to obsess him (87) is also Prousts, who returns impulsively to the theme throughout his novel in episodes that Nabokov particularly admired.9 Sebastians ill health begins to affect him midway through the novel, as he is diagnosed with heart problems, and from that point on, death becomes one of his main themes, especially in his final novel (and, according to V, his masterpiece), The Doubtful Asphodel, in which the theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book (146). The same is true of Sebastian Knight itself, in which the subjectlike Proust, neuralgic, oversensitive, and awkwardis already dead at the start, the only task remaining, the recovery of that life. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Sebastian in his final year is described in scenarios unmistakably derived from the Proustian myth, which are accurate even to the final burst of social effort before death: he returned to London and stayed there a couple of months, making a pitiful effort to deceive solitude by appearing in public as much as he could. A thin, mournful, and silent figure, he would be seen in this place or that, wearing a scarf around his neck in even the warmest dining-room (154)10

9. For example, in his lecture on A ct du chez Swann, Nabokov digresses to remark that Bergottes death is beautifully described in a later volume (Lectures on Literature 230). 10. Edmund White notes that In 1917 and 1918 Proust, as though tempted for a last time by worldly pleasure, once more went out more frequently, mainly to the Ritz (123). Anecdotes about Prousts tendency to wear warm clothes inside and in all weathers is mentioned by a number of biographers.

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The contrast between Sebastians slow, painful demise and his aesthetic defiance of time is the basis for Sebastian Knights irony and pathos, and also provides a perspective on Nabokovs understanding of the eventual passing of the high Modernist era. James Joyce, the last of the three great European modernist novelists on Sebastians bookshelf, was also the only one still living at the time of Sebastian Knights composition. It is perhaps because of Nabokovs proximity to, and friendship with Joyce, that Modernisms most notorious parodist remains hovering unnamed about the fringes of Sebastians writing and identity. When, however, we read that Sebastian, in his final days, drank hot milk in the middle of the night at coffee stalls with taxi drivers (154), in a scenario lifted from Ulysses, we can legitimately assert that Joyce was clearly on Nabokovs mind as he created Sebastian.11 His role, though less explicit than Prousts, has a similar functionof informing Sebastians aesthetics and of contributing to his identity as part of the last gasp of high Modernist experimentation. If Lost Property owes much to Prousts A la recherche, then Sebastians second novel, Success, bears significant comparison to Joyces own second novel, Ulysses. Nabokov, on the evidence presented in Lectures on Literature, read Ulysses chiefly in terms of the synchronization device he had derived from Flaubert. He even goes so far as to claim that the whole of Ulysses, as we shall gradually realize, is a deliberate pattern of recurrent themes and synchronization of trivial events (289). In a spectacular simplification he writes, This is the main theme: Bloom and Fate (288). Reading Vs description of Success, we find a remarkable likeness:

Mary Ann Caws, for example, reports how Proust, panicked as usual over the notion that he might be cold, stuffed his tuxedo with a great mass of thermal wadding, placed several mufflers around his neck, and three overcoats over the tux (30) John Burt Foster, Jr., also notices this Proustian element, but prefers to view it as indicative of Nabokovs own affinities, rather than part of Sebastians Proustian identity (167). 11. Bloom and Stephen take late-night refreshment at a cabmans shelter in the Eumaeus chapter of Ulysses: Mr Bloom hit on an expedient by suggesting , off the reel, the propriety of a cabmans shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt bridge where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral (569). See also Foster 167.

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if his first novel is based on methods of compositionthe second deals mainly with the methods of human fate. With scientific precision in the classification, examination, and rejection of an immense amounts of data Sebastian Knight devotes the three hundred pages of Success to one of the most complicated researches that has been attempted by a writer all the magic and force of his art are summoned in order to discover the exact way in which two lines of life were made to come into contactthe whole book indeed being but a glorious gamble on causalities. (7980) Success s plot, the tracing of the parallel wanderings of two people through an urban space, thus mimics those of Ulysses characters, who, for Nabokov, come and go and meet and separate, and meet again as the live parts of a careful composition in a kind of slow dance of fate (Lectures on Literature 289). Even more striking is the way in which Sebastian, in Success, seems to specifically avoid the very shortcomings Nabokov finds in Ulysses. In his lectures Nabokov objects to Joyces use of an overweight of local allusions and foreign expressions. In these, a needless obscurity can be produced by details not brought out with sufficient clarity but only suggested for the knowledgeable (Lectures on Literature 290). Sebastian works according to the assumption that an author is able to discover anything he may want to know about his characters, such capacity being limited only by the manner and purpose of his selection in so far as it ought not to be a haphazard jumble of worthless details but a definite and methodical quest. (80) In this passage, Nabokovs creation represents an idealized Joyce, and as such illustrates the same technique that was used in the hyperbolic rendering of Flauberts axiom when Sebastian is found lying on the floor after creating a new world. Nabokov consciously signals similarities and echoes of his predecessors before superseding them, thus suggesting kinship at the same time as evolutionary progress. This, then, is the knights move, which carries the piece forwards largely in a uniform direction but with an unexpected deviation.12

