Lolita / Лолита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Lolita / Лолита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Vladimir Nabokov

Чтение в оригинале (Каро)Modern Prose

Владимир Набоков – знаменитый русский писатель, перу которого принадлежат также замечательные произведения на английском языке. «Лолита» – один из самых читаемых романов в мире.

Предлагаем читателям неадаптированный текст романа.

Книга предназначена студентам вузов, слушателям курсов иностранных языков и всем любителям современной литературы. Роман печатается с примечаниями и словарем.

Vladimir Nabokov / Владимир Набоков

Lolita / Лолита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

© Каро, 2019

Part One

1

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line[1 - the dotted line – место для подписи (на документах)].

But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.

Look at this tangle of thorns.

2

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera.