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

Примерный текст на первых найденных страницах

Входимость: 7. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: 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 to a select New England school with phoney British aspirations. Unfortunately, despite “that French kid’s uncle” being “a millionaire,” Lo dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time to enjoy in my modest way her fragrant presence in the Humbert open house. The reader knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my senses in Mona Dahl who was a good deal around, especially during the...

Входимость: 6. Размер: 46кб.

Часть текста: to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed slit. Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass upon an alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita’s script causing me almost to collapse as I leant against an adjacent urn, almost my own. Whenever that happenedwhenever her lovely, childish scrawl was horribly 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...

Входимость: 3. Размер: 52кб.

Часть текста: design over the lid and could be securely locked. Once glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizettas” that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. 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 ...

Входимость: 3. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dresseddouble-breasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tielay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.’s nurse running with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened porchwhere the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to groupfrom a bunch of neighbors already collected on the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise shell glasses. At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he laya banked banker so to speakwas not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. These were picked up and handed to...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 106кб.

Часть текста: тексту Набокова. В 1973 г. эта статья была отдана Карлу Профферу, редактору журнала «Russian Literature Triquarterly», но не появилась в книге под его редакцией [96] и долго не появлялась в журнале. В конце концов, лет через пять она (т. е. только первая ее половина) была напечатана в № 14, на котором стояла дата 1976, но реально он вышел значительно позже [97] — и напечатана в искаженном виде. Во-первых, анонимно, во-вторых — пропала вторая половина статьи [98] . Я написал язвительное (или, может быть, просто злобное) предисловие, в котором обвинил редактора во всех смертных грехах, включая плагиат [99] , и скандальное письмо, в котором грозил напечатать статью с этим предисловием [100] . Действия это не возымело, и вспоминая тогдашние почтовые «оказии» (а эта переписка была к тому же и небезопасной), я не могу быть уверен даже в том, получил ли мои послания адресат. Но что сейчас сводить счеты с покойным редактором журнала. Его безвременная смерть списала все подобные мелкие претензии, и я вспоминаю его только с сочувствием и скорбью. Статья так и лежала без дела (попытки напечатать ее по-русски встречали то простое возражение, что она уже наполовину напечатана и потому «для нашего журнала» интереса не представляет — возражение, естественно, приводившее меня в ярость). Единственное упоминание (и «атрибуция» анонимной работы) появились в статье Славы Паперно и Джона Агопяна «Официальные и неофициальные отклики на Набокова в Советском Союзе» [101] . Теперь я позволяю себе предложить эту работу читателю, полагая, что она сохранила хотя бы исторический интерес — не так много работ о Набокове писалось в России в 1973 г. Вероятно, пафос этой статьи сейчас покажется устаревшим — она была написана в период «Бури и натиска» метода цитат или подтекстов (последний термин тогда еще сравнительно недавно был введен К. Ф. ...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 58кб.

Часть текста: Part Two. Chapters 32 - 36 32 There was the day, during our first tripour first circle of paradisewhen in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawnto mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart ona roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face… that look I cannot exactly describe… an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one 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...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: better to do. On the other hand, I was urged by a war-time university in New York to complete my comparative history of French literature for English-speaking students. The first volume took me a couple of years during which I put in seldom less than fifteen hours of work daily. As I look back on those days, I see them divided tidily into ample light and narrow shade: the light pertaining to the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to my excruciating desires and insomnias of which enough has been said. Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I got, trying to catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always remote) playing in Central Park, and how repulsed I was by the glitter of deodorized career girls that a gay dog in one of the offices kept unloading upon me. Let us skip all that. A dreadful breakdown sent me to a sanatorium for more than a year; I went back to my workonly to be hospitalized again. Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap with a little brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an ...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 63кб.

Часть текста: 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 "American. "Now that you're living in Switzerland there seems to be complete agreement that you're American. Do you find this kind of distinction at all important regarding your identity as a writer? I have always maintained, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance. The more distinctive an insect's aspect, the less apt the taxonomist is to glance first of all at the locality label under the pinned specimen in order to decide which of several vaguely described races it should be assigned to. The writer's art is his real passport. His identity should be immediately recognized by a special pattern or unique coloration. His habitat may confirm the correctness of the determination but should not lead to it. Locality labels are known to have been faked by unscrupulous insect dealers. Apart from these considerations I think of myself today as an American writer who has once been a Russian o! ne. The Russian writers you have translated and written about all precede the so-called "age of realism, " which is more celebrated by English and American readers than is the earlier period. Would you say something about your temperamental or artistic affinities with the great writers of the 1830-40 era of masterpieces? Do you see your own work falling under such general rubrics as a tradition of Russian humor? The question of the affinities I may think I have or not have with nineteenth-century Russian writers is a...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 42кб.

Часть текста: moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her pantiesshe had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked inafter satisfying myself that the door carried 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 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,...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 6кб.

Часть текста: ghosts. Whatever a person’s creed, wheresoever one places one’s faith, in river spirits, the Great Mother, a desert bush, crucified shepherds, or a bald and paunchy wise man sitting serenely under a Bo tree, an afterlife is humanly impossible to disbelieve. Even avowed atheists, I suspect, know, intuitively, implicitly, that there is something more. Whether or not there is Bog with a capital B, the possibility that human existence, with its stomach-sucking abyss of laughter and tears, tea leaves and tree bark, fleeting smiles and fleecy clouds, ineffable bliss and inconsolable despair, ends, once and for all, merely as a consequence of the sudden cessation of a small series of mechanical events (beating heart, expanding lungs) is purely and simply unthinkable--in the literal sense of that term. As a late friend of mine liked to say when confronted by a particularly short-sighted variety of seize-the-day hedonist: Life is not a dress rehearsal, true; but neither is it the final act. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a confession to make: since beginning this book, I have been haunted. By this I do not mean obsessed by my subject, nor beguiled by a dim whiff of literary fame, nor even the victim of an id?e fixe . I mean haunted, from the Old Zemblan heimte : to bring home, pull, fetch, claim. Someone or something has been haunting me: dogging my mental steps, hiding my pencils and note cards, tapping a disembodied fingernail against my cabin’s windowpanes, whispering seductive doom between gusts of March wind and endeavoring in every...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "PULL"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "PULL"