The main themes in Nabokov's work. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich - short biography. Television versions of theatrical productions

Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899 in St. Petersburg in a family that belonged to the highest circle of the capital's aristocracy. The Nabokov family dates back to the Russified Tatar prince Nabok Murza. The writer's grandfather Dmitry Nabokov, a kind of Karenin of L. N. Tolstoy, was the Minister of Justice in 1878 -1885. Father V.D. Nabokov is one of the leaders of the People's Freedom party, constitutional democrats (they were then called “cadets”), a friend of the leading liberal ministers of the Provisional Government P.N. Milyukov, A.I. Shingarev. On the side of his mother E.I. Rukavishnikova, the future writer belonged to the richest merchant family of the Rukavishnikovs, Siberian gold miners.
The happiest days of childhood and youth were spent in the Rozhdestvenskaya estate near St. Petersburg. All his life, Nabokov's father collected a unique library. An encyclopedic educated person, he instilled in children a love of reading. From early childhood, Vladimir spoke three languages ​​fluently. “At three years old I spoke English better than Russian. I started studying French at the age of six,” the writer recalled.
The son passed on another passion of his father - hunting butterflies with the aim of creating scientific collections. For the rest of his life, no matter where he lived, Vladimir Nabokov, along with literature, was engaged in entomology, i.e. studying butterflies; he is responsible for the discovery of one of its rare species.
At the age of eleven, Vladimir was enrolled in the 2nd grade of the Tenishevsky School. Studying was easy for him. In addition, he was a great athlete. But those around him - both students and teachers - often accused Vladimir of individualism and unwillingness to participate in the life of the team. Eighteen-year-old Vladimir graduated from the school in the winter of 1917, passing his final exams a month before the official deadline.
At the time of the revolution, the Nabokov family moved to Crimea, where the father was a member of the white Crimean government. From there, young Nabokov, who retained some material values ​​and family heirlooms, ended up in London, at the University of Cambridge, where he studied French literature and entomology.
In 1922, my father was killed in Berlin. But Nabokov the writer was immediately supported by his father’s comrades, former cadets, Socialist Revolutionaries (and “brothers” in the mighty Masonic lodge) like the publisher of the Berlin newspaper “Rul” V. I. Hessen. Friends of the father, and then publishers close to P. N. Milyukov, to the Slonim family, timber traders (Nabokov’s wife Vera Slonim was from their family) made the creative debut of Nabokov, a poet and prose writer, very noticeable and significant. Thanks to these same connections, Nabokov (like M.A. Aldanov), in fact, filled the pages of Sovremennye Zapiski, the leading emigration magazine.
In 1923, he published two books of poetry - “The Bunch” and “The Mountain Path”. In 1926 the novel “Mashenka” appeared, in 1929 - “The Defense of Luzhin”, in 1936 - “Invitation to Execution”, in 1938 - “The Gift”. He published these and other works - “Camera Obscura” (1933), “Despair” (1934), many stories - under the pseudonym “V. Sirin." In the mythology of the Middle Ages, Sirin is a bird of paradise-maiden with a female head and breast. She enchants people with heavenly singing and serves as a symbol of a homeless, persecuted soul.
In 1940, Nabokov left Nazi Germany and settled in France: his wife Vera Sloim under Hitler was in danger of being transferred to a Jewish ghetto or concentration camp. In 1940, the writer emigrated to the USA and for many years worked as a teacher in American colleges and universities. He writes most of his new works in English, including the popular novel “Lolita” (1955), which had millions of copies, a bestseller about erotic vanity, the complexes of an elderly hero with an empty soul associated with attachment to a 12-year-old very vulgar heroine.
Nabokov lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in a hotel in the town of Montreux. In English, Nabokov wrote two well-known American novels, Pale Fire and Ada, or the Passion.
The writer died of lung disease in 1977. On his grave near Montreux there is an inscription in French: “Vladimir Nabokov. Writer. 1899 - 1977".

