Nabokov’s long absence from America is reflected in his work. Lolita (1955) and Pnin (1957) have American settings, but Pale Fire (1962), conceived in the States but completed in Europe, is only partly American in locale, and Ada (1969) is a fantasia that only in its final few pages touches ground, in Switzerland. “I can’t use a contemporary American setting now,” says Nabokov, “because I’ve lost touch with the slang.” It is fitting that the last work he should have completed in America, after twenty years here (1940–1960), was his monumental translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. If, as Nabokov says, “the writer’s art is his real passport,” then Ada, the first and only classic of Amerussian literature, makes it more difficult than ever for academic pigeonholers and census-takers to “place” him.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899, a birthday he shares with William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple, as he likes to point out, thereby defining the polar extremes of the vast areas of knowledge at his disposal as scholar and novelist. Widely read in three languages by the age of seventeen, when he inherited from his uncle a country estate and the equivalent of a few million dollars, Nabokov took with him into exile no legacy, but a mind filled with literature and memories of a loving and “harmonious world of perfect childhood,” recreated with eloquence and elegance in his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951, revised edition, 1966). His was a truly distinguished as well as aristocratic family, with a long tradition of culture and public service. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, was an eminent jurist, the author of several books and thousands of articles, including “The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” a famous protest against the 1903 pogrom in which hundreds of Jews were massacred. A leader of the prerevolutionary opposition party and a member of the first imperial parliament (Duma), he moved his family to the Crimea in 1917 (as Minister of Justice in the anti-Soviet government), and two years later, into exile in Berlin. His son noted that occasion with several poems, including one called “Hotel Room”:
Not quite a bed, not quite a bench
Wallpaper: a grim yellow
A pair of chairs. A squinty looking-glass
We enter—my shadow and I.
We open with a vibrant sound the window
the light’s reflection slides down to the ground
The night is breathless. Distant dogs
with varied barks fracture the stillness
Stirless, I stand there at the window,
and in the black bowl by the sky
glows like a golden drop of honey
the mellow moon.
Written shortly before his twentieth birthday in Sebastopol, “Hotel Metropole, room seven, April 8, 1919, a few days before leaving Russia,” the poem provides the foreground frame for an infinite regress of rented rooms.
Nabokov’s exile defines a state of mind and spirit and is not simply a matter of his being a so-called “White Russian.” The figure of the exile embodies the human condition in our time, and it has become a commonplace to point out how many writers have either chosen this role or been cast literally in it: Joyce, Mann, Toller, Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, and Russians too numerous to name, for they seem to have had all of modern history with which to contend. Nabokov’s cousin and childhood playmate was killed by the Soviets in 1919; his brother died in a German concentration camp in 1945; and his father, age fifty-two, was shot at a political meeting in Berlin in 1922 as he was shielding a speaker from two Russian monarchist assassins. Under Hitler, Vladimir Dmitrievich’s killer became chief of the Gestapo’s émigré section.
The sorrows of exile were infinite: isolation, poverty, despair, disease, early death, suicide, or—if the émigré writer survived, languageless in some distant land—silence, obscurity, and the nightmare of nostalgia. “I haf nofing, I haf nofing,” wails Pnin, and,
Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,
I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns,
soft participles coming down the steps,
treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns
writes Nabokov in “An Evening of Russian Poetry” (1945), the year he became an American citizen. Only the vulgar persist in believing that Nabokov scorns the Russian Revolution simply because it wiped out his wealth.
Nabokov graduated in 1922 from Trinity College, Cambridge, with a “first-class” (Honors) degree in foreign languages (French and Russian). From 1922 until 1937, except for many summers, he lived in Berlin where he wrote prolifically in Russian—numerous translations, fifty reviews and essays, hundreds of poems, nine plays, forty short stories, and nine novels—almost all under the pseudonym of “V. Sirin,” which he adopted in 1920 so as to avoid confusion with his father, in whose newspaper, the liberal émigré publication Rul’ (The Rudder), he often published.
