The Artist-Spy in V. Nabokov’s Short Story ‘The Assistant Producer’: the Representation of Sensorial and Aesthetic Experience
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2073-6681-2024-3-130-137Keywords:
V. Nabokov; American years; The Assistant Producer; perceptive imagery; intercultural communication; writer’s identity; intertext.Abstract
he article is devoted to the analysis of The Assistant Producer, Vladimir Nabokov’s first short story in English. The study explores how V. Nabokov interprets the problem of the author’s identity in foreign readers’ audience. The structural-semiotic and intertextual methods are used in the paper to identify the narrative techniques organizing the intrigue in the short story: the exposure of the character as a triple agent and the narrator as an artist. The narrator focuses on the optical and sound effects of cinema as well as on the foreign accent in other characters’ speech. These peculiarities of the narrator’s perception show his perceptive and language sensitiveness inherent in an artist. The pseudo-documental cinema world includes the legends of Stepan Razin, portraits by impressionists and post-impressionists, and emigre literature. The artistic world is constructed through the images conveying the aberrations of perception, smells and the senses of touch, which are difficult to verbalize, unmotivated alliterations, allusions that are hard to interpret for foreign readers. Perceptive images and literary allusions construct the plot about the communicative mistake: from the narrator’s point of view, the cinema shows the world of Russian emigre inaccurately, but it reveals the banality of the intentions of the character-executioner. V. Nabokov assesses incompleteness as a key characteristic of intercultural communication, motivated by the differences in recipients’ sensorial and reading experience. V. Nabokov’s strategy is to highlight the inexpressible characteristics of his sensorial and creative (reading and writing) experience. Communicative mistakes inspire co-creative reading. At the beginning of his American career, V. Nabokov develops the idea that a genius writer can convey his sensorial, aesthetic, and language experience despite the communicative borders.References
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