JК
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight :: Набоков Владимир Владимирович
Страница: 29 из 124Tell me, was it never warm and sunny? Does not Sebastian himself refer somewhere to the "pink candlesticks of great chestnut trees" along the bank of some beautiful little river?'
Yes, I was right, spring and summer did happen in Cambridge almost every year (that mysterious 'almost' was singularly pleasing). Yes, Sebastian quite liked to loll in a punt on the Cam. But what he liked above all was to cycle in the dusk along a certain path skirting meadows. There, he would sit on a fence looking at the wispy salmon-pink clouds turning to a dull copper in the pale evening sky and think about things. What things? That cockney girl with her soft hair still in plaits whom he once followed across the common, and accosted and kissed, and never saw again? The form of a particular cloud? Some misty sunset beyond a black Russian fir-wood (oh, how much I would give for such a memory coming to him!)? The inner meaning of grass blade and star? The unknown language of silence? The terrific weight of a dew-drop? The heartbreaking beauty of a pebble among millions and millions of pebbles, all making sense, but what sense? The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasive in the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been really introduced. Or perhaps, we shall be nearer the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life, and that his destiny lay beyond that ghostly battlefield which he would cross in due time.
'Did I like his books? Oh, enormously. I didn't see much of him after he left Cambridge, and he never sent me any of his works. Authors, you know, are forgetful. But one day I got three of them at the library and read them in as many nights. I was always sure he would produce something fine, but I never expected it would be as fine as that. In his last year here – I don't know what's the matter with this cat, she does not seem to know milk all of a sudden.'
In his last Cambridge year Sebastian worked a good deal; his subject – English literature – was a vast and complicated one; but this same period was marked by his sudden trips to London, generally without the authorities' leave. His tutor, the late Mr Jefferson, had been, I learnt, a mighty dull old gentleman, but a fine linguist, who insisted upon considering Sebastian as a Russian. In other words, he drove Sebastian to the limit of exasperation by telling him all the Russian words he knew – a nice bagful collected on a journey to Moscow years ago – and asking him to teach him some more. One day, at last, Sebastian blurted out that there was some mistake – he had not been born in Russia really, but in Sofia. Upon which, the delighted old man at once started to speak Bulgarian.
Yes, I was right, spring and summer did happen in Cambridge almost every year (that mysterious 'almost' was singularly pleasing). Yes, Sebastian quite liked to loll in a punt on the Cam. But what he liked above all was to cycle in the dusk along a certain path skirting meadows. There, he would sit on a fence looking at the wispy salmon-pink clouds turning to a dull copper in the pale evening sky and think about things. What things? That cockney girl with her soft hair still in plaits whom he once followed across the common, and accosted and kissed, and never saw again? The form of a particular cloud? Some misty sunset beyond a black Russian fir-wood (oh, how much I would give for such a memory coming to him!)? The inner meaning of grass blade and star? The unknown language of silence? The terrific weight of a dew-drop? The heartbreaking beauty of a pebble among millions and millions of pebbles, all making sense, but what sense? The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasive in the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been really introduced. Or perhaps, we shall be nearer the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life, and that his destiny lay beyond that ghostly battlefield which he would cross in due time.
'Did I like his books? Oh, enormously. I didn't see much of him after he left Cambridge, and he never sent me any of his works. Authors, you know, are forgetful. But one day I got three of them at the library and read them in as many nights. I was always sure he would produce something fine, but I never expected it would be as fine as that. In his last year here – I don't know what's the matter with this cat, she does not seem to know milk all of a sudden.'
In his last Cambridge year Sebastian worked a good deal; his subject – English literature – was a vast and complicated one; but this same period was marked by his sudden trips to London, generally without the authorities' leave. His tutor, the late Mr Jefferson, had been, I learnt, a mighty dull old gentleman, but a fine linguist, who insisted upon considering Sebastian as a Russian. In other words, he drove Sebastian to the limit of exasperation by telling him all the Russian words he knew – a nice bagful collected on a journey to Moscow years ago – and asking him to teach him some more. One day, at last, Sebastian blurted out that there was some mistake – he had not been born in Russia really, but in Sofia. Upon which, the delighted old man at once started to speak Bulgarian.