Stratigraphy of Nabokov?s syntax: on the essence of the stylistic device of Vladimir Nabokov

the article is devoted to one of the features of Nabokov's style – complex sentences of complex construction – in the psycholinguistic aspect. Such optics makes it possible to see that Nabokov’s complex sentences differ from constructively similar sentences of other writers in a semantic sense: at the boundaries of predicative units, transitions occur between levels or, when viewed three-dimensionally, registers of consciousness, which in terms of the philosophy of literature correspond to possible worlds. These transitions in Nabokov's texts are not marked by lexical or grammatical items (the so-called transition operators) and therefore turn out to be obscured, which causes pleasure in the attentive reader, but makes the inattentive reader get lost between the real and the unreal, the present and the past, wakefulness and sleep. Perhaps the solution to this technique associated with syntax gives researchers the key to a generalization of the description of Nabokov's style, in which elliptical elements are represented quite widely.

Nabokov studies, psycholinguistics, style, syntax, level of consciousness, register of consciousness, possible world, ellipsis