The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Modernist Impasse

This article takes issue with the notion that Nabokov ignored or repressed the historical in his fiction. It proposes that Nabokov's formal innovation in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight constitutes a complex response to modernity. Through examination of the novel's historical-cultural location, its high modernist intertexts, and its manipulation of various forms of temporality, I demonstrate how Nabokov here engages with "the modernist impasse," a perceived crisis in autonomous, experimental fiction during the 1930s.