The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written from late 1938 to early 1939, and published in 1941 by New Directions Publishers.

Composition

Ostensibly Nabokov's first major work in English, it was composed in Paris while the author sat in the bathroom, his valise set across a bidet as a writing desk.^[1] Nabokov retreated into the washroom to write, so as not to disturb his wife and newborn son in their one-room apartment.

Plot summary

The narrator, V ("V stands for Victor" as Nabokov revealed to Andrew Field in a letter), is absorbed in the composition of his first literary work, a biography of his half-brother the famous English novelist, Sebastian Knight.

Themes

Through biographical research, V comes to trace, understand and repeat the "moves" (in the chess sense) made by his sibling. As an academic project transformed into what Charles Kinbote would call "the monstrous semblance of a novel," Sebastian Knight operates as a kind for trial run of the author's later novel Pale Fire.

Critical response

Nabokov's friend, correspondent, and sometime antagonist Edmund Wilson called Sebastian Knight his favorite among the author's works^[2]; in the Wilson style (Wilson proved both supportive and dismissive of his literary friends Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald this may be viewed as something of a dig.

Notes

^ Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. p. 57. (Nabokov writes Wilson on October 21, 1941, "I am very happy that you liked that little book. As I think I told you, I wrote it five years ago, in Paris, on the implement called bidet as a writing desk — because we lived in one room and I had to use our small bathroom as a study. There is another fishy "as" in that sentence. You are quite write about the slips. There are many clumsy expressions and foreignish mannerisms that I noticed myself when reading the book again after five years had passed; but if I started correcting them I would rewrite the whole thing.")
^ Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. p. 25.

References

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[1] Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. p. 57. (Nabokov writes Wilson on October 21, 1941, "I am very happy that you liked that little book. As I think I told you, I wrote it five years ago, in Paris, on the implement called bidet as a writing desk — because we lived in one room and I had to use our small bathroom as a study. There is another fishy "as" in that sentence. You are quite write about the slips. There are many clumsy expressions and foreignish mannerisms that I noticed myself when reading the book again after five years had passed; but if I started correcting them I would rewrite the whole thing.")

[2] Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. p. 25.

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