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This article examines the narrative technique employed by V. V. Nabokov in his novel “Pale Fire,” reflecting postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives by subverting the formal elements of literary texts. The narrative is presented through the lens of an unreliable first-person narrator, Charles Kinbote, who, in his self-appointed role as commentator on John Shade’s poetic text, challenges established narrative norms, thereby destabilizing the structure of the novel. The aim of this study is to trace how Kinbote’s irrationalist approach to linguistic nominations complicates the reader’s access to the deeper meanings embedded within the text. It is established that the theme of Shade’s poem, which serves as the subject of Kinbote’s academic commentary, possesses an unstable form, leaving the reader unable to definitively identify character representations or ascertain whether the presented version of the poem is final. The unreliable narrator oscillates between two distinct narrative threads — one pertaining to the universe of New Wye and the other to the imagined world of Zembla — while simultaneously adopting various identities. The conclusion drawn is that the psychological profile of the commentator calls into question the veracity of his character, as he struggles to assess the relevance of disparate fragments of information.

Nabokovian scholarship has consistently emphasised the plurilingual aspects in Nabokov’s oeuvre. His American novels frequently include numerous sentences in Russian and French, which are often translated or discussed from a metalinguistic angle by the author. A remarkable example in this regard is the autobiography Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited (1966), which conjures up various places where Nabokov spent different periods of his life, along with the languages overlapping in his European memoirs. Considering that the coexistence of foreign terms and expressions is common in Nabokov’s works, this article aims to analyse the linguistic architecture and aspects of self-translation in one of his American novels, Pnin. While this study dwells on the numerous grammatical and phonetic inaccuracies that feature in the protagonist’s dialogues, it also means to investigate the issue pertaining to the translator’s (in)visibility in the text. The analysis will be carried out in light of Venuti’s (2018) theories, which foreground the crucial yet often overlooked role of the translator, particularly in contexts where translation is domesticated. By quoting various examples of self-translated expressions from the novel, as well as grammatical and phonetic mistakes, the article traces the linguistic borders in the story, shedding light on the work of the translator, whose presence becomes discernible through the foreignizing effect generated by the numerous non-English words, mistakes and inaccuracies. The work thus engages with the issue of Nabokov’s (in)visibility in the story, since the translator’s presence is not always detectable as the storyline progresses. The alternation of domestication and foreignization, linguistic adaptation and estrangement, is infused with the writer’s investigation into his linguistic past which, in Cronin’s (2013, 19) words, sheds light on the “historical sense” of the languages employed. The exploration of Nabokov’s linguistic past, expressed through numerous foreignisms, paves the way for an analysis of the writer’s double, thereby providing a more nuanced illustration of Nabokov’s linguistic transition.

The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce's Ulysses; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, reflecting its plot pattern and its cluster of concerns; and (3) blazon, which helps to convey the implied author's critique of the attitudes of the first-person narrator of Lolita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the musical context of the works of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. Joyce's Ulysses, one of the most important literary texts of the twentieth century, is filled with musical allusions and various musical techniques. The chapter "Sirens" is the most interesting in this context as it features a "musical" form and contains a large number of musical quotations. The myth of the singing sirens, recreated by Joyce in images and characters from the modern world, encapsulates the idea of erotic seduction, bringing threat and doom to the seduced. Joyce offers a new version of the sea world filled with music, creating a system of musical leitmotifs and lexical patterns within the text. Developing the themes of temptation, the danger that temptation entails, doom, uniting with the vital forces of the world, and loneliness, Joyce in "Sirens" reveals the semantics of music, showing the specific nature of its effect on listeners. Vladimir Nabokov, who praised Ulysses and devoted a lecture to "Sirens", is much less musical than Joyce. However, he, like Joyce, also refers to the images of singing sirens and the accompanying images of the aquatic world. One of the central, meaning-making signs in his work is the "Sirin complex", his pseudonym. This sign, which refers to a large number of pretexts, refers in particular to the lilac (siren') and to the mythological "musical" sirens. As in Joyce's work, sirens are present in his texts as mermaids and naiads, or as figures of seducers who fulfil their function and bring doom. Joyce and Nabokov are also united by the presence of recurrent leitmotifs, lexical patterns, and the presence of auditory impressions in their text that are evoked by the sound of the everyday world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article weaves the impossibilities of Dambudzo Marechera's life under colonialism, racism, poverty, and violence, and of love between the Zimbabwean poet and the German scholar, Flora Veit-Wild. In this article, Veit-Wild is characterized as an "unreliable narrator" and "inside trader" due to her relationship with the poet. However, it is this position of Veit-Wild that allows us to decipher one of Marechera's most difficult poems, "My Arms Vanished Mountains." In using Veit-Wild as a window into my intepretation of Marechera, I also link Marechera's poetics with that of a highly unlikely counterpart, Vladimir Nabokov. The impossibilities I allude to find their representation in Dambudzo Marechera's "My Arms Vanished Mountains," the poem Veit-Wild saved by chance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Edward Albee's stage adaptation (1981) of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is universally regarded as an unqualified failure. This contribution seeks to recover the play from critical neglect by arguing that it not just productively interprets and transforms the source text but also critically comments on its implications regarding the relationship between artist and creation, audience and art, and ethics and aesthetics. The play features an anthropomorphised equivalent to the novel's implied author in the character of 'A Certain Gentleman' (ACG), a figure uniting features of (imagined) Nabokov and Albee, who introduces himself to the audience as the creator of Humbert and guides them through the plot while commenting on the action, alternatively trying to distance himself from his creation, trying to teach him moral values, or admonishing the audience to show empathy. In the interplay of Humbert, Lolita, and ACG, the play stages an emancipatory dialogue between artist and creation, using the presentational character of (epic) theatre to level diegetic hierarchies. Just as Lolita emancipates itself from Nabokov in the act of adaptation, so Humbert emancipates himself from ACG and Lolita from Humbert. In the same way, the play encourages an emancipation on the part of the audience from a position of passive spectatorship by cultivating a critical engagement with the discordant discourses of theatrical narration, presentation, and spectatorship in a dialogic of identification and distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on discovering emotional and evaluative overtones in Vladimir Nabokov's short story "Terror." Based on a thorough examination of the story and meticulous analysis of dictionary and thesaurus definitions of the notions conveying emotions in it, the author constructs a text associative semantic field (TASF) with the nucleus represented by the lexeme "terror" and the periphery with its synonyms and associations. Such an approach to researching an artwork's overall emotional tone constitutes the paper's novelty. The study has demonstrated that many words belonging to the field appear to be involved in diverse linguistic devices that are dispersed throughout the story and create a more sophisticated layer of meaning and subcontext that allows for a more profound understanding of the character's emotional state and detection of hidden emotional and evaluative overtones. Specifically, apart from the leading emotion of terror and its synonyms from the fear cluster, multiple emotional and evaluative overtones have been discovered, including terror-disgust, terror-rage, terror-surprise, and terrorgrief. Overall, the comprehensive linguistic investigation has proven the complexity and depth of human emotions, the unique character of their verbal representation, and the multi-layered nature of the short story where they are so skillfully concealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Pain as a positive phenomenon is rare in literary s tudies, especially in those related to Nabokov. This research, for the firs t time, discusses the ideas of Damasio on emotions and consciousness and applies them to the character of Luzhin through a close reading of the text to show how the individual's lived experiences are vital in his formation of consciousness and survival. Background: Brian Boyd in his extensive biography of Nabokov contends, "In creating Luzhin, Nabokov uses his eye for psychological quirks common to us all but rarely attended to" (323). He believes Nabokov creates vivid worlds out of details that can place readers "wherever his imagination sends the shots" (324). Masing compares Luzhin with Gogol's Bashmakhin of "The Overcoat" to conclude both are fascinated with abs tract patterns, having no defense agains t the chills of life. Farmasi considers patterns of consciousness to be easily observable in The Defense as it engages the reader with Luzhin's consciousness through representations of his experiences and perceptions. She believes Luzhin's s tory can be read as "an allegory of the relationship between narrative patterns and experience" (40). Kalay discusses the complicated character of Luzhin and considers his escape from reality as a force to death. Boyd, in his essay on therole of senses, writes: we are always embedded in experiences and Nabokov depicts them as artis tically multidimensional. Methodology and Argument:Antonio Damasio, the prominent contemporary neuroscientis t, in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, focuses on emotions and consciousness. He believes consciousness and emotions are inseparable, as are embodied and embedded. Hence, emotions are not jus t the by-product of consciousness; but are also influential in its formation. He divides 'the self in three types: proto-self (reflection of the the body's internal s tate), core-self (a sense of ownership to emotions) and autobiographical self (integration of memories, emotions, and personal experiences into a coherent narrative). By "self" being updated, consciousness is formed in three levels proto, core, and extended. He concludes that the self is not fixed and is in cons tant change based on experiences. Therefore, the extended consciousness which is formed in this way can help the individual to survive. Luzhin is presented in three interwoven phases: his childhood in which he "flinches from life's pinpricks and jagged edges (Boyd RY 326), the genius of his early youth, and the final years when he is disappointed to have survived and commits suicide. Nabokov introduces a fatal pattern into his life by depicting him as a locked genius who has difficulty communicating and is driven to seclusion. For years he has jus t chess in mind; so, his definition of self is limited to proto-self. He lacks the experiences that he needs for his core self or his autobiographical self to bes tow on his identity and meaning. Based on Damasio, there grows a big gap between Luzhin and his emotions, so his "self" is not able to update itself, leading to a true formation of deep or extended consciousness. Conclusion: The character of Luzhin is s tudied based on the ideas of Damasio to find how emotions and consciousness work. The analysis shows when man limits the array of experiences, he is depriving himself of knowing his emotions. These emotions can update one's self, which in turn can form one's core consciousness. Luzhin locks himself in his loneliness and runs to the black-and-white world of chess. Unable to have sincere communication, he prefers to get hold of the chess board rather than manage his being. If experiences are escaped, there would remain no way out as there is no consciousness or memory at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este trabajo pretende poner el foco en el tipo de relación que se establecen entre los distintos elementos que comprenden un texto literario, tanto constructivamente como la comunicación interpretativa implícita entre escritor y lector. Para ello, se utilizan dos modelos literarios no ficticios: Los diarios de Emilio Renzi: Años de formación y Habla, memoria, el primer tomo de la autobiografía de Ricardo Piglia y la autobiografía de Vladimir Nabokov, respectivamente. Usando como marco teórico al formalista Yuri Tyniánov se leen las dos obras siguiendo el camino trazado por las series que la componen, tanto temática como formalmente. This essay intends to focus on the way the various elements that give shape to a literary text interact with each other, either in a constructive sense or in the implicit interpretative relationship between writer and reader. In order to do so, we have used two non-fictional literary models and a single fictional one: The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The formative Years, first volume of Ricardo Piglia’s autobiography, Speak, memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography and Ulysses by James Joyce. Using the formalist Yuri Tyniánov as theoretical framework, the three volumes are read following the path drawn by the series that structure them, thematically and formally.

Vladimir Nabokov - the Russian and American writer is the author of two novelistic anti-utopias: Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, in which he expressed his political views, although he usually declared himself as an apolitical writer. In both works the author exposes the mechanisms of communism and German fascism, warns readers against the enslavement of totalitarian ideology, against passivity in the face of violence and manipulation. Nabokov’s categorical political views stem from the fact that he experienced the consequences of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and World War II, as a result of which he had to flee, first from his native Russia and then from war-torn Europe. The novel Bend Sinister allows direct association of the world depicted with the reality of persecution and repression under Hitlerism, with the morally distorted system of the police state. Nabokov opposes evil, condemns it in all its forms, advocates good, which cannot be seen in the political reality presented by the writer, in the novel’s totalitarian world. It is the duty of the writer to criticize and discredit criminal political ideologies, Nabokov thus emphasizes the importance of goodness and morality in human life.

How might a novel play tennis? In a New York Times essay on Roger Federer, David Foster Wallace reflects on how the climactic topspin lob that won Wimbledon for Federer in 2006 was a product of narrative, reliant on a sequence of bluffs, building up to a final unreturnable shot whose genius lay in its 'unimaginable angle.' Tennis becomes fiction here, both in the sense that the final shot is unreal and that it is Rafael Nadal's imagination that is ultimately overwhelmed by Federer's spin. In this essay I consider how Wallace and Vladimir Nabokov's most tennis-obsessed novels, Infinite Jest and Lolita, achieve the equivalent of tennis's 'unimaginable angles' in their language and form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using modern terms of morality to evaluate the sexual attitude of Humbert towards Lolita, which constitutes the central subject matter of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (2005), most readers view the novel as erotica, a piece of literature that glamorizes amoral sexuality and rebels against humans' morality. This view feasibly condemns the sexual relationship between a forty-year-old male and a twelve-year-old girl-child nymphet; nevertheless, it overlooks the insistence of the novel's fictitious narrator and editor that the narrative is ethical and heavily loaded with pro morality messages. To resolve this perspectival dichotomy, this article revisits Humbert's love of Lolita contending that the relationship between Humbert and Lolita constitutes a form of courtly love, not rape or pedophilia. Relying on the medieval definition of courtly love, the article argues that Humbert is better viewed as a medieval lover whose love-based sexuality towards Lolita is ennobling and transcendent. By so doing, the article discharges Humbert’s love of Lolita from any modern connotations of animalistic carnality, thus maintaining the narrative’s obsessive involvement in the medieval culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares and contrasts Vladimir Nabokov's and Witold Gombrowicz's various kinds of instructions in order to find out how they work in metafiction. The complicated relationship with the readerdom—a struggle (Gombrowicz) or a clash (Nabokov)—is discussed within an intertwined framework of theoretical approaches to audiences, readers, and the texts. This examination aims at a shift of the study of metafiction—fiction which problematizes its fictional reality—to an aesthetic-response perspective while characterizing a specific type: instructive metafiction. In Gombrowicz's case, one and the same instruction may appear several times, because it is only that way that mythology is created, and instructions turn out to be what Gombrowicz calls "Form," which is to be wrestled with by the implied reader. In Nabokov's case, instructions place the implied reader in the created world, in which he is "the perfect dictator" so that he could also control the reader as a fictional character, for as long as we "live" in his house, we ought to obey his house rules. Thus, this essay probes a scholarly discussion on metafiction with a self-reflexive layer by not only (re) reading with authorial instructions, and (un)reading against them, but also by analyzing instructions themselves and their interaction with various audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the musical context of the works of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the most important literary texts of the twentieth century, is filled with musical allusions and various musical techniques. The chapter “Sirens” is the most interesting in this context as it features a “musical” form and contains a large number of musical quotations. The myth of the singing sirens, recreated by Joyce in images and characters from the modern world, encapsulates the idea of erotic seduction, bringing threat and doom to the seduced. Joyce offers a new version of the sea world filled with music, creating a system of musical leitmotifs and lexical patterns within the text. Developing the themes of temptation, the danger that temptation entails, doom, uniting with the vital forces of the world, and loneliness, Joyce in “Sirens” reveals the semantics of music, showing the specific nature of its effect on listeners. Vladimir Nabokov, who praised Ulysses and devoted a lecture to “Sirens”, is much less musical than Joyce. However, he, like Joyce, also refers to the images of singing sirens and the accompanying images of the aquatic world. One of the central, meaning-making signs in his work is the “Sirin complex”, his pseudonym. This sign, which refers to a large number of pretexts, refers in particular to the lilac (siren’) and to the mythological “musical” sirens. As in Joyce’s work, sirens are present in his texts as mermaids and naiads, or as figures of seducers who fulfil their function and bring doom. Joyce and Nabokov are also united by the presence of recurrent leitmotifs, lexical patterns, and the presence of auditory impressions in their text that are evoked by the sound of the everyday world.

