Сибирский федеральный университет

Тип публикации: статья из журнала

Год издания: 2017

Идентификатор DOI: 10.17223/19986645/49/9

Ключевые слова: В. Набоков, В.А. Жуковский, Н.В. Гоголь, эмиграция, сюжет, остра-нение, двойничество, баллада, V. Nabokov, V.A. Zhukovsky, N.V. Gogol, Russian first-wave emigration, plot, defamiliarization, doubleganger, ballad

Аннотация: В статье анализируется важный нюанс смысловой кодировки и сюжетной структуры романа В. Набокова «Пнин» - систематические повторы, связанные с образом зубов. Стоматологические коды романа рассматриваются в широком контексте истории русской эмиграции первой волны и отечественной патографической культуры. С помощью приема остранения раскрывается тема утраты корней русскими эмигрантами, судьба которых на языке патографической образности метафоризируется как утрата больных зубов. The article analyzes an important aspect of the semantic encoding and plot structure of Nabokov’s novel Pnin - the continual repetition of the images of teeth. This novel’s dental codes are considered in the broad context which comprises primarily the author’s re-thinking the myth of the Russian emigration with signs and elements of Russian pathographic culture. The research is focused on the technique of defamiliarisation which provides the reader with a metaphor of a person losing his teeth being pulled out, which meant the destiny of “rootless” Russian emigrants to Nabokov in the language of pathographic imagery. The author of the article studies Nabokov’s refraction of the philosophy of history and identity attracting a large number of examples referring to the structure of the novel, the imagery of fragmented bodies, duplicity in the plot, allusions to the Russian ballads. Pnin is considered in the context of Nabokov’s autobiographical prose. Thus, Nabokov’s book The Other Shores written simultaneously with Pnin is involved in the research. In his autobiographical oeuvre Nabokov substantiates the idea of emigrants as doublegangers applying in these representations primarily the archetypes of the ballad genre. The plot of crossing the border by an illegitimate intruder is the core of ballad poetics. In Nabokov’s version this topos gives birth to the motifs of crossing the linguistic and cultural boundaries by emigrants who resemble in these situations the ballad dead men invading the world of the living. Thus, the ballad horror is activated in the field of historical reflection and becomes an equivalent of the painful duality of emigrants’ consciousness. An emigrant as a crucial figure in Nabokov’s system of characters is always a pathological person, and Pnin’s toothlessness is one of the versions of this recurring feature. The main character’s name is another device appearing as a metaphor of defamiliarisation of the phenomenon of Russian emigration. The two, linguistic and historical, perspectives are combined in Pnin as a word. On the one hand, the writer reminds the reader on the Russian practice of truncating the names of bastard sons of a noble ancestry (Repnin - Pnin), illegal branches on a family trees. On the other hand, accentuating the sense of a “stub” (Rus. pen’ means “stub”), Nabokov succeeds to describe the sad historical prospect of the Russian emigration as a tree deprived of body and branches. The first half of the 20th century, alike with the epoch of Peter the Great (who himself regularly practiced pulling his subjects’ teeth), was a large-scale cultural breakdown which compelled Nabokov’s compatriots to endure the same painful procedure of parting with their “roots” as that of the 18th century when Russian elite was involuntarily turning by the czar from traditional “boyars” to the European gentry. The geocultural perspective proves this main idea: on a symbolic map Pnin associates his artificial smiling jaws with America while his old sick and therefore pulled out teeth become the symbol of Russia lost forever. Moreover, Pnin becomes able to fully apprehend and describe his forsaken homeland only when he is finally free from his “toothache” provoked by pulling his roots out.

Журнал: Вестник Томского государственного университета. Филология

Выпуск журнала: № 49

Номера страниц: 136-146

ISSN журнала: 19986645

Место издания: Томск

Издатель: Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования "Национальный исследовательский Томский государственный университет"

• Анисимова Евгения Евгеньевна (Сибирский федеральный университет)

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