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

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Часть текста: from Speak, Memory, G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y., 1966. The world has been and is open to you. With your Proustian sense of places, what is there in Montreux that attracts you so? My sense of places is Nabokovian rather than Proustian. With regard to Montreux there are many attractions-- nice people, near mountains, regular mails, headquarters at a comfortable hotel. We dwell in the older part of the Palace Hotel, in its original part really, which was all that existed a hundred and fifty years ago (you can still see that initial inn and our future windows in old prints of 1840 or so). Our quarters consist of several tiny rooms with two and 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...

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Часть текста: как это свойственно им всем]; [более того], она была влюблена… Я ее прощаю, [как это должно быть прощено моей Татьяне]; любовь ее сделала виновной [ср.: ЕО, гл. 3, XXIV]. О если бы судьба ее извинила также!» Согласно греческой мифологии, нимфа Эхо, зачахнувшая от любви к Нарциссу (который, в свою очередь, изнемог от безответной страсти к собственному отражению), превратилась в лесной голос, подобно Татьяне в гл. 7, XXVIII, когда образ Онегина проступает перед ней на полях читанной им книги (гл. 7, XXII–XXIV). В принадлежавшем Пушкину учебнике «Лицей, или Курс древней и современной литературы» («Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne», книге, которая являлась руководством для Ламартина и которая сформировала его плачевный goût [427] , a также для Стендаля, упоминающего в дневниковой записи от 1804 г. о желании «делагарпизировать» свой стиль, что ему, наследнику Вольтера и Лакло, так никогда и не удалось) Лагарп (VIII, 252) цитирует два вполне невинных отрывка из «Нарцисса», первый из которых начинается той самой строкой, которую Пушкин мог позднее вспомнить. И хотя, вообще говоря, Пушкин никогда не упускал случая сделать скабрезный намек, здесь он вряд ли осознавал, что нимфа Мальфилатра подслушивала — за спиной Лагарпа — довольно непристойную беседу Венеры со стариком Тиресием, на которого Юнона наслала импотенцию за то, что тот убил двух змей in copula [428] . На титульной странице чистовика третьей главы (ПБ, 10) Пушкин предпосылает вышеназванному эпиграфу три строки из Данте («Ад»,...

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Часть текста: Two 1 It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motelclean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. At first, in my dread of arousing suspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each containing a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement was even intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could be attained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or room into two communicating love nests. By and by, the very possibilities that such honest promiscuity suggested (two young couples merrily swapping mates or a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder, and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-bed cabin, a prison cell or paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain. We came to know nous connmes, to use a Flaubertian intonationthe stone...

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Часть текста: common criticule discerned the structural knot of the story. May I explain that simple and elegant point? You certainly may. Allow me to quote a passage from my first page which baffled the wise and misled the silly: "When we concentrate on a material object. . . the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object." A number of such instances of falling through the present's "tension film" are given in the course of the book. There is the personal history of a pencil. There is also, in a later chapter, the past of a shabby room, where, instead of focusing on Person and the prostitute, the spectral observer drifts down into the middle of the previous century and sees a Russian traveler, a minor Dostoevski, occupying that room, between Swiss gambling house and Italy. Another critic has said- Yes, I am coming to that. Reviewers of my little book made the lighthearted mistake of assuming that seeing through things is the professional function of a novelist. Actually, that kind of generalization is not only a dismal commonplace but is specifically untrue. Unlike the mysterious observer or observers in Transparent Things, a novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. So who is that observer; who are those italicized "we" in the fourteenth line of the novel; who, for goodness' sake, is the "I" in its very first line? The solution, my friend, is so simple that one is almost embarrassed to furnish it. But here goes. An incidental but curiously active component of my novel is Mr. R ., an American writer of German extraction. He writes...

