Vladimir Nabokov. Anniversary notes
My first intention was to write an elaborate paper on this
TriQuarterly number (17, Winter 1970, Northwestern
University, Evanston, Illinois) which is dedicated to me on the
occasion of my seventieth birthday. I soon realized, however,
that I might find myself discussing critical studies of my
fiction, something I have always avoided doing. True, a
festschrift is a very special and rare occasion for that kind
of sport, but I did not wish to create even the shadow of a
precedent and therefore decided simply to publish the rough
jottings I made as an objective reader anxious to eliminate
slight factual errors of which such a marvelous gift must be
free; for I knew what pains the editors, Charles Newman and
Alfred Appel, had taken to prepare it and remembered how firmly
the guest co-editor, when collecting the ingredients of this
great feast, refused to show me any plum or crumb before
publication.
Butterflies are among the most thoughtful and touching
contributions to this volume. The old-fashioned engraving of a
Catagramma-like insect is delightfully reproduced twelve
times so as to suggest a double series or "block" of specimens
in a cabinet case; and there is a beautiful photograph of a Red
Admirable (but "Nymphalidae" is the family to which it belongs,
not its genus, which is Vanessa-- my first bit of
carping).
Mr. Appel, guest co-editor, writes about my two main works
of fiction. His essay "Backgrounds of Lolita" is a
superb example of the rare case where art and erudition meet in
a shining ridge of specific information (the highest and to me
most acceptable function of literary criticism). I would have
liked to say more about his findings but modesty (a virtue that
the average reviewer especially appreciates in authors) denies
me that pleasure.
His other piece in this precious collection is "Ada
Described." I planted three blunders, meant to ridicule
mistranslations of Russian classics, in the first paragraph of
my Ada: the opening sentence of Anna Karenin (no
additional "a," printer, she was not a ballerina) is turned
inside out; Anna Arkadievna's patronymic is given a grotesque
masculine ending; and the title of Tolstoy's family chronicle
has been botched by the invented Stoner or Lower (I must have
received at least a dozen letters with clarifications and
corrections from indignant or puzzled readers, some of them of
Russian origin, who never read Ada beyond the first
page). Furthermore, in the same important paragraph, "Mount
Tabor" and "Pontius" allude respectively to the
transfigurations and betrayals to which great texts are
subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists. The present
statement is an amplification of Mr. Appel's remarks on the
subject in his brilliant essay "Ada Described." I
confess that his piece was a great pleasure to read, but one
error in it I really must correct: My Baltic Baron is totally
and emphatically unrelated to Mr. Norman Mailer, the writer.
Mr. Karlinsky's "N. and Chekhov" is a very remarkable
essay, and I greatly appreciate being with A. P. in the same
boat-- on a Russian lake, at sunset, he fishing, I watching the
hawkmoths above the water. Mr. Karlinsky has put his finger on
a mysterious sensory cell. He is right, I do love Chekhov
dearly. I fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I
can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with
the flash of this or that unforgettable passage (". . . how
sweetly she said: "and even very much' "-- Vronsky recalling
Kitty's reply to some trivial question that we shall never
know), but when I imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all
I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made
epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so
forth; yet it is his works which I would take on a trip
to another planet.
In another article-- on "N.'s Russified Lewis Carroll"--
the same critic is much too kind to my Anya in
Wonderland (1924). How much better I could have done it
fifteen years later! The only good bits are the poems and the
word-play. I find an odd blunder in the "Song of the Soup":
lohan'^ kind of bucket) is misspelt by me and twisted
into the wrong gender. Incidentally, I had not (and still have
not) seen any other Russian versions of the book (as Mr.
Karlinsky suggests I may have had) so that my sharing with
Poliksena Solovyov the same model for one of the parodies is a
coincidence. I recall with pleasure that one of the accidents
that prompted Wellesley College to engage me as lecturer in the
early forties was the presence of my rare Anya in the
Wellesley collection of Lewds Carroll editions.
