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

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stepmother).
...
I knew he obtained good marks at school,
read an astonishing number of books, was
clean in his habits, insisted on taking a
cold bath every morning although his lungs
were none too strong -I
knew all this and
more, but he himself escaped me... " (29).
She tells him a few facts about the first marriage
of Sebastian's father, about a short meeting of
nine-year-old Sebastian and his mother in an hotel,
and about his father's death. She has something to
say about Sebastian's upbringing and about Sebastian's
adventure with the poet Alexis Pan and his wife.
Apart from this she has always felt "that I never
really knew Sebastian" and that he would always re-
main "an enigma" (29).
Undismayed, and urged by his love for his brother,
V decides that information can surely be obtained
from others, particularly from those persons who met
Sebastian after he left for England and who lived with
him, and he sets out to find it, making "exhaustive
research, fairness and wisdom" (14) the three con-
ditions under which alone his kind of quest can lead
to correct results. Without any warning he involves
the reader in his research and writes not the ex-
pected biography of Sebastian, but, much in the man-
ner of A. J. A. Symons12, "A Quest for Sebastian", an
account of his investigations, interspersed with
bits of information about Sebastian as he comes across
it.
In his quest he follows all the well-established
methods of biographical research, and as he conscien-