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

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Часть текста: and his wife have for the 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 distinctive an insect's aspect, the less apt the taxonomist is to ...

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Часть текста: and "Playwriting" were composed for a course on drama that Nabokov gave at Stanford during the summer of 1941. We had arrived in America in May of 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...

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Часть текста: TV-13 NY, 1965 г. TV-13 NY [1965] In September, 1965, Robert Hughes visited me here to make a filmed interview for the Television 13 Educational Program in New York. At our initial meetings I read from prepared cards, and this part of the interview is given below. The rest, represented by some fifty pages typed from the tape, is too colloquial and rambling to suit the scheme of the present book. As with Gogol and even James Agйe, there is occasionally confusion about the pronunciation of your last name. How does one pronounce it correctly? It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to 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...

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Часть текста: Fiction, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. In the twelve years since the American publication of Lolita, you've published twenty-two or so books-- new American or Antiterran novels, old Russian works in English, Lolita in Russian-- giving one the impression that, as someone has said-- John Updike, I think-- your oeuvre is growing at both ends. Now that your first novel has appeared (Mashenka, 1926), it seems appropriate that, as we sail into the future, even earlier works should adhere to this elegant formula and make their quantum leap into English. Yes, my forthcoming Poems and Problems [McGraw-Hill] will offer several examples of the verse of my early youth, including "The Rain Has Flown," which was composed in the park of our country place, Vyra, in May 1917, the last spring my family was to live there. This "new" volume consists of three sections: a selection of thirty-six Russian poems, presented in the original and in translation; fourteen poems which I wrote directly in English, after 1940 and my arrival in America (all of which were published in The New Yorker), and eighteen chess problems, all but two of which were composed in recent years (the chess manuscripts of the 1940-1960 period have been mislaid and the earlier unpublished jottings are not worth printing). These Russian poems constitute no more than one percent of the mass of verse which I exuded with monstrous regularity during my youth. Do the components of that monstrous mass fall into any discernible periods or stages of development? What can be called rather grandly my European period of verse-making seems to show several distinctive stages: an initial one of passionate and commonplace love verse (not represented in Poems and Problems)-, a period reflecting utter distrust of the so-called October Revolution; a period (reaching well into the nineteen-twenties) of a kind of private curatorship, aimed at preserving nostalgic retrospections and...

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Часть текста: had written in longhand before having them typed for submission to Toffler when he came to Montreux in mid-March, 1963. The present text takes into account the order of my interviewer's questions as well as the fact that a couple of consecutive pages of my typescript were apparently lost in transit. Egreto perambis doribus! With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary cognoscenti-- which you bad enjoyed for more than 30 years-- to 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...

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Часть текста: and specific affair. I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to compose it. I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn-- so much the better. Art is difficult. Easy art is what you see at modern exhibitions of things and doodles. In your prefaces you constantly mock Freud, the Viennese witchdoctor. Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind? I may have aired this before but I'd like to repeat that I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro. Of course, the first takes the fig, as the fellows say in the dissecting-room. I've no intention to dream the drab middle-class dreams of an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella. I also suggest that the Freudian faith leads to dangerous ethical consequences, such as when a filthy murderer with the brain of a tapeworm is given a lighter sentence because his mother spanked him too much or too little-- it works both ways. The Freudian racket looks to me as much of a farce as the jumbo thingurn of polished wood with a polished hole in the middle which doesn't represent anything except the gaping face of the Philistine who is told it is a great sculpture produced by the greatest living caveman. The novel on which you are working is, I believe, about 'time'? How do you see 'time'? My new novel (now 800 typed pages long) is a family chronicle, mostly set in a dream America. Of its five parts one is built around my notion of time. I've drawn my scalpel through spacetime, space being the tumor, which I assign to the slops. While not having much physics, I reject Einstein's slick formulae; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist. Both my female creatures have Irish and Russian blood. One girl lasts 700 pages, dying young; her...

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Часть текста: 1971-72 г. Bayerischer Rundfunk [1971-72] In October, 1971, Kurt Hoffman visited me in Montreux to film an interview for the Bayeriscber Rundfunk. Of its many topics and themes I have selected a few for reproduction in this volume. The bit about my West European ancestors comes from a carefully executed and beautifully bound Ahnentafel, given me on my seventieth birthday by my German publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-RowohIt. ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example "applied time"-- time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the "passage of time," we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part...

