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

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him knowledge surpassing that given by the senses,
the intellect, by science, or philosophy; experiences
that cannot be expressed in intellectual terms because
they have nothing to do with the intellect but are
purely intuitive. It seems that this is implied in
something he once said in an interview:
... what I am going to say now is something
I have never said before... I know more
than I can express in words, and the little
I can express would not have been expressed,
had I not known more. -27
What has emerged from this analysis confirms what
was said at the beginning about Nabokov's conception
of art, and it confirms what he says about his own
novels. They are unlike anything that Chernyshevskii
wants art to be, and thus support Nabokov's rejection
of Chernyshevskii's theories. They neither "reproduce"
nor "explain", nor do they "teach". They defy any
attempt to read a "social mission" into them, and they
are not concerned with the "problems of the age". As
Nabokov insists, they contain no "moral message" and
certainly no "general ideas".
If they cannot be called "art for art's sake",
this is due to their preoccupation with the quest
that has been described. As has been seen, Nabokov
puts this quest into an artistic shape because he considers
art as a superior way to knowledge. By his gift
of the imagination, the artist can obtain knowledge,
and can penetrate into realms which are forbidden to
everybody else, and though he does not "teach", he can,
through his art, make this knowledge available to others;
he can sometimes open these realms to others, or he