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

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Часть текста: as the honnкtes gens used to put it in judicious France, " the aurelian, " as the poets said in grove-rich England, the "fly 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 ...

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Часть текста: 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 deplorable practice of commercial origin which impairs a number of recent...

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Часть текста: in my belief that a careful rereader, forearmed with a knowledge of what is to come, is more apt to catch the glimpses of future greatness that the prose of a first novel allows. After having considered and discarded one by one a series of clever but clumsy titles for this chapter I settled on the 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...

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Часть текста: фундаментальный элемент искусства. Чтобы добраться до ядра перверсии в «Пнине», нужно покинуть филологическую раздевалку и обратиться… к белке. Центральная роль этого животного в романе не требует доказательств: белка появляется там неоднократно и в ключевые моменты. Этимологически слово «squirrel» (белка), как мы узнаем из открытки, отправленной Пниным Виктору, означает «shadow tail» («тенехвостая»); благодаря очевидной игре слов — tail / tale (хвост / рассказ) — этот зверек становится образом романа в целом, с его призрачными, как тени, повествователями и метатворческим сюжетом. Р. Олтер и Г. Барабтарло утверждали, что белка служит всего лишь репрезентацией принципа мотивного повторения, без которого, по Набокову, немыслим никакой литературный текст. «Имеет ли Тема Белки особую аллегорическую миссию, — спрашивает Барабтарло, — помимо того, что она включена в общую символику художественного выражения вообще? Уж, по крайней мере, не в романе Набокова» [647]. Излюбленный «мальчик для битья» набоковедов, У. У. Роу, утверждает, что белка — репрезентация призрака Миры Белочкиной, который неотступно преследует героя на протяжении всего текста [648]. С моей точки зрения, белка в романе служит репрезентацией...

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Часть текста: 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 "death" into an aerial acrobat with the sexual potency to impart a physical presence to future generations. Although not avowedly religious, Nabokov suspected a conscious design to the world and thought it likely, according to his biographer, Brian Boyd, that there was some transformation of human consciousness beyond death. The astounding metamorphosis of ugly bug into beautiful, if ephemeral, butterfly epitomised this magical passage of the upwardly mobile soul. "We are the caterpillars of angels," he wrote. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Nabokov switched from natural sciences to French and Russian literature. Writing became his spouse, but lepidoptery was his mistress, with whom he spent summers in the montane regions of Europe and America. Nabokov's contribution to taxonomy is unquestioned. In addition to describing new species, he formulated a novel method of classification based on the...

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Часть текста: I had described as Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens in 1949 (Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., vol. 101: p. 513) on the strength of nine males in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, which had been taken in the vicinity of Telluride half a century ago. L. sublivens is an isolated southern representative (the only known one south of northwestern Wyoming, southeast of Idaho, and east of California) of the species (the holarctic argyrognomon Berg str.=idas auct.) to which anna Edw., scudderi Edw., aster Edw., and six other nearctic subspecies belong. I bungled 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...

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Часть текста: volume brings together technical papers and butterfly-themed passages from his work. The closest comparable case of a major author having world eminence in another expertise would be A. E. Housman, who emended corrupt 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 detectable: 'The most conspicuous thing about the...

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Часть текста: 1962 г. BBC Television [1962] In mid-July, 1962, Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher 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...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "VARIATION"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "VARIATION"