Часть текста: cell or paradise, with 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...

2. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. Vogue, 1972 г.

Входимость: 6. Размер: 17кб.

Часть текста: 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 at Cornell). Usually we spent only a day or two in each motorcourt, but sometimes, if the hunting was good, we stayed for weeks in one place. The main raison d'etre of the motel was the possibility of w! alking out straight into an aspen grove with lupines in full bloom or onto a wild...

3. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 22 - 26

Входимость: 4. Размер: 57кб.

Часть текста: proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call… But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last laptwo hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas. Jos Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly...

4. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 17 - 21

Входимость: 4. Размер: 52кб.

Часть текста: 17 - 21 17 Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presentspresents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. Once glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizettas” that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept itusing it for a totally different purpose. In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I 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...

5. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 32 - 36

Входимость: 3. Размер: 58кб.

Часть текста: 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...

6. Левинтон Г. А.: The Importance of Being Russian или Les allusions perdues

Входимость: 3. Размер: 106кб.

Часть текста: составляли единую и концептуальную работу: первая рецензия, на книгу Дж. Т. Локрантц, обсуждала в связи с этой книгой теоретические вопросы, а рецензия на статью К. Р. Проффера — их приложение к наиболее в тот момент [95] актуальному и сложному тексту Набокова. В 1973 г. эта статья была отдана Карлу Профферу, редактору журнала «Russian Literature Triquarterly», но не появилась в книге под его редакцией [96] и долго не появлялась в журнале. В конце концов, лет через пять она (т. е. только первая ее половина) была напечатана в № 14, на котором стояла дата 1976, но реально он вышел значительно позже [97] — и напечатана в искаженном виде. Во-первых, анонимно, во-вторых — пропала вторая половина статьи [98] . Я написал язвительное (или, может быть, просто злобное) предисловие, в котором обвинил редактора во всех смертных грехах, включая плагиат [99] , и скандальное письмо, в котором грозил напечатать статью с этим предисловием [100] . Действия это не возымело, и вспоминая тогдашние почтовые «оказии» (а эта переписка была к тому же и небезопасной), я не могу быть уверен даже в том, получил ли мои послания адресат. Но что сейчас сводить счеты с покойным редактором журнала. Его безвременная смерть списала все подобные мелкие претензии, и я вспоминаю его только с сочувствием и скорбью. Статья так и лежала без дела (попытки напечатать ее по-русски встречали то простое возражение, что она уже наполовину напечатана и потому «для нашего журнала» интереса не представляет — возражение, естественно, приводившее меня в ярость). Единственное упоминание (и «атрибуция» анонимной работы) появились в статье Славы Паперно и Джона Агопяна «Официальные и ...

7. Мейер Присцилла. "Бледный огонь" Владимира Набокова. 7. Культура: ученые и поэты

Входимость: 3. Размер: 96кб.

Часть текста: как некоторые поступают по отношению к вельможам: затвердить их титулы и потом хвастать знакомством с ними; либо — и это лучший, более основательный и приличный способ — подробно изучать указатель, которым вся книга управляется, как рыба хвостом. Джонатан Свифт. Сказка бочки (раздел VII) [233] Витийство, будто преломленный свет, Все в радужный окрашивает цвет… <…> Как царский пурпур не к лицу шуту, Так слог не скроет мысли пустоту; И как имеешь много платьев ты: Для дома, бала, верховой езды, Так стили различаются, затем, Что нужен разный стиль для разных тем. Александр Поуп. Опыт о критике [234] Творчество Шекспира служит литературным местом встречи Шейда и Кинбота. Комментарий Кинбота переносит нас в прошлое: предшественники Шекспира представлены в земблянских вариациях на связанные с областью ученых занятий Кинбота темы викингов, англосаксов и шотландцев. Шейд в своей поэме начинает там, где остановился Кинбот: присутствие наследников Шекспира в «Бледном огне» обусловлено профессиональной деятельностью Шейда как преподавателя английской литературы, специализирующегося на XVIII веке, а также как современного американского литератора, работающего в контексте англо-американской традиции. В «Бледном огне» Набоков прямо упоминает около тридцати больших и малых фигур английской литературы, роль которых в романе варьируется от центральной (Шекспир) до периферийной (Мэтью Арнольд) и едва заметной (Флэтман). Некоторые писатели названы по имени, другие вводятся в текст через упоминание их произведений, еще бо́льшая часть — через скрытые цитаты. Само обилие вовлеченного в орбиту «Бледного огня» литературного материала говорит о том, что анализ конкретных произведений каждого из этих авторов вряд ли способен дать ключ к пониманию набоковского...

8. Articles about butterflies

Входимость: 3. Размер: 35кб.

Часть текста: order to search for the unknown female of what I had described as Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens in 1949 (Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., vol. 101: p. 513) on the strength of nine males in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, which had been taken in the vicinity of Telluride half a century ago. L. sublivens is an isolated southern representative (the only known one south of northwestern Wyoming, southeast of Idaho, and east of California) of the species (the holarctic argyrognomon Berg str.=idas auct.) to which anna Edw., scudderi Edw., aster Edw., and six other nearctic subspecies belong. I bungled my family's vacation but got what I wanted. Owing to rains and floods, especially noticeable in Kansas, most of the drive from New York 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...

9. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 3 - 8

Входимость: 3. Размер: 54кб.

Часть текста: did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. 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...

10. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. TV-13 NY, 1965 г.

Входимость: 2. Размер: 20кб.

Часть текста: Program in New York. At our initial meetings I read from prepared cards, and this part of the interview is given below. The rest, represented by some fifty pages typed from the tape, is too colloquial and rambling to suit the scheme of the present book. As with Gogol and even James Agйe, there is occasionally confusion about the pronunciation of your last name. How does one pronounce it correctly? It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"-- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na- bo -kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentallv, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer-- rhyming with "redeemer"-- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "MOUNTAIN"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "MOUNTAIN"