One evening on her way back to their apartment, Véra Nabokov witnessed one of the first of the Berlin book-burnings, and the passage of time has not dulled her or her husband’s memories. They have not revisited Germany since their return to Europe ten years ago; they cannot forget the crimes, or forgive a criminal, however hapless he may now seem. “It is always the year one,” as one of his narrators says. Thus, the vehemence with which Nabokov noted the news coverage describing the return to Hamilton College in 1969 of a famous American poet whose activities as an Axis broadcaster are barely remembered: “That bit about Mr. E. Pound, a venerable mediocrity, making a ‘sentimental visit’ to his alma mater in Clinton, New York, and being given a standing ovation by the commencement audience—consisting, apparently, of morons and madmen.”
Too many readers have taken Nabokov too literally when, in the prefaces issued from his present tower, he says he is not a political writer. He is no ideologue, to be sure, but Invitation to a Beheading (1935–1936) and Bend Sinister (1947) are in the best sense “political,” and Nabokov’s detractors should submit themselves to Adam Krug’s anguish in Bend Sinister when he discovers that the State has murdered his young son by mistake, or the vision in Pale Fire of Obscene Gradus, the political assassin, fighting the effects of less-than-fresh pommes frites as he rushes to discharge his gun rather than his bowels.
Unable to obtain an academic job in England, which he visited during the winter of 1939, Nabokov, his wife and son, Dmitri, emigrated to America in May, 1940. On the Continent, Nabokov had supported his family by reading his works to Russian émigré audiences and by giving lessons in tennis and English. There was less demand for such services in America. During his first year here he wrote reviews on Russian subjects and received modest grants. The summer of 1940 was spent at the Vermont summer home of an old friend, Mikhail Karpovich, a professor at Harvard. One day at Karpovich’s, the mail produced an invitation to contribute to the New Republic. The letter was signed by someone named Edmund Wilson, who also enclosed a copy of a book he had just published, To the Finland Station, thereby inaugurating a friendship that would last some twenty-five years. At about the same time, a telegram arrived from the Tolstoy Committee (an organization that, among other things, helped émigrés to resettle), advising Nabokov to return immediately to New York City; a job had been found for him in publishing. Nabokov hurried back to the city. The Tolstoy Committee’s secretary told him to present himself at the main desk of Scribner’s Bookshop, which is located below their editorial offices on Fifth Avenue. “And stand up straight,” she added, “you’ll make a better impression.” At Scribner’s he was received by a man named Wraden, whom he had known in Europe, and who was somewhat nonplussed to see who had been sent over, since the job opening was for a delivery boy on a bicycle. When young Dmitri registered at school, he wrote “tennis coach” in the blank space above “father’s occupation.”
Nabokov’s vocational identity was firmer by 1941. That summer he taught Russian literature and a creative writing course at Stanford University, and in the fall began teaching Russian grammar and literature at Wellesley College. The salary was in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars. “Not bad for a beginning boy
of forty-one,” he says today, smiling slyly. There were other upward turns. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which he had written in English in Paris, was “bought for $150 in 1941 by New Directions.” Lucie Leon had gone over the manuscript in Paris; and now, still concerned with what he calls “the fragility of my English at the time of my abandoning Russian in 1939,” Nabokov “begged the late Agnes Perkins, the admirable head of the English department at Wellesley, to assist me in reading the galley’s of the book.” It was published just a few days after Pearl Harbor and did not eclipse The Song of Bernadette, The Robe, or any of the other timely bestsellers of the moment.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was not his first publication in English. Gleb Struve, the émigré critic and scholar, had placed translations of Nabokov stories in This Quartet, an English-language little magazine based in Montparnasse (1932), and in Lovat Dickson’s Magazine in England (1934—the misspelled byline read “V. Nobokov-Sirin”). An offer of further Nabokov stories was rebuffed by a famous “liberal” magazine in London because it was against their policy, during the worst years of Stalin’s reign of terror, to publish those reactionary “White Russians.” Encouraged by the English publication in 1936 of Winifred Roy’s translation of Laughter in the Dark (1932), Nabokov himself translated Despair (1934) at the end of 1936, and it appeared in London the next year. “This was my first serious attempt,” he says, “to use English for what may be loosely termed an artistic purpose.” It sold badly, however, and the entire publisher’s stock was destroyed by German bombs in 1940.
