From Nabokov’s Amerussia to Mallarmé’s Donje te zankoriv: Vladimir Nabokov at the crossroads of languages

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov makes a predominant use of code-switching in the novels he wrote in English. However, he occasionally indulges in hybridity, which makes him resemble, linguistically and stylistically speaking, Creole writers. Nabokov’s style is indeed creolized, in the sense of Glissant’s philosophy, and his hybridization of tongues is manifest in four of Nabokov’s novels. This paper first focuses on Lolita and Ada by studying lexical and syntactical hybridity as well as two macaronic tongues which are always associated with eroticism. It then studies two forged languages used extensively by Nabokov. In Bend Sinister, the “vernacular” is defined by the author as “a mongrel blend of Slavic and Germanic” and is the language of the totalitarian regime in the novel; it is contrasted with another hybrid idiom, based on French, which challenges tyranny with the poetic power of suggestion inherent to foreign languages. In Pale Fire, “Zemblan” is the creolized language of an exile torn between his two identities; this tongue reveals his madness through the return of the linguistically repressed.