The Magician and the Juggler in Nabokov’s Aesthetic and Artistic Frame (Based on Stories of the 1920s and the 1930s)

The article focuses on the study of the artist’s image in Nabokov’s Russian-language stories of the 1920s and the 1930s. The image of the artist in the article is compared with the images of the magician and the juggler considered in the context of the author’s aesthetic representations with the aim of clarifying the concept of Nabokov’s creative personality. Methods of structural, conceptual and style analysis are used to achieve the aim. The specificity of Nabokov’s artistic consciousness is revealed, the meaning of his aesthetic axiom is clarified: art is deception. This conclusion is made after analyzing the categories “manner”, “prism”, “key”. Deception in art is not a goal, but a tool, a technique by which the author shifts the usual perspective of the perception of reality and reveals its essential properties. The prismatic nature of art explains the duality of the figure of the creator as a deceiver, creator of illusion, and secretive. Further, these two aspects of creativity are revealed in the analysis of the images of the magician and the juggler. The author brings the images together, which confirms the common semantic field of the concepts “creativity” and “fokus” (Rus. for “magic trick” and “focus”). The latter includes the concepts “skill”, “deception”, “trick”, the motifs of fantasy, mystery, and transformation. Through these concepts the images of the magician and the juggler, the “multi-layered” images that distinguish them from middlebrow people, are revealed. Nabokov contrasts the magician and the juggler as true and imaginary artists, respectively. Both reformat reality, but the juggler only imitates life and fakes it. The magician creates a new world: detail in Nabokov’s works reflects the whole world, hence the attention to detail in his characters-artists and the inability to single out the main thing, to embed detail in the structure of the text in amateurs and graphomaniacs. The concept “creativity” in Nabokov’s oeuvre includes the concept “fokus” as distinct vision. As a result, the true artist and magician has a special gift of vision, discerning the innermost essence of phenomena, and insight often becomes a catalyst for inspiration. This brings the artist closer to grasping the secret meaning of life, which gives his works the property of a genuine reality. The juggler’s manipulations are based on optical illusion, and he is deprived of the elementary observation skill. The character’s mismatch with the role of the creator also shows the features of the narrative. Characters-artists often perform the function of storytelling, and jugglers exclusively play the role of a character in Nabokov’s works. Thus, the image of the juggler is one of the elements that denote Nabokov’s originality, emphasizing the artist’s independence from reality, but this image is contrasted with the image of the true creator like the juggler with the magician.

Keywords

Authors

References