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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 Knightand the Modernist Impasse

The question of how to locate Nabokov in relation to Modernist lit-erary 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 assuccessfully 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 (Post-

modernism 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 Nabo-

kovs much-quoted list of greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century


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68 Nabokov Studies

prose is made up of four novels written within twelve years of eachother 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 thefragments 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

embracingcinemaandgenre-fiction,asthe allureof fashionable, sexu-

ally available women, as the socio-literary criticism that insists on be-

laboring Sebastians status as the product and victim of our time

(52), and ultimately, as the writers own mortality as he progresses in-

exorably towards death. As we will see, these aspects of modernity do

not impede Sebastian Knight as a novel, but are assimilated into itsnarrative structure in a synthesis that attempts to resuscitate the auto-

nomous, 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 pro-

ductive 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. Mygreatest 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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RLSKand the Modernist Impasse 69

produced, and then reworked, his masterpiece, Petersburg, between1913 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 Opin-

ions 71). That Nabokov should describe it as formless is particularly

significant, for Finnegans Wake, thought by some to be not only theapex 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 Realismwas officially espoused. A greater anathema to Nabokovs own aesthetic

can hardly be imaginedan insistence not only on the positive presen-

tation of a heroic proletariat, but also a perspective on formal experi-

mentalism 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 Tol-

stoy 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 Rus-sian 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 him-

self and Joyce, Strong Opinions 8687.


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70 Nabokov Studies

murdered in 1921) were Isaak Babel, one of the few Soviet prose-writersNabokov 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. Mandel-

shtam was for Nabokov emblematic of the disastrous interference of

historical forces with art, and later provoked one of the very few articu-

lations 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 Modern-

ism and the succession of a polarized literary culture that Nabokov

detested. A series of economic and political crises had left a great num-

ber of intellectuals with the conviction that a writer cannot, and should

not, be apolitical. Very little can be said with certainty about Nabokovs

viewsonBritishwritersofthethirties.Itcanbesafelyassumed,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 recommen-

dation ofLa condition humaine. Among other things, Malraux was labeled a


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who skirted political themes only to engage vigorously with religiousand 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. Al-

though 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 rum-

blings and starkness (which is not starkness at all but skele-

tonized 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)

Nabokovwasawriterwithakeensenseofinnovation,whocontinued

to read contemporary fiction throughout his life. His perspective on

literary culture in his three languagesEnglish, French, and Russian

attheendofthe1930scanonlyhavebeenbleak.Theageofautonomous

experimental Modernism seemed to have passed with Ulysses andA larecherche 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, Nabo-

kovs favorites (and friends), Khodasevich and Bunin, had fallen silent,

the former dying in 1939. One of the most promising of the next gen-

eration, 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 additionthird rate writer and one solid mass of clichs (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya

202, 203).


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72 Nabokov Studies

to belated romanticism Faulkner and Malraux also practice staleromanticism [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, SebastiansCambridge 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 novelthat, 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 par-

ticular importance on Flauberts novel. Indeed, Flaubert is central to

Sebastians very identity, especially with regard to time, history, and6. 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 thatrare 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 Flau-

bert famously placed himself and watched the rising tide of shit: Sebas-

tiansfirstbiographer,Goodman,remarksthathis ivorytowercannot

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 pro-nouncement 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.Ihavefinishedbuildingaworld,andthisismySabbathrest(75).

This hyperbolic treatment of Flauberts presence in Sebastian is typi-

cal of Nabokovs method as he designs his ridiculous authorial carica-

ture. 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 mo-

ment or the society that surrounds him:

Newspaper headlines, political theories, fashionable ideas meant

to him no more than the loquacious printed notice (in three lan-

guages, 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 ofMadame Bovarys composition, with which Nabo-

kov was well familiar. These pieces bristle with contempt for ideas ofmodernity 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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74 Nabokov Studies

current literary fashion and position himself among the Parisian artisticsets: 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 re-

fraction of Flaubert, there is also a strong element of Nabokovs ownattitudes, 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 renais-

sance, 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 inten-

tional. What is certain, however, is that Nabokov endowed his creation

with the same legacy of aesthetic autonomy that he himself had inher-ited 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 narra-

tor finally realizes that the true mechanism by which time is recovered

is through involuntary memory, through accident rather than con-

scious 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 describesas 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 fromthat 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 re-

move them from the contingencies (the accidents) of time, and

links them together by means of timeless words. (Lectures on Lit-

erature 211)

