Ускользающие аллюзии: «Гофмановский мир» в рассказах Набокова Elusive allusions: "Hoffmann's world" in Nabokov's novels

This paper reveals some points of the influence of E. T. A. Hofmann on the early period of Nabokov’s prose, with particular focus on two short stories, “The Potato Elf” and “The Venetian Woman,” both written in 1924. The first story is analysed in the light of “Little Zaches, great Zinnober,” in the other, I identify allusions from The Devil’s Elixir. Motifs inspired by the German romantic, well-received by Russian writers of the Silver Age, are intertwined, on the one hand, with the symbolist poetics of Aleksandr Blok, and, on the other, with the art of painting represented as a boundary between reality and a parallel world. Most of the motifs converge in Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave, written under his pen name Sirin