Nabokov and the Soul Searching.

Continuing re-reading my Nabokov I got to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first English novel Nabokov wrote. The plot is to discover the fatal woman the author lived with just before his death. The brother of Sebastian, the narrator, offers us his version of it all, and at some point he says this about the woman with whom Sebastian Knight had lived with for some six years:

Next morning was rainy again and she stayed in her room until lunch time, reading Donne, who for ever after remained to her associated with the pale gray light of that damp and hazy day and the whine of a child wanting to play in the corridor. And presently Sebastian arrived (Vintage International Edition, p. 86).

Donne is the eminent poet of death in the English language, and death and its secret is what the search of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (night of the soul) is all about. In the last chapter, Donne appears again: “That nasal drone: donne, donne, donne...” (p. 195).

Examples of Nabokovʼs repulsive characters can be gathered here too. The narrator says at one moment about his brother: “In those days he had a little black bull-terrier; eventually it fell ill and had to be destroyed” (p. 101). Not the humane thing to say, but that is his way. Another example of Nabokovʼs black humour:

There is in it a short chapter dealing with an aeroplane crash (the pilot and all the passengers but one were killed); the survivor, an elderly Englishman, was discovered by a farmer some way from the place of the accident, sitting on a stone. He sat huddled up—the picture of misery and pain. “Are you badly hurt?” asked the farmer. “No,” answered the Englishman, “toothache. Iʼve had it all the way” (p. 110).

Another: “Years later Sebastian wrote that gazing at the stars gave him a sick and squeamish feeling, as for instance when you look at the bowels of a ripped-up beast” (p. 137). Looking at the stars at night is a pleasurable, wonderful experience, but here Nabokov decided to suprise us with a gore image. A good example of Nabokovʼs humour is this one where the narrator is looking for the last beautiful Russian woman his brother lived with before his death; when the narrator sees an ugly old woman instead, this is what happens:

My ring was answered by a fat elderly woman with waved bright orange hair, purplish jowls and some dark fluff over her painted lip.

“May I speak to Mademoiselle Lydia Bohemsky?” I said.

“Cʼest moi,” she replied with a terrific Russian accent.

“Then Iʼll bring the things,” I muttered and hurriedly left the house. I sometimes think that she may be still standing in the doorway (p. 151).

Funny and memorable, like that description of the narrator trying to slamm the door after him, a door that refuses to do so for “it was one of those confounded pneumatic doors which resist” (p. 122). The search for the real life of the author Sebastian Knight is futile, like knowing what is after death. The plot is a hoax, a conclusion which bears some resemblance to the trick the Russian lady plays with the narrator:

“It was very clever of you,” I said, in our liberal grand Russian language, “it was very clever of you to make me believe you were talking about your friend when all the time you were talking about yourself. This little hoax would have gone for quite a long time if fate had not pushed your elbow, and now youʼve spilled the curds and whey ….” No, I did not say a word of all this. I just bowed myself out of the garden. She will be sent a copy of this book and will understand (p. 171).

The secret of death, the secret of to be “donne” with, the result of interviewing those women (donne in Italian too) can be read in the two last pages (pp. 202-03): “that the soul is but a manner of being—not a constant state—that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden … I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.” This other “someone” living inside their souls (Sebastian, his brother, the rest of characters in the novel) is the reader who has just finished it. Santayana said that “The imagination is the great unifier of humanity” (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, MIT critical edition, p. 11). Imagination allows us to feel empathy for others, because we are able to imagine what they feel, so we can put ourselves in their shoes–or their souls. This is the moral of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in plain, naturalistic terms. “No man is an island, entire of itself,” said Donne, in a quote that Nabokov may have thought inserting in this work.