Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "VIRGINIA"
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Часть текста: 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has only just been made clear to general readers with the publication of Nabokov's Butterflies, a fascinating volume of unpublished and uncorrected writings on the subject, edited by the Russian author's tireless biographer and critic Brian Boyd, with Robert Michael Pyle, an expert in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 realised that the further we inquire, the more we can discover, yet the more we find that we do not know, not because truth is an illusion or a matter of mere convention but because the world is infinitely...
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Часть текста: the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached the States. In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects, attending to it whenever I had nothing 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 ...
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Часть текста: travels all over the States. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motelclean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. At first, in my dread of arousing suspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each containing a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement was even 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,...
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Часть текста: 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 her fragrant presence in the Humbert open house. The reader knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize...
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Часть текста: Шарж Уильяма Брэмхолла Едва ли я ошибусь, если скажу, что Вирджиния Вулф долгое время была для российских читателей чем-то вроде блумсберийского привидения. В правоверных советских учебниках по «зарубежке» Вирджинию Вулф (тогда еще – «Вульф») вяло поругивали за аполитичность и «изощренное эстетство». Спорить или соглашаться с ними было трудно, поскольку произведения писательницы не переводились и были малодоступны для простых смертных. Многие, наверное, и имя-то ее узнали впервые благодаря интригующему названию некогда популярной пьесы Эдварда Олби и одноименному фильму. Такое положение дел продолжалось вплоть до 1984 года, когда в «Иностранной литературе» был напечатан перевод «Миссис Дэллоуэй» (1925). Несколько лет спустя, в баснословные времена книжного и журнального бума, плотину прорвало: достоянием российских книгочеев стали рассказы (точнее – лирические миниатюры в прозе), эссе и, конечно, романы Вулф. В общем, к настоящему времени мы получили возможность составить более или менее цельный портрет писательницы, которая вместе со своими единомышленниками из творческого содружества «Блумсбери» во многом определяла эстетический и духовный климат в английской литературе первой трети ХХ века. Тонкий и проницательный критик, яркий теоретик модернизма (собственно, этот термин закрепился в литературно-критическом обиходе не в последнюю очередь благодаря ее стараниям), Вирджиния Вулф вошла в Большую литературу благодаря экспериментальным романам двадцатых годов. Как известно, творческий эксперимент – далеко не всегда синоним литературной удачи. В литературе, как и в искусстве вообще, любые эксперименты чреваты досадными срывами вкуса и нарушением чувства художественного такта и меры. К тому же...