Composition

Nabokov's work, especially in the early period, reflected the terrible catastrophe that he experienced in 1919 - emigration from Russia. The loss of his Motherland and home turned out to be a heavy blow for him and subsequently became one of the fundamental themes of his works. Many of Nabokov's heroes are emigrants who, like the author, lost their homeland, but, like him, carefully preserved it in their memory.
This idea of ​​Nabokov was reflected especially clearly in one of his first novels, called “The Gift.” Some researchers consider it one of Nabokov’s most important works, and this idea is connected with the fact that here the author shows the life of Russian emigration abroad, the fact that for exiles neither Soviet Russia nor a foreign land can become a new Fatherland. But, according to Nabokov, real Russia is no longer the main thing for them. The main thing is the image of “eternal” Russia, the lost paradise that the hero took with him into exile.
The motif of paradise lost will then continue in many of his works, only acquiring different forms. Thus, in his most scandalous work, “Lolita,” the image of paradise lost will be the childhood love of the protagonist Humbert for the girl Annabel Lee. II it is this love, this lost paradise that he will look for in Lolita.
In his early work, Nabokov paid close attention to many other themes and ideas. Thus, in many of his works the theme of the relationship between art, creativity and the vulgar life surrounding a person is heard. Man is a creator, he leaves the real world into the world of his fantasies, fiction, and games. This idea is described in detail by Nabokov in his novel “The Defense of Luzhin.” In the center is a lone hero who has escaped from the real world into the world of a chess game, where he feels like a virtuoso, a creator, and a ruler. Everything around him is hostile to him - everyday life, people, and circumstances - and only in the world of the game does he begin to live a real life. Only there does all his clumsiness and helplessness disappear, his life becomes “harmonious, distinct and rich in adventure.”
Luzhin's tragedy from a romantic confrontation between genius and the crowd develops into the metaphysical tragedy of a man who has reached the pinnacle of his creativity and is faced with something beyond his control. Luzhin is constantly looking for protection for himself: first from the outside world, then from Turati, then from chess itself. But all his attempts fail, and even at the end, when Luzhin commits suicide, he falls into “an abyss that disintegrates into pale and dark squares” and sees “what kind of eternity is servilely and inexorably spread out before him.”
Many researchers believe that Nabokov’s novels cannot be considered separately, that they all represent a complex “metatext”. This conclusion can be made based on the fact that many themes and images that are secondary in some novels become major in others. Nabokov seems to be continuing an unfinished conversation, all the time finishing his thoughts. And our task as his readers is to understand what he wanted to tell us.

In the 1930s Nabokov writes short stories, 7 novels, plays “The Discovery of the Waltz” and “The Event”. Generalization of psychological experience - memoirs. A special page of creativity includes works on the history of Russian and Western literature, three-volume notes to his own translation of Eugene Onegin.

In 1938 Nabokov moved to Paris, and in 1940 to the USA. This is the end of the Russian-speaking writer Sirin and the birth of the English-speaking Nabokov. The novels “Other Shores”, “Lolita”, “Pnin”, “Ada” were written in English.

Literature for Nabokov was a game with readers. He radically diverged from the classical tradition of Russian literature. In this regard, he is an artist of rupture and at the same time an innovative artist. The revolution unsettled Nabokov. The loss of paradise (childhood) is not only a social loss, but above all an existential one. This is a transition to the world of vulgarity (Nabokov’s most terrible concept). But, finding himself in the world of vulgarity, Nabokov defines it not as a genuine world, but as a world of ghosts, illusions. Nabokov embodied the lost right to social aristocracy into aesthetic aristocracy.

Nabokov's method is a hoax, a game, a parody, in which the traditions of Stern, Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe can be traced. The type of hero is a genius misunderstood by ordinary people, persecuted, lonely, suffering and often mocking the crowd. Nabokov's heroes seem to be reflected in each other, differing only in the degree of loneliness.

Nabokov is an intellectual writer who values ​​the play of imagination and mind above all else. He is concerned about the problems of loneliness and freedom; personality and power, gift and destiny are refracted in stylistic sophistication and virtuosity. This sharply distinguishes it from traditional Russian literature, where the form was subordinated to a moral, “teacher” task.

The main feature of Nabokov's novel is the absence of character in the traditional realistic sense. Nabokov creates not so much a character as a mannequin, a doll. Heroes are executors of the author's will, devoid of motivation and logic in their actions. Material from the site

Nabokov asserted a new ethical system, unacceptable for Russian literature, which is based on fundamental individualism and the pathos of social non-service. This also led to a break with the aesthetic tradition of Russian literature and led to the destruction of the realistic character, to modernism. Aestheticism has become a quality of the artistic world. It manifested itself in the complexity of the style and the phenomenal nature of metaphors. In Nabokov's world there is no reality at all, but there are many subjective images of reality, hence the multiplicity of interpretations of the work. With all these aesthetic techniques, Nabokov pre-admired postmodernism.

1922 - Nabokov graduates from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studies Romance and Slavic languages ​​and literature. In the same year, the Nabokov family moved to Berlin, where his father became editor of the Russian newspaper “The Rudder”. It was in “Rul” that the first translations of French and English poets, Nabokov’s first prose, would appear.

1922-37 - Nabokov lives in Germany. For the first few years he lived in poverty, earning a living by composing chess compositions for newspapers and giving tennis and swimming lessons, and occasionally acting in German films.

