Shifts : Patterns of Nabokov's Prose

The book includes interpretations that offer an alternative reading of Nabokov''s texts, looking for the inner connections of the writer''s oeuvre, in the microstructures of motifs, nodes, and patterns. The concept of the erotext, combining the bliss of the textual and the sexual detaches analyses from reading literature as a copy of life. Nabokov''s paths of initiation lead the reader to transcend boundaries: facets of Ego and of imaginary norms, the limits of space and time, to the threshold of the otherworldly -- towards ecstasy. Being a polyglot writer with synaesthesia, he savored words, knew their physics and music, visualized word forms, blended hybrid languages. By indulging in associations, he brought things to life, and exposed the vulgarity of ''Communazist clowns''. Shifts reveal hidden layers, maintain tensions, and create new qualities. This shift can be understood in terms of the identity in the crisis of exile, multilinguality and synesthesia of the author, the provocation of ethics and eroticism, mirroring multiplications and dreams, and the loosening of the role of the author. In the shifts shattering the foundations of normativity Nabokov, the forerunner of the Postmodern is revealed.