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

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Часть текста: precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. 2 I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjectspaleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed...

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Часть текста: is urged to bear in mind, however, that, later in life, Father might have expressed certain thoughts differently. The lectures were partly in typescript and partly in manuscript, replete with Nabokov's corrections, additions, deletions, occasional slips of the pen, and references to previous and subsequent installments of the course. I have limited myself to what editing seemed necessary for the presentation of the lectures in essay form. If Nabokov had been alive, he might perhaps have performed more radical surgery. He might also have added that the gruesome throes of realistic suicide he finds unacceptable onstage (in "The Tragedy of Tragedy") are now everyday fare on kiddies' TV, while "adult" entertainment has long since outdone all the goriness of the Grand Guignol. He might have observed that the aberrations of theatrical method wherein the illusion of a barrier between stage and audience is shattered - a phenomenon he considered "freakish" - are now commonplace: actors wander and mix; the audience is invited to participate; it is then applauded by the players in a curious reversal of roles made chic by Soviet performers ordered to emulate the mise-en-sce´ne of party congresses; and the term "happening" has already managed to grow obsolescent. He might have commented that the quest for originality for its own sake has led to ludicrous excesses and things have taken their helter-skelter course in random theatre as they have in random music and in random painting. Yet Nabokov's own plays demonstrate that it is possible to respect the rules of drama and still be original, just as one can write original poetry without neglecting the basic requirements of prosody, or play brilliant tennis, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, without taking down the net. There were those who considered Father's professorial persona odd and vaguely...

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Часть текста: (written on November 20, 1972, for Saturday Review) The awakening, quickening, or creative impulse, esp. as manifested in high artistic achievement. Webster, Second Ed., unabridged, 1957 The enthusiasm that sweeps away (entraine) poets. Also a term of physiology (insufflation): ". . . wolves and dogs howl only by inspiration; one can easily ascertain this by causing a little dog to howl close to one's face (Buffon)." Littre. ed. integrate, 1963 The enthusiasm, concentration, and unusual manifestation of the mental faculties (umstvennyh sil). Dal, Revised Ed., St. Petersburg, 1904 A creative upsurge. [Examples: ] Inspired poet. Inspired socialistic work. Ozhegov, Russian dictionary, Moscow, 1960 A special study, which I do not plan to conduct, would reveal, probably, that inspiration is seldom dwelt upon nowadays even by the worst reviewers of our best prose. I say "our" and I say "prose" because I am thinking of American works of fiction, including my own stuff. It would seem that this reticence is somehow linked up with a sense of decorum. Conformists suspect that to speak of "inspiration" is as tasteless and...

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Часть текста: had nothing better to do. On the other hand, I was urged by a war-time university in New 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...

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Часть текста: me any plum or crumb before publication. BUTTERFLIES Butterflies are among the most thoughtful and touching contributions to this volume. The old-fashioned engraving of a Catagramma- like insect is delightfully reproduced twelve times so as to suggest a double series or "block" of specimens in a cabinet case; and there is a beautiful photograph of a Red Admirable (but "Nymphalidae" is the family to which it belongs, not its genus, which is Vanessa-- my first bit of carping). ALFRED APPEL, JR. Mr. Appel, guest co-editor, writes about my two main works of fiction. His essay "Backgrounds of Lolita" is a superb example of the rare case where art and erudition meet in a shining ridge of specific information (the highest and to me most acceptable function of literary criticism). I would have liked to say more about his findings but modesty (a virtue that the average reviewer especially appreciates in authors) denies me that pleasure. His other piece in this precious collection is "Ada Described." I planted...

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Часть текста: New York Times [1969] In April, 1969, Alden Whitman sent me these questions and came to Montreux for a merry interview shortly before my seventieth birthday. His piece appeared in The New York Times, April 19, 1969, with only two or three of my answers retained. The rest are to be used, I suppose, as "Special to The New York Times" at some later date by A. W., if he survives, or by his successor. I transcribe some of our exchanges. You have called yourself "an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England. " How does this make you an American writer? An American writer means, in the present case, a writer who has been an American citizen for a quarter of a century. It means, moreover, that all my works appear first in America. It also means that America is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home. Rightly or wrongly, I am not one of those perfectionists who by dint of hypercriticizing America find themselves wallowing in the same muddy camp with indigenous rascals and envious foreign observers. My admiration for this adopted country of mine can easily survive the jolts and flaws that: , indeed, are nothing in comparison to the abyss of evil in the history of Russia, not to speak of other, more exotic, countries. In the poem "To My Soul, "you wrote, possibly of yourself, as "a provincial naturalist, an eccentric lost in paradise. " This appears to link your interest in butterflies to other aspects of your life, writing, for instance. Do you feel that you are "an eccentric lost in paradise"? An eccentric is a person...

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Часть текста: на надувном матрасе сидел, скрестив ноги, Педро (фамилия неизвестна, сценическое имя забыто), смазливый до омерзения, практически голый юный актер с ушами сатира, с косо посаженными глазами и чуткими, рысьими ноздрями, которого Марина вывезла из Мексики и держала в Ладорской гостинице. Лежавшая на краю бассейна Ада изо всех сил старалась удержать пугливого таксика в приличной позе на задних лапах перед фотоаппаратом, в то время как Филип Рак, мало что собой представлявший, но в целом симпатичный молодой музыкант, который в нескладных плавках смотрелся еще более удручающе нелепо, чем в зеленом костюме, который считал приличным надевать, давая Люсетт уроки фортепиано, тщился запечатлеть на пленке рвущуюся из рук, плотоядно облизывавшуюся собачонку на фоне раздвоенной девичьей груди, такой наглядной в вырезе купальника в позиции полулежа на животе. Наведя объектив на другую группу людей, стоявших в нескольких шагах поодаль под пурпурными гирляндами, свисавшими с арочного перекрытия, можно было бы сделать снимок беременной супруги молодого маэстро в платьице в горошек, наполнявшей бокалы присоленным миндалем, а также прославленной дамы-литераторши, ослепительной в своих розовато-лиловых оборках, розовато-лиловой шляпе, розовато-лиловых туфлях, накидывающей жакет из зебры на Люсетт, которая отталкивала его с грубыми выражениями, почерпнутыми у какой-нибудь горничной, но произносимыми так, что глуховатая мадемуазель Ларивьер не слыхала. Люсетт по-прежнему была только в трусиках. Ее крепко сбитое, гладкое тельце имело цвет густого персикового сиропа; в зеленых, как листва,...

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Часть текста: 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 street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket. Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit, that he did; but...

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Часть текста: yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain. We came to know nous connmes, to use a Flaubertian intonationthe stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of friend-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some other gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except “good beds”), and an unsmiling landlady always prepared to have her gift (“…well, I could give you…”) turned down. Nous connmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of their repetitious namesall those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac’s Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the write-up, such as “Children welcome, pets allowed” ( You are welcome, you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn instantly beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary complement in the shower you had so carefully blended. Some motels had instructions pasted ...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "EASILY"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "EASILY"