| Titre | Les fantômes de l'opéra dans les romans de Vladimir Nabokov | |
|---|---|---|
| Auteur | Nora Buhks | |
 |
Revue | Revue des Etudes Slaves |
| Numéro | Vol. 72, no 3-4, 2000 | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | Nabokov dans le miroir du XXe siècle, sous la direction de Nora Buhks Articles |
|
| Page | 453-466 | |
| Résumé anglais |
The phantoms of the opera in Nabokov's novels
The art of music, and especially of the opera, in Nabokov's oeuvre is an important, but almost undeveloped topic. Allusions to operas exist in the most of his novels of the European period and their appearance weakens during the American period. While the allusions agree with the main topics of Nabokov's prose they symptomatically mark the development from Orpheus to Faust.
The referral within his early story The Return of Chorb to Gluck's opera Orfeo е Euridice demonstrates the exploration by the author of one of the main structural principles of his poetics: the transgression of the border between reality and art (the happy end of the opera stimulates the hero to repeat it in real life).
Furthermore, Laughter in the Dark is the crossroads of two kinds of art: cinema and opera. Meanwhile the German opera of the expressionist period with its declarational anti-romantic and anti-Wagner aesthetics (as in the operas of Paul Hindemith) becomes the important subtext of the novel. The operas based on famous masterpieces of literature, especially those written by Puškin, occupy a particular place in Nabokov's prose. They are conceptualized as parodic double of the texts and are used for creating the purely aesthetic substitutions that pretend to be the original one. For example, in Despair, Nabokov creates allusions to Čajkovskij's opera and not to Puškin 's The Queen of Spades. The same parodic exposing function is complied by the scene from the opera in the second chapter of Invitation to a Beheading, which contains the allusion to the Song About the Rat from the dramatic legend of Hector Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust.
The allusions to the operas in the novels of Nabokov are distinguished by the rich structure, repertoire variety and unexpectedness of artistic realizations. That could raise them to the level of being called "the phantoms of the opera". Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
|
| Article en ligne | https://www.persee.fr/doc/slave_0080-2557_2000_num_72_3_6676 |