Publication in America continued to elude Nabokov. After Ivan Bunin won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, H.L. Mencken asked Albert Parry (now chairman of the Russian department at Case-Western Reserve University) if there were any other émigré writers who deserved an American audience, and if he would write a piece on them for Mencken’s American Mercury. Parry said there were, and his article, which also focused on Mark Aldanov and Nina Berberova, represents the first mention of Nabokov in America. It prompted the following letter to Parry from Slovo, the émigré publishing house in Berlin (dated September 1, 1933):
Dear Sir,
We have had the pleasure of reading your fine article—“Belles-lettres among the Russian Émigrés”—in the July issue of the American Mercury.
We are the publishers of Mr. Sirin’s works and in this capacity highly appreciate your recognizing that author’s great merits. You are right in supposing that Mr. Sirin’s brilliant novels and short stories (with the only exception of one short story published in The Quarter) have not yet been translated either in America or in England. We should be very much obliged to you for any suggestion or advice you should care to give in regard to the chance of Mr. Sirin’s works finding a publisher in America.
We hope that you will kindly give your attention to this matter, and remain, dear, Sir,
Yours faithfully
(signed)
Alfred A. Knopf, Bunin’s publisher, saw Parry’s article and invited him to his office to discuss Sirin, but nothing came of it; the economic realities of the Depression did not encourage Knopf to introduce another foreign author. But in 1938, Bobbs-Merrill published Miss Roy’s rather flat translation of Laughter in the Dark, revised anew by the novelist, who at the time transliterated his name as “Nabokoff.” While he was still living in Paris he also made his debut in an American magazine, the December, 1939, Esquire, wherein appeared Sirin’s “The Potato Elf,” a dark and haunting tale about a dwarf, quite out of place in a gala Christmas issue.
Sebastian Knight and Laughter in the Dark each had its American admirers, but only after “Hurricane Lolita” (to quote Pale Fire) did Nabokov’s eight other Russian novels begin to appear here in English translations. In the mid-nineteen-forties, one of Dmitri’s teachers asked him who his favorite Russian writers were. “Pushkin and my father,” he answered, a piquant enough response, given the sudden disappearance of Sirin and the scant evidence in America that he had ever existed.
In addition to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941 saw the publication also of “Cloud, Castle, Lake” and “The Aurelian” in The Atlantic Monthly. Translations of short stories from the thirties, they were only the first of seven stories, both old and new, which Nabokov would contribute to that magazine in the forties; they made him visible. A novel, of course, is on its own, for better or worse, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and his next novel, Bend Sinister (1947), turned out to be lonely creatures indeed. The Atlantic, however, provided Nabokov with a body of readers large enough to call an audience, and these stories in turn formed the main content of Nine Stories (1947).
That first American audience included Professor Morris Bishop of Cornell University, who in 1947 found himself chairman of a committee searching for a new professor of Russian literature. Bishop sought out Nabokov, even though the latter had neither advanced degrees nor, worse yet, a record of academic publications. Nabokov liked Wellesley, especially since its proximity to Cambridge allowed him to work on Lepidoptera many hours every day (including Sundays) at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, but after seven years he still did not have tenure. He was invited to Cornell to present a paper and endure the customary “looking over,” and shortly afterwards, in 1948, was offered an associate professorship, which he accepted—“though at heart,” says Nabokov, “I have always remained a lean visiting lecturer.”
The Bishops remember how Nabokov, seated in their living room before giving the paper, suddenly clasped his coat against his chest to see if his folded lecture was there, a heart-arresting gesture sufficiently reminiscent of Nabokov’s own creation, the myopic and addlepated Professor Pnin. Lecturer Nabokov had his share of Pninian experiences. One letter of invitation from a department chairman was signed “Vladimir Nabokov.” Only four people showed up for the resulting lecture; “I forgot to advertise,” said the chairman, a genius of absentmindedness. As Nabokov began to speak, half of the audience, a mother and son, got up and left. They were in the wrong room. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, we are all Pnins,” said an émigré colleague in the history department as they were walking across the snowbound Cornell campus shortly after one of the Pnin chapters had appeared in The New Yorker. “You know, he’d forgotten I’d written it,” says Nabokov, fifteen years later, his disbelief firmly intact. But Nabokov is not Pnin. He did not take the wrong train to Cornell or arrive at the Bishops’ a week too early, and the folded pages were in their place, as Morris Bishop fondly recalls.
