Великий Гэтсби

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93
           Ф66

© КАРО, 2008
ISBN 9785992503357

Фицджеральд Ф. С.
Ф66     Великий Гэтсби: Книга для чтения на английском
языке. — СПб.: КАРО, 2011. — 256 с. — (Серия «Classical Literature»)

ISBN 9785992503357.

Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд (1896–1940) — американский
писатель и сценарист, классик американской литературы.
Предлагаемый читателям психологический роман «Великий Гэтсби» (1925) нравственно развенчивает безоглядное
восприятие «американской мечты» — идеи социального
преуспеяния личности.
Неадаптированный текст на языке оригинала снабжен
постраничным комментарием и словарем.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93

THE GREAT GATSBY

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my
father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning
over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he
told me, “just remember that all the people in this
world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been
unusually communicative in a reserved way, and
I understood that he meant a great deal more than
that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious
natures to me and also made me the victim of not a
few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about1 that

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

1 so it came about — (разг.) так получилось

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD

in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,
unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was
quivering on the horizon — for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which
they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred
by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a
matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of
missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of
the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come
to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may
be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes
but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded
on. When I came back from the East last autumn
I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and
at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no
more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses
into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who
gives his name to this book, was exempt from my
reaction — Gatsby who represented everything for
which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is

THE GREAT GATSBY

an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there
was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were
related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of
the “creative temperament” — it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as
I have never found in any other person and which
it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby
turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed
on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of
his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest
in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations
of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do
people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and
we have a tradition that we’re descended from the
Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my
line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in
fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War1 and started
the wholesale hardware business that my father carries
on today.

1 Civil War — война между Севером и Югом (1861–1865)

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD

I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to
look like him — with special reference to the rather
hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office.
I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter
of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known
as the Great War1. I enjoyed the counter-raid so
thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west
now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe —
so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.
Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my
aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, “Why —
ye-es” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed
to finance me for a year and after various delays I
came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of
twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city
but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young
man at the office suggested that we take a house
together in a commuting town it sounded like a great
idea. He found the house, a weather beaten card
1 Great War — Первая мировая война (1914–1918)

THE GREAT GATSBY

board bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last
minute the firm ordered him to Washington and
I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least
I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an
old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed
and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom
to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning
some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped
me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked
helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no
longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.
He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the
neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts
of leaves growing on the trees — just as things
grow in fast movies — I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the
summer.
There was so much to read for one thing and so
much fine health to be pulled down out of the young
breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they
stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money
from the mint, promising to unfold the shining

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD

secrets that only Midas1 and Morgan2 and Maecenas3 knew. And I had the high intention of reading
many other books besides. I was rather literary in
college — one year I wrote a series of very solemn
and obvious editorials for the “Yale News” — and
now I was going to bring back all such things into
my life and become again that most limited of all
specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just
an epigram — life is much more successfully looked
at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented
a house in one of the strangest communities in North
America. It was on that slender riotous island which
extends itself due east of New York and where there
are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual
formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair
of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated
only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere,
the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They
are not perfect ovals — like the egg in the Colum
1 Midas — по классической (греческой) мифологии, царь
Фригии, превращавший в золото все, чего касался. В переносном смысле — богач, приумножающий свое состояние

2 Morgan — Морганы, одно из богатейших семейств Америки (пираты, контрабандисты, банкиры, финансисты)

3 Maecenas — щедрые покровители искусств

THE GREAT GATSBY

bus story they are both crushed flat at the contact
end — but their physical resemblance must be a
source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon
is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape
and size.
I lived at West Egg, the — well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag
to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of
the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and
squeezed between two huge places that rented for
twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my
right was a colossal affair by any standard — it was a
factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville1 in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new
under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and
garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t
know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a
gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been
overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial
view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires — all for eighty dollars a month.

1 Hôtel de Ville — (фр.) ратуша

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the
history of the summer really begins on the evening
I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom
Buchanans1. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And just after
the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends
that ever played football at New Haven — a national
figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an
acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything
afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy — even in college his freedom with
money was a matter for reproach — but now he’d
left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather
took your breath away: for instance he’d brought
down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It
was hard to realize that a man in my own generation
was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came east I don’t know. They had
spent a year in France, for no particular reason,
and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This
was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone,

1 the Tom Buchanans — (разг.) семейство Тома Бьюкенена