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

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the time during which he lived with Clare, the first
signs of his illness and the necessity for him to go
to Blauberg. There is, finally, his unfortunate and
unhappy affair with Nina, and, in 1936, his death in
a St Damier hospital. There are rare moments at which
a real person seems to fill the dry information with
some traces of individual life: "sundry bits of a
cinema-film cut away by scissors" (17), bits that
show pictures of the young Sebastian, of the lover,
of the student as seen by a college friend; of Clare's
companion as seen by Miss Pratt and P. G. Sheldon. The
last glimpse that this fragmentary film furnishes is
an "atrocious" picture (150) of Sebastian, sketched
by a woman the very thought of whom makes her first
husband shudder. How much truth is there in it? How
much truth in there in any of the pictures?
Smurov in The Eye is left with a whole variety of
pictures that rather conceal than reveal the person
he is looking for. It seems as if the same were happening
to V. It is true that there is one prominent
trait in Sebastian's nature on which all those who
knew him agree: he struck them all as silent, distant,
aloof, morose, preoccupied, and unsociable. However,
none of them knows what the source of his aloofness
was. As happens with Smurov, the pictures of Sebastian
vary according to the natures of those who knew
him, and according to the reactions he evoked in them.
He has left sadness, and love and admiration in V
for whom that trait in his brother was a sign of su-
periority. Clare loved him and accepted him as he