The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

I have a vivid recollection, too, of his riding a bicycle with very low handlebars along a sun-dappled path in the park of our countryplace, spinning on slowly, the pedals motionless, and I trotting behind, trotting a little faster as his sandalled foot presses down the pedal; I am doing my best to keep pace with his tick-tick-sizzling backwheel, but he heeds me not and soon leaves me hopelessly behind, very out of breath and still trotting.

Then later on, when he was sixteen and I ten, he would sometimes help me with my lessons, explaining things in such a rapid impatient way, that nothing ever came of his assistance and after a while he would pocket his pencil and stalk out of the room. At that period he was tall and sallow-complexioned with a dark shadow above his upper lip. His hair was now glossily parted, and he wrote verse in a black copybook which he kept locked up in his drawer.

I once discovered where he kept the key (in a chink of the wall near the white Dutch stove in his room) and I opened that drawer. There was the copybook; also the photograph of a sister of one of his schoolmates; some gold coins; and a small muslin bag of violet sweets. The poems were written in English. We had had English lessons at home not long before my father's death, and although I never could learn to speak the language fluently, I read and wrote it with comparative ease. I dimly recollect the verse was very romantic, full of dark roses and stars and the call of the sea; but one detail stands out perfectly plain in my memory: the signature under each poem was a little black chess-knight drawn in ink.

I have endeavoured to form a coherent picture of what I saw of my half-brother in those childhood days of mine, between say 1910 (my first year of consciousness) and 1919 (the year he left for England). But the task eludes me. Sebastian's image does not appear as part of my boyhood, thus subject to endless selection and development, nor does it appear as a succession of familiar visions, but it comes to me in a few bright patches, as if he were not a constant member of our family, but some erratic visitor passing across a lighted room and then for a long interval fading into the night. I explain this not so much by the fact that my own childish interests precluded any conscious relation with one who was not young enough to be my companion and not old enough to be my guide, but by Sebastian's constant aloofness, which, although I loved him dearly, never allowed my affection either recognition or food. I could perhaps describe the way he walked, or laughed or sneezed, but all this would be no more than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors and having nothing in common with the essential drama. And drama there was. Sebastian could never forget his mother, nor could he forget that his father had died for her. That her name was never mentioned in our home added morbid glamour to the remembered charm which suffused his impressionable soul. I do not know whether he could recall with any clarity the time when she was his father's wife; probably he could in a way, as a soft radiance in the background of his life. Nor can I tell what he felt at seeing his mother again when a boy of nine. My mother says he was listless and tongue-tied, afterwards never mentioning that short and pathetically incomplete meeting. In Lost Property Sebastian hints at a vaguely bitter feeling towards his happily remarried father, a feeling which changed into one of ecstatic worship when he learnt the reason of his father's fatal duel

'My discovery of England', writes Sebastian (Lost Property), 'puts new life into my most intimate memories…. After Cambridge I took a trip to the Continent and spent a quiet fortnight at Monte Carlo. I think there is some Casino place there, where people gamble, but if so, I missed it, as most of my time was taken up by the composition of my first novel – a very pretentious affair which I am glad to say was turned down by almost as many publishers as my next book had readers. One day I went for a long walk and found a place called Roquebrune. It was at Roquebrune that my mother had died thirteen years before. I well remember the day my father told me of her death and the name of the pension where it occurred. The name was "Les Violettes". I asked a chauffeur whether he knew of such a house, but he did not. Then I asked a fruit-seller and he showed me the way. I came at last to a pinkish villa roofed with the typical Provence round red tiles, and I noticed a bunch of violets clumsily painted on the gate. So this was the house. I crossed the garden and spoke to the landlady. She said she had only lately taken over the pension from the former owner and knew nothing of the past. I asked her permission to sit awhile in the garden. An old man, naked as far down as I could see, peered at me from a balcony, but otherwise there was no one about. I sat down on a blue bench under a great eucalyptus, its bark half stripped away, as seems to be always the case with this sort of tree. Then I tried to see the pink house and the tree and the whole complexion of the place as my mother had seen it. I regretted not knowing the exact window of her room. Judging by the villa's name, I felt sure that there had been before her eyes that same bed of purple pansies. Gradually I worked myself into such a state that for a moment the pink and green seemed to shimmer and float as if seen through a veil of mist. My mother, a dim slight figure in a large hat, went slowly up the steps which seemed to dissolve into water. A terrific thump made me regain consciousness. An orange had rolled down out of the paper bag on my lap. I picked it up and left the garden. Some months later in London I happened to meet a cousin of hers. A turn of the conversation led me to mention that I had visited the place where she had died. "Oh," he said, "but it was the other Roquebrune, the one in the Var."'

It is curious to note that Mr Goodman, quoting the same passage, is content to comment that 'Sebastian Knight was so enamoured of the burlesque side of things and so incapable of caring for their serious core that he managed, without being by nature either callous or cynical, to make fun of intimate emotions, rightly held sacred by the rest of humanity'. No wonder this solemn biographer is out of tune with his hero at every point of the story.

For reasons already mentioned I shall not attempt to describe Sebastian's boyhood with anything like the methodical continuity which I would have normally achieved had Sebastian been a character of fiction. Had it been thus I could have hoped to keep the reader instructed and entertained by picturing my hero's smooth development from infancy to youth.