If one can generalize as far as to say that fiction falls into the two broad categories of realism and romance, Nabokov's work belongs in the latter category. The reader of today is likely to find the romance of Nabokov's art strangely archaic and old-fashioned. In some ways he seems to have stronger affinities with the nineteenth century than with the twentieth. This affinity is not simply an accident of age and environment … but a matter of temperament and conscious choice. (p. 5)

[Nabokov shows an] affinity with the romantic writers of Russian literature…. Nabokov has claimed that there is nothing unusual in his interest in Pushkin, since—as he has said—Pushkin is to Russian literature what Shakespeare is to English. Nevertheless, the connection is closer and more significant than Nabokov's demur suggests. After surveying the evidence for the influence of the older writer on Nabokov, [Clarence Brown] gave the question this pointed summation: "Pushkin is Nabokov's fate" [see CLC, Vol. 1]. Though extreme, the remark illuminates the center of Nabokov's art. What he achieves in his fiction is a compelling fusion of past and present, fancy and fact, poetry and prose, romance and his own special brand of realism.

Not only does Nabokov's work seem to have closer affinities with the literary traditions of the nineteenth century than with those of the twentieth, but his fiction often seems to have greater affinities with poetry, especially romantic poetry, than with the novel, as it is usually thought of. W. H. Auden's discussion of romanticism is helpful in understanding Nabokov's ties to that movement. (pp. 5-6)

Auden's description of the romantic poet [who held that man's most important faculty is consciousness itself] fits Nabokov with surprising exactness. First, the opening pages of Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory, are nothing less than a hymn of praise to the powers of human consciousness. Life, he says there, is a series of "extraordinary visions" between "the two black voids" of those mysterious periods before one's birth and after one's death. (pp. 6-7)

Second, since in Nabokov's view the creative process is a cycle of charging consciousness with highly particularized and personal impressions and then of discharging those impressions into words, he can be only tangentially interested in questions of morality and social realism. On many occasions, Nabokov has affirmed his total lack of interest in literature that aims at teaching a moral lesson. Probably the best-known such occasion is the passage in the postscript to Lolita in which he asserts that he is "neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction." In this connection, one should keep in mind the moral controversy surrounding the publication of Lolita. (p. 7)

As for the question of the need for realism in the novel, Nabokov has dismissed the idea of "everyday reality" as itself a fiction. Since for Nabokov individual perception constitutes reality, there are as many realities as individuals. Therefore art cannot be a reflection of a common reality. [Though his works are remarkably varied], the voice speaking in these many genres is recognizably the same. Nabokov's audacious style, which calls attention as much to itself as to what it is meant to convey, leaves its mark on all he writes. In other words, like Auden's romantic poet, Nabokov is always his own most important subject. (p. 8)

Uninterested in didacticism or in realism, Nabokov is committed only to the purity of aesthetic experience, to the joys of what he has called, again in the postscript to Lolita, "aesthetic bliss." His talent is to conjure up for his readers the kind of bliss he has experienced in his own life…. The pleasure in these moments of aesthetic bliss arises from the conscious savoring of details, of colors, textures, patterns, designs. (p. 9)

Nabokov's work is marked by two … strong propensities: the reluctance to judge and the passion to describe. In a man of his talent, the former makes him a great ironist; the latter makes him a great stylist. For the reader, these virtues also constitute his limitations. Because his works are formed of layers upon layers of irony …, they do not make for easy reading. The quantity of irony means that the reader's willingness to suspend his judgment of characters and their actions is taxed to the limit. As soon as the reader thinks he has found the basis for judging a character or an action, that basis suddenly disappears in a typical Nabokovian flourish of ironic magic.

Nabokov has a decided preference for protagonists who are either geniuses or madmen, and sometimes both. His favorite characters are socially marginal types, and it is their very eccentricity … that makes them to his mind appropriate artistic subjects. (pp. 9-10)

[His characters are not happy in the conventional sense] because they possess a purely Nabokovian worthiness and happiness: their worthiness consists, as one might expect, in their powers of consciousness, and their happiness, in their moments of aesthetic bliss. This bliss is a state of ecstasy, which means in its original sense, ex-stasis, or standing outside of oneself….

