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

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Часть текста: long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical accumulation 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...

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Часть текста: Mist I trust the reader has enjoyed our little digression. 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...

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Часть текста: it was not worth while tearing the child 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...

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Часть текста: my brainand 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 participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski...

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Часть текста: 4 did not read Cicero; in those days, in mysterious valleys, in springtime, to the calls of swans, near waters shining in the stillness, 8 the Muse began to visit me. My student cell was all at once radiant with light: in it the Muse opened a banquet of young fancies, 12 sang childish gaieties, and glory of 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...

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Часть текста: to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawnto mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart ona roller 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 sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are...

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Часть текста: on the elbows, hand-carved pipe stuffed with lavender-scented tobacco--were apparently unsuccessful in completely masking the sheen of royalty I was accustomed to exuding. Yes, they found the jewels, but that is a tale for another time. I was met at the station by an envoy, if that's not too grand a word, from the university, whom I did not immediately recognize despite the rectangle of cardstock he held chest-high with my adopted moniker carefully lettered on it. He was so young I looked right past him, toward an elderly gentleman in a dark uniform who corresponded to the mental image of natty chauffeur I had formed during the crossing. When I accosted him with a question and a questioning expression, he shook his head and stared past me, as if I weren't there. I gathered from his stony rebuff that I was only one in a series of persons to have mistaken him for their driver. Looking around, I spotted the person I had previously missed, and marveled at my having missed not only my new name, prominently displayed, but at my having failed to notice and acknowledge such an attractive youth. The blond lock covering his forehead almost obscured his electric blue eyes. He wore a very long, very shaggy overcoat of sorts, unbuttoned, and a crisp light blue oxford shirt, the tails of which were tucked into incongruously soiled dungarees. Grease from the machine shop? Dirt from a good-natured game of Fuss in the yard? I introduced myself by pointing mutely at the sign, then at my own breast. "Doctor Kinbot?" he asked, uncertain. I smiled. " Kinbote ," good sir, "the o is long, like das Boot in German, or, or the French ?ter ." He apologized as I clasped his hand, which was warm and wet (from holding the sign? from nervousness over the prospect of meeting an arriving dignitary?), and ...

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Часть текста: April 9, 1999 Web posted at: 5: 36 p. m. EDT (2136 GMT) Nabokov in Menton, 1937-38 (CNN) - Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is known as one of the century's great writers, particularly as the author of "Lolita." But he had many more dimensions, and in the end of his life he became the Eccentric Writer, one who avoided publicity at all costs (even declining election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters), preferring a quiet life engaging in creation and Lepidoptera. Born on, or about, April 23, 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nabokov's childhood was spent in storybook fashion. The oldest of five children , he grew up in a wealthy and aristocratic family, shuttling between the family's two homes (one in St. Petersburg , and the other - an estate - 50 miles south in the countryside). He enjoyed playing tennis and soccer, but spent hours at a time embroiled in his passion - chasing and collecting butterflies, a hobby he apparently learned from his father . At the time, Russia was under the rule of Tsar Nicholas II, and Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov , was a respected (and to authorities, controversial) liberal politician. In fact, the elder Nabokov was imprisoned for 90 days in 1908 for signing a political manifesto. Nabokov's mother, Elena Ivanova , raised her three boys and two girls with the help of several governesses and tutors who taught the Nabokov children French and English, along with Russian. At the highly regarded Tenishev School, which Nabokov began attending in...

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Часть текста: even earlier works should adhere to this elegant 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)-,...

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Часть текста: и преуспевающий Набоков. В начале 1950-х годов реальный Набоков действительно преуспевал и как сотрудник «Нью-Йоркера», и как университетский преподаватель. Но хотя, когда он писал «Пнина», на его столе уже лежала законченная рукопись «Лолиты», мог ли он подумать, что всего лишь через пару лет прославится на всю страну и на весь мир и что в 1959 году, через несколько месяцев после публикации «Лолиты» в Америке, сможет уйти из Корнеля и всецело посвятить себя литературе? Характер Пнина во многом раскрывается через восприятие его коллег. А создатель Пнина? Как относились к нему его коллеги в те дни, когда он был уважаемым писателем, но еще не знаменитостью? Был ли он похож на Пнина? Был ли у Пнина другой прототип? Многие считали, что прототипом Пнина был Марк Шефтель, русский эмигрант и преподаватель русской истории в Корнеле. Кое-кто даже упрекает Набокова за то, что он жестоко высмеял Шефтеля в образе Пнина. Но Набоков считал Пнина «симпатичным и притягательным человеком», куда умнее и добрее тех, кто его высмеивает, — поэтому подобные упреки кажутся неуместными 2 . И все же — был ли Шефтель прототипом Пнина? Набоков высоко ценил проделанную Шефтелем совместно с Якобсоном работу над «La geste d'Igor» [108] и поэтому в 1950 году согласился вместе с ними издавать «Слово» на английском языке 3 . В Итаке Набоков встречался с Шефтелем и на преподавательских семинарах русистов (специалистов по истории, экономике, политике, литературе и т. п.), и в домах общих знакомых. При этом он всегда отрицал, что Шефтель — прототип Пнина. Лекции Шефтеля отличались сумбурностью, по-английски он говорил с сильным русским акцентом, отчего студенты плохо понимали его. Двадцать лет спустя Альфред Аппель рассказал Набокову о том, как студенты звонили...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "RETURNED"

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Cлово "RETURNED"