Часть текста: of paradisewhen in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawnto mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart ona roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face… that look I cannot exactly describe… an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustrationand every limit presupposes something beyond ithence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her. And I have still ...

2. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 22 - 26

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Часть текста: After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques , crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brainand proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call… But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last laptwo hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas. Jos Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and...

3. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. The Paris Review, 1967 г.

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Часть текста: of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry-- to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing. No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"-- not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress." One critic has said about you that "his feelings are like no one else's. " Does this make sense to you? Or does it mean that you know your feelings better than others know theirs? Or that you have discovered yourself at other levels? Or simply that your history is unique? I do not recall that article; but if a critic makes such a statement, it must surely mean that he has explored...

4. Комментарий к роману "Евгений Онегин". Глава восьмая. Пункты XXXIX - LI

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Часть текста: в Петербург наш поэт сравнивает эти службы с «la messe de Frédéric II pour le repos de l'âme de Monsieur de Voltaire» [880] . 7 …зимовал он, как сурок… — Выражение, заимствованное из французского — «hiverner comme une marmotte». «Сурок» — родовое название, однако грызун, именуемый французами la marmotte ( Marmota Marmota , Linn.), обитает лишь в горах Западной Европы. В южной и восточной России встречается не он, а Marmota bobac , Schreber; по-французски — boubak, по-русски — байбак, по-английски — bobac, или «польский сурок», который в Америке называется «русским сурком» и, по-видимому, насколько может судить систематик, не специалист по млекопитающим, принадлежит к одному роду вместе с тремя американскими сурками (восточным лесным американским сурком, западным желтобрюхим сурком и серым сурком, или «свистуном»). Луговая собачка относится к другому роду. Кстати, любопытно отметить, что байбак с баснословными подробностями описывается в...

5. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 27 - 31

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Часть текста: I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promisedthe great rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fentres! Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take offwhereupon the lighted image would move and Even would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper. Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and...

6. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 9 - 11

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Часть текста: York to complete my comparative history of French literature for English-speaking students. The first volume took me a couple of years during which I put in seldom less than fifteen hours of work daily. As I look back on those days, I see them divided tidily into ample light and narrow shade: the light pertaining to the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to my excruciating desires and insomnias of which enough has been said. Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I got, trying to catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always remote) playing in Central Park, and how repulsed I was by the glitter of deodorized career girls that a gay dog in one of the offices kept unloading upon me. Let us skip all that. A dreadful breakdown sent me to a sanatorium for more than a year; I went back to my workonly to be hospitalized again. Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap with a little brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a “recorder of psychic reactions.” With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and then (never very successfully) the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnsonwho was soon flown back, I am glad to say. I had little notion of what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand) the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third...

7. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 18 - 22

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Часть текста: a prayer book. The bride’s little daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H. a touch of vivid vermeil; but I knew I would not dare be too tender with cornered Lolita yet, and therefore agreed it was not worth while tearing the child away from her beloved Camp Q. My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I discovered that although she could not control her heart or her cries, she was a woman of principle. Immediately after she had become more or less my mistress (despite the stimulants, her “nervous, eager chri a heroic chri ! had some initial trouble, for which, however, he amply compensated her by a fantastic display of old-world endearments), good Charlotte interviewed me about my relations with God. I could have answered that on that score my mind was open; I said, insteadpaying my tribute to a pious platitudethat I believed in a cosmic spirit. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk. She said it did not matter a bit; but that, if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me the creeps. It was then I knew she...

8. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 9 - 16

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Часть текста: long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever had been one. Eva Rosen, a displaced little person from France, was on the other hand a good example of a not strikingly beautiful child revealing to the perspicacious amateur some of the basic elements of nymphet charm, such as a perfect pubescent figure and lingering eyes and high cheekbones. Her glossy copper hair had Lolita’s silkiness, and the features of her delicate milky-white face with pink lips and silverfish eyelashes were less foxy than those of her likesthe great clan of intra-racial redheads; nor did she sport their green uniform but wore, as I remember her, a lot of black or cherry darka very smart black pullover, for instance, and high-heeled black shoes, and garnet-red fingernail polish. I spoke French to her (much to Lo’s disgust). The child’s tonalities were still admirably pure, but for school words and play words she resorted to current American and then a slight Brooklyn accent would crop up in her speech, which was amusing in a little Parisian who went to a select New England school with phoney British aspirations. Unfortunately, despite “that French kid’s uncle” being “a millionaire,” Lo dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time to enjoy in my modest way her fragrant presence in the Humbert open house. The reader knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my senses in Mona Dahl who was a good deal around, especially during the spring term when Lo and she got so enthusiastic about dramatics. I have often wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous...

9. Утгоф Г.М.: «Audiatur et altera pars» - к проблеме «Набоков и Лоуэлл»

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Часть текста: - переводчица, журналистка, автор мемуаров, в том числе о встречах с Борисом Пастернаком» 2 . Справка эта нуждается в существенных дополнениях. В частности, что такое те «мерзостны<е> “преображен- ии<я>”», о которых с таким гневом пишет своему адресату Набоков? Очевидно, что речь здесь идет об одной из тогдашних новинок - антологии “Poets on Street Corners” («Поэты на уличных углах») под редакцией О. В. Андреевой-Карлайль. В антологию эту вошли переводы из пятнадцати русских поэтов: А. Блока, Анны Ахматовой, Б. Пастернака, О. Мандельштама, М. Цветаевой, В. Маяковского, С. Есенина, Н. Заболоцкого, Б. Поплавского, Е. Евтушенко, А. Вознесенского, И. Холина, Г. Сапгира, Б. Ахмадулиной и И. Бродского 3 . Переводы из Мандельштама, выполненные Робертом Лоуэллом, лауреатом Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize 1962 г., помещены в антологии с указанием на их подчеркнуто вольный характер. Уже этого одного обстоятельства было достаточно для того, чтоб Набоков счел Лоуэлла оскорбителем тени покойного Мандельштама - поэта, который Набокову был особенно дорог в те годы 4 . В 1964 г. в предисловии к своему комментированному переводу пушкинского «Онегина» Набоков писал, что попытки поэтического перевода подпадают под три категории: 1) парафрастический перевод (создание вольного переложения исходного текста с купюрами и конъектурами), 2) лексический перевод (передача основного смысла слов и их...

10. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 23 - 27

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Часть текста: gentleman with a white mustache, well-dresseddouble-breasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tielay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.’s nurse running with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened porchwhere the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to groupfrom a bunch of neighbors already collected on the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise shell glasses. At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he laya banked banker so to speakwas not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the...

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