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

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Часть текста: so did the weather. My visitors and their crew had never paid much attention to those insects and I was touched and flattered by the childish wonderment with which they viewed the crowds of butterflies imbibing moisture on brookside mud 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...

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Часть текста: was dominated by a single passion," wrote Vladimir Nabokov. "If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender." It was an unusual way to view the world, and one that not many readers - even those who adore Nabokov - may have fully appreciated. In fact, the ferocity of Nabokov's obsession with butterflies has only just been made clear to general readers with the publication of Nabokov's Butterflies, a fascinating volume of unpublished and uncorrected writings on the subject, edited by the Russian author's tireless biographer and critic Brian Boyd, with Robert Michael Pyle, an expert in butterflies. All translations are, as usual, by Nabokov's son Dmitri, who has lavished time and unusual talent on his father's work over several decades. More than 700 densely printed pages on this subject may strike even the most sympathetic reader as overkill. Does anybody really want to read page after page of Nabokov's highly technical descriptions of various butterflies? Are these writings "important" to anyone, even lepidopterists? Is there any connection between Nabokov's passion for "lepping" and his fiction? I suspect "no" is the correct answer to all but the final question, which one must answer resoundingly in the affirmative. In his shrewd introduction Boyd teases out the connections between the writer and the lepidopterist. One comes to understand Vladimir Nabokov as novelist more completely and precisely by understanding that science gave this canny author "a sense of reality that should not be confused with modern (or 'postmodern') epistemological nihilism. "Dissecting and deciphering the genitalic structure of lycaenids, or counting scale rows on their wings, he...

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Часть текста: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова Chapter Seven. King, Queen, Knave Chapter Seven King, Queen, Knave "Kollektsiia duratskikh fizionomii i zamuchennykh veshchei." ( Korol', dama, valet , 242) 1 Rather than dwell on the unpleasant and, truth be told, unforeseen afteraffects of my visit to Madame Fat and the mysterious events pursuant thereto, I shall now discuss matters more literary, less metaphysical, partly in the interest of the maintenance of my own mental equilibrium, partly in response to what an impartial observer would certainly characterize as the overly vociferous behest of my good, but sometimes impatient, editor, who enjoined me, in a fax sent to the seedy but comfortable hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer where I was recovering from recent scholarly labors, to "get on with it." (Incidentally, the sea softly plashing against the sandy edge of this charming townlet is, at noon, a deep azure hue, recalling a certain lake in my homeland, a distant northern land. And at night, I have noticed on my insomniac rambles, the moon casts slivers of silvery light upon the ink-black waters. Do remind me to say more of this later.) The original contract for this book (signed three years ago with a then noticeably more solicitous publisher whose name I am legally bound not to mention) stipulated that the text be comprised ...

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Часть текста: the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she wouldinvariably, with icy precisionplump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke. Oh, d not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impressin that I did not manage to be happy. Readeer must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours , that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradisea paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flamesbut still a paradise. The able psychiatrist who studies my caseand whom by now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascinationis no doubt anxious to have me take Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at last, the “gratification” of a lifetime urge, and ...

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Часть текста: такого сопоставления я выбрала роман самого Вл. Набокова «Защита Лужина» [389] и роман японского прозаика Ясунари Кавабаты «Мастер или Турнир Го» [390] . Набоков и Кавабата — писатели одной художественной величины, одного литературного поколения (они даже родились в тот же год), но разных и, казалось бы, далеких культур. Роман «Защита Лужина» написан Набоковым в 1929 году по-русски и опубликован в Берлине в 1930-м. В английском переводе он появился лишь 35 лет спустя. Кавабата, который в Токио учился на факультете английской филологии и внимательно следил за европейской литературой, русского языка, однако, не знал и, следовательно, с «Лужиным» знаком не был. Свой роман «Турнир Го» он написал в начале 50-х. Тема обоих произведений — игра, но не просто игра, а самая интеллектуальная, творческая ее форма, сочетающая признаки искусства и соревнования, требующая от игрока фантазии воли. Знатоки называют Го — китайской разновидностью шахмат. Их условия сходны. Два соперника ведут игру на доске, разделенной на квадраты (в Го — 361, в шахматах — 64) белыми и черными фигурами. Время партии строго регламентировано. Победа в Го заключается в захвате территории противника, в шахматах — в захвате короля. В Го так же, как в шахматах, до относительного недавнего их институирования, чемпион выбирает себе противника и вызывает его на турнир. Этика шахмат и Го отражает моральные законы древних схваток, шахматы — рыцарских турниров, Го — боев самураев. Желающий победить обязан атаковать. Отказ от атаки понимается как отсутствие храбрости у игрока, психологическая...

