Choosing the Hero: Nabokov's Short Story ‘Recruiting’ as an Introduction to His Aesthetics

The article approaches the broad topic of Nabokov's philosophy of art through one carefully considered example – the short story, ‘Nabor’ (‘Recruiting’). The analysis of the story is an attempt to answer on behalf of Nabokov the fundamental question of aesthetics: What is the relationship of art to reality? And more specifically: If the artist is free to create, how is his or her subjective creativity not arbitrary? The article argues against the purely aesthetic approach to Nabokov as well as against the metaphysical one and links Nabokov's aesthetic views with those of Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, which, in the end, provides the hermeneutic key for reading the short story in question.