| Through a study of Nabokov's "public prose" and his fiction, I examine his complex relationship to his readers, critics, and reviewers. My goal is to contribute to our understanding of Nabokov's frequent interposing of his authority as both a writer and a reader ("I write for myself in multiplicate" (SO 114)) between his works and their readers. That authority has its genesis in Nabokov's experience of writing for a small and quarrelsome group of artists and critics in exile and manifests itself in his combative stance towards his potential mis-readers and his insistently affirmative view of life.; I start by outlining in Chapter One the components of Nabokov's authority gathered from his criticism in Russian and English, his autobiographies, lectures, letters, interviews, and prefaces. In Chapter Two I investigate the historical circumstances of the genesis of Nabokov's aesthetics and discuss Nabokov's first short fictional responses to his actually and potentially hostile readers. In the next three chapters I isolate three crucial aspects of the relationship between Nabokov and his readers: the ethical, encoded in Nabokov's view of fiction as ethical conceptualization; the rhetorical, evident in Nabokov's use of a technique he calls "optical metamorphosis" and his dialogical presence within monologues by Nabokovian (The Gift) and decidedly un-Nabokovian narrators (Pnin and Lolita); and the historical, amassed from the reactions of emigre, Western and Soviet critics to Nabokov's tone, theories and techniques. Chapter Six serves as the conclusion of my discussion and evaluates Nabokov's theories and reading strategies.; What I offer in this study is a contribution toward a more complete picture of Nabokov as an artist, thinker, and man who treats life with a religious seriousness. Such a contribution also presents a timely challenge to some widely held beliefs about Nabokov's use of, and absorption in artifice. |