The stress of subjectivity makes Nabokov and his characters (who, as a number of critics have pointed out, are all "little Nabokovs") sound like solipsists, like individuals completely wrapped up in their own mental worlds. It is as if they have no sense whatever of the objective existence of an outer reality. While this is true in part, it would be misleading to leave the matter there, for even they are aware that consciousness receives its impressions from an outer world. Though Auden's romantic poet may prefer the dream world to the world of waking reality, Nabokov does not; the perceptions he receives in the state of wakeful consciousness are what he prizes most. (p. 11)

The suffering of Nabokov's characters comes both from within and from without. Agnostics like their creator, sure of nothing but the steady flow of sensations, his characters are, in fact, desperately dependent on the external world. Through their passion for intensity they victimize themselves; and hence their suffering is in part self-created. Yet, at the same time, their suffering has a corresponding source in the external world. Not only is the world devilishly seductive and tantalizing, but also the impressions one receives from it seem at times to form themselves into significative patterns and designs…. As these patterns form and dissolve, so the hope quickens and dwindles, leaving the perceiver with nothing but memories. The humanity of Nabokov's characters is based on no philosophical, political, or religious system, on no creed or ideology, but simply on the dignity with which they confront this mirage of hope. (p. 12)

Nabokov's fiction is peopled by characters whose spiritual hungers make them highly vulnerable to illusions. This one quality unites his various protagonists, and the probing of their illusions constitutes his greatest theme. This preoccupation has important consequences for Nabokov's art. First, by means of such probing, he forces his fiction beyond the in some ways simpler modes of tragedy and comedy toward the more complex mode of irony. To be sure, the probing of illusions is also an integral part of both comedy and tragedy; but those modes move typically toward quite recognizable and solid resolutions. In each case illusion is exorcised by reality, the exorcism leading in one to a happy ending and in the other to a sad one.

There is a wealth of comic and tragic touches in Nabokov's fiction; but the controlling mode is irony, and irony has its own special requirements. For the ironist there is no ultimate and solid reality that is not itself subject to attack as an illusion. Hence, any work controlled by irony is necessarily robbed of that sense of finality that makes up a large share of the pleasure of comedy and tragedy. Nabokov's commitment to irony not only produces his famous inconclusive conclusions, but also constantly reminds us of the uncertainty of fate.

The desire to probe illusions has a notable effect on characterization, especially for Nabokov. To a writer of his sophisticated tastes, the testing of illusions can be genuinely interesting only if the major characters are strong. Nabokov usually measures the strength of his characters either by their ability to resist the illusions of others (even poor Lolita is strong in this sense) or by their ability to create illusions of their own (most of Nabokov's madmen have this power). Nabokov's favorite characters possess both kinds of strength. Though this does not make them proof against the antics of fate, it makes their struggle slightly more even and far more interesting. Nabokov's concern with this sort of strength leads him quite naturally to write about artists, geniuses, and the especially gifted, and seldom, if ever, about ordinary man, whose existence—in Nabokov's view—is merely hypothetical anyway. (pp. 42-3)

Beyond the autobiographical connections, one can observe a subtle but significant interplay of theme and method in [his first two English-language novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister]. While Sebastian Knight seems highly individual in theme and Bend Sinister highly political, the novels are in actuality odd inversions of each other and for that reason make interesting companion pieces. Sebastian Knight, presumably a biography written from a personal inner knowledge of the subject, collapses into a strange and unsatisfying impersonality. Bend Sinister, whose theme is presumably social and political in scope, creates a personal portrait far more concrete and compelling. Each in its own way—and with a different degree of success—is an examination of the lives of geniuses and of the illusions to which they are subject. (pp. 43-4)

Bend Sinister is Nabokov's first significant achievement as an English-language novelist. Its world is solid and tangible, and Adam Krug is one of the strongest of Nabokov's characters, including those in his Russian fiction. Because Krug and his world are so solid, however, the reader tends to do what Nabokov wants most for him to avoid, that is, make value judgments. To solve this problem, Nabokov closed the novel with a technical trick. In the last four paragraphs, he suddenly broke the fictional illusion of his work by switching from a description of Krug's final moments to a description of himself as a writer in his room working on the novel. The illusion is broken and Nabokov reminds the reader that art is, after all, a game and judgments are inappropriate…. (p. 61)

[What makes Lolita] something more than either a case study of sexual perversion or pornographic titillation is the truly shocking fact that Humbert Humbert is a genius who, through the power of his artistry, actually persuades the reader that his memoir is a love story. It is this accomplishment that makes the novel a surprising success from the perspective of Humbert Humbert's desires and intentions. From the perspective of Nabokov's and the reader's desires and intentions, Lolita fulfills the highest standards of artistic perfection in the organic fusion of its fable and its form. (p. 66)

Many of the dualities of Lolita are obvious: Humbert the man versus Humbert the artist, Humbert the man versus Humbert the beast, erotic and poetic fantasy versus prosaic reality. But the dualism is an ingrained quality of the style and structure of the novel as well.