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Часть текста: Леонида Андреева, дочь его сына, эмигрантского поэта и прозаика Вадима Андреева, - переводчица, журналистка, автор мемуаров, в том числе о встречах с Борисом Пастернаком» 2 . Справка эта нуждается в существенных дополнениях. В частности, что такое те «мерзостны<е> “преображен- ии<я>”», о которых с таким гневом пишет своему адресату Набоков? Очевидно, что речь здесь идет об одной из тогдашних новинок - антологии “Poets on Street Corners” («Поэты на уличных углах») под редакцией О. В. Андреевой-Карлайль. В антологию эту вошли переводы из пятнадцати русских поэтов: А. Блока, Анны Ахматовой, Б. Пастернака, О. Мандельштама, М. Цветаевой, В. Маяковского, С. Есенина, Н. Заболоцкого, Б. Поплавского, Е. Евтушенко, А. Вознесенского, И. Холина, Г. Сапгира, Б. Ахмадулиной и И. Бродского 3 . Переводы из Мандельштама, выполненные Робертом Лоуэллом, лауреатом Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize 1962 г., помещены в антологии с указанием на их подчеркнуто вольный характер. Уже этого одного обстоятельства было достаточно для того, чтоб Набоков счел Лоуэлла оскорбителем тени покойного Мандельштама - поэта, который Набокову был особенно дорог в те годы 4 . В 1964 г. в...

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Часть текста: me by George A. Plimpton. The combined set appeared in The Paris Review of October, 1967. Good morning. Let me ask forty-odd questions. Good morning. I am ready. Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry-- to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing. No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert 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...

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Часть текста: 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 within the frame of one screen; but the central figure in the passage you quote is not equipped with any kind of video attached to his lawn chair and must therefore rely on the power of pure imagination. Incidentally, I tend more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination-- hence my inverted commas around "reality." Whatever the mind grasps, it does so with the assistance of creative fancy, that drop of water on a glass slide which gives distinctness and relief to the observed organism. 1969 marks the fiftieth anniversary of your first publication. What do that first book and your latest, Ada, have in common? What of your intention and technique has changed, what has...

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Часть текста: is the man who penned the most controversial novel of the 20th century, a book that has been termed both "the only convincing love story of our century" and "pornography," and still causes controversy 50 years after its release. But he also created a startling breadth of quality work that supports, matches and even surpasses the heights of talent he reached with the novel "Lolita." "He will be increasingly appreciated," says Jeff Edmunds, editor of Zembla, the Web site dedicated to Nabokov and his work. "He crosses national boundaries... he's not considered a modernist, or post-modernist... He's simply Nabokov." D. Barton Johnson, Professor Emeritus at University of California - Santa Barbara and former president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, agrees. "There can, I think, be no question that Nabokov is and will remain a prominent figure in the 20th Century canon - at least in American and Russian literature," Johnson says. "Nabokov is one of the rare figures who, at the end of the century, enjoys both a wide popular readership and is firmly entrenched in academe." Nabokov writing at his lectern, Montreux, 1966 Galya Diment, Professor of Russian at University of Washington and the author of "Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel," says...

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Часть текста: here are draft reminiscences later revised for the autobiography Speak, Memory; the 1920 technical paper "A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera"; selected parts of the later scientific and technical work; numerous poems with butterfly-related lines, some in English, some translated from Russian; Nabokov's last short story, "The Admirable Anglewing"; excerpts from letters and interviews; notes for the New Yorker ("Incidentally, pinching the thorax is a much simpler way of dispatching a butterfly") and segments of Nabokov's lecture notes; and lepidopteran passages from the novels and stories. Among the previously unpublished works, one standout is the 36-page essay (originally in Russian) that Nabokov meant to use as the afterword to The Gift. Also present are the surviving fragments of Nabokov's never-completed descriptive catalogue, Butterflies of Europe. Boyd and Pyle contribute separate, informative and sometimes parallel introductions. Not even a Nabokov-obsessed taxonomist would want to read this collection from start to finish: it is, though, a volume devotees will delight to browse in and scholars will want to own. 30 color and 30 b&w...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "OBSESSION"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "OBSESSION"