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

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Часть текста: a monthly journal, the sheer number of these journals and volumes (in my father's library there were more than a thousand of the latter alone, representing a good hundred journals) - all this had to be overcome in order to hunt down the necessary reference, if it existed at all. Nonetheless, even in my exceptionally propitious situation things were not easy: Russia, particularly in the north, dwelt in a mist, while the local lists, scattered through the journals, totally haphazard, scanty, and cruelly inaccurate in nomenclature, only maddened me when at last I ferreted them out. My father was the preeminent entomologist of his time, and very well off to boot, but the ordinary amateur, unable to dispatch his scouts throughout Russia, and denied the opportunity - or not knowing how - to gain access to specialized collections and libraries (and an accidental boon, the hasty inspection of collections at a lepidopterological society or in the cellar of some museum, does not satisfy the true enthusiast, who needs to have the boon always at hand), had no choice but to hope for a miracle. And that miracle dawned in 1912...

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Часть текста: 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 three countries, before reaching his conclusion. If so, lama rare fowl indeed. If, on the other hand, he has merely limited himself to quizzing members of his family or club, his statement cannot be discussed seriously. Another critic has written that your "worlds are static. They may become tense with obsession, but they do not...

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Часть текста: no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous 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 ...

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Часть текста: soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? 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...

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Часть текста: 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 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...

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Часть текста: inserted questions). That convenient method has been used to mutual satisfaction in interviews with Playboy, The Paris Review, Wisconsin Studies, Le Monde, La Tribune de Genève, etc. Furthermore, I like to see the proofs for checking last-minute misprints or possible little flaws of fact (dates, places). Being an unusually muddled speaker (a poor relative of the writer) I would like the stuff I prepared in typescript to be presented as direct speech on my part, whilst other statements which I may stammer out in the course of our chats, and the gist of which you might want to incorporate in The Profile, should be used, please, obliquely or paraphrastically, without any quotes. Naturally, it is for you to decide whether the background material should be kept separate in its published form from the question-and-answer section. I am leaving the attached material with the concierge because I think you might want to peruse it before we meet. I am very much looking forward to seeing you. Please give me a ring when you are ready."...

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Часть текста: issue-- the one with my face on the cover. There seem to be similarities in the rhythm and tone of Speak, Memory and Ada, and in the way you and Van retrieve the past in images. Do you both work along similar lines? The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. It is a familiar embarrassment that I face with very faint qualms, particularly since I am not really aware of any special similarities-- just as one is not aware of sharing mannerisms with a detestable kinsman. I loathe Van Veen. The following two quotations seem closely related: "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. " (Speak, Memory) and "pure time, perceptual time, tangible time, time free of content, context and running commentary-- this is my time and theme. All the rest is numerical symbol or some aspect of space. " (Ada). Will you give me a lift on your magic carpet to point out bow time is animated in the story of Van and Ada? In his study of time my creature distinguishes between text and texture, between the contents of time and its almost tangible essence. I ignored that distinction in my Speak, Memory and was mainly concerned with being faithful to the patterns of my past. I suspect that Van Veen, having less control over his imagination than I, novelized in his indulgent old age many images of his youth. You have spoken in the past of your indifference to music, but in Ada you describe time as "rhythm, the tender intervals between Stresses. " ...

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Часть текста: Editor of Vogue, New York, sent me the questions answered below. The interview appeared in the Christmas number of that journal. Magic, sleight-of-hand, and other tricks have played quite a role in your fiction. Are they for amusement or do they serve yet another purpose? Deception is practiced even more beautifully by that other V. N., Visible Nature. A useful purpose is assigned by science to animal mimicry, protective patterns and shapes, yet their refinement transcends the crude purpose of mere survival. In art, an individual style is essentially as futile and as organic as a fata morgana. The sleight-of-hand you mention is hardly more than an insect's sleight-of-wing. A wit might say that it protects me from half-wits. A grateful spectator is content to applaud the grace with which the masked performer melts into Nature's background. In your autobiography. Speak, Memory, you describe a series of concurrent, insignificant events around the world "forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, " of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair at lthaca. New York) is the nucleus. How does this open out on your larger belief in the precedence of the imagination over the mind? The simultaneousness of these random events, and indeed the fact of their occurring at all as described by the central percipient, would only then conform to "reality" if he had at his disposal the apparatus to reproduce those events optically...

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Часть текста: doing. True, a festschrift is a very special and rare occasion for that kind of sport, but I did not wish to create even the shadow of a precedent and therefore decided simply to publish the rough jottings I made as an objective reader anxious to eliminate slight factual errors of which such a marvelous gift must be free; for I knew what pains the editors, Charles Newman and Alfred Appel, had taken to prepare it and remembered how firmly the guest co-editor, when collecting the ingredients of this great feast, refused to show me any plum or crumb before publication. BUTTERFLIES Butterflies are among the most thoughtful and touching contributions to this volume. The old-fashioned engraving of a Catagramma- like insect is delightfully reproduced twelve times so as to suggest a double series or "block" of specimens in a cabinet case; and there is a beautiful photograph of a Red Admirable (but "Nymphalidae" is the family to which it belongs, not its genus, which is Vanessa-- my first bit of carping). ALFRED APPEL, JR. Mr. Appel, guest co-editor, writes about my two main works of fiction. His essay "Backgrounds of Lolita" is a superb example of the rare case where art and erudition meet in a shining ridge of specific information (the highest and to me most acceptable function of literary criticism). I would have liked to say more about his findings but modesty (a virtue that the average reviewer especially appreciates in authors) denies me that...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "OBJECTIVE"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "OBJECTIVE"