Socio-Cultural and Historical-Political Themes in V. Nabokov’s Novel Camera Obscura

Despite the fact that V. Nabokov paid attention to the social and socio-cultural characteristics of the characters and space, a significant part of the information about the period of their formation is given retrospectively, goes beyond the boundaries of the plot actions. This indicates, on the one hand, the shift of socio-cultural and political issues to the periphery of the figurative and motivic-thematic structure of the novel, on the other hand, that Nabokov implicitly shows interest in this area, creating an unaccented in the narrative, but capacious image of German society of the 1920s. The analysis revealed the following: methods of describing the city’s socio-cultural locations and episodic non-plot characters (depersonalization, non-mention, opposition, etc.); a collective image of different social groups of German society, as well as V. Nabokov’s views on contemporary historical and socio-cultural processes taking place in Europe. The writer expresses a negative and ironic attitude towards the proletariat, because its representatives demonstrate an aggressive strategy of behavior to satisfy physiological and social, but not human spiritual needs, and are characterized by a lack of morality and erudition. Nabokov also notes the aggressive replacement of elitism by mass art, which leads to the intellectual degradation of the society. Flirting with the tastes of the masses and value relativism leads representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia, embodied in the image of Bruno Kretschmar, to the inability to resist the expansion of the social lower classes, both in the cultural and social spheres of life.