Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” “The Waves,” and “Orlando” and Nabokov’s “The Defense,” “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” and “Pale Fire” feature divided consciousnesses that represent transmuted aspects of each author’s concerns: Woolf separates her domestic London self (as represented by the quite different Clarissa Dalloway) from her mad, suicidal self (as embodied in Septimus Smith) and separates her male and female selves in “Orlando.” Nabokov has his Russian persona (Sebastian) merge with his younger anglophone self (V) in “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” attempting to reconcile the loss of Russia and its language; in “Pale Fire” he separates these into family loss (Shade’s daughter) and loss of country—its language and culture (Kinbote’s Zembla). Nabokov’s losses are so great that his oeuvre is preoccupied with preventing his pain from overwhelming his art. His early work (after “Mary”), criticized for its coldness, avoids sentiment and any hint of personal involvement; only as he becomes more confident in his art, starting with “The Gift,” where he tempers the loss of his father and country with the gain of his beloved and maturation of his art, does he allow his experience into his novels. In “The Defense,” however, he is still maintaining emotional incognito; Nabokov heightens the narrative distance from the hero that characterizes his early work, which distinguishes it from the ‘lady novelist’s’ more empathic models.
Priscilla Meyer and Rachel Trousdale, ‘Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf’ (2013)
