Перцепция в малой прозе В. Набокова (на материале рассказов «Возвращение Чорба» и «Картофельный Эльф»)

Abstract

The aim of the research is to prove that V. Nabokov’s short prose is inconceivable without combining all the existing ways of perception of an artistic reality and its comprehension by the reader as a whole. The author of the paper chose the two stories from the collection “The Return of Chorb” where perception is most explicitly used as a technique: smells, sounds, tactile and gustatory sensations, visual images – all these elements together, complementing each other, make up the narrative pattern of the works. The researcher analyses how the characters are perceived by the reader combining in his/her imagination visual, sound images, tactile and gustatory sensations, smells. The scientific novelty of the research lies in integrating the study of the reader’s perception of different types of sensations found in one work. Until recently, perception has been little studied as an independent artistic technique, separate tools, motifs, means became the object of study. For V. Nabokov, who has eidetic memory, it is not enough to reproduce one sensation – the completeness of his artistic reality requires the involvement of all perceptive organs. The research findings have shown that the reader’s imagination, recreating the artistic reality from the author’s text, due to the multitude of details evokes the feeling of reality, presence in the recipient, helps him/her to comprehend the narrative as a whole, the state of the characters, other people’s attitude towards these characters, which is impossible without the use of perception, namely the ability to communicate the entire complex of sensations available to a person.