Vladimir Nabokov

Glynn provides a new reading of Vladimir Nabokov s work by seeking to challenge the notion that he was a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality. Glynn argues that Nabokov s epistemology was in fact anti-Symbolist and that this aligned him with both Bergsonism and Russian Formalism, which intellectual systems were themselves hostile to a Symbolist epistemology. Symbolism may be seen to devalue material reality by presenting it as a mere adumbration of a higher realm. Nabokov, however, valued the immediate material world and was creatively engaged by the tendency of the deluded mind to efface that reality.

"This is a striking and original book. Glynn attacks the trend in criticism of Nabokov that reads his work as a Symbolist and instead suggests that a large part of the novelist s work is founded on a dynamic interaction with the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Henri Bergson. This study explores how Nabokov s project has been transformed by the philosophy of Shklovsky and Bergson into a fictional universe which is at once playful and serious, experimental yet rooted in the everyday, both engaged and moral, a convincing answer to the demeaning arguments that the writer is nothing more than a pure stylist." - Robert Lawson-Peebles, University of Exeter

Autorentext
MICHAEL GLYNN is Head of the English Department at the City College Plymouth, UK

Inhalt
Nabokov as Anti Symbolist Nabokov and Russian Formalism Nabokov and Bergson Pale Fire Lolita Despair Deluded Worlds: King, Queen, Knave, Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend Sinister Afterword