The difficulty of assessing Nabokov's achievement as a novelist writing about people obviously derives from the flagrantly artificial quality of his fiction…. The Nabokovian universe, we all know, is a construct of words, taking life from the page and pen of its author. Self-conscious artifice intrudes on the reader's awareness, signaling the discontinuities between Nabokov's fabricated worlds and the one we call our own…. The continuous word-play, allusions, self-conscious references, and authorial intrusions all serve to interrupt the reader's sympathetic participation in the author's illusory world. In this way, Nabokov alerts us to the fictional status of his literary landscape; he impels us to recognize that all the apparent depth and dimension we perceive in this "picture in a picture" are achieved aesthetic effects. (pp. 4-5)
The most familiar assumption is that Nabokov's "lush verbal jungle" (as one distinguished critic recently wrote) is an obvious manifestation of the decadent writer, whose excessive preoccupation with language stems from an exhaustion with life. Yet while numerous critics have, over half a century, assumed that Nabokov's delight in language evinces a preference for art over life, he himself regarded the process of verbal creation as, above all, life-giving. In a long passage in Bend Sinister, Nabokov calls his reader's attention to the intimate relationship that exists between language and life. The passage occurs as the philosopher, Adam Krug, considers the mysterious process by which Shakespeare brought his characters to life in words…. Nature created Shakespeare who, in turn, inspired life in the creatures of his imagination through language—fusing words into live entities as magically as Nature sparks life in a combination of cells. Why, we might ask, did Nabokov emphasize this miraculous creation of life if, as so many assume, he was indifferent to creating live characters?… Contrary to the aestheticism we are told to expect from Nabokov, the emphasis here is not on the more exotic delights of word formation but on the absolute vitality of literary creation. (pp. 5-6)
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Nabokov, Vladimir (Vladimirovich) 1899–1977: Critical Essay by Ellen Pifer Access Pass.
