Abraham Adams wrote: In light of all of VN's comments on his own works' aesthetic autonomy and lack of social significance, etc, I think it might be interesting to discuss this story's similarity to certain Formalist ideas ( following JM suggestion to examine the relationship bt. Nabokov,symbolist poets and, in particular, Baudelaire's "Correspondances". Abraham states that " This particular poem was taken up by Russian Formalist Vjacheselav Ivanov as a semiotic theory..."

Next he wrote: VN's opposition to the Soviet literary traditions seems pretty clear:as Donald Barton Johnson observes in an August 1993 post to the list (...) Does referential mania add anything to the tempting similarity of "total lack of social significance" (VN) to "art has always been free of life" (Shklovsky)? [...] As far as I understand the relationship to “higher reality” seen in Ehrlich/Ivanov, it refers to the realm of significance/meaning (the unity of this and a higher reality quickly becomes a unity of signifier and signifier- so the only higher reality appears to be that of meaning). But I recall various statements by both VNs about the work's “otherworldliness”--

What I can advance, though, is that "Delusions of Reference" appear in what was formerly named "Manic Depressive Psychosis" and in "Paranoia." but I found no designation of "referential mania", as such).
Common dictionaries describe "mania", "manic states" and inform that the word "mania" comes from the Greek for "madness".

As I wrote before, I consider "madness" ("mania") in Nabokov a sign for his having introduced elements that defy "common-sense" and that pertain to his own other-world metaphysics and his vision of art/science.
In the case of S&S, VN described the adolescent's plights in detail without considering standard psychological terms or a precise symptomatology ( the narrator had the parent's describe how the young man "excluded real people from the conspiracy.")

Nevertheless, VN might have based his stories on details observed in people he knew. At the time when the novel was written little was known about autism, and Asperger in particular ( the "Savant's" extraordinary mnemonic and intellectual feats, talent with numbers, chess-games and often, synaesthesia) but VN must have met young boys who had these talents: Alexander Luzhin's phobias and his unsociability at school, his genius with chess are suggestive of it and, in the present novel, so are the boy's initial behavior, lack of social skills, "inventiveness", drawing abilities. Also his parents considered him a "prodigiously gifted child".
After a prolonged convalescence from pneumonia we learn that things radically changed because the boy became "totally inaccessible to normal minds." ( a revealing way of describing his affliction) and, in my opinion, it was when the "normal" people of his environment began to consider him "mentally deranged". So the unfortunate boy was institutionalized!
I believe it is only on paragraph seven, part one, that VN uses his trademark style writing about "minute and module...undulation ...volume and volubility...granite and groaning.." to give word to the adolescent's misdirected hypersensitivity.

The reference to the Symbolists came from Nabokov's Otherworld by Vladimir E. Alexandrov, when he explained that "irony and faith need not be incompatible. Indeed, this blend was fundamental for the German Romanatics...and was widespread amont the Symbolists... Another link between Nabokov's metaphysics and aesthetics hinges on his seminal epiphanic experiences..."(page 7,Ardis) Both Mallarmé and Baudelaire were known to have "synesthaesia", like Nabokov.

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