Rhythm of Nabokov’s Verse and Prose

This work addresses the problem of verse and prose interaction in a broad sense. These literary forms can be viewed in different ways: they are opposed, because each of them has unique features inherent only in it or conversely, they are perceived as a whole and as something that complements each other. In the 20th century, scholars began to closely study the interaction of verse and prose, when they noticed that poetry imperceptibly penetrates into prose and exists harmoniously there. The study of verse-similar fragments (metric parts within prose) began. The work of such authors as Pushkin, Pasternak, Tolstoy has already been studied. This paper continues the study of these verse-similar fragments on the example of the V. Nabokov’s work. There is an assumption that the presence of such fragments in prose is connected with author’s past literary experience, so the purpose of the work is to check whether Nabokov's poetic experience has an impact on his prose and to compare the rhythm of his works with other poets. In this paper the rhythm of such novels as The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, Lolita, Mary, The Defense is planning to consider as well as a number of Nabokov’s poems and poems of his contemporaries. The methods used for this study are graphing based on text markup and comparative analysis of graphs of speech and language models of Nabokov's verse and prose.