As a follow-up to the posting on 31 July of John DeMoss’s
article on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
I should like to draw the attention of list members to my recently-completed
PhD thesis, “Vladimir Nabokov, 1938: The Artistic Response to Tyranny.”
My thesis contains a comprehensive new reading of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, arguing the existence of
a covert subtext based on themes of totalitarian tyranny, espionage, and
revenge. My contention is that The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight is triadic or spiral in structure,
presenting an innocuous overt or thetical level which gives way to a covert or
antithetical level of horrors, before drawing the reader towards an “absolute
solution” or synthesis of artistic delight, as in Nabokov’s chess
problem in Speak, Memory.
The thesis is held at the