Поиск по заголовкам произведений
Cлово "INSIPID"

1. Чарльз Кинбот: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова. Chapter Two. An Insipid Incipit

Сайт: http://nabokov-lit.ru Размер: 6кб.

1. Чарльз Кинбот: Серебристый свет. Подлинная жизнь Владимира Набокова. Chapter Two. An Insipid Incipit

Сайт: http://nabokov-lit.ru Размер: 6кб.

Часть текста: , in broad washes of reddish brown and black, or mauve and ivory, of the tableau to follow. Think of the synopses at the head of each Canto in the Harvard Classics edition of Dante's Divine Comedy . Thus, we would have: Void -- Birth of Nabokov -- Infancy and boyhood in Russia -- School years -- First poems -- Expatriation -- Cambridge -- Berlin -- Friends and associates -- Early works -- Maturity -- Madness -- Death -- Etc., etc.... Such a format has the advantage of giving the reader, and, truth be told, the author, umbratic foreglimpses of what is to come. Its principal drawback is its implication that the life lived was lived simply and linearly with a sort of storybook neatness about the whole. But life is neither simple nor neat, and, moreover, Nabokov is an outstanding example of Robert Musil's personality ohne Eigenschaften . He was a remarkable man who lived an unremarkable life, but unremarkable only in the popularly understood sense of being unmarked by those melodramatic ups and downs, such as tempestuous affairs with perverse poodle-trimmers or repeated suicide attempts, of which the reading public (whatever that is) is so fond. Even his paraphilia, so pregnant with the possibility of melodrama, is ultimately dreary and bears none of the glamour we associate with say, Charles Dodgson or Vincent Van Gogh. I say at the outset: Vladimir Nabokov's life is not the stuff of film fantasies or pulp fiction. This book is a work of scholarship, and as such, is predicated not on the appeal of...