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Часть текста: acclaim and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational 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 absolutely first-rate....

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Часть текста: to weed out ten years later but was forced to strike out a few sentences here and there when memory refused to restore the sense flawed by defective or improperly mended speech. The poem I quote (with metrical accents added) will be found translated into English in Chapter Two of The Gift, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1963. Would you ever go back to Russia? I will never go back, for the simple reason that all the Russia I need is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian childhood. I will never return. I will never surrender. And anyway, the grotesque shadow of a police state will not be dispelled in my lifetime. I don't think they know my works there-- oh, perhaps a number of readers exist there in my special secret service, but let us not forget that Russia has grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart from the fact that people there are told what to read, what to think. In America I'm happier than in any other country. It is in America that I found my best readers, minds that are closest to mine. I feel...

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Часть текста: The rest (asterisked) were mailed to me by George A. Plimpton. The combined set appeared in The Paris Review of October, 1967. Good morning. Let me ask forty-odd questions. Good morning. I am ready. Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry-- to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing. No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"-- not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress." One critic has said about you...

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Часть текста: 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, more exotic, countries. In the poem "To My Soul, "you wrote, possibly of yourself, as "a provincial naturalist, an eccentric lost in paradise. " This appears to link your interest in butterflies to other aspects of your life, writing, for instance. Do you feel that you are "an eccentric lost in paradise"? An eccentric is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice. And, per contra, the average eccentric-- for there are many of us, of diffйrent waters and magnitudes-- is utterly baffled and bored by the adjacent tourist who boasts of his business connections. In that sense, I often feel lost; but then, other people feel lost in my presence too. And I also know, as a good eccentric should, that the dreary old fellow who has been telling me all about...

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Часть текста: 1967 г. Wisconsin Studies [1967] This interview (published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, spring 1967) was conducted on September 25, 27, 28, 29, 1966, at Montreux, Switzerland. Mr. Nabokov and his wife have for the last six years lived 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 "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,...

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Часть текста: that might have been of some help is the fact that I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect roe obsessively-- though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous (and on the whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved. Has your life thus far come up to expectations you bad for yourself as a young man? My life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of boyhood and youth. In the first decade of our dwindling century, during trips with my family to Western Europe, I imagined, in bedtime reveries, what it would be like to become an exile who longed for a remote, sad, and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia, under the eucalipti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization of that fantasy. At the age of twelve my fondest dream was a visit to the Karakorum range in search of butterflies. Twenty-five years later I successfully sent myself, in the part of my hero's father (see my novel The Gift) to explore, net in hand, the mountains of Central Asia. At fifteen I visualized myself as a world-famous author of seventy with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald. If birthday wishes were horses, what would yours be for yourself? Pegasus, only Pegasus. You are, I am told, at work on a new novel. Do you have a working title? And could you give me a precis of what it is all about? The working title of the novel I am composing now is Transparent Things, but a precis would be an opaque shadow. The façade of our hotel in Montreux is being repainted, and I have reached the ultimate south of Portugal in an effort to find a quiet spot (pace the booming surf and rattling wind) ...

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Часть текста: ставшую бестселлером и принесшую автору Пулитцеровскую премию (за которой, кстати, последовала и Нобелевка). По всем параметрам пятисотстраничный талмуд Беллоу соответствует сложившемуся представлению об «интеллектуальном романе». Огромный, тяжеловесный, с зачаточной фабулой, загроможденной ретроспекциями и внутренними монологами протагониста, он напоминает многопалубный пароход, под завязку нагруженный философскими проблемами и «Большими Идеями». У руля этого литературного «Титаника» – писатель Чарлз Ситрин, типичный для позднего Беллоу герой: пожилой интеллектуал, изъеденный рефлексией и замученный бракоразводным процессом (сам писатель разводился четыре раза, поэтому не стоит удивляться, что тема развода и связанных с ним моральных и финансовых издержек с пугающим постоянством повторяется едва ли не во всех его романах). Многие члены команды также знакомы нам по ранее переводившимся произведениям американского нобелиата: стерва-жена, с маниакальным упорством сокрушающая душевное здоровье и финансовое...

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Часть текста: have been long convinced; to hear the same objections, annihilate the prejudices which never had and hasn't 8 a little girl of thirteen years! Who will not grow weary of threats, entreaties, vows, feigned fear, notes running to six pages, 12 betrayals, gossiping, rings, tears, surveillances of aunts, of mothers, and the onerous friendship of husbands! IX Exactly thus my Eugene thought. In his first youth he had been victim of tempestuous errings 4 and of unbridled passions. Spoiled by a habitude of life, with one thing for a while enchanted, disenchanted with another, 8 irked slowly by desire, irked, too, by volatile success, hearkening in the hubbub and the hush to the eternal mutter of his soul, 12 smothering yawns with laughter: this was the way he killed eight years, having lost life's best bloom. X With belles no longer did he fall in love, but dangled after them just anyhow; when they refused, he solaced in a twinkle; 4 when they betrayed, was glad to rest. He sought them without rapture, while he left them without regret, hardly remembering their love and spite. 8 Exactly...

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Часть текста: chapter of Speak, Memory was only 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,...

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Часть текста: as to be ready to fly far at short notice. What are the literary virtues you seek to attain-- and how? Mustering the best words, with every available lexical, associative, and rhythmic assistance, to express as closely as possible what one wants to express. What are the literary sins for which you could be answerable some day-- and bow would you defend yourself? Of having spared in my books too many political fools and intellectual frauds among my acquaintances. Of having been too fastidious in choosing my targets. What is your position in the world of letters? Jolly good view from up here. What problems are posed for you by the existence of ego? A linguistic problem: the singular act of mimetic evolution to which we owe the fact that in Russian the word ego means "his," "him." What struggles these days for pride of place in your mind? Meadows. A meadow with Scarce Heath butterflies in North Russia, another with Grinnell's Blue in Southern California. That sort of thing. What are your views about man's upward climb from slime? A truly remarkable performance. Pity, though, that some of the slime still...

Поиск по творчеству и критикеCлово "YOURSELF"

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Cлово "YOURSELF"