Pushkin's Texts in Nabokov's Oeuvre: A Dialogic Discourse

Abstract

This article examines the specifics of intertextual dialogue between Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction and the oeuvre of Alexander Pushkin. The study is grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. It posits that Nabokov’s polemical engagement with the Russian literary tradition operates along two divergent vectors. On the one hand, his work aligns itself with the lineage of Pushkin — Gogol — Bunin; on the other, it constitutes a sustained antagonism toward Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Chernyshevsky. The analysis foregrounds Nabokov’s insistence on the inherent autonomy of poetry from political and ideological contingencies — a stance consistently articulated across his critical essays and public lectures. The paper interrogates the complexity and multifaceted nature of this exchange, arguing that it transcends mere appropriation or apprenticeship to encompass a sophisticated matrix of semantic interactions both within individual texts and across the broader corpora of the two authors. Identifying core referential works by Pushkin that function as genetic substrata for numerous narratives by Nabokov, the author demonstrates how Nabokov’s entire artistic project can be productively read as an extended reminiscence of the poem “The Prophet”. The argument culminates in the conclusion that the dialectic between Nabokov and Pushkin synthesizes canonical inheritance with epistemological innovation, deploying formal freedom and strategic ventriloquism (the incorporation of the “other’s word”) to advance Nabokov’s distinct poetics.