Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  (1928) Korol, dama, valet (Король, дама, валет); English translation: King, Queen, Knave (1968)

  (1930) Zashchita Luzhina (Защита Лужина); English translation: The Luzhin Defense or The Defense (1964); also adapted to film, The Luzhin Defence (2000)

  (1930) Sogliadatay (Соглядатай), novella; first publication as a book, 1938; English translation: The Eye (1965)

  (1932) Podvig (Подвиг [Deed]); English translation: Glory (1971)

  (1933) Kamera obskura (Камера oбскура); English translations: Camera Obscura (1936) Laughter in the Dark (1938)

  (1934) Otchaianie (Отчаяние); English translation: Despair (1937, 1965)

  (1936) Priglashenie na kazn’ (Приглашение на Казнь [Invitation to an Execution]); English translation: Invitation to a Beheading (1959)

  (1938) Dar (Дар); English translation: The Gift (1963)

  (1939) Volshebnik (Волшебник); unpublished; English translation: The Enchanter (1986)

  In English:

  (1941) The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

  (1947) Bend Sinister

  (1955) Lolita; self-translated into Russian (1965)

  (1957) Pnin

  (1962) Pale Fire

  (1969) Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

  (1972) Transparent Things

  (1973) Strong Opinions

  (1974) Look at the Harlequins!

  (mid-1970s) The Original of Laura; fragmentary, published posthumously (2009)

  3 wrote her once a day: Schiff, 78.

  4 “My life, my love”: SL, 22–24.

  5 pack of lies: Both Boyd and Schiff say that the affair began in February ’37, but Michael Maar, in his book Speak, Nabokov (2009), says it began in early ’36. His evidence is the short story “Spring in Fialta,” written April ’36 and containing an “erotically irresistible” female “angel of death” figure such as would show up in many later works by Nabokov. There is already a figure of this kind in his novel Laughter in the Dark (first serialized in 1932), and the hero of The Eye (1930) has an affair with an irresistible, conscienceless woman whose husband beats him up.

  6 to judge by a story: Boyd 1, 577n48.

  7 The crisis: By some accounts, the Nabokovs’ marriage was almost the last Russian marriage under the old dispensation, whereby the wife serves the immortal genius husband. Véra, in this version, joins the exalted ranks of Sophia Tolstoy, Anna Dostoevsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn. Schiff’s Véra is, among other things, an attempt to wrestle with this tradition and with Véra’s extraordinary lifelong devotion in light of contemporary feminism.

  8 “Berlin is very fine”: Schiff, 92n.

  9 second child: Ibid., 76.

  10 not a marriage: Ibid., 139–41.

  11 two other novels: Boyd 1, 407.

  12 “loose, shapeless”: SL, 13, 15.

  13 less than fully confident: Boyd 1, 420. Altagracia de Jannelli was N.’s agent beginning 1934.

  14 Mandelstam’s famous: Prieto, “Reading.”

  15 given him a vision: Espey, “Speak.”

  16 “Far as the eye”: Headless Horseman, 25.

  17 “The landscape”: Ibid., 26.

  18 “Through the curtains”: Ibid.

  19 “The edition I had”: SM, 195–96. There are traces of Mayne Reid in Ada, Lolita, Glory, and The Gift: Johnson, “Nabokov and Reid.” Czesław Miłosz says that to “explore Reid’s influence in Russia and Poland would call for a special study,” noting that “Chekhov and other writers take for granted the reader’s familiarity with the scenery of Reid’s novels.” Emperor of the Earth, 154–55. In a prose translation, with commentaries, that N. wrote for Edmund Wilson about his poem “To Prince S. M. Kachurin” (1947), he says, “I am asking you, is it not time to return to the theme of the (Indian) bow-string, to the enchantment of the chaparral (the birds are already there) of which we read in The Headless Horseman? Is it not time to go back to Matagorda Canyon (place in Texas mountains) and there fall asleep on the burning stones—with the skin of one’s face prickly dry from the aquarelle paints (with which we used to daub our faces when we played Indians) and with a crow’s feather in one’s hair? (in other words, let me take the direct road to America straight from my boyhood and the Wild West novels I used to love).” Barabtarlo, “Nabokov in the Wilson Archive.”

  20 “Please find enclosed”: LOC.

  21 “We feel that”: Ibid.

