On the film looking nature of the novel Mary by Vladimir Nabokov

The article studies the film looking nature of the novel Mary in terms of the historical and literary process of the beginning of the 20th century and Nabokov's authorial style strategy. Due to the specific features of his artistic view and perception, a reader can notice the film looking nature through a constant tendency to show a key feature of a thing depicted although it is implicit. The chosen approach opens a prospect for a deeper insight into the work, serving as a pattern for his later novels and possessing the most important features of Nabokov's poetics and his poetics of cinema, in particular. The constant opposition between the real world and the fictional one is typical of Nabokov's texts, and the novel Mary depicts it as a contrast between the main character's life in Berlin and his flashbacks about Russia. However, Nabokov features each of these two worlds as a specific variant of a cinematic reality. In the Berlin parts of the novel he achieves it by the episodes of filming and film show, mirroring each other, the motives of darkness and reflection as well as the color palette of the novel, namely the black and white scale, inspired by silent movies, and unnaturally bright lilac and yellow flashes. As a result, cinematography turns into a metaphor of the blank and factitious existence of Russian emigrants; that is, anti-existence, not-being. In the parts about Russia, Nabokov creates an analogy between the character's reminiscences and the cinema by aiming at the dynamic representation of reality, resulting from the processual character of his memory, and the visualization of the past. The dynamic situation of watching and observation gives maximum authenticity and genuineness to the narration about the Russian life of the main character. The author plays on cutting with shots, angles, "external" and "internal" viewpoints, which creates a cinematographic presence effect in the novel when a reader gets involved in the text and experiences current events on the screen as real. Moreover, Nabokov continually emphasizes the aesthetic value of the world constructed in reminiscences. Therefore, he sees the genuine reality as a created reality, that is, the world of art including cinematography. Being developed by the motive of duplicity, the metamorphoses of Ganin (underpart, shadow - Demiurge, author's double) prove it. The research results in the understanding of the structural and conceptual function of cinematography in the novel. The modeling of Mary's imaginative world according to the principles of cinematography makes the main conflict more profound, turning it into an axiological issue (real / unreal being), expresses the artistic logic of the novel, not isolating extremes but integrating them, and reveals the essence of the author's world view - an infinite complexity and multiple dimensions, which is a key to his novel and poetics. It allows stating that Mary's film looking nature is not the consequence of borrowing but the result of coincidence when literature of the beginning of the 20th century was generally determined to combine expressive means and authorial style strategy, in particular, of Nabokov.

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