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Часть текста: Chapter Five. Kafka Chapter Five Kafka What, the bemused reader may ask, does any of this have to do with Sirin? Patience, dear friends: there is method to my madness. Kafka. During the final years of his life, Franz Kafka spent time in several spas and sanatoria, among them Kiesling on the Black Sea coast, fifteen kilometers south of Sochi. It was here, on the white sand beach, that Nabokov met the dying writer. According to our hero, he had travelled by train to Kiesling to visit a friend, referred to only as "M." in his diary. (Jean-Jacques Molard, a casual acquaintance of Nabokov's since 1922 when they met at Cambridge, believes M. to have been Maria Ostrowsky, the adopted daughter of a Galician timber merchant, about whom we will hear more later.) The time was mid-June. Kafka, as was his custom, spent the morning reclining on a chaise longue on the spa's veranda overlooking the sea. Nabokov, sketching fat figures in the margins of his notebook while relaxing on the beach, had stuffed the end of a Gauloise cigarette into his mouth when he realized he had left his matches at the Pension des H?brides five hundred meters away. Sitting up as a prelude to borrowing what he needed, the young writer noticed the older writer, whose six-foot frame, by this time, weighed less than nine stone, all in black, surveying the strand from his chair. Nabokov stood, folded closed his notebook, and plodded off, minus his espadrilles, toward the invalid. He asked for a match first in French, which elicited only a questioning stare, then in Russian ( m?me jeu ), finally in German, to which the elegant consumptive replied "Schade, Mein Herr, Ich rauche nicht." Nabokov went back to his blanket and gave up on the cigarette. Waves soughed against the damp and spongy shingle, gulls mewed and dived for small fry or the scraps ...
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Часть текста: for these the author alone must answer. I have opted, against the protestations of my editor, to forego this tiresome ritual. Every word, every thought, every mark of punctuation in this work is my own, except where stated otherwise according to the dictates of careful scholarship. Certainly the comments (solicited or not) of many persons have guided me in perfecting my book, but only insofar as they served as signposts of exactly the type of tired tripe I wished to avoid. The most common of these was a chilly "You can't do that," as if my book were violating some immemorial cosmic law. For all their carping about institutional constraints on the freedom of their thought and work, my fellow academicians (and even many of you, self-styled "Nabokovians") have revealed themselves to be virulently censorial when confronted by the weird fruit of my research. Few things are more depressing to an intelligent person than the revelation that a whole league of supposedly enlightened literati is in fact a mob of petulant nitwits. Chapter One On Visiting Nabokov's Tomb "Biography is a form of murder." -- J. Tenier The cemetery of the Centre Funéraire St. Martin is...
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Часть текста: Montreux. Our exchange appeared in Vogue, New York, April 15, 1972. Three passages (pp. 200-1, 201-2 and 204), are borrowed, with modifications, 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...