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

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"for the grape season or lavender gala" (5). One Nina
Lecerf rings at Ivor's and Iris' villa, and her tele-
phone call causes Iris to betray herself in much the
same way in which Nina Lecerf gave herself away in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (14). The "nice blue
Icarus, Ivor's thoughtful wedding present" (49) has
already belonged to mad Hermann in Despair.
These, of course, are minor influences from that
other mysterious realm, but there are more fateful ones.
His father, for example, is called Demon and comes
straight from Ada, even though Vadim may insist that,
reversely, he used him "for touching up the father of
the passionate siblings in the best of my English
romaunts, Ardis (1970)" (96).
He describes his flight from Russia:
One autumn evening poor Mstislav's young
mistress showed me a fairy-tale path
winding through a great forest where a
last aurochs had been speared by. a first
Charnetski under John III (Sobieski).
I followed that path with a knapsack on
my back and - why not confess -a tremor
of remorse and anxiety in my young heart
(9).
This path - "a two-way street" as Patteson puts it7 -
is the very same path on which Martin Edelweiss in
Glory makes his clandestine and fatal way back into
Russia.
Most remarkable is the fact that Vadim's relationship
with his daughter Bel, which seems, to be the
basis of his own A Kingdom by the Sea is a direct echo
of Lolita. 'Their journeys are those that Humbert
Humbert and Lolita undertake, and Vadim's passion for
Bel equals that of Humbert for Lo. The connection, so