Часть текста: a half bathrooms, the result of two apartments having been recently fused. The sequence is: kitchen, living-dining room, my wife's room, my room, a former kitchenette now full of my papers, and our son's former room, now converted into a study. The apartment is! cluttered with books, folders, and files. What might be termed rather grandly a library is a back room housing my published works, and there are additional shelves in the attic whose skylight is much frequented by pigeons and Alpine choughs. I am giving this meticulous description to refute a distortion in an interview published recently in another New York magazine-- a long piece with embarrassing misquotations, wrong intonations, and false exchanges in the course of which I am made to dismiss the scholarship of a dear friend as "pedantry" and to poke ambiguous fun at a manly writer's tragic fate. Is there any truth in the rumor that you are thinking of leaving Montreux forever? Well, there is a rumor that sooner or later everybody living now in Montreux will leave it forever. Lolita is an extraordinary Baedecker of the United States. What fascinated you about American motels? The fascination was purely utilitarian. My wife used to drive me (Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Buick, Buick Special, Impala-- in that order of brand) during several seasons, many thousands of miles every season, for the sole purpose of collecting Lepidoptera-- all of which are now in three museums (Natural History in New York City, Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Comstock Hall at Cornell). Usually we spent only a day or two in each motorcourt, but sometimes, if the hunting was good, we stayed for weeks in one place. The main raison d'etre of the motel was the possibility of w! alking out straight into an aspen grove with lupines in full bloom or onto a wild mountainside. We also would make many sorties on the way between motels. All this I shall be describing in my next memoir,...

2. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 9 - 11

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Часть текста: 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 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...

3. Эссе о драматургии ("Playwriting", на английском языке)

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Часть текста: plays, a survey of Soviet theatre, and an analysis of commentary on drama by several American critics. The two lectures presented here have been selected to accompany Nabokov's plays because they embody, in concentrated form, many of his principal guidelines for writing, reading, and performing plays. The reader is urged to bear in mind, however, that, later in life, Father might have expressed certain thoughts differently. The lectures were partly in typescript and partly 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...

4. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 1 - 8

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Часть текста: 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, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me ...

5. Чарльз Кинбот: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова. Chapter Seven. King, Queen, Knave

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Часть текста: townlet is, at noon, a deep azure hue, recalling a certain lake in my homeland, a distant northern land. And at night, I have noticed on my insomniac rambles, the moon casts slivers of silvery light upon the ink-black waters. Do remind me to say more of this later.) The original contract for this book (signed three years ago with a then noticeably more solicitous publisher whose name I am legally bound not to mention) stipulated that the text be comprised not only of biography proper (of which the reader has already enjoyed, I trust, a taste) but also of criticism of each of Nabokov's books. In lieu of any sensible reason not to proceed in any but a chronological, or pseudo-chronological, fashion, I turn now to Korol', dama, valet , 2 a novel quite different from Mashen'ka , strangely lacking in luster, which a 28-year-old Sirin began in July of 1927 and a 29-year-old Sirin completed in June of the following year, not very far from here, I'm told. The plot, though banal, perhaps bears repeating. A brooding, not unattractive boy named Frants arrives in a large German city--manifestly Berlin though unnamed in the book--with the hope that his maternal uncle, a wealthy speculator and businessman who owns, among other things, a large department store, will assist him in making...

6. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 18 - 22

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Часть текста: bride is a window and the groom is a widower; when the former has lived in Our Great Little Town for hardly two years, and the latter for hardly a month; when Monsieur wants to get the whole damned thing over with as quickly as possible, and Madame gives in with a tolerant smile; then, my reader, the wedding is generally a “quiet” affair. The bride may dispense with a tiara of orange blossoms securing her finger-tip veil, nor does she carry a white orchid in a prayer book. The bride’s little daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H. a touch of vivid vermeil; but I knew I would not dare be too tender with cornered Lolita yet, and therefore agreed 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...

7. Лаура и ее оригинал (фрагменты романа). Барабтарло Геннадий: "Лаура" и ее перевод

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Часть текста: вследствие болезни, от которой уже не оправился. Один из ранних пробных вариантов названия был Dying Is Fun ; это последнее слово, в новом американском хождении превратившееся в полуприлагательное, плохо поддается переводу, разве что истолковательному. Веселая смерть? (по образцу провансальской la gaya scienza, веселой науки поэзии). Умирать в свое удовольствие? Умирание уморительно? Умирать, так с музыкой? В "Приглашении на казнь" один из действующих шутов под шумок и как бы ненароком выдает музыкальный ключ к замыслу книги (правда, калейдоскопически зашифрованный): "смерть мила: это тайна". Нужно, конечно, помнить, что все такие максимы дороги в художественных вымыслах, тогда как у самого художника мог быть иной взгляд на эти вещи. Спустя четыре года но смерти Набокова я впервые услышал от его вдовы о начатом последнем романе. "Мне велено было сжечь его". Это было сказано с отдаленной легкой улыбкой, со свойственным ей задержанным прямым взглядом в глаза собеседнику. Мы сидели в маленьком кабинете в начале анфилады гостиничной квартиры Набоковых в Монтрё, об одном большом овальном окне, выходившем на юго-запад, на озеро. "Но я покамест не исполнила этого - рука не поднялась". Подробностей она не предлагала, и я не стал их просить из...

8. The Man of To-morrow’s Lament (Жалобная песнь Супермена)

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9. Интервью Симоне Морини, февраль 1972

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Часть текста: виде и различимы наши будущие окна). Наши апартаменты состоят из нескольких маленьких комнат с двумя с половиной ваннами — результат недавнего слияния двух квартир. Последовательность расположения такова: кухня, гостиная-столовая, комната моей жены, моя комната, бывшая кухонька, теперь заполненная моими бумагами, и бывшая комната нашего сына, превращенная в кабинет. Квартира забита книгами, картотечными ящиками и папками. То, что весьма помпезно называется библиотекой, представляет собой заднюю комнату, в которой собраны мои опубликованные работы, и есть еще дополнительные полки на чердаке, слуховое окно которого часто посещают голуби и клушицы. Я привожу это мелочно-дотошное описание, чтобы опровергнуть искажения в интервью {202}, недавно опубликованном в другом нью-йоркском журнале, — длинной штуке с досадными лжецитатами, неверной интонацией и фальшивым обменом репликами, в продолжение которого я, оказывается, пренебрежительно отзываюсь об ученых трудах своего дорогого друга как об исполненных «педантизма» и отпускаю двусмысленные шуточки {203} по поводу трагической судьбы мужественного писателя. Содержится ли доля правды в слухах о том, что вы подумываете навсегда оставить Монтрё? Ну, ходят слухи, что каждый из живущих ныне в Монтрё рано...

10. Ада, или Радости страсти. Семейная хроника. (Часть 1, глава 24)

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Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "TRAIN"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "TRAIN"