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

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Часть текста: 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 completely on your...

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Часть текста: early Russian poems, inscribed by Nabokov for his wife Vera. Image from Vera's Butterflies (NY: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 1999). Courtesy the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. A commentator from a distant southern land that begins with Z composes an outlandish elucidation of another man's masterpiece. His startling, perhaps outrageous claims upset certain entrenched academic specialists, and he must flee (a world tour, a centenary), and undergo the ordeals of exile before coming to rest, in some almost successful disguise—as a professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. An unlikely plot, but the real story is no less exceptional: Brian Boyd, author of the prize-winning two-volume biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, and of Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness and the just-released Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, is a scholar who changed his mind. Writing in The New York Observer on Boyd's 'remarkable, obsessive, delirious, devotional study, Nabokov's Pale Fire,' Ron Rosenbaum called him 'an ornament of the accidents and possibilities of Nabokov scholarship' and praised him 'for having the courage and humility to retract an earlier conjecture and the imaginative daring' to (as Boyd himself might put it) re-re-reread Pale Fire. Nabokov's 1962 novel takes the form of an introduction by a scholar named Charles Kinbote; a lucid 999-line poem by an American poet named John Shade; and a commentary and index by Kinbote, whose attention veers continually from the poem to his own unsatisfactory life, from John Shade's homely metaphysics and painful autobiography to what must be his own entirely irrelevant fantasy—unless he really is Charles the Beloved, the deposed King of...

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Часть текста: 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. All the rest follows-- the glory of thought, poetry, a vision of the universe. In that respect, the gap between ape and man is immeasurably greater than the one between amoeba and ape. The ...

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Часть текста: 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 has chided me for diverging too frequently and too widely from my subject--but what is a life if not a series of diversions from some hidden, ineffable theme? Mashen'ka opens with the tongue-twisting name and patronymic of the protagonist Ganin, Lev Glebovich, which, complains the character Alferov, "iazyk vyzvikhnut' mozhno" (7). Instantly we are made aware of the potential treachery of words. With Alferov's statement a few paragraphs later that "vsiakoe imia obiazyvaet," we are also reminded of their power. The first stylistic glimmer of the mature Nabokov, which comes after the brief dialogue between Ganin and Alferov of which chapter one wholly consists, is the sequence "i bubliki, i brilliantin i prosto brillianty" (17-18) a harbinger of such later alliterative lists as "the brook and the boughs and the beauty of the Beyond" 1 and "glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins." 2 In the sentence "Tak meshalis' v nem chustvo chesti i chustvo zhalosti, otumanivaia tvorcheskie podvigi, na vsiakii trud, i prinimaiushchagosia za etot trud zhadno, s okhotoi, s radostnym namereniem vse odolet' i vsego dostich'," (33) we are struck by the phrase's musicality and especially by the aptness of the final "dostich'"--chosen in preference to the alternative perfective form of dostigat' , dostignut' (lined out in the fair copy), which would not have scanned. From the first it is apparent that the young Nabokov is a...

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Часть текста: в субботу, 10 октября 1905 года и в тот же день перебрался на противоположный берег озера, в Монтру. Он поселился в обычном своем отеле “Les Trois Cygnes”. Маленький, хрупкий, почти мифически древний портье этой гостиницы помер еще когда Ван стоял здесь четыре года назад, и ныне взамен уважительной, загадочно замысловатой улыбки сухонького Жюльена, светившейся ровно лампа сквозь пергамент, старому растолстевшему Вану приветственно улыбнулось румяное круглое лицо прежнего коридорного, облачившегося ныне в сюртук. – Люсьен, – глядя поверх очков, сказал доктор Вин, – меня могут посещать, – о чем твоему предшественнику я мог бы и не говорить, – самые удивительные гости – маги, безумцы, дамы в масках, – que sais-je?, поэтому я ожидаю, что вся троица молчаливых лебедей явит чудеса сдержанности. Вот тебе предварительная награда. – Merci infiniment, – сказал портье, и Вана, как всегда, бесконечно тронула учтивая гипербола, наводящая на пространные философские размышления. Он занял два просторных покоя, 509-й и 510-й: старосветский салон с золотисто-зеленой мебелью и прелестную спальню, соединенную с квадратной ванной комнатой, явно переделанной из жилой (году в 1875-м, когда отель обновляли, стараясь сообщить ему пущую роскошь). С трепетом предвкушения он прочитал надпись на восьмиугольной картонной табличке с прицепленным к ней щегольским красным шнурком: Не беспокоить. “Priиre de ne pas dйranger”. Повесьте ее на ручку двери снаружи. Проинформируйте телефонный коммутатор. Avisez en particulier la tйlйphoniste (никакого нажима по-русски, никакой влажноголосой девы) В цветочном магазине rez-de-chausйe он заказал оргию орхидей, а в “обслуживании” один бутерброд с ветчиной. Он...

