Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but... they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out. Actually, I'm a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.
--Vladimir Nabokov [1]

Prospectus Summary:
By the time of his death in 1977, the Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov (b. 1899) had already become one of the most important and influential novelists of the twentieth century. Since then, the critical appreciation of his works has continued to grow steadily. It is only recently, however, that criticism has looked beyond the cleverness and bold aestheticism of Nabokov's work to perceive its equally strong ethical and metaphysical dimensions.

The purpose of this proposed dissertation is two-fold. As a literary-critical study, it will explore an under-examined religious dimension in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov--namely, the significant appearance and development of diabolism as a deep-seated motif and far-ranging theme in a number of his works. As a project within the field of religious and theological studies, it will endeavor to make a strong contribution to the understanding of 'the demonic,' particularly as an archetypal category of symbolic richness that continues to be articulated and developed within fictional narratives. The design of the project is to be interdisciplinary: literary-critical method will be prompted and enlivened throughout by significant soundings in mythology, biblical scripture, folklore, theology, and philosophy while, on the other hand, the project's theological and hermeneutic concerns will be supported and advanced through the close, critical reading of literary texts.

By examining selected novels by Nabokov, starting primarily with Lolita (1955) and continuing through the author's late, English-language period, this dissertation will show that Nabokov's art represents a theologically significant "phenomenology of the demonic." Ultimately, this study will demonstrate the enduring power of the narrative imagination to revise, renovate, and expand the meaning of potentially outmoded theological notions--particularly those concerning the nature and agency of evil, the meaning of Hell and damnation, the enthralling power of desire, and the twinned dangers of diabolical temptation and self-deception.

What will be most distinctive about this particular project is its overriding theme of the "virtue"--which is to say, the "ethical and theological significance"--of our literary devils. Undoubtedly, the proposed title for this dissertation introduces a complex and provocative theme, but one which is not unfamiliar to Nabokov nor to his significant literary predecessors. Indeed, the ironic notion of the "virtue of devils" is a crucial element of Nabokov's literary project and is, therefore, essential to a critical understanding of his works.

This prospectus will elaborate upon the brief summary above, addressing the proposed dissertation's general thematic concerns, its critical methods (e.g., what is meant by the phrase "phenomenology of the demonic"), and the overall significance of this study for the interdisciplinary field of religion and literature.

Statement of the Problem: On the "Virtue" of Devils
One can speculate, albeit inconclusively, about the existence or non-existence of demons--i.e., about the ontological reality of spiritual beings, evil in essence and manifestation, commonly called "devils." What one cannot discount or render irrelevant, however, is the existential reality of the demonic. In other words, "demons" may or may not, in fact, exist, but the lived human experiences of evil, suffering, and temptation, of self-dividedness, enmity, and guilt--in short, of all that one may compoundedly call "the demonic"--are beyond doubt. Hence, stories of devils, witches, ghosts, and supernaturally wicked villains of all sorts haunt our childhoods and testify, not so much to the physical (or metaphysical) existence of such entities, but rather, to the authentic human experience of the demonic. [2] It is thus that the demonic continues to persist as a highly charged symbolic field, even in the most sophisticated of our modern, "grown-up" fictions.

It is no doubt easy to see that literature is regularly engaged with that which I am calling "the demonic." Readers persistently enjoy--virtually in spite of themselves--feelings of anxiety, fear, and even repugnance, granted that such feelings are provoked under the enchantment of fiction. Furthermore, the enjoyment of such emotions is not limited to the audiences of paperback bestsellers and horror films; it is altogether fundamental to the appreciation of our most respectable and profound literary works as well.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that literature is equally capable of giving rise to genuine joy, light-heartedness, and aesthetic or spiritual bliss; yet, at the heart of almost every story, even those with harmonious ends, is a conflict or struggle serving to motivate the dramatic action. Indeed, it is very often necessary that a narrative's particular and primary element of conflict, villainy, or ill will be practically nourished and sustained until the climactic moment (assuming such a moment arrives) of transcendence or resolution. This fact, no doubt, calls into question the morality of literature--just as it has been called into question continually since at least the time of Plato and the Republic. At the same time, however, it is this capacity within literature to let evil show itself as it appears that opens up every real possibility for a meaningful ethics of fiction.

