Часть текста: conforms meticulously to the answers, every word of which I had written in longhand before having them typed for submission to Toffler when he came to Montreux in mid-March, 1963. The present text takes into account the order of my interviewer's questions as well as the fact that a couple of consecutive pages of my typescript were apparently lost in transit. Egreto perambis doribus! With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary cognoscenti-- which you bad enjoyed 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...

2. Inspiration

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Часть текста: 20, 1972, for Saturday Review) The awakening, quickening, or creative impulse, esp. as manifested in high artistic achievement. Webster, Second Ed., unabridged, 1957 The enthusiasm that sweeps away (entraine) poets. Also a term of physiology (insufflation): ". . . wolves and dogs howl only by inspiration; one can easily ascertain this by causing a little dog to howl close to one's face (Buffon)." Littre. ed. integrate, 1963 The enthusiasm, concentration, and unusual manifestation of the mental faculties (umstvennyh sil). Dal, Revised Ed., St. Petersburg, 1904 A creative upsurge. [Examples: ] Inspired poet. Inspired socialistic work. Ozhegov, Russian dictionary, Moscow, 1960 A special study, which I do not plan to conduct, would reveal, probably, that inspiration is seldom dwelt upon nowadays even by the worst reviewers of our best prose. I say "our" and I say "prose" because I am thinking of American works of fiction, including my own stuff. It would seem that this reticence is somehow linked up with a sense of decorum. Conformists suspect that to speak of "inspiration" is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand up for the Ivory Tower. Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks. One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of...

3. Утгоф Г.М.: «Audiatur et altera pars» - к проблеме «Набоков и Лоуэлл»

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Часть текста: бедных наших поэтов. В свое время я, конечно, грохну, но хорошо бы и Вам продолжить Вашу кампанию против этих шарлатанов» 1 . В публикации в журнале «Звезда» (1999. № 4) подготовленной Е. Б. Белодубровским, эти строки сопровождаются следующей историко-литературной справкой: «Роберт Лоуэлл (1917-1977) - американский поэт. Ольга Карлайл, урожд<енная> Андреева - внучка русского писателя Леонида Андреева, дочь его сына, эмигрантского поэта и прозаика Вадима Андреева, - переводчица, журналистка, автор мемуаров, в том числе о встречах с Борисом Пастернаком» 2 . Справка эта нуждается в существенных дополнениях. В частности, что такое те «мерзостны<е> “преображен- ии<я>”», о которых с таким гневом пишет своему адресату Набоков? Очевидно, что речь здесь идет об одной из тогдашних новинок - антологии “Poets on Street Corners” («Поэты на уличных углах») под редакцией О. В. Андреевой-Карлайль. В антологию эту вошли переводы из пятнадцати русских поэтов: А. Блока, Анны Ахматовой, Б. Пастернака, О. Мандельштама, М. Цветаевой, В. Маяковского, С. Есенина, Н. Заболоцкого, Б. Поплавского, Е. Евтушенко, А. Вознесенского, И. Холина, Г. Сапгира, Б. Ахмадулиной и И. Бродского 3 . Переводы из Мандельштама, выполненные Робертом Лоуэллом, лауреатом Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize 1962 г., помещены в антологии с указанием на их подчеркнуто вольный характер. Уже этого одного обстоятельства было достаточно для того, чтоб Набоков счел Лоуэлла оскорбителем тени покойного Мандельштама - поэта, который Набокову был особенно дорог в те годы 4 . В 1964 г. в предисловии к своему комментированному переводу пушкинского «Онегина» Набоков писал, что попытки поэтического перевода подпадают под три категории: 1)...

4. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. Wisconsin Studies, 1967 г.

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Часть текста: 1967 г. Wisconsin Studies [1967] This interview (published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, spring 1967) was conducted on September 25, 27, 28, 29, 1966, at Montreux, Switzerland. Mr. Nabokov and his wife have for the last six years lived in an opulent hotel built in 1835, which still retains its nineteenth-century atmosphere. Their suite of rooms is on the sixth floor, overlooking Lake Geneva, and the sounds of the lake are audible through the open doors of their small balcony. Since Mr. Nabokov does not like to talk off the cuff (or "Off the Nabocuff," as he said) no tape recorder was used. Mr. Nabokov ei! ther wrote out his answers to the questions or dictated them to the interviewer; in some instances, notes from the conversation were later recast as formal questions-and-answers. The interviewer was Nabokov's student at Cornell University in 1954, and the references are to Literature 311-312 (MWF, 12), a course on the Masterpieces of European Fiction (Jane Austen, Gogol, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stevenson, Kafka, Joyce, and Proust). Its enrollment had reached four hundred by the time of Nabokov's resignation in 1959. The footnotes to the interview, except where indicated, are provided by the interviewer, Alfred Appel, Jr. For years bibliographers and literary journalists didn't know whether to group you under "Russian" or "American. "Now that you're living in Switzerland there seems to be complete agreement that you're American. Do you find this kind of distinction at all important regarding your identity as a writer? I have always maintained, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance. The more distinctive an insect's aspect, the less apt the...

5. Чарльз Кинбот: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова. Chapter Five. Kafka

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Часть текста: Kafka, 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 veranda, discussing his malady and the sundry ineffectual "cures" the specialists were forcing him to endure. He refused Nabokov’s requests to allow a sketched portrait, pleading aversion to the making of images on religious grounds. At the time, of course, Nabokov had no idea with whom he was conversing. It was not until a decade...

