This study seeks to counter the critical orthodoxy that conceives of Vladimir Nabokov as a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality.
Glynn provides a new reading of Vladimir Nabokov s work by seeking to challenge the notion that he was a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality. Glynn argues that Nabokov s epistemology was in fact anti-Symbolist and that this aligned him with both Bergsonism and Russian Formalism, which intellectual systems were themselves hostile to a Symbolist epistemology. Symbolism may be seen to devalue material reality by presenting it as a mere adumbration of a higher realm. Nabokov, however, valued the immediate material world and was creatively engaged by the tendency of the deluded mind to efface that reality.
Glynn provides a new reading of Vladimir Nabokov s work by seeking to challenge the notion that he was a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality. Glynn argues that Nabokov s epistemology was in fact anti-Symbolist and that this aligned him with both Bergsonism and Russian Formalism, which intellectual systems were themselves hostile to a Symbolist epistemology. Symbolism may be seen to devalue material reality by presenting it as a mere adumbration of a higher realm. Nabokov, however, valued the immediate material world and was creatively engaged by the tendency of the deluded mind to efface that reality.
"This is a striking and original book. Glynn attacks the trend in criticism of Nabokov that reads his work as a Symbolist and instead suggests that a large part of the novelist s work is founded on a dynamic interaction with the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Henri Bergson. This study explores how Nabokov s project has been transformed by the philosophy of Shklovsky and Bergson into a fictional universe which is at once playful and serious, experimental yet rooted in the everyday, both engaged and moral, a convincing answer to the demeaning arguments that the writer is nothing more than a pure stylist." - Robert Lawson-Peebles, University of Exeter