Владимир Владимирович Набоков цитаты

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Из прозы

Из прозы

Из прозы

Despair

«Лекции по русской литературе»

Из прозы

Из прозы

Из рассказа "Памяти Л.И.Шигаева", 1934 г.

С. 180.
«Лекции по русской литературе»

Из поэзии

Из прозы
Источник: Набоков. О Набокове и прочем: Интервью, рецензии, эссе / Сост., коммент. Н.Г. Мельникова. М., 2002. 704 с.

Из поэзии

Монтрё, декабрь 1973 г. Перевод с английского: Андрей Бабиков
Из прозы

апрель 1969

из интервью журналу «Плейбой», 1964
The fact that since my youth – I was 19 when I left Russia — my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.
Из интервью
Вариант: С юности — я покинул Россию в 19 лет — мои политические взгляды остаются строгими и неизменными, как старая серая скала. Они классически, почти до банальности. Свобода слова, свобода искусства. Социальный или экономический строй идеального государства меня интересует мало. 'Желания мои весьма скромны. Портреты главы государства не должны размером превышать почтовую марку.' Никаких пыток, никаких казней.
Источник: http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter03.txt_with-big-pictures.html

начало стихотворения

«Картофельный эльф», 1924
Из прозы
Источник: Набоков В.В. Собрание сочинений в 4 томах — М.: Правда, 1990 г. Том первый

сверчок
Источник: проза

воздух
Источник: проза

Из поэзии

Из поэзии

Из поэзии

«Лекции по русской литературе»

Источник: Lolita

Источник: Lolita

Источник: Lolita

Источник: Lolita

From a BBC Interview (1962), p. 14.
Strong Opinions (1973)
Контексте: I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.

Источник: Strong Opinions (1973), p. 18.

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Контексте: Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Контексте: Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

On the first moon landing, p. 150.
Strong Opinions (1973)
Контексте: Oh, "impressed" is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. Of course, I rented a television set to watch every moment of their marvelous adventure. That gentle little minuet that despite their awkward suits the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight. It was also a moment when a flag means to one more than a flag usually does. I am puzzled and pained by the fact that the English weeklies ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, of feeling along one's spine the shiver and wonder of it. After all, Englishmen should understand that thrill, they who have been the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?

Источник: Bend Sinister (1963), p. vi.
Контексте: The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.

Источник: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), p. 5.
Контексте: An old Russian lady who has for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past..... I cannot see any real necessity of complying with her anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Olga Olegovna Orlova — an egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to whithold.
Her dry account cannot convey to the untravelled reader the implied delights of a winter day such as she describes in St. Petersburg; the pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye; the sheen of sledge-cuts on the hard-beaten snow of spacious streets with a tawny tinge about the middle tracks due to a rich mixture of horse-dung; the brightly coloured bunch of toy-balloons hawked by an aproned pedlar; the soft curve of a cupola, its gold dimmed by the bloom of powdery frost; the birch trees in the public gardens, every tiniest twig outlined white; the rasp and twinkle of winter traffic… and by the way how queer it is when you look at an old picture postcard (like the one I have placed on my desk to keep the child of memory amused for the moment) to consider the haphazard way Russian cabs had of turning whenever they liked, anywhere and anyhow, so that instead of the straight, self-conscious stream of modern traffic one sees — on this painted photograph — a dream-wide street with droshkies all awry under incredibly blue skies, which farther away, melt automatically into a pink flush of mnemonic banality.

Источник: Bend Sinister (1963), p. vi.
Контексте: The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Контексте: Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

Playboy 1964 interview
Контексте: The fact that since my youth – I was 19 when I left Russia — my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.

Источник: Pnin

Источник: Lectures on Literature

Источник: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

As quoted in Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi

Источник: Lolita

Источник: Pale Fire

Источник: Lectures on Literature (1980)

Источник: Pale Fire

Источник: Lolita

Источник: Lolita