''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

-
94 -
adding to its reality, it also detracts from it, for
it can be suspected of having been invented.
The intricacies are so tight as hardly to allow of
a solution. One answer to the riddle might be that
Pnin, in a rather round-about fashion, is relating
the story of his own life, exposing and correcting
the faulty images that exist of him in the minds: of
others .
One can also approximate to a conclusion if
one remembers and accepts Nabokov's direct and indirect
statements about art and reality. The narrator is an
artist, like other Nabokov characters: Luzhin, Shade
and Kinbote, Sebastian Knight and Mr. R., and like
Nabokov-himself. Therefore, when writing Pnin's bi-
ography, he does not write a. straightforward _factual
account of Pnin's life but shapes his work artistically.
Kinbote speaks for all of Nabokov's artists when
he says that "'reality' is neither the subject nor
the object of true art. "42 This certainly does not
mean that art has nothing at all to do with factual
reality; what it means is that art does not aim at
describing and reproducing factual reality slavishly,
and to this the narrator of Pnin subscribes. Apart
from his rather obvious departures from reality, he
betrays what liberty he feels he can take with it
by his somewhat less obvious unconcern with real dates:
even though the 15th February 1955 was,. a Tuesday
(187,188) the 15th February 1953 was not, although
the author insists in a rather round about fashion that
it was (67,75).
Instead, then, of taking down facts and instead of