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

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Часть текста: that although she could not control her heart or her cries, she was a woman of principle. Immediately after she had become more or less my mistress (despite the stimulants, her “nervous, eager chri a heroic chri ! had some initial trouble, for which, however, he amply compensated her by a fantastic display of old-world endearments), good Charlotte interviewed me about my relations with God. I could have answered that on that score my mind was open; I said, insteadpaying my tribute to a pious platitudethat I believed in a cosmic spirit. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk. She said it did not matter a bit; but that, if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me the creeps. It was then I knew she was a woman of principle. Oh, she was very genteel: she said “excuse...

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Часть текста: hot hairy fist. In a few minutessay, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher its sicher as my uncle Gustave used to sayI would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,indeed, the globethat very same night. Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self-accusatory innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely anesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto-even if that “purity” (incidentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no doubt homosexual, at...

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Часть текста: endless rope of silk handkerchiefs a conjuror extracts with mock amazement from his black satin sleeve, or, for that matter, from the mouth of a compliant, if somewhat sheepish, volunteer. But Nabokov's death still comes as an unpleasant shock, an absurdly anomalous element at the end of the series, as if the final section of the streamer were not one last, particularly colorful piece of silk, but a live worm, a rotting plum, or some other equally strange bit of inexplicable detritus. Thank you, Madam, you may return to your seat. That Nabokov did not die of natural causes is only now beginning to be publicly acknowledged. His "mysterious" death, variously attributed to a fall, a viral infection, pneumonia, or mundane cardiac arrest, is now known to have been caused, or at least hastened along, by a special, nearly untraceable poison whose unpronounceable name I will not reveal here for fear that some unbalanced individual bearing a grudge against a family member, former love, noisy neighbor, or Department Head 1 might seek it out. The substance is readily available. It is odorless, flavorless, and difficult to detect unless a thorough autopsy is performed by...

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Часть текста: Владимиру Набокову Борисом Ивановичем Щёголевым, не слишком интеллигентным персонажем одного из его «русских» романов ("Дар"), написанного в 1934–1937 годах. Ниже приводится соответствующий пассаж. "Эх, кабы у меня было времячко, я бы такой роман накатал… Из настоящей жизни. Вот представьте себе такую историю: старый пес, — но еще в соку, с огнем, с жаждой счастья, — знакомится с вдовицей, а у нее дочка, совсем еще девочка, — знаете, когда еще ничего не оформилось, а уже ходит так, что с ума сойти. Бледненькая, легонькая, под глазами синева, — и конечно на старого хрыча не смотрит. Что делать? И вот, недолго думая, он, видите ли, на вдовице женится. Хорошо-с. Вот, зажили втроем. Тут можно без конца описывать — соблазн, вечную пыточку, зуд, безумную надежду. И в общем — просчет. Время бежит-летит, он стареет, она расцветает — и ни черта. Пройдет, бывало, рядом, обожжет презрительным взглядом. А? Чувствуете трагедию Достоевского? Эта история, видите ли, произошла с одним моим большим приятелем, в некотором царстве, в некотором самоварстве, во времена царя Гороха. Каково?" — и Борис Иванович, обратя в сторону темные глаза, надул губы и издал меланхолический лопающийся звук {1}. Из-за этого Бориса и трагедии Достоевского я нахожу эксцентричное описание генезиса лучшего набоковского романа самим автором намеренно сбивающим с толку. Он пишет: Первая маленькая пульсация «Лолиты» пробежала во мне в конце 1939-го или в начале 1940-го года в Париже на рю Буало, в то время как меня пригвоздил к постели серьезный приступ межреберной невралгии. Насколько помню, начальный озноб вдохновения был каким-то образом...

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Часть текста: 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. In deciding whether to regard a butterfly as a race of its closest ally or as a separate species the Field Guide displays good judgment in re-attaching Rebel's Blue to Alcon, and in tying up the Bryony White with the Green-veined White: anyone who has walked along a mountain brook in the Valais, the Tessin, and elsewhere must have noticed the profusion and almost comic muddle of varicolored intergrades between...

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Часть текста: Henry Grossman. Text and pictures appeared in the November 20 issue of Life. What writers and persons and places have influenced you most? In my boyhood I was an extraordinarily avid reader. By the age of 14 or 15 I had read or re-read all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English, and all Flaubert in French-- besides hundreds of other books. Today I can always tell when a sentence I compose happens to resemble in cut and intonation that of any of the writers I loved or detested half a century ago; but I do not believe that any particular writer has had any definite influence upon me. As to the influence of places and persons, I owe many metaphors and sensuous associations to the North Russian landscape of my boyhood, and I am also aware that my father was responsible for my appreciating very early in life the thrill of a great poem. Have you ever seriously contemplated a career other than in letters? Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime-- but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum. Which of your writings has pleased you most? I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow-- perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully ...

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Часть текста: State to Colorado 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 male on the 15th. Three days later I had the pleasure of discovering the unusual-looking female. Between the 15th and the 28th, a dozen hours of windy but passable collecting weather in all (not counting the hours and hours uselessly spent in mist and rain) yielded only 54 specimens, of which 16 were females. Had I been younger and weighed less, I might have perhaps got another 50, but hardly much more than that, and, possibly, the higher ridges I vainly investigated between 12,000 and 14,000...

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Часть текста: in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of 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...

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Часть текста: ним». Безусловно, исчерпывающая полнота совершенной пропорции является великим достоинством во всяком искусстве; но разве не должно что-то сказать и в пользу блистательного перебива, взрывной фразы, захватывающего отступления, хода коня? Этюды г-на Беллока — это, несомненно, сплошь слоны и ладьи; происхождение многих его мыслей слишком очевидно; принаряженная банальность то и дело грациозно кланяется читателю. Некоторые из этих эссе (такие, как «О неудачнике» или «О шляпах») представляют для писателя слишком легкую задачу. Когда автор ищет «ясной» прозы и с грустью замечает, что сегодня «нам скучно описывать вещи такими, как они есть», он излагает общераспространенное мнение, которому вряд ли есть дело до писательского чувства правды; ибо где и в каком веке описывали вещи «как они есть»? Кроме того, когда г-н Беллок пытается выразить идею Постоянства, пространно рассуждая о «человеке, пашущем свое поле» (пока города превращаются в руины и зарастают маком), удручающее постоянство избитого образа (которого не могут спасти ни эти мои маки, ни ренановские) подмывает возразить, что человек никогда не бывает одним и тем же. Беда г-на Беллока в том, что он пытается быть одновременно тривиальным и оригинальным, помещая на, так сказать, предметное стекло тончайший срез очевидного и разглядывая его в телескоп. В результате получается странная деформация, пример которой можно обнаружить (без особых усилий) в следующей неряшливой фразе: «(…) если молодой человек напишет два любовных письма и, отправляя их, перепутает адреса, каждый из получателей, вполне вероятно, воспримет свое послание как предназначенное ему или ей». Г-н Беллок хорош (как я уже намекал), когда таскает сливы с пирога Клио (который она ест и который всегда в ее распоряжении, не так ли?) или когда (приношу извинения за все эти замечания в скобках, слишком уж...

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Часть текста: 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 especially the time when he was quite small, playing all alone, and wrapping himself up in the tiger rug, to represent, rather forlornly, a king (p. 70, 4). (Indeed. A young and ...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "MILD"

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Cлово "MILD"