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

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Часть текста: "Translations are by Brian Boyd unless otherwise noted." (A number are noted as being by Nabokov fils, but certainly not all.) From the Reviews: "Some selectivity could have made for a more accessible volume, though the care with which it has been assembled is an impressive testament to the deep devotion that Nabokov continues to inspire almost 25 years after his death. Apart from entomologists and Nabokov fans, it is difficult to imagine that many readers will last the enormous distance." - Simon Caterson, The Age "While few readers will want to study the scientific articles reprinted here, their presence in this striking miscellany operates in subtle ways to remind us that Nabokov (who referred to himself as VN), was also a student "of that other VN, Visible Nature"." - Jay Parini, The Guardian "Nabokovian humour shines through these writings, illustrated by a note he penned to Hugh Hefner pointing out how the carefully positioned wings and eyespot of a butterfly can be made to look like the Playboy bunny motif." - Steve Connor, The Independent "This book...

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Часть текста: as Blues. Butterfly-linked images and ideas pervade some of his fiction, and butterfly-collecting expeditions took up much of his free time. Nabokov biographer Boyd and butterfly expert Pyle team up to offer a gigantic compendium of butterfly-relevant Nabokoviana. Reprinted here are draft reminiscences later revised for the autobiography Speak, Memory; the 1920 technical paper "A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera"; selected parts of the later scientific and technical work; numerous poems with butterfly-related lines, some in English, some translated from Russian; Nabokov's last short story, "The Admirable Anglewing"; excerpts from letters and interviews; notes for the New Yorker ("Incidentally, pinching the thorax is a much simpler way of dispatching a butterfly") and segments of Nabokov's lecture notes; and lepidopteran passages from the novels and stories. Among the previously unpublished works, one standout is the 36-page essay (originally in Russian) that Nabokov meant to use as the afterword to The Gift. Also present are the surviving fragments of Nabokov's never-completed descriptive catalogue, Butterflies of Europe. Boyd and Pyle contribute separate, informative and sometimes parallel introductions. Not even a Nabokov-obsessed taxonomist would want to read this collection from start to finish: it is, though, a volume devotees will delight to browse in and scholars will want to own. 30 color and 30 b&w illus. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Apr.) FYI: For more information on Nabokov's Butterflies, see Book News, Feb. 28. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The recent publication of Kurt Johnson and Steven L. Coates's Nabokov's Blues (LJ 10/15/99) brought to light Nabokov's expertise in the study of butterflies. The distinction of this new volume is that it contains never-before-seen writings by Nabokov on ...

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Часть текста: doctor," as they wisecracked in advanced Russian circles) who wished to acquire from books a general notion of the fauna of Europe, including Russia, was compelled to scrabble for his crumbs of information in entomological journals in six languages and in multivolume, hard-to-find editions such as the Oberthьr books or those of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich. The absence or utter inadequacy of "references" in the atlases ad usum Delphini, the tedious perusal of the index of names enclosed with an annual volume of a monthly journal, the sheer number of these journals and volumes (in my father's library there were more than a thousand of the latter alone, representing a good hundred journals) - all this had to be overcome in order to hunt down the necessary reference, if it existed at all. Nonetheless, even in my exceptionally propitious situation things were not easy: Russia, particularly in the north, dwelt in a mist, while the local lists, scattered through the journals, totally haphazard, scanty, and cruelly inaccurate in nomenclature, only maddened me when at last I ferreted them out. My father was the preeminent entomologist of his time, and very well off to boot, but the ordinary amateur, unable to dispatch his scouts throughout Russia, and denied the opportunity - or not knowing how - to gain access to specialized collections and libraries (and an accidental boon, the hasty inspection of collections at a lepidopterological society or in the cellar of some museum, does not satisfy the true enthusiast, who needs to have the boon always at hand), had no choice but to hope for a miracle. And that miracle dawned in 1912 with the appearance of my father's four-volume work The Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire. Although in a hall adjoining the library dark-red cabinets contained my father's...

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Часть текста: classical texts with the same analytical exquisiteness that Nabokov used to revise the classification of butterflies, according to the details of their dissected genitals. Classical philology is hardly a more popular or accessible pursuit than lepidoptery, but the volume (edited by Christopher Ricks), which includes passages from Housman's technical writings as well as the poems, is an outstanding success. The advantages of that book over this one were that it was wieldy, that it never left the domain of culture and that it showed a side of the writer absent from his verse. The slyly fatalistic persona of the poet made a fascinating contrast with the professor of Latin, who was a doughty if not brutal scrapper, and never split a hair in argument if there was a chance of splitting the person to whom it was attached. When Nabokov wrote in 1947 that his scientific papers 'have no interest whatever for the layman', he was expressing pride as much as melancholy. Any reader would enjoy the passage reprinted here from his novel, The Gift, about the living arrangements of those large blues which have 'concluded a barbaric pact' with ants: 'I saw how an ant, greedily tickling a hind segment of that caterpillar's sluglike little body, forced it to excrete a drop of intoxicant juice, which it swallowed immediately. In compensation, it offered its own larvae as food; it was as if cows gave us Chartreuse and we gave them our infants to eat. ' His prose, though, is impenetrable even when there are touches of the same precise fancy dimly ...

