Egocentric Elements in V. Nabokov’s Novel — The Defense

The article presents a linguistic analysis of a literary text within the framework of the dominant communicative scholarly paradigm. The focus is on the narrative sub-ject and the complex communicative situation of fictional narration. The material for the study is the text of V. V. Nabokov’s novel The Defense. To address the key task of linguistic analysis of a literary text — the localization of the narrative subject within the novel — the concept of the egocentric element, developed by E. V. Paducheva, is employed. The literary-critical aspect of the article is connected with the notion of the dual-world structure characteristic of Nabokov’s texts. The protagonist of The Defense exists simultaneously in the real world and in the artistic world of the text, in the time of the narrative plot and in the world of his fantasies — the world of chess. The narra-tive structure in which the subject is situated simultaneously within two modal narra-tive planes is organized through the repetition of lexical and grammatical egocentric elements.