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Cлово "MATTER"

Часть текста: my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promisedthe great rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fentres! Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take offwhereupon the lighted image would move and Even would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper. Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. “ Savez-vous qu’ dix ans ma petite tait folle de voius?” said a woman I talked to at a tea in Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away, and I could not even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis courts, a dozen years before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse, the promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated seductively but also to be nobly heldall this, chance denied mechance and a change to smaller characters on the pale beloved writer’s part. My fancy was both Proustianized and Procrusteanized; for that particular morning, late in September 1952, as I had come down to grope for my mail, the dapper and bilious janitor with whom I was on execrable terms started to complain that a man who had seen Rita home recently had been “sick...

2. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 1 - 8

Входимость: 11. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. 2 I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjectspaleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigiditythe fatal rigidityof some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time,...

3. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 28 - 33

Входимость: 11. Размер: 42кб.

Часть текста: 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 practices. We are not surrounded in our enlighted era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in...

4. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 18 - 22

Входимость: 10. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: 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...

5. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 17 - 21

Входимость: 9. Размер: 52кб.

Часть текста: It turned out to be much too flat for holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept itusing it for a totally different purpose. In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decideddespite Lo’s visible annoyanceto spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There, snugly wrapped in a white woolen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: caliber. 32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb. I was now glad I had it with meand even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his. 38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, ...

6. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. Playboy, 1964 г.

Входимость: 7. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: 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 same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works-- at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet. Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer-- so much so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as saying, "Of course they'll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26. " Though you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film to task for watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with the final product? I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car-- these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing...

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

Входимость: 6. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: 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 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 congresses; and the term "happening" has already managed to grow obsolescent. He might have commented that the quest for originality for its own sake has led to ludicrous excesses and things have taken their helter-skelter course in random theatre as they have in random music and in random painting. Yet Nabokov's own plays demonstrate that it is...

8. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 12 - 17

Входимость: 6. Размер: 43кб.

Часть текста: more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphetfor the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid clawswould have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer. The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have...

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

Входимость: 6. Размер: 20кб.

Часть текста: 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...

10. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 9 - 16

Входимость: 5. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: reason she did not comewas perhaps not allowed to cometo our house; so I recall her only as a flash of natural sunshine on an indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry except Eva Rosen. Avis ws a plump lateral child with hairy legs, while Mona, though handsome in a coarse sensual way and only a year older than my aging mistress, had obviously long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever had been one. 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...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "MATTER"

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Cлово "MATTER"