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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight :: Набоков Владимир Владимирович
Страница: 62 из 124He looked bored and yawned almost without opening his mouth in a very annoying manner and presently said he would take the dog out and then go to bed. In those days he had a little black bulldog; eventually it fell ill and had to be destroyed.
The Funny Mountain was completed, then Albinos in Black and then his third and last short story, The Back of the Moon. You remember that delightful character in it – the meek little man waiting for a train who helped three miserable travellers in three different ways? This Mr Siller is perhaps the most alive of Sebastian's creatures and is incidentally the final representative of the 'research theme', which I have discussed in conjunction with The Prismatic Bezel and Success. It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr Siller makes his bow, with every detail of habit and manner, palpable and unique – the bushy eyebrows and the modest moustache, the soft collar and the Adam's apple 'moving like the bulging shape of an arrased eavesdropper', the brown eyes, the wine-red veins on the big strong nose, 'whose form made one wonder whether he had not lost his hump somewhere'; the little black tie and the old umbrella ('a duck in deep mourning); the dark thickets in the nostrils; the beautiful surprise of shiny perfection when he removes his hat. But the better Sebastian's work was the worse he felt – especially in the intervals. Sheldon thinks that the world of the last book he was to write several years later (The Doubtful Asphodel) was already casting its shadow on all things surrounding him and that his novels and stories were but bright masks, sly tempters under the pretence of artistic adventure leading him unerringly towards a certain imminent goal. He was presumably as fond of Clare as he had always been, but the acute sense of mortality which had begun to obsess him, made his relations with her appear more brittle than they perhaps were. As for Clare, she had quite inadvertently in her well-meaning innocence dallied at some pleasant sunlit corner of Sebastian's life, where Sebastian himself had not paused; and now she was left behind and did not quite know whether to try and catch up with him or attempt to call him back. She was kept cheerfully busy, what with looking after Sebastian's literary affairs and keeping his life tidy in general, and although she surely felt that something was awry, that it was dangerous to lose touch with his imaginative existence, she probably comforted herself by presuming it to be a passing restlessness, and that 'it would all settle down by-and-by'.
The Funny Mountain was completed, then Albinos in Black and then his third and last short story, The Back of the Moon. You remember that delightful character in it – the meek little man waiting for a train who helped three miserable travellers in three different ways? This Mr Siller is perhaps the most alive of Sebastian's creatures and is incidentally the final representative of the 'research theme', which I have discussed in conjunction with The Prismatic Bezel and Success. It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr Siller makes his bow, with every detail of habit and manner, palpable and unique – the bushy eyebrows and the modest moustache, the soft collar and the Adam's apple 'moving like the bulging shape of an arrased eavesdropper', the brown eyes, the wine-red veins on the big strong nose, 'whose form made one wonder whether he had not lost his hump somewhere'; the little black tie and the old umbrella ('a duck in deep mourning); the dark thickets in the nostrils; the beautiful surprise of shiny perfection when he removes his hat. But the better Sebastian's work was the worse he felt – especially in the intervals. Sheldon thinks that the world of the last book he was to write several years later (The Doubtful Asphodel) was already casting its shadow on all things surrounding him and that his novels and stories were but bright masks, sly tempters under the pretence of artistic adventure leading him unerringly towards a certain imminent goal. He was presumably as fond of Clare as he had always been, but the acute sense of mortality which had begun to obsess him, made his relations with her appear more brittle than they perhaps were. As for Clare, she had quite inadvertently in her well-meaning innocence dallied at some pleasant sunlit corner of Sebastian's life, where Sebastian himself had not paused; and now she was left behind and did not quite know whether to try and catch up with him or attempt to call him back. She was kept cheerfully busy, what with looking after Sebastian's literary affairs and keeping his life tidy in general, and although she surely felt that something was awry, that it was dangerous to lose touch with his imaginative existence, she probably comforted herself by presuming it to be a passing restlessness, and that 'it would all settle down by-and-by'.