The hero reports about his first meeting with the heroine as follows: "I met Nina a long time ago, in nineteen seventeen, probably judging by the places where time has worn out. It was on a birthday party at my aunt's house, on her Luzhsky estate, in a pure country winter."

The observant reader, of course, cannot but pay attention to the historically extremely important date of acquaintance of the hero and heroine, as if through clenched teeth, - the winter of 1917. Very soon, the reader's guess about the secret explosive subtext embedded in this date is confirmed. A paragraph after the phrase just quoted, a hypothetical reason will be mentioned (again, as if in passing), which caused a crowd of merry guests to leave the warm room: "I don't remember why we all spilled out of the bell-shaped pillared hall into this motionless darkness, populated only by Christmas trees, twice swollen from snow porosity: whether the watchman was called to look at the promising glow of a distant fire, or whether we admired the ice horse carved by the Swiss near the pond of my cousins; but the memory only comes to life when..."

This, lost in the endlessly unfolding sentence "the promising glow of a distant fire", nevertheless contains a clear reference: very similar realities and circumstances are described in the writer's novel "Podvig": "... in nineteen hundred and eighteen... the whole estate was also burned down, which, out of stupidity, was completely burned down, instead of making a profit on the situation, by peasants from a nearby village."

Two Nabokovian epithets - "promising" and "distant" - also deserve special attention. Far Away is not only a spatial, but also a temporal characteristic (it is now February 1917, but the real fire will break out after October, which is still far away). The promising glow promises not only the horrors of Oktyabrsky perevoro-

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that, but also the emigration of the hero and heroine provoked by these horrors, and therefore their further emigrant meetings, including the meeting in Fialt, which is described in detail in the story.

An attentive reader of Nabokov will also understand more significant information: after informing about the year of his acquaintance with Nina, the hero then drops: "I just graduated from high school." The word "lyceum" will definitely make you think of Pushkin, especially since " Spring in Violets "is densely saturated with reminiscences from his works (for example, the heroine is said to have"Pushkin's legs"). Given that the future author of "Eugene Onegin" graduated from the lyceum exactly one hundred years before the hero of the story-in 1817, one can see in the roll call of these two dates the conscious intention of the writer, supported by a distinctly "Onegin" flavor of the entire episode (winter, village, name day, empire decor). This is the correlation of the beloved hero with Pushkin, carefully carried out in the story "Spring in Violets" (and in a number of other Nabokov's works-compare, for example, about the hero of "Dara": "Pushkin was part of his blood. With the voice of Pushkin merged the voice of his father"), enriched with another discreet, but expressive touch.

Looking through Pushkin's prism also allows you to see the distant glow of the fire in the "promising glow" of the Nabokov fire from Pushkin's story "Dubrovsky": "Now everything is fine ," said Arkhip, " how does it feel to burn, eh? tea, nice to see from Pokrovsky."

This example is a good illustration of one of the main principles of construction of Vladimir Nabokov's short story "Spring in Violets", and, perhaps, to most of his prose texts. The empathetic reader is encouraged to follow the writer along a certain path, as if by hooks, marked by hints or repetitive motifs. And this path is never a dead end.

For the sophisticated reader, Nabokov carefully and lovingly outlines the second, and sometimes third, path: roads leading to much more important discoveries. So, a connoisseur of Nabokov's prose, getting acquainted with the analyzed fragment, can determine how the hero of "Spring in Violet" relates to the author of the story: he is his cousin, who, according to the hero's memoirs, had a Swiss tutor, just like Nabokov himself (cf. the hero of the story remembered "the first sign of approaching" to the estate aunts: "a red barn in the middle of a white field" with the same detailed description of the Nabokov estate in "Other Shores": "icicles hanging from the roof of a red barn").

The motif of the railway is persistently repeated in the story. For the first time, the image of a moving train appears on the second page of "Spring in Fialt": "I arrived on the night express, in some kind of steam-driven excitement trying to get as much as possible with a bang

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tunnels". For the last time - symmetrically - on the second page from the end: "... rounding the foot, the smoke of an invisible train ran and suddenly disappeared." Between these two points, railway realities and metaphors are pushed persistently, not to say obsessively. With the help of railway metaphors, the relationship between the hero and the heroine is described: "... until the very departure, we did not talk about anything with each other, did not agree about those future, far-off, fifteen road years." And-with her husband, the cynical fiction writer Ferdinand: "During these ten years, we have both switched to you, and left a small matter of shared memories in two or three points."

The hero often imagines Nina "at the counter in the travel office, the legs of the retinue, one of them hitting the linoleum with her toe, elbows and a bag on the counter, behind which the employee, taking a pencil from behind his ear, thinks with her about the plan of the sleeping car." One of the most significant encounters between the hero and the heroine takes place "in the blue shadow of the car", and then we watch together as Nina "climbed into the vestibule, disappeared, and then through the glass I saw her sitting in the compartment, suddenly forgetting about us, moving to another world."

Starting from this episode, the function of the railway motif in the story "Spring in Fialt" seems to become more and more clear: the movement of the heroine from the platform to the railway compartment appears as a clear metaphor of death ("disappeared", having passed "to another world"), all the more significant because throughout the story the hero of the story is not the same as the main character. he constantly hints that he will never see Nina again (with the description of her death, "Spring in Fialt" ends). Further, the themes of death and the railway are even more closely linked with each other and with the image of Nina. In particular, the hero recalls his dream: "... in the aisle, on a chest, with a rolled-up matting under her head, pale and wrapped in a handkerchief, Nina sleeps in a dead sleep, as migrants sleep at God-forsaken railway stations " (our italics. - O. L.).

