“The Big and Noble Family of Barbiturates”: Proust, Nabokov, and the Literary History of the Sleeping Pill

Scant attention has been devoted to the depictions of sleep and insomnia within Vladimir Nabokov’s body of work. Yet the author was closely acquainted with Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), a book unrivaled in literary history for its fixation on various states of slumber and their nuances. This presentation illuminates how sleep scenes in Nabokov’s writings consistently rework and reinterpret passages from Proust’s autobiographical novel. The eponymous sleeping pills serve as an exemplary connecting thread between the two authors. At stake, however, is neither the mere identification of a recurring motif or theme nor a quest to unearth allusions. The central concern is exploring the poetics and literary strategies of two authors who seek to convey the elusiveness of sleep, a state which notoriously resists representation.

Sebastian Klinger received his Ph.D. in literary studies from Princeton University in 2021. He was the Matthews Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, before taking up his present position as Universitätsassistent / Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna. His forthcoming monograph, Sleep Works: Sleep Experiments in Literature and Science, 1899–1929, investigates the representation of sleep in German and French modernist literature and in contemporary scientific and pharmaceutical discourses. His second book project, Poetics of Habitability: Literature and Life in the Anthropocene, connects this focus on literature and science to the environmental humanities. Sebastian’s articles have appeared in (or are forthcoming with) journals such as DVjs, Representations, and Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.

Co-sponsored by Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of French, and Whitney Humanities Center 

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