Lolita / Лолита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

) бездарь] talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipesmoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:

… Fräulein von Kulp

may turn, her hand upon the door;

I will not follow her. Nor Fresca.

that Gull.

A paper of mine entitled �The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey’ was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an �Histoire abrégée de la poesie anglaise[14 - Histoire abrégée de la poesie anglaise – (фр.) "Краткая история английской поэзии"]’ for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the �forties – and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.

I found a job – teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a couple of winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools[15 - reform school – исправительное заведение], where pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in dreams.

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as �nymphets’.

It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see �nine’ and �fourteen’ as the boundaries – the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks – of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not.