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Cлово "DOUBT"

Часть текста: Father's Butterflies by Vladimir Nabokov DURING my adolescence, the butterfly enthusiast (" 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...

2. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 23 - 27

Входимость: 5. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: in a heap), and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery. To the anatomical right of this car, on the trim turn of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dresseddouble-breasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tielay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical 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...

3. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 22 - 26

Входимость: 5. Размер: 57кб.

Часть текста: changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques , crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brainand proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call… But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last laptwo hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas. Jos Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis....

4. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 9 - 16

Входимость: 5. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: 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 who went to a select New England school with phoney British aspirations. Unfortunately, despite “that French kid’s uncle” being “a millionaire,” Lo dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time to enjoy in my modest way her fragrant presence in the Humbert open house. The reader knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my senses in Mona Dahl who was a good deal around, especially during the spring term when Lo and she got so enthusiastic about dramatics. I have often wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous Dolores Haze...

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

Входимость: 4. Размер: 20кб.

Часть текста: 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 forget that Russia has grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart from the fact that people there are told what to read, what to think. In America I'm happier than in any other country. It is in America that I found my best readers, minds that are closest to mine. I feel intellectually at home in America. It is a second home in the true sense of the word. You're a professional lepidopterist? Yes, I'm interested in the classification, variation, evolution, structure, distribution, habits, of lepidoptera: this sounds very grand, but actually I'm an expert in only a very small group of butterflies. I have contributed several works on butterflies to the various scientific journals-- but I want to repeat that my interest in butterflies is exclusively scientific. Is there any connection with your writing? There is in a general way, because I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science. In your new novel, Pale Fire, one of the characters says that reality is neither the subject nor the object of real art, which creates its own reality....

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

Входимость: 3. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: 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; it is then applauded by the players in a curious reversal of roles made chic by Soviet performers ordered to emulate the ...

7. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 18 - 22

Входимость: 3. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: 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 slight burp interrupted her flowing speech, called an envelope and ahnvelope, and when talking to her lady-friends referred to me as Mr. Humbert. I thought it would please her if I entered the community trailing some glamour after me. On...

8. Хрущева Н.: Владимир Набоков и русские поэты (Из книги "В гостях у Набокова", Пушкин и Мандельштам)

Входимость: 3. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: к писателям. «Mое личное впечатление таково, что, несмотря на политические невзгоды, лучшая поэзия, созданная в Eвропе (и xудшая проза) за последние двадцать лет, написана на русском языке» 1 , — сказано им еще в 1941 году. Зощенко, Ильф и Петров и Юрий Oлеша, правда, заслужили поxвалы своему комическому таланту, но иx юмор — теплый, жалостливо-русский, не уничижительный, а сочувствующий — не представлял конкурентной опасности для саркастического таланта Набокова-романиста. K тому же русская проза тогда еще не отвечала интересам выживания в сегодняшем открытом мире. Oна была по-преж-нему непрактична, как когда-то «бестолковы» были навыки чеxовских интеллигентов. Помогая выжить в жестокой обстановке советского режима, она не помогала жить. Выживание у Булгакова, Платонова, Зощенко и Ильфа с Петровым было выживанием в гипотетической, типично русской надпрактической реальности, выживанием из смерти, но не выxодом в жизнь. И полстолетия спустя русская проза все так же буксовала на чеxовской...

9. Articles about butterflies

Входимость: 2. Размер: 35кб.

Часть текста: 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...

10. Чарльз Кинбот: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова. Chapter Six. This Hovering Honeyed Mist

Входимость: 2. Размер: 10кб.

Часть текста: by car. (For those readers keen on fatidic dates, I note that this was the 2nd of July.) Nowadays I drive a powerful white Volvo station wagon, and the trip from Cedarn to Lincoln, pleasantly free from state troopers and jack-knifed semis, was effected beneath cloudless skies in under five hours. In keeping with her name, and contrary to the description I had received of her as frailly skeletal, Madame Fat was fat. When she answered her door, this fact created a burst of cognitive dissonance that momentarily struck me dumb: I would have had no problem referring to a bony Asian lady as Madame Fat to her face, but calling a fat woman Fat strayed well beyond the bounds of my personal sense of decorum. I quickly began considering a series of alternative pronunciations, Faht, Fate, Fuht, when she beamed at me and said: “You Doktah Keenbote! Come een, come een, welcome!” Her speech was a weird blend of lazy American vowels and razor-sharp “e’”s that made the skin of her ample amber-colored face assume a series of bizarre distortions. I guessed that this had to be she and settled, sounding like some inept grandee, for plain “Madame.” She ushered me unceremoniously into her parlor, identical to her Omaha one, to judge by the bamboo blinds and corny Oriental fixtures. “Seet, seet” she said, patting the back of a cane chair, beside the small round table, that looked much too weak to support my considerable bulk. I sat down hestitantly to a chorus of crackling. The sun had set an hour ago and the apartment was dim, lit only by a few...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "DOUBT"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "DOUBT"