Speaking of present tense, have been reading an interesting study by Vladimir Alexandrov, called Nabokov's Otherworld. About the nature of VN's "metaphysics" & its influence on his art. Although Alexandrov emphasizes the novelist's originality, he mentions Proust's fiction as showing some similarities in their presentations of time, eternity, nature, the afterlife. That "the present" is not what it seems in an everyday sense, as neither are life nor death, and that art gives an image or a form to a reality of mystery, "simultaneity".