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

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Входимость: 3. Размер: 52кб.

Часть текста: 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 be retrieved for proofonly a little iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpeckercompletely out of season, incidentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did would a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. “You like here,” I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with a dram of gin. 18 The reader must now forget Chestnuts and Colts, and accompany us further west. The following days were marked by a number of great thunderstormsor perhaps, thee was but one single storm which progressed across country in...

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Часть текста: 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 possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket. Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit, that he did; but he opened his ...

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Часть текста: 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 now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascinationis no doubt anxious to have me take Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at last, the “gratification” of a lifetime urge, and release from the “subconscious” obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee. Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach, though I also have to confess that by the time we reached its mirage of gray water, so many delights had already been granted me by my traveling companion that the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or whatnot, far from being the impulse of the subconscious, had become the rational pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill. The angels knew it, and arranged things accordingly. A visit to a plausible cove on the Atlantic side was completely messed up by foul...

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Часть текста: away from her beloved Camp Q. My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I discovered 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 me” whenever a slight burp interrupted her flowing speech, called an envelope and ahnvelope, and when talking to her lady-friends referred to me as Mr. Humbert. I thought it would please her if I entered the community trailing some glamour after me. On the day of our wedding a little interview with me appeared in the Society Column of the Ramsdale Journal , with a photograph of Charlotte, one eyebrow up and a misprint in her name (“Hazer”). Despite this contretempts, the publicity warmed the porcelain cockles of her heartand made my rattles shake with...

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Часть текста: there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. 2 I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjectspaleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory,...

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Часть текста: tidily into ample light and narrow shade: the light pertaining to the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to my excruciating desires and insomnias of which enough has been said. Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I got, trying to catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always remote) playing in Central Park, and how repulsed I was by the glitter of deodorized career girls that a gay dog in one of the offices kept unloading upon me. Let us skip all that. A dreadful breakdown sent me to a sanatorium for more than a year; I went back to my workonly to be hospitalized again. Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap with a little brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a “recorder of psychic reactions.” With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and then (never very...

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Часть текста: formula and make their quantum leap into English. Yes, my forthcoming Poems and Problems [McGraw-Hill] will offer several examples of the verse of my early youth, including "The Rain Has Flown," which was composed in the park of our country place, Vyra, in May 1917, the last spring my family was to live there. This "new" volume consists of three sections: a selection of thirty-six Russian poems, presented in the original and in translation; fourteen poems which I wrote directly in English, after 1940 and my arrival in America (all of which were published in The New Yorker), and eighteen chess problems, all but two of which were composed in recent years (the chess manuscripts of the 1940-1960 period have been mislaid and the earlier unpublished jottings are not worth printing). These Russian poems constitute no more than one percent of the mass of verse which I exuded with monstrous regularity during my youth. Do the components of that monstrous mass fall into any discernible periods or stages of development? What can be called rather grandly my European period of verse-making seems to show several distinctive stages: an initial one of passionate and commonplace love verse (not represented in Poems and Problems)-, a period reflecting utter distrust of the so-called October Revolution; a period (reaching well into the nineteen-twenties) of a kind of private curatorship, aimed at preserving nostalgic retrospections and developing Byzantine imagery (this has been mistaken by some readers for an...

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Часть текста: Chapman, and Eva Rosen, and Mona 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 “that French kid’s uncle” being “a millionaire,” Lo dropped Eva for some reason before...

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Часть текста: our ancientry, and the heart's tremulous 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 turbulently dangle after her; and I was proud 'mong friends of my volatile mistress. IV But I dropped out of their alliance — and fled afar... she followed me. How often the caressive Muse 4 for me would sweeten the mute way with the bewitchment of a secret tale! How often on Caucasia's crags, Lenorelike, by the moon,...

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Часть текста: процветало. Витрина - скромного размера, но хорошо расположена. Небольшие зеркала оживляли её. На дне, во впадинах холмистого лазурного бархата ютились пёстрые папиросные коробки, с именами облечёнными в глянцевые международные диалекты, которые с таким же успехом служат названиями гостиниц; повыше располагались ряды папирос, ухмыляющиеся в их легковесных домиках. В своё время Мартын был обеспеченным помещиком. Он был славен в моих детских воспоминаниях замечательным трактором, во времена, когда я и его сын Петя одновременно стали жертвами Майн Рида и скарлатины, так, что теперь, после пятнадцати лет битком набитых всяческими вещами, я с удовольствием останавливался у этой табачной лавки, на этом оживленном углу, где Мартын продавал свой товар. Но с прошлого года нас связывало больше чем общие воспоминания. У Мартына была тайна, и я участвовал в этой тайне. “Ну, всё как обычно?” Спрашивал я шёпотом, и он, глянув поверх плеча, отвечал так же тихо, “да, слава богу, всё спокойно”. Эта тайна была совершенно необычайной. Я вспомнил, как уезжал в Париж и как за день до отъезда просидел до вечера у Мартына. Душу человека можно сравнить с универсальным магазином, а его глаза с двумя витринными окнами. Прицениваясь к глазам Мартына, отметим, что тёпло-коричневые тона были в моде. Судя по глазам, товар в этой душе был отменного качества. А какая пышная борода довольно поблёскивала здоровой русской сединой. А его плечи, его рост, его выражение лица. ... Одно время даже говорили, что он мог разрубить платок мечём, - один из подвигов Ричарда Львиное Сердце. И теперь ещё всякий эмигрант мог бы сказать с завистью, “Этот не сдастся”. Его жена была пухлой, тихой пожилой женщиной с родинкой у левой ноздри. Со времён революционных испытаний её лица коснулся тик: она бросала быстрый взгляд...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "QUIET"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "QUIET"