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

Примерный текст на первых найденных страницах

Входимость: 2. Размер: 59кб.

Часть текста: The lectures "The Tragedy of Tragedy" and "Playwriting" were composed for a course on drama that Nabokov gave at Stanford during the summer of 1941. We had 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...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 52кб.

Часть текста: 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 in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb. I was now glad I had it with meand even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and...

Входимость: 2. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: 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 expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a “recorder of psychic reactions.” With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and then (never very successfully) the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnsonwho was soon flown back, I am glad to say. I had little notion of what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand) the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographeran insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had some psychic troubles)maintained that the big men on our team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the arctic fox. We lived in prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. We had heaps of suppliesthe Reader’s Digest , an ice cream mixer, chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas. My health improved wonderfully in spite or because of all the...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 21кб.

Часть текста: № 1). После того как у Набокова, благодаря стараниям Эдмунда Уилсона, завязались тесные отношения с "Нью-Йоркером", почти все автобиографические очерки, писавшиеся Набоковым в сороковые-пятидесятые годы, были опубликованы в этом журнале. Впрочем, все необходимые библиографические сведения имеются в авторском предисловии к третьей версии автобиографии «Моя связь с "Нью-Йоркером" началась (при посредстве Эдмунда Уилсона) с напечатанного в апреле 1942 года стихотворения, за которым последовали другие перемещенные стихи, однако первое прозаическое сочинение появилось здесь только 3 января 1948 года, им был "Портрет моего дяди" (глава третья в окончательной редакции книги), написанный в июне 1947 года в Коламбайн Лодж, Эстес-Парк, Колорадо, где мы с женой и сыном вряд ли смогли бы задержаться надолго, если бы призрак моего прошлого не произвел на Гарольда Росса столь сильного впечатления. Тот же самый журнал напечатал главу четвертую ("Мое английское образование", 27 марта 1948), главу шестую ("Бабочки", 12 июня 1948), главу седьмую...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 72кб.

Часть текста: and limpid poetry, 8 of high thoughts and simplicity. But so be it. With partial hand take this collection of pied chapters: half droll, half sad, 12 plain-folk, ideal, the careless fruit of my amusements, insomnias, light inspirations, unripe and withered years, 16 the intellect's cold observations, and the heart's sorrowful remarks. CHAPTER ONE To live it hurries and to feel it hastes. Prince Vyazemski I “My uncle has most honest principles: when he was taken gravely ill, he forced one to respect him 4 and nothing better could invent. To others his example is a lesson; but, good God, what a bore to sit by a sick person day and night, not stirring 8 a step away! What base perfidiousness to entertain one half-alive, adjust for him his pillows, 12 sadly serve him his medicine, sigh — and think inwardly when will the devil take you?” II Thus a young scapegrace thought as with post horses in the dust he flew, by the most lofty will of Zeus 4 the heir of all his kin. Friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan! The hero of my novel, without preambles, forthwith, 8 I'd like to...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 30кб.

Часть текста: printed, from our careful jottings, in the spring, 1971, issue of Novel, A Forum on Fiction, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. In the twelve years since the American publication of Lolita, you've published twenty-two or so books-- new American or Antiterran novels, old Russian works in English, Lolita in Russian-- giving one the impression that, as someone has said-- John Updike, I think-- your oeuvre is growing at both ends. Now that your first novel has appeared (Mashenka, 1926), it seems appropriate that, as we sail into the future, even earlier works should adhere to this elegant formula and make their quantum leap into English. Yes, my forthcoming Poems and Problems [McGraw-Hill] will offer several examples of the verse of my early youth, including "The Rain Has Flown," which was composed in the park of our country place, Vyra, in May 1917, the last spring my family was to live there. This "new" volume consists of three sections: a selection of thirty-six Russian poems, presented in the original and in translation; fourteen poems which I wrote directly in English, after 1940 and my arrival in America (all of which were published in The New Yorker), and eighteen chess problems, all but two of which were composed in recent years (the chess manuscripts of the 1940-1960 period have been mislaid and the earlier unpublished jottings are not worth printing). These Russian poems constitute no more than one percent of the mass of verse which I exuded with monstrous regularity during my youth. Do the...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 55кб.

