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

Примерный текст на первых найденных страницах

Входимость: 4. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: and "Playwriting" were composed for a course on drama that Nabokov gave at Stanford during the summer of 1941. We had arrived in America in May of 1940; except for some brief guest appearances, this was Father's first lecturing engagement at an American university. The Stanford course also included a discussion of some American plays, a survey of Soviet theatre, and an analysis of commentary on drama by several American critics. The two lectures presented here have been selected to accompany Nabokov's plays because they embody, in concentrated form, many of his principal guidelines for writing, reading, and performing plays. The reader 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...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 6кб.

Часть текста: Housman, who emended corrupt classical texts with the same analytical exquisiteness that Nabokov used to revise the classification of butterflies, according to the details of their dissected genitals. Classical philology is hardly a more popular or accessible pursuit than lepidoptery, but the volume (edited by Christopher Ricks), which includes passages from Housman's technical writings as well as the poems, is an outstanding success. The advantages of that book over this one were that it was wieldy, that it never left the domain of culture and that it showed a side of the writer absent from his verse. The slyly fatalistic persona of the poet made a fascinating contrast with the professor of Latin, who was a doughty if not brutal scrapper, and never split a hair in argument if there was a chance of splitting the person to whom it was attached. When Nabokov wrote in 1947 that his scientific papers 'have no interest whatever for the layman', he was expressing pride as much as melancholy. Any reader would enjoy the passage reprinted here from his novel, The Gift, about the living arrangements of those large blues which have 'concluded a barbaric pact' with ants: 'I saw how an ant, greedily tickling a hind segment of that caterpillar's sluglike little body, forced it to excrete a drop of intoxicant juice, which it swallowed immediately. In compensation, it offered its own larvae as food; it was as if cows gave us Chartreuse and we gave them our infants to eat. ' His prose, though, is impenetrable even when there are touches of the same precise fancy dimly detectable: 'The most conspicuous thing about the upper portion is the presence of a pair of formidable semi-transparent hooks [the subunci or falces of a peculiar shape not found in allied genera], produced from the opposite side of the distally twinned uncus and facing each other in the manner of the stolidly raised fists of two pugilists [of the old...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 54кб.

Часть текста: To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think 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...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: 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 studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographeran insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to partake in a good deal of menial ...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 9кб.

Часть текста: of important papers on Lep-idoptera, and Norman D. Riley, keeper of insects at the British Museum. The exclusion of Russia is (alas) a practical necessity. Non-utilitarian science does not thrive in that sad and cagey country; the mild foreign gentleman eager to collect in the steppes will soon catch his net in a tangle of barbed wire, and to work out the distribution of Evers-mann's Orange Tip or the Edda Ringlet would have proved much harder than mapping the moon. The little maps that the Field Guide does supply for the fauna it covers seem seldom to err. I note that the range of the Twin-spot Fritillary and that of the Idas Blue are incorrectly marked, and I think Nogell's Hairstreak, which reaches Romania from the east, should have been included. Among minor shortcomings is the somewhat curt way in which British butterflies are treated (surely the Norfolk race of the Swallowtail, which is so different from the Swedish, should have received more attention). I would say that alder, rather than spruce, characterizes the habitat of Wolfens-berger's and Thor's Fritillaries. I regret that the dreadful nickname "Admiral" is used instead of the old "Admirable." The new vernacular names are well invented-- and, paradoxically, will be more attractive to the expert wishing to avoid taxonomic controversy when indicating a species than to the youngster who will lap up the Latin in a trice. The checklist of species would have been considerably more appealing if the names of authors had not been omitted (a deplorable practice of commercial origin which impairs a number of recent zoological and botanical manuals in America). The choice of important subspecies among the thousands described in the last hundred years is a somewhat subjective matter and cannot be discussed here....

Входимость: 1. Размер: 5кб.