The article is dedicated to the subject of the crucifixion in Russian lyric poetry of 19th–21st centuries. It studies five poems that present different images of Calvary. Analyzing A.S. Pushkin’s “Worldly power” we discover a lexical connection of the poem to prayers and liturgical texts. The poem “When rowan leaves are dank and rusting…” by A.A. Blok requires consideration from two angles: among his other Christological poems and in the light of a general among symbologists tendency of eroticizing Christian images. We demonstrate that the subject of co-crucifixion is natural for Blok, that it was slowly emerging in his lyric poetry of the 1900s. The article analyzes O.E. Mandelstam’s poem “The implacable words…” in the context of his lyric poetry of the 1910s, as well as in comparison to the later variation of the image (“Like chiaroscuro’s martyr Rembrandt…”). The research reveals “maternal projection” of the subject of Calvary on the example of the poem “Mother” by V.V. Nabokov, passages from A.A. Akhmatova’s poem "Requiem” and I.A. Brodsky's poem “Still-life.” El.A Shvarts’s poem “Rembrandt’s etching — Christ and the thieves” represents ekphrastic versions of the biblical story.

Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Hamlet’s soliloquy is compared to the original text and Boris Pasternak’s version. The translators had different views on the theory of translation which manifests through different approaches taken by Nabokov and Pasternak when they were translating Shakespeare’s conceptual metaphors. Nabokov’s aspiration for literal translation is put in contrast with «intentional freedom» of Pasternak’s «Hamlet». It is noted that Nabokov’s translation is much closer to the English text in terms of semantic content but nonetheless lacks idiomatic «naturalness» of Pasternak’s translation.

The following article off ers a theoretical interpretation of Nabokov’s aphorism on Joyce’s inner monologues. Nabokov supposed that thinking is extraverbal and cannot be fully embodied in a word. He assumed that James Joyce was wrong to materialize the stream of inner life in a rigid verbal form. For Nabokov, thinking as an uninterrupted continuum of psychological states, should be opposed to the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique and should be moved towards the lyrical synthetism. In order to embody the narrative mode, the author puts forward the method of synthetic technique, which dissolves the word material in the pervasive fl ow of meaning. The unifi ed meaning of the word undergoes deformation and gains a fl exible, fl uid-like form, pours/merges completely with other words, forming a versatile palette of meanings. Nabokov’s fundamental principles were structurally related to the intuitive philosophy of A. Bergson, who considered the ‘stream of consciousness’ as an indivisible melody, but an improperly considered artistic montage of mental states (in Joyce’s prose). Theorists of the ‘stream of consciousness’ (L. S. Vygotsky, A. Bergson) assumed that the ‘stream’ cannot be divided into moments, objects and forms, it is a syncretic formation, which cannot be subjected to the reverse decomposition into words. Applied to literature, this statement means literature cannot be retold. Then the author comes to the conclusion that Nabokov’s late prose is substantially synthetic, it implements the principle of duration at the deepest level of speech, which allows us to say that the Russian-speaking writer completely actualized the principles of Bergsonism when in the Gift, through the flowing speech, he portrayed consciousness as elusive and indefinable. Thus, the facts of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s spiritual life cannot be grasped by intellectual means, they can only be contemplated intuitively.

