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NABOKOV’S CODE IN THE EARLY WORKS BY L. ULITSKAYA: LITERARY CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION ASPECTS

N. Kovtun, V. Razumovskaya

Abstract

In modern criticism, V. Nabokov is revered as one of postmodernism “godfathers”. In the texts of a number of iconic contemporary writers (from A. Bitov up to O. Slavnikova and L. Ulitskaya) the influence of “Lolita” author’s creative works is highly significant. L. Ulitskaya never attributed herself to the postmodernist trend; on the contrary, she insisted that aesthetics under the sign “post” is becoming obsolete. Such experience of the author's self-identification beyond the post-modernism's aesthetics is worth to the literature at the turn of the 20th century. Ulitskaya point out – V. Nabokov's prose, in her comprehension, is an ideal one, an appeal to the writer's image and to his characters proves the scale of an individual artistic concept. The problem of intertextuality links between Ulitskaya’s works and Nabokov’s prose has been addressed by the critics. Among others, the attention has been paid to the tale “Sonechka” [1] and such stories as “Bron’ka” and “Golubchik” (eng. – “Dear Fellow”) [2], thought the earlier texts of the modern author as a single metatext where Nabokov’s influence can be identified at the level of literary devices, images and author’s philosophy have not been considered under this context. In Ulitskaya’s Hall of Fame of the Russian literary geniuses the name of Nabokov comes right after Pushkin. In the collection “The Holy Garbage” Ulitskaya highlights the key points in a perfectly precise way: “Nabokov… has set the national literature free from that typical flavor of unhealthy religiousness, groundless messiahship, hysteria-accented social worries, feeling of a permanent guilt mixed with teach-shadowing and created almost a crystal-clear, sheer “higher” literature with a non-traditional degree of the author’s estrangement from the text” [3]. Thus, the most crucial part among the writer’s literary heritage is the didactics poverty, estranged attitude towards his characters and a special status of the artistic word, the rhythm and melody of which discover new possibilities of the modern literature and express those previously unnamed things.

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