Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I am sorry that you came across my dwarf story in the Esquire.3 I wrote it exactly 25 years ago and it is an absolute failure of the lurid juvenile type. In the thirties a friend of mine, then in America, translated it into English, sold it and mailed me a cheque to Menton—that's all; I am not responsible for anything in the translation. Incidentally and quite objectively I have a faint feeling that your knowledge of my Russian works is not as complete as it ought to be in view of your general deep knowledge of Russian letters.

  Thanks again for your interesting letter. I loved that bit about your having certain little sigils to check pilfering—like Sherlock Holmes upsetting the ashtray.

  Yours cordially

  TO: MRS. THEODORE SHERWOOD HOPE1

  CC, 1 p.

  8 Craigie Circle

  Cambridge 38, Mass.

  8th February 1944.

  Dear Mrs. Hope,

  Thanks for your letter and kind invitation to address your Society.

  I have read with interest the account of your German studies—I liked the bit about Goethe—but the end has puzzled me greatly. I have lived in Germany for 17 years and am quite sure Gretchen has been thoroughly consoled by the secondhand, somewhat bloodstained, but still quite wearable frocks that her soldier friend sent her from the Polish ghettos. No, I am afraid we shall never see the Barnard statue in a German impersonation. It is useless looking at a hyena and hoping that one day domestication or a benevolent gene will turn the creature into a great soft purring tortoiseshell cat. Gelding and Mendelism, alas, have their limits. Let us chloroform it—and forget. I am sorry of course for music and gemütlichkeit—but not very much, not more in fact than I am for the lacquered what-nots and cherry-trees in bloom (trashy perhaps but sweet) which gemütlich little Japan has contributed.

  When I lecture on Russian literature I do so from a writer's point of view, but upon reaching modern times cannot avoid stressing the fact that Communism and its totalitarian rule have prevented the development of authentic literature in Russia during these last twenty five years.

  My fee is considerably higher than the one you suggest.

  Sincerely yours

  TO: DONALD B. ELDER1

  CC, 2 pp.

  8 Craigie Circle

  Cambridge 38, Mass.

  March 22nd 1944

  Dear Mr. Elder,

  I am sending you at last a short account of the remaining chapters of my novel.

  The subject of The Person from Porlock2 is not easy to define concisely. If I say that its writing requires a considerable amount of critical and original research in such different fields as Shakespearean lore (mainly Hamlet) and certain aspects of Natural Science, this will only vaguely define the limits of the matter. I propose to portray in this book certain subtle achievements of the mind in modern times against a dull-red background of nightmare oppression and persecution. The scholar, the poet, the scientist and the child—these are the victims and witnesses of a world that goes wrong in spite of its being graced with scholars, poets, scientists and children. I am putting this rather bluntly, I am afraid, as it is difficult to give a synopsis of something, the rhythm and atmosphere of which are more essential than a physical outline. And the difficulty is increased by the fact of the idea of the book being far more than the discomfort experienced by free minds on the worst curves of a bumpy century; its idea being, in fact, something fundamentally new and thus demanding a treatment incompatible with the bare description of a general theme. Although I do not believe in message of hope books whose intention is to solve the more or less transient problems of mankind, I do think that a certain very special quality of this book is in itself a kind of justification and redemption, at least in the case of my likes.

  As has been adumbrated in the first chapters, the main character of the book, Prof. Krug, is a man of genius and the totalitarian government of his country is extremely anxious to have him on its side. I am especially satisfied with the scene depicting his conversation with Paduk, the Ruler of the State,—Paduk who has been his schoolmate (an account of their school days is given in the chapter following the part already submitted). Krug refuses to collaborate in any way and the next step of the government is trying to find out by what means he may be forced to do so. Finally his weak point is discovered, and this weak point is his love for his child. The boy is taken from him—and he who had been aloof and sarcastic in his dealings with the government, now accepts to bend his philosophy and his University work to the government's needs. Unfortunately (for the government) the child is taken by mistake to a camp for defective children (whom the state is anxious to get rid of) and, being sick at the time, dies. Krug has now nothing to lose and refuses to collaborate.

  I find difficult to go on with this bald account at this point. Anyway, the problem with which the reader now thinks Prof. Krug is faced, is the problem of responsibility, since the government now tries to break Krug by offering, in case he submits, to set free all his numerous colleagues and friends who have been imprisoned (and to let them remain free as long as he continues to submit). In the meantime, however, Krug, who in the months following his wife's death, had begun to work at a book about death and resurrection, has a most prodigious illumination (coinciding with his imprisonment after the boy's death), the dawning of a certain great understanding—and this is the most difficult bit to explain—but to put it bluntly, he realizes suddenly the presence of the Author of things, the Author of him and of his life and of all the lives around him,—the Author who is myself, the man who writes the book of his life. This singular apotheosis (a device never yet attempted in literature) is, if you like, a kind of symbol of the Divine power. I, the Author, take Krug to my bosom and the horrors of the life he has been experiencing turn out to be the artistic invention of the Author.

