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

- 60 -
He says he calms down, but the tone in which he
later insists on his happiness betrays the despair
that has remained in him. One might conclude that
the source of his despair is not simply the loss of
Vanya but an awareness of the great loneliness to
which his theory condemns man and has condemned himself.
If his assumption about himself and about Vanya
is right, then people not only see and judge, hate
or attack "phantoms"; then they also talk and get attached
to, and fall in love with, not real people,
but persons of their own invention, "phantoms" as well.
Then all genuine contact and communication is impossi. -
ble. Feelings and emotions never reach the person on
whom they are centred because they are all based on
errors and illusions. Should an emotion become too
powerful and painful, one needs only remind oneself
of these facts.
In the last analysis, and this may well be the
profoundest cause of Smurov's despair, the conclusions
he has come to completely reduce life to irreality
and uncover its transiency. He has set out to try and
understand his existence, and has found that his and,
in fact, everybody's existence is only "a shimmer on
a screen. " He has found only reflections, images in
mirrors, which, though they may look like people and
appear lifelike, cannot be taken for real people and
are not life, but only a debased and distorted and
unreal version of it. His own real self, and Vanya's,
which he thought for a moment he had found behind her
reflection, escape him, and although he senses that