Names of colour in V. Nabokov’s bilingual worldview (based on the original and self-translated texts of the novel Lolita)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the current problem of studying bilingual authors’ idiolects in colour aspect. This research aims to identify the features of Vladimir Nabokov’s lingua-colour worldview associated with the use of English and Russian in self-translation. Lists of colouremes of the original and translated Lolita are made; their part-of-speech facet is analyzed; dominant coloronyms are identified and compared; structural peculiarities of the selected colours in both lists are studied. The novelty of the work lies in the creation of English and Russian lexicons and frequency dictionaries of representatives of Nabokov’s color worldview, which gives objective data about the linguistic personality basing on idiolect. Along with quantitative method, the work uses the method of systematic scientific description, via which the multidimensional systematization of empirical material is conducted and the comparative method implemented in observation, comparison and interpretation techniques for the received language data. The article notes both common and specific features in the two color lexicons. With a comparable number of English and Russian colouremes, the translation language is more coloristic. Part-of-speech differences of colours are noted. In complete lists chromatic designations predominate, they are more frequent in Russian. Among the dominants achromatic colors outweigh, English achromatisms prevail. Numerous hapaxes and complex coloremes, rarely equivalent, contribute to the palette diversity. The main causes of inconsistencies are identified. The author comes to the conclusion that the ways of lexicalizing the color perceptions of the bilingual writer-translator are modified when switching to the target language that indicates differences in Nabokov’s worldview.