About grotesque in the Russian prose of V. V. Nabokov

The article studies the features of grotesque in V. V. Nabokov’s prose of the Russian-speaking period (stories of the 1920-1930s, the novel "Invitation to a Beheading"). We have emphasized the influence of Gogol's grotesque on Nabokov, the attention of contemporary critics to the problem of genesis of Nabokov's form and content use of the grotesque. Methods used to create a special model of the world with its chaos, disintegration in the prose of V. V. Nabokov permit to wild using of grotesque. Attention is drawn to the image of the grotesque body as an expression of the facelessness of characters, physiological details, lifeless expression on faces, carnaval actions. In a world full of chaos, the grotesque as a way of artistic embodiment of the illusory, mirage nature of the world becomes the only productive way to develop an idea about the complexity and incomprehensibility of the human.