Mr. Alter's essay on the "Art of Politics in Invitation
to a Beheading" is a most brilliant reflection of that book
in a reader's mind. It is practically flawless so that all I
can add is that I particularly appreciated his citing a passage
from The Gift "that could serve as a useful gloss on the
entire nature of political and social reality in the earlier
novel."
Mr. Hyman in his first-rate piece "The Handle" discusses
Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, the
two book-ends of grotesque design between which my other
volumes tightly huddle. I am a great admirer of Ransom's poem
about Captain Carpenter aptly mentioned by Mr. Hyman.
I must point out two fascinating little mistakes in Mr.
Stuart's very interesting "Laughter in the Dark:
Dimensions of Parody": (1) The film in which my heroine is
given a small part in the 1920s has nothing to do with Garbo's
Anna Karenina (of which incidentally I have only seen
stills); but what I would like my readers to brood over is my
singular power of prophecy, for the name of the leading lady
(Dorianna Karenina) in the picture invented by me in 1928
prefigured that of the actress (Anna Karina) who was to play
Margot forty years later in the film Laughter in the
Dark, and (2) Mr. Stuart cleverly toys with the idea that
Albert Albinus and Axel Rex are "doubles," one of his main
clues being that Margot finds Albinus' telephone number not
under "A" but under "R" in the directory. Actually that "R" is
a mere slip or type (the initial corresponds correctly to the
man's name in the first English-language edition of the novel,
London, 1936).
Mr. Steiner's article ("Extraterritorial") is built on
solid abstractions and opaque generalizations. A few specific
items can be made out and should be corrected. He absurdly
overestimates Oscar Wilde's mastery of French. It is human but
a little cheap on his part to chide my Van Veen for sneering at
my Lolita (which, in a transfigured form, I
magnanimously turned over to a transposed fellow author); it
might be wiser for him to read Ada more carefully than
did the morons whom he rightly condemns for having dismissed as
hermetic a writer's limpid and precise prose. To one piece of
misinformation I must strongly object: I never belonged to the
"haute bourgeoisie" to which he grimly assigns me
(rather like that Marxist reviewer of my Speak, Memory
who classified my father as a "plutocrat" and a "man of
affairs"!). The Nabokovs have been soldiers and squires since
(at least) the fifteenth century.
In her otherwise impeccable little piece "Spring in
Fialta: The Choice that Mimics Chance," Mrs. Barbara Monter
makes a slight bibliographic mistake. She implies that I wrote
the Russian original of the story sometime around 1947, in
America. This is not so. It was written at least a dozen years
earlier, in Berlin, and was first published in Paris ("Vesna v
Fial'te," Sovremennyya Zapiski, 1936) long before being
collected in the Chekhov House edition, New York, 1956. The
English translation (by Peter Pertzov and me) appeared in
Harper's Bazaar, May, 1947.
I am not sure that Mr. Leonard has quite understood what
Van Veen means by his "texture of time" in the penultimate part
of Ada. First of all, whatever I may have said in an old
interview, it is not the entire novel but only that one part
(as Alfred Appel correctly points out elsewhere) in which the
illustrative metaphors, all built around one viatic theme,
gradually accumulate, come to life, and form a story turning on
Van's ride from the Grisons to the Valais-- after which the
thing again disintegrates and reverts to abstraction on a last
night of solitude in a hotel in Vaud. In other w'-ords, it is
all a structural trick: Van's theory of time has no existence
beyond the fabric of one part of the novel Ada. In the
second place, Mr. Leonard has evidently not grasped what is
meant by "texture"; it is something quite different from what
Proust called "lost time," and it is precisely in everyday
life, in the waiting-rooms of life's stations that we can
concentrate on the "feeling" of time and palpate its very
texture. I also protest against his dragging "Antiterra," which
is merely an ornamental incident, into a discussion whose only
rightful field is Part Four and not the entire novel. And
finally I owe no debt whatsoever (as Mr. Leonard seems to
think) to the famous Argentine essayist and his rather confused
compilation "A New Refutation of Time." Mr. Leonard would have
lost less of it had he gone straight to Berkeley and Bergson.
