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

-
166
-
his brother's personal life and possibly an insight
into his emotions, namely a bundle of letters, he
does something quite unheard of: he burns them because
this is what Sebastian has determined should.
be done. Soon after destroying this clue, he indifferently
includes two others in his collection of
insignificant details: the two pictures on the wall,
which he regards with complete incomprehension: "The
taste of their juxtaposition seemed to me questionable"
(38), and the collection of books set apart
on one
shelf.
Through some unobtrusive touches of parody this
instance of V's investigation illustrates from the
beginning the limitations of this particular method
of biographical research. It is constantly in danger
of degenerating into a more or less automatic and
indiscriminate accumulation of facts. V takes with
him some meagre factual knowledge about the writer
Sebastian Knight, but hardly anything from which it
would be possible to draw any conclusion about the
real person, and ironically he gets those two clues
which might possibly tell him something about his
brother's mind mixed up with a lot of insignificant
details.
Ironically, too, instead of filling in a gap in
his knowledge of Sebastian, his visit tothe flat
has created new and wider ones and has put new ques-
tions: who is the woman that wrote to Sebastian in
Russian, and what was their relation? And it has put
V in the absurd situation of having to find out with