Lexical correlates of the concept spheres “weather phenomena”/“погодные явления” in bilingual V. Nabokov’s idiolects

This article examines meteorological (weather) vocabulary as a fragment of the bilingual writer Vladimir Nabokov’s idiolect. The material for the analysis was the English-language original of the novel “Lolita” and its author’s translation into Russian. The aim of the paper is to examine the weather-related fragment of the writer’s linguistic worldview and to identify the specifics of the lexical objectification of meteorological reality, conditioned by the author’s translation. The focus is on a comparative analysis of linguistic units nominating meteorological realities. The research methodology is based on a comprehensive approach, including a continuous sampling method for forming a corpus of examples, quantitative and comparative analysis, as well as part-of-speech and dominant classification of the selected lexemes. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the application of a lexicographic approach to a layer of meteorological vocabulary that is rarely studied in terms of artistic self-translation, which allowed for the first time to approach the presentation of a comprehensive picture of this segment of V. Nabokov’s idiolect. The findings reveal that while the overall quantity of weather vocabulary is similar in both versions, their qualitative and part-of-speech composition differs significantly. Nouns dominate in both texts, but the Russian translation contains twice as many adjectives and notably fewer verbs. The analysis identifies dominant lexemes and traces semantic and quantitative discrepancies in equivalent pairs to both the inherent differences between the English and Russian language systems and the author’s specific translation strategies. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that despite parallel quantitative indicators, the weather fragments in Nabokov’s bilingual worldview are not identical, reflecting a complex interplay of linguistic structure and authorial choice.