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

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go about it), behaving as if he were tracing a criminal
much rather than his brother. Even granting that
biographical research must necessarily resemble a
detective's work of investigation, one can state that
V often takes the recommended methods to comic extremes,
applying them where even the most optimistic
biographer would no longer hope to learn anything.
What can he expect to learn from a row of old suits,
some folded shirts and Sebastian's shoes (34)? Can
it be of any interest that the trees outside the window
of the study are "elms, not oaks, in spite of
the street name's promise" (35)? V's rather too emotional
questions as to what "all these quiet things"
in the flat can tell him of Sebastian are answered
in a totally sober and comically matter-of-fact
fashion: they can tell him nothing at all. The whiterobed
armchair which, V imagines, gives a particularly
"guilty start" (34), yields a Brazil nut instead
of the secret that V expects in its folds, and a
cigarette-end that V seems to count as a personal
item in the otherwise "impersonal" dining-room turns
out to have been left by a house agent (35). V then
turns to Sebastian's desk, feeling that he is "really
getting down to business" (35). The contents of the
desk yield some information about Sebastian's approval
of mixed metaphors, about his "queer way... in the
process of writing" (37), about plans he had of
writing a fictitious biography. So, V does seem to
be on the right track after all. But, when he finds
something that promises to disclose a few facts about