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

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in 'Transparent Things.
Like Ganin in Mary, Martin Edelweiss is a young
exile trying to come to terms with the fact that his
homeland is lost to him. The "course-to take refuge
in nostalgia, to enter the comfortable past and there
lapse dreamily away"134is rejected by him, just as
by Ganin. Nor can he in the long run accept the attitude
of his Cambridge tutor, Archibald Moon, who
treats Russia as an "inanimate article of luxury"
(97), who regards it as a definitely lost land "which
the present cannot touch" and who delights in its
"hermetic containedness. ""135 Martin decides on a dan-
gerous enterprise. Illegally, all by himself, he is
going to cross the frontier, to enter Russia for just
twenty-four hours and thus to recover it. His enterprise
is of course doomed, and he never returns from
his
exploit.
What. is interesting in the context of the present
study is not so much Martin's story but the way in
which the author uses the idea that a
human life is
not just a chaotic sequence of events and incidents,
but that for him who can see, it appears structured.
It has an underlying thematic design. There are in
a life incidents that link with others, earlier or
0
later ones, and that may in some cases be discovered
to be of fatidic significance.
Nabokov introduces this idea in Speak, Memory
where he says that "The following of such thematic
designs through one's life should be, I think, the
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true purpose of autobiography. -,
6 He weaves one such