It may be admitted that the ethical criticism of literature, already problematic in regard to texts as "simple" as Aesop's moral fables, has become ever more complicated by the modern era's literary propensity for irony, anti-heroes, and unreliable narrators. [3] Nevertheless, the responsible reader should still recognize cruelty and selfishness whenever it is encountered, in spite of any narrative's own mischievous "misdirection" or "evasiveness." Wayne Booth, the literary critic who labeled "the unreliable narrator" and who has most substantially addressed the ethics of fiction in the last forty years, cites Nabokov's works as test cases concerning the relationship between complex modern narratives and the capacity to render a coherent ethics of fiction:

Booth's argument implies that there is, for all readers, an "essential ethical experience" of literature; I would add that this experience--at heart, a critical judgment of behavior and intention--is made possible primarily by the author's creative ability to register ethical wrongdoing convincingly, or, again, to show evil as it actually appears. [5] This, I posit, is precisely the strength of Vladimir Nabokov's most distinguished "brilliant offerings."

In virtually every novel and short story by émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, there is some striking and sustained depiction of ethical failure, usually the result of a monstrous, self-deluding egotism or a passionately disordered desire or, more often than not, some fatal combination of the two. The world of Nabokov's fictions is very often tragic, in spite of its frequent playfulness and irony, because the ethical failures it reveals are both abysmally profound and altogether human. This is to say that Nabokov's works are thoroughly tragic in the sense that they routinely examine the full, perhaps overfull, human experience of evil. Nabokov's typical villain or villain-protagonist is not merely immoral or cruel, he is also by turns guilty, paranoid, charming, self-deceived, intelligent, self-righteous, and full of malice. Or, put another way, Nabokov is a genuinely tragic writer, not because his protagonists so often die by the story's conclusion, but rather, because his characters' lives are so deeply and radically faulted from start to finish.

Toward the end of Lolita's Part One, near the center of the book, Nabokov's infamous narrator Humbert Humbert attempts to provide an explanation for his extravagantly written report of the highs and lows of "nymphet love": "I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world." [6] Humbert indicates here that he finds his literary task a difficult one, that it is a retelling full of "boundless misery." At the same time, however, he clearly supposes that the confessional text he is writing (somewhat satirically subtitled The Confession of a White Widowed Male) will ultimately transcend its own hellish viciousness and misery so as to recall, by means of careful distinction, the "portion of heaven" (namely, the bittersweet measure of genuine love) that he has also experienced.

Here, Humbert Humbert gives a rough, rather grotesque impersonation of the medieval poet Dante Alighieri who, at the opening of his Inferno, describes a similar motive for recounting the terrors which continue to fill him with fear and trembling:

The telling of tragic things, of hardships and horrors, is understood to be a means to an all-the-more beneficial end. What Humbert Humbert and his creator seem to share with Dante is a belief that literary testimony can reveal the luminescent secret hidden in the depths of pain, loss, and squalor--that a portion of heaven exists which is reachable only by passing deeply through the heart of darkness. [8] Dante justifies his literary journey through Hell and beyond "to treat of the good that I found there"; clearly, had the Commedia unthinkably consisted only of the Paradiso, its glories would have fallen hopelessly flat. Dante, it seems, acutely recognized the profound necessity, justice, and virtue of Hell--despite the occasionally sympathetic damned--because the reality of Hell serves to underscore the significance of Heaven. Similarly, Nabokov trusts that even his most "beastly" narrators will point toward and even highlight the goodness and beauty that they themselves lack. [9]

This capacity to show light out of darkness is, in essence, what is meant by the phrase serving as this project's working title--"the virtue of devils." [10] Nabokov has shown, perhaps more consistently than any other author of our time, that diabolically wicked and frustratingly flawed fictional characters can lead readers, often surprisingly, to the most profound moral insights. I am inclined to describe the means by which Nabokov succeeds in this effect as a "phenomenology of the demonic"--which requires, in part, a little explanation.