In Miss Berberov's excellent article on Pale Fire I
find a couple of minute mistakes: Kinbote begs "dear Jesus" to
relieve him of his fondness for faunlets, not to cure his
headache, as she implies; and Professor Pnin, whose presence in
that novel Miss Berberov overlooks, does appear in
person (note to line 949, Pale Fire), with his dog. She
is much better, however, at delineating the characters in my
novels than in describing V. Sirin, one of my characters in
"real" life. In her second article, on "N. in the Thirties"
(from her recent memoirs, The Italics Are Mine), she
permits herself bizarre inaccuracies. T may be absentminded, I
may be too frank about my literary tastes, okay, but I would
like Miss Berberov to cite one specific instance of my having
read a hook that I had never read. In my preface (June 25,
1959) to the English-language edition of Invitation to a
Beheading I have more to say about that kind of nonsense.
Then there is a sartorial detail in her memoir that I must set
straight. Never did I possess, in Paris or elsewhere, "a tuxedo
Rachmaninov had given [me]." I had not met Rachmaninov before
leaving France for America in 1940. He had twice sent me small
amounts of money, through friends, and I was eager now to thank
him in person. During our first meeting at his flat on West End
Avenue, I mentioned I had been invited to teach summer school
at Stanford. On the following day I got from him a carton with
several items of obsolete clothing, among which was a
cutaway (presumably tailored in the period of the Prelude),
which he hoped-- as he said in a kind little note-- 1 would
wear for my first lecture. I sent back his well-meant gift but
(gulp of mea culpa!) could not resist telling one or two
people about it. Half a dozen years later, w-hen Miss Berberov
migrated to New York in her turn, she must have heard the
anecdote from one of our common friends, Karpovich or Kerenski,
after which a quarter of a century elapsed, or rather
collapsed, and somehow, in her mind, the cutaway was
transformed into a "tuxedo" and transferred to an earlier era
of my life. I doubt that I had any occasion in Paris, in the
thirties, when the short series of my brief encounters with
Miss Berberov took place, to wear my old London dinner jacket;
certainly not for that dinner at L'Ours (with which,
incidentally, the "Ursus" of Ada and the
Med'ved'of St. Petersburg have nothing to do); anyway, I
do not sec how any of my clothes could have resembled
the doubly anachronistic hand-me-down in which the memoirist
rigs me out. How much kinder she is to my books!
The multicolored inklings offered by Mr. Lubin in his
"Kickshaws and Motley" are absolutely dazzling. Such things as
his ""v ugloo" [Russ. for "in the corner"] in the igloo
of the globe [a blend of "glow" and "strobe"] are better than
anything I have done in that line. Very beautifully he tracks
down to their lairs in Eliot three terms queried by a poor
little person in Pale Fire. I greatly admire the
definition of tmesis (Type Ï) as a "semantic petticoat slipped
on between the naked noun and its clothing epithet," as well as
Lubin's "proleptic" tmesis illustrated by Shakespeare's
glow-worm beginning "to pale his ineffectual fire." And the
parody of an interview with N. (though a little more
exquisitely iridized than my own replies would have been) is
sufficiently convincing to catch readers.
The extent to which I was concerned with the fragility of
my English at the time of my abandoning Russian in 1939 may be
gauged by the fact that even after Mrs. Léon had gone over the
manuscript of my Sebastian Knight in Paris where it was
written, and I had moved to the USA, I begged the late Anes
Perkins, the admirable Head of the English Department at
Wellesley, to assist me in reading the galleys of the book
(bought for $150 in 1941, by New Directions), and that later,
another kind lady, Sylvia Berkman, checked the grammar of my
first English stories that appeared in The Atlantic in
the early forties.
