Th e article is devoted to the pragmasemantic analysis of the problem of axiological anomaly in the
stream of consciousness of a character, its linguistic embodiment and evaluative interpretation in a
literary text. Th e stream of consciousness as a passive form of a character’s monologue speech serves as
a direct translation of his thinking and associative images into verbal language. In Vladimir Nabokov’s metanovel “Despair”, the image of the stream of consciousness
demonstrates the self-refl ection of the character-narrator about the
values that are relevant to him and gives an idea of the transformation
of the picture of the world that he reconstructs in his own novel. Th e
shift in values, fi xed by the evaluative anomaly, becomes an important
characterological element of the artistic image of the character-narrator.
In the stream of consciousness, contradictory or tautological evaluative
preferences of the character were found according to the parameters
of deviation from axiological norms: intellectual / sensory activity
of consciousness; the possibility / impossibility of coexistence of an
alternative; priori / posteriori judgment; positivity / negativity of value
choice; variability / standardness of axiological norm; diachronism
/ synchronicity of the functioning of assessments; prestige / lack of
prestige of the values of the individual and society; consideration /
reality; intention / decision. Th e axiological anomaly of the character’s
stream of consciousness manifests itself in subject-object, intuitivelogical, causal, spatial-temporal, diachronous-synchronous, parallelalternative relationships and is expressed by negative semantics of
vocabulary, constructions, syntactic or textual structure of diff erent
ways of linguistic embodiment. In “Despair”, axiological oppositions
of one’s own and another’s / individual and social / abnormal and
normative in the thinking of the main character Herman generates his
conscious priority of proper-individual abnormal values over socialcollective value stereotypes. In the personal linguistic identifi cation of
his own dual monological personality — the criminal and the writer
— the character rationalizes the anomalous moments of his thinking
about the real event and the literary plot with a stream of consciousness,
turning the unprecedented into the happened, the unreal into the real,
the unusual into the ordinary, the anomaly into the norm.