Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time - 9781138109674

Taylor & Francis

This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself \u2014 that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism \u2014 this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author\u2019s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov\u2019s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov\u2019s majo.