As Paul Ricoeur has noted, "Taken alone the term 'phenomenology' is not very illuminating." [11] He continues to assert (disparagingly) that "any work devoted to the way anything whatsoever appears is already phenomenology." [12] While this proposed dissertation is thus "already phenomenology" in the sense that it is dedicated to a discussion of how the demonic appears to human consciousness, it is also more deeply and decisively phenomenological in both method and inspiration. Indeed, the project has emerged largely in response to crucial passages in two fundamental phenomenological treatises. First, there is Husserl's provocative comment in Ideas I that "the element which makes up the life of phenomenology as of all eidetic science is 'fiction', that fiction is the source whence the knowledge of 'eternal truths' draws its sustenance." [13] Secondly, there is the etymological revision of "phenomenology" that takes place in the Introduction to Being and Time, where Heidegger claims (gymnastically enough) that the term phenomenology means "to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself." [14]

Taken together, these two pioneering attempts to render the essence of phenomenology expressly recommend it as a method for investigating how fictional narratives meaningfully allow "that which shows itself [to] be seen from itself." I believe, moreover, that the admittedly difficult category of "the demonic" is particularly well suited for a phenomenological approach to the problem of evil. If the vast majority of philosophical and theological discussions of evil render it as a nullity or lack of being, then the word demonic, at least, gives palpable shape and substance to the structures of that so-called nullity. On the way to this terrible zero there is always a something--something which scandalizes, horrifies, or, perhaps, dazzles and enchants even as it destroys. It is this shifting, diabolical something--the demonic facticity of evil--that Nabokov succeeds in drawing out into the open light of narrative, letting it show itself as it appears in a variety of discernible forms.

Significance and Limitations of the Study
The basic premise at the heart of this project is that the literary imagination has an unique capacity for revealing complex truths--including not only truths about the human condition, but theological truths as well. At the same time, it is necessary to make these densely compacted, narrative truths accessible to thought by means of interpretive analysis. No single such interpretation can ever prove to be exhaustive; any given study is automatically delimited by its own predetermined objectives. In this sense, the selection of Nabokov, although by no means arbitrary, is not absolute; he is simply one of many talented authors to succeed, to some degree, in laying bare the structures of evil--exposing the demonic potential of desire, pride, envy, and self-concern. As such, however, he has quite appreciably helped to map a province or two of the vast territory of sin.

By examining relatively recent fictional works (published, for the most part, within the last fifty years), I intend to highlight and discuss those insights and descriptive innovations in Nabokov's fictions which appear as "new"--that is to say, those elements which constitute genuinely original contributions to an evolving understanding of "the demonic" as a complex theological symbol. At the same time, however, I am eager to excavate in Nabokov's thoroughly modern narratives the many recourses to earlier traditions--from the Bible and medieval visions of Hell to Romanticism and nineteenth-century literature. I intend to show how these religious and literary precursors have strongly (though, sometimes, so subtly as to have remained previously undetected) informed the substance of Nabokov's texts.

Admittedly, I shall not be the first to have noticed and critically engaged Nabokov's use of diabolical imagery and themes. Adam Weiner devoted a chapter to the subject in his book on "the demonic novel," [15] and a brief article on "Nabokov and the Devil" appeared in the Israeli journal Slavica Hierosolymitana. [16] However, even considering these brief surveys and other similar critical pieces, it can be stated emphatically that no single study nor group of studies has encompassed the sort of far-reaching, interdisciplinary treatment of Nabokov and the theme of the demonic that I am proposing. [17] In short, though others have indeed recognized Nabokov's exceptional preoccupation with the demonic, none have considered it fully or seriously enough from the standpoint of its existential and theological significance. This fact may stem, in large part, from the dubious status of "the demonic" itself as a theological concept. It is, perhaps, a laughably outmoded expression--still outfitted in horns and tail--in need of some renovation or rehabilitation. Consequently, although it is unmistakably beyond the limited sphere of Nabokov scholarship, I would acknowledge that just such a renovation is the greater goal of this proposed dissertation.