1925 - marries V. Slonim, who became his faithful assistant and friend.

1926 - after the publication of the novel “Mashenka” in Berlin (under the pseudonym V. Sirin), Nabokov gains literary fame. Then the following works appear: “The Man from the USSR” (1927), “The Defense of Luzhin” (1929-1930, story), “The Return of Chorba” (1930; collection of stories and poems), “Camera Obscura” (1932-1933, novel) , “Despair” (1934, novel), “Invitation to Execution” (1935-1936), “The Gift” (1937, separate edition - 1952), “The Spy” (1938).

1937 - Nabokov leaves Nazi Germany, fearing for the lives of his wife and son.

1937-40 - lives in France.

1940-1960 - in the USA. At first, after moving to the USA, Nabokov traveled around almost the entire country in search of work. A few years later he began teaching at American universities. Since 1945 - US citizen. Since 1940, he began to write works in English, which he had been fluent in since childhood. The first English-language novel is The True Life of Sebastian Knight. Next, Nabokov writes the works “Under the Sign of the Illegitimate,” “Conclusive Evidence” (1951; Russian translation “Other Shores,” 1954; memoirs), “Lolita” (1955; he wrote it in both Russian and English), "Pnin" (1957), "Ada" (1969). In addition, he translates into English: “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign”, the novel “Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin (1964; Nabokov himself considered his translation unsuccessful), the novel by M.Yu. Lermontov "Hero of Our Time", lyrical poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev.

1955 - the novel “Lolita,” which four American publishers refused to publish, is published in Paris by Olympia Press. In 1962, a film was made based on the novel.

1960-1977 - Nabokov lives in Switzerland. During these years, Nabokov’s works were published in America (books “Poems and Problems” (39 poems in Russian and English, 14 poems in English, 18 chess problems), 1971; “A Russian Beauty and Other Stories” (13 stories, some translated from Russian, and some written in English) (New York). Published by “Strong Opinions” (interviews, criticism, essays, letters), 1973; “Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories” (14 stories, some of which are translated from Russian, and some are written in English), 1975; “Details of a Sunset and Other Stories” (13 stories translated from Russian), 1976, etc.

1986 - Nabokov’s first publication appears in the USSR (the novel “The Defense of Luzhin” in the magazines “64” and “Moscow”).

Main works:

Novels: “Mashenka” (1926), “The Defense of Luzhin” (1929-1930), “Camera Obscura” (1932-33), “Despair” (1934), “The Gift” (1937), “Lolita” (1955), "Pnin" (1957), "Ada" (1969),
"Look at the harlequins!" (1974),

The story “Invitation to Execution” (1935 - 36), Collection of stories: “The Return of Chorb” (1930), Book of Memories “Other Shores” (1951), Collection “Spring in Fialta and Other Stories” (1956), Poems, Research “ Nikolai Gogol" (1944), Commentary prose translation of "Eugene Onegin" (vol. 1-3, 1964), Translation into English of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", "Lectures on Russian Literature" (1981), "Conversations. Memories" (1966)

Vladimir Nabokov: an essay on life and work

Ranchin A. M.

Childhood, youth, youth: Russia. Emigration. Germany. Birth of "Sirin"

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 10th. style (April 22, new style) 1899 in St. Petersburg in an old and wealthy noble family. Grandfather, Dmitry Nikolaevich, was the Minister of Justice in the governments of Alexander II and Alexander III and was distinguished by his strong commitment to law and justice. Father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, was one of the leading politicians of the Cadet Party; after the February Revolution of 1917, he served as Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government. From his father, Nabokov inherited liberal views, hatred of despotism in all its manifestations, a developed sense of self-esteem, a decisive character and commitment to Western cultural values. However, politics, unlike his father, always left his son indifferent. Mother, Elena Ivanovna (nee Rukavishnikova), came from a small noble family.

During his adolescence, Nabokov developed an interest in collecting and studying butterflies, which was later reflected in his work. In 1911-1916. Nabokov studied at the Teneshevsky School. Nabokov’s literary debut in print was the collection “Poems” (1916). After the October Revolution of 1917, the Nabokovs moved to Crimea, where their father took the post of Minister of Justice in the government of the Crimean Republic. After the fall of the Crimean government and the Red Army's invasion of Crimea, the Nabokovs left Russia forever. This happened on April 2 (15), 1919.

In 1919-1922 Nabokov studied Russian and French literature at the University of Cambridge in the UK. After graduating from university, he moved to his father’s family in Berlin, Germany. He lived in Berlin until 1937, when he moved with his wife and little son Dmitry to Paris. In Berlin on March 28, 1922, his father was killed, defending the leader of the Kadet Party P.N. Miliukov from the monarchists who attempted to assassinate him. The death of his father is clearly and covertly reflected in several of Nabokov’s works.

