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

-3-
passage can only be taken as a wild parody of such a
view.
His principles become an even more integral part
of his work in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
where Mr Goodman embodies all those theories in connection
with art which Nabokov abhors. Mr Goodman
who criticizes Sebastian because he refused to take
any interest in general ideas and contemporary questions
and who holds the view that at difficult moments
"a perplexed humanity eagerly turns to its writers and
thinkers, and demands of them attention to, if not the
cure of, its woes and wounds"9, and who demands that
a writer should at such moments transform his ivory
tower into a lighthouse or a broadcasting station10,
is clearly one of those "middlebrow[s] or... upper
Philistine[s]
[who]
cannot get rid of the furtive feel-
ing that a book, to be great, must deal in great
ideas. " 11
The most extensive and complex, even though indirect
statement of Nabokov's views is to be found in
Chapter IV of The Gift12, although the chapter should
not be read as an abstract treatise on the theory of
literature but as an integral part of the novel.
The chapter contains a biography of the nineteenth
century Russian critic and novelist N. G. Chernyshevskii.
When the novel was published in serialized form in the
Paris emigre literary journal Sovremennye Zapiski,
this chapter was turned down, and it was only fifteen
years later, in 1952, that the novel was published as
13
a complete book. The omission, made with Nabokov's