The dialectic of perception of Nabokov's poems is such that the author's well-known tendency to repeat "someone else's" as his own should be seen not as a lack of talent, originality of aesthetic solutions, but as a characteristic way of expressing his originality. Nabokov's talent allows him to pass "other people's "ideas through the prism of his personality and make them"his own". Therefore, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the "own", individual and original, in Nabokov's creative heritage is inseparable from the reinterpreted tradition.
You can name a wide range of names of those Russian artists with whose work Nabokov's poetry is fundamentally correlated. These are primarily A. S. Pushkin, Andrey Bely, A. Blok, B. Pasternak, A. Fet, F. Tyutchev. This list can be continued, but for the sake of the article, we would like to limit ourselves to one parallel that we have not yet mentioned, but which is obvious.
In one of his letters to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov disagrees with his addressee that Russian literature entered a period of decline after 1905: "The decline of Russian literature in the periods 1905-1917 is a Soviet invention. Blok, Bely, Bunin < ... > write their best stuff. And never - even in Pushkin's time - has poetry been so popular. I was born in this era, I grew up in this atmosphere" (The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. 1940 - 1971. New York, 1979. P. 220). Based on this letter, Johnson concludes that symbolism played an important role in Nabokov's creative development (Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis. 1985. P. 2 - 3). And Nabokov himself considered the Russian Silver Age to be his "cradle". It is significant that, naming two symbolist poets-Bely and Blok, he also includes Bunin, whose work is usually attributed to realism. On the other hand, Nabokov's negative attitude towards this literary movement is well known. What attracted him to Bunin's ...
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