Nabokov’s Palace: The American Novels

Nabokov’s distinguished and unique position in American literature has always been indisputable, but paradoxical. There has always been an element of foreignness in his writing. Nabokov’s Palace, however, aims to discover those sub-texts and inter-textual patterns embedded in Nabokov’s American novels which undeniably contribute towards making these works an integral part of the Anglo-American literary tradition. Aware of this tradition, in some of his late novels Nabokov also provides a literary historical overview of particular themes, such as friendship, melancholy, madness and trance, as they surfaced in literary texts throughout the history of English and American literature.To Nabokov aesthetic bliss meant a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. Most of Nabokov’s American novels express-through different elaborate literary structures, themes, motifs and metaphors-these other states of being where the fantastic recurrence of literary situations and communion with dead poets and writers (Poe, Shakespeare, Hawthorne and Melville, among many others) becomes possible. The American reality that some readers miss in his writings (with the exception of Lolita) and the absence of which questions whether Nabokov truly belongs to the Anglo-American tradition, is clearly to be found in the wayside murmur of the allusive sub-texts. Nabokov’s Palace is thus recommended for scholars, students and devotees of Nabokov’s fiction who wish to make further discoveries in the distinct otherworld of Art in Nabokov’s American novels.