Synestezja jako forma języka figuratywnego. Rozważania o synestezyjnych asocjacjach Vladimira Nabokova

The main goals of the article are to present the place of synaesthesia among the other devices of figurative language and to show diversity of synaesthetic associations in Vladimir Nabokov’s prose. As it has been proved, a key notion for understanding the mechanism and functioning of figures, such as synaesthesia, metaphor and metonymy, is that of conceptual conflict. The presence or absence of conceptual conflict underpins the distinction between living and conventional figures, as well as metonymy and hypallage.What is more, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy is based on the way they deal with conflict. In turn, interpretation of conceptual conflict may lead to understanding the mechanism of a synaesthetic association and the author’s strategy. The examples of Nabokov’s synaesthetic expressions show that metonymy and synaesthesia may be both present in a text and that they interact. However, it is worth underlying, that in literary texts synaesthesia may also coexist with hypallage and similes involving sensory lexemes, as it was observed on the examples of Nabokov’s prose.