Genre parameters of an intellectual novel (based on V. Nabokov’s novelistics)

The subject of our study is invariant genre parameters of the intellectual novel. The purpose of the study is to identify and describe the theoretical model of the intellectual novel genre, implemented in the novelistics of V. Nabokov, whose works have a strong intellectual source. The methodology of the research is based on the theory of genre, developed by M. Bakhtin and significantly supplemented and refined at the school of theoretical poetics by N. Tamarchenko (the concepts of “internal measure” and the invariant of genre). In the analysis of texts, we used the methods combining elements of structural-semiotic and functional approaches, and the method of hermeneutical interpretation to characterize the genre parameters of the intellectual novel. The conducted research made it possible to study the theoretical potential of the intellectual prose concept based on V. Nabokov’s novels “The Gift”, “Lolita” and “Pale Fire”. The article identifies the structural and semantic model of the intellectual novel genre whose matrix can contribute to clarifying and deepening the interpretation of the poetics of some modernist and postmodern texts focused on intellectualism as a genre strategy. We highlight the following invariant parameters: a narrative strategy of provocation that creates an occasional world and programmatically complicates the composition of the text (generating textual riddles, puzzles and secrets); an intellectual protagonist as a narrating (interpreting and world-modeling) instance in the narrative; a stable thematic complex (aestheticization of themes of art, love, fate of a fictional world and death); the permeability of the boundary between the world of the text and the world of the reader, leaving the choice of a strategy for constant reinterpretation of the work and relativizing the philosophical, aesthetic and ideological context of the text.

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