6. Чарльз Кинбот: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова. Chapter Three. Mashen'ka

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Часть текста: свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова Chapter Three. Mashen'ka Chapter Three Mashen'ka For three years the mental image of those cahiers laid edge to edge on Berthoud's desk blotter burned in my brain like a neon eidolon. Here was V. Sirin's first book of prose, in fair copy, before me. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book, one can only reread it, as the Master once wrote. And this I did, many times, savoring the turns of phrase and the shades of words, staunch in my belief that a careful rereader, forearmed with a knowledge of what is to come, is more apt to catch the glimpses of future greatness that the prose of a first novel allows. After having considered and discarded one by one a series of clever but clumsy titles for this chapter I settled on the pedestrian choice above. Engaging in verbal legerdemain while speaking of Nabokov is a perilous and perhaps foolhardy undertaking, given his own multilingual mastery over words--one might compare it to beginning a talk on Nijinsky by stepping from behind the lectern to attempt a jeté or two. While much, indeed too much, has been written about Nabokov's English novels, much less has been said about his earliest Russian fiction. It is to this I must now turn. My editor...

7. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1971-72 г.

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Часть текста: time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada. He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being "an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration," of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, "in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." He also is aware that "Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors." Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion-- and Time does not move. Van's greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat. PERSONAL PAST Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described by my creature under my sympathetic direction. The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it...

8. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. BBC Television, 1962 г.

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Часть текста: viewed the crowds of butterflies imbibing moisture on brookside mud at various spots of the mountain trail. Pictures were taken of the swarms that arose at my passage, and other hours of the day were devoted to the reproduction of the interview proper. It eventually appeared on the Bookstand program and was published in The Listener (November 22, 1962). I have mislaid the cards on which I had written my answers. I suspect that the published text was taken straight from the tape for it teems with inaccuracies. These I have tried to weed out ten years later but was forced to strike out a few sentences here and there when memory refused to restore the sense flawed by defective or improperly mended speech. The poem I quote (with metrical accents added) will be found translated into English in Chapter Two of The Gift, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1963. Would you ever go back to Russia? I will never go back, for the simple reason that all the Russia I need is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian childhood. I will never return. I will never surrender. And anyway, the grotesque shadow of a police state will not be dispelled in my lifetime. I don't think they know my works there-- oh, perhaps a number of readers exist there in my special secret service, but let us not forget that Russia has grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart from the fact that people there are told...

9. Чарльз Кинбот: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова. Chapter Six. This Hovering Honeyed Mist

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Часть текста: Now we must return to Madame Fat, with whom I was put in contact by the same colleague who had so inconsiderately run off in the middle of his story. The next day I told him that my aunt had recently died, that we had never been close, that there was residual ill will between us over a trifling incident involving her adolescent grandson, my nephew, many years ago, and that I sorely wished to contact her. He looked at me strangely, suspecting, I think, a joke, but surrendered the name of his friend in Omaha without asking any questions. Discretion is a rare thing indeed. I called the professor of French, who confirmed the red scarf story and enthusiatically provided Madame Fat’s address. She had moved to Lincoln, whither I betook myself the following morning by car. (For those readers keen on fatidic dates, I note that this was the 2nd of July.) Nowadays I drive a powerful white Volvo station wagon, and the trip from Cedarn to Lincoln, pleasantly free from state troopers and jack-knifed semis, was effected beneath cloudless skies in under five hours. In keeping with her name, and contrary to the description I had received of her as frailly skeletal, Madame Fat was fat. When she answered her door, this fact created a burst of cognitive dissonance that momentarily struck me dumb: I would have had no problem referring to a bony Asian lady as Madame Fat to her face, but calling a fat woman Fat strayed well beyond the bounds of my personal sense of decorum. I quickly...

10. Rowe's symbols

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Часть текста: his Introduction, "that Nabokov-- partially by means of the mechanisms revealed below-- will continue to flutter the pulses of his readers for some time." "The mechanisms revealed below" is a pretty phrase, suggesting perhaps more than its author intends, but it does not quite apply to me. The purpose of the present review is not to answer a critic but to ask him to remove his belongings. The book consists of three parts. Whilst I have no great quarrel with the first two, entitled "A Touch of Russian" and "N. as Stage Manager," I must protest vehemently against a number of indecent absurdities contained in the third part, entitled "Sexual Manipulations." One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe's time to exhibit erotic bits picked out of Lolita and Ada-- a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick. But that is his own choice and concern. What I object to is Mr. Rowe's manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual "symbols" into them. The notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me, and I never tire of retelling how I once failed a student-- the dupe, alas, of an earlier teacher-- for writing that Jane Austen describes leaves as "green" because Fanny is hopeful, and "green" is the color of hope. The symbolism racket in schools attracts computerized minds but destroys plain intelligence as well as poetical sense. It bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art. Who the hell cares, as Mr. Rowe wants us to care, that there is, according to his italics, a "man" in the sentence about a homosexual Swede who "had embarrassing man ners" (p. 148), and another "man" in " man ipulate" (passim)? "Wickedly folded moth" suggests "wick" to Mr. Rowe, and...

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