Poetic Citations in the Narrative Structure of Vladimir Nabokov’s Story “Cloud, Lake, Tower”

Abstract

The article examines the interpretive possibilities of two fragments of Feodor Tyutchev’s poetry as key text-forming elements in the narrative structure of Vladimir Nabokov’s story “Cloud, Lake, Tower”. This approach is based on the perception of quotation fragments as a source of intertextual codes that demonstrate two-way communication: retrospective, referring to Tyutchev’s texts, and projective, anticipating the author’s intention in modeling further narrative. The way quotations are presented in the text largely determines the strategies of establishing referential links between the quoted fragment and the verbal and figurative deployment of motif lines. In order to reveal the propositional meaning of the quoted elements, the author analyzes the way of deconstructing the precedent phrase in the connecting link with reminiscence. The organizing role of the author’s forms of quotation for the formation of the interpretative field of poetic inclusions in the art text is determined. The author traces the methods of actualization of semantic components of the theme of silence in the explication of the main narrative motifs and reveals the modeling principle of the author’s play with cultural codes that acquire their own plan of expression in the opposition/displacement of the conventions of poetic and everyday language. The manifestation of the writer’s artistic self-reflection in the reconstruction of the theme of poetic silence in interaction with the social and everyday context of the narrative is shown. The ironic and parodic elements located at different value-semantic levels of the text are revealed. It is stated that the transposition of quotations into the context of the story contributes to the expansion of intertextual space from intertextual and auto-intertextual paradigms, in which the theme of silence is inscribed, to ironic distancing as a way of author’s self-objectification.

Keywords:

fiction text, interpretation, poetic quotation, irony, intertextual codes, text-forming elements