Immortality of Nostalgic Souls in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight | ||||
| المجلة العلمیة لکلیة الآداب-جامعة أسیوط | ||||
| Article 21, Volume 27, Issue 81, January 2022, Page 1205-1238 PDF (1.15 MB) | ||||
| Document Type: بحوث علمية محکمة | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/aakj.2022.239634 | ||||
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| Author | ||||
| أسماء شرف الدين محمد إبراهيم | ||||
| کلية التربية - جامعة 6 أکتوبر | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| This study is basically concerned with the conceptualization of Nostalgic Souls in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (RLSK) as an exile novel. In RLSK, Nabokov’s creative conceptualization of nostalgia was apparent in his attempts to reveal that nostalgic souls never die. On one hand, in RLSK, Nabokov distinctively explores how non-Russians are nostalgic for Russia; the place that once hosted them. In this sense, nostalgic Swiss women go under psychological tension because of their longing for a foreign home and their shaky belonging to their native home. Merging real with fictional, those people exist in their actual homeland, yet they nostalgically live in their virtual host-home, Russia. Such exiles resort to nostalgia to find a fictional home for their “wandering souls.” Sebastian may decide to part Russia physically, yet the expression of his longing "I have not stopped loving you” is an everlasting feeling. The point to be stressed here is that an exile could exist physically in one place, but he virtually lives in another. For V., he and his brother are physically two bodies, yet they may have a shared soul. Concerning such a case of full soul fusion, V. admitted: “I may have seen and remembered what he saw and remembered” (RLSK 34). To facilitate soul fusion, V. exploited Sebastian’s statement: “I'm not dead… and this is my Sabbath rest” (RLSK 90). Such saying may support the claim that Sebastian’s soul faints but never dies. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Nostalgic Souls; Vladimir Nabokov; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Mystical vision | ||||
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