Boundaries of Art in Nabokov'sThe Gift
Reading as Transcendence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5153795 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen H Blackwell (0000-0001-9349-9266, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 600-625 |
| Publication date | 1999-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Slavic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2697570 |
| OpenAlex | W2312388938 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
The author's actual creative act always proceeds along the boundaries of the aesthetic world, along the boundaries of the reality of the given, along the boundary of the body and the boundary of the spirit.-M. M. BakhtinThe spirit finds loopholes, transluscences in the world's finest texture.-V. V. Nabokov, "How I Love You"Are boundaries real? This, to a certain extent, is the central question posed byThe Giftwhen Fyodor suggests that "definitions are always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet." Written in one of the most border-conscious eras of history (the Treaty of Versailles had just created nine new independent countries and changed the boundaries of many others), Vladimir Nabokov's last complete Russian novel addresses head-on the most pressing issues he and his fellow emigres faced. Cast beyond the edge of their homeland, the exiles were forced to accept unnaturally restricted movement within Europe as well, due to their lack of a valid nationality. So one might say that for Russian exiles of the 1920s and 1930s, boundaries constituted the single most unrelenting feature of reality
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Boundary (topology · Boundary line · Epistemology · Fyodor · Geometry · Homeland · Literature · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Transcendence (philosophy · History · Law · Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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