In this play of dualities, the perspective afforded by the first-person point of view is by no means the least important device of contrast. Two Humberts are present on every page of Lolita: the Humbert who actually experiences the events narrated, always unaware of what will happen next, and the Humbert who has been through it all and writes his story in a wiser retrospect. (p. 76)

As if to illuminate the novel's complex thematic counterpoint in an explicitly structural way. Nabokov framed Humbert's story between a foreword by John Ray, a fictitious expert on "morbid states and perversions," and a postscript by Nabokov himself, an expert on "aesthetic bliss." Nabokov seems to have added the postscript merely to counteract the foreword (and the reading public's criticism), for Ray takes a moral and didactic view of the story and Nabokov, a purely aesthetic view.

Yet the relevance of this frame is much more complex, for both essays have an organic connection with the structure of the novel itself. The extrinsic duality of the foreword and postscript mirrors the intrinsic duality of the two parts of the novel proper. (p. 80)

Thus, Lolita becomes the consummate example of Nabokov's passion for symmetry, as the foreword balances the aestheticism that dominates Part One, while the postscript balances the moralism of Part Two. In all this brilliant juggling of contradictory values, Nabokov's genius has allowed both sides to win. At last, both the reader and Humbert have had their bliss, even if reality has overtaken them both once again. (p. 81)

Pnin is as finely constructed as Lolita and has a similarly pseudo-biographical thrust. Ostensibly the novel is an account of the life and times of Timofey Pnin, the bumbling but good-natured professor of Russian at Waindell College, located somewhere northwest of Albany, New York. Under this surface, however, Nabokov developed with a special twist his favorite complex of themes—life as a struggle with fate, the gamelike quality of the struggle, the function of the imagination in the game. In typical Nabokovian fashion, the complex of themes drives the novel toward a magic resolution, one less ghostly and evasive than that in Sebastian Knight and more elementally optimistic than that in Lolita. At the end of Pnin, the reader knows more certainly than in Sebastian Knight where he is and what has happened, and he may be more encouraged about life than he was after reading Lolita. Another touch of artistry makes Pnin a masterpiece: the warmth of Nabokov's treatment of his title character. Timofey Pnin is probably the most genuinely endearing figure in all of Nabokov's fiction.

The art of this work incorporates to the highest degree three of Nabokov's major talents. The first is the talent for condensed verbal portraiture. The picture of Pnin is economical, yet as full as life itself. The second is the talent for sustaining and then, after gradual preparation, finally integrating all the story's elements into a grand design. Pnin moves to a conclusion as surprising as that of Sebastian Knight, but a more realistic one. The reader is compelled to admire the control required for the novel's fateful resolution. The third talent is the ingenious handling of point of view. Again, as in Sebastian Knight, the narrator is not a transparent medium through whom the story is transmitted, but an actor in the story whose role turns out to be crucial. (p. 84)

If Pale Fire provides evidence for the novel's continued vitality, it does so in an ambiguous manner, not so much by serving as a model for future novels but by revealing the remarkable plasticity of the genre. It is an experimental work, one that defies fiction's conventions.

The novel is in the form of a carefully prepared and scholarly edition of a poem. It is, we are told, a labor of love, undertaken by an editor especially qualified for the job by his close intimacy with the poet and by the influence his friendship had on this, the poet's last and supposedly greatest work. (pp. 104-05)

All this is plausible enough, but the reader does not proceed far before discovering that the edition is something less than scholarly. The foreword is written in a nervously meandering style, marked by irrelevant interjections and obvious proofreading errors. The great haste and consequent carelessness are the products of the peculiar pressure under which Kinbote has labored. He, the reader gradually surmises, was never truly intimate with the poet; but in the few months they were neighbors and acquaintances, he dreamed up an elaborate fantasy about his own importance in Shade's life and in the poem Shade was working on when he died. (p. 105)

The poem is direct, coherent, and easily intelligible; yet to understand the novel of which the poem is quantitatively so small a part, the reader must put together the story Kinbote is trying to tell. That story is related in scattered, disjointed, achronological fashion, according to the peculiar associative patterns of Kinbote's mind. Not only are the connections he finds between his story and Shade's poem absurdly tenuous, but the story itself is so bizarre that it further knocks the reader off balance, if he has any left. (p. 106)

[Pale Fire is] essentially a twofold work made up of John Shade's poem and Charles Kinbote's personal narrative. The challenging task for the reader is to decide what true connection there is between the two parts of the novel.

