The material offered to the readers is a translation into Russian, with
extensive notes, of an excerpt from the First Part of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada,
or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). The published material consists of a translator’s
Preface, five chapters from the novel, notes by V.V. Nabokov and the translator’s
annotations. The Preface to the publication describes the creative and biographical
circumstances of the creation of one of the most significant and controversial novels
of the twentieth century, and indicates the sources of its conception, which goes
back to the English short story of Nabokov Time and Ebb (1944), and considers
its formal peculiarities. The Preface outlines the basic principles of Ada’s poetics,
which distinguish it from the number of other works of the outstanding master and
innovator of prose and affect it’s readers perception, such as: deliberate complexity
of the narrative technique and an unprecedented variety of language tools used by
Nabokov. The author of the Preface draws attention to the fact that the subtitle of the
novel, indicating that it belongs to the genre of family chronicles, serves as one of the
elements of Nabokov’s game poetics, since the classical tradition becomes the subject
of parody in Ada. The novel is considered by the author of the Preface and translator of
Ada as a grand compendium of European literature of Modern period, as an experiment
in combining many varieties of the novel, from pastoral and Enlightenment utopian
fiction of the 16– 17 centuries to the Nouveau roman of the 1950s and 1960s. The new
Russian version of Nabokov’s most untranslatable novel took into account detailed
annotations (in progress) by B. Boyd, works by A. Appel, Jr., and other researches,
observations by one of the German translators of Ada, D. Zimmer, and the text of the
French translation of the novel, which was prepared under Nabokov’s supervision.
The Preface to the publication and the translator’s annotations involve archival
material, in particular the draft of several chapters of the Russian translation of Ada,
prepared by Véra Nabokov.
FEATURES OF RECEPTION AND TRANSLATION INTO GERMAN OF NON-EQUIVALENT VOCABULARY IN THE WORK OF S.T. AKSAKOV "FAMILY CHRONICLE"
