Sebastian Knight, a cipher in a novel, possesses no real life; what Nabokov labels as The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is, of course, mislabeled inasmuch as the words apply to the story the book coyly tells, as if the life were being...

Mario Vargas Llosa's 1980s novel 'The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta' is similar to Vladimir Nabokov's 1930s novel 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight' since both stories engage the relation of fiction to reality. Vargas Llosa's story is of an attempted biography of a...

Breathe easy: I think it’s safe to say without much exaggeration (and only an understandable modicum of self-congratulation) that The Observer has saved Laura. Saved the last, incomplete, unseen Vladimir Nabokov manuscript from a threat of destruction. In a convoluted way, my plea to Dmitri...

Breathe easy: I think it’s safe to say without much exaggeration (and only an understandable modicum of self-congratulation) that The Observer has saved Laura. Saved the last, incomplete, unseen Vladimir Nabokov manuscript from a threat of destruction. In a convoluted way, my plea to...

In the following essay, Morgan argues that there is “a series of deliberate analogies between” Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the French courtly stag-hunt poetry of the thirteenth century.