NABOKOV: THE SCHOOL OF CREATIVE READING

The article shows the value of Nabokov as an informant for cognitive scientists studying heuristically active personality. In the case of Nabokov this means the personality that combines features of an aesthetic person (artistis talent) and a theoretical person (a researcher, a classifier).

Nabokov’s linguistic experiment (his artistic practice) serves as a pretext for search of underlying psychological motivations which explain the writer’s inclination to play rhetoric, in particular, to the formation of hybrid metaphors, countermetaphors, to the clash of literalism and figurativeness, to the invention of metaphorical scenarios of different formats and other techniques by means of which Nabokov deliberately brings us into a state of productive puzzlement, stimulates creative initiative of a potential reader.

Nabokov’s text taken as a whole space is filled with the material in integrative stylistics, which explains the author’s idionorm in a unified manner. Materials of his lectures to American students are involved, as well as his interviews dealing with the writer’s creative principles and the features of his verbal behavior.

Problem situation “Author – recipient – text” relevant for cognitive science, finds a meaningful response in Nabokov’s writings. Hypersemantization observed in Nabokov’s artistic experience, is an effective means of education and improvement of the linguistic competence of a language speaker. Modern humanitarian science appeals to Nabokov’s authority in search of an answer to the question about the conditions of creation productivity, about the influence of reading culture on the activity of creative thinking.