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

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implying with this statement that there exists a close
connection between his life and his work and that an
understanding of the images may be helpful in at least
partly reconstructing his life, and that, reversely,
an insight into his life might illuminate his work.
He is quite generous in pointing out the sources
of what one finds in his novels. Some of them are
fleeting impressions, such as a little gesture of Iris
(26), or an unexpected and illogical remark of hers
(63) both of which go into Ardis. Others are rooted
in his emotions: he could not have written his magic
and tender descriptions of the young beauty of girls
had he not loved Iris (40). Young Dolly Borg is the
model of "little Amy, the condemned man's ambiguous
consoler" in The Red Tophat (78), and, there are finally
those lengthy emotional passages which allow of the
conclusion that his relationship with his daughter Bel
is the source of A Kingdom by the Sea (168ff. ).
At the same time, of course, the present book, Look
at the Harlequins:, is supposed to be an artistic re-
construction of Vadim's life in which his successive
marriages and love affairs play a prominent part,
forming an intricate artistic pattern in which they
are interwoven with literary matters:
In this memoir my wives and my books are
interlaced monogrammatically like some
sort of watermark or ex libris design...
(85).
But although Vadim sounds so confident about de-
scribing his life in an orderly way and making it
transparent to his readers, there are points at which