V. SIRIN VS V. NABOKOV: NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
The study attempts to compare and characterize the two periods of the writing activity of the Russian and American novelist V. Nabokov from the point of view of the psychology of creativity, and also solves the following problems: attention is paid to two types of author’s self-identification; features of national and international poetics are highlighted; the author investigates the system of characters of the writer’s novels from the position of their belonging to the Russian, European or North American cultural tradition. To achieve the goal set in the work, a complex of biographic, typological, psychological and historical literary methods as well as a method for analyzing binary oppositions were used. The methodological base in the work is the scientific works of Russian and foreign researchers relating to the problem of the study. The author’s novel prose of both the Russian and English-speaking period of creativity, as well as his interviews and poetic works are mainly used as a material of the present research. The article concludes that the work of Nabokov-Sirin is a unique synthesis of the Russian-American bilingual writer of the twentieth century, organically combining both purely national and international features. The further scientific perspectives of the study are also outlined.