In the first half of the 1920s. Nabokov published poetry collections “The Mountain Path” and “The Bunch”, translations of “Alice in Wonderland” by L. Carroll (“Anna in Wonderland”) and “Cola of Breugnon” by R. Rolland (“Nicholas the Peach”). He published his works under the pseudonym “V. Sirin" (“sirin” is a word meaning the mythical bird of paradise and, apparently, was associated for Nabokov with the name of Gogol, which is identical to the designation of the bird, Gogol’s duck).

In 1926, Nabokov's first major prose work was published - the novel Mashenka. “Mashenka” is constructed as a recollection of the Russian emigrant Ganin about his former life in Russia, cut short by the revolution and the Civil War; The narrative is told in third person, but from the psychological point of view of the hero. The main event of Ganin’s Russian life is his love for Mashenka, who remained in her homeland. Ganin learns that Mashenka has become the wife of Alferov, his neighbor in the Berlin boarding house, and that she should come to Berlin. The hero of the story expects a meeting with her, like a miracle, like a return to a seemingly forever lost past. He goes to the station to meet Mashenka, but when the train approaches, he suddenly goes to another station to leave the city.

In "Mashenka" themes were found that were dear and attractive to Nabokov, present or dominant in most Russian and English novels that he created later. This is the theme of irretrievably lost Russia as a semblance of a lost paradise and as the embodiment of the happiness of youth; this is the theme of time and memory, simultaneously opposing the all-destroying time and failing in this futile struggle.

The story, as well as several of the writer’s later prose works, refracts the events of the author’s adolescence and youth: the dacha place Voskresensk resembles Batovo, Vyru and Rozhdestveno, where Nabokov spent his childhood, adolescence and youth; the story of Ganin and Mashenka vaguely resembles the youthful love of Vladimir Nabokov and Lucy Shulgina, whom the future writer met on the estate of his uncle Rozhdestvene near St. Petersburg in the summer of 1915. However, while maintaining an autobiographical “trace” in the plot of the story, Nabokov consciously avoids direct similarities: Ganin, although and endowed with the gift of imagination, presented as a person far from literature, and Nabokov, living in Berlin, did not expect a new meeting with his first lover.

Despite its external (in comparison with the writer’s later works) traditionalism, “Mashenka” is not at all a classic story about love. Nabokov discards the stereotyped move suggested by the very arrangement of characters - the “love triangle”; Ganin’s refusal to meet with Mashenka has not a traditional psychological, but a deep philosophical motivation: Nabokov’s character realizes the uselessness of the meeting, because it is impossible to turn back time, and such an attempt would be submission to the past and abandonment of oneself. The heroine, whose name is the title of the work, never appears in reality on its pages, and her very existence seems half-real, half-ephemeral.

The theme of time, so significant in the story, is one of the cross-cutting themes of Nabokov’s work, who again and again wrote about the break with the forever disappeared past and at the same time tried to overcome this gap in the creative imagination. In Nabokov’s works, this is either the imagination and dream world of the character, or the imagination of the author himself, resurrecting his own past in a transformed form on the pages of his prose, or the imagination of an autobiographical hero, like Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in the novel “The Gift.”

“Mashenka” is preceded by such features that developed in Nabokov’s later poetics, such as the play with literary quotations and allusions and the construction of the text as variations of leitmotifs and images that either slip away or emerge. These include various sounds (from nightingale singing, meaning the natural beginning and the past, to the noise of a train and tram, personifying the world of technology and the present), smells, repeating images - trains, trams, light, shadows, associations of heroes with birds. The literary subtexts of the story are “Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin, on the plot of which the separation of the heroes of the story is projected, the lyrics of A.A. Fet (images of a nightingale and a rose), the lyrics of A.S. Pushkin and A.A. Blok (heroine under the falling snow and among the snow, dates in a blizzard).

