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

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Часть текста: 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, ...

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Часть текста: 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 plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as saying, "Of course they'll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26. " Though you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film to task for watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with the final product? I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car-- these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain things that were not stressed--...

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Часть текста: in manuscript, replete with Nabokov's corrections, additions, deletions, occasional slips of the pen, and references to previous and subsequent installments of the course. I have limited myself to what editing seemed necessary for the presentation of the lectures in essay form. If Nabokov had been alive, he might perhaps have performed more radical surgery. He might also have added that the gruesome throes of realistic suicide he finds unacceptable onstage (in "The Tragedy of Tragedy") are now everyday fare on kiddies' TV, while "adult" entertainment has long since outdone all the goriness of the Grand Guignol. He might have observed that the aberrations of theatrical method wherein the illusion of a barrier between stage and audience is shattered - a phenomenon he considered "freakish" - are now commonplace: actors wander and mix; the audience is invited to participate; it is then applauded by the players in a curious reversal of roles made chic by Soviet performers ordered to emulate the mise-en-sce´ne of party congresses; and the term "happening" has already managed to grow obsolescent. He might have commented that the quest for originality for its own sake has led to ludicrous excesses and things have taken their helter-skelter course in random theatre as they have in random music and in random painting. Yet Nabokov's own plays demonstrate that it is possible to respect the rules of drama and still be original, just as one can write original poetry without neglecting the basic requirements of prosody, or play brilliant tennis, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, without taking down the net. There were those who considered Father's professorial persona odd and vaguely improper....

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Часть текста: ITS TEXTURE We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example "applied time"-- time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the "passage of time," we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied 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 ...

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Часть текста: Burstall came for a BBC television interview to Zermatt where I happened to be collecting that summer. The lepidoptera lived up to the occasion, so did the weather. My visitors and their crew had never paid much attention to those insects and I was touched and flattered by the childish wonderment with which they 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...

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Часть текста: working life trying to capture the perfect style and structure on the page, in the same way he netted a butterfly that fluttered in his path. Nabokov, known as VN, first gained acclaim in Berlin, writing in his native Russian language and developing a following with fellow émigrés. In 1923, shortly after his graduation from Cambridge, Nabokov was busy with work - he published four plays (including "Death" and "The Grandfather") and two books of poetry ("The Empyrean Path" and "The Cluster"). His first book, "Mary," was published in 1926. The story details a young émigré's longing for the love he left behind in Russia, the battle between what is memory and what is real, and the inevitable disappointment of facing both. The book received little initial attention. Nabokov working on "The Defense" at a hotel in Le Boulou, East Pyrenees, February 1929 That's not to say Nabokov was an unknown. He continued to write, publishing the novels "King, Queen, Knave" (1928), "The Defense" (1930), and "Glory" (1932)...

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Часть текста: submitted on September 8, 1969, for Review, BBC-2 (October 4) some 40 were answered and recorded by me from written cards in Montreux. The Listener published the thing in an incomplete form on October 23 of that year. Printed here from my final typescript. You have said that you explored time's prison and have found no way out. Are you still exploring, and is it inevitably a solitary excursion, from which one returns to the solace of others? I'm a very poor speaker. I hope our audience won't mind my using notes. My exploration of time's prison as described in the first chapter of Speak, Memory was only a stylistic device meant to introduce my subject. Memory often presents a life broken into episodes, more or less perfectly recalled. Do you see any themes working through from one episode to another? Everyone can sort out convenient patterns of related themes in the past development of his life. Here again I had to provide pegs and echoes when furnishing my reception halls. Is the strongest tie between men this common captivity in time? Let us not generalize. The common captivity in time is felt differently by different people, and some people may not feel it at all. Generalizations are full of loopholes and traps. I know elderly men for whom "time" only means "timepiece." What distinguishes us from animals? Being aware of being aware of being. In other words, if I not only know that I am but also know that I know it, then I belong to the human species....

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Часть текста: 3 - 8 3 She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never 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 ...

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Часть текста: простит и судьба!» По греческому мифу, Эхо, чахнувшая от любви к Нарциссу, который, в свою очередь, чах от любви к собственному отражению, высохла так, что остался лишь ее голос, слышимый в лесу, — почти та же история с Татьяной в главе Седьмой, XXVIII, когда она все время видит перед собой Онегина, перелистывая книги, которые он читал (глава Седьмая, XXII–XXIV). В школьном учебнике Пушкина — «Лицей, или Курс литературы древней и новой» (она была учебником и для Ламартина, сформировав его ужасный вкус, а также для Стендаля, признающегося в своем «Дневнике» 1804 г., что ему хотелось бы «делагарпизировать» свой стиль, — в чем он, наследник Вольтера и Лакло, так и не преуспел) — Лагарп (VIII, 252) приводит два вполне невинных отрывка из «Нарцисса», и первый из них открывается строкой, вынесенной в эпиграф, — Пушкину могла вспомниться та самая страница из Лагарпа. Хотя, вообще говоря, у Пушкина очень часты рискованные намеки, которые даются непредумышленно, я не убежден, что в этом случае он вполне ясно сознавал: мальфилатрова нимфа увлечена подслушиванием (за спиной Лагарпа) малопристойной беседы Венеры со стариком Тиресием, которого Юнона лишила мужской силы за то, что он убил двух змей «in copula» <«спаривающихся» — лат. >. На титульном листе беловой рукописи главы Третьей (ПБ, 10)...

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Часть текста: дурными английскими стишками, — необходим перевод предельно точный, подстрочный, дословный, и этой точности я рад был все принести в жертву — «гладкость» (она от дьявола), изящество, идиоматическую ясность, число стоп в строке, рифму и даже в крайних случаях синтаксис. Одно, что сохранил я, — это ямб, ибо вскоре выяснились два обстоятельства: во-первых, что это небольшое ритмическое стеснение оказывается вовсе не помехой, а, напротив, служит незаменимым винтом для закрепления дословного смысла, а во-вторых, что каким-то образом неодинаковость длины строк превращается в элемент мелодии и как бы заменяет то звуковое разнообразие, которого все равно не дало бы столь убийственное для английского слуха правильное распределение мужских и женских рифм. Из комментариев, объясняющих содержание и форму ЕО , образовался том в тысячу с лишком страниц, и из него я привожу здесь несколько заметок в сокращенном виде. 1. Слов модных полный лексикон. Одна из задач переводчика — это выбор поэтического словаря. Ни словарь...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "TALENT"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "TALENT"