[There are two virtual commonplaces] about the art of Vladimir Nabokov: that it is anti-realistic or anti-mimetic, and therefore a deliberate reproach to the Great Tradition of the nineteenth-century novel; that its major subject is art itself, which makes it a supreme example of what we now call metafiction. (p. 439)
Surely his own books reject the conventions of realism for a deliberate and even exaggerated artifice, an art about different conceptions of art. Such, at least, is the conventional wisdom apparently sanctioned by Nabokov himself.
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