My analysis of selected works by Nabokov will be devoted to a relatively modest critical unpacking of situations that disclose themselves, by narrative means, as "demonic." In Lolita, for example, Humbert Humbert conspicuously employs the super-charged, symbolic language of the demonic to describe his pedophiliac urges ("how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child" [18] ). The reader must (and usually does) discern that it is the unreliable--indeed, downright criminal--narrator, and not the anonymous child, who is truly demonic; in this way, Nabokov effectively exposes demonizing-the-Other as an essential mode of diabolical deceit. [19] In-depth critical treatments of narrative situations such as these will, in turn, facilitate deeper, more nuanced readings of entire texts. The study will thus achieve new critical understandings of Nabokov's fiction and will work towards expressing and developing fundamental insights regarding the nature and agency of moral evil.

Method of Investigation
The dissertation will have a basic three-part structure: (1) an orientation to Nabokov, to his works, and to the study's own methodological and thematic concerns; (2) literary critical readings of specific, individual works, with a strong focus on three major novels and one minor one from Nabokov's English-language period; and (3) a concluding, general analysis of recurring thematic, symbolic, and stylistic elements in Nabokov's works as they relate to the particular focus of this study. The following is a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the proposed three-part dissertation:

Chapter 1: Introduction--Towards a Phenomenology of the Demonic through Literature
The study's opening chapter will be a brief, general introduction to the dissertation, including a discussion of its overarching intentions. Proceeding to a large degree (though not exclusively) from Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic analysis of the "symbolism of evil," [20] this introduction will provide a preliminary exposition of the methods to be employed in revealing a meaningful phenomenology of the demonic in and through Nabokov's works. Why, the question shall be posed, does a reportedly irreligious, "godless author" [21] such as Nabokov find recourse time and time again to the symbolic language of the demonic? Why, in the midst of fictions portraying all-too-human ethical failures, does Nabokov invoke so many devils--repeatedly relying on "diabolically evocative" [22] keywords?

These questions are answered, in part, by Ricoeur's claim that the inscrutability of evil requires an "insubstitutable language" of "elementary symbols." [23] He maintains that

Ricoeur is speaking here of the broadest and earliest "elementary symbols" relating to the human experience of evil: stain, infection, bondage, sin. My own study shall focus somewhat more closely on the related symbolic language of "the demonic," a defensible sub-category of the symbolism of evil typically represented by expressions of diabolical possession, temptation, enthrallment, deceit, damnation, torment, etc. It is, in fact, within the powerful and dangerous symbolic field of the demonic that one considers precisely "whether man admits his responsibility or claims to be the prey of an evil which takes hold of him." Overall, the introduction will more fully reiterate many points briefly sketched already in this prospectus.

Chapter 2: Authenticity and Engagement: Nabokov and the Tradition
Two of the principal charges leveled against Nabokov are that he is too frivolous--i.e., that his use of parody consistently reduces everything, even serious matters, to a great cosmic joke--and that he is too self-absorbed--i.e., that his aesthetic sense suffers from a hyper-reflexivity; an intrusive authorial self-consciousness bordering on solipsism. My second chapter will address these criticisms by showing that Nabokov did engage serious questions in an authentically concerned manner and that, far from being wholly self-reflexive, his works abound with meaningful allusions to a rich tradition of literary and artistic influences. The chapter will consist of several brief subsections, each exploring a particular connection between Nabokov's works and the "pre-texts" to which they make important suggestive allusions. Among the discussions to be included are brief treatments on "Nabokov and the Bible," "Dante and Bosch: The Medieval Vision of Hell," "Nabokov and Shakespeare," "Milton and Marvell," "Nabokov and Romanticism," and several such others. Examples from the whole of Nabokov's oeuvre, including his Russian-language works (in translation), will be utilized in this chapter. Although only an introductory chapter, this survey will provide a much-needed overview of Nabokov's often underestimated debt to the larger Western tradition.