12. The knights move: This relationship enacts a recognized Russian

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Nabokov also regarded Joyce as a master of parody, which he identifies as the third of his main styles (Lectures on Literature 289). One of his favorite chapters in Ulysses was Nausicaa, full of wonderfully amusing clichs, the platitudes of gracious living and pseudopoetry (Lectures on Literature 345). Nabokovs perspective on this chapter in his Lectures on Literature provides an explanation for the otherwise inexplicably terrible prose in the passage from Success that V extracts in Sebastian Knight. This episode describes the parting of two lovers on a dark, rainy night, Sebastian appearing to plumb the very depths of bad writing, with sentences such as He kissed her again and they stood like some soft dark statue with two dim heads (82). If we read it as a parody of popular romantic fiction from the 1930s, in the same vein as Gerty Macdowells ladies-magazine prose, then we once again reposition Sebastian as an embodiment of Modernist style, this time Joycean. Sebastian, we should remember, was for ever hunting out the things that had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud (76). Nabokov uses the same metaphor of death and decay in his discussion of clich in Nausicaa: When we say clich, stereotype, trite pseudoelegant phrase, and so on, we imply, amongst other things that when used for the first time in literature the phrase was original and had a vivid meaning. In fact, it became hackneyed because its meaning was at first vivid and neat, and attractive, and so the phrase was used over and over again until it became a stereotype, a clich. We can thus define clichs as bits of dead prose and of rotting poetry. (Lectures on Literature 346)

Formalist figure for literary genealogy, used, for example, by Viktor Shklovsky in his critical work Khod konia (The Knights Move [1923]), in which artistic legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew. This knights move denoting a non-linear linkage in two dimensions complicates the conventions of connectivity and is favored by Nabokov on a number of other occasions, most notably in Speak, Memory, where Nabokovs developing literary talents are associated with his Proustian Uncle Ruka.

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The parody of popular forms is thus, for Joyce and, following him, Sebastian, a means of asserting ones own position at the forefront of literary evolution while at the same time signaling ones own distance from popular culture. Nabokovs imagery, linking Joyces parodies to Sebastians, is one that revolves around the opposition between natural vividness and false, sham paintedness, between the living and the dying. Both this imagery of aging and their common use of synchronization and temporal disruption signal their dominance over time, their continued vibrancy. Just as, however, Nabokov judged Joyces demise in writing Finnegans Wake, so we find echoes of this atrophic slowing in the narrating of Sebastians last work and its reception. How familiar Nabokov was with Finnegans Wake, or, as it was then, Work in Progress, at the time he wrote Sebastian Knight cannot be certain, although it seems probable that he had at least an idea of its experimental principle and radical style.13 Nabokov has The Doubtful Asphodel published in 1935, a year before its authors death, and this is reflected in its main theme. It holds a number of things in common with Finnegans Wake, or more precisely, Finnegans Wake as Nabokov may have rewritten it, relying on a pattern of images rather verbal association and punning: One thought-image, then another breaks upon the shore of consciousness, and we follow the thing or the being that has been evoked (147). A central consciousness of a dying man, rather than any

13. Finnegans Wake was finally published just months after Nabokov had finished writing Sebastian Knight . Joyce and Nabokov knew each other through their mutual friends Paul and Lucie Lon. Lucie Lon had known Nabokov since his Cambridge days, and helped him check the manuscript of Sebastian Knight, working at the same desk that Paul Lon used for Joyces dictation of Finnegans Wake. At a dinner early in 1939, just after Sebastian Knight was finished, Joyce handed Nabokov a copy of Haveth Childers Everywhere, but this is not necessarily the first time Nabokov had read any of Work in Progress (see Boyd, Russian Years 5034). Haveth Childers Everywhere had been available since 1930, Anna Livia Plurabelle since 1928, and Tales Told of Shem and Shaun since 1929. Among other serializations, various pieces had been published in Transition during the late twenties and early thirties (see Ellmann 79496). Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamation of Work in Progress (1929) also increased awareness of the nature of Joyces project.