Nabokov evidently feels it necessary to clarify a few points for his stu-

dents 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 book-

shelf. 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 inter-

related 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 al-

thoughit seemsunlikelythatSebastianascharacterwouldconsciously

copy Proust, yet it is nevertheless true that as Nabokovian creation,


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76 Nabokov Studies

and as composite Modernist novelist, he (subconsciously) does copyProust, 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 ex-

pansion 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 andspace were to him measures of the same eternity (56). In the light of

these evocations, Sebastians novel Lost Propertycan 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 peram-

bulations, 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 intan-

gible steps across ghostly lawns and through dancing halls [RLSK58]) 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 up-turned faces from the top of the branch (Proust, Swanns Way180). 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 poorhealth, 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 ele-

ments 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

thatNabokovparticularlyadmired.9Sebastiansillhealthbeginstoaffecthim midway through the novel, as he is diagnosed with heart problems,

and from that point on, death becomes one of his main themes, espe-

cially 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 ofSebastian Knight itself, in which the subjectlike Proust,

neuralgic, oversensitive, and awkwardis already dead at the start, the

onlytaskremaining,therecoveryofthatlife.Itshouldnot besurprising,

therefore, that Sebastian in his final year is described in scenarios un-

mistakably 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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78 Nabokov Studies

The contrast between Sebastians slow, painful demise and his aestheticdefiance 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

ofSebastian Knights composition. It is perhaps because of Nabokovs

proximity to, and friendship with Joyce, that Modernisms most notori-

ous parodistremainshoveringunnamedaboutthefringesofSebastians

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 legiti-mately 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.

IfLostPropertyowesmuchtoProustsAlarecherche,thenSebastians

secondnovel,Success, bearssignificant comparisonto Joycesown sec-

ond novel,Ulysses.Nabokov, on theevidencepresentedin Lectureson

Literature, read Ulysses chiefly in terms of the synchronization device

he hadderivedfromFlaubert.He evengoesso far asto claimthatthe

wholeofUlysses,as weshallgraduallyrealize,is adeliberatepatternof

recurrentthemesandsynchronizationoftrivialevents(289).Inaspec-tacular simplification he writes, This is the main theme: Bloom and

Fate(288).ReadingVs descriptionofSuccess, we finda 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 inthe Eumaeus chapter ofUlysses: Mr Bloom hit on an expedient by sug-

gesting , 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 drink-

ables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral (569). See also Foster 167.


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80 Nabokov Studies

NabokovalsoregardedJoyceasa master ofparody,whichheidenti-fies 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 asGerty Macdowells ladies-magazine prose, then we once again reposi-

tion 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,

paintedand repainted,continuing tobe acceptedby lazymindsserenely

unaware of the fraud (76).

Nabokov uses the same metaphor of death and decay in his discus-

sion of clich in Nausicaa:

When we say clich, stereotype, trite pseudoelegant phrase, and soon, 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 workKhod konia (The Knights Move [1923]), in which artistic

legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew. Thisknights 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 synchro-

nization 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, Workin Progress, at the time he wrote Sebastian Knightcannot be certain,

although it seems probable that he had at least an idea of its experimen-

tal 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 Finne-

gans 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 ofFinnegans Wake. At a dinner early in 1939, just after Sebastian

Knightwas finished, Joyce handed Nabokov a copy of Haveth Childers Every-

where, 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 hadbeen 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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82 Nabokov Studies

mythical structure (or phony folklore) provides the unifying princi-ple 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). Sug-

gesting Finnegans Wake (and also possiblyA la recherche), nearly all

the reviews gave to understand that the book was a little too long, andthat many passages were obscure and obscurely aggravating (15253).

AlthoughitsVsfavorite,The DoubtfulAsphodelemergesfromSebas-

tian 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 inno-

vation 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

InMr.Goodmansbiography,TheTragedyofSebastianKnight,thesense

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 ex-citement (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


18/32


Park; the glories of standardization; the cult of machinery; the de-gradation 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,

Goodmanisalargelyunsympatheticcharacter,aself-interestedmanipu-

lator. 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 con-

tradict not only Sebastians view of himself, but also Nabokovs own

professed view on the relationship between what he would call first-

rate 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 refer-

ence 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 re-

call the writers flirtation with Futurism in his youth. The vapid lewd-

ness of the foxtrot reflects how Sebastian is lured into betraying Claire

by a vulgar girl whose idea of life involves dancing the shimmy or

whateverit

was

called

(121).

