''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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emotions, and furthermore they are partly embedded in
the account of his abortive attempt to keep "my degrading
and dangerous desires" under "pacific control"
(26) by marrying Valeria, and in the comic quality of
this account they participate.
They become all the more questionable as he intermingles
with them all sorts of facts meant to rationalize
his affliction and to prove that he is not such an
exceptional and shocking case after all, and that "it
was all a question of attitude, that there was really
nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girlchildren"
(20). To prove his point, he goes back to
ancient Greece and points out that nothing was thought
at that time of implicating little girls of ten in sex,
and for a similar purpose he evokes certain habits of
the people of some East Indian province (with the girls
participating even younger) (21). He draws examples
from the Bible and from modern law. What introduces an
element of insincerity into all this is the fact that
he seems to have meddled with some of his examples so
as to make them serve his purpose. Whereas throughout
his memoir he proves to know his authors and his literary
history inside out, he makes some strange mistakes
here, which cannot simply be put down to ignorance.
He overlooks that "Dante... was... nine years old when
he met Beatrice in 1274, and she was suppqsedly eight",
and that "there was no romance", and that there is no
certainty about who Petrarch's Laura was and about how
old she was when he met her21, so that these two can
certainly not be counted among his distinguished pre-
decessors
as he wants to make out.