The word “metempsychosis” is pronounced by Alfyorov in a conversation with Ganin about the “old life in Russia.” It is a term that refers to the transmigration of souls or reincarnation, and one that, interestingly, is the basis for an important thematic in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), but also deployed by other high modernists such as Eliot, Borges, and Proust. Alfyorov seems to connect the term with nostalgia and the aforementioned permanency of waiting. A term just in the air in the 1920s? Or a word that symptomatically shows the influence of Buddhism and other religions on Western modernism, as well as whatever biographical linkages can be discerned between these writers?
Now knowing that Alfyorov’s wife is his former beloved, Ganin rushes into the street and witnesses the flashing of a neon sign on a building spelling out in gigantic letters the phrase “Can–it–be–possible.” In this moment of illumination, the night sky becomes a vast field of signs and portents: “But then who can tell what it really is that flickers up there in the dark above the houses—the luminous name of a product or the glow of human thought; a sign, a summons; a question hurled into the sky and suddenly getting a jewel-bright, enraptured answer?” This is an early instance of the many recognition scenes in Nabokov’s novels, in which the world is filled with mystery and significance for an enraptured protagonist.