I am sorry that Lucie Léon in her amiably modulated
"Playback" does not speak more than she does of her brother
Alex Ponizovski of whom I was very fond (I particularly like
recalling the streak of quiet eccentricity that endeared him to
fellow students at Cambridge, such as the time he casually
swallowed the contents of a small bottle of ink that happened
to be within reach while we sat and talked by the fire). In her
account of a dinner with James Joyce in Paris, I found it
refreshing to be accused of bashfulness (after finding so
frequently in the gazettes complaints of my "arrogance"); but
is her impression correct? She pictures me as a timid young
artist; actually I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid
awareness of what I had already done for Russian letters
preventing me from feeling awed in the presence of any living
writer. (Had Mrs. Léon and Ï met more often at parties she
might have realized that I am always a disappointing guest,
neither inclined nor able to shine socially.)
Another little error occurs in the reference to the
palindrome that I wrote in her album. There was nothing new
about a reversible sentence in Russian: the anonymous sandglass
"a roza upala na lapu Azora"' ("and the rose fell upon
Azor's paw") is as familiar to children as, in another nursery,
"able was I ere I saw Elba." The first line of my Kazak
is, in fact, not mine (T think it was given me by the
late Vladimir Piotrovski, a wonderfully skillful poet); what I
claimed was new referred to my expanding the palindrome into a
rhymed quatrain with its three last verses making continuous
sense in spite of each being reversible.
Curiously enough, the note appended to my Kazak by
lrwin Well (who contributes an interesting essay on my
"Odyssey" elsewhere in the volume) also requires correction.
His statement that "the third and fourth lines are each
palindromes if one excludes the last [?] syllables" is quite
wïong; all four lines are palindromes, and no "last syllables"
have to be excluded. Especially regrettable is Mr. Well's
mistranslation of one of them. He has confused the Russian word
for aloes (a genus of plant) with aloe, which means
"red" or "rosy," and that, too, is mistranslated, becoming
"purple"!
I must also question an incomprehensible statement in Mr.
Weil's article "Odyssey of a Translator." The Russian lawyer E.
M. Kulisher may well have been "an old acquaintance" of my
father's, but he was not "close to the Nabokov family" (I do
not remember him as a person) and I have never said anywhere
what Mr. Weil has me indicate in the opening paragraph of his
article.
My old friend Morris Bishop (my only close friend on the
campus) has touched me very deeply by his recollections of my
stay at Cornell. I am assigning an entire chapter to it in my
Speak On, Mnemosyne, a memoir devoted to the 20 years I
spent in my adopted country, after dwelling for 20 years in
Russia and for as many more in Western Europe. My friend
suggests that I was bothered by the students' incompetence in
my Pushkin class. Not at all. What bothered and angered me was
the ineptitude of the system of Scientific Linguistics at
Cornell.
I remember most of the best students in my Cornell
classes. Mr. Wetzsteon was one of them. My "Bleak House
diagram," which he recalls so movingly, is preserved among my
papers and will appear in the collection of lectures (Bleak
House, Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, etc.) that I mean to
publish some day. It is strange to think that never again shall
I feel between finger and thumb the cool smoothness of virgin
chalk or make that joke about the "gray board" (improperly
wiped), and be rewarded by two or three chuckles (RW? AA? NS?).
JULIAN MOYNAHAN
Mr. Moynahan in his charming ^Lolita and Related
Memories" recalls his professor of Russian, the late Dr. Leonid
Strakhovski (most foreign-born lecturers used to be "doctors").
I knew him, he did not really resemble my Pnin. We met at
literary parties in Berlin half a century ago. He wrote verse.
He wore a monocle. He had no sense of humor. He dwelt in
dramatic detail on his military and civil adventures. Most of
his yarns had a knack of fading out at the critical point. He
had worked as a trolley car driver and had run over a man. The
rowboat in which he escaped from Russia developed a leak in the
middle of the Baltic. When asked what happened then, he would
wave a limp hand in the Russian gesture of despair and
dismissal.
