The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s first novel in English, was completed in Paris in 1938, first published by New Directions in 1941, reissued in 1959 to wide critical acclaim, and now relaunched again with an appreciative introduction by Pulitzer-Prize winning critic Michael Dirda. This, the narrator tells us, is the real life of famous author Sebastian Knight, the inside story. After Knight’s death, his half-brother sets out to penetrate the mystery of the famous English novelist’s life, but he is impeded by the false, the distorted, the irreverent.…