Barwy w „Lolicie” Vladimira Nabokova

Abstrakt

Verbal art of Vladimir Nabokov, although supremely visual, engages all the other physical senses in the process of writing. He repeatedly stressed the fact that he thought ‘not in words but in images, in swimming colors, in shaded shapes’ (Bodenstein
1977: 239). This way of imaginative perceiving influences the creation of the world presented in the novel. The suggestive power of words and synesthesia as two of the stylistic devices make it possible to convey meaning indirectly - hidden behind the senses given directly. Suggestive onomatopoeia and a special use of the names of colours, when discovered and decoded by the reader, create a new surface of actual events,
feelings, motives and emotions. Consequently, the present paper provides the analyses of suggestive onomatopoeia and the suggestive power of names of colours as the semantic and stylistic devices
used by Vladimir Nabokov in his novel “Lolita”. It discuses some interesting cases of interpretation of colours in their connection with the proper names of the main protagonist of the novel.