Nabokov's second great work, the novel “King, Queen, Jack” (1928), was written on German material. The novel is built on leitmotif images associated with a card game, a waltz and mannequins symbolizing a mechanical, soulless world. At the end of the novel, the author himself and his wife appear in the role of background characters (Nabokov would subsequently resort to this technique more than once). The plot of the novel is the story of the relationship between the merchant’s wife, Maria Dreyer, and Franz, her husband’s nephew; The lovers are contemplating suicide, but due to suddenly discovered new circumstances it is not carried out, and Maria Dreyer, falling ill, dies. The main meaning and theme of the novel is the whimsicality and unpredictability of fate, which confuses all the cards for the players. Nabokov addressed the same topic in the novel “Despair” (complete ed. - 1934), the hero of which, Herman, imitates his own death, killing an outwardly similar person, but turns out to be exposed due to one overlooked detail.. “Despair” - an artistic exploration of the peculiar “poetics” of murder: Herman plots a murder, as if writing a detective novel. The depiction of a criminal game, the “aesthetics” of cynical deception is the theme of the novel “Camera obscura” (in the first edition of “Camera obscura”, 1932-1933), which tells the story of the blind man Kretschmar, who is deceived by his wife Magda, cheating on her husband in his presence with her lover, an artist. cartoonist Gorn. Compositionally, the novel is focused on the pulp fiction and cinema of that time: the plot dominates, not descriptiveness, the text is divided into short chapters, the action of which ends at the most intense moment.

Nabokov turned to the Russian theme, to the life of the Russian emigration, in the novels “The Defense of Luzhin” (1929-1930), “Feat” (1931-1932) and in the story “The Spy” (1930).

“Feat” is dedicated to the theme of returning to the homeland that invariably worried Nabokov, which was also reflected in his poetry and stories. The main character, Martyn Edelweiss, secretly returns to Soviet Russia and disappears.

“The Defense of Luzhin” tells the story of the brilliant chess player Luzhin, in whose painful consciousness the world appears like a chessboard on which a dangerous game is being played against him. His wife and his rival, a grandmaster with the “chess” surname Turati (“tura” - rook), seem to be fighting for Luzhin’s life and consciousness. Luzhin seeks to escape from life, from chess into the lost paradise of childhood, but chess or time itself takes revenge on him for this, forcing him to commit suicide in a state that from an ordinary point of view looks like madness. “The Defense of Luzhin” was a wonderful example of depicting the inner world of a hero saying goodbye to childhood. The classicism of psychologism and everyday details is combined in the novel with a modernist game between reality and the painful fantasies of the hero.

In The Spy, Nabokov develops the technique of unmotivated change of narrative point of view, characteristic of modernist poetics, but does this in a non-trivial way. At the beginning, the hero talks about his suicide attempt, and then he himself becomes the object of attention of others and the subject of the author’s story; the identity of “I” and the character named Smurov becomes clear only as the story progresses. Behind this technique lies a deep philosophical meaning: the inequality of a person to himself.

Departure for France. Novel "The Gift"

In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany. An echo of the new order of things that had established not only in Russia, but also in part of Europe, was the novel “Invitation to Execution” (1935-1936). “Invitation to an Execution” is a dystopian novel that depicts the escheat and deceptive world of a totalitarian state. The main character, Cincinnatus Ts., is sentenced to execution without any guilt; he is introduced to the executioner Monsieur Pierre, who pretends to be a fellow prisoner. The verdict is announced in a whisper, the executioner entertains Cincinnatus with magic tricks, his unfaithful wife Marfinka is ready to live in her husband’s cell until his execution. The reality of a totalitarian state appears as a triumph of deception and vulgarity, execution is depicted as liberation - the awakening of the hero from a fainting “sleep”.

In 1937, after his wife lost her job in Nazi Germany (Vera Nabokova was Jewish), the Nabokovs moved to France.

Nabokov’s most voluminous and final work of the Russian period was “The Gift,” recognized by researchers as the writer’s best novel (the novel was written from 1933 to early 1938, first published without the 4th chapter, dedicated to the biography of N.G. Chernyshevsky, in the journal “Modern Notes” "in 1937-1938, completely separate publication in 1952). According to the author’s own description, “The Gift” is a novel whose main character is “Russian literature.” This is a story from the author’s perspective about his hero, the emigrant poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who, like Nabokov himself, lives in Berlin, interspersed with Fyodor’s story about himself and his life. In addition to the main framing line, “The Gift” contains: poems by Fyodor; biography of Fyodor’s father, traveler-naturalist Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev, mentally created but not written by his son; biography of N.G. Chernyshevsky, written by Fyodor and constituting the fourth chapter of the novel; critics' reviews of this biography, supposedly published as a separate book. “The Gift” as a whole is both a description of three years (from 1926 to 1929) in the life of the poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev and an autobiographical novel written by Fyodor himself. In addition, “The Gift” can also be read as an artistic re-creation of the events of Nabokov’s own life. The story of Fyodor’s love for Zina Merz, who became like a Muse for him, recalls the love of Nabokov and Vera Slonim: the writer met her in Berlin in 1923, they got married on April 15, 1925. The motive of fate, which had almost introduced Fyodor and Zina several times before , also finds a real correspondence: the paths of Nabokov and Vera in the past, long before they met, passed very close several times and almost crossed. Nabokov gave Fyodor's father his passion for collecting and describing butterflies; Godunov-Cherdyntsev Sr., with his independent disposition and courageous character, is similar to Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. The poet and critic Koncheyev, who highly values ​​the works of Fyodor, is correlated with the poet and critic V.F. Khodasevich, who loved and revered Nabokov’s work, and the writer Christopher Mortus, who is biased towards the works of Nabokov’s hero, is a grotesque double of the poet and critic G.V. Adamovich, who spoke unkindly about Nabokov the writer.

