JК
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight :: Набоков Владимир Владимирович
Страница: 56 из 124But at the very moment when the reader feels quite safe in an atmosphere of pleasurable reality and the grace and glory of the author's prose seems to indicate some lofty and rich intention, there is agrotesque knocking at the door and the detective enters. We are again wallowing in a morass of parody. The detective, a shifty fellow, drops his h's, and this is meant to look as if it were meant to look quaint; for it is not a parody of the Sherlock Holmes vogue but a parody of the modern reaction from it. The lodgers are examined afresh. New clues are guessed at. Mild old Nosebag potters about, very absent-minded and harmless.
He had just dropped in to see if they had a spare room, he explains. The old gag of making the most innocent-looking person turn out to be the master-villain seems to be on the point of being exploited. The sleuth suddenly gets interested in snuffboxes. ''Ullo,' he says, ''ow about Hart?' Suddenly a policeman lumbers in, very red in the face and reports that the corpse has gone. The detective: 'What dy'a mean by gorn?' The policeman: 'Gone, Sir, the room is empty.' There was a moment of ridiculous suspense. 'I think,' said old Nosebag quietly, 'that I can explain.' Slowly and very carefully he removes his beard, his grey wig, his dark spectacles, and the face of G. Abeson is disclosed. 'You see,' says Mr Abeson with a self-deprecating smile, 'one dislikes being murdered.'
I have tried my best to show the workings of the book, at least some of its workings. Its charm, humour, and pathos can only be appreciated by direct reading. But for enlightenment of those who felt baffled by its habit of metamorphosis, or merely disgusted at finding something incompatible with the idea of a 'nice book' in the discovery of a book's being an utterly new one, I should like to point out that The Prismatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called 'methods. of composition'. It is as if a painter said: look, here I'm going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it. In the first book Sebastian brought this experiment to a logical and satisfactory conclusion. By putting to the ad absurdum test this or that literary manner and then dismissing them one after the other, he deduced his own manner and fully exploited it in his next book Success. Here he seems to have passed from one plane to another rising a step higher, for, if his first novel is based on methods of literary composition – the second one deals mainly with the methods of human fate.
He had just dropped in to see if they had a spare room, he explains. The old gag of making the most innocent-looking person turn out to be the master-villain seems to be on the point of being exploited. The sleuth suddenly gets interested in snuffboxes. ''Ullo,' he says, ''ow about Hart?' Suddenly a policeman lumbers in, very red in the face and reports that the corpse has gone. The detective: 'What dy'a mean by gorn?' The policeman: 'Gone, Sir, the room is empty.' There was a moment of ridiculous suspense. 'I think,' said old Nosebag quietly, 'that I can explain.' Slowly and very carefully he removes his beard, his grey wig, his dark spectacles, and the face of G. Abeson is disclosed. 'You see,' says Mr Abeson with a self-deprecating smile, 'one dislikes being murdered.'
I have tried my best to show the workings of the book, at least some of its workings. Its charm, humour, and pathos can only be appreciated by direct reading. But for enlightenment of those who felt baffled by its habit of metamorphosis, or merely disgusted at finding something incompatible with the idea of a 'nice book' in the discovery of a book's being an utterly new one, I should like to point out that The Prismatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called 'methods. of composition'. It is as if a painter said: look, here I'm going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it. In the first book Sebastian brought this experiment to a logical and satisfactory conclusion. By putting to the ad absurdum test this or that literary manner and then dismissing them one after the other, he deduced his own manner and fully exploited it in his next book Success. Here he seems to have passed from one plane to another rising a step higher, for, if his first novel is based on methods of literary composition – the second one deals mainly with the methods of human fate.