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

-
210
-
THEDEFENCE
R. H. W. Dillard, discussing Nabokov's novels,
discovers in them close affinities to Russian litera-
ture. One of its characteristics is, he says, that
its
world
is
... one in which a coincidence is a
controlled event and in which the creative
freedom of man is involved in the
discovery of the pattern of his destiny
rather than in forming the future himself
out of a chaos of possibilities.
In various ways a number of Nabokov's novels
illustrate the points Dillard makes about Russian
literature. The early novel The Defence, and two novels
which Nabokov wrote when he had long begun to consider
himself an American writer: Pale Fire and Transparent
Things, seem to continue the Russian tradition.
Nabokov makes the "discovery of the pattern" part of
his quest for "true reality". People do not normally
see more than the "average reality", or even only the
"thin veneer of immediate reality", of their lives:
what they see appears to them chaotic. The events
and incidents of their lives do not seem to them to
be in any way logically connected but seem to follow
each other haphazardly and without any recognizable
design or purpose.
None of the novels quoted, however, leaves any
doubt about the fact that "a coincidence
a con-
`is
trolled event". Behind the seemingly chaotic surface
and "average reality" another (true) reality is re-
vealed. In it each event and incident can be seen to
have its function and purpose, and in it even the