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The present study is an exploration of reflections of/on reality in Sasha Sokolov’s novels: School for Fools, Between Dog and Wolf and Palisandriia. The language in these texts does not express reality but embodies it, and reality fades away into its reflections, where it finds its essence. The project is framed by an overview of the theoretical models advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin (outsideness and surplus of vision), Jacques Derrida (dissemination and supplement) and Jacques Lacan (the mirror stage), and constructed around the myth of Narcissus. Within this critical framework, the study comprises three chapters, presenting the novels in their chronological appearance. Chapter one examines an aesthetical (trans)formation of reality and reconstruction of the self through a series of metaphors. By adopting the metaphor of narcissism and exploring its ontological, narrative and psychological implications in relation to Sokolov’s text, it is demonstrated how memory, instead of retrieving the past, signifies it, and how language, instead of expressing reality, engenders it. Chapter two constitutes a reading of Between Dog and Wolf as a re-enactment of the Eucharist, wherein the spirit becomes the letter, and the context merges with the text. Employing deconstruction as an approach, the analysis illuminates how reality is grounded by its representation as the latter is grounded in its medium: language. Chapter three presents Palisandriia as a parody of a ‘ritualized biography’, whereby the hero’s personal life becomes a historical allegory. This technique, identified with sots-art and historiographic metafiction, is viewed as an attempt to deal with the disappearance of the historical referent. It is argued that by approaching history – personal and public – as an artefact, Sokolov’s novel stands as an expression of the spirit of Dandyism in the face of the total discrediting of the real.

This thesis uses the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche to explore and explain moral and literary problems in Vladimir Nabokov's works. Although a phalanx of 'Nabokov and X' studies exist, there remains no English-speaking work that focuses solely on the relationship between these two figures. This seems strange given their deep connection to the Russian Silver Age, Nabokov's frequent references and allusions to Nietzsche, and their thematic similarities. The many knotted issues in Nabokov studies - Lolita's relationship to morality, Pale Fire's internal authorship, Nabokov's relationship with his readership - often create impasses that frustrate interpretation. By breaking with traditional approaches in Nabokov studies; by 'answering back' to Nabokov rather than adhering to the conditions he suggested for reading his work, I demonstrate how a Nietzschean analysis can negotiate such interpretative stalemate and act as a fulcrum to problems in Nabokov's fiction. The study is divided into three sections, each with two chapters: 'Nietzschean Engagements', 'Nietzschean Readings' and 'Beyond Nietzsche'. The first section deals with Nabokov's more obvious points of contact with Nietzsche through allusions and references. 'Nietzschean Readings' looks at Nabokov's texts through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy, allowing us to frame certain literary problems differently.

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Between Two Worlds: The Fairy-Tale Novels of Aleksandr Fomich Vel'tman is a thesis devoted to four of the author's novels published during the 1830s and 1840s: Koshchei bessmertnyi (1833), Svetoslavich, vrazhii pitomets (1835), Serdtse i Dumka (1838) and Novyi Emelia, ili Prevrashcheniia (1845). It argues for the typological unity of these works based on their prominent use of fairy-tale structures and motifs, and analyses them against the backdrop of their nineteenth-century context, relating them to the emergence and development of the ‘Romantic fairy tale' as a literary genre throughout Europe and to the philosophical and intellectual environment in which they were written. The thesis thereby seeks to posit these novels as a unique, yet nevertheless organic, response to contemporary aesthetic issues and trends and to challenge dominant perceptions of Vel'tman's fiction as idiosyncratic and unapproachable. The title itself, Between Two Worlds, reflects the two trajectories of investigation that the thesis will endeavour to pursue: the paradigmatic, in an analysis of the interplay of fairy-tale and mimetic elements within the texts, and the diachronic, in viewing how this interplay changes over the course of the novels against the backdrop of the broader aesthetic evolution from Romanticism to Critical Realism in Russian letters. After establishing a typological model for the volshebnaia skazka it will argue that the form is employed in these four works as a discourse of the self, and serves to actualize the relationship between the individual and the world, the ideal and the real. Employing a methodology that draws on various psychoanalytical models it will discuss how, in contemporary theory, the fairy tale can be read symbolically as a discourse of personal development to meaningful interaction with the surrounding world. Subsequently, it will proceed to show how Vel'tman's use of the form in his novelistic creations self-consciously problematizes this basic idea, as the fairy tale is alternately presented as facilitator of, and obstacle to, such growth. It will analyse in particular how these novels suggest different readings of the fairy tale and, through a comparison with other generic systems, different conceptions of its potential truth. Ultimately, it will argue that the ambiguity of the fairy tale in these works stems from its dual status as both symbolic discourse and cultural artefact, and that they are as much ‘novels about fairy tales' as they are ‘fairy-tale novels'.

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