Часть текста: The beds are made. Guests are assigned night lodgings — from the entrance hall 12 even to the maids' quarters. Restful sleep by all is needed. My Onegin alone has driven home to sleep. II All has grown quiet. In the drawing room the heavy Pustyakov snores with his heavy better half. 4 Gvozdin, Buyanov, Petushkov, and Flyanov (who is not quite well) have bedded in the dining room on chairs, with, on the floor, Monsieur Triquet 8 in underwaistcoat and old nightcap. All the young ladies, in Tatiana's and Olga's rooms, are wrapped in sleep. Alone, sadly by Dian's beam 12 illumined at the window, poor Tatiana is not asleep and gazes out on the dark field. III With his unlooked-for apparition, the momentary softness of his eyes, and odd conduct with Olga, 4 to the depth of her soul she's penetrated. She is quite unable to understand him. Jealous anguish perturbs her, 8 as if a cold hand pressed her heart; as if beneath her an abyss yawned black and dinned.... “I shall perish,” says Tanya, 12 “but perishing from him...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 53кб.

Часть текста: bestseller. In the aftermath of this cause celebre, do you ever regret having written Lolita? On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there was a moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was on the point of burning Humbert Humbert's little black diary. No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle-- its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works-- at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet. Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer-- so much so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as saying, "Of course they'll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26. " Though you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film to task for watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with the final product? I thought the movie was...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 7кб.

Часть текста: piece appeared in The New York Times, April 19, 1969, with only two or three of my answers retained. The rest are to be used, I suppose, as "Special to The New York Times" at some later date by A. W., if he survives, or by his successor. I transcribe some of our exchanges. You have called yourself "an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England. " How does this make you an American writer? An American writer means, in the present case, a writer who has been an American citizen for a quarter of a century. It means, moreover, that all my works appear first in America. It also means that America is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home. Rightly or wrongly, I am not one of those perfectionists who by dint of hypercriticizing America find themselves wallowing in the same muddy camp with indigenous rascals and envious foreign observers. My admiration for this adopted country of mine can easily survive the jolts and flaws that: , indeed, are nothing in comparison to the abyss of evil in the history of Russia, not to speak of other,...

Входимость: 1. Размер: 16кб.

Часть текста: de son teint, et pour avoir trouvé des tasses de blanc sur sa toilette, mais sur ce qu'entrant un matin dans sa chambre, je le trouvai brossant ses ongles avec une petite vergette faite exprès, ouvrage qu'il continua fi+èrement devant moi. Je jugeai qu'un homme qui passe deux heures tous les matins à brosser ses ongles peut bien passer quelques instans à remplir de blanc les creux de sa peau.” (Les Confessions de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.) Grimm was ahead of his age: nowadays people all over enlightened Europe clean their nails with a special brush. >> 7. The whole of this ironical stanza is nothing but a subtle compliment to our fair compatriots. Thus Boileau, under the guise of disapprobation, eulogizes Louis XIV. Our ladies combine enlightenment with amiability, and strict purity of morals with the Oriental charm that so captivated Mme de Staël ( Dix ans d'exil). >> 8. Readers remember the charming description of a Petersburg night in Gnedich's idyl: Here's night; but the golden stripes of the clouds do not darken. Though starless and moonless, the whole horizon lights up. Far out in the [Baltic] gulf one can see the silvery sails 4 Of hardly discernible ships that seem in the blue sky to float. With a gloomless radiance the night sky is radiant, And the crimson of sunset blends with the Orient's gold, As if Aurora led forth in the wake of evening 8 Her rosy morn. This is the aureate season When the power of night is usurped by the summer days; When the...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "YESTERDAY"

Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "YESTERDAY"