Gennady Barabtarlo

Bio: Gennady Barabtarlo is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 6 citations.

Taina Naita. Narrative Stance in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Abstract: The paper discusses Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first English experiment in constructing a model of a possible metaphysical contact between the world of human consciousness and a mysterious dimension beyond it. Nabokov's almost invariable principles of composition make the narrative stance of the novel open to various interpretations; the paper argues in favor of the version in which the title character's secret (Russ. Taina Naita) is his calculated absence from the book of which he appears to be the biographical subject. The Appendix presents some results of archival study of the novel's extant manuscripts.

Nabokov's Otherworld.

Abstract: A major reexamination of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov as \"literary gamesman, \" this book systematically shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm and in his consequent redefinition of \"nature\" and \"artifice\" as synonyms. Beginning with Nabokov's discursive writings, Vladimir Alexandrov finds his world view centered on the experience of epiphany--characterized by a sudden fusion of varied sensory data and memories, a feeling of timelessness, and an intuition of immortality--which grants the true artist intimations of an \"otherworld.\" Readings of The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, and Pale Fire reveal the epiphanic experience to be a touchstone for the characters' metaphysical insightfulness, moral makeup, and aesthetic sensibility, and to be a structural model for how the narratives themselves are fashioned and for the nature of the reader's involvement with the text. In his conclusion, Alexandrov outlines several of Nabokov's possible intellectual and artistic debts to the brilliant and variegated culture that flourished in Russia on the eve of the Revolution. Nabokov emerges as less alienated from Russian culture than most of his emigre readers believed, and as less \"modernist\" than many of his Western readers still imagine. \"Alexandrov's work is distinctive in that it applies an otherworld' hypothesis as a consistent context to Nabokov's novels. The approach is obviously a fruitful one. Alexandrov is innovative in rooting Nabokov's ethics and aesthetics in the otherwordly and contributes greatly toNabokov studies by examining certain key terms such as commonsense, ' nature, ' and artifice.' In general Alexandrov's study leads to a much clearer understanding of Nabokov's metaphysics.\"--D. Barton Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara

Past Reviews of “The Identity Puzzle” in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Abstract: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899–1977), a Russian-born American writer, is one of the most gifted exilic writers of the twentieth century. His first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which inherits certain aesthetic motifs of his Russian works, such as the artist in exile, the motif of the double, and the theme of "the other world", has attracted the academic circle and received extreme views spreading between the good and the bad. But the core question in the whole of Nabokov scholarship is the ambiguous identities of the novel's two heroes, Sebastian and V. who are half-brothers. It is the identity puzzle that makes this novel more and more popular in Nabokov criticism. This essay attempts to review past reviews concerning this problem and analyze the four interpretations occasioned by "the identity puzzle" in Nabokov criticism.

The “Doubles” in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Abstract: The ambiguous identities of the two heroes, V. and Sebastian, in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, is of great interest to Nabokovian criticism and scholarship. This paper, in light of theories on the “double”, intents to figure out the problem and reveal Nabokov’s design of Sebastian and V. as “doubles”. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov structures delicate mappings for the doubling relationship between the two heroes. His intricate design of doubles aims to show the dynamic process of Sebastian and V.’s selfdevelopment by erasing the psychic distance between them.

Nabokov’s The Gift, Dostoevskii, and the Tradition of Narratorial Ambiguity

Abstract: Sometimes, we don’t know what a thing is. Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift, in Chapter Two describes some witch doctors collecting “Chinese rhubarb, whose root bears an extraordinary resemblance to a caterpillar, right down to its prolegs and spiracles—while I, in the meantime, found under a stone the caterpillar of an unknown moth, which represented not in a general way but with absolute concreteness a copy of that root, so that it was not quite clear which was impersonating which—or why.” How to tell original from copy? Which is the source and which the subsidiary? This uncertainty makes an excellent figure for the complexities in The Gift, with its elusive, shifting narrative voice. Does Fyodor, from a variety of proximities and distances, control that voice? Or is there a superior “authorial” figure nestled between Fyodor and the ultimate author, Nabokov himself? This play with the relationship between narrative form and knowledge connects Nabokov tightly with Dostoevskii’s early experiment in epistemological fiction, The Double.