  There is of course much more in the book, and these bald notes are quite inadequate and unworthy of it. When, in a most dramatic chapter, Paduk the Ruler brings together Krug and his friends in the old schoolroom of yore, and his friends plead with him to yield and thus save them from the firing squad, Krug tries to explain to them what he has discovered —my presence and the disappearance of all problems. And when finally Krug is taken up a hill, through the vineyards, to be shot—and is shot according to the local conceptions, I, the Author, intervene,—but the special way in which I manage this intervention, cannot be explained without actually producing the completed manuscript of the book which will be ready in a few months.

  Very sincerely yours

  TO: JAMES LAUGHLIN

  ALS (XEROX), 3 pp.

  10-VII-44

  NB

  Ship it to: V. Nabokov

  Museum of Comparative Zoology

  Harvard Room 402

  Cambridge

  Dear Laughlin,

  I want you to do something for me. I noticed with dismay that I have somehow mislaid samples of plants which I brought from Utah—and namely the pabulum of two allied forms of butterflies—a thing I call vetch on which melissa breeds and the species of lupine—the food plant of annetta. I need these plants badly to identify them quite exactly. There are several species of lupine around Alta. I need the one growing in the haunts of annetta (Locality N° 2 on the chart I append). As annetta lives in symbiosis with ants I would also like to have a few, half-a-dozen, say, specimens of ants from the anthill (or anthills) shown on the map. Both lupine and ant must come from that precise spot. Kill the ants with alcohol or carbona or any other stuff handy (just drown them, do not squash) and put them into a small box with cotton wool. The plants can be mailed in a carton or in any other way, but try to keep them flat (they might also be placed in some book etc). The other plant, the "vetch" (I am not quite sure whether it is vetch, but it has pods), although growing in the vicinity of Walker's Lane, along the roads, must come from the limited locality N°. Mrs. Laughlin once saw me collecting there, and another time I pointed out these flowers to you on our way down. Melissa is well out and on the wane, little blue butterfli
es fluttering about that vetch, but nowhere else higher up. Annetta may be just emerging. It will be in full force towards the end of the month. You will do me a great favour if you can send me these plants (and a few ants)!

  Sincerely yours V. Nabokov

  ! Please, give me the approx. altitude of the Vetch locality (6000 ?) and its distance from Salt Lake City and Alta. Also, please, the altitude of Walker's Lane [where another form of melissa occurs in June and in August (also as "noted")].1

  Nabakov's maps accompanying his 10 July 1944 letter to James Laughlin.

  TO: KATHARINE A. WHITE1

  TLS, 1 p. Bryn Mawr College.

  8 Craigie Circle

  Cambridge 38, Mass.

  28 September 1944

  Dear Mrs. White,

  I am a little shocked by your readers' having so completely missed the point of my story.2 Apart from that, I quite fail to see how it may be confused with the "projections into the future made by would-be American satirists" since there is no projection and not the faintest trace of satire in my story—either "half-exposed" or otherwise. For all I know or care the 21st century may be less "enlightened" than our time, which may or may not be "crude" etc.—but again all this has nothing whatever to do with the point of the story.

  I shall certainly continue to show you the things I happen to write.

  Sincerely yours

  V. Nabokov3

  TO: KATHARINE A. WHITE1

  C. 2–3 June 1945

  TLS, 1 p. Bryn Mawr College,

  8 Craigie Circle

  Cambridge

  Dear Mrs. White,

  I am mailing you the proofs in haste.1 Please give them your personal attention if you have time. I do not think news of H's death2 would interfere with passages in the story since it all happened a month ago. The French consul has been simplified. Other things I have altered or added (gently put back in some cases) are utterly essential. The two sentences I have deleted in the last section are quite unnecessary—I mean any good reader can insert mentally the two little explanations your reviser inserted in print.

  Thanks for the news about Bunny—I felt somehow unhappy about him.

  This is the first letter I have typed out myself in my life. Took me 28 minutes but came out beautifully.3

  Yours very sincerely

  V. Nabokov

  TO: PROF. WILLIAM T. M. FORBES1

  TLS, 1 p. Cornell University.

  Letterhead: Harvard

  Museum of Comparative Zoology.

  September 24, 1945

  Dear Professor Forbes:

  Many thanks for gifting these excellent little Lycaenids (faga, ramon, some hanno specimens) and for the loan of the rest. Also, for the return and dissection of the mollicularia specimen.

  Your material comes out as:

  Itylos (sensu stricto) Koa Druce, 2 ♂, 2 ♀

  Pseudolucia endymion Blanchard (forma chilensis Blanchard), 4 ♂, 1 ♀

  Pseudolucia collina Philippi, 1 ♂

  Pseudothecla faga Dognin, 4 ♂ (one labeled "excisicosta")

  Echinargus martha Dognin, 1 ♂, "Huacapistana", 1 ♀ sic! "Matucana".