Since its publication in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov's contentious novel Lolita has stirred heated controversies that originated from Nabokov's treatment of a thorny subject matter. What makes his achievement so stupendous is that he penned a book about a forbidden desire and succeeded in persuading his reader to feel for the deviant. The present study intends to fathom Nabokov's success in his art of deception drawing on Søren Kierkegaard's existentialist ideologies of aestheticism and despair in order to offer a new insight regarding the elements used in Humbert's narration and character which bestow upon him the distinctive personality of the aesthete. Referring to Kierkegaard's spheres of existence introduced in his "Either/Or," it is suggested that Humbert, similar to Kierkegaard's Johannes, aesthetically alienates himself from commitment and consequence while keeping an eye open for the interesting and relishing sensual immediacy. It is this shrewd aestheticizing of Humbert's character that grants him his unique status that has elicited both attraction and aversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to identifying the poetological and semantic features of V. Nabokov’ short stories “The Word” and “The Thunderstorm”. The analysis of the first of them is directly connected with the theme of verbal art, important to Nabokov, which in this case acts as the semantic center of the work and is realized through the comparison of two contrastive plans set, on the one hand, by the motif of the hero’s verbal weakness, and on the other, by the motif of “shining”, explanatory divine word. The content of these two plans is shaded by the theme of the otherworldly, a double-world, which are significant of the entire Nabokov’s art. To clarify the writer’s intention, the author of the article turns to the two most important pretexts of “The Word”: the poems of A. Pushkin and F. Tyutchev. The article demonstrates that, focusing on the works of his predecessors, Nabokov borrowed from them those techniques and motifs that could be most organically inscribed in his own artistic system: Nabokov refuses not only to depict his hero against the background of concrete historical reality, but also from the desire to substantiate his psychological reactions. The conventional world-model of the story is subordinated to game strategies aimed at comprehending the essence of creativity and its role in human life. Only the word, taken in its aesthetic function, is capable, according to Nabokov, to bring a person closer to the secrets of existence, to penetrate into the realm of the otherworldly, rationally incomprehensible. Thus, the angelic Word, rendered in the title, acts as a metaphor for creativity, embodied by Nabokov in the artistic fabric of the work. In the aspect of realizing the themes of double world and verbal creativity, the article also analyzes “The Thunderstorm”, which clearly reveals game narrative strategies. Thus, Nabokov’s method of “an open finale” assimilated by the literary tradition appears as a false narrative move, emphasizing the author’s modernistic intentions. Using the example of the analysis of the indicated stories, the article shows that Nabokov’s poetics vividly demonstrates the principles of modernistic writing with its headline setting on creative comprehension and figurative reflection of the irrational foundations of human life.

The review traces papers of the International conference V. Nabokov and Transatlantic Relations in American and European culture hosted at Saint Petersburg State University on May14–16, 2021. Scholars in various fields of humanities traced the routes of intercontinental cultural contacts of the XX-th century to construct a global context to understand Vladimir Nabokov as a paradigmatic transatlantic figure. The main direction which was discussed in papers of D. Ioffe, T. Venediktova, G. Kruzhkov, O. Panova, A. Astvatsaturov, O. Antsyferova, I. Golovacheva, A. Shvets, O. Sokolova, traditionally turned out to be American and British. The Russian cultural context viewed through the transatlantic prism was outlined by E. Penskaya, V. Feshchenko, A. Rodionova, A. Masalov, Y. Probstein, C. Bernstein and by Marjorie Perloff. The issues of transatlantic transfer in Romanesque literatures were presented in the papers of L. Muravieva, A. Petrova, V. Popova and I. Khohlova. The speakers discussed Franco-American autofiction, the images of Americans in the works of G. Apollinaire and the history of Soviet-Latin American and Portuguese-American poetic contacts, German and Scandinavian contexts viewed the in light of transatlantic problems. Discussion of Vladimir Nabokov works summed up a kind of outcome of the conference that brought together linguists (A. Kretov, Zh. Gracheva), historians of literature and culture (D. Tokarev, A. Bolshev, N. Shcherbak, A. Stepanova, N.A. Karpov ), scholars of poetics and narratology (F. Dvinyatin, V. Schmid, E. Kazartsev, D.Yu. Dovzhenko, N.I. Emelyanova).

