Prismatiche rifrazioni. Autobiografia e codificazione complessa nel primo romanzo composto in lingua inglese da V.V. Nabokov

As Dale Peterson has acutely observed, “[a]n odd mixture of mischief and melancholia, [The Real Life of Sebastian Knight] stands bravely at the beginning of a new career path [...]. With his usual deliberation and composure, Nabokov undertook the daunting task of transporting a distinctive literary persona into a foreign environment, translating a defunct Russian artist into a lively new tongue” (2007: 25). Drawing from this assumption, the present essay focuses on the complex bind of narrative levels, where fictional biographies and auto-biography melt. The author devotes special attention to the process of self-encodement of autobiographical elements in the text. Ultimately, this study aims to demonstrate that trustworthy autobiographical elements can be found also in narratives that openly reject the principle of realism, such as the case of the autofictional genre.