SOURCE: “Illusion, Reality, and Parody in Nabokov's Plays,” in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1967, pp. 268-79.

In the following essay, Karlinsky examines the sources of two of Nabokov's plays and their similarities to his novels.

It was Vladislav Khodasevich who in 1937 characterized Nabokov as a writer obsessed with a single theme.¹ Nabokov's writings of the subsequent decades have confirmed the accuracy of this observation. Nabokov's central theme is, of course, the nature of the creative imagination and the solitary, freak-like role into which a man gifted with such imagination is inevitably cast in any society. Such a person may be shown pursuing his basic endeavor directly (e.g., Sebastian Knight or the hero of The Gift), but more often, as Khodasevich pointed out, Nabokov's artist-hero is disguised by means of some mask that may appear at first glance unrelated to artistic creation. Thus, the work...