Владимир Набоков: Поиск по текстам произведений автора и критике. Cлово "CHECK". Классическая русская литература.

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Часть текста: died, that we had never been close, that there was residual ill will between us over a trifling incident involving her adolescent grandson, my nephew, many years ago, and that I sorely wished to contact her. He looked at me strangely, suspecting, I think, a joke, but surrendered the name of his friend in Omaha without asking any questions. Discretion is a rare thing indeed. I called the professor of French, who confirmed the red scarf story and enthusiatically provided Madame Fat’s address. She had moved to Lincoln, whither I betook myself the following morning by car. (For those readers keen on fatidic dates, I note that this was the 2nd of July.) Nowadays I drive a powerful white Volvo station wagon, and the trip from Cedarn to Lincoln, pleasantly free from state troopers and jack-knifed semis, was effected beneath cloudless skies in under five hours. In keeping with her name, and contrary to the description I had received of her as frailly skeletal, Madame Fat was fat. When she answered her door, this fact created a burst of cognitive dissonance that momentarily struck me dumb: I would have had no problem referring to a bony Asian lady as Madame Fat to her face, but calling a fat woman Fat strayed well beyond the bounds of my personal sense of decorum. I quickly began considering a series of alternative pronunciations, Faht, Fate, Fuht, when she beamed at me and said: “You Doktah Keenbote! Come een, come een, welcome!” Her speech was a weird blend of lazy American vowels and razor-sharp “e’”s that made the skin of her ample amber-colored face assume a series of bizarre distortions. I guessed that this had to be she and settled, sounding like some inept...

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Часть текста: Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman, and Eva Rosen, and Mona Dahl (save one, all these names are approximations, of course). Opal was a bashful, formless, bespectacled, bepimpled creature who doted on Dolly who bullied her. With Linda Hall the school tennis champion, Dolly played singles at least twice a week: I suspect Linda was a true nymphet, but for some unknown reason she did not comewas perhaps not allowed to cometo our house; so I recall her only as a flash of natural sunshine on an indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry except Eva Rosen. Avis ws a plump lateral child with hairy legs, while Mona, though handsome in a coarse sensual way and only a year older than my aging mistress, had obviously 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...

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Часть текста: 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 nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. “ Savez-vous qu’ dix ans ma petite tait folle de voius?” said a woman I talked to at a tea in Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away, and I could not even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis courts, a dozen years before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse, the promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated seductively but also to be nobly heldall this, chance denied mechance and a change to smaller characters on the pale beloved writer’s part. My fancy was both Proustianized and Procrusteanized; for that particular morning, late in September 1952, as I had come down to grope for my...

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Часть текста: visible annoyanceto spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There, snugly wrapped in a white woolen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: caliber. 32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb. I was now glad I had it with meand even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his. 38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proofonly a little iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpeckercompletely out of season, incidentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did would a squirrel on a later occasion when I went...

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Часть текста: 17, 1968, Martin Esslin came to see me at my hotel in Montreux with the object of conducting an interview for The New York Times Book Review. The following letter awaited him downstairs. "Welcome! I have devoted a lot of pleasurable time to answering in writing the questions sent to me by your London office. I have done so in a concise, stylish, printable form. Could I please ask you to have my answers appear in The New York Times Book Review the way they are prepared here? (Except that you may want to interrupt the longer answers by several inserted questions). That convenient method has been used to mutual satisfaction in interviews with Playboy, The Paris Review, Wisconsin Studies, Le Monde, La Tribune de Genève, etc. Furthermore, I like to see the proofs for checking last-minute misprints or possible little flaws of fact (dates, places). Being an unusually muddled speaker (a poor relative of the writer) I would like the stuff I prepared in typescript to be presented as direct speech on my part, whilst other statements which I may stammer out in the course of our chats, and...

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Часть текста: October, 1967. Good morning. Let me ask forty-odd questions. Good morning. I am ready. Your sense of the immorality 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 the feelings of literally millions of people, in at least three countries, before reaching his conclusion. If...

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Часть текста: 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 various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor....

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Часть текста: that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she wouldinvariably, with icy precisionplump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke. Oh, d not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impressin that I did not manage to be happy. Readeer must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours , that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradisea paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flamesbut still a paradise. The able psychiatrist who studies my caseand whom by now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascinationis no doubt anxious to have me take Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at last, the “gratification” of a lifetime urge, and release from the “subconscious” obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee. Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach, though I also have to confess that by the time we reached its mirage of gray water, so many delights had already been granted me by my traveling companion that the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or whatnot, far from being the impulse ...

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Часть текста: 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....

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Часть текста: вспоминает, отражая мнение огромного большинства, Уильям Максуэлл. Даже недоброжелатели признавали, что Вера Набокова принимает невиданное участие в работе своего мужа. Это тем более удивительно для русских, не слишком склонных к сотрудничеству. Набоковы и приходили, и уходили вдвоем. Как правило, в одиночку на людях Набоков почти не появлялся. Супруги были не только неразлучны, у них и мысли сливались: и на бумаге, и в общении. У них и дневник был один на двоих. В записной книжке каждого присутствуют оба почерка; набоковским начинаются записи с одного конца, Вериным — с другого. На третьем году супружеской жизни Владимир в письме матери извиняется, что пишет карандашом: в соседней комнате Вера правит корректуру ручкой, имевшейся у них, судя по всему, в единственном экземпляре. Тридцать пять лет спустя Вера сетует на то же самое. Она-де пишет карандашом, так как ее ручка вечно занята. Только к концу письма к Вере возвращается от мужа ее ручка. Для биографа они представляли неблагодатный материал: слишком редко разлучались. Вот бы прожили так, как Луиза Коле с Флобером, — сотня писем и лишь шесть встреч за полтора года! Отношения Набоковых многим представлялись потрясающей историей большой любви. Что за человек была Вера? «Она оставалась женой, и только», — вспоминал издатель, с которым та тридцать лет вела переписку от имени Набокова. «Она была лучшей в мире из писательских жен, не просто достойной мужа, еще и с собственным интеллектом», — говорил о ней один из друзей. «Не жена, а святой Себастьян в юбке!» — замечал другой. При всем этом сама Вера о себе предпочитала говорить от противного. Не русская аристократка. У Набокова не первая невеста. Решительно не считает себя — что особо подчеркивала — шофером мужа. Никакая не «смуглая леди» шекспировских сонетов; книг не пишет и героиней в ...

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