  22 “occupy themselves”: Boyd 1, 409. In somewhat the same spirit, Ernest Hemingway, born the same year as Nabokov, writes in A Farewell to Arms, “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity… . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

  23 Jannelli, who recognized: Schiff, 94. Jannelli’s phone number was Washington Square 1–3131. Catalog of Copyright Entries, LOC. According to a New York Times obituary, she died June 11, 1945, at 17 E. Ninth St.

  “As a child”: LITD, 142–43.

  24 Faulkner being: N. did read Light in August, at Edmund Wilson’s urging. DBDV, 239–40. “I detest these puffs of stale romanticism,” he wrote Wilson, likening Faulkner to Victor Hugo, with his “horrible combination of starkness and hyperbole… . The book you sent me is one of the tritest and most tedious examples of a trite and tedious genre. The plot and those extravagant ‘deep’ conversations affect me as bad movies do… . I imagine that this kind of thing (white trash, velvety Negroes, those bloodhounds out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin …) may be necessary in a social sense, but it is not literature… . The book’s pseudo-religious rhythm I simply cannot stand… . Has la grace descended upon Faulkner too? Maybe you are just pulling my leg when you advise me to read him, or impotent Henry James, or the Rev. Eliot?”

  25 “with attractive”: Boyd 2, 14.

  26 “No, the ‘Mr.’”: LOC.

  27 “make you happy”: Ibid.

  28 “never, never, never”: Schiff, 96–97. Jannelli sent The Gift to two Russian readers, who had been hired by publishers to report on the novel’s suitability for the American market. Both praised the book but advised against acquiring it. LOC. Alexander I. Nazaroff, a critic who had written about Sirin before, called the book “dazzlingly brilliant” but noted, “In its general type, The Gift sharply differs from that which hitherto was the common run of Nabokoff’s novels. No matter how Nabokoff has always been fond of … tricks and artifices of composition and style, [his earlier books] are ‘normal’ novels [with] a well-constructed and developed dramatic plot … or are built ‘biographically’ around one central character which holds the reader’s interest… . Now, in contradiction to this, The Gift is not a realistic novel… . It is an ultra-sophisticated and modernist piece of introspective, almost ‘non-subjective’ writing which … may be likened to James Joyce’s Ulysses.” Nabokov was flattered but irritated by this report. He argued that “there is a lot more in my book both for the connoisseur and the lay reader” than Nazaroff saw. SL, 27. Nazaroff’s mix of praise with cool market calculation went to the painful crux for Nabokov. Leving, 257. He was faced with the torturous choice between the Joycean way, resoundingly acclaimed by sophisticated critics, and something else, something unknown, a more commercially promising approach, perhaps, more “American” style. It would be twelve years before he hit upon a method that was even simpler in the structural sense than that of his supposedly “normal,” well-plotted earlier books. He had broken ground with The Gift but had to come back, far back, to one of the most comprehensible and simplest story forms, the voyage account—an American terrestrial Odyssey.

  29 “quite understand”: SL, 28–29.

  30 American Mercury: By 1937–38 both Mencken and Nathan had left the magazine, though they contributed occasional pieces.

  Chapter Two

  1 nice secure lectureship:
N. told an interviewer, “A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer.” SO, 99.

  2 captured a Blue: Boyd 1, 488; NB, 637–38. His find was not a new species, but a hybrid of others already known. NB, 74.

  3 poor as they had ever: Schiff, 94.

  4 Vladimir had inherited: Boyd 1, 121. Conversion from Dollar Times, http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php.

  5 Russian Literary Fund: Boyd 1, 489.

  6 gleeful speeder: “Sergei Rachmaninoff,” IMDb.com, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006245/bio; “Sergei Rachmaninoff,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Rachmaninoff.

  7 definite plan: Schiff, 96, 394n.

  8 “the family’s hold”: Ibid., 96.

  9 faring remarkably: Bagazh, 195.

  10 “twelve languages”: FBI file.

