Life is sweet. Учебное пособие

Рецензенты:

Мавлина, И.Т. М 121 «LIFE IS SWEET…» Текст]: учеб. пособие/ И.Т. Мавлина, Д.А. Малинина, Н.Б. Богдановская.– Липецк: Изд-во Липецкого государственного технического университета, 2016.– 48 с.

ISBN 978-5-88247-794-2

"Henry was a great fellow for books. He did not read many nor did he possess above half a dozen. He looked at all in the Charing Cross Road during lunch-time and at any odd time in London; the quantity with which he was on nodding terms was amazing. By his clean neat handling of them and by his nice choice of phrase when discussing them with one or another bookseller you would have thought that he had taken his pap with a tome propped before his nurse's bosom. But you would have been wrong." (from 'Something Childish But Very Natural')

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, into a middle-class colonial family. Her father was a banker and mother a genteel. She lived for six years in the rural village of Karori. Mansfield said that "I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, that nothing at all." As a first step to her rebellion against her background, she withdrew to London in 1903 and studied at the Queen's College, where she joined the staff of the College Magazine. Then she took up music in New Zealand in 1906. Her father denied her the opportunity to become a professional cello player - she was accomplished violoncellist. Her lifelong friend Ida Baker persuaded Mansfield's father to allow Katherine to move back to England in 1908, with an allowance of 100 a year. There she devoted herself to writing. Mansfield never visited New Zealand again.

'In a German Pension'. On her return to London in 1910, Mansfield became ill with an untreated sexually transmitted disease, a condition which contributed to her weak health for the rest of her life. She attended literary parties without much enthusiasm: "Pretty rooms and pretty people, pretty coffee, and cigarettes out of a silver tankard... I was wretched."

In 1911 Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, a Socialist and former literature critic, who was first a tenant on her flat, then her lover. Mansfield co-edited and contributed to a series of journals. Until 1914 she published stories in Rhythm and The Blue Review. In 1918 she divorced her first husband and married John Murry. In the same year she was found to have tuberculosis. When her only brother died in World War I, Mansfield focused her writing on New Zealand, re-creating in her fiction members of her family, grandmother, her parents, her brother 'Chummie'. She and Murry became closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. When Murray had an affair with the Princess (nee Asquith), Mansfield did not object to the affairs but her letters to Murray.

Her family memoirs were collected in Bliss (1920), which secured her reputation as a writer. In the next two years she did her best work, achieving the height in 'The Garden Party' (1922). During her life only three volumes of her stories

husband becomes painfully aware that his relationship to his wife has deteriorated to 'rot', and 'The Garden Party' (1921), in which an extravagant garden-party coincides with the accidental death of a local working-class man, and the daughter of the party's hostess is touched by a newborn social conscience.

Mansfield was greatly influenced by Anton Chekhov, sharing his warm humanity, sensitive characterization and subtle choice of detail. Her influence on the development of the short story as a form of literature was also notable. Among her literary friends were Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, who considered her over praised, and D.H. Lawrence, who later turned against Murry and her. Mansfield's journal, letters, and scrapbook were edited by her husband.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss— absolute bliss!—as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every par ticle, into every finger and toe?..

Oh, is there no way you can express it without being "drunk and disorderly?" How idiotic civil isation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

"Bring the fruit up to the dining-room, will you? I'll arrange it before I go upstairs."

It was dusky in the dining-room and quite chilly. But all the same Bertha threw off her coat; she could not bear the tight clasp of it another moment, and the cold air fell on her arms.

But in her bosom there was still that bright glowing place—that showers of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror—but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something... divine to happen... that she knew must happen... infallibly.

Mary brought in the fruit on a tray and with it a glass bowl, and a blue dish, very lovely, with a strange sheen on it as though it had been dipped in milk.

When she had finished with them and had made two pyramids of these bright round shapes, she stood away from the table to get the effect—and it really was most curious. For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air. This, of course, in her present mood, was so incredibly beautiful... She began to laugh.

"No, no. I'm getting hysterical." And she seized her bag and coat and ran

upstairs to the nursery.

"She's been a little sweet all the afternoon," whispered Nanny. "We went to the park and I sat down on a chair and took her out of the pram and a big dog came along and put its head on my knee and she clutched its ear, tugged it. Oh, you should have seen her."

"You're wanted on the telephone," said Nanny, coming back in triumph and seizing her Little B.