In

particular,

the

glaring

picture

palacesare 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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84 Nabokov Studies

inextricably linked to the increased social liberty enjoyed by youngmiddle 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 produc-

tion 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 de-

rived 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 daughterof modernity, a figure associated not only with postwar sexual liber-

tinism 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 sugges-

tion 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

allureofavulgar,fashionable, cruel,sexualizedmistressbecomeblurred

for Sebastian, and collaborate in bringing about a submission to the

contemporary.

Barbara Wyllies study of Nabokovs relationship to the cinematicmedium, 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 charac-

ters 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 artist-

figures who is attracted to the medium, and this novel thereby disclosesthe 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


20/32


than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors and having noth-ing to do with the essential drama (15), he soon contradicts this dis-

missal of the filmic as he lapses into cinematic method to evoke their

childhood home: let the beautiful olivaceous house on the Neva em-

bankment 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 ofSo -

gliadatai (The Eye, 1930), in which, as Wyllie demonstrates (1828),

cinematic narrative techniques are used as a tool for deception by anunreliable, 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 in-

teresting ways. The description of her flat, for example, containing a

copy of Dr. Axel Munthes San Michele, the popular memoirs of a hyp-

notist 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 outof a decadent paradigm. In this she embodies one of the crucial para-

doxes 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 anoddallusiontoindustrializationhintsattherealityofmodernity

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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86 Nabokov Studies

dustiness; when later I learned that it had only been built somethirty-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 through-

out 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 at-

tendant mortality. The working manuscript that V discovers in his flat

tells of a man so afraid of missing tomorrows that he buys eight alarm

clockstoensurehisawakening.ThisfigureisrepresentativeofSebastian

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 Sebas-

tian, 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 thatonly serves to increase awareness of its passing. What is particularly

interesting about this sequence is that Vs agonizing, personal experi-

ence 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 stagesof the novel.


22/32


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 experi-

mentalism 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

anotherdimensionthe troubledmodernityof1930sWesternEurope.

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 odderside 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 mostfully explored the similarities between the events of Vs quest and Sebastians

novels are: Charles Nicol, The Mirrors of Sebastian Knight; Shlomith Rim-

mon, Problems of Voice in Nabokovs The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; and

Vladimir Alexandrov,Nabokovs Otherworld13759.


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88 Nabokov Studies

clichs of contemporary romantic fiction are deployed as part of hisparodic 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 tran-

scendence 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 detectiveis 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 indi-

cation that is equally well applied to Sebastian himself, as composed by

Nabokov. The aesthetics ofThe Prizmatic Bezel, which authorize a de-

ployment of pastiche of various writers and genres in order to super-

sede 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

stilltoberecognized,onegenrestandsout asthekeystoneofNabokovs

strategythat of the literary biography. Not only does this genre servethe purpose of mastering contemporary forms and therefore subordi-

nating 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.

ThegenreofliterarybiographywasmuchonNabokovsmindduring

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 publica-

tion ofThe 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 possibilitiesof 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 bio-

graphieromance:

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 Giftas 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 Sebastianbeen 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 charac-

ter 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.HencethroughoutthenovelVcontinuallyreferstoSebastians

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 anoblique allusion to Byrons dream, which Nabokov had so objected to

being lifted from its natural place in a poem and given to thebiographi-

cal subject. As V imaginatively recreates Sebastians adolescent love in a


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90 Nabokov Studies

series of cinematic scenes, he self-consciously employs Byrons ownverse 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 deByron 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 Knighthe 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 evidenceof 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 suc-

ceeding 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.

Aspec ts ofBiographydemonstrates theextentto whichMauroisac-

knowledged the existence of a revolution in biographical writing that

he tracesto Britishfiguressuchas LyttonStrachey,VirginiaWoolf, andHaroldNicolson,althoughhealsoacknowledgesProustandHenriBerg-

sonasinfluencing histheory. In his openingchapter,ModernBiogra-

phy,hepositsthequestionIstheresuchathingasmodernbiography?

beforegoingon to inquire,oughtbiographyto be an artor a science?