Цель данной работы: рассмотрение концепта «пространство» в романе В. В. Набокова “Transparent Things” посредством сравнительного анализа его вербальных репрезентаций в оригинальном тексте романа и переводе С. Б. Ильина. Представлена структура концепта «пространства» в романе В. В. Набокова, показано его разнообразие. Теоретическая и практическая значимость работы заключается в конкретизации понятия «концепт»; раскрытии авторского концепта «пространство» в романе В. В. Набокова, имеющего сложную структуру и содержащего различные лексемы и сочетания лексем; в построении структуры концепта «пространство» и его сопоставительном описании в романе В.В. Набокова “Transparent Things”.

The article contains a comparative study of the visual poetics observed in the literary texts of American writer Ambrose Bierce and Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. In particular, the study focuses on Bierce's short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and Nabokov's three short stories "Details of a Sunset", "Aurelian", and "Perfection", in all three of which a number of narrative tools, images, and motifs borrowed from Bierce's text can be found. The representation of the bridge and the narrativization of mystical insight are regarded as the principal features of the correlative imagery systems. These features are analyzed in order to discover Bierce's and Nabokov's understandings of the artist, visual imagination, and the freedom of will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American writer who wrote in two languages, Russian and English, is one of the most outstanding writers of the twentieth century. Nabokov's bilingualism is the source of his success, and this article tries to answer the question: is it the source of the Lolita author's linguistic purism? Brought up in an Anglophile family, fluent in two languages, Nabokov had to strive for linguistic perfection, which was both an expression of his talent, as well as hard work with the language and his experience as a translator. The perfection of his literary language, his mastery of style expressed in allusions, cryptic quotations, repetitions, made Nabokov a virtuoso, a master of words and a literary authority, allowing him to adopt a critical and radical attitude towards literary texts, especially those translated into foreign languages. Thus, Nabokov's linguistic purism is due to his artistic manner and creative consistency and also the high demands the writer made on himself. Hence, he categorically judged other authors and translators. According to Nabokov, literary talent obliges one to linguistic purism, and true masterpieces are characterized by artistically perfect language that delights the readers.

The author of the article, pointing to the definitions of the novel Eugene Onegin that are stable in scientific Pushkin studies — realistic, historical, philosophical, autobiographical and problematic — notes that the novel is full of mysticism, understanding by mysticism a belief in the existence of supernatural metaphysical forces, with which the heroes, and the author of the novel himself, are connected in a mysterious way. The article examines the reasons for Onegin’s spiritual crisis, which manifests itself in the worldview and behavior of the hero. Its most important features, named in the novel — deceit, hypocrisy, cynicism, idleness, a distorted idea of love, which is replaced by “the science of tender passion” — are considered in comparison with the texts of Holy Scripture. As a result, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that the state of the protagonist’s soul can be characterized as its “mortification” or “petrification”. “The disease, the cause of which should have been found long ago”, is connected not so much, perhaps, with life in the “pool of light” as with the loss of faith in God, “loss of oneself ” under the latent influence of demonic forces.

“JE T’AIME MOI NON PLUS”: THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND HIS FRENCH TRANSLATORS The structure of the letters which Vladimir Nabokov sent to his French translators shows how ambivalent his relation to them was: generally, Nabokov starts by praising the beauty of the translation, and then he makes a long list of all the blunders and howlers made by the translator. This article studies three cases. First, the translation of Pale Fire is analysed as a confrontation of two very proud men, in which the famous translator Maurice Edgar Coindreau refuses to be bossed around by the novelist. Then the article presents the translation of Ada or Ardor (entrusted to Gilles Chahine) as the collaboration of “men on the verge of a nervous breakdown”. Finally, it shows the very friendly relationship which Nabokov had with Jarl Priel, the translator of Invitation to a Beheading, whom Nabokov always fiercely defended. Thanks to the correspondence between Nabokov, his translators and publishers, it will become clear that these collaborative translations were in fact “mediated self-translations”. For Nabokov, it was not just about translating his novels: he wanted to remain the full master of his creations.

The paper presents the results of the research of doppelganger topos by means of quantitative analysis, namely, by elementary approach provided by graph theory. The idea to employ the approach belongs to M. Zhuravlev. Seven canonic texts chosen by I. Golovacheva and M. Zhuravlev (E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Die Doppeltgänger”, E. A. Poe’s “William Wilson”, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double”, Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner”, Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair) are analyzed. Our point of departure was the archetypal attributes of the double highlighted in a seminal work by Otto Rank of 1914. Still, Rankean list of attributes had to be supplemented by a list of other, specifically ‘poetic’, attributes, by a set of diverse invariant motifs found in the above works of fiction, specified by I. Golovacheva and P. de Mauny. Incidence matrixes built for each of the four specific groups of attributes of the double allowed us to view the doppelganger poetics as a whole and each of the chosen seven texts in particular. The quantitative method led to several new qualitative conclusions. For example, it demonstrated that Dostoevsky’s “The Double” and Nabokov’s Despair occupy opposite places in the set of doppelganger texts: Dostoevsky’s novella and Nabokov’s short novel differ much in their comprehensiveness and typicality of doppelganger imagery. Such a result allowed Golovacheva, Zhuravlev and de Mauny to reconsider the notion of the ‘typical’ in literary theory. The incidence matrix method also revealed the similarity of “William Wilson” and Despair. The objectivist comparative analysis and the subsequent close rereading of these two fictions prove, Golovacheva argues, that Poe’s tale is one of the pre-texts of Despair, such intertextuality previously neglected in Nabokov studies.

