This article is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.

The Myth of the Native Language

Gabriel Josipovici
I always think that one of the purest emotions is that of the banished man pining after the land of his birth. I would have liked to show him straining his memory to the utmost in a continuous effort to keep alive and bright the vision of his past, the blue remembered hills and the happy highways, the hedge with its unofficial rose and the field with its rabbits, the distant spire and the near bluebell... But because the theme has already been treated by my betters and also because I have an innate distrust of what I feel easy to express, no sentimental wanderer will ever be allowed to land on the rock of my unfriendly prose.
So writes Sebastian Knight, the eponymous hero of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, articulating the classic view of the exile’s nostalgia for his homeland even as he punctures its sentimentality. But though Nabokov was every bit as hard on sentimentality as the hero of this, the first novel of his to be written in English, he himself was just as nostalgic for the Russia and the Russian language he had lost, even if a little more sophisticated in his rehearsals of it. English, he always felt, was a straightjacket into which he had been forced by history, and while he was proud of the way he had mastered it, he never lost the sense that by having to forgo his native Russian he had been deprived of a tool that allowed him to express the richness and complexity of the world in a way English never would. ...
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