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Cлово "DESIRE"

1. The wings of desire

Сайт: http://nabokov-lit.ru Размер: 8кб.

1. The wings of desire

Сайт: http://nabokov-lit.ru Размер: 8кб.

Часть текста: author's tireless biographer and critic Brian Boyd, with Robert Michael Pyle, an expert in butterflies. All translations are, as usual, by Nabokov's son Dmitri, who has lavished time and unusual talent on his father's work over several decades. More than 700 densely printed pages on this subject may strike even the most sympathetic reader as overkill. Does anybody really want to read page after page of Nabokov's highly technical descriptions of various butterflies? Are these writings "important" to anyone, even lepidopterists? Is there any connection between Nabokov's passion for "lepping" and his fiction? I suspect "no" is the correct answer to all but the final question, which one must answer resoundingly in the affirmative. In his shrewd introduction Boyd teases out the connections between the writer and the lepidopterist. One comes to understand Vladimir Nabokov as novelist more completely and precisely by understanding that science gave this canny author "a sense of reality that should not be confused with modern (or 'postmodern') epistemological nihilism. "Dissecting and deciphering the genitalic structure of lycaenids, or counting scale rows on their wings, he realised that the further we inquire, the more we can discover, yet the more we find that we do not know, not because truth is an illusion or a matter of mere convention but because the world is infinitely detailed, complex, and deceptive, 'an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms'." Born into a wealthy and aristocratic Russian family just before the turn of the century, ...