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Часть текста: 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 saying a good deal, and followed by cloudy and rainy weather through the rest of the day. After 10 days of this, and despite diligent subsequent exploration, only one sparse colony of sublivens was found. On that one spot my wife found a freshly emerged male on the 15th. Three days later I had the pleasure of discovering the unusual-looking female. Between the 15th and the 28th, a dozen hours of windy but passable collecting weather in all (not...

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Часть текста: of important papers on Lep-idoptera, and Norman D. Riley, keeper of insects at the British Museum. The exclusion of Russia is (alas) a practical necessity. Non-utilitarian science does not thrive in that sad and cagey country; the mild foreign gentleman eager to collect in the steppes will soon catch his net in a tangle of barbed wire, and to work out the distribution of Evers-mann's Orange Tip or the Edda Ringlet would have proved much harder than mapping the moon. The little maps that the Field Guide does supply for the fauna it covers seem seldom to err. I note that the range of the Twin-spot Fritillary and that of the Idas Blue are incorrectly marked, and I think Nogell's Hairstreak, which reaches Romania from the east, should have been included. Among minor shortcomings is the somewhat curt way in which British butterflies are treated (surely the Norfolk race of the Swallowtail, which is so different from the Swedish, should have received more attention). I would say that alder, rather than spruce, characterizes the habitat of Wolfens-berger's and Thor's Fritillaries. I regret that the dreadful nickname "Admiral" is used instead of the old "Admirable." The new vernacular names are well invented-- and, paradoxically, will be more attractive to the expert wishing to avoid taxonomic controversy when indicating a species than to the youngster who will lap up the Latin in a trice. The checklist of species would have been considerably more appealing if the names of authors had not been omitted (a...

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Часть текста: 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...

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Часть текста: my voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached the States. In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects, attending to it whenever I had nothing better to do. On the other hand, I was urged by a war-time university in New York to complete my comparative history of French literature for English-speaking students. The first volume took me a couple of years during which I put in seldom less than fifteen hours of work daily. As I look back on those days, I see them divided 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...

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Часть текста: я и занимался множество раз, смакуя повороты фраз и тени слов, сохраняя стойкую веру в то, что тщательный перечитыватель, вооруженный знанием того, что ждет его впереди, способен уловить больше отблесков будущего величия, чем то позволяет сама проза первой книги. Обдумав и забраковав одно за одним целый ряд недурных, но неловких названий этой главы, я остановился на предъявленном выше простеньком выборе. Когда говоришь о Набокове, упражнения в словесных вывертах есть занятие и опасное и, может быть, безрассудное, особенно если учесть собственное его владение многоязычным словом, — занятие это можно уподобить лекции о Нижинском, в начале которой лектор сходит с кафедры, чтобы натужно изобразить пару-другую jet e. В то время как об английских романах Набокова написано многое, пожалуй что слишком многое, о ранней его русской прозе сказано куда меньше. К ней я и собираюсь теперь обратиться. Издатель мой пожурил меня за слишком частые, слишком далекие отступления от избранной темы, но что есть жизнь, как не череда отступлений от некоей темы — потаенной, неизъяснимой? “Машенька” открывается непроизносимым именем-отчеством ее героя, Ганина: Лев Глебович — “язык вывихнуть можно” (7), жалуется другой персонаж, Алферов. Мгновенно осознаем мы...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "THINKING"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "THINKING"