The Noble Nest by I. S. Turgenev: Poetics of Costume

Abstract

The costume which has recently become the focus of many scientific disciplines has hardly attracted literary critics: the methodology of its research in fiction is just beginning to take shape. The historical and cultural approach, which essentially boils down to a commentary has been replaced by a very productive structural and semiotic approach that deciphers the semantics and functions of the costume. The methodology of our research is of a complex nature, combining the structural-semiotic, mythopoetic, and motivic aspects of the analysis of literary texts. The narratological aspect in the study of costume poetics is emphasized, which, as a rule, remains outside the scope of research.The narratological aspect is aimed at identifying “flickering” meanings in the structure of the whole – “prose as poetry” (V. Schmid).The dynamics of costume descriptions, their functionality in the structure of the whole and the specifics in the organization of the narrative (taking into account the “point of view”, the motive given by costume details and based on semantic nodes that connect polar meanings, etc.) are at the center of our research.Thanks to costume inclusions, the text of the novel The Noble Nest becomes multidimensional. Thus, the characterological detail of Panshin – a screw-shaped Golden ring is situational and at the same time conceptual: it connects the “beginnings” and “ends” of his story, symbolically programming fate. Laconic sketches of Lavretsky’s clothing, scattered throughout the text, formalizing the opposition of one’s own/ another’s, prepare a motif of loneliness and homelessness. In layered narrative created by the play of the author’s and character’s points of view, Lavretsky’s point of view “migrates” to the author’s one replacing it (“poetic” sign of the optics of the hero) and then separates from it. The content of the method of crushing, which replaced the silhouette image, is an expression of the confusion of the soul, deforming the female image. The details in Lavretsky’s “split” point of view are ambiguous: on the one hand, there is alienation, on the other hand, there is a subconscious attraction to the beloved woman in the primary, unreflexed sense of a person losing happiness. The novel’s flickering meaning is created by semantic nodes that match polarities. “White” is the symbolic color of the national, rooted in the soil (the white caps of Marfa Timofeevna and Nastasya Karpovna), and at the same time the ghostly, impossible realization of happiness (the rhyming white dress of Lisa and the white dress on the portrait of Lavretsky’s mother). “Black” is also ambivalent: the elegant black silk dress of Varvara Pavlovna and the unnamed color of Lisa’s monastic clothes in the Epilogue. The scarf that Marfa Timofeevna knits is a mythologeme that encodes the story of love and failed happiness and at the same time the semantic core of the poetics of incompleteness. Keywords: costume, costume poetics, mythologeme, narrative, semantics, point of view