The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Nabokov's first major work in English was written hastily in Paris while the author sat in the bathroom, his valise set across a bidet as a writing desk.

[1] It had been preceded by nine earlier novels in Russian, written under the pen name V. Sirin, and shares with them a preoccupation with the problems of living in exile and of adaptation.

[2] The narrator, V., is absorbed in the composition of his first literary work, a biography of his half-brother, the Russian-born English novelist Sebastian Knight (1899–1936).

V. leaves for Blauberg, where, with the help of a private detective, he acquires a list of the names of four women who were staying at the hotel at the same time as Sebastian and tracks down each to interview them.

Then there is Knight's own “memoir”, supported by passages from his novels, both as stylistic demonstrations and illustrative of V's subjective reading of their biographical significance.

[5] Finally there are V's own novelistic interpolations, making clear the difference between Knight's linguistic mastery and the literary devices used by hack authors.

“She will be sent a copy of this book and will understand.” Such tricks continue the perception in Nabokov's earlier novel Despair that “the first person is as fictitious as all the rest”.

He too was a Russian émigré who was educated at Cambridge, his relationship with his brother Sergei was always at arm's length, and an unwise emotional entanglement had just endangered his domestic arrangements.