“ON THAT HAPPY DAY...” The structure of happiness and the problem of the poetic manifestation in Nabokov’s Sounds

Abstract

The study deals with one of the most determining poetic categories of Nabokov’s early period, with happiness. With the analysis of Nabokov’s short story, entitled Sounds, it examines how the topic motive of happiness emerges in the first place in Nabokov’s prose. Besides close reading of the text, it touches upon those narratological procedures that will also be determining later in Nabokov’s prose. In the course of the analysis the complicated correlation between the state of happiness, the increased perception and the creation is revealed, not regardless of the young Nabokov’s psychological studies, above all of William James’s works. Beside all these, the analysis mentions the most important Russian literary references and allusions, makes an attempt at interpreting the further writing of Tolstoy’s, Chekhov’s, Tyutchev’s and Mandelstam’s works in the Sounds.