The writer generously scatters indirect hints throughout the story that the heroine's death will take place in railway scenery (let's recall Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina").

In Nabokov's case, Nina's death occurs as a result of a traffic collision, but the railway, contrary to expectations, turns out to have nothing to do with it: the car "crashed behind Violetta, flying at full speed into the van of a traveling circus." Nevertheless, the railway motif is present in the story, as the hero learns about Nina's death from the newspaper, standing "at the train station in Milan". That is, Nabokov still found the railway useful, but the metaphor of the killer train was eventually preferred to the image of the station - as a place of public solitude.

Now nothing prevents the attentive reader from once again purposefully studying Nabokov's story and making sure that,

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first, "fifteen years on the road that have already started moving into the distance" can be perceived as a metaphor not only for the beginning of the train movement, but also as a likening of the relationship between the hero and the heroine to the movement of a car that is gradually gaining speed. And, secondly , the fact that Nina's death in a car accident is inevitably predicted at the very beginning of "Spring in Fialt". This is also indicated by such a detail in the portrait of the heroine: "... she remained standing for a moment, half-turned, pulling a shadow around her neck, tied with a lemon-yellow scarf." The ominous phrase "drawing a shadow around her neck" seems to be intended to recall the ridiculous and tragic death of Isadora Duncan: "... Isadora went down to the street, where a small racing car was waiting for her, joked and, throwing the end of a red shawl with a sprawling yellow bird over her shoulder, waved her hand goodbye and, smiling, said the last words in a low voice. your life's words (...) A red shawl with a sprawling bird and blue Chinese asters fell from Isadora's shoulder, slid over the side of the car, and gently licked the dry, spinning rubber of the wheel. And suddenly, vmotavshis in the wheel, roughly pulled Isadora by the throat (...) Two hours later, outside Duncan's studio in Nice, I heard the sound of horses ' hooves. It was Isadora's body being brought home from the morgue. She was laid on the sofa, covered with a scarf, in which she danced" (Schneider I. I. Meetings with Yesenin. Memoirs, Moscow, 1965, pp. 101-102). Another hint of the inevitability of a car accident waiting for the heroine of the story is hidden in the comparison of Ferdinand's car with the " smooth and (for now. - O. L.) a whole " egg.

Finally, we will consider such an important component of Nabokov's story as its title, paying special attention to the toponym "Fialta" invented by the writer. B. Boyd notes that this toponym is "a contamination of the names of the Adriatic Fiyum and the Black Sea Yalta" (Boyd B. Vladimir Nabokov. Russian years. Biografiya, Moscow, 2001, pp. 496-497). Nabokov himself is silent about Fiume, substituting"violet" in its place: "I love this town (...) in the hollow of its name, I can hear the sugary-moist smell of small, dark, most crumpled flowers, and not in tone, although distinct, the sound of Yalta." At the end of the story, Nina will have a "bouquet of dark, small, unselfishly fragrant violets" in her hands - a kind of emblem of the image of the main character.

The imaginary Violetta is surrounded in Nabokov's story by real great European cities: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, and Milan are mentioned. This unobtrusively creates a contrast between the past meetings of the hero and heroine and their last date, which turns out to be a phantom city. Nabokov sees Fialta as a place where a wide variety of cultures and peoples mix whimsically, without losing its almost photographic resemblance to Yalta: "... the child that excites my Tatar memory was carried from the naked mountains.

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Compare the description of the Crimea in "Other Shores": "... everything was not Russian, smells, sounds, Potemkin flora in the parks of the coast, sweet smoke spilled in the air of Tatar villages (...) all this was decidedly reminiscent of Baghdad , and I immediately plunged into Pushkin's orientales." Fialta, therefore, serves as a double-a symbol not only of Nabokov's, but also of Pushkin's Crimea (which partly justifies the plethora of Pushkin's allusions in the text).

Remembering that in one of the episodes of the story the author speaks about the "greenhouse - moist essence of Violets", and comparing this characteristic with the place in the "Gift" where it is about the "greenhouse paradise of the past", we will understand that Nabokov's Violets are a kind of substitute for the earthly paradise for the hero and heroine, from which they recklessly and criminally refuse. And not only the "greenhouse", but also the" wet " part of the essence of Violets plays a role here. At the beginning of the story, the hero "splashes" through the streets of the town "towards the streams, without a hat, with a wet head." But the devil-like Ferdinand is walking "in a completely waterproof coat with a belt."

If you carefully re-read the scene of the last meeting of unsuccessful lovers in Fialta, then the detail mentioned in passing will acquire special significance, as usual with Nabokov: "There was a rusty key lying at our feet." This is an unrecognized key to the unfulfilled happiness of the heroes, from the paradise that they did not enter. A few lines later, it is reported about Nina that she, "who easily, as in paradise, uttered obscene words," at the moment of a decisive explanation, was confused and frightened.

Nabokov was probably more concerned with finding and "educating" the ideal reader than others. "... In the works of literary art, the real struggle is not between the characters of the novel, but between the novelist and the reader," he admitted in Other Shores.

"Often written - execution, and read correctly - song", - once wrote Osip Mandelstam, and this line reflected one of the key principles of his poetics. In Nabokov, if you spell "execution" and read correctly - "song", then the reader should also not forget about "execution".

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