Nabokov is one with Pnin, however, in his abhorrence of Soviet totalitarianism and “the philistine essence of Leninism.” The decision to leave Wellesley had been hastened by the person in high authority there who had suggested to Nabokov that he tone down his classroom criticism of Soviet writers. “They are our allies, you know.” Of the writers he met in this country, only Robert Frost seemed to share his opinion of Communism, but their fleeting political kinship was neutralized for Nabokov when Frost was gratuitously and excessively rude to their kind host. “My main regret,” says Nabokov, is “that I didn’t emigrate earlier to America.” If he had lived in New York City in the thirties he might have offered “free lessons to pro-Soviet boosters.” After receiving Edmund Wilson’s presentation copy of To The Finland Station, Nabokov sent him an errata and a critique, which insisted, among other things, that the oft-repeated story about Lenin sparing a fox’s life was both apocryphal and symbolically meaningless, considering certain facts and statistics.
Nabokov and Wilson met often thereafter, particularly in the forties, and exchanged “frank letters” for years. Wilson was kind in many ways, some of them professional—a long blurb for Sebastian Knight, a publisher for Bend Sinister—while Nabokov quietly aided and abetted Wilson backstage in his long struggle with the Russian language.
It would not be cheap or easy psychologizing to suggest that Wilson’s famous 1965 assault on his old friend’s Eugene Onegin translation was a monumental self-assertion dating back to their precep
torials in Russian. Wilson nevertheless sent the Nabokovs his customary Christmas card that year, enclosing a little wind-up paper butterfly. “It didn’t work,” complains Nabokov. “‘Made in Japan.’”
Politics and pedagogy converge in Nabokov’s view of the “student revolution.” Lamenting the conformity of “group beards and group protests,” he says that “rowdies are never true revolutionaries.” Nabokov would be unhappy on today’s campuses for more than one reason. “After all,” he notes, “my method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students,” and it is, of course, that kind of contact which many students now demand.
Although Nabokov gave some seminars at Cornell—in Pushkin, for example—the subject matter and the catalogue description (“Prerequisite, proficiency in Russian”) led no one to expect a rap session. Nabokov’s other courses were conducted as lectures, even if the enrollment was modest, as in his survey of Russian literature. Few of his pre-Lolita students knew he was a writer. He was an immensely popular teacher, however, particularly in his Literature 311–312 course, “Masterpieces of European Fiction.” The course was unique in the smallest of ways (witness the “bonus system” employed in examinations, allowing students two extra points per effort whenever they could garnish an answer with a substantial and accurate quotation—“a gem”—drawn from the text in question).
Carefully handwritten and then typed out, an artist-scientist’s anatomical examination of the books he admired and adored, Nabokov’s lectures ranged widely and wildly in mood, from the most moving to the most farcical of moments. “You cannot understand a writer if you cannot pronounce his name,” he would say, introducing Gogol (“Gaw-gol, not Go-gal!”). He would then rehearse Gogol’s death agonies, his head thrown back in pain and terror, nostrils distended, eyes shut, his beseechments filling the hushed lecture hall. Urging his students to become “creative readers,” he would ask them to develop “the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist”—double takes on the part of note-takers; didn’t he mean the opposite?—and, digressing for the minute, Nabokov would toss brickbats at “Old Dusty” or “the Viennese quack,” eliciting from the gallery as many gasps as laughs. He would conclude a lecture with a rhapsodic apostrophe to our writer’s style: “Feel it in your spine; let us worship the spine—the upper spine, the vertebrate tipped at the head with a divine flame!” And then, as the hour ended, he would ask to see the students who had occupied seats 102 and 103 during the recent midterm examination: “I suspect mental telepathy!”
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 22