Another dominant plan of “The Gift” is literary subtexts, one of the main ones being the works of A.S. Pushkin and, in particular, “Eugene Onegin”: Nabokov’s novel ends with poetic lines about farewell to the book, going back to the final verses of the eighth chapter of Pushkin’s novel in verse. Nabokov's novel is built on the romantic antithesis of the everyday vulgar world (the Berlin Germans, the association of Russian writers in Berlin, positivism and utilitarianism in the worldview of N.G. Chernyshevsky, the hero of Godunov's book) and the high poetry of creativity, heroism, love (the gift of Fyodor, the heroism of his father's wanderings , Fyodor's love for Zina). But unlike romantic and post-romantic psychological prose, Nabokov consistently blurs the boundaries between reality, memory and imagination. In “The Gift,” something new is created from an amalgam, from a complex combination of elements of traditional and modernist poetics.

In his novel, Nabokov seemed to predict and model the genuine reaction of part of literary circles to the chapter dedicated to N.G. Chernyshevsky. A number of critics reproach Fyodor for denigrating the memory of one of the pillars of Russian democracy, and publishers refuse to publish his biography. The editors of the journal Sovremennye Zapiski, which invariably favored Nabokov, categorically rejected this chapter of The Gift, and the novel was published without it. Nevertheless, “The Gift” strengthened the author’s primacy in the literature of the Russian emigration.

Throughout the 1930s. Nabokov, whose family lived in very tight quarters, made repeated attempts to find teaching work in the United States or to interest American publishers in his writings. These attempts became especially persistent after the outbreak of World War II. In 1938-1939 he wrote the first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published in the USA in 1941. The novel told the story of an attempt to create a biography of the writer Sebastian Knight, undertaken by his half-brother. Its theme is the relationship between life and creativity, the limitations of a biographer seeking to find the truth.

In the second half of May 1940, when German troops had already captured most of the territory of France, Nabokov, his wife and son left France, sailing by ship to the United States.

Life in America. "American" Nabokov

In America, Nabokov taught Russian language and Russian and foreign literature. In 1941-1948. he taught Russian language and literature at Walesley College (Massachusetts), in 1951-1952. gave a course of lectures at Harvard University. From 1948 to 1958 he was a professor at Cornell University. In 1955, the novel “Lolita” was published in Paris, in 1958 it was published in America, and a year later in England. The novel brought the writer enormous, although not without scandal, fame and financial independence. This allowed Nabokov to leave teaching and devote himself entirely to literature. In 1960, he moved from the USA to Switzerland and settled in a fashionable hotel in Montreux. Here Nabokov spent the last seventeen years of his life. He died in Montreux and was buried in the cemetery of the nearby village of Clarens.

From Nabokov’s professional activities in teaching and studying Russian literature grew a biography-research “Nikolai Gogol” (in English, published in 1944), a series of lectures on Russian and Western European literature of the modern era and a fundamental commentary on A.S. Pushkin’s novel “Eugene” Onegin" in English translation, also by Nabokov (4-volume edition, 1964).

Having moved to America, Nabokov abandoned the pseudonym “Sirin” and began signing his works with his own name. The change in literary name corresponded to a change in language. From this time on, Nabokov wrote almost exclusively in English. His most significant Russian works are translations or Russian versions of works written in English: the Russian translation of the novel Lolita (1967) and the memoir Other Shores (1954), the original English version of which is the book Conclusive Evidence (" Convincing Evidence”, 1951), and a later version is the book “Speak, memory” (“Memory, speak”, 1966). After 1940, Nabokov wrote several novels in English: “Bend Sinister” (a polysemantic title, the most adequate translation is “Under the Sign of the Illegitimate”, written from 1941 to 1946, published in 1947); “Lolita” (written in 1946-1954, published in 1955), “Pnin” (written in 1953-1955, fully published by a separate edition in 1957); “Pale Fire” (“Pale Flame”, or “Pale Fire”, written in 1960-1961, published in 1962); “Ada, or Ardor” (in Russian translations “Ada, or Erotiad”, “Hell, or Desire”, “Hell, or the Joy of Passion”, written intermittently from 1959 to 1968, published in 1969); “Transparent Things” (“Transparent objects”, or “Transparent things”, written in 1969-1972, published in 1972); "Look at the Harlequins!" (“Look at the harlequins!”, written in 1973-1974, published in 1974).

American writer John Updike noted about Nabokov: “Twice an exile, fleeing from the Bolsheviks in Russia and from Hitler in Germany, he managed to create a mass of magnificent works in a dying language for an emigrant audience that was steadily melting away. Nevertheless, during the second decade of his stay in America, he managed to instill in local literature unusual audacity and brilliance, restore taste and fantasy to it, and gain international fame and wealth for himself” (translated from English by V. Golysheva).

Nabokov's English prose forms a single whole with his Russian works. The plot of “Lolita” is outlined in the Russian short story, or story “The Wizard” (written in 1939, it was not published during the author’s lifetime). Narrative techniques in “The Gift” - alternating a story from the first person (as if from the “I” of the author and the hero at the same time) and from the third person - were developed and rethought in the novel “Under the Sign of the Illegitimate”, where the author arbitrarily intervenes in the text of the narrative and possesses absolute power over the hero. The opposite relationship between the author and the hero is presented in the novel "Pnin", where the narrator Vladimir Vladimirovich, whose name and patronymic coincide with Nabokov's, turns out to be the lover of the hero's ex-wife, Professor Pnin, and an acquaintance of Pnin himself, but the hero reveals complete independence from the author-narrator, committing actions of one's own volition. The portrayal of totalitarian power as a farcical performance fraught with the death of the hero (“Invitation to Execution”) is continued in the English novel “Under the Sign of the Illegitimate”), in which the main character, Professor Krug, who lost his son, is saved from death by the will of the almighty author, who destroys evil the spell of the escheat kingdom of the dictator Paduk. Other themes common to Nabokov's Russian and English prose are man and time, the illusory nature of time, the hidden pattern of Fate woven into the fabric of human life. Playing with allusions and quotations, masks of false authors behind which the real author lurks, are characteristic of such English novels as “Ada” and “Pale Fire”; in “Pale Fire” there is also a virtuoso and ironic imitation of the style of famous English poets (A. Pope, W. Wordsworth).

The novel “Lolita,” which brought the writer worldwide fame, was initially rejected by American publishers, who considered it obscene and pornographic and feared prosecution if the work was published. After the author managed to publish Lolita in Paris (1955), and then in the USA (1958) and Great Britain (1959), a number of literary critics also rated this work as pornographic or, at a minimum, perceived it only as a description of sexual perversions. Meanwhile, although the plot basis of “Lolita” is the frankly depicted story of the passion of the middle-aged Humbert Humbert for the teenage girl Dolores (Lolita) Haze and the connection between Humbert Humbert and Lolita, the novel is full of deep symbolic meaning and has nothing to do with pornography or the depiction of sexual pathology. “The real reason why Mr. Nabokov turned to such challenging life material is that he wanted to write a book about love.

... “Lolita” is a book about love, not sex. Each of its pages appeals to an erotic feeling, depicts an unambiguously erotic action or manifestation, and for all that, this book is not about sex,” this is how one of the reviewers, L. Trilling, described Nabokov’s novel (“The Last Lover (“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov) // Classic without retouching: The literary world about the work of Vladimir Nabokov. M., 2000. P. 284).

The teenage girl Lolita personifies the tempting, demonic principle in the novel. She is correlated with the demonic female creature of Jewish tradition - the demon Lilith, the first wife of Adam. Reminds me of Lolita and the temptress Eve (the motif of “apple sweetness” in the novel). But at the same time, the image of Lolita is associated with childish purity and innocence, with paradise, sought but never found by Humbert Humbert. Nabokov builds a sound association: “Lolita” - “lilies” (flowers symbolizing erotic passion, beauty and at the same time purity in the Bible). The protagonist's passion is an attempt to resurrect his childhood love, a girl named Anabella Lee, who Lolita resembles. This is the desire to overcome, to turn back time. Humbert Humbert perceives the world aesthetically, assigning himself the role of Director and Author in it. But his passion for Lolita kills the innocent, childish beginning in her, and victory turns into defeat. The main character's sinister double, his rival, who embodies an exceptionally dark principle, is director Claire Quilty, who seduces Lolita. (The name is symbolic: “Claire” is French for “clear”, “bright”, which ironically corresponds to the libertine Quilty; “Quilty” is associated with the English “guilty” - “guilty”). The grotesquely depicted murder of Quilty by Humbert Humbert marks the collapse of the protagonist's originally romantic belief in the charm of childhood and the possibility of returning to the past.

When creating Lolita, Nabokov resorted to a technique characteristic of postmodern literature: the text of the novel contains an encrypted, hidden, deep meaning. A literary unprepared, “mass” reader should perceive “Lolita” as a semi-pornographic work about the adventures of a sexual pervert, while a subtle and prepared reader will perceive the novel as a symbolic text, as a kind of philosophical parable.

The most sophisticated example of a postmodern game built on the collision of different points of view and interpretations, on the ambiguity of the relationship between truth and fiction, is the novel Pale Fire. The novel consists of an autobiographical poem by American literature professor John Shade and commentary on it, the author of which calls himself his colleague Professor John Kinbote, formerly the king of the country of Zembla in northern Europe. The reality of both characters is semi-illusory: the text of the novel suggests that Shade (English “Shade” - “shadow”) is not a real person, but a product of Kinbote’s imagination; but the novel also suggests the opposite - that the commentator Kinbote could have been invented by Shade. A third interpretation is not excluded: both Shade and Kinbote are equally real. The author, Vladimir Nabokov, is also drawn into the field of the game, built on blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality: Kinbote declares that one day he may appear before the public in the image of a professor of Slavic studies from Russia, in whom one can discern a resemblance to Nabokov himself.

Shade and Kinbote seem completely different from each other. Shade is the creator of a poem about himself, about the death of his daughter Gazelle and about the mysteries of existence; Kinbote, a proud madman, not alien to vulgar complacency; he is obsessed with the manic idea that Shade has encrypted in the poem a story about his native Zembla and about him, the former king Charles the Beloved. (Perhaps Kinbote only imagines himself as King Charles.) But the two characters are united by the gift of imagination and interest in the deep interweavings, the “texture” of existence and fate. They are contrasted with the world of averageness, routine and stupid violence, embodied by the terrorist Gradus, who intends to kill the former king, but instead kills the poet Shade with a pistol shot.

Myths about Nabokov and the writer’s artistic world

The widespread opinion about Nabokov’s “aestheticism”, about the intrinsically playful nature of his prose, which strikingly distinguishes it from the Russian classical tradition, is very inaccurate and simplified. Firstly, there is no doubt about Nabokov’s continuity in relation to, relatively speaking, the “pre-realistic” Russian tradition, primarily to the work of A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, in whose works there is an element of play, a reinterpretation of established literary schemes, situations, literary the implications and allusions are very significant. Secondly, Nabokov invariably treated with great respect and even reverence the work of such a writer with a very strong didactic, edifying attitude as L.N. Tolstoy; At the same time, in his lectures on Tolstoy, Nabokov paid special attention to the deep symbolic images of his works. And, finally, the idea of ​​Nabokov as a cold esthete, alien to warmth and ready to justify immorality, is incorrect. Nabokov is a writer who is not at all socially indifferent and even, if you like, didactic in denouncing despotism and violence in any of their forms. Nabokov's position is ultimately a moral position; self-valued aestheticism is not close to him, and the heroes’ attempts to see the world as nothing more than a semblance of an artistic composition and claim the role of the Creator in it are doomed to failure.

According to the writer Andrei Bitov, “Nabokov’s typical effect: to create an atmosphere of uninitiation in order to reveal the high accuracy of reality. Denying either God or music, he only talks about them.”

Researcher of Nabokov’s work and his biographer B. Boyd described the writer’s authorial position and the essence of his artistic world as follows: “Because Nabokov valued the liberating power of consciousness, he felt the need to understand what it means to be in a prison of madness, an obsession, or in a lifelong “solitary confinement of the soul.” . Here his interest in psychology turns into a philosophical interest in consciousness - the main subject of all his work. Although Nabokov argued for the benefits of critical reason, he distrusted any explanations, logical arguments, and spoke with contempt and ridicule of “philosophical” prose, which is why many of his readers believe that he only has style and no substance. In fact, he was a deep thinker - in epistemology, in metaphysics, in ethics and in aesthetics.

...It is necessary to explain the deceptive strategy of Nabokov the writer. Reading Nabokov is like sitting in a room from which a certain view opens up, which for some reason seems to us like a mirage, as if winking slyly in the sun and luring us to it. Some readers fear they are being lured out of their homes only to be turned in the door. In fact, Nabokov wants a good reader to cross the threshold into this world and enjoy its detailed reality. A good re-reader, who is not afraid to go further, finds another door hidden in what previously seemed an unshakable landscape - a door to another, transcendental world" (B. Boyd. Vladimir Nabokov: Russian Years: Biography / Translated from English. M.; St. Petersburg, 2001. pp. 13-14).