«Киргизская сказка» в «Даре»: Набоков, фольклор и ориентализм

Abstract

In the second chapter of The Gift, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev recalls a “Kirghiz fairy tale” about a human eye that wants “to encompass everything in the world.” The plot of the story goes back to a Talmudic parable about Alexander the Great. The parable was retold in Russian by a number of writers and scholars in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. However, it seems unlikely that Nabokov did use in any original piece of Inner Asian folklore in his novel. More probable is that he invented the “fairy tale” proceeding from one of the Russian versions of the parable. At the same time, Nabokov’s version is based on a number of international literary and folkloric motifs and is related to the “Kalmyk fairy tale” in Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter and to 19 th century Russian literary fairy tales in verse. While the central theme of Nabokov’s parable is the insatiability of human vision and the frailty of life, its con- and subtexts allude to some other recurrent themes of the novel — death and immortality, the quest for paradise, closed doors and exile, sources of love and poetical inspiration. The Oriental coloring of the tale (and the second chapter of the novel in general) appears to be a literary play with a limited number of texts, in particular with The Captain’s Daughter and A Journey to Arzrum. This allows discussing the “Kirghiz fairy tale” as an intratextually meaningful part of the novel rather than a marginal encrustation. It seems that Nabokov’s literary work with “migratory” plots and folklore texts was in a way close to the methods and ideas developed in Alexander Veselovsky’s school of comparative literary studies.