  11 “always late”: Saunders, 12. In his FBI file, which runs to 120 pages, one of the citizens asked to comment on Nicolas’s political coloration makes an understandable mistake, describing him as “anti-Socialist, and … his father held a high position in Russian circles prior to the Russian Revolution in 1917. His father was killed by the Bolsheviks.” This is Vladimir’s father, not Nicolas’s (although V. D. Nabokov was killed not by Bolsheviks, either, but by fanatical rightists); Nicolas’s father was still alive in ’48, when the FBI conducted its investigation, and the informant, a Cornell history professor, casually recast Nicolas as the son of V. D. Nabokov because Nicolas himself had nearly done the same. In one of his early turnings toward the most famous personage in any room, Nicolas attached himself to V. D. Nabokov, sitting at his feet and through him taking on a rich infusion of cultural and historical savoir faire. V. D., distinguished legal scholar, one of the principals of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party in the Russian Duma, a party that contended strenuously with the Bolsheviks during the momentous events of 1917; V. D., editor-publisher of Rech’ (Speech), the Kadet paper, an enemy of Russian absolutism in all its forms, son of an historically very, very high-up man himself (Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, minister of justice under two tsars)—this same V. D. Nabokov was, as we learn in Speak, Memory, a refined aesthete as well as a politician, a sophisticated reader of modern literatures, a connoisseur of the plastic arts, and, unlike Vladimir, a music lover.

  “On Sunday mornings we would take the Berlin subway,” Nicolas writes in Bagazh, his colorful if not always reliable memoir, headed for “the general rehearsals of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.” This was shortly after the expulsion from Russia; V. D. had experienced “all the horrors … all the abominations of the Bolshevik orgy,” and the collapse of his political fortunes and the loss of his personal fortune as well. Uncle and nephew were “the rare Nabokovs who truly loved music,” and when they arrived at the hall where the orchestra practiced—next door to a smaller hall where would be staged, on the evening of March 28, 1922, the political meeting at which V. D. would be murdered—they stood together under a light in the back; V. D. always brought along a pocket score, and they followed the music together.

  “The Nabokov flat in Berlin,” Nicolas tells us, was “a center of émigré cultural life.” Both V. D. and wife Elena Ivanovna had “brilliant minds, quick wits,” and the “stimulating ambience of their home was for me a Russian haven and the intellectual catalyst I badly needed.” In V. D.’s rooms the nephew encountered Konstantin Stanislavsky, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre and theorist of performance, as well as Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhov, widow of the playwright and an actress destined to find success under the Soviets, as she had found it under the ancien régime. It may be pressing things to say that Nicolas encountered in his uncle and aunt’s salon the model for a life of physical and spiritual proximity to talent, to influence, and honed there his own personal presentation, whereby he gained acceptance within an entire galaxy of twentieth-century cultural circles; in any case, the concertgoing and the study of scores represented “the first truly useful and lasting part of my musical education,” and his adoration of his uncle was complete.

  12 well-known publisher father: V. D. Nabokov published his son in Rul’ and also published his nephew in its pages, naming him music critic. Bagazh, 107.

  13 “find it refreshing”: SO, 292.

  14 “extraordinary openness”: Bagazh, 188.

  15 Mark Aldanov: Boyd 1, 511; Boyd 2, 22.

  16 his English subpar: Field, Life in Part, 195.

  17 two courses: Boyd 2, 22.

  18 “nom de plume”: LOC.

  19 “Please allow me”: Bakh (translation: Belokowsky and author).

  20 largely on a loan: Schiff, 103.

  21 follow him: Ibid., 157.

  22 “fifty dead … ruined”: V. D. Nabokov, “The Kishinev Bloodbath,” Hoover Institution.

  23 next twenty years: Judge, 13.

  24 “regime of oppression”: V. D. Nabokov, “Bloodbath.”

  25 expressed his nonchalance: V.D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional, 3.

  26 “no courts for them”: V. D., Nabokov, “Bloodbath.”

  27 a forecast: “The historian Rufus Learsi once wrote that the 1903 Kishinev pogrom must be seen as ‘a dress rehearsal’ for the far bloodier wave of anti-Semitic violence two years later, following the 1905 revolution, which left some 3,000 Jews dead. But that violence was only a rehearsal for the genocidal fury of the 1918 Russian civil war, in which Ukrainian militias under Simon Petlura massacred as many as 200,000 Jews. And that, of course, was just a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.” Goldberg, “Kishinev 1903.”

  28 Mendel Beilis: V.D.N. also acted as unofficial legal counsel for the accused. Boyd 1, 104.

  29 Hessen: Boyd 1, 206.

  30 “like many”: Ibid., 521; Boyd 2, 11.

  31 “assisting non-Jews”: Schiff, 105.

  32 “Jewish rescue organization”: Ibid.

  33 only half fare: HIAS did not normally pay for passage of immigrants. R. Sanders, Shores of Refuge, 275.

  34 “splendid ship’s funnel”: SM, 309–10.

  35 “We were given”: Field, Life and Art, 226. That there was an upgrade is not in dispute. Whether this was the work of a French officer or of a Jewish friend probably does not matter much in the fullness of time, but a source that Schiff cites for her account—a letter Véra wrote in 1958—says only, “We had a 1st-class cabin, but this was owed to an enviable [cabin] assignment. We had paid for third class,” which leaves the identity of the upgrader unspecified. Bakh, Véra to A. Goldenweiser. Routinely, HIAS put a representative on board on the day of embarkation; problems of many kinds arose in the last hours. Perhaps Frumkin saw a chance to make the trip to America even more memorable for the Nabokovs; perhaps things had been planned this way, as a surprise.

  Frumkin also, before the day of embarkation, took Nabokov around Paris to some wealthy Jewish families, soliciting donations, accompanied also by Mark Aldanov; in this way, Nabokov at last was able to put together the cost of his half-fare tickets. Boyd 1, 522.

  Véra may have mistaken Frumkin’s man for a French ship’s officer. However, that seems unlikely. In matters of Jewish identity and survival, she was not prone to misperception. She was proudly, deeply, insistently Jewish; she had fallen out with an older sister over the sister’s conversion to Catholicism, and in Berlin, as the Nazis came to power, and later in America, as the Nabokovs ran into homegrown anti-Semitism here and there, she let the world know that she was Jewish—she would not let the world not know. Boyd 1, 403; Boyd 2, 363.

  36 “Your letter”: Berg.

  37 had been a bestseller: Boyd 2, 365.

  38 classic writer’s idyl: Ibid., 407–8. Though N. is credited as the screenwriter of Kubrick’s Lolita, Kubrick wrote another version and mostly shot from that. N. was fond of the film, calling it “absolutely first-rate,” singling out the actors for “the highest praise” and declaring the killing of Quilty a “masterpiece.” While acknowledging that “I had nothing to do with the actual production,”
he insisted he had had a role that was more than nominal: “All I did was write the screenplay, a preponderating portion of which was used by Kubrick.” SO, 21. At other times, he was not so sure about the size of his contribution; see “Vladimir Nabokov’s Script for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita,” Open Culture, http://www.openculture.com/2014/06/vladimir-nabokovs-script-for-stanley-kubricks-lolita.html.

  39 “ghastly”: Boyd 1, 486.

  40 disputed the chicken: Schiff, 104.

  41 matter of being desperate: N. implored an organization that assisted émigrés to help secure his family’s passage to New York; the woman he spoke to remembered his frank “panic,” his “wild fear at the prospect of war,” which made upon her an unpleasant impression. Field, Life and Art, 197, 393.

  Chapter Three

  1 Natalia had signed an affidavit: Interview with Ivan Nabokov, April 25, 2013. Serge Koussevitzky’s name was also on the emigration documents, according to Ivan. Mikhail Karpovich also “stood surety” for N. Boyd 2, 14.

  2 Madison … West Eighty-seventh: Véra’s notes, Berg. Natalia secured a scholarship to the nearby Walt Whitman School for Dmitri, who entered first grade in fall ’40 and was soon promoted to second grade, despite having no English to begin with.

  3 “the first part of it excellent”: New York Times, May 1, 1940, 1.

  4 “Flanders pocket”: New York Times, May 28, 1940, 1.

  5 “heavy tidings”: New York Times, May 29, 1940, 1.

  6 morning was cloudy: New York Times, May 28, 1940, 1. The page one weather notice reads, “Mostly cloudy, with scattered showers and little change in temperatures today and tomorrow.” An article on the 1940 season of the New York World’s Fair noted that it had been “hounded by rain and unfavorable weather” for over two weeks: Ibid., 25. thirty thousand: Goldstein, Helluva Town, 92. The time period of the thirty thousand arrivals from France is summer ’40 to spring ’41.

  7 Lévi-Strauss: Ibid., 97.

  8 Léger: Ibid., 100.

  9 lilac tinge: Boyd 2, 11.

  10 synesthete: SM, 34–35.

  11 “I simply loved”: NB, 120; Boyd 1, 259.