Text and translation by Vladimir Nabokov through the prism of stylemetry

The paper deals with the concept of style in V Nabokov’s texts, considered in the context of his own statements about this aspect of literary creativity and the research tradition that follows it. Another important concept of the Nabokov studies is translation, to which the writer had also paid much attention. The usual approach to these two aspects of Nabokov’s work is togather personal observations. This article proposes to consider style and translation in the context of stylometry. Stylometry is a discipline that considers style as a set of quantifiable parameters. Modern stylistic approaches (the most authoritative one is Burrows Delta) allow us to compare texts with each other, focusing on the distribution of the frequency of words. This allows us to pose three important research questions: 1) how similar in style are the original English novels of the writer and the translations of Russian novels by Nabokov into English? Answer: these text corpora are independent sets of texts with the exception of the English translation of “Despair”; 2) how similar in style are the original Russian novels of the writer and the translations of his English-language novels? Answer: these are independent corpora, with the exception of the similarities between the auto-translation of “Lolita” and “The Gift”; 3) Can we see Nabokov’s creative individuality when he translates into English “A Hero of Our Time”? Answer: as usually happens in such cases, the translator’s individuality becomes “invisible” and is muted by an authorial signal.