Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

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  NOTES

  All translations from Russian are by Simon Belokowsky.

  The names of research archives and of works by Nabokov and others are abbreviated as follows:

  Bagazh Bagazh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan, Nicolas Nabokov

  Bakh Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University

  Beinecke Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

  Berg Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library

  Boyd 1 Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Brian Boyd

  Boyd 2 Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Brian Boyd

  BS Bend Sinister

  CE Conclusive Evidence

  “Close Calls” “Close Calls and Fulfilled Dreams: Selected Entries from a Private Journal,” Dmitri Nabokov

  DBDV Dear Bunny Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters

  D.N. Dmitri Nabokov

  DS Dead Souls, Garnett translation

  EO Eugene Onegin, Nabokov translation

  GIFT The Gift

  Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University

  Letters Letters on Literature and Politics, Edmund Wilson

  LITD Laughter in the Dark

  LOC Library of Congress

  NB Nabokov’s Butterflies

  NG Nikolai Gogol

  PF Pale Fire

  Schiff Véra, Stacy Schiff

  SL Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters

  SM Speak, Memory

  SO Strong Opinions

  TRLSK The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

  Introduction

  1 “from 12 to 18 miles”: DBDV, 116.

  2 specimens “on both sides”: NB, 436–7.

  3 “man without pants”: Ibid., 52.

  4 “My tongue is like”: DBDV, 123. Nabokov was remarkably unvain about his teeth. To friend Roman Grynberg he wrote on December 25, 1943, “The dentist with a crack tore out all my top teeth; I walked with a bare mouth for the rest of the month and then made efforts to get used to the wide and absolute erasure. Now I have gotten used and only sometimes notice that my conversational partner quietly wipes either his cheek or brow.” Bakh.

  5 Had they been in France: Pitzer, 173–74. Jews were first interned at Drancy in August ’41. The Nabokovs’ voyage to America was the last of the SS Champlain; upon its return to France the s
hip was sunk at anchor off the French coast by collision with an air-laid German mine. The dangers of embarkation at Saint-Nazaire, the port where the Nabokovs caught the Champlain, are suggested by the fate of the HMT Lancastria, a British Cunard liner commandeered by the UK government and sunk off Saint-Nazaire a month after the Nabokovs embarked, with the loss of more than four thousand: it was the greatest loss of life ever in the sinking of a British ship (more than the combined losses of the Titanic and the Lusitania).

  6 “wondrous”: Bakh, Véra to A. Goldenweiser, July 26, 1941.

  7 “During our motor-car”: DBDV, 52.

  8 Nabokov’s prolific tramping: The Gift, which tells of cramped émigré life in an inimical German city, finds ways to send out tendrils of mountain adoration even so. The hero imagines his late father, an explorer of Central Asia, in high-mountain surroundings whenever he wishes to suggest the explorer’s contentment, in an environment not unlike that of north-central Utah, in fact, a realm of snowmelt and granite. As if in uncanny foresight of his upcoming American adventures, Nabokov wrote (in 1938; first English translation, 1963) of “genuine Crimean rarities … to be found not here … but much higher, in the mountains, among the rocks”; of being “always off in wild lands, often mountainous, often high desert”; of “the constant feeling that our days here are only pocket money, farthings clinking in the dark, and that somewhere is stocked the real wealth, from which life should know how to get dividends in the shape of dreams, tears of happiness, distant mountains.” Gift, 128–29, 136, 164.

  9 “one-sided conversation”: NB, 52–53.

  10 reader of Whitman: BS, 83. N. entitles a fictitious book “When Lilacs Last” in a fictitious review chapter written for but not finally added to Conclusive Evidence. SL, 105.

  11 taught to read English … before he learned to read Russian: SM, 79. On p. 80, N. speaks of being with Miss Clayton, his governess, learning basic English from a grammar book; on p. 87, he is again with her and is aged four.

  Chapter One

  1 trying to put together: Schiff, 73–78.

  2 “afraid of living”: Bakh, May 24, 1936. N.’s productions—his novels and novellas, with which this book is centrally concerned—are:

  In Russian: (1926) Mashenka (Машенька); English translation: Mary (1970)