The reception of Russian drama in V. Nabokov’s “Bend sinister”

The article investigates the allusions to the works of Russian drama in “Bend Sinister”, V. Nabokov’s first novel created in America. For the first time, we scrutinize the novel’s Russian literary intertext. Comprehending the problem of historical determinism, Nabokov appeals to works by A. Pushkin, and N. Gogol. The author parodies the image of Boris Godunov and highlights the dreamlike nature of Pushkin’s plot: in Nabokov’s world, the government of vulgarians and executioners is also in a painful nightmare dream. Interpreting “The Little Tragedies”, Nabokov makes a travesty of the motif of fate, which the author evaluates as a situation of discovering the phantom nature of the characters’ reality. Nabokov transforms the composition of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector” and emphasizes the similarity between his characters and Gogol’s characters-homunculi. We conclude that allusions to the Russian literature are the part of writer’s experiment with the boundaries of the literary genres. Showing the variations of drama collisions, Nabokov uses intertext in different artistic modes: comic, heroical, satiric. Allusions to works in which the heroes witness a historical catastrophe allow the writer to create an image of a world where the fate of a person and humanity does not obey the logic of tragic determinism. Reminiscences of the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and Chekhov explicate the author’s identity as the heir of Russian classical literature.