Reduction of the Poetic Text in a Critical Essay by V. Nabokov Vladislav Khodasevich. Collected Verse

Abstract

The highlighting of Nabokov’s interpretational strategies in other literary texts is a relevant problem for Russian and European Nabokov studies. The goal of the article is to scrutinize the methods of reduction of a poetic text used by Nabokov in his early essay Vladislav Khodasevich. Collected Verse. The approach developed by receptive poetics allows author to describe Nabokov’s practices of reading and writing as an experience of creative game with literature of his contemporaries and predecessors. The narrative analysis is productive to characterize the point of view, to highlight the role of narrator in the structure of Nabokov's essay and his own literary work and the techniques for the transformation of Khodasevich’s poems into the prose. There are different methods of literary text reduction in Nabokov’s essay: creation of meta-plot not immanent in the original poems; selective sampling of literary contexts common for both authors; ignoring of artistic issue of ethics of beauty important for V. Khodasevich. For Nabokov, the reduction and transfer of his own techniques into the space of Khodasevich’s text is a way of approbation of patterns of artistic reality in texts of the poet, which conceptualizes the problem of boundaries of artistic talent, important for Nabokov himself.