Wickliff, Gregory Alan. The Politics of Reception: Vladimir Nabokov's Images of the 1940s. 1992

Nabokov's published texts of the 1940s—his lepidoptera articles, Nikolai Gogol, Conclusive Evidence, ten short stories, and Bend Sinister—are read in terms of Henri's Bergson’s theories of image perception. For both authors, time is real, and change is basic to human perception. Consequently, any static representation of time, including language, is finally mechanistic, false, and even deterministic in the sense of presenting a single, closed future. In Nabokov's texts, mechanism and determinism are rejected, subverted by reflexive techniques, and parodied as aesthetically and morally empty doctrines. In Nabokov's lepidoptera articles this thesis takes the form of Nabokov's theory of the creative evolution of butterfly genitalia, a hypothesis that rejects Spencerian “survival of the fittest” and the single line of biological development implied by Darwin's theory of “natural selection.” Instead, Nabokov argues for the mind-like development of species in novel and plural directions, and the constant need for revolutionary revision in science. Principles similar to biological mechanism are carried into the human social realm by Spencer's deterministic theories of sociology that Nabokov rejects utterly, especially as they are represented by nineteenth century Russian literary criticism, by Marxist-Leninist dogma, by Stalinism, and by Hitler’s National Socialism. In Nabokov’s literary biography of Gogol, he revises criticism of the Gogol texts to continue a critique of nineteenth century Russian literary and social criticism, and to parody the biological determinism of associationist psychology, especially as practiced by Freud. Nabokov's autobiography creatively explodes many genre conventions and Imitates the flow of human memory in the structure of its recurrent themes, one of the greatest of which is the political liberalism of Nabokov's father. The short stories treat quite directly the conflict between mechanism and individual creative consciousness that Nabokov suggests underlies the causes of World War II, and that projects itself as a kind of neurosis, even in the wake of the war. Bend Sinister, the most important work of the period for the purposes of this study, presents an exhaustive parody of the mechanistic police state that destroys every vestige of creative consciousness within its borders, but is itself destroyed by the unexpected intervention of the creative author of that world.