JК
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight :: Набоков Владимир Владимирович
Страница: 14 из 124A few months later we learned that our poor friend had been shot, together with a score of people in the same batch, shoulder to shoulder with Palchin, who died as bravely as Belov.
In his last published book, The Doubtful Asphodel (1936), Sebastian depicts an episodical character who has just escaped from an unnamed country of terror and misery. 'What can I tell you of my past, gentlemen [he is saying], I was born in a land where the idea of freedom, the notion of right, the habit of human kindness were things coldly despised and brutally outlawed. Now and then, in the course of history, a hypocrite government would paint the walls of the nation's prison a comelier shade of yellow and loudly proclaim the granting of rights familiar to happier states; but either these rights were solely enjoyed by the jailers or else they contained some secret flaw which made them even more bitter than the decrees of frank tyranny.… Every man in the land was a slave, if he was not a bully; since the soul and everything pertaining to it were denied to man, the infliction of physical pain came to be considered as sufficient to govern and guide human nature…. From time to time a thing called revolution would occur, turning the slaves into bullies and vice versa…. A dark country, a hellish place, gentlemen, and if there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home….'
Owing to there being in this character's speech a chance reference to 'great woods and snow-covered plains', Mr Goodman promptly assumes that the whole passage tallies with Sebastian Knight's own attitude to Russia. This is a grotesque misconception; it should be quite clear to any unbiased reader that the quoted words refer rather to a fanciful amalgamation of tyrannic iniquities than to any particular nation or historical reality. And if I attach them to that part of my story which deals with Sebastian's escape from revolutionary Russia it is because I want to follow it up immediately with a few sentences borrowed from his most autobiographical work: 'I always think', he writes (Lost Property), 'that one of the purest emotions is that of the banished man pining after the land of his birth. I would have liked to show him straining his memory to the utmost in a continuous effort to keep alive and bright the vision of his past: the blue remembered hills and the happy highways, the hedge with its unofficial rose and the field with its rabbits, the distant spire and the near bluebell…. But because the theme has already been treated by my betters and also because I have an innate distrust of what I feel easy to express, no sentimental wanderer will ever be allowed to land on the rock of my unfriendly prose.
In his last published book, The Doubtful Asphodel (1936), Sebastian depicts an episodical character who has just escaped from an unnamed country of terror and misery. 'What can I tell you of my past, gentlemen [he is saying], I was born in a land where the idea of freedom, the notion of right, the habit of human kindness were things coldly despised and brutally outlawed. Now and then, in the course of history, a hypocrite government would paint the walls of the nation's prison a comelier shade of yellow and loudly proclaim the granting of rights familiar to happier states; but either these rights were solely enjoyed by the jailers or else they contained some secret flaw which made them even more bitter than the decrees of frank tyranny.… Every man in the land was a slave, if he was not a bully; since the soul and everything pertaining to it were denied to man, the infliction of physical pain came to be considered as sufficient to govern and guide human nature…. From time to time a thing called revolution would occur, turning the slaves into bullies and vice versa…. A dark country, a hellish place, gentlemen, and if there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home….'
Owing to there being in this character's speech a chance reference to 'great woods and snow-covered plains', Mr Goodman promptly assumes that the whole passage tallies with Sebastian Knight's own attitude to Russia. This is a grotesque misconception; it should be quite clear to any unbiased reader that the quoted words refer rather to a fanciful amalgamation of tyrannic iniquities than to any particular nation or historical reality. And if I attach them to that part of my story which deals with Sebastian's escape from revolutionary Russia it is because I want to follow it up immediately with a few sentences borrowed from his most autobiographical work: 'I always think', he writes (Lost Property), 'that one of the purest emotions is that of the banished man pining after the land of his birth. I would have liked to show him straining his memory to the utmost in a continuous effort to keep alive and bright the vision of his past: the blue remembered hills and the happy highways, the hedge with its unofficial rose and the field with its rabbits, the distant spire and the near bluebell…. But because the theme has already been treated by my betters and also because I have an innate distrust of what I feel easy to express, no sentimental wanderer will ever be allowed to land on the rock of my unfriendly prose.