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mythical structure (or phony folklore) provides the unifying principle behind the book, which evolves, plotless, from one episode to the next. It even contains sham-clever thoughts scribbled in the margin of a borrowed book (the episode of the philosopher) (148), a possible ironic reference to the obscure philosophizing of the Night Lessons episode in Finnegans Wake. Finally, though, it is the books reception that echoes the prevailing opinion on Joyces final novel as it circulated in fragmentary extracts during the late twenties and thirties: here and there the hint kept recurring that the author was a tired author, which seemed another way of saying that he was just an old bore (152). Suggesting Finnegans Wake (and also possibly A la recherche), nearly all the reviews gave to understand that the book was a little too long, and that many passages were obscure and obscurely aggravating (15253). Although its Vs favorite, The Doubtful Asphodel emerges from Sebastian Knight as something of a failure, an indulgent Modernist opus, unappreciated by its readers who feel that it has left them puzzled and cross. In fact, it seems that Sebastian, who was never (we are told) concerned with time, has been beaten by it. Like Proust, like Joyce, his evasion of linear time was, and could only ever be, temporary. As a paradigmatic Modernist writer (in Nabokovs sense of stylistic innovation and autonomy) Sebastians eventual failure and death, both physically and artistically, carries with it all the force of the aesthetic crisis Nabokov perceived in the late thirties. Sebastian, Modernity, and Time In Mr. Goodmans biography, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, the sense of cultural crisis of the 1920s and 30s is given vigorous expression, to the disgust of V: The War, says Mr Goodman without so much as a blush, had changed the face of the universe. And with much gusto he goes on to describe those special aspects of post-war life which met a young man at the troubled dawn of his career: a feeling of some great deception; weariness of the soul and feverish physical excitement (such as the vapid lewdness of the foxtrot); a sense of futilityand its result: gross liberty. Cruelty, too; the reek of blood still in the air; glaring picture palaces; dim couples in dark Hyde

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Park; the glories of standardization; the cult of machinery; the degradation of Beauty, Love, Honour, Art and so on. (53) It would be too easy to accept Vs dismissal of Goodmans diagnosis, that Sebastian was the product and victim (52) of the age. After all, Goodman is a largely unsympathetic character, a self-interested manipulator. V regards his work as slapdash and very misleading (13), and, indeed the extracts we are permitted seem overwritten and clichd. Most importantly though, to align ourselves with Goodman is to contradict not only Sebastians view of himself, but also Nabokovs own professed view on the relationship between what he would call firstrate writers and their times. This perspective is, however, problematic. No matter how much we may wish to disagree with Goodman, and buy into the myth propagated by three writers (V, Sebastian, Nabokov) that art exists independent of history, Goodman is quite simply right. One after another, the assertions of his biography bear out truth. The reference to cruelty, for example, is linked to the bizarre incident in which V discovers horrific photographs of Chinese torture in Sebastians flat. The cult of machinery; the degradation of Beauty, Love, Honour recall the writers flirtation with Futurism in his youth. The vapid lewdness of the foxtrot reflects how Sebastian is lured into betraying Claire by a vulgar girl whose idea of life involves dancing the shimmy or whatever it was called (121). In particular, the glaring picture palaces are born out by Sebastians considerable interest in the cinema, one of the chief ways in which modernity could be said to intrude on his supposedly hermetic existence. The most symbolic example of this is the Cambridge chapter, when Sebastians viewing of Charlie Chaplin and Wild West films disturb the equilibrium of an episode otherwise emptied of all allusion of modernity, dwelling instead on the timeless associations of the city found in the poems of Rupert Brooke and A. E. Housman. These last two aspects of Goodmans cultural diagnosis, the supposed licentiousness of the inter-war years and the upsurge in the popularity of the cinema, are linked in Sebastians life through the figure of Nina, the seductress who lures the author from his partner only to ditch him shortly after, just before his death. The portrait of Nina offered by her former husband, Pahl Pahlich, makes clear that her persona is