Часть текста: of a renowned novelist with a creditable reputation as an insect taxonomist. In butterfly circles, Nabokov was a monarch. Butterflies and literature were Nabokov's twin passions. He started in 1906, aged seven, when he caught his first specimen on his family estate. A few years later, Nabokov was precocious enough to think he had found a new species, only to have his dreams dashed. Undaunted, he set out on a life of butterfly hunting, interspersed with equally passionate forays into fiction. Nabokov not only realised his dream of finding a new species; he had several named after him. He became an authority on the taxonomy of a family known as the "Blues". "It is not improbable," he said, "that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology." To him, butterflies represented a form of immortality, whereby the asexual, shuffling caterpillar transmogrified after "death" into an aerial acrobat with the sexual potency to impart a physical presence to future generations. Although not avowedly religious, Nabokov suspected a conscious design to the world and thought it likely, according to his biographer, Brian Boyd, that there was some transformation of human consciousness beyond...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 55кб.

Часть текста: 4 Gvozdin, Buyanov, Petushkov, and Flyanov (who is not quite well) have bedded in the dining room on chairs, with, on the floor, Monsieur Triquet 8 in underwaistcoat and old nightcap. All the young ladies, in Tatiana's and Olga's rooms, are wrapped in sleep. Alone, sadly by Dian's beam 12 illumined at the window, poor Tatiana is not asleep and gazes out on the dark field. III With his unlooked-for apparition, the momentary softness of his eyes, and odd conduct with Olga, 4 to the depth of her soul she's penetrated. She is quite unable to understand him. Jealous anguish perturbs her, 8 as if a cold hand pressed her heart; as if beneath her an abyss yawned black and dinned.... “I shall perish,” says Tanya, 12 “but perishing from him is sweet. I murmur not: why murmur? He cannot give me happiness.” IV Forward, forward, my story! A new persona claims us. Five versts from Krasnogórie, 4 Lenski's estate, there lives and thrives up to the present time in philosophical reclusion Zarétski, formerly a brawler, 8 the hetman of a gaming gang, chieftain of rakehells, pothouse tribune, but now a kind and simple bachelor paterfamilias, 12 a steadfast friend, a peaceable landowner, and even an honorable man: thus does our age correct itself! V Time was, the monde 's obsequious voice used to extol his wicked pluck: he, it is true, could from a pistol 4 at twelve yards hit an ace, and, furthermore, in battle too once, in real rapture, he distinguished himself by toppling from his Kalmuk steed 8 boldly into the mud, swine drunk, and to the...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: for more than 30 years-- to both acclaim and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational bestseller. In the aftermath of this cause celebre, do you ever regret having written Lolita? On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there was a moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was on the point of burning Humbert Humbert's little black diary. No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle-- its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works-- at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet. Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer-- so much so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: 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...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 35кб.

Часть текста: was entomologically uneventful. When reached at last, Telluride turned out to be a damp, unfrequented, but very spectacular cul-de-sac (which a prodigious rainbow straddied every evening) at the end of two converging roads, one from Placerville, the other from Dolores, both atrocious. There is one motel, the optimistic and excellent Valley View Court where my wife and I stayed, at 9,000 feet altitude, from the 3rd to the 29th of July, walking up daily to at least 12,000 feet along various more or less steep trails in search of sublivens. Once or twice Mr. Homer Reid of Telluride took us up in his jeep. Every morning the sky would be of an impeccable blue at 6 a. m. when I set out. The first innocent cloudlet would scud across at 7: 30 a. m. Bigger fellows with darker bellies would start tampering with the sun around 9 a. m., just as we emerged from the shadow of the cliffs and trees onto good hunting grounds. Everything would be cold and gloomy half an hour later. At around 10 a. m. there would come the daily electric storm, in several installments, accompanied by the most irritatingly close lightning I have ever encountered anywhere in the Rockies, not excepting Longs Peak, which is saying a good deal, and followed by cloudy and rainy weather through the rest of the day. After 10 days of this, and despite diligent subsequent exploration, only one sparse colony of sublivens was found. On that one spot my wife found a freshly emerged...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "EXPLANATION"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "EXPLANATION"