The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

With scientific precision in the classification, examination, and rejection of an immense amount of data (the accumulation of which is rendered possible by the fundamental assumption that an author is able to discover anything he may want to know about his characters, such capacity being limited only by the manner and purpose of his selection in so far as it ought to be not a haphazard jumble of worthless details but a definite and methodical quest), Sebastian Knight devotes the three hundred pages of Success to one of the most complicated researches that has ever been attempted by a writer. We are informed that a certain commercial traveller Percival Q at a certain stage of his life and in certain circumstances meets the girl, a conjuror's assistant, with whom he will be happy ever after. The meeting is or seems accidental: both happen to use the same car belonging to an amiable stranger on a day the buses went on strike. This is the formula: quite uninteresting if viewed as an actual happening, but becoming a source of remarkable mental enjoyment and excitement, when examined from a special angle. The author's task is to find out how this formula has been arrived at; and all the magic and force of his art are summoned in order to discover the exact way in which two lines of life were made to come into contact – the whole book indeed being but a glorious gamble on causalities or, if you prefer, the probing of the aetiological secret of aleatory occurrences. The odds seem unlimited. Several obvious lines of inquiry are followed with varying success. Working backwards the author finds out why the strike was fixed to take place that particular day and a certain politician's life-long predilection for the number nine is found to be at the root of the business. This leads us nowhere and the trail is abandoned (not without having given us the opportunity of witnessing a heated party debate). Another false scent is the stranger's car. We try to find out who he was and what caused him to pass at a given moment along a given street but when we do learn that he had passed there on his way to his office every week-day at the same time for the last years of his life, we are left none the wiser. Thus we forced to assume that the outward circumstances of meeting are not samples of fate's activity in regard to two, subjects but a given entity, a fixed point, of no causal import; and so, with a clear conscience we turn to the problem of why Q and the girl Anne of all people were made to come and stand side by side for a minute on the kerb at that particular spot. So the girl's line of fate is traced back for a time, then the man's, notes are compared, and then again both lives are followed up in turn.

We learn a number of curious things.