Art and Experience

In "A Guide to Berlin" Nabokov presents a series of short vignettes of everyday life in the Berlin of the 1920s that illuminate the themes of time, memory, and the artist's response to experience. The artist's duty to record everyday experience is summed up in "The Streetcar" section, where the narrator declares, "I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right." In the narrator's eyes, the artist's obligation to ordinary experience is not simply to record it, but to portray it with the same nostalgic generosity with which future generations will...