Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "KILOMETER"
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Примерный текст на первых найденных страницах
Входимость: 1. Размер: 6кб.
Часть текста: as was his custom, spent the morning reclining on a chaise longue on the spa's veranda overlooking the sea. Nabokov, sketching fat figures in the margins of his notebook while relaxing on the beach, had stuffed the end of a Gauloise cigarette into his mouth when he realized he had left his matches at the Pension des H?brides five hundred meters away. Sitting up as a prelude to borrowing what he needed, the young writer noticed the older writer, whose six-foot frame, by this time, weighed less than nine stone, all in black, surveying the strand from his chair. Nabokov stood, folded closed his notebook, and plodded off, minus his espadrilles, toward the invalid. He asked for a match first in French, which elicited only a questioning stare, then in Russian ( m?me jeu ), finally in German, to which the elegant consumptive replied "Schade, Mein Herr, Ich rauche nicht." Nabokov went back to his blanket and gave up on the cigarette. Waves soughed against the damp and spongy shingle, gulls mewed and dived for small fry or the scraps of someone's lunch, a bald man with a mandarin moustache strolled slowly by, accompanied by an olive-skinned lady, the two exchanging phrases in some unknown tongue (Georgian? Armenian? Greek?). Nabokov reports that later in the week, after his friend's departure for France, he spoke often to the thin man on the...
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Часть текста: work is my own, except where stated otherwise according to the dictates of careful scholarship. Certainly the comments (solicited or not) of many persons have guided me in perfecting my book, but only insofar as they served as signposts of exactly the type of tired tripe I wished to avoid. The most common of these was a chilly "You can't do that," as if my book were violating some immemorial cosmic law. For all their carping about institutional constraints on the freedom of their thought and work, my fellow academicians (and even many of you, self-styled "Nabokovians") have revealed themselves to be virulently censorial when confronted by the weird fruit of my research. Few things are more depressing to an intelligent person than the revelation that a whole league of supposedly enlightened literati is in fact a mob of petulant nitwits. Chapter One On Visiting Nabokov's Tomb "Biography is a form of murder." -- J. Tenier The cemetery of the Centre Funéraire St. Martin...
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Часть текста: nice people, near mountains, regular mails, headquarters at a comfortable hotel. We dwell in the older part of the Palace Hotel, in its original part really, which was all that existed a hundred and fifty years ago (you can still see that initial inn and our future windows in old prints of 1840 or so). Our quarters consist of several tiny rooms with two and a half bathrooms, the result of two apartments having been recently fused. The sequence is: kitchen, living-dining room, my wife's room, my room, a former kitchenette now full of my papers, and our son's former room, now converted into a study. The apartment is! cluttered with books, folders, and files. What might be termed rather grandly a library is a back room housing my published works, and there are additional shelves in the attic whose skylight is much frequented by pigeons and Alpine choughs. I am giving this meticulous description to refute a distortion in an interview published recently in another New York magazine-- a long piece with embarrassing misquotations, wrong intonations, and false exchanges in the course of which I am made to dismiss the scholarship of a dear friend as "pedantry" and to poke ambiguous fun at a manly writer's tragic fate. Is there any truth in the rumor that you are thinking of leaving Montreux forever? Well, there is a rumor that sooner or later everybody living now in Montreux will leave it forever. Lolita is an extraordinary Baedecker of the United States. What fascinated you about American motels? The fascination was purely utilitarian. My wife used to drive me (Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Buick, Buick Special, Impala-- in that order of brand) during several seasons, many thousands of miles every season, for the sole purpose of collecting Lepidoptera-- all of which are now in three museums (Natural History in New York City, Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Comstock Hall...