Essay from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1.2, Durham University, language: English, abstract: The clinical picture of paranoid narcissism and its inherent contradictions provides a particularly useful framework for revisiting Nabokov's work. The premise that the novels are studies of paranoid selves, who suffer from an interpretive delirium that rejects the real in order to impose meaning, has not been explored in sufficient depth to date. A more developed understanding of the pathology of paranoia and schizophrenia as delusional disorders helps to elucidate that the protagonists are locked in internally consistent systems of false beliefs. Their alternating states of grandeur and persecution are an implicit critique of Modernism's tendency to professionalize artists and art criticism.