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Владимир Набоков: The original of Laura

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Владимир Набоков The original of Laura

The original of Laura: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five--the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books--has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrative--dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality--affords us one last experience of Nabokov’s magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work.

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CHAPTER THREE

Flora was barely fourteen when she lost her virginity to a coeval, a handsome ballboy at the Carlton Courts in Cannes. Three or four broken porch steps — which was all that remained of an ornate public toilet or some ancient templet — smothered in mints and campanulas and surrounded by junipers, formed the site of a duty she had resolved to perform rather than a casual pleasure she was now learning to taste. She observed with quiet interest the difficulty Jules had of drawing a junior-size sheath over an organ that looked abnormally stout and at full erection had a head turned somewhat askew as if wary of receiving a backhand slap at the decisive moment. Flora let Jules do everything he desired except kiss her on the mouth, and the only words said referred to the next assignation. One evening after a hard day picking up and tossing balls and pattering in a crouch across court between the rallies of a long tournament the poor boy, stinking more than usual, pleaded utter exhaustion and suggested going to a movie instead of making love; whereupon she walked away through the high heather and never saw Jules again — except when taking her tennis lessons with the stodgy old Basque in uncreased white trousers who had coached players in Odessa before World War One and still retained his effortless exquisite style. Back in Paris Flora found new lovers. With a gifted youngster from the Lanskaya school and another eager, more or less interchangeable couple she would bicycle through the Blue Fountain Forest to a romantic refuge where a sparkle of broken glass or a lace-edged rag on the moss were the only signs of an earlier period of literature. A cloudless September maddened the crickets. The girls would compare the dimensions of their companions. Exchanges would be enjoyed with giggles and cries of surprise. Games of blindman's buff would be played in the buff. Sometimes a voyeur would be shaken out of a tree by the vigilant police.

This is Flora of the close-set dark-blue eyes and cruel mouth recollecting in her midtwenties fragments of her past, with details lost or put back in the wrong order, TAIL between DELTA and SLIT, on dusty dim shelves, this is she. Everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name which seems to have been made expressly to have another one modeled upon it by a fantastically lucky artist. Of art, of love, of the difference between dreaming and waking she knew nothing but would have darted at you like a flatheaded blue serpent if you questioned her knowledge of dreaming.

She returned with her mother and Mr. Espenshade to Sutton, Mass., where she was born and now went to college […] At eleven she had read A quoi r?vent les enfants, by a certain Dr. Freud, a madman. The extraits came in a St. Léger d'Eric Perse series of Les grands repr?sentants de notre?poque though why great representatives wrote so badly remained a mystery.

A sweet Japanese girl, who took Russian and French because her stepfather was half French and half Russian, taught Flora to paint her left hand up to the radial artery (one of the tenderest areas of her beauty) with miniscule information, in so called "fairy" script, regarding names, dates and ideas. Both cheats had more French than Russian; but in the latter the possible questions formed, as it were, a banal bouquet of probabilities:


[DN: references are to Lomonsov and Derzhavin, Tatyana and Eugene Onegin, and Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich; [] = intentional blank space throughout]


What kind of folklore preceded poetry in Rus?; speak a little of Lom, and Derzh.; paraphrase T's letter to E.O.; what does I. I.'s doctor deplore about the temperature of his own hands when preparing to [] his patient? — such was the information demanded by the professor of Russian Literature (a forlorn looking man bored to extinction by his subject). As to the lady who taught French Literature, all she needed were the names of modern French writers and their listing on Flora's palm caused a much denser tickle. Especially memorable was the little cluster of interlocked names on the ball of Flora's thumb: Malraux, Mauriac, Maurois, Michoux, Michima, Montherland and Morand. What amazes one is not the alliteration (a joke on the part of a mannered alphabet); not the inclusion of a foreign performer (a joke on the part of that fun loving little Japanese girl who would twist her limbs into a pretzel when entertaining Flora's lesbian friends); and not even the fact that virtually all those writers were stunning mediocrities as writers go (the first in the list being the worst); what amazes one is that they were supposed to "represent an era" and that such repr?sentants could get away with the most execrable writing, provided they represent their times.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mrs. Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated from Sutton College. A new fountain had just been bequeathed to its campus by a former student, the widow of a shah. Generally speaking, one should carefully preserve in transliteration the feminine ending of a Russian surname (such as — aya, instead of the masculine — iy or — oy) when the woman in question is an artistic celebrity. So let it be

"Landskaya" — land and sky and the melancholy echo of her dancing name. The fountain took quite a time to get correctly erected after an initial series of unevenly spaced spasms. The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty. It was a very hot day with its blue somewhat veiled. A few photographers] moved among the crowd, as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job. And certainly for no earthly reason does this passage resemble in rhythm another novel, My Laura, where the mother appears as "Maya Umanskaya," a fabricated film actress. Anyway, she suddenly collapsed on the lawn in the middle of the beautiful ceremony. A remarkable picture commemorated the event in "File." It showed Flora kneeling belatedly in the act of taking her mother's non-existent pulse, and it also showed a man of great corpulence and fame, still unacquainted with Flora: he stood just behind her, head bared and bowed, staring at the white of her legs under her black gown and at the fair hair under her academic cap.

CHAPTER FIVE

A brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer and a gentleman of independent means, Dr. Philip Wild had everything save an attractive exterior. However, one soon got over the shock of seeing that enormously fat creature mince toward the lectern on ridiculously small feet and of hearing the cock-a-doodle sound with which he cleared his throat before starting to enchant one with his wit. Laura disregarded the wit but was mesmerized by his fame and fortune.

Fans were back that summer — the summer she made up her mind that the eminent Philip Wild, PH, would marry her. She had just opened a boutique d'eventails with another Sutton coed and the Polish artist Rawitch, pronounced by some Raw Itch, by him Rah Witch. Black fans and violet ones, fans like orange sunbursts, painted fans with dubtailed Chinese butterflies oh they were a great hit, and one day Wild came and bought five (five spreading out her own fingers like pleats) for "two aunts and three nieces" who did not really exist, but never mind, it was an unusual extravagance on his part. His shyness surprised and amused Flaura. Less amusing surprises awaited her. Today after three years of marriage she had had enough of his fortune and fame. He was a domestic miser. His New jersey house was absurdly understaffed. The ranchito in Arizona had not been redecorated for years. The villa on the Riviera had no swimming pool and only one bathroom. When she started to change all that, he would emit a kind of mild creak or squeak, and his brown eyes brimmed with sudden tears.

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