  Hemiargus ramon Dognin, 2 ♂, 1 ♀

  Hemiargus hanno Stoll (various forms, the Paramaribo one being the typical one), 10 ♂, 5 ♀

  I was especially pleased with the loan of martha (I think it is the Lycaena martha of Dognin, judging by his woodcut etc.). Genitalically (and in a way macroscopically) it is beautifully intermediate between Echinargus isola from Central America and Echinargus n.sp. from Trinidad. One hind wing (in the ♂) was loose. I shall return the loaned specimens (and genitalia preparation) together with the Lycaeides forms previously borrowed, if this is convenient to you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: PROF. GEORGE R. NOYES1

  TLS, 2 pp.

  8 Craigie Circle

  Cambridge 38, Mass.

  24th October 1945

  Dear Professor Noyes,

  Many thanks for your kind letter and interesting article in the Slavonic Review. It gives a very clear picture of what has been done and is being done in Russian at Berkeley.

  I am glad you liked my translations.2 Yes, I do read Iphigenia in five syllables, but as this made it impossible to fit her into my line, I consulted some American poets who were of the opinion that under the circumstances it would be permissable to imply a contracted reading to the exclusion of the second "i" in I'ph(i)geni'a.

  As to Gogol I do not think that your point of view is so widely divergent from my own. I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and am prepared to fight to the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skillfully written. There is a deep morality in the Overcoat which I have tried to convey in my book, but this morality has certainly nothing whatever to do with the cheap political propaganda which some overzealous admirers in nineteenth century Russia have tried to squeeze out of, or rather into it, and which, in my opinion does violence to the story and to the very notion of art.

  By the same token, though you may be right that Gogol did not object to serfdom, the interior moral standards of the book bristle against it. And the reader is more impressed by the bodily serfdom of the peasants and the inevitably following spiritual serfdom of the owners than by the petty roguery of Chichikov.

  In my opinion, the fact that The Kreutzer Sonata and The Power of Darkness3 were written with a deliberate moral purpose largely defeats their purpose, killing the inherent morality of uninhibited art.

  I thank you for the steps you have kindly taken on my behalf. I am glad you understand that I should not be offered a low-salaried job. And I fully understand that the considerations you describe may influence in many ways the final choice among the applicants. But please bear in mind that I am very much interested.

  I shall certainly treat as confidential all the information which you have indicated as such in your letter.

  Sincerely yours,

  V. Nabokov

  TO: ELENA SIKORSKI1

  26 November 1945

  ALS, 2 pp. Elena Sikorski.

  Cambridge, Mass

  My Dear Elenochka,

  We received three letters of yours—one bearing a postmark (15 October), a second one thanks to opportunity, and now another, dated 8 November. Thanks, my dearest. Write me more fully and more often. Your delightful letters are a great joy to me. I cannot even begin to tell you how precious the snapshots are for me.

  You asked me to describe my day for you. I wake up at eight or on the near side of eight, and always as a result of one and the same noise: Mityushenka going to the bathroom.

  [floorplan of apartment]

  He has a propensity for pensiveness and dawdling, so there is always a chance he will be late for school. At 8:40 the school car picks him up at the corner. Véra and I watch through the window (marked by an X) and see him striding toward the corner, looking very trim, wearing a gray suit and a reddish jockey cap, with a green bag (for his books) slung over his shoulder. At about half-past-nine I too set out, carrying my lunch (a flask of milk, two sandwiches). It is about a quarter hour's walk to the museum, along tranquil streets (we live in a suburb, in the Harvard area), then past the university tennis courts—a multitude of courts, totally overgrown with gigantic weeds during the war years, when there has been no one to care for them. My museum—famous throughout America (and throughout what used to be Europe)—is the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a part of Harvard University, which is my employer. My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world; many are type specimens (i.e., the very same specimens used for the original descriptions, from the 1840s until today). Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes,
acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens sent by collectors. I work on my personal research, and for more than two years now have been publishing piecemeal a study of the classification of American "blues"2 based on the structure of their genitalia (minuscule sculpturesque hooks, teeth, spurs, etc., visible only under a microscope), which I sketch in with the aid of various marvelous devices, variants of the magic lantern. When the weather is good I take a short break around midday. Other curators, from various floors, of reptiles, mammals, fossils, etc.—all wonderful people—also gather on the steps. My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me; I have ruined my eyesight, and wear horn-rimmed glasses. To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena—all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it (in a certain sense, in The Gift, I "foretold" my destiny—this retreat into entomology). Around five I come home, already in the blue darkness of winter, the hour of evening newspapers, the hour when ... are rolling home, and radio phonographs burst into song in the illumined apartments of large ivy-colored buildings.

  The school delivers Mityushenka at about the same time. He lays out on the table what he calls his "sour little papers"—sheets of paper with drawings that are the result of chance and grades that are not. He does extremely well at school, but that is thanks to Véra who goes over every bit of homework with him in detail—his assignments in Latin, mathematics, etc. His exceptionally gifted nature includes a dose of indolence, and he can forget everything in the world to immerge in an aviation