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

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in the solution it offers.
Cincinnatus has an intuitive knowledge that there
is more behind things than the ordinary mind can grasp
und put into words. He knows intuitively that the
world he lives in is no more than a shabby reproduc-
tion, "a clumsy copy" (IB, 84) of some wonderful orig-
inal that exists somewhere and for which he longs: a
realm of "stars" and "thoughts and sadness" (IB, 22),
where "time takes shape according to one's pleasure,
like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such
a way that two designs will meet" (IB, 85), where "the
gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding", where
"everything strikes one by its bewitching evidence,
by the simplicity of good", where "the freaks that are
tortured here walk unmolested" (IB, 85). That is real-
ity for Cincinnatus, not this "so-called world" (IB, 62),
in which he finds himself only "through an error"
(IB, 82).
Cincinnatus had knowledge of. all this even as a
child, perhaps an even better knowledge than now, for
that place, where the beautiful originals of this world
are, is the "native realm" of his soul (IB, 84). The
mind and soul of the child was nearer its native realm,
thus nearer reality, than the mind of the adult who
has been worn down by "continual uneasiness, conceal-
ment of my knowledge, pretence, fear" (I, 86).
His dreams, however, bring him a knowledge of that
world that can be said to equal the child's:
... ever since my childhood I have had
dreams... In my dreams the world was ennobled,
spiritualized; people whom in