Цитаты из книг — Брайан Бойд

Он обозвал всех, кто испугался «Лолиты», «вульгарными клушами и старыми пошляками», и тогда его попросили объяснить, кто такие «пошляки». «Готовые души в полиэтиленовых пакетах», — ответил Набоков

Русские, - писал Набоков, - знают, что понятия "родина" и "Пушкин" неразделимы, и быть русским - значит любить Пушкина.

"Европа мне не особенно нравится. Мне скучно, я подавлен... Время самовольно изменило места, которые я знал, а те, которые я посетил в первый раз, не обещают никаких воспоминаний, которые стоило бы хранить" В.Н.

Писательница Сильвия Беркман, коллега Набокова по Уэлсли, утверждает, что, хотя ей и довелось дружить со многими современными литераторами, такими, как, например, Роберт Фрост, она не встречала никого настолько самобытного, как Набоков, - казалось, что он принадлежал к совершенно особой породе, состоявшей лишь из одного…

After five years' research and writing—and time "off" for another novel, two translations, a play, eleven stories and a small-scale autobiography—he completed The Gift in January 1938.

CHAPTER 14 The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina) IN THE DEFENSE, his first masterpiece, Nabokov perfected the surface of his art and at the same time discovered how to plumb its depths.

After personality and time comes the third constraint upon consciousness that Nabokov defines, unsettles us into noticing, and tries to transcend: the closed circle of mortal knowledge. Throughout his novels he undermines the comfortable solidity books usually seek. Something out of kilter here or there suggests that the…

Formed and delivered in a moment, likely to be forgotten soon after, spoken language smacked to Nabokov of the prison of the present. The very nature of written language meant something special to him: an opportunity to revisit the impulse of a past instant from which time has forced us to march on, a sort of access to a…

As with personality, so with time: Nabokov's structures compel us to recognize the fading of the past as an absurd constraint on human consciousness rather than a direct reflection of the way things are. The fates of his characters indicate again and again the gross discrepancy between our ability to return in space and…

Like everything else in Nabokov, his ethics spring from his view of consciousness. He sees consciousness as the space of freedom: as his style proclaims, the mind has an enormous ease of movement and range of choice and room for self-awareness within the moment. And yet consciousness, although it seems to be the agent of…

In a century that saw the rise of minimalist art, Nabokov was a maximalist. He explored human nature at the upper reaches of consciousness.

How much Nabokov took from Bergson and how much was in him already is difficult to assess. Bergson set space and time at loggerheads in order to counter the mechanistic materialism he attributed to a narrowly spatial or outer view of the world, rather than a time-oriented or inner view. Through his mother and Russian…

The first postulate of Nabokov's philosophy is the primacy of consciousness, "consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all."

No subject would become more uniquely Nabokov's than the preposterous fact that we cannot retain the real past we have lived through. Like Chorb, many of his characters—Humbert, Kinbote, Van Veen, Hugh Person—seek to reimpose a vanished past a changed present and become grotesque or cruel in the process. Only within the…

Mary is a novel about time: about the reality of the past, even though we can only reach it within the present; about the delusive force of our anticipations of the future (Alfyorov's and Ganin's visions of meeting Mary at the station, Podtyagin's of crossing into France); and about the present, where we are free to act…

Time, not space, is Nabokov's real subject: not the Russian Berlin the book renders so well, but the accumulated time of memory that allows Ganin to superimpose the country of his past on the city streets of his present.

Later he might recall Mary as mere nostalgic indulgence, but back in 1925 he had taken great pains to construct a novel of exile. Ganin's yearning for Mary becomes a personalized image of the emigre dream, the hope of reliving and resuming the happiness of remembered Russia. Not that Mary is in any way a symbol: Nabokov…

CHAPTER 11 Scenes from Emigre Life: Berlin, 1925-1926 EXILE for the Nabokovs was a succession of rented rooms.

In the 1920s Berlin was fabled for the vitality and diversity of its theaters and especially its cabarets. The first and by far the most successful of Berlin's Russian cabarets was Yakov Yuzhny's Sinyaya Ptitsa (Bluebird). Founded at the end of 1921, a descendant of Nikita Baliev's famous Letuchaya mysh' (The Bat) in…