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Часть текста: 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 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...

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Часть текста: 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 There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart ona roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie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 other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about...

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Часть текста: 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 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...

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Часть текста: afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphetfor the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid clawswould have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer. The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an old spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose...

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Часть текста: had decideddespite Lo’s 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...

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Часть текста: dreams. II And with a smile the world received her; the first success provided us with wings; the aged Derzhavin noticed us — and blessed us 4 as he descended to the grave. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III And I, setting myself for law only the arbitrary will of passions, sharing emotions with the crowd, 4 I led my frisky Muse into the hubbub of feasts and turbulent discussions — the terror of midnight patrols; and to them, in mad feasts, 8 she brought her gifts, and like a little bacchante frisked, over the bowl sang for the guests; and the young people of past days 12 would...

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Часть текста: the same objections, annihilate the prejudices which never had and hasn't 8 a little girl of thirteen years! Who will not grow weary of threats, entreaties, vows, feigned fear, notes running to six pages, 12 betrayals, gossiping, rings, tears, surveillances of aunts, of mothers, and the onerous friendship of husbands! IX Exactly thus my Eugene thought. In his first youth he had been victim of tempestuous errings 4 and of unbridled passions. Spoiled by a habitude of life, with one thing for a while enchanted, disenchanted with another, 8 irked slowly by desire, irked, too, by volatile success, hearkening in the hubbub and the hush to the eternal mutter of his soul, 12 smothering yawns with laughter: this was the way he killed eight years, having lost life's best bloom. X With belles no longer did he fall in love, but dangled after them just anyhow; when they refused, he solaced in a twinkle; 4 when they betrayed, was glad to rest. He sought them without rapture, while he left them without regret, hardly remembering their love and spite. 8 Exactly thus does an indifferent guest drive up for evening whist: sits down; then, when the game is over, he drives off from the place, 12 at home falls peacefully asleep, and in the morning does not know himself where he will drive to in the evening. XI But on...

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Часть текста: collection. You have mid your novels have 'no social purpose, no moral message. ' What is the function of your novels in particular and of the novel in general? One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist. The book I make is a subjective and specific affair. I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to compose it. I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn-- so much the better. Art is difficult. Easy art is what you see at modern exhibitions of things and doodles. In your prefaces you constantly mock Freud, the Viennese witchdoctor. Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind? I may have aired this before but I'd like to repeat that I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro. Of course, the first takes the fig, as the fellows say in the dissecting-room. I've no intention to dream the drab middle-class dreams of an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella. I also suggest that the Freudian faith leads to dangerous ethical consequences, such as when a filthy murderer with the brain of a tapeworm is given a lighter sentence because his mother spanked him too much or too little-- it...

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Часть текста: but the real story is no less exceptional: Brian Boyd, author of the prize-winning two-volume biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, and of Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness and the just-released Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, is a scholar who changed his mind. Writing in The New York Observer on Boyd's 'remarkable, obsessive, delirious, devotional study, Nabokov's Pale Fire,' Ron Rosenbaum called him 'an ornament of the accidents and possibilities of Nabokov scholarship' and praised him 'for having the courage and humility to retract an earlier conjecture and the imaginative daring' to (as Boyd himself might put it) re-re-reread Pale Fire. Nabokov's 1962 novel takes the form of an introduction by a scholar named Charles Kinbote; a lucid 999-line poem by an American poet named John Shade; and a commentary and index by Kinbote, whose attention veers continually from the poem to his own unsatisfactory life, from John Shade's homely metaphysics and painful autobiography to what must be his own entirely irrelevant fantasy—unless he really is Charles the Beloved, the deposed King of Zembla; and that unless unlocks only the first in a series of secret passages. From the dedication copy of...

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Часть текста: later that same year by Slovo in Berlin. An English version, translated by the author in collaboration with Michael Scammell, was published in 1964 by Putnam as The Defenestration . This edition is true to the original with the exception of two references to Zembla that the author, or the translator, or an unnamed editor, or an inattentive typesetter, chose to remove, or happened to remove inadvertantly, from Chapters Two and Five. Zashchita Luzhina is a book about chess, "a game of skill played by two persons, each having sixteen pieces to move in different ways, on a board divided into 64 squares, alternately light and dark." (I owe this pithy definition to Webster.) If the reader does not know, or has forgotten, the rules to the game, he or she is invited to consult one of the many pamphlets devoted to chess that must surely exist in every language written and read in the civilized world. The word chess derives from Middle English ches or chesse , thence from Old French eschec (francophones will hear here an echo of the French word for failure, a not irrelevant observation for the case under discussion), or echac ,2 thence from Persian shah , a king, the most important piece in the game. Luzhin, the eponymous hero, is our king: He remembered...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "GUESS"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "GUESS"