Pushkin's and Akhmatova's Personal Texts in Vladimir Nabokov's Novel Pnin

The article analyzes Vladimir Nabokov's literary predecessors' personal texts which are included in the poetics of Pnin. In the study, personal text is understood as motive structures that allow reconstructing the author's image of two epochs in the history of Russian literature. The basic material for the study was Nabokov's novel Pnin, Alexander Pushkin's elegy "Wandering the Noisy Streets" and Anna Akhmatova's and her imitators Lidia Chervinskaya and Irina Odoyevtseva's early poems. Intertextuality is one of the main tools Nabokov used for creating the artistic space in Pnin. Two literary periods included in the text (the classical Russian literature of the 19th century and the Silver Age) are illustrated with images and motifs which are associated with Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Akhmatova, her imitators (Chervinskaya and Odoyevtseva), Adamovich, respectively. In the novel, these two periods are opposed to each other like Pushkin's "Wandering the Noisy Streets" and a parody on the early Akhmatova's poems. The main character (Timofey Pnin, an emigrant, a professor of the Russian language) is giving a lecture about Pushkin's elegy whereas the parody is presented by the lyrics written by his ex-wife Liza Bogolepova. These two works differ both in form (non-canonical Pushkin's elegy is written in iambic pentameter using perfect rhymes, while the parody is written in "spavined anapaestic tetrameter", i.e. in a combination of two-syllable and three-syllable feet with inaccurate type of rhyming) and content (awareness of human life's inescapable end and the theme of unrequited love and suicide, respectively). The lyrical character in Pushkin's text is trying to guess the date of his own death and is feeling death's arrival, and Pnin's appeal to this text is similar to the author's forefeeling about the impending mass emigration and the "end of Russian culture". Nabokov also included the parody on Akhmatova as his own reaction to the brand new type of intellectual personality popularized in the Russian modernist culture. Nabokov shows these personal "texts" differently as a philologist demonstrating his own view on the previous and contemporary literature. The image of Pushkin is deliberately made of books and a portray on a cover as, for Nabokov, library is a key symbol referring to the language and cultural heritage of the involuntarily abandoned country. The classical writers of Russian literature are placed onto the library shelves, while Akhmatova does not seem to have this privilege and is described as a parody character. Setting emigrants' "correct" value orientation and placing certain writers on bookshelves, Nabokov describes his own role in literature. The author considers himself a systematizer who is able to set a place for each author in this "emigration library".