Kolmakova O.A. Distinctive genre features of Nabokov's short story "Recruiting" ("Nabor")

The article discusses the genre analysis of Nabokov’s short stories. The author analyzed the story «Recruiting» («Nabor»), written by Nabokov in 1935. The genre features of this work reveal the uniqueness of Nabokov’s poetics, where playing and stylization are some of its stable characteristics. The author plays with the reader’s expectations, skillfully imitating the aesthetics of a realistic social psychological novel. The narrative structure of the text is shaped by means of combining some novel techniques, most important of which are the character’s portrayal, inner speech, psychological feature, landscape, sociocultural background, etc. However, at the end of the story we see the point almost belonging to the genre of a novella: the imagined exposition of the novel,when the main character is presented to the reader, turns out to be a part of a document - the diary orthe memoirs of the writer, and the novel’s narrator becomes the demiurge author.