Chapter 3: Desire and the Demonic in Nabokov: Lolita and Pale Fire
This chapter, which I anticipate to be the lengthiest and most challenging of the dissertation, will present an analysis of the deep-seated relationship between desire--primarily in the sense of erotic desire or desire for the Other--and the demonic. Nabokov's two most important novels will be addressed critically as indispensable fictional treatments of this theme, showing--from the inside out, as it were--how desire functions to facilitate the very worst in human conduct. It is anticipated that, throughout the chapter, the work of Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard--two major twentieth-century theorists of desire--will also be brought to bear on the investigation.

The chapter will proceed with a general discussion of the problem, briefly tracing the "indelible association" between eros and the demonic in religion and philosophy. [25] Obviously, the most threatening manifestations of desire--e.g., the jealousy that insists, even to the point of violence, upon possession of the beloved--can quite rightfully be called "demonic," even without a full rehearsal of this tradition. Why does erotic longing for another so often culminate (as it does in these fictions) in petty self-concern, cruelty, or violence? Is evil, as has sometimes been suggested, an outgrowth of desire? Why is human desire so often suffused with the chthonic--with the sense that dark, otherworldly powers of enchantment, possession, pain, and even madness are somehow at work?

To pursue answers to such questions, the chapter will undertake more-or-less independent treatments of two major novels: Lolita and Pale Fire. The relevance of Lolita is virtually self-evident: Humbert Humbert attributes his own uncontrollable impulses to the enthralling demonism of "nymphets"; he murders his "rival devil" [26] in desire, Claire Quilty; he vacillates sickeningly between honesty and prevarication--in short, desire makes a devil of him. Similarly, in Pale Fire, envy, self-concern, and unrequited homosexual desire all contribute to the inadvertent cruelty of its unbalanced narrator, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote is a grotesque, self-righteous egomaniac; he engages in a "broken" dialectic, having no genuine concern for the Other, while nevertheless being consumed by a solipsistic form of desire. He is also marked by a religiosity quite uncommon among Nabokovian characters, mixing pious talk of God and the Church with suggestive allusions to the disappointments of black ("goetic") magic and the double-crossing dealings of demons.

Pale Fire is unique in form, consisting of Kinbote's outrageously defective line-by-line commentary upon the last surviving poem by the book's other central character, John Shade. Throughout, Shade's kindness and sincerity shine through and stand in stark contrast to Kinbote's obscure blusterings. And yet, it is Kinbote himself who (like Humbert Humbert) is completely in charge of the proceedings; unwittingly, he reveals his own detestable selfishness, as well as his desperate loneliness and alienation. In this latter novel, perhaps even more so than in Lolita, the sadness and torment of ethical failure "shows itself from itself" in a powerful, thought-provoking way.

Chapter 4: The Inscription of Hell in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
In Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan proclaims that "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven" (Book 1, lines 254-255). Milton's verse here is particularly well-suited to the modern worldview which tends to regard the idea of Hell as representative of an existential or psychological situation. [27] This is to say that, in the modern idiom, Hell is almost always understood as (little more than) a "state of mind." This can be seen quite clearly in the various hells of twentieth-century literature: the bureaucratic hells of Kafka, the existentialist hells of Sartre, the squalid, strung-out hells of Burroughs, etc. Today, more than ever before, Hell in its literary manifestations seems indistinguishable from life as lived on earth.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that Vladimir Nabokov's Hell-inscribed novel Ada (ad is Russian for "hell") is so particularly striking. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Nabokov's longest and most elaborate novel, could very easily be viewed as a meditation upon Milton's Satanic proposition to "make a Heaven of Hell." The narrative takes place on Antiterra, also known as Demonia, a world like our own, but filled with innumerable little differences which appear as funhouse-mirror distortions of human history and culture. In some contradistinction to the hells of other twentieth-century fiction, however, the aesthetically beautiful Antiterra is not reducible to a mere state of mind or existential angst; it is an unique and powerfully rendered world unto itself. Moreover, for all its passing similarities to science fiction, it must be stated that Ada has much more in common with the visions of Dante, Milton, and (most especially) Hieronymus Bosch than with those of Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. LeGuin.

