Lyaskovets T. Approaching Nabokov with Bergson on Time: Why Spatializing Time?

Article published in the «Caleidoscope» — 2013 — Vol 5 — No 2 — pp. 98-118Vladimir Nabokov’s writings reveal an intense thinking about the irreversibility of time and the ways, if any, to resist this temporal irreversibility through art. Nabokov’s obsession with time and space is well-known among literary historians from Anglo-American, European, and Russian critical traditions. Although these scholars explore Nabokov’s involvement with space and time in a variety of significant ways, in their discussions they tend to separate time from space. In doing so, they follow a tradition established by Henri Bergson, who influenced Nabokov’s conception of time, and bypass an important stylistic element of Nabokov’s fiction represented by certain narrative ways in which Nabokov visualizes time