“Urban Text” in Nabokov’s 1920s Works: St. Petersburg vs Berlin

Aim. To analyse the poetics of the “urban text” in V. V. Nabokov's poetic and prose works in the 1920s..Methodology. The main content is consideration of the “metageographic” aspects of Nabokov’s poetry and short prose, in which images of St. Petersburg and / or Berlin appear. The research uses biographical, comparative, cultural-historical methods of analysis.Results. The analysis showed that in the first half of the 1920s Nabokov’s Petersburg not only appears in artistically reinterpreted memories in images associated with real toponymy, but also receives a metaphysical dimension. In the same years and later, Berlin in Nabokov’s works is a city not of the past, but of the present happiness, “romanticized” by means of optical illusion. But the opposition between St. Petersburg and Berlin is removed in Nabokov’s works, on the one hand, due to the fact that through the German city Nabokov “sees” the Russian city (in natural and cultural aspect), and on the other hand, due to universalization of the chronotope: a particular city vanishes, replaced by the space of the author’s consciousness filled with love.Research implications. The results of this research expand the scope of Nabokov’s artistic world, especially about the existence in his works of such cultural and literary phenomena as the “Petersburg” and “Berlin text”.