There’s perhaps no more ardent proponent of “art for art’s sake” than the Vladimir Nabokov of Strong Opinions. In that book of self-interviews, Nabokov repeatedly skewers the notion that art should have social orientation. For him, fiction presents its own new reality, glimpsed through the looking glass of an author’s aesthetic and linguistic obsessions. Nabokov’s ideal novel owes nothing to what we might collectively call “real life.”...