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 lyrics of V.V. Nabokov (Sirin) reflect the author’s ideas about home as a sacral space associated with the memories of his childhood, the abandoned city, the lost homeland, the bygone era. Memories of home as an earthly paradise are an important part of Nabokov’s poetic worldview. For the poet home is not only the mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya in Saint Petersburg or the family manor, but all distant Russia. His thoughts about the small and large homeland appear in anxious dreams of memory, drawing endless returns “home”. The article examines Nabokov’s poems addressed to Russia (the predominance of two dual motives: interpenetration / rejection and death / resurrection is emphasized), as well as the conventional thematic cycle “Petersburg”, that includes seven poems in which the dominant topos is the exiled poet’s hometown. Ambivalence in the attitude to Petersburg is manifested in a mixture of feelings: enthusiastic love for the city of the past and hostility to its present; feeling it as one’s own and at the same time as a foreign town; pain of loss, grief for the dead city and thoughts of it as eternally alive; memory of it and oblivion. For the lyrical hero, the return to his city of birth, “home”, is tantamount to a miracle and is associatively correlated with the miracle of resurrection. It is no coincidence that the poems with biblical motifs (“On Golgotha”, “The Legend of the Old Woman Looking for a Carpenter”, etc.) metaphorically convey the poet’s basic worldview orientations associated with the image of home.
V.V. Nabokov; lyrics; image of home; dream; memory; returns; Russia; Petersburg; biblical motifs.
15.05.2025
10.06.2025
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