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Cлово "OFTEN"

Часть текста: in an opulent hotel built in 1835, which still retains its nineteenth-century atmosphere. Their suite of rooms is on the sixth floor, overlooking Lake Geneva, and the sounds of the lake are audible through the open doors of their small balcony. Since Mr. Nabokov does not like to talk off the cuff (or "Off the Nabocuff," as he said) no tape recorder was used. Mr. Nabokov ei! ther wrote out his answers to the questions or dictated them to the interviewer; in some instances, notes from the conversation were later recast as formal questions-and-answers. The interviewer was Nabokov's student at Cornell University in 1954, and the references are to Literature 311-312 (MWF, 12), a course on the Masterpieces of European Fiction (Jane Austen, Gogol, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stevenson, Kafka, Joyce, and Proust). Its enrollment had reached four hundred by the time of Nabokov's resignation in 1959. The footnotes to the interview, except where indicated, are provided by the interviewer, Alfred Appel, Jr. For years bibliographers and literary journalists didn't know whether to group you under "Russian" or...

2. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 1 - 2

Входимость: 5. Размер: 49кб.

Часть текста: intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could be attained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or room into two communicating love nests. By and by, the very possibilities that such honest promiscuity suggested (two young couples merrily swapping mates or a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder, and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-bed cabin, a prison cell or paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain. We came to know nous connmes, to use a Flaubertian intonationthe stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of friend-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some other gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except “good beds”), and an unsmiling landlady always prepared to have her gift (“…well, I could give you…”) turned down. Nous connmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of their repetitious namesall those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts,...

3. Набоков Дмитрий: Отцовские бабочки. Интервью данное Брайеном Бойдом журналу BOMB Magazine

Входимость: 5. Размер: 24кб.

Часть текста: disguise—as a professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. An unlikely plot, but the real story is no less exceptional: Brian Boyd, author of the prize-winning two-volume biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, and of Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness and the just-released Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, is a scholar who changed his mind. Writing in The New York Observer on Boyd's 'remarkable, obsessive, delirious, devotional study, Nabokov's Pale Fire,' Ron Rosenbaum called him 'an ornament of the accidents and possibilities of Nabokov scholarship' and praised him 'for having the courage and humility to retract an earlier conjecture and the imaginative daring' to (as Boyd himself might put it) re-re-reread Pale Fire. Nabokov's 1962 novel takes the form of an introduction by a scholar named Charles Kinbote; a lucid 999-line poem by an American poet named John Shade; and a commentary and index by Kinbote, whose attention veers continually from the poem to his own unsatisfactory life, from John Shade's homely metaphysics and painful autobiography to what must be his own entirely irrelevant fantasy—unless he really is Charles the Beloved, the deposed King of Zembla; and that unless unlocks only the first in a series of secret passages. From the dedication copy of Pale Fire, inscribed by Nabokov for his wife Vera. Image from Vera's Butterflies (NY: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 1999). Courtesy the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Has Boyd's book-length study, written in response to an online discussion, produced a robust thesis or the shadow of a madman's fancy? All I can say now is that reading Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Nabokov's Pale Fire is like being immersed in a medium that clarifies, but not without some shifting and spill of glare, what was before...

4. Lolita. Part One. Chapters 1 - 8

Входимость: 4. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: 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 infancy had set:...

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

Входимость: 4. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: arrived in America in May of 1940; except for some brief guest appearances, this 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 their helter-skelter ...

6. Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Chapter eight

Входимость: 4. Размер: 71кб.

Часть текста: to the calls of swans, near waters shining in the stillness, 8 the Muse began to visit me. My student cell was all at once radiant with light: in it the Muse opened a banquet of young fancies, 12 sang childish gaieties, and glory of our ancientry, and the heart's tremulous dreams. II And with a smile the world received her; the first success provided us with wings; the aged Derzhavin noticed us — and blessed us 4 as he descended to the grave. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III And I, setting myself for law ...

7. Lolita. Part Two. Chapters 9 - 16

Входимость: 3. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: 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,...

8. Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Chapter two

Входимость: 3. Размер: 51кб.

Часть текста: castle was built as castles should be built: excellent strong and comfortable 4 in the taste of sensible ancientry. Tall chambers everywhere, hangings of damask in the drawing room, portraits of grandsires on the walls, 8 and stoves with varicolored tiles. All this today is obsolete, I really don't know why; and anyway it was a matter 12 of very little moment to my friend, since he yawned equally amidst modish and olden halls. III He settled in that chamber where the rural old-timer had for forty years or so squabbled with his housekeeper, 4 looked through the window, and squashed flies. It all was plain: a floor of oak, two cupboards, a table, a divan of down, and not an ink speck anywhere. Onegin 8 opened the cupboards; found in one a notebook of expenses and in the other a whole array of fruit liqueurs, pitchers of eau-de-pomme, 12 and the calendar for eighteen-eight: having a lot to do, the old man never looked into any other books. IV Alone midst his possessions, merely to while away the time, at first conceived the plan our Eugene 4 of instituting a new system. In his backwoods a solitary sage, the ancient corvée 's yoke by the light quitrent he replaced; 8 the muzhik blessed fate, while in his corner went into a huff, therein perceiving dreadful harm, his thrifty neighbor. 12 Another slyly smiled, and all concluded with one voice that he was a most dangerous eccentric. V At first...

9. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. Time, 1969 г.

Входимость: 3. Размер: 21кб.

Часть текста: 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. " Are these rhythms musical, aural, physical, cerebral, what? Those "intervals" which seem to reveal the gray gaps of time between the black bars of space are much more similar to the interspaces between a metronome's monotonous beats than to the varied rhythms of music or verse. If, as you have said, "mediocrity thrives on 'ideas, ' " why does Van, who is no mediocrity, start explaining at length near the end of the book bis ideas about time? Is this the vanity of ...

10. Интервью Набокова на английском языке. BBC-2, 1969 г.

Входимость: 3. Размер: 22кб.

Часть текста: a stylistic device meant to introduce my subject. Memory often presents a life broken into episodes, more or less perfectly recalled. Do you see any themes working through from one episode to another? Everyone can sort out convenient patterns of related themes in the past development of his life. Here again I had to provide pegs and echoes when furnishing my reception halls. Is the strongest tie between men this common captivity in time? Let us not generalize. The common captivity in time is felt differently by different people, and some people may not feel it at all. Generalizations are full of loopholes and traps. I know elderly men for whom "time" only means "timepiece." What distinguishes us from animals? Being aware of being aware of being. In other words, if I not only know that I am but also know that I know it, then I belong to the human species. All the rest follows-- the glory of thought, poetry, a vision of the universe. In that respect, the gap between ape and man is immeasurably greater than the one between amoeba and ape. The difference between an ape's memory and human memory is the difference between an ampersand and the British Museum library. Judging from your own awakening consciousness as a child, do you think that the capacity to use language, syntax, relate ideas, is something we learn from adults, as if we were computers being programed, or do we begin to use a unique, built-in capability of our own-- call it imagination? The stupidest person in the world is an all-round genius compared to the cleverest computer. How we learn to imagine and express things is a riddle with premises impossible to express and a solution impossible to imagine. In your acute scrutiny of your past, can you find the instruments that fashioned you? Yes-- unless I...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "OFTEN"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "OFTEN"