the theme

What single aspect makes Nabokov's polyhedral fiction so extraordinary? After all, few practiced readers will not agree with Martin Amis that Nabokov does “all the usual things” – creates characters, threads storyline, writes prose – “better than anybody else.”

The most striking difference between a casual reader of his writings, even an intelligent one experienced in good reading, and a seasoned student of Nabokov who has traversed his books many times, is that fine shades of meaning may escape the former, since it takes many successive readings of a Nabokov text to discover and then study higher planes of narrative strategies. Depending on the student's (the notorious Nabokovian “re-reader's”) individual talents and experience, he will sooner or later make out the subtle recurrence of images and situations which weave, at a proper remove from the scene of action, thematic grids. The intricately beautiful meaning and function of these patterns – along with their aesthetic and even metaphysical implications – cut the most distinctive facet of Nabokov's work.

This essay considers the general subject of Nabokov's themes, in an attempt to single out and arrange several larger strains in them. In the last section, I take up the example of one of his earliest works, only recently published, to show that those strains were formed astonishingly early and ran a surprisingly long and stable course.

Before going any further, I should define the volume of meaning associated with the term theme inasmuch as it can be applied to Nabokov.