Ada's Antiterra is clearly identified in many instances with the Hell of mythology, theology, and art; however, this identification is profoundly complicated by the simultaneous depiction of Antiterra as a bountiful Edenic paradise (with explicit echoes of Marvell's famous poem "The Garden"). This, in part, is achieved through Nabokov's use of a thoroughly demonic narrator-protagonist (Van Veen) who presents the ardent, earthly delights of his "dark paradise" in stirring rhapsody. For all of Antiterra's aesthetic beauty, however, it remains a place marked by cruelty, excess, and ethical bankruptcy. Even Van Veen, who perceives little beyond the blissful splendors of his "happy" Hell (the greatest joy of which is his rapturous, lifelong, incestuous affair with his sister Ada), occasionally feels the terrible pang and passion brought about by disproportionate ardor. "Demonia" is constantly ablaze with the hellfire of infinite, unquenchable desire. By comparison, the middle ground of our own "fair Terra" seems positively heavenly in its sober moderation. In considering Nabokov's challenging novel--one which demonstrates some of the author's most deeply metaphysical, as well as artistic, concerns--this chapter will reflect upon not only literary and artistic but also theological conceptions of Hell and its relation to human life as we know it.

Chapter 5: Diabolical Evocations in Transparent Things
Nabokov's penultimate novel was a slim book; its poor initial critical reception quickly relegated it to the status of an inferior, "minor" work. Nevertheless, the odd, fascinating novella is, for all its brevity, a deeply affecting allegory, pointing in new ways toward the same dark depths as previous works. The story follows the oafishly clumsy, impotent, sleepwalking Hugh Person, whose name connotes the mythic universality of an everyman ("you, person"). By means of a neatly structured retrospective, dividing Person's life upon four visits to Switzerland, the reader glimpses, in outline, the whole of a life. [28] Throughout the novel, strange voices intrude upon the narrative; Nabokov, frustrated by baffled critics, identified these peculiar commentators as "ghosts"--most often, the ghost of one of the story's main characters, a disagreeable novelist named "R." who dies toward the book's conclusion. My chapter on Transparent Things will trace the strong demonic theme which threads--from Edenic allusions to the book's infernal conclusion--through Nabokov's most mythic, most allegorical, and most undervalued work.

Chapter 6: Sympathy for the Devil: Nabokov's Demonic Narrators and the Reader's Secret Share
The concluding portion of the dissertation will be a constructive, and not merely reiterative, summary of findings. After I have undertaken analyses of both fictional books and the phenomenological structures of evil those books expose, my goal is to treat the overall religious significance of the demonic in Nabokov's texts. This will be achieved by considering not only the ethical and metaphysical content of his works, but also by discussing the importance of stylistic elements and narrative form. Among the topics to be (re)assessed in the concluding analysis are: (1) the "confessional mode" of Nabokov's fictional autobiographies, (2) the meaning and consequences of contemplating diabolically unethical heroes and narrators, and (3) the "guilty" burden of the responsible reader and the ensuing requirements of witnessing (to) evil. This conclusion will, in general feeling, be an attempt to bring an ethical treatment of Nabokov's works into line with William James's compelling observation that "the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck." [29]

