“Deeper matters”

V. quotes liberally from The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, Mr. Goodman’s biography of V.’s half-brother:

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941).

Goodman represents of course the kind of critical writing that Nabokov despised. One of the no-nos from Nabokov’s quiz about requirements for a good reader: “The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.” Nabokov’s requirements: “imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[Nabokov’s quiz appears in Lectures on Literature (1980).]