Ellendea Proffer's report on my Russian readers is both
heartening and sad. "All Soviet age groups," she observes,
"tend to feel that literature has a didactic function." This
marks a kind of dead end, despite a new generation of talented
people. "Zhalkiy udel (piteous fate)," as the
Litera-turnaya Gazeta says à propos de bottes
(March 4, 1970).
Several passages in Mr. Elkin's "Three Meetings," a parody
of an "I remember . . ." piece, are extremely funny, such as
the farcical variety of repetition or the casual reference to
the "lovely eggal forms" he and I encountered on "an expedition
up the Orinoco." And our third meeting is a scream.
Mr. Hughes in his "Notes on the Translation of
Invitation to a Beheadings is one of the few critics who
noticed the poetry of the Tamara terraces with their
metamorphosed tamaracks. In the trance of objectivity which the
reading of the festschrift has now induced in me, I am able to
say that Mr. Hughes' discussion of the trials and triumphs
attending that translation is very subtle and rewarding.
Mr. Proffer, who discusses another translation, that of my
much older Korol', Dama, Valet, tackles a more
ungrateful task, first because King, Queen, Knave "does
not surmount its original weaknesses," and secondly because
revision and adaptation blur one's interest in faithfulnesses.
He wonders what "worse sins" (than planning the murder of his
uncle) cowardly and brutal Franz could have committed between
the twenties and sixties in Germany, but a minute's thought
should reveal to the reader what the activities of that type of
man could have been at the exact center of the interval. Mr.
Proffer ends his "A New Deck for Nabokov's Knaves" by saving he
expects the English version of Mashenka to be quite
different from the Russian original. Expectation has been the
undoing of many a shrewd gambler.
I had read and hugely enjoyed Mr. Scott's essay on my
EO translation, "The Cypress Veil," when it first
appeared in the Winter, 1965, issue of the TriQuarterly.
It is a most refreshing piece. My improved cab is now ready for
publication.
Mr. Scott is also responsible for the last item in the
volume, a letter addressed by Tirnofey Pnin to "Many respected
Professor Apple [sic]," a stunning affair in which scholarship
and high spirits interlace to produce the monogram of a very
special masterpiece. And that frozen frenzy of footnotes!
There is magic in every penstroke and curlicue of the
delightful diploma that Saul Steinberg has drawn for my wife
and me.
Mr. Adams' letter about me addressed to "M. ie Baron dc
Stendhal" is an extremely witty piece-- reminding me, I do not
know why, of those macabre little miracles that chess
problemists call suimates (White forces Black to win in a
certain number of moves).
In Mr. Burgess' poem I particularly appreciate his Maltese
grocer's cat that likes to sit upon the scales and is found to
weigh 2 rotolos.
"Not even Colette," says Mr. Guerard in his tribute to
Ada, "rendered fleshly textures and tones with such
grace." The lady is mentioned in Ada.
Blending fact and fiction in a kind of slat-sign shimmer,
Mr. Gold recalls our meetings in upstate New York and in a
Swiss hotel. I recall with pleasure my correspondence with the
puzzled éditeur of the Saturday Evening Postior which he
had written what I had thought was to be an interview with me--
or, at least, with the person I usually impersonate in
Montreux.
Mr. Howard's poem "Waiting for Ada" contains a wonderful
description of a Grand Hotel du Miroir very like some of the
"nearly pearly nougat-textured art-nouveau" places where I have
been "working wickedly away" during recent séjours in
Italy.
I am grateful to Mr. Updike for mentioning, in his stylish
tribute, the little Parisian prostitute whom Humbert Humbert
recalls so wistfully. On the other hand there was no reason at
all for that harsh and contemptuous reference to a small
publishing house which brought out excellent editions of four
books of mine.
Mr. Dillard's poem "A day, a country home" is most
attractive-- especially the "light through the leaves, like
butterflies" in the fourth stanza.
