Intrigue of word in I. Bunin and V. Nabokov’s short stories (“Light Breathing” / “Torpid Smoke”)

The paper discusses the category of narrative intrigue in the stories of I. Bunin and V. Nabokov. Theoretical and historical aspects of the term “intrigue” and its place in Russian and Western practice are reviewed. Following the concepts by Paul Ricoer, Raphaël Baroni, and Valerij Tjupa, intrigue is defined as a receptive aspect of the plot combining referential and communicative levels of narration. The analysis of interactions between the “intrigue of action” and the “intrigue of the word” allows establishing several consistent patterns in the composition of two narrative fields - that of event and that of discourse. In Bunin’s “Light Breathing,” the repetition of the word “dykhanie” (breath) and its variants changes the story of Olya’s life into a story of “vdokhnovenie” (inspiration). The second layer of the story is formed by anagrams and arranged sequences of sound and structure, enhancing the reader’s artistic impression. In Nabokov’s “Torpid Smoke,” the narration becomes multi-layered due to its metapoetical qualities, including the correlation of the poetic intention and the metaphor of “legkosti/tyazhesti” (lightness/heaviness). The “crisis event” (constitutive for the genre of short story) is transformed into the event of text-making. In addition to Bunin’s concept of “legkogo dykhaniya” (light breathing), the story’s “intrigue of the word” also includes the reflection on Nabokov’s signature concepts (references to L’Inconnue de la Seine and The Defence). Moreover, the narrator unites the protagonist and the lyrical persona, interchanging the first- and third-person pronouns.

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