The poetics of color “cattleya labiata” in the lyrics by Vladimir Nabokov

The present article demonstrates one of the ways of analyzing an important aspect of poetic world, namely, its colour saturation, based on the example of a fragment related to lilac color poetics. The research is carried out simultaneously within the frameworks of literary criticism and linguistics and is predicated on the analysis of the poet’s language. The interpretation of themes and image-motive situations associated with color names is based on multi-aspect lexicographic description. Drawing on the database of verse corpus, serving as the material of research, the authors have compiled a frequency dictionary of Nabokov’s poetic language with a concordance, a dictionary of color names, a functional thesaurus of color names, a dictionary of image models associated with color, a dictionary of lexical collocations which includes color names. The data for the latter was obtained with the help of original software “Hypertext search of words-companions in authorial texts”. The use of the data of these dictionaries helps to objectively characterize the range of meanings of a particular word in texts of a particular author. This approach makes it possible to reveal the meanings of the word relevant to the author’s individual style among the meanings of this word that it has acquired over centuries in poetic, philosophic and religious traditions. The article is necessarily limited to the presentation of poetics of color “cattleya labiata” in the lyrics by Vladimir Nabokov, conducted on the basis of analysis of frequency dictionary, functional thesaurus and image model dictionary.