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inextricably linked to the increased social liberty enjoyed by young middle class women following World War I. Her pastimes included drinking cocktails and eating a large supper at four in the morning, inspecting brothels because that was fashionable among Parisian snobs, and buying expensive clothes (121). To underline the false, constructed nature of her image, he tells V you may find her in any cheap novel, shes a type, a type. While this binds her to the production of popular fiction, a later reference to her as merely a bad dream after seeing a bad cinema film (122) confirms that she is equally derived from another medium of popular culture by which the clichs of fashion were propagated. As Nicholas Daly has pointed out, the 1920s and 30s saw the emergence of the fast flapper, the dancing daughter of modernity, a figure associated not only with postwar sexual libertinism but also the vamps and femmes fatales of Hollywood cinema (79, 9293). In Sebastians final months, V notes that he is said to have been three times to see the same filma perfectly insipid one called The Enchanted Garden (155), a phenomenon explained by his suggestion that Nina herself is to be glimpsed in the background to a seaside scene, glancing back at the camera. The allure of the cinema and the allure of a vulgar, fashionable, cruel, sexualized mistress become blurred for Sebastian, and collaborate in bringing about a submission to the contemporary. Barbara Wyllies study of Nabokovs relationship to the cinematic medium, Nabokov at the Movies (2004), has shown that the tension that cinema creates in his works, between the promise of immortality and the price of moral corruption, has been present throughout. In early Russian novels such as Korol, dama, valet (King, Queen, Knave, 1928) and Kamera Obskura (Laughter in the Dark, 193233), femmes fatales deriving from cinematic types and modeling themselves on film characters are responsible for immoral, cruel acts against their men (Wyllie 5575). This leads Julian Connolly to associate Nabokovs cinematic theme with poverty of the imagination and sterility of the soul (216). In Sebastian Knight, however, it is one of Nabokovs sympathetic artistfigures who is attracted to the medium, and this novel thereby discloses the seductive nature of cinema for those wishing to defeat linear time. It is not only Sebastian, but also V who is affected in this way. Although early in his narration V derides his memories of Sebastian as no more

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than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors and having nothing to do with the essential drama (15), he soon contradicts this dismissal of the filmic as he lapses into cinematic method to evoke their childhood home: let the beautiful olivaceous house on the Neva embankment fade out gradually in the grey-blue frosty night (17). This level of cinematic sentimentality is then surpassed as V futilely imagines Sebastians first love (the lights go out, the curtain raises, a Russian landscape is disclosed [113]). This pathetic impulse, based more on fancy than reality, fails as an attempt to revive the past. In this sense, then, the cinematic theme in Sebastian Knight resembles that of Sogliadatai (The Eye, 1930), in which, as Wyllie demonstrates (1828), cinematic narrative techniques are used as a tool for deception by an unreliable, deluded narrator. As in the case of Sebastians pathetic attempts to recapture the past by repeated viewings of a film that might offer a glimpse of Nina, the cruelty of the cinema matches that of Nina, an enflaming of desire (temporal and carnal) and a subsequent refusal to surrender its charms. Nina, Sebastians downfall, is associated with modernity in other interesting ways. The description of her flat, for example, containing a copy of Dr. Axel Munthes San Michele, the popular memoirs of a hypnotist well known in the thirties, reflects her superficial and fashionable interest in mysticism. Taken together with what Pahl Pahlich calls her weakness for Lhassa (122) this detail suggests how Nina is created out of a decadent paradigm. In this she embodies one of the crucial paradoxes of modernity for Nabokov, for she is simultaneously a symbol of modernity and of decadence, and thereby is both contemporary and dated. Despite her self-conscious attention to the fashions of the day, including mysticism as well as displays of sexual liberty and hedonism, she is also linked to the idea of decay and demise. This is clearly visible through Vs presentation of her house, where, in an inversion of the usual fairy-tale motif, time is found to accelerate rather than stand still, and an odd allusion to industrialization hints at the reality of modernity breaking through the veneer of old-world charm: A score of unhealthy old trees represented the park. There were fields on one side and a hill with a factory on the other. Everything about the place had a queer look of weariness, and shabbiness, and

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dustiness; when later I learned that it had only been built some thirty-odd years ago I felt still more surprised by its decrepitude. (137) Nina is the embodiment of Vs maxim that super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others (25), a seductress who literally ages everything she has contact with, from Sebastian himself to the flowers which she claims wither when she touches them (138). Nina only speeds up a process that is occurring inexorably throughout the novelthe passage of time and history. The structure of the novel is necessarily built around the fact of Sebastians death, which is also its inevitable conclusion, thus ensuring that the novel functions as a deferral of this unquestionable evidence of mans submission to time. Sebastian, we should remember, despite his posturing as a man unaffected by the passing of the years, is obsessed by time and its attendant mortality. The working manuscript that V discovers in his flat tells of a man so afraid of missing tomorrows that he buys eight alarm clocks to ensure his awakening. This figure is representative of Sebastian himself, who, though he never wears a wristwatch, is constantly looking at other peoples, and who, according to Nina, would count his own pulse (33, 88, 133). Neither is this acute sense of time limited to Sebastian, for V himself, particularly in the race to reach Sebastian before he dies (a race he loses), is subjected to a nightmarish slowing of time that only serves to increase awareness of its passing. What is particularly interesting about this sequence is that Vs agonizing, personal experience of times texture is also paralleled obscurely by a sense of historical time. In the phone booth from which he tries to call Sebastians doctor, he finds prescient signs of the political and racial violence to overtake Europe in the coming years: who wrote on the wall Death to the Jews or Vive le front populaire (166). This literalized writing on the wall is augmented by the presence of a red-eyed soldier on the train to St. Damier, whose touch causes V to crave to wash his hand (164). The irony of Vs scoffing at Goodmans phrase post-war is that the thirties was also pre-war, a dawning realization that haunts the latter stages of the novel.

