Abstract
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899–1977), a Russian-born American writer, is one of the most gifted exilic writers of the twentieth century. His first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which inherits certain aesthetic motifs of his Russian works, such as the artist in exile, the motif of the double, and the theme of "the other world", has attracted the academic circle and received extreme views spreading between the good and the bad. But the core question in the whole of Nabokov scholarship is the ambiguous identities of the novel's two heroes, Sebastian and V. who are half-brothers. It is the identity puzzle that makes this novel more and more popular in Nabokov criticism. This essay attempts to review past reviews concerning this problem and analyze the four interpretations occasioned by "the identity puzzle" in Nabokov criticism.
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