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

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Часть текста: 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...

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Часть текста: and expert lepidopterist, is the "type specimen" of a renowned novelist with a creditable reputation as an insect taxonomist. In butterfly circles, Nabokov was a monarch. Butterflies and literature were Nabokov's twin passions. He started in 1906, aged seven, when he caught his first specimen on his family estate. A few years later, Nabokov was precocious enough to think he had found a new species, only to have his dreams dashed. Undaunted, he set out on a life of butterfly hunting, interspersed with equally passionate forays into fiction. Nabokov not only realised his dream of finding a new species; he had several named after him. He became an authority on the taxonomy of a family known as the "Blues". "It is not improbable," he said, "that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology." To him, butterflies represented a form of immortality, whereby the asexual, shuffling caterpillar transmogrified after...

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Часть текста: 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 with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he laya banked banker so to speakwas not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket. Three doctors and the ...

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Часть текста: of straphanging school children. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphetfor the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid clawswould have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer. The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my...

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Часть текста: 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...

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Часть текста: 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 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 Christian God, she would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me the creeps. It was then I knew she was a woman of principle. Oh, she was very genteel: she said “excuse me” whenever a...

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Часть текста: sounded, no doubt, very venerable in the days when life expectancy hardly reached one half of that length. Anyway, Petersburgan pediatricians never thought I might perform the feat you mention: a feat of lucky endurance, of paradoxically detached will power, of good work and good wine, of healthy concentration on a rare bug or a rhythmic phrase. Another thing that might have been of some help is the fact that I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect roe obsessively-- though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous (and on the whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved. Has your life thus far come up to expectations you bad for yourself as a young man? My life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of boyhood and youth. In the first decade of our dwindling century, during trips with my family to Western Europe, I imagined, in bedtime reveries, what it would be like to become an exile who longed for a remote, sad, and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia, under the eucalipti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization of that fantasy. At the age of twelve my fondest dream was a visit to the Karakorum range in search of butterflies. Twenty-five years later I successfully sent myself, in the part of my hero's father (see my novel The Gift) to explore, net in hand, the mountains of Central Asia. At fifteen I visualized myself as a world-famous author of seventy with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald. If birthday wishes were horses, what would yours be for yourself? Pegasus, only Pegasus. You are, I am told, at work on...

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Часть текста: and unusual talent on his father's work over several decades." John Fowles also suggests that all the translations are by Dmitri Nabokov. However, in the introductory A Note on the Texts it clearly states that: "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 glistens like a rainforest: swarming with sap and colour, with love and death." - Robert Winder, New Statesman " Nabokov's Butterflies is a book trying to be many books (.....) The thematic anthology has its charms, but they are rather modest ones. (...) And it's hard to see what we gain from the frequent short flashes of administrative communciation from the letters." - Michael Wood, The New York Review of Books "Even Nabokov, however, might...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "ULTIMATE"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "ULTIMATE"