In 1938 tyranny attained unprecedented power: the Nazis annexed Austria and the Sudetenland
the Soviet purge reached its peak and the persecution of the Jews escalated into the horror of
Kristallnacht. Nabokov frequently engaged with the subject of totalitarianism but in 1938 on
the eve of the Second World War he responded to the political situation with an intensity
unmatched at any other time in his career writing three stories a play and a novel each
warning of the danger of leaving tyranny unopposed. Offering fresh insights into all of
Nabokov's works of 1938 this book focuses on a major new reading of The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight revealing that Nabokov's seemingly non-political novel contains a hidden subtext of
espionage and totalitarian tyranny. Drawing on the popular British authors he admired as a boy
Nabokov weaves a covert narrative reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes story in which Sebastian
Knight a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel uncovers a world of Wellsian scientific misadventure
that foreshadows the Holocaust. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight emerges as an
antitotalitarian masterpiece in which the «absolute solution» is both a dire prediction of the
future and Nabokov's artistic answer to the problem of the time.