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In the 1920s, during his émigré life in interbellum Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a number of Christmas stories. These stories—"Christmas," "The Christmas Story," and "A Reunion"—were all composed and published at Christmastime and set on the eve of Russian Christmas (first week of January). While involving the traditional motifs of the Christmas-story genre, such as the combination of joy and sorrow as well as the motifs of epiphany, gift, care, and forgiveness, these narratives expand the scope of the genre to represent not communal religious values but a private ethical stance. The purity of commitments emerges as a criterion for successful inner life. The gifts are usually the gifts of the memory, cherished in "Christmas" and "A Reunion," and forfeited in "The Christmas Story," as well as in a counter-story, "A Matter of Chance," which was also written at Christmas time but set August and published with half a year's delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

В статье рассматривается функционирование стилистического приема “каламбур” в англоязычной автобиографии В.В. Набокова «Speak, Memory!». Приводится типология каламбуров (фонетические, лексические, фразеологические, грамматические), выявляются все случаи бытования данного приема в тексте (40 случаев), используются методы лингвистического, стилистического и семантического анализа каламбуров. Освещаются вопросы специфики бытования каламбура в произведении документального жанра. В результате исследования обнаружены основные функции каламбура, актуальные для В.В. Набокова: создание комического эффекта, сарказм, нарушение ожиданий читателя и др. Результаты работы могут быть применены при чтении курсов по лексикологии и стилистике английского языка, а также в курсе зарубежной литературы.

In the second chapter of The Gift, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev recalls a “Kirghiz fairy tale” about a human eye that wants “to encompass everything in the world.” The plot of the story goes back to a Talmudic parable about Alexander the Great. The parable was retold in Russian by a number of writers and scholars in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. However, it seems unlikely that Nabokov did use in any original piece of Inner Asian folklore in his novel. More probable is that he invented the “fairy tale” proceeding from one of the Russian versions of the parable. At the same time, Nabokov’s version is based on a number of international literary and folkloric motifs and is related to the “Kalmyk fairy tale” in Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter and to 19 th century Russian literary fairy tales in verse. While the central theme of Nabokov’s parable is the insatiability of human vision and the frailty of life, its con- and subtexts allude to some other recurrent themes of the novel — death and immortality, the quest for paradise, closed doors and exile, sources of love and poetical inspiration. The Oriental coloring of the tale (and the second chapter of the novel in general) appears to be a literary play with a limited number of texts, in particular with The Captain’s Daughter and A Journey to Arzrum. This allows discussing the “Kirghiz fairy tale” as an intratextually meaningful part of the novel rather than a marginal encrustation. It seems that Nabokov’s literary work with “migratory” plots and folklore texts was in a way close to the methods and ideas developed in Alexander Veselovsky’s school of comparative literary studies.

Introduction. This research aims at analyzing the novel by Vladimir Nabokov Transparent Things (1972) from the perspective of post-modernist philosophy. By post-modernist philosophy I mean the post-structural view of the sign theory, that focuses on iconicity, symbolic and iconic nature of the sign, the сoncept of deconstruction, the concept of rhizome, the concept of silence, the concept of différance (as stated by Derrida), the concept of difference and repetition introduced by G. Deleuze. This philosophy is linked to a more general view expressed, for instance, by Derrida (in his work the Gift of Death (Donner la mort)). The main innovative element of this research, therefore, is to study the prose by Nabokov as an example of post-modernist writing simultaneously applying the views and concepts introduced by cognitive linguistics, literary critics and post-modern writers like J. Derrida, U. Eco, R. Barthes.Methodology and sources. The research method used is semantic and structural analysis of the novel by Nabokov Transparent Things. Its main tool is the use of ideas introduced by French poststructuralists regarding the theory of sign, the symbolic nature of language, study of multiple meanings generated by a word in the process of its use and decoding.Results and discussion. The results of this research allow to outline main tendencies in the development of the 20th century narrative. It adheres to the general law of multi-level structure of the novel, play of words and sounds, which corresponds to the general view of difference (as coined by Derrida), deconstruction, rhizome, iconicity of sign. The rhizomorphic structure of the novel at the same time is mirror-like, which allows to apply the difference-repetition dichotomy put forward by G. Deleuze. If the micro-structure of Nabokov’s texts allows to make generalization about the author’s use of language, its macro-structure reveals deeper philosophical notions, implying that the death of the character in the novel leads to the study of the transcendental, or ”the Other” in psychoanalytical terms, thus putting the plot on a different scale of values. The view of language and its structure in its relation to the notion of transparency, allows to see the sign in a Heideggerian way, as bearing the replica of the world, having more in itself about the world, than anything else.Conclusion. The novel Transparent Things by Nabokov falls into the category of similar novels in which the author develops symbolic language and explores its potential, following the general pattern and establishing the rules of narrative construction in postmodern tradition.

Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight presents the ambiguous identities of the two heroes, V. and Sebastian, attracting great attention among Nabokovian scholarship. The present article intends to reveal that Nabokov’s design of Sebastian and V. pertains to his own Gnostic faith and the ambiguous identities of V. and Sebastian, in light of certain Gnostic tenets and concepts, are the representation of their spiritual evolution and their merging spirits during their respective quest of “gnosis”. The article will show how the heroes as “aliens” break the shackles of “this world,” undo the chains of the heavy flesh, regain their spiritual identities of the inner selves, start the journey of spiritual evolution and self-revelation, and finally achieve the fusion of spirits in “the other world” by way of attaining “gnosis”.

In his Preface to the American edition of "Dar", Vladimir Nabokov has maintained that the real heroine of his novel is Russian literature. As is well known, the text is fraught with quotations from other literary works. At the same time, poetry plays a crucial role in the text, the protagonist being a young Russian poet. This article analyses how the poems (and their quotations) in the novel have been translated by Nabokov himself in the American edition.

The concept of romantic love directed towards a young bride is an ideological construction in the history of European culture as manifested in works of Rousseau, Novalis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Any given author's modification of this form of love is an important indication of his religious, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs, which are in turn indicative of his cultural trend and which reflect the fears and ideals of the given author's contemporary society. Here, I will trace the transformation of this topic in the late work of Vasily Zhukovsky in its intersection with the Rousseauist topos of the last or "twilight" love. I will also analyze the transformation of the image of the girl-bride, previously canonized by the patriarch of Russian Romanticism, in the poetry of Pyotr Vyazemsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - works which represent different literary-ideological programs which respond in different ways to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1769, published 1782).

The paper elaborates on a selection of canonical texts by Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), and Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), reflecting on the art of literary translation. A thorough analysis of these writings, covering the period from the mid-18 century to the mid-20 century, reveals a striking continuity of thought, especially in terms of the Russian writers’ perception of their mother tongue and of poetry as the national language’s subtlest manifestation. All the texts analysed are, more than anything else, marked by the Muse of poetry, a key feature defining Russian national mentality.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the peculiarities of V. Nabokov’s creative thinking, to the search for the reasons for the formation of (meta)poetics of collecting and systematizing literary material in his works. In the 1930s, when the society of the Russian diaspora prevailed nostalgic attitude to Russia, and it became clear that previous strategies of self-legitimation in the literary field were losing their relevance, the feeling of fear was strengthened not only for one’s own life due to current social events, but also for the future of Russian culture. At that time, Nabokov changed a type of writing – he began to create works on cards. The practice of creating texts on cards was intensified in the literature of the 20th century and was found in the works of other writers, such as F. Sologub and L. Rubinstein. However, for Nabokov, “card writing” was not just textological practice, but became an integral part of his life-creating strategy as a systematizer and “cataloger”. This is evidenced by his returns to the writing on cards in his interviews, autobiographies, and fiction. Also, the author changed the technique of text construction, he processed documentary materials. Nabokov did not just communicate with his predecessors but collected his philological observations and systematized them in his own works. In our opinion, all new strategies began to be used by the writer because of the change of epistems and the peculiarities of the Nabokov’s worldview as a lepidopterologist.

El presente trabajo se detiene en las discrepancias que subyacen a la genealogía articulada entre Los emigrados de W. G. Sebald y Habla, memoria de Vladimir Nabokov. A partir de una comparación detallada del abordaje escritural se evidenciará el punto de vista fatídico que la rememoración adquiere en la novela del autor alemán, alejándola del proyecto autobiográfico nabokoviano.

In attempting to answer whether Nabokov's Lolita can be described as an unethical novel, the author ponders on what basis one could make such a determination. At (1) the author analyzes die merited-response argument offered by Gaut (and previously Hume and Carroll), which provides a conceptual framework for the resolution of the controversy surrounding Lolita. Based on this analysis, (2) the author decides what constitutes die novel's ethical foundation and what (3) prescriptions and (4) responses can follow from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]