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Synthesis: Artistic Continuity Sebastian Knights central conceit is a two-part maneuver that first demarcates two dimensions, spatial and temporal, and then brings them into collision with each other. Sebastian is first presented as a composite novelist, created out of a tradition of autonomous experimentalism aloof from social and political history. In the extracted passages from his novels and stories we are presented with time gone astray, asprawl; a dimension free from the constraints of linear time. Nabokovs rather cruel strategy is, having created this vulnerable, fragile and two-dimensional genius, to place him within the social context of another dimension the troubled modernity of 1930s Western Europe. Sebastians autonomy is assailed by the pressures of time and history, precipitating the crisis that brings about his demise and death. And yet can we finally assert that Sebastian is a failure, or, more realistically, that Vs quest to find the real Sebastian Knight and rescue him from time is a failure? Obviously this depends on how we define real, a term that Nabokov was notoriously elusive about. Examining the novel, we actually know remarkably little about Sebastian, about his final love affair, or the inner life that V claims to know. What we do know, largely due to Vs habit of inferring biographical truth from Sebastians novels, is confined to his art. The attempt to retrieve Sebastians life within time is, as Silberman tells V, ewsyless. You cant see de odder side of de moon (109). However, in a novel where art and literature assert their presence so much more forcefully than people, where they determine and create their own paths, it is Sebastians artistic life that is real, and that survives beyond his death.14 This survival should not, however, be understood as occurring despite modernity but rather through its incorporation within the autonomous aesthetic. We have already seen how, in Sebastians second novel, Success, the

14. Critics have gradually come to realize the extent to which events from Sebastians novels are found mirrored in Vs narration and seem to determine its course, beginning to create their own reality. Among those who have most fully explored the similarities between the events of Vs quest and Sebastians novels are: Charles Nicol, The Mirrors of Sebastian Knight; Shlomith Rimmon, Problems of Voice in Nabokovs The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; and Vladimir Alexandrov, Nabokovs Otherworld 13759.

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clichs of contemporary romantic fiction are deployed as part of his parodic strategy. Examining his first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, it can be seen that his tendency to incorporate popular or fashionable genres into his work is a crucial aspect of his aesthetic. This is, as V makes clear, only the authors springboard (77), a way of exploiting the tools offered by the present in order to signal the works self-conscious transcendence of it. The example V gives is the fashionable trick found in the modern novel of grouping a medley of people together in a limited space (a hotel, an island, a street) (77). The author also draws on the cinema practice of showing the leading lady in her impossible dormitory years as glamorously different from a crowd of plain and fairly realistic classmates (77). Finally, the character of the detective is not a parody of the Sherlock Holmes vogue but a parody of the modern reaction from it (78). As V explains, the heroes of the book are what can loosely be called methods of composition (79), an indication that is equally well applied to Sebastian himself, as composed by Nabokov. The aesthetics of The Prizmatic Bezel, which authorize a deployment of pastiche of various writers and genres in order to supersede them, is an accurate indication of the composition of Sebastian Knight itself. Among the many parodies contained in the novel, of Proust, of Joyce, of Brooke and Housman and probably many others still to be recognized, one genre stands out as the keystone of Nabokovs strategythat of the literary biography. Not only does this genre serve the purpose of mastering contemporary forms and therefore subordinating them to Nabokovs aesthetic of evolving stylistic autonomy, but it is also of particular relevance to the questions that haunt Sebastian Knight, revolving around the possibility of using literature as a means of compensating for lost time, and of what endures of a writers life after his death. The genre of literary biography was much on Nabokovs mind during the late 1930s. Fyodors mock biography of Nikolai Chernyshevski in The Gift, as Nabokov scholarship has eventually proved, is formed around verifiable fact and meticulous research.15 Following the publication of The Gift, however (without the offending biographical chapter),

