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

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Входимость: 5. Размер: 24кб.

Часть текста: set of Nabokov's early Russian poems, inscribed by Nabokov for his wife Vera. Image from Vera's Butterflies (NY: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 1999). Courtesy the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. A commentator from a distant southern land that begins with Z composes an outlandish elucidation of another man's masterpiece. His startling, perhaps outrageous claims upset certain entrenched academic specialists, and he must flee (a world tour, a centenary), and undergo the ordeals of exile before coming to rest, in some almost successful 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...

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Часть текста: 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 ...

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Часть текста: 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 me by a pretty child in a dirty pink...

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Часть текста: daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H. a touch of vivid vermeil; but I knew I would 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...

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Часть текста: 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...

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Часть текста: отца Набокова. Английская история, отраженная в романе, начинается с короля Альфреда; следующее по времени историческое событие, выделяемое Набоковым, — это английская революция. Кинбот идентифицируется с королем Карлом II Английским, который был вынужден удалиться в изгнание, но впоследствии вернул себе трон. Он увлечен образом Карла II потому, что сам мнит себя свергнутым королем. Его не интересуют ни причины революции Кромвеля, ни то обстоятельство, что Кромвель казнил Карла I. Однако и здесь навязчивая идея Кинбота скрывает значимый для самого Набокова смысл: отсылки к английской Реставрации в «Бледном огне» — это своего рода способ раскрыть политическое измерение темы гибели Владимира Дмитриевича Набокова от руки убийцы. Как мы уже отмечали в предисловии, характер гибели Джона Шейда, воспринятой Кинботом в качестве неудачной попытки цареубийства, напоминает о том, что отец Набокова пал случайной жертвой политического убийства. Кинбот считает, что убийца Шейда также целил в другого: воспринимая все происходящее с ним в контексте земблянской политики, он отказывается поверить в то, что убийцей был беглый преступник, решивший отомстить судье Гольдсворту и введенный в заблуждение его сходством с Шейдом. На параллелизм двух убийств указывает тщательно продуманная хронология «Бледного огня»: Джон Шейд погибает 21 июля, в день рождения отца Набокова [164] . В соответствии с доминирующим в «Бледном огне» принципом перевернутых зеркальных отражений (особенно в отношении мужского/женского) мать Кинбота, королева Зембли, умирает 21 июля. Шейд погибает, едва закончив поэму, посвященную смерти его дочери и природе потусторонности. Поэма Шейда...

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Часть текста: my 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,...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 43кб.

Часть текста: в их легковесных домиках. В своё время Мартын был обеспеченным помещиком. Он был славен в моих детских воспоминаниях замечательным трактором, во времена, когда я и его сын Петя одновременно стали жертвами Майн Рида и скарлатины, так, что теперь, после пятнадцати лет битком набитых всяческими вещами, я с удовольствием останавливался у этой табачной лавки, на этом оживленном углу, где Мартын продавал свой товар. Но с прошлого года нас связывало больше чем общие воспоминания. У Мартына была тайна, и я участвовал в этой тайне. “Ну, всё как обычно?” Спрашивал я шёпотом, и он, глянув поверх плеча, отвечал так же тихо, “да, слава богу, всё спокойно”. Эта тайна была совершенно необычайной. Я вспомнил, как уезжал в Париж и как за день до отъезда просидел до вечера у Мартына. Душу человека можно сравнить с универсальным магазином, а его глаза с двумя витринными окнами. Прицениваясь к глазам Мартына, отметим, что тёпло-коричневые тона были в моде. Судя по глазам, товар в этой душе был отменного качества. А какая пышная борода довольно поблёскивала здоровой русской сединой. А его плечи, его рост, его выражение лица. ... Одно время даже говорили, что он мог разрубить платок мечём, - один из...

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Часть текста: Linda was a true nymphet, but for some unknown reason 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, 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 ...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "SURPRISE"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "SURPRISE"