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Часть текста: restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"-- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na- bo -kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentallv, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer-- rhyming with "redeemer"-- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think). How about the name of your extraordinary creature. Professor P-N-I-N? The "p" is sounded, that's all. But since the "p" is mute in English words starting w-ith "pn", one is prone to insert a supporting "uh" sound-- "Puh-- nin"-- which is wrong. To get the "pn" right, try the combination "Up North", or still better "Up, Nina!", leaving out the initial "u". Pnorth, Pnina, Pmn. Can you do that? . . . That's fine. You 're responsible for brilliant summaries of the lives and works of Pushkin and Gogol. How would you summarize your own? It is not so easy to summarize something which is not quite finished yet. However, as I've pointed outelsewhere, the first part of my life is marked by a rather...

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Часть текста: — книга зачастую непристойная; более того, ее скрытая непристойность намекает на более глубокую, поэтическую перверсию, лежащую в основе почти всех набоковских текстов. В романах «Лолита», «Камера обскура» («Laughter in the Dark»), «Бледное пламя» и «Ада» фигура извращенца служит Набокову внутритекстовой репрезентацией герменевтической позиции автора — и его идеального читателя: чтобы добраться до сути текста, его нужно извратить, вывернуть наизнанку. «Пнин», казалось бы, стоит особняком среди англоязычных произведений Набокова — никого из его главных героев читатели «The New Yorker» 1950-х гг. не заклеймили бы как извращенца. И все же одним из важных признаков присутствия автора остается его плотоядный взгляд, и — что гораздо более важно — в «Пнине» перверсия, отвечая на герменевтические усилия проницательного читателя, обнажает свои приемы как нигде больше в набоковской прозе — до такой степени, что эту книгу можно прочесть как тайный манифест о необходимости извращенного прочтения. Озадачивает нежелание набоковедов осознать, что извращенный ум — необходимое (хотя и недостаточное) условие понимания набоковских текстов. «Лолиту» необходимо читать раздевающим взглядом, чтобы оценить ее юмор и языковые игры, но и «Пнина» невозможно понять адекватно, не обладая особой чуткостью к сексуальным намекам в языке. «Пнин» производит впечатление самого теплого, самого сентиментального набоковского текста; это роман Набокова для тех, ...

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Часть текста: . I think it would be impossible to improve upon that. If it were up to me rather than to my editor, this chapter, like a painter's preliminary sketch, would be a sort of ébauche , in broad washes of reddish brown and black, or mauve and ivory, of the tableau to follow. Think of the synopses at the head of each Canto in the Harvard Classics edition of Dante's Divine Comedy . Thus, we would have: Void -- Birth of Nabokov -- Infancy and boyhood in Russia -- School years -- First poems -- Expatriation -- Cambridge -- Berlin -- Friends and associates -- Early works -- Maturity -- Madness -- Death -- Etc., etc.... Such a format has the advantage of giving the reader, and, truth be told, the author, umbratic foreglimpses of what is to come. Its principal drawback is its implication that the life lived was lived simply and linearly with a sort of storybook neatness about the whole. But life is neither simple nor neat, and, moreover, Nabokov is an outstanding example of Robert Musil's personality ohne Eigenschaften . He was a remarkable man who lived an unremarkable life, but unremarkable only in the popularly understood sense of being unmarked by those melodramatic ups and downs, such as tempestuous affairs with perverse poodle-trimmers or repeated suicide attempts, of which the reading public (whatever that is) is so fond. Even his paraphilia, so pregnant with the possibility of melodrama, is ultimately dreary and bears none of the glamour we associate with say, Charles Dodgson or Vincent Van Gogh. I say at the outset: Vladimir Nabokov's life is not the stuff of film...

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Часть текста: 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 that “purity” (incidentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no doubt homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in my old-fashioned, old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first met her, that she was as unravished as the stereotypical notion of “normal child” had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B. C. and its fascinating...

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Часть текста: 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 arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a “recorder of psychic reactions.” With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and then (never very successfully) the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnsonwho was soon flown back, I am glad to say. I had little notion of what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand) the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographeran insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had some psychic troubles)maintained that the big men on our team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the...

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Часть текста: 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 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...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "ELEGANT"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "ELEGANT"