Miss Calisher's contubernal contribution expresses in a
sophisticated metaphor her readiness to share the paranoia of
her fellow writers. Oddly enough, even the best tent is
absolutely dependent on the kind of country amidst which it is
pitched.
I remember, not without satisfaction, how fiercely and
frequently, during my last year of high school in Russia (which
was also the first year of the revolution), most of my teachers
and some of my schoolmates accused me of being a "foreigner"
because I refused to join in political declarations and
demonstrations. Mr. Ludwig in his splendid little article
indicates with great sympathy and acumen the possibility of
similar accusations being made by my new fellow-citizens. They
could not vie with Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius, my fiery,
redhaired teacher of Russian literature.
Dear Mr. B.:
Thanks for your birthday greetings. Let me wish you many
returns of the same day. How many nice people crowd around my
cradle! It is pleasant to know you like Max Planck. I rather
like him, too. But not Cervantes!
Yours cordially,
V. N.
Lines 31-32 of Mr. Brown's fascinating poem in Russian
display a looping-the-loop inversion of which old Lomonosov
might have been proud: "Why, better of Dante's Hell for him to
burn in the seventh circle" if translated lexically. His
cartoons in a British weekly are marvelous.
The editor of the TriQuarterly, in "Americanization
of V. N." (an exhilarating physical process in the present
case!) recalls taking Pale Fire "to Basic Training in
hot Texas," tearing it from its binding, and keeping it "pure
and scrolled in my Fatigues' long pocket like a Bowie knife"
safe from the Barracks Sergeant. It is a beautifully written,
and most touching, epic.
Laughter in the Dark is paid a suitable tribute in
Mr. Wagoner's sinister poem.
I like the epithets "opulent, triplicitous," in Mr.
Stern's lines, but I am not sure that any of the four
Karamazovs (grotesque, humorless, hysterical, and jejune,
respectively) can be defined as "triste."
My good friend, Mr. Field, has contributed some
brilliantly worded remarks, one of which refers to V.N.'s being
"counted upon to observe the hoisting of his statue (Peter the
Great seated upon an invisible horse)." This reminded me
suddenly of a not-unsimilar event in California where some
fancy statuary, lovingly erected by a Russian group to
commemorate Pushkin's duel, partly disintegrated after a couple
of years' exposure, removing Pushkin but leaving intact the
figure of magnificent Dantes pointing his pistol at posterity.
The "socio-political nature" of Mr. Brewer's tribute to
Lolita, far from being repugnant to me (as he modestly
assumes), is more than redeemed by the specific precision of
his artistic touch.
In his "Advice to a Young Writer," Mr. Shaw draws his
examples from the life, labors, and luck of "Vladimir N.,
perched on a hill in Switzerland." To lrwin S., perched on a
not-too-distant hill, I send by Alpine Horn my best greetings.
In a very pretty little poem, Mr. Neugeboren seems to
rhyme, somewhat surprisingly, "Nabokov" and "love." I would
suggest "talk of" or "balk of" as more closely conforming to
the stressed middle vowel of that awkward name ("Nabawkof"). I
once composed the following rhyme for my students:
The querulous gawk of
A heron at night
Prompts Nabokov
To write
Mr. Oilman's tribute to Ada comes at a time when I
still think that of all my books it is the one that corresponds
most exactly to its fore-image; and therefore T cannot help
being affected by his kind words.
Among my short stories, "Signs and Symbols" still remains
an old favorite of mine. I am happy that Mr. Elliott has
singled it out for comment with a phrase from Ada
heading his pithy piece.
A final splendid salute comes from one of my friendliest
readers. It ends on an emotional note which I inwardly respond
to without being able to formulate my response with Mr. Kazin's
force and feeling.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Written on March 10, 1970, and published in the
Supplement to TriQuarterly 77, Northwestern University
Press, 1970.
Last-modified: Sat, 25 Jul 1998 20:54:58 GMT