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

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intimately interwoven with his (and somebody else's)
fiction that it is impossible to disentangle the two
and to find the true Vadim. Also, towards the end,
Vadim himself undercuts the expectation of succeeding
in any such attempt. No matter what one does, his
"reality" and identity will remain hidden. About the
most intimate part of his life, and perhaps the most
precious, his relation to his last love, whose name
one does not even learn, he refuses to talk and no
reader will be able to find out about it:
Reality would be only ad. ulterated if
'I now started to narrate what you know,
what I know, what nobody else knows,
what shall never, never be ferreted out
by a matter-of-fact, father-of-muck,
mucking biograffitist. And how did your
affair develop, Mr. Blong? Shut up,
Ham Godman! And when did you decide to
leave together for Europe? Damn you, Ham!
See under Real, my first novel in
English, thirty-five years ago! (226)
The reference to See under Real (The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight) and Ham Godman (Mr Goodman in that
novel) is telling, and so is the hint that "'reality'
is the keyword here" (226), for in that novel, and partly
through Mr Goodman, the absurdity of any attempt to
dig up the "real" identity of an author from his work
has been illustrated.
What Vadim puts in somewhat rude terms when speak-
ing of himself, can in an even higher degree be ap-
plied to Nabokov. "... I cannot sympathize with anybody
wanting to know me"9, he has once said, and, in fact,
he successfully prevents his readers from "really"
knowing him. Of course, there are in his novels no
end of autobiographical details. Mary and Glory, for