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Часть текста: 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 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...

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Часть текста: of desire Saturday March 25, 2000 Jay Parini discovers how much Nabokov's lepidoptery informed his literature in Nabokov's Butterflies Nabokov's Butterflies: unpublished and uncollected writings by Vladimir Nabokov; edited by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle (Allen Lane, £25) "From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion," wrote Vladimir Nabokov. "If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender." It was an unusual way to view the world, and one that not many readers - even those who adore Nabokov - may have fully appreciated. In fact, the ferocity of Nabokov's obsession with butterflies has only just been made clear to general readers with the publication of Nabokov's Butterflies, a fascinating volume of unpublished and uncorrected writings on the subject, edited by the Russian author's tireless biographer and critic Brian Boyd, with Robert Michael Pyle, an expert in butterflies. All translations are, as usual, by Nabokov's son Dmitri, who has lavished time and unusual talent on his father's work over several decades....

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Часть текста: и растолкованы, произведения опубликованы с предисловиями и послесловиями, английские вещи переведены на русский, причем некоторые дважды, а то и трижды разными переводчиками. Тех, кто так полагал, подвел своего рода обман зрения: число книг и статей, посвященных Набокову (и Nabokov’у) в 1999–2004 годах, начиная с даты его столетнего юбилея, широко отмечавшегося вместе с двухсотлетием Пушкина, и до выхода долгожданного русского перевода второго тома аналитической биографии писателя, созданной Брайаном Бойдом (первый том вышел в 2001 году), казалось совершенно неслыханным и даже чрезмерным. В те тучные годы было выпущено большое комментированное собрание его сочинений (сначала пять томов «американского» периода, затем пять томов «русского»), еще раньше – два тома его университетских лекций по литературе (в 2002 году последовал и третий – лекции о «Дон Кихоте»), тысячестраничный русский перевод его комментариев к «Евгению Онегину», а затем и комментарий к «Слову о полку Игореве». В 1999 году был издан русский перевод известной книги Владимира Александрова «Набоков и потусторонность: метафизика, этика, эстетика»; в следующем году вышел сборник эмигрантских и западных критических отзывов о творчестве Набокова «Классик без ретуши» и тогда же перевод «Ключей к „Лолите“» Карла Проффера; затем – переводная...

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Часть текста: AUDUBON'S BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND OTHER STUDIES AUDUBON'S BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND OTHER STUDIES Compiled and edited by Alice Ford Anyone knowing as little about butterflies as I do about birds may find Audubon's lepidoptera as attractive as his bright, active, theatrical birds are to me. Whatever those birds do, I am with them, heartily sharing, for instance, the openbilled wonder of "Green Heron" at the fantastic situation and much too bright colors of "Luna Moth" in a famous picture of the "Birds" folio. At present, however, I am concerned only with Audubon's sketchbook ("a fifteen-page pioneer art rarity" belonging to Mrs. Kirby Chambers of New Castle, Kentucky) from which Miss Ford has published drawings of butterflies and other insects in a handsome volume padded with additional pictorial odds and ends and an account of Audubon's life. The sketches were made in the 1820s. Most of the lepidoptera which they burlesque came from Europe (Southern France, I suggest). Their scientific names, supplied by Mr. Austin H. Clark, are meticulously correct-- except in the case of one butterfly, p. 20, top, which is not a Hamaeris but a distorted Zerynthia. Their English equivalents, however, reveal some sad editorial blundering: "Cabbage," p. 23, and "Miller," p. 91, should be "Bath White" and "Witch,"...

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Часть текста: the future, 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)-, 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 interest in "religion" which, beyond literary stylization, never meant anything to me); a period lasting another decade or so during which I set myself to illustrate the principle of making a short poem contain a plot and tell a story (this in a way expressed my impatience with the dreary drone of the anйmie ...

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Часть текста: Playboy for January, 1964. Great trouble was taken on both sides to achieve the illusion of a spontaneous conversation. Actually, my contribution as printed 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 view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works-- at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet. Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer-- so much so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his ...

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Cлово "SCIENTIFIC"