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Часть текста: пор оставался почти исключительно в ведении специалистов по англо-саксонской литературе. Цель этого доклада — ввести роман в обиход русистики, наметив опорные точки для предстоящего подробного изучения в новом контексте. Набоков говорит о «Bend Sinister» как о своем первом американском романе [444] (по-русски он называет его «Под знаком незаконнорожденных»), и хотя в книге уже можно найти следы американского опыта, материал ее еще европейский — она как бы завершает цикл тех довоенных произведений, в которых писатель дал свой диагноз болезни века, тоталитарному мышлению и политическому устройству [445] . Вкратце напомню сюжетную основу книги. Действие происходит в вымышленной стране, бывшей монархии и кратковременной республике, где в результате бескровного переворота к власти приходит эгалитаристская партия. Герой романа Адам Круг, философ с мировым именем, потрясенный личным горем — после неудачной операции умирает его жена, — с рассеянностью наблюдает за тем, как лидер партии Среднего Человека, его бывший школьный враг Падук, превращается в диктатора, а страна — в тоталитарное государство, ведущее террор против всех, кто может представлять опасность для нового порядка. Круг думает, что слава и талант делают его неуязвимым, и не отвечает ни на угрозы, ни на заигрывания диктатуры, которая пытается привлечь его на свою сторону. Но когда с целью шантажа берут в заложники, а затем — по роковой ошибке — убивают его единственного сына, философ восстает...

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Часть текста: to Montreux for a merry interview shortly before my seventieth birthday. His piece appeared in The New York Times, April 19, 1969, with only two or three of my answers retained. The rest are to be used, I suppose, as "Special to The New York Times" at some later date by A. W., if he survives, or by his successor. I transcribe some of our exchanges. You have called yourself "an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England. " How does this make you an American writer? An American writer means, in the present case, a writer who has been an American citizen for a quarter of a century. It means, moreover, that all my works appear first in America. It also means that America is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home. Rightly or wrongly, I am not one of those perfectionists who by dint of hypercriticizing America find themselves wallowing in the same muddy camp with indigenous rascals and envious foreign observers. My admiration for this adopted country of mine can easily survive the jolts and flaws that: , indeed, are nothing in comparison to the abyss of evil in the history of Russia, not to speak of other, more exotic, countries. In the poem "To My Soul, "you wrote, possibly of yourself, as "a provincial naturalist, an eccentric lost in paradise. " This appears to link your interest in butterflies to other aspects of your life, writing, for instance. Do you feel that you are "an eccentric lost in paradise"? An eccentric is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice. And, per contra, the average eccentric-- for there are many of us, of diffйrent waters and magnitudes-- is utterly baffled and bored by the adjacent tourist who boasts of his...

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Часть текста: смутно осознает искажение нарратива, в рамки которого он заключен: «<Н>е was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into a bit of preposterous oversight» — «Напротив, он был, возможно, чересчур осторожен, слишком усерден в выискивании дьявольских ловушек, слишком бдителен, ибо опасался, что окружающий беспорядок (непредсказуемая Америка!) подтолкнет его к совершению какого-нибудь дурацкого промаха». Слово «preposterous» (дурацкий, нелепый, бессмысленный, абсурдный) своим значением обязано инверсии: оно произошло от латинского praeposterus, что означает «противоположный, обратный» или «извращенный», и изначальное его значение в английском языке — «перевернутый, поставленный в обратном порядке». В елизаветинской драме это слово употреблялось в непристойном смысле и относилось к анальному сексу [666] (Henke, 202) — например, у Шекспира в «Троиле и Крессиде» [667], — и эту коннотацию можно распространить на главный (для повествователя) источник анекдотов о Пнине — Джека Кокерелла, «а rather limp, moon-faced, neutrally blond Englishman» — «довольно вялого, луноликого, невыразительного <тут игра слов: можно прочесть и как „бесполого“. — Э. Н.> и белесого англичанина». В русской литературе о «лунной» гомосексуальности писал Василий Розанов, и Набоков ранее уже пользовался этой коннотацией [668]. В метатворческом смысле «дурацкий промах» («preposterous oversight») совершает повествователь, который до крайности, до абсурда извращает историю Пнина. И все же слова «preposterous oversight» (которые могут означать и «обратный пересмотр») описывают не только болтовню Кокерелла; речь еще и о долге хорошего...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "GREATEST"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "GREATEST"