New Beginnings

Abstract

Although it constitutes a fresh start in a new language for the pre-eminent Russian novelist of the emigration, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight marks a continuity in other ways. Fluent in English from birth by virtue of a series of English nannies and an anglophile family, Nabokov had already translated two of his Russian novels by 1938 when he set about writing Sebastian Knight. That this particular novel, in English or Russian, should appear at precisely this stage of Nabokov’s career is significant. Never had his family situation been more precarious, his prospects less clear, the danger posed by the political situation in Europe more obvious. And the result? Three books written in the second half of the 1930s that do a splendid job of ignoring what Auden described as a ‘low dishonest decade’.1 In Priglashenie na kazn’, Nabokov spun a dazzling fantasy about someone escaping a death sentence by refusing to believe in the reality of executioners; in Dar, he turned back the clock more than a decade and paid tribute to his literary heritage by telling the story of a young poet in exile, full of the romance of life in 1920s Berlin. Now, in this new venture, he lays bare the devices of his fiction, making the novel in one important sense a book about modes of composition. Nabokov’s aesthetic response to being without a secure income or future, in a Europe that was being transformed before his eyes, was to transform it himself. But the novels under investigation in this chapter also speak to the upheavals, both personal and political, that he was subject to during these years. Questions about authorship, the slip- periness of selfhood, the transvaluation of loss, the risks of sympathetic identification - these combine to make Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister particularly important texts in Nabokov’s development as a writer.KeywordsFictional CharacterRussian LiteratureDetective StoryTrain JourneyAuthorial VoiceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.