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

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soaked in reality, saturated with sun
flecks, might be an unconscious imitation
of another's unearthly art (234).
Certainly it is Nabokov who - at least to a certain
extent - serves as a model for Vadim. The quasi-identity
with Nabokov is established when the narrator
muses about his name. He cannot remember his family
name, except that "I felt it began with an N,... "
(248). Is it "Nabedrin", or "Nablidze", or "Naborcroft"?
(249) Why does somebody call him "McNab"? (7) His
Christian name, however, is clearly established:
Vladimir Vladimirovich, "Vadim Vadimovich" for short,
since "in rapid Russian speech longish name-and-patro-
nymic combinations undergo familiar slurrings" (249).
He could not have put it any better: his life is
the "non-identical twin", a "parody" of Nabokov's,
who, of course, inhabits "another earth", since his
narrator lives in the world of fiction. The word
"twin" in the comparison of Vadim's and Nabokov's lives
can be accounted for by such obvious parallels as
that they are both exiles, study at Cambridge, publish
in a Paris emigre magazine, teach at Cornell
("Quirn"2), and share memories of a house on Gertsen
Street (Hertzen Street, formerly Morskaya, "in St.
Petersburg,
now Leningrad").
3
They even have the same views on various subjects.
They both have a predilection for Wells, but do not
4.
care for "his sociological stuff" (22); Vadim reveals
a very Nabokovian attitude when he talks of his "path-
ological indifference to politics, major ideas in