Clarence Brown once commented in a critical essay that “for well over a quarter of a century now. He strove for and achieved a uniqueness that runs as a thread throughout his oeuvre. He can, in many respects, be called an aesthete, but his rejection of most schools of thought makes him difficult to classify. Throughout his entire life, although Nabokov underwent great changes in his circumstances, he was consistent, whether writing in Russian or English, in his unflagging delight in literary devices of all sorts, art for its own sake, and a contempt for mimetic conventions, simplistic psychological motivation, ordinary plot structure, and anything that inhibits the literary imagination. “The life of the artist and the life of a device in the consciousness of an artist-this is Sirin’s theme.” Khodasevich, although he had not yet read The Gift-purported to be Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest Russian novel-had discovered the most important element of Nabokov’s fiction.

his writing is distinguished by exceptional diversity, complexity, brilliance, and novelty.” Khodasevich went on to say that the key to all Sirin’s work was his ability to put all his literary devices on display, with little or no attempt to conceal them, thus entertaining his readers more with the revelation of how the magician performs his tricks, than with the trick itself. Sirin’s” work, wrote, “Sirin proves for the most part to be an artist of form, of the writer’s device, and not only in that. In 1937, Vladeslav Khodasevich, an émigré poet and champion of “V.

Mary by vladimir nabokov