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Часть текста: transformed into the dull hand of one of my few correspondentsI used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made 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...

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Часть текста: The herds are noisy, and the nightingale has sung already in the hush of nights. II How sad your apparition is to me, spring, spring, season of love! What a dark stir there is 4 in my soul, in my blood! With what oppressive tenderness I revel in the whiff of spring fanning my face 8 in the lap of the rural stillness! Or is enjoyment strange to me, and all that gladdens, animates, all that exults and gleams, 12 casts spleen and languishment upon a soul long dead and all looks dark to it? III Or gladdened not by the return of leaves that perished in the autumn, a bitter loss we recollect, 4 harking to the new murmur of the woods; or with reanimated nature we compare in troubled thought the withering of our years, 8 for which there is no renovation? Perhaps there comes into our thoughts, midst a poetical reverie, some other ancient spring, 12 which sets our heart aquiver with the dream of a...

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Часть текста: cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques , crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brainand proceeded 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...

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Часть текста: tedious to dissemble; diversely to repeat the same; try gravely to convince one 4 of what all have been long convinced; to hear the same objections, annihilate the prejudices which never had and hasn't 8 a little girl of thirteen years! Who will not grow weary of threats, entreaties, vows, feigned fear, notes running to six pages, 12 betrayals, gossiping, rings, tears, surveillances of aunts, of mothers, and the onerous friendship of husbands! IX Exactly thus my Eugene thought. In his first youth he had been victim of tempestuous errings 4 and of unbridled passions. Spoiled by a habitude of life, with one thing for a while enchanted, disenchanted with another, 8 irked slowly by desire, irked, too, by volatile success, hearkening in the hubbub and the hush to the eternal mutter of his soul, 12 smothering yawns with laughter: this was the way he killed eight years, having lost life's best bloom. X With belles no longer did he fall in love, but dangled after them just anyhow; when they refused, he solaced in a...

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Часть текста: живо вообразить некий “павильон”, а вернее беседку. Долговязый пятнадцатилетний подросток, каким я был тогда, спрятался в ней от грозы, которых необычайное множество пролилось тем июлем. Беседка моя снится мне самое малое дважды в год. Появляется она, как правило, совершенно независимо от содержания сна, каковым, разумеется, может быть все что угодно, от Авалона до явнобрачия. Она, так сказать, мреет где-то рядом, словно скромная подпись художника. Я нахожу ее приставшей в уголку живописного полотна сновидения или затейливо внизанной в какую-нибудь декоративную часть картины. Однако временами она как бы замирает поодаль, немного барочная и все же не спорящая со статью деревьев – темной ели, белой березы, побег которой однажды пробился через ее дощатый пол. Винно-красные, бутылочно-зеленые и темно-синие ромбы цветных стекол беседки сообщают нечто часовенное ее решетчатым оконцам. Она осталась такой же, какой была в мою отроческую пору, – старая, крепкая деревянная постройка над папоротниковым оврагом в старой, приречной части нашего вырского парка. Осталась такой же или, может быть, чуть получшела. В той, настоящей, не хватало нескольких стекол и ветер заметал вовнутрь крошащуюся листву. Узкий мосток над яругой в самой глуши парка и беседка, встающая в середине его, будто сгущенная радуга, становились после недолгого дождика скользкими, словно натертыми темной и, пожалуй, волшебной мазью. Этимологически “pavilion” и “papilio” – близкие родственники. Мебели внутри не было никакой, лишь откидной, на ржавых петлях, столик под восточным окном, сквозь два-три опустевших или прозрачных ромба которого проглядывал между синих расплывов и пьяных краснот отблеск реки. На полу у моих ног лежал на спине мертвый слепень, рядышком с бурыми останками березовой сережки. А на уцелевших пятнах побелки снутри двери забредавшие сюда чужаки оставляли надписи вроде “Здесь были Даша, Тамара и Лена” или “Долой Австрию!”. Гроза миновала быстро. Ливень, масса...

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Часть текста: not dare be too tender with cornered Lolita yet, and therefore agreed it was not worth while tearing the child away from her beloved Camp Q. My soi-disant passionate 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 she was a woman of principle. Oh, she was very genteel: she said “excuse me” whenever a slight burp interrupted her flowing speech, called an envelope and ahnvelope, and when talking to her lady-friends referred to me as Mr. Humbert. I thought it would please her if I entered the community trailing some glamour after me. On the day of our wedding a little interview with me appeared in the Society Column of the Ramsdale...

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Часть текста: elle était amoureuse. Malfilâtre I “Whither? Ah me, those poets!” “Good-by, Onegin. Time for me to leave.” “I do not hold you, but where do 4 you spend your evenings?” “At the Larins'.” “Now, that's a fine thing. Mercy, man — and you don't find it difficult thus every evening to kill time?” 8 “Not in the least.” “I cannot understand. From here I see what it is like: first — listen, am I right? — a simple Russian family, 12 a great solicitude for guests, jam, never-ending talk of rain, of flax, of cattle yard.” II “So far I do not see what's bad about it.” “Ah, but the boredom — that is bad, my friend.” “Your fashionable world I hate; 4 dearer to me is the domestic circle in which I can…” “Again an eclogue! Ah, that will do, old boy, for...

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Часть текста: 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 sorrowful remarks. CHAPTER ONE To live it hurries and to feel it hastes. Prince Vyazemski I “My uncle has most honest principles: when he was taken gravely ill, he forced one to respect him 4 and nothing better could invent. To others his example is a lesson; but, good God, what a bore to sit by a sick person day and night, not stirring 8 a step away! What base perfidiousness to entertain one half-alive, adjust for him his pillows, 12 sadly...

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Часть текста: of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustrationand every limit presupposes something beyond ithence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her. And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichs, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gatedim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags ...

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Часть текста: hear it for lepidoptery... Science doesn't quite meet literature in a collection of technical papers and butterfly inspired writing in Nabokov's Butterflies Adam Mars-Jones Sunday March 19, 2000 Vladimir Nabokov was an expert on butterflies. He not only collected them obsessively but invented techniques to make their classification more precise. This volume brings together technical papers and butterfly-themed passages from his work. The closest comparable case of a major author having world eminence in another expertise would be A. E. Housman, who emended corrupt classical texts with the same analytical exquisiteness that Nabokov used to revise the classification of butterflies, according to the details of their dissected genitals. Classical philology is hardly a more popular or accessible pursuit than lepidoptery, but the volume (edited by Christopher Ricks), which includes passages from Housman's technical writings as well as the poems, is an outstanding success. The advantages of that book over this one were that it was wieldy, that it never left the domain of culture and that it showed a side of the writer absent from his verse. The slyly fatalistic persona of the poet made a fascinating contrast with the professor of Latin, who was a doughty if not brutal scrapper, and never split a hair in argument if there was a chance of splitting the person to whom it was attached. When Nabokov wrote in 1947 that his scientific papers 'have no interest whatever for the layman', he was expressing pride as much as melancholy. Any reader would enjoy the passage reprinted here from his novel, The Gift, about the living arrangements of...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "MELANCHOLY"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "MELANCHOLY"