[2] The word authentic here could be glossed as "real and meaningful," bearing in mind that the experience could also be, for example, a "real" hallucination. [Cf., Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Collier Books, 1962, c1931.), p.237ff. (§88).] While this statement may seem merely to impart some demythologized, psychological meaning to the sundry monsters of myths, legends, and folklore, it is, instead, intended to acknowledge the untranslatable, experiential ("noematic") content given only in and through an encounter with the demonic itself. Certain events, experiences, and structures of experience appear to consciousness as demonic--the meaning of which is only partially educed by words like overwhelming, terrifying, devious, destructive, etc. All of this already indicates the general approach of a "phenomenology of the demonic" which brackets out the question of the objective reality of devils and diabolical promptings and instead concerns itself with the meaning of the demonic as it appears to human consciousness.

[3] Wayne Booth uses the example of Aesop's tale of the goose that lays golden eggs to elaborate upon the relative complexity involved in forming an ethical response even to a seemingly simple story. (The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988, p.138ff.) He goes on to show how "the complexities of our ethical inferences" have been multiplied by the "ironies within ironies" of modern narrative (p.148).

[5] This twice-emphasized matter of showing evil as it appears is intended to anticipate the discussion of a "phenomenology of the demonic" below.

[6] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Originally published 1955.), p.135.

[7] Robert Durling's translation of Canto 1, lines 4-9 (The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol. 1: Inferno. Edited and translated by Robert M. Durling, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p.27).

[8] It must be understood that Dante, in the Inferno, is not concerned with revealing a "luminescent secret hidden in the depths of" sin but, rather, with showing the manifold sinful violations of "the good"--light, love, intellect, etc. It is first and foremost this difficult recognition of sin as sin which allows the pilgrim Dante--the poem's narrative "I"--to proceed on his journey, through repentance, towards the genuinely luminous vision of God in Paradiso.

[9] It is clear that Nabokov maintains a strong distance even from his most eloquent narrators. He once described Humbert Humbert as "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching" (Strong Opinions, p.94). Later, upon the publication of Ada (1969), Nabokov would say of that book's beguiling narrator: "I loathe Van Veen" (SO, p.120). In a subsequent interview, on the other hand, he spoke favorably of his better-hearted, victimized characters, saying, "[M]y favorite creatures, my resplendent characters... are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel--and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride." (SO, p.193). See also the epigraph at the start of this prospectus.

[10] Undoubtedly, the phrase is pure oxymoronic nonsense if one understands it to suggest that devils--always, by any definition, agents of malevolence--are morally virtuous themselves; instead, one must consider the idea, wholly compatible with any number of orthodox theodicies, that devils-as-such ultimately fulfill some divinely apportioned function in the world. Furthermore, an etymological consideration of "virtue" itself shows the intrinsic value and correctness of the phrase: the OED's leading entry gives virtue as "the power or operative influence inherent in a supernatural or divine being." There is an active power with which to contend in the demonic. Even more importantly, however, the phrase is intended to suggest that the "strength" and "power" of the demonic derives from "man" (vir) himself: i.e., the will-to-evil requires human agency as a conduit.

[11] Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1967), p.202.

[12] Ibid., p.202. The context is Ricoeur's attempt to identify for the term phenomenology a "disciplined limitation of its usage," particularly with regard to the field of "existential phenomenology."

[14] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), p.58.

[15] Adam Weiner, "Nabokov and the Exorcism of the Novel" in By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1998), pp.189-226. Weiner's treatment is problematic because it argues that Nabokov's recurring use of demonic imagery represents, above all, a wholly parodic attempt to "exorcise" the all-too-prevalent devils of Russian literature. Weiner therefore seems to say, quite paradoxically, that Nabokov's demons and demonic keywords appear merely to show that they should not be there at all--a rather difficult conclusion, to my mind. Despite his conclusions, Weiner provides clear proof of Nabokov's diabolical themes and recognizes their inherently ethical content. I would contend, however, that Nabokov's use of demonic language and imagery is, in the end, only partially ironic.

