Petersburg in the Early Works by Vladimir Nabokov

Abstract

The article is devoted to the early works of Vladimir Nabokov, both prose and poetry, written in the 1910s and 1920s. The main artistic space of these texts is Petersburg, nostalgia for which accompanied the writer throughout his life. At the same time, most of the texts, not only dedicated to Petersburg, but also those where the space of the city appears, were created in emigration. Domestic and foreign literary scholars have devoted their studies to the image of Petersburg in Nabokov’s work, but the material for their analysis was mainly prose written after 1930, and a little less often poetry — the poems “To the Capital”, “Petersburg”. For this study, poems, stories, the play “A Man from the USSR” and the novel “Mashenka” were selected. The selection was made based on the principle of mentioning the space of St. Petersburg and recognizable loci, such as the Bronze Horseman, the Neva, the Moika, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, etc. The city is integrated into various associative series that arise in the consciousness of the characters. In Nabokov’s work, St. Petersburg is ambivalent. On the one hand, it is shown as a place of happiness, where the characters spent their childhood and had their first love. On the other hand, it is directly connected with historical events: the difficult course of construction in a swampy area not intended for this, emigration, and the October Revolution, which destroys the appearance of the former St. Petersburg (for Nabokov’s characters, the city of childhood ceases to exist on the map) and puts an end to the characters’ St. Petersburg biography.

Keywords:

Vladimir Nabokov, St. Petersburg, urban text, space, methods of time personalizing