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Часть текста: Review of October, 1967. Good morning. Let me ask forty-odd questions. Good morning. I am ready. Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry-- to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing. No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"-- not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress." One critic has said about you that "his feelings are like no one else's. " Does this make sense to you? Or does it mean that you know your feelings better than others know theirs? Or that you have discovered yourself at other levels? Or simply that your history is unique? I do not recall that article; but if a critic makes such a statement, it must surely mean that he has explored the feelings of literally millions of people, in at least...

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Часть текста: 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 mise-en-sce´ne of party...

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Часть текста: émigré intellectual 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 "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, ...

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Часть текста: Pushkin Chapter one EUGENE ONEGIN A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin Pétri de vanité il avait encore plus de cette espèce d'orgueil qui fait avouer avec la même indifférence les bonnes comme les mauvaises actions, suite d'un sentiment de supériorité, peut-être imaginaire. Tiré d'une lettre particulière Not thinking to amuse the haughty world, having grown fond of friendship's heed, I wish I could present you with a gage 4 that would be worthier of you — be worthier of a fine soul full of a holy dream, of live and limpid poetry, 8 of high thoughts and simplicity. But so be it. With partial hand take this collection of pied chapters: half droll, half sad, 12 plain-folk, ideal, the careless fruit of my amusements, insomnias, light inspirations, unripe and withered years, 16 the intellect's cold observations, and the heart's...

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Часть текста: 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 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...

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Часть текста: 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...

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Часть текста: - may have fully appreciated. In fact, the ferocity of Nabokov's obsession with butterflies has only just been made clear to general readers with the publication of Nabokov's Butterflies, a fascinating volume of unpublished and uncorrected writings on the subject, edited by the Russian author's tireless biographer and critic Brian Boyd, with Robert Michael Pyle, an expert in butterflies. All translations are, as usual, by Nabokov's son Dmitri, who has lavished time and unusual talent on his father's work over several decades. More than 700 densely printed pages on this subject may strike even the most sympathetic reader as overkill. Does anybody really want to read page after page of Nabokov's highly technical descriptions of various butterflies? Are these writings "important" to anyone, even lepidopterists? Is there any connection between Nabokov's passion for "lepping" and his fiction? I suspect "no" is the correct answer to all but the final question, which one must answer resoundingly in the affirmative. In his shrewd introduction Boyd teases out the connections between the writer and the lepidopterist. One comes to understand Vladimir Nabokov as novelist more completely and precisely by understanding that science gave this canny author "a sense of reality that should not be confused with modern (or 'postmodern') epistemological nihilism. "Dissecting and deciphering the genitalic structure of lycaenids, or counting scale rows on their wings, he realised that the further we inquire, the more we can discover, yet the more we find that we do not know, not because truth is an illusion or a matter of...

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Часть текста: of his free time. Nabokov biographer Boyd and butterfly expert Pyle team up to offer a gigantic compendium of butterfly-relevant Nabokoviana. Reprinted here are draft reminiscences later revised for the autobiography Speak, Memory; the 1920 technical paper "A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera"; selected parts of the later scientific and technical work; numerous poems with butterfly-related lines, some in English, some translated from Russian; Nabokov's last short story, "The Admirable Anglewing"; excerpts from letters and interviews; notes for the New Yorker ("Incidentally, pinching the thorax is a much simpler way of dispatching a butterfly") and segments of Nabokov's lecture notes; and lepidopteran passages from the novels and stories. Among the previously unpublished works, one standout is the 36-page essay (originally in Russian) that Nabokov meant to use as the afterword to The Gift. Also present are the surviving fragments of Nabokov's never-completed descriptive catalogue, Butterflies of Europe. Boyd and Pyle contribute separate, informative and sometimes parallel introductions. Not...

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Часть текста: 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...

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Часть текста: 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...

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