Часть текста: 1940; except for some brief guest appearances, this was Father's first lecturing engagement at an American university. The Stanford course also included a discussion of some American 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 invited to participate;...

2. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. Wisconsin Studies, 1967 г.

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Часть текста: last six years lived in an opulent hotel built in 1835, which still retains its nineteenth-century atmosphere. Their suite of rooms is on the sixth floor, overlooking Lake Geneva, and the sounds 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, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance. The more ...

3. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 28 - 33

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Часть текста: or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked inafter satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutessay, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher its sicher as my uncle Gustave used to sayI would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,indeed, the globethat very same night. Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self-accusatory innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely anesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto-even if...

4. Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Chapter five

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Часть текста: like a trot. Plowing up fluffy furrows, a bold kibitka flies: the driver sits upon his box 8 in sheepskin coat, red-sashed. Here runs about a household lad, upon a hand sled having seated “blackie,” having transformed himself into the steed; 12 the scamp already has frozen a finger. He finds it both painful and funny — while his mother, from the window, threatens him... III But, maybe, pictures of this kind will not attract you; all this is lowly nature; 4 there is not much refinement here. Warmed by the god of inspiration, another poet in luxurious language for us has painted the first snow 8 and all the shades of winter's delectations. 27 He'll captivate you, I am sure of it, when he depicts in flaming verses secret promenades in sleigh; 12 but I have no intention of contending either with him at present or with you, singer of the young Finnish Maid! 28 IV Tatiana (being Russian at heart, herself not knowing why) loved, in all its cold beauty, 4 a Russian winter: rime in the sun upon a frosty day, and ...

5. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. BBC Television, 1962 г.

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Часть текста: 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 not...

6. Набоков Дмитрий: Отцовские бабочки. Отцовские бабочки. Father's Butterflies (английский язык)

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Часть текста: le curieux, " 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...

7. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 9 - 16

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Часть текста: and Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman, and Eva Rosen, and Mona Dahl (save one, all these names are approximations, of course). Opal was a bashful, formless, bespectacled, bepimpled creature who doted on Dolly who bullied her. With Linda Hall the school tennis champion, Dolly played singles at least twice a week: I suspect Linda was a true nymphet, but for some unknown reason she did not comewas perhaps not allowed to cometo our house; so I recall her only as a flash of natural sunshine on an indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry except Eva Rosen. Avis ws a plump lateral child with hairy legs, while Mona, though handsome in a coarse sensual way and only a year older than my aging mistress, had obviously long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever had been one. Eva Rosen, a displaced little person from France, was on the other hand a good example of a not strikingly beautiful child revealing to the perspicacious amateur some of the basic elements of nymphet charm, such as a perfect pubescent figure and lingering eyes and high cheekbones. Her glossy copper hair had Lolita’s silkiness, and the features of her delicate milky-white face with pink lips and silverfish eyelashes were less foxy than those of her likesthe great clan of intra-racial redheads; nor did she sport their green uniform but wore, as I remember her, a lot of black or cherry darka very smart black pullover, for instance, and high-heeled black shoes, and garnet-red fingernail polish. I spoke French to her (much to Lo’s disgust). The child’s tonalities were still admirably pure, but for school words and play words she resorted to current American and then a slight Brooklyn accent would crop up in her speech, which was amusing in a little Parisian...

8. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 3 - 8

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Часть текста: 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 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...

9. Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Chapter six

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Часть текста: made. Guests are assigned night lodgings — from the entrance hall 12 even to the maids' quarters. Restful sleep by all is needed. My Onegin alone has driven home to sleep. II All has grown quiet. In the drawing room the heavy Pustyakov snores with his heavy better half. 4 Gvozdin, Buyanov, Petushkov, and Flyanov (who is not quite well) have bedded in the dining room on chairs, with, on the floor, Monsieur Triquet 8 in underwaistcoat and old nightcap. All the young ladies, in Tatiana's and Olga's rooms, are wrapped in sleep. Alone, sadly by Dian's beam 12 illumined at the window, poor Tatiana is not asleep and gazes out on the dark field. III With his unlooked-for apparition, the momentary softness of his eyes, and odd conduct with Olga, 4 to the depth of her soul she's penetrated. She is quite unable to understand him. Jealous anguish perturbs her, 8 as if a cold hand pressed her heart; as if beneath her an abyss yawned black and dinned.... “I shall perish,” says Tanya, 12 “but perishing from him is sweet. I murmur not: why murmur? He cannot give me happiness.” IV Forward, forward, my story! A new persona claims us. Five versts from Krasnogórie, 4 Lenski's estate, there lives and thrives up to the present time in philosophical reclusion Zarétski, formerly a brawler, 8 the hetman of a gaming gang, chieftain of rakehells, pothouse tribune, but now a kind and simple bachelor paterfamilias, 12 a steadfast friend, a peaceable landowner, and even an honorable man: ...

10. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. Playboy, 1964 г.

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Часть текста: 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...

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