Can it,likethe novel,be a meansofexpressionorameansofescapefor

theauthoraswellasforthereader?(5).Maurois,inrepresentingthekey

issuesfacingthe contemporarybiographer,presentsa set ofconcerns

similarto thoseaddressedbyNabokovin SebastianKnight,namelythe

possibilityofconvergencebetweenthe noveland the biography.Infact,

the two writersalsocometoreachsimilarconclusionsastothe impossi-

bilityof conventionalbiographysdoingjusticeto itssubject.Nabokov,

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


26/32


inPushkin,ortheRealandthePlausiblewrites:

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 nov-

elist 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 inferi-ority 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

innerlifeandinnerknowledge,hisquesttofollowtheharmony,

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 Sebas-

tian comes to be perceived as Nabokovs novel, The Real Life of Sebas-tian Knight, for while Maurois repeatedly flirts with the boundaries

between the novel and biography, Nabokovs novel enacts the transfor-

mation of one into the other. V, after all, expresses several times his

desire to be permitted the freedoms of fiction, as when, after one par-

ticularly 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

becomesclearthatVsquesthasfinallybeencut loosefromtheconfines

17. RLSK82, 28, 113, 172. Compare Maurois, who refers also to the search

for the inner life that can be made apparent through the introduction ofrhythm and the recurrence, at more or less distant intervals, of the essential

motifs of the work (162, 6364). In Sebastian Knight, Vs pursuit of Sebas-

tians life uncovers a range of these recurring patterns and motifs, such as

violet/violette.


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92 Nabokov Studies

of biography, and that its events are shaped not by any conventionallyunderstood reality, but by the reality of Sebastians books, then Vs

wish hasbeenfulfilled. Mauroisownbiographer,GeorgesLemaitre,ex-

presses his subjects fundamental conception of biography as a living

integration of the emotions of two men (85). This assertion is sup-

ported byAspects 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 masterand parody the genre ofbiographie romance.

Despite these convergences between their arts, the recurrence of a

number of strategies across their work, it is finally an inversion of ob-

jectives 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

tangibleandaffectivereality.ThehistoryofSebastians life,itsgradualcrumbling in the face of modernity, is eventually effaced by his art,

which,asI haveshown,incorporatesthegenericfacesof thatmodernity

in its parodic style. Ultimately, it is Sebastians art that conditions and

determines the history of Vs quest for him, and facilitates their in-

tegration 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 pas-

sageoftimeseemsinclinedtore-evokethegesturesofagenius,imbuing

his imagined existence with the same tints and colors that the poetbestowed on his creations (40). This is perhaps the best summary we

have of howSebastian Knight functions aesthetically. The passage of

time here submits humbly to mimicry of poetic genius, transforming


28/32


the life of the poet into a pastiche of his works, precisely the maneuverNabokov effects in his novel. The shift of reality experienced during its

process, from that of a verifiable history into a fictional one corre-

sponding 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 ofSebastian Knight is that it chal-

lenges a view entrenched within Nabokov scholarship since Alexan-

drovs 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 trans-lation 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 ad-

vanced 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 inter-

penetration of souls (16). Alexandrovs later, more fully realized thesisreads the congruence between V and Sebastian as evidence of a fatidic

link,andtheghostlycoincidencesas demandinganoccultexplana-

tion, 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 Knightwithin 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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94 Nabokov Studies

toward this conjunction of personal and communal past) the burden ofnarrativelogic,thenervousscrabbling for solutions,beginstodissi-

pate. 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

ofthenovelitself,onethatoutlaststhatofitsowncharacters andevents,

which wander off stage as the curtain falls. Sebastians resurrection is in

theshapeofa newliteraryformthat,becauseit incorporates itshistori-

cal moment, survives it.

Conclusion

I feel it within me now, and it is what forces me to repeat some-thing 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 liter-

ary 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 lit-

erature is concerned, but the sense may also include the idea of entan-glement (in politics, or social concerns?). In the same paragraph, Nabo-

kov 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 Knightresponds 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.

Hegelianphilosophycameto no goodinourparts,lamentsNabo-kov 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 withNabokovs. Also latent in Nabokovs remark is the shadow of successive

distortions of Hegelian historicism leading through Marx to the estab-

lishment 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

Hegelstriadicseries(sopopularinold Russia)(211).Inthatinstance,

Hegels dialectic is understood in the temporal sense, as Russias left-

Hegelians thought of it, but with the Nabokovian insistence upon time

as personal and subjective rather than historical and national. In Sebas-tian 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 in-

tact 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 bySebastian Knight. In fact, the writerdem-

onstrates his acute sensitivity of his own position in relation to both theliteraryhistoryandsocialmodernity,aposition,moreover,thattoretain

stability must paradoxically move with its times.

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