“Diaphanous Irony”: Ironic Masquerade and Breakdown in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Gaito Gazdanov’s Night Roads

This is a comparative article exploring the use of exilic irony in the work of a Russian–French writer, Gaito Gazdanov, and Russian–American author, Vladimir Nabokov. I argue that both Gazdanov’s Night Roads, written in Russian, and Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, written in English, employ a multilayered irony to deal with exile. Irony remains the driving force of both narratives, but, precisely because so much emotional and aesthetic weight is attached to it, it also becomes their potential breaking point. By combining close readings of these texts with theoretical insights into the phenomenon of exilic irony, chiefly from Kierkegaardian existentialism and Lacanian/Kristevian psychoanalysis, this essay will examine the different levels of irony in these novels. Since the primary focus of attention here is exilic irony rather than exile per se, I contend that this combined theoretical perspective is more compelling than traditional approaches to exile. Via my analysis, I hope to establish two paradigms of exilic irony that may become applicable to a larger body of exilic literature: the one that is insistent on exilic experience and is easily collapsible, and the one that transcends exilic experience and is energizing—intellectually, aesthetically, and metaphysically.