Karina A. Zhul’kova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nakhimovsky Avenue, 51/21, 117418, Moscow, Russia.
The article examines the early poems of V.V. Nabokov “Joseph’s Glasses”, “In the Cave”, “When I’m on the Diamond Staircase…”, “The Legend of the Old Woman Who Searched for the Carpenter”, “The Last Supper”, “Mother” and others, in which the pictorial and expressive detail (portrait, landscape, object, everyday life) becomes the main means of creating of biblical images; it is argued that, deviating from the iconographic tradition and endowing the biblical characters with “too human” touches, the poet emphasizes important ideological principles for himself, the main one of which is the transparency of the boundaries between the earthly and the heavenly, the merging of the worlds at the point of the highest spiritual manifestations of man; it is noted that the literary detail in Nabokov’s lyrical texts with gospel themes performs a number of interdependent and complementary functions: visualizer, semantic emphasis, metaphor, often rises to a symbol, becomes the main element of two differently directed processes: desacralization and sacralization.
V.V. Nabokov; lyrics; biblical images; literary detail; symbol; metaphor.
20.10.2024
15.11.2024
Zhul’kova, K.A. “Literary Detail as a Basis for Creating Biblical Images in the Early Lyrics of V.V. Nabokov”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 1(67), 2025, pp. 142–159. (In Russ.)
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