[16] Ronen, Irena, and Omry Ronen, "'Diabolically Evocative': An Inquiry into the Meaning of a Metaphor." Slavica Hierosolymitana. Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University, Vol. 5-6 (Jerusalem, 1981), pp.371-386.

[17] Several treatments of Nabokov's works approach, in some respect or another, the kind of study I am proposing--though none anticipate it fully. Ellen Pifer, for example, has an excellent chapter in her book Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980) entitled "Heaven, Hell, and the Realm of Art: Ada's Dark Paradise" (pp.132-157). While her appraisal of that particular novel is, as might be assumed, close to my own, the overall treatment she provides neither adopts nor precludes the perspective I intend to bring to the topic--namely, an interdisciplinary perspective much more explicitly informed by the study of religion.

[19] This is necessarily an extremely foreshortened example of the sort of analysis the dissertation will undertake.

[20] While this analysis is principally carried out in Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), important related treatments and elaborations also appear in Fallible Man (Revised translation. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1986) and The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1974).

[21] Nabokov applies this atheistic phrase to himself in his preface to King, Queen, Knave (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p.x.

[22] The phrase "diabolically evocative" appears in Nabokov's novel Transparent Things (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), discussed below in the synopsis of the dissertation's fifth chapter.

[25] The religious manifestations of this association are so well established as to seem customary. Biblical scripture--spanning from the sexual undercurrents of the Edenic expulsion to the terrible allure of the Revelator's whore of Babylon--undoubtedly promoted certain archetypal connections between eros and evil. The medieval European tradition effectively systematized many implicit Judeo-Christian and mythological associations between sexual desire and radical evil by formulating demonological folklore which eroticized the Devil and his minions. Even a comparative religious perspective reveals, cross-culturally, the same fundamental connection: Mara, the Buddhist parallel to Satan, is unequivocally identified with desire itself.
To trace this archetypal correlation within philosophy, one could quite justifiably begin with the passage in Plato's Symposium in which the prophetess Diotima proclaims that "Eros is a great daimon"--an intermediary spirit understood as neither good nor evil. For all the potential ambiguity of Diotima's remark (daimon, after all, though the source of the Judeo-Christian "demon," did not bear strong negative connotations for the ancient Greeks), her supporting observations nevertheless explicitly describe both the immortal powers and the considerable deficiencies (ethical and aesthetic) inhering in love and desire. (Cf., Symposium §202ff.) The modern philosophical tradition--from Kant to Levinas--takes up the question of desire quite explicitly as an ethical matter: a philosophy of the will, concerned especially with how the willing subject relates to the Other. Hegel's treatment of desire in The Phenomenology of Spirit is almost certainly the most important and influential in the modern era; it will therefore receive at least some attention in the dissertation, however foreshortened. Nevertheless, it is Levinas's critique of Hegel--in tandem with René Girard's socio-cultural theories of desire, rivalry, and violence--which will likely prove more valuable to the present project.

[27] It must be remembered that the words are uttered by Satan, who is rationalizing his status and making a virtue of the evil to which he is now inextricably tied. Significantly, the devil who elaborates the notion of making "a heaven of hell" is Mammon, who stands for something like artifice in competition with nature and natural good. A nearly identical grouping of issues--artifice, aestheticism, sovereignty, the rationalization of evil, etc.--is decidedly taken up throughout Nabokov's Ada.

[28] The first trip, taken at age twenty-two, is a father-and-son affair, during which Hugh's father (with whom Hugh had been angry that morning) abruptly dies. On the second visit, ten years later, he meets his cruel wife-to-be, Armande, whom he will later accidentally strangle to death in his sleep while dreaming. The third is a business trip to consult the renowned author "R." on his overdue novel. Finally, on the fourth visit, Person dies in a hotel fire, while mournfully revisiting his honeymoon suite.

[29] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor Books, 1958), p.55.