15. See Davydov 36970; Paperno 309.

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Nabokov became more interested in the status and artistic possibilities of biography in the absence of verifiable truth. One of the products of this interest was the article Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable (later translated as Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible, quoted here), which he published in La Nouvelle Revue Franaise in March 1937. This piece begins with a critique of the genre Nabokov calls biographie romance: The formula is a familiar one. One begins by sifting through the great mans correspondence, cutting and pasting so as to fashion a nice paper suit for him, then one leafs through his works proper in search of character traits. Indeed what could be simpler than to have the great man circulate among the people, the ideas, the objects that he himself described and that one plucks from his own books in order to make stuffing for ones own? (38) This genre, which Nabokov compares to the musings of a madman who believes he traveled back in time, is also referred to in The Gift as those idiotic biographies romances where Byron is coolly slipped a dream extracted from one of his own poems (200). Likewise, V laments his inability to describe Sebastians boyhood with anything like the methodical continuity which I would normally have achieved had Sebastian been a character of fiction. But if I should try this the result would be one of those biographies romances which are by far the worst kind of literature yet invented. (17) The irony of Vs pronouncement is not only that Sebastian is a character of fiction, but also that (as V always does when he claims to avoid something) he goes on to use exactly the conventions of the genre he disowns. Hence throughout the novel V continually refers to Sebastians novels as a means of discovering biographical truth about his subject, allowing his Lost Property to stand in for an absence of material on his childhood, or claiming the absurd romantic parody in Success to be so strangely connected with Sebastians inner life (82). There is even an oblique allusion to Byrons dream, which Nabokov had so objected to being lifted from its natural place in a poem and given to the biographical subject. As V imaginatively recreates Sebastians adolescent love in a

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series of cinematic scenes, he self-consciously employs Byrons own verse transition, a change came oer the spirit of my dream and writes as in Byrons dream, again the picture changes (114).16 Andr Maurois Don Juan, ou la vie de Byron was published in 1930 and achieved immense popularity. In the years that followed, he wrote prodigiously, producing biographies almost annually, including one of Turgenev in 1931, Voltaire in 1932, and Chateaubriand in 1938. By the time that Nabokov wrote Sebastian Knight he was the chief proponent of the biographie romance, having not only written a great number of best-selling examples, but also credited himself with creating a form of theory around his work, expounded in his Cambridge lectures of 1928, which were published as Aspects de la biographie in 1929. The evidence of the references to Byron in connection with the genre, together with a parody of that biography discerned by Boyd in his online notes to Ada, indicates strongly that Nabokov had read Maurois Byron . Given his reaction to it, it seems unlikely that he went on to read any of the succeeding publications by that author, but the phrasing from Pushkin, or the Real and the PlausibleEvery time I open one of those curious books customarily called fictionized biographies (39)suggests that he was at least familiar with other examples of this popular genre. Aspects of Biography demonstrates the extent to which Maurois acknowledged the existence of a revolution in biographical writing that he traces to British figures such as Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Harold Nicolson, although he also acknowledges Proust and Henri Bergson as influencing his theory. In his opening chapter, Modern Biography, he posits the question Is there such a thing as modern biography? before going on to inquire, ought biography to be an art or a science? Can it, like the novel, be a means of expression or a means of escape for the author as well as for the reader? (5). Maurois, in representing the key issues facing the contemporary biographer, presents a set of concerns similar to those addressed by Nabokov in Sebastian Knight, namely the possibility of convergence between the novel and the biography. In fact, the two writers also come to reach similar conclusions as to the impossibility of conventional biographys doing justice to its subject. Nabokov,

16. See Byrons The Dream, in The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. 4, 2229.

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in Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible writes: Is it possible to imagine the full reality of anothers life, to relive it in ones mind and set it down intact on paper? I doubt it: one even finds oneself seduced by the idea that thought itself, as it shines its beam on the story of a mans life, cannot avoid deforming it. (40) Maurois, in presenting the life of his subject as a kind of fugitive, whose documented and inner lives are in divergence, shares Nabokovs judgment: What hunter has ever been able to pursue two shadows at the same time? The biographer? Apparently not. But perhaps the novelist can (165). Later, in claiming that it is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies (167), Maurois seems to strike at the centre of Vs own struggle in Sebastian Knight. Indeed, Nabokovs novel emerges as a literalization of the dramatic conflict between biography and novel that Maurois locates at the heart of the modernist biographical art. V uses the same terminology as Maurois, of inner life and inner knowledge, his quest to follow the harmony, rhythmical interlacements, and undulations of his half-brothers life, a task which, like Maurois, he achieves through heavy reliance upon his subjects fictions.17 The literalization of the objectives of the biographie romance occurs at the point where Vs biography of Sebastian comes to be perceived as Nabokovs novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, for while Maurois repeatedly flirts with the boundaries between the novel and biography, Nabokovs novel enacts the transformation of one into the other. V, after all, expresses several times his desire to be permitted the freedoms of fiction, as when, after one particularly wishful twist of the plot, he cries Oh how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel! (44). Eventually, then, as it becomes clear that Vs quest has finally been cut loose from the confines

17. RLSK 82, 28, 113, 172. Compare Maurois, who refers also to the search for the inner life that can be made apparent through the introduction of rhythm and the recurrence, at more or less distant intervals, of the essential motifs of the work (162, 6364). In Sebastian Knight, Vs pursuit of Sebastians life uncovers a range of these recurring patterns and motifs, such as violet/violette.

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of biography, and that its events are shaped not by any conventionally understood reality, but by the reality of Sebastians books, then Vs wish has been fulfilled. Maurois own biographer, Georges Lemaitre, expresses his subjects fundamental conception of biography as a living integration of the emotions of two men (85). This assertion is supported by Aspects of Biography, in which Maurois writes of the perfect congruence, this interchangeability of author and hero which although rare is nevertheless both possible and desirable: The soul of any man who writes a life of Carlyle becomes, at any rate at certain moments, like Carlyles (11718). Sebastian Knights conclusion, which involves the final integration of Sebastian and VI am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I (173)is thus the final expression of Nabokovs desire to master and parody the genre of biographie romance. Despite these convergences between their arts, the recurrence of a number of strategies across their work, it is finally an inversion of objectives with which Nabokov signals his difference from Maurois. The latter, despite his readiness to introduce aspects of the novelists art into biography, emphasizes a consistent fidelity to history, the outward life of the man duly embodied in documents and evidence (162). The use of intuition, or, as he writes, divination, is reserved as a means of imposing a coherence or unity that is unavailable from history. For Nabokov, however, it is Sebastians fictions that constitute the most tangible and affective reality. The history of Sebastians life, its gradual crumbling in the face of modernity, is eventually effaced by his art, which, as I have shown, incorporates the generic faces of that modernity in its parodic style. Ultimately, it is Sebastians art that conditions and determines the history of Vs quest for him, and facilitates their integration at the novels conclusion. Turning again to Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible, we find that it is exactly that replacement of a confined and falsely embellished historical reality with one that has evolved creatively from it, which Nabokov endorses as an alternative to biography: The life of a poet is a kind of pastiche of his art. The passage of time seems inclined to re-evoke the gestures of a genius, imbuing his imagined existence with the same tints and colors that the poet bestowed on his creations (40). This is perhaps the best summary we have of how Sebastian Knight functions aesthetically. The passage of time here submits humbly to mimicry of poetic genius, transforming

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the life of the poet into a pastiche of his works, precisely the maneuver Nabokov effects in his novel. The shift of reality experienced during its process, from that of a verifiable history into a fictional one corresponding to the Sebastians works, is thus also a generic transformation, which finds a contemporary form, the biographie romance, overtaken by Nabokovs own, radically innovative form as articulated in the Pushkin article. One consequence of this reading of Sebastian Knight is that it challenges a view entrenched within Nabokov scholarship since Alexandrovs Nabokovs Otherworld (1991) that those elements of textual resistance within his novels that seem to defy the logic of the narrative are explicable as manifestations of the otherworld, which is the translation Alexandrov gives to the Russian term potustoronnost. Sebastian Knight, as I have mentioned, appears to provide plenty of ammunition to such an interpretative model. As early as 1968, Susan Fromberg advanced the thesis that Sebastian aids Vs quest from beyond the grave: Sebastians shade has revealed the absolute solution that it could only half glimpse from mortal shores (441). Similarly, Dabney Stuart, in his Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody (1978), notices the ways in which Sebastians novels seem to anticipate elements of Vs quest and admits that is seems very strange, but only until one remembers that one theme of the novel, and a lesson that narrator learns, involves the interpenetration of souls (16). Alexandrovs later, more fully realized thesis reads the congruence between V and Sebastian as evidence of a fatidic link, and the ghostly coincidences as demanding an occult explanation, which transpires to involve Sebastians fated attachment to a higher plane of being and Vs function as the otherworlds agent.18 What unites these approaches is their shared reluctance to transgress on Nabokovs edicts by placing Sebastian Knight within a comparative context. The result is too literal an understanding of its mechanisms, and an acceptance of the occult theme at face value. Once we recognize that the novel is abundant with parody and pastiche, that it is a novel that grapples not only with personal histories but with literary and social ones too (the elasticity of the French word histoire pointing

18. Alexandrov 146, 148, 13940, 158.

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toward this conjunction of personal and communal past) the burden of narrative logic, the nervous scrabbling for solutions, begins to dissipate. The conclusion to Nabokovs novel, in which Sebastian is to be found revived and conjoined with V, narrating the continuation of his own existence, is the last of a series of allusions to the stubborn reality of the novel itself, one that outlasts that of its own characters and events, which wander off stage as the curtain falls. Sebastians resurrection is in the shape of a new literary form that, because it incorporates its historical moment, survives it. Conclusion I feel it within me now, and it is what forces me to repeat something Flaubert knew as well as Shakespeare, and Shakespeare as well as Horacethat for a poet only one thing counts: his art. It is high time we remembered this, for I would say we are floundering, so far as literature is concerned. (Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible 42) These words, from Nabokovs essay on Pushkin, return us to the literary crisis which Nabokov perceived in 1937 and which overshadows Sebastian Knight. Dmitri Nabokov translates the original French de littrature nous pataugeons (376) as we are floundering, so far as literature is concerned, but the sense may also include the idea of entanglement (in politics, or social concerns?). In the same paragraph, Nabokov reminds us of Pushkins enduring brilliance (as indestructible as a conscience), and Belinskys failed attempt to quarrel with his aesthetic during the rise of Russian utilitarian criticism. The implication, it seems an understandable oneis that aesthetic autonomy is once more threatened by an ideology devoted to subordinating art to historical necessity. Sebastian Knight responds to that threat in an ingenious way, by assembling an autonomous aesthetic from fragments of the literary past, presenting its clash with modernity, and finally asserting itself as the next innovative artistic stage to evolve out of the collision. Hegelian philosophy came to no good in our parts, laments Nabokov in his Pushkin essay, in reference to Belinskys critique of his hero (42). Belinskys own Hegelianism, which insisted on viewing art as the organic manifestations of a nations vital concerns during a given

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historical epoch, inevitably clashes with Pushkins aesthetics, and with Nabokovs. Also latent in Nabokovs remark is the shadow of successive distortions of Hegelian historicism leading through Marx to the establishment of the Soviet Union and, ultimately, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, not to mention Nabokovs more personal losses. What is most interesting, though, is the implicit suggestion of another Hegelianism, one that might have turned out better. Nabokov employs the figure of the spiral as a figure for time in Speak, Memory, and associates it with Hegels triadic series (so popular in old Russia) (211). In that instance, Hegels dialectic is understood in the temporal sense, as Russias leftHegelians thought of it, but with the Nabokovian insistence upon time as personal and subjective rather than historical and national. In Sebastian Knight, we find yet another example of the triadic series, in which the evolution of the autonomous novel encounters its antithesis in subjection to the collective experience of history before emerging intact as a continuation of that tradition. This then, is Nabokovs evasion of the Modernist impasse, and his attempt to identify himself with the aesthetics of Proust and Joyce while simultaneously emphasizing a sense of evolution and progress. The rhetoric of atemporal isolation expounded in Strong Opinions and other belletristic publications gives us a simplified and misleading account of Nabokovs location within literary history, one belied by Sebastian Knight. In fact, the writer demonstrates his acute sensitivity of his own position in relation to both the literary history and social modernity, a position, moreover, that to retain stability must paradoxically move with its times.
Works Cited Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokovs Otherworld. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Boyd, Brian. Notes on Ada. Zembla, 19 May 2005 <www.libraries.psu.edu/ nabokov/zembla/ada/ada18ann.htm> . Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. . Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Byron, Lord. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome McGann. Vol. 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.

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Caws, Mary Ann. Marcel Proust. London: Overlook, 2003. Connolly, Julian.Laughter in the Dark. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Vladimir Alexandrov. New York: Garland, 1995. 21426. Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 18602000. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Davydov, Sergej. The Gift: Nabokovs Aesthetic Exorcism of Chernyshevski. Canadian-American Slavic Studies 19.3 (1985): 35774. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Flaubert, Gustave. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert. Vols. 1 and 2, 18301880. Ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller. London: Picador, 2001. Foster, John Burt, Jr. Nabokovs Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Fromberg, Susan. The Unwritten Chapters of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Modern Fiction Studies 13.4 (196768): 42742. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. . The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Joyce, James. Ulysses. The 1922 Text. Ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Lemaitre, Georges. Maurois: The Writer and His Work. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968. Maurois, Andr. Aspects of Biography. Trans. S.C. Roberts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1929. Nabokov, Vladimir. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 19401971. Revised and expanded edition. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. Berkeley: U of California P: 2001. . The Gift. Trans. Michael Scammel, with the collaboration of the author. 1963. New York: Vintage, 1991. . Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980. . Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable. Nouvelle Revue Franaise 282, Vol. 48 (1937): 36278. . Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York Review of Books, 31 Mar 1988: 3842.

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