The mere fact that the novel is structured on a duality (poem plus editorial apparatus) does not make it stand out in the Nabokov canon. One of the most prominent metaphors in Nabokov's work is that of the mirror. It includes conveniently both the idea of reflection (the doubling of an image) and that of distortion (the reversal of left and right). But Nabokov was not satisfied with this degree of metaphoric suggestiveness. He also took advantage of the increased complexity involved in placing two mirrors opposite each other. One mirror produces simple reflection and distortion, but two mirrors facing each other at a slight angle produce an infinite series of reflections and distortions. (p. 109)

[In] the testing of form, Pale Fire marks a recognizable turning point in Nabokov's career. Here he moved us out of the relatively more safe, if amusing, position between the parallel mirrors and shoved us through the looking glass with Alice. In Lolita the structural duality is latent, while in Pale Fire it is overt. In Lolita the reader is merely expected to follow Humbert Humbert as he plays the game with fate, as he pursues the clues fate has planted to the overall design and meaning of his life. But in Pale Fire, the reader himself must get directly involved in the game, for his active participation in making the story meaningful is required.

Stylist that he is, Nabokov has always produced poetic novels, full of metaphors and allusions whose patterns he hopes the reader will trace out. But with Pale Fire he exploded the former union of poetry and novel, turned the world of his fiction inside out, and emptied its disjointed contents on the table before us, so to speak—the poetry on one side and the narrative on the other. Upping the ante of his game, Nabokov left the integration of poem and narrative for the reader to manage as best he can, a task made especially teasing since Kinbote has already done such a zany job of it before the reader gets his chance to play. (pp. 110-11)

The characterization of Kinbote and Shade carries the tensions between art and life, imagination and reality that are Nabokov's primary themes. Should the reader allow himself to make the choice between Kinbote and Shade as principal character in Pale Fire, as he often feels himself urged to do? Has the very ordinariness of Shade's life made possible his art? Does the fact that Kinbote has lived a life as romantic as a poem mean that he cannot be himself an artist? Still, is there not art in everything Kinbote writes? Is it not, after all, conceivable that Shade has written the whole novel, impersonating a real or imagined madman who harrassed him while he was writing the poem and thus giving free play to his own less-than-ordinary side? Because one can give both affirmative and negative answers to all these questions, one is led to the conclusion that Nabokov was doing what Shade says in his poem the gods are doing—that is, "playing a game of worlds." The novel illustrates not only how reality is mirrored differently in the subjectivity of each person who views it, but how the further mirroring that results from the interplay of minds creates still different views of reality. (p. 121)

The demands on the reader's participation, enlarged so greatly by Pale Fire, are just as great in his two most recent English novels. It is for this reason that the critic Alfred Kazin has proclaimed that "Ada cannot be confidently explained in toto even after several readings," and that the experience of reading the book is best described as "travelling and floundering in the mind of that American genius, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov." The remark might well be extended to include Transparent Things. (p. 130)

Even if they are not his last novels, we can understand Ada and Transparent Things much better, I think, if we recognize that they are Nabokov's novels about last things. In spite of his frequently expressed anti-ideological bias, they have, in other words, a distinctly metaphysical and even eschatological flavor. Ada is Nabokov's fullest celebration of the powers of consciousness, and Transparent Things is his dramatization of the state of consciousness that lies beyond life.

The privateness of these novels makes them difficult for the uninitiated, but the lover of his earlier fiction will rejoice in them. These novels belong together in any discussion of Nabokov's work, not merely because they come together in point of time, but also because they represent a change in Nabokov's attitude toward his fictional material. After forty years of writing about characters bound and limited by chance, fate, and other villains, he wrote at last about freedom…. Nabokov seemed free at last to indulge in his favorite speculations, which are embodied in the myths he created in Ada and Transparent Things. There is a tentative optimism about these works, so that no matter what Nabokov may yet write, the comprise a moving coda to the harsher music of his earlier fiction.

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is an extraordinarily luxuriant piece of fiction…. (pp. 130-31)

Donald E. Morton, in his Vladimir Nabokov (copyright © 1974 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc.), Ungar, 1974, 164 p.