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

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simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally,
with my eyes closed and my body
immobile, I am unable to switch from
one direction to the other. Some swivel
cell in my brain does not work (41).
This is explained by his last companion as quite a
simple failure, common to all, to come to terms with
the impossibility to stop or reverse time:
"His mistake, " she continued, "his
morbid mistake is quite simple. He has
confused direction and duration. He
speaks of spac e but he means time.
Why... is it so extraordinary that he
cannot imagine himself turning on his
heel? Nobody c an imagine in physical
terms the act of reversing the order
of time. Time is not reversible" (252).
This is in its turn directly related to the problem
of death, treated in so many of the earlier novels.
It is a problem that haunts Nabokov and that haunts
his characters, and only some of them (all of them
artists) are allowed to cope with it and to come to
terms with it. The impossibility to reverse time means
that one is at any moment and helplessly approaching
death, that "madness" that Vadim feels in him even
"as a child of seven or eight" (8), that "madness"
that he feels "had been lying in'wait for me behind
this or that alder or boulder since infancy" (240).
Again as with other Nabokov characters (Mr. R. for
example), it is when he actually faces death during
some severe illness, that Vadim finds some comfort
and gains some insights which free him from his des-
pair and mitigate the madness and senselessness of
death:
I feel that during
...
three weeks of
general paresis (if that is what it