Lyudmila Bratukhina

Russian Discourse in Nabokov's English Prose Lyudmila Bratukhina

The book is devoted to the study of V. Nabokov's work in the aspect of national-cultural specificity. The problem of the ambiguity of the definition of the writer's work within the framework of any one literary tradition is one of the directions of modern Nabokovian studies. The author of this work turns to the consideration of the English prose of the bilingual writer within the category of "discourse". The concept of "Russian discourse" reflects the national and cultural aspect of the extra-linguistic continuum of discourse semantics, which organizes the structure of the work on the principle of contrasting comparison of its multicultural components. The chapters of the book offered to the reader are devoted to three works of the writer "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight", "Pnin", "Speak, Memory", reflecting different stages of his career as an English-speaking author. The author considers the dialectics of local and universalist tendencies in the interaction of cultural subtexts of Nabokov's prose: both the specificity of the Russian origin, which constitutes a certain authorial intention, and the intercultural context in which it receives its comprehension.