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

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a very close one, and it seems that Sebastian was
to blame for this. V insists that he was even as a
child deeply interested in his brother, trying in
various ways to catch his attention, but that
Sebastian remained "silent and distant" (15) towards
him and ignored him almost completely. On the
few occasions on which they met in later years,
Sebastian was apparently just as distant and offhand
in his dealings with V. V sees their relationship
as one in which his life-long affection for
Sebastian "had always been crushed and thwarted"
(31) by his brother's aloofness.
No wonder he realizes very soon that he hardly
knows anything about Sebastian. Beyond an "inner
knowledge of [his brother's] character" (31) that
he claims to possess there is nothing on which to
base his book; even the feeling that "Sebastian
and I... had some kind of common rhythm" (32) cannot
make up for the absence of facts. His memory does
not furnish much beyond vague glimpses of Sebastian
as a boy, "gloriously messing about with watercolours
in the homely aura of a stately kerosene
lamp" (15), "[coming] up the stairs, after school... "
(15), or, later, sometimes helping V with his les-
sons, but soon impatiently "[pocketing] his pencil
and
[stalking]
out of the room" (16). Thq only other
memory V has of those days is his discovery that
Sebastian wrote "very romantic" poems which he signed
with "a little black chess-knight drawn in ink" (16).
Nor does he learn much from his mother (Sebastian's