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Little to no attention has been paid to the unique presence and meaning of shadows in Vladimir Nabokov's fiction. Nabokov's unconventional treatment ofshadows stems from how he perceived them as a synesthete not subject to strict sensory divisions. Nabokov's shadows are material phenomena and also illustrate his relationship to memory, language, writing, and readers, who cannot perceive and therefore do not attend to shadow the same way as he does. Shadow stands infor synesthesia's operations across Nabokov's oeuvre. In The Gift, Nabokov's relation to shadow and problems of communicating his perception through the written line are most pronounced. The following reading of shadow in Nabokov for thefirst time explores this phenomenon in his writing, as well as how the author uses shadow to expand imagery's possibilities and range.
Keywords: Vladimir Nabokov / synesthesia / shadow / perception / imagery
No, I have as yet said nothing, or, rather, said only bookish words . . . there is something I know, there is something I know, there is something . . . I knew without knowing, I knew without wonder, I knew as one knows oneself, I knew what it was impossible to know. . . .
-Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (1959)
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Vladimir Nabokov's writing is full of shadows. Let us recall the shadow lingering on an uneven wall in Invitation to a Beheading, leading Cincinnatus to reflect that, "brought up into the air, the word bursts, as burst those spherical fishes that breathe and blaze only in the compressed murk of the depths when brought up in the net" (94). In Ada, "thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors" (280). In Pnin, Nabokov emphasizes Victor's ability to distinguish the colors of shadows and describes shades that approach the point beyond "human perception" (70). Nor can we omit Pale Fire's waxwing, whose shadow flies on reduplicated in Shade's sky: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; / I was the smudge of ashen fluff- and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky" (33). Shade's word choice suggests that a particular form of thought extends beyond the written line, a communicative tool and artistic cage whose mimetic capacity...