Vladimir Nabokov

Butterflies and mid-points

By William Dane, 22 October, 2018

Are there any existing articles that talk about the thematic importance of mid-points, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The Gift, and the structure of the novels themselves? (I haven't found anything yet...)

Looking at a list of the novels in chronological order, The Gift is like the body of a butterfly, the symmetrical wings of the other eight Russian novels on one side, the eight English novels on the other.

Then opening the lids onto that butterfly body, there are The Gift's five chapters, with chapter three of course at a mid-point chapter-wise, and somewhere around pages 178-179 (in the Vintage paperback) at the page level, if I've calculated correctly. A few pages past that, at the bottom of page 183, we find Zina responding to Fyodor:

"'For five reasons,' she said. "In the first place because I'm not a German girl, in the second place because only last Wednesday I broke up with my fiance, in the third place it would be--well, pointless...'" The midpoint of Zina's argument is emptiness: wings without a body.

In the next book chronologically, RLSK, Sebastian's bookshelf has an odd number of books (15), with positions 1 and 15 by Shakespeare (Hamlet and Lear), with other connections between the symmetrical pairs as we progress toward the mid-point: The Invisible Man--perhaps emblematic of V's search for his brother's, at that point, still largely-invisible identity. (And Sebastian's five-book oeuvre is mid-pointed by The Funny Mountain.)

Getting back to the oeuvre, physically, the mid-point seems to vanish: if you stack the English and Russian novels in two piles, they at an anecdotal glance are the same height--although my collection is a bit of a publisher hodgepodge dominated by Vintage, with longish third-party introductions in some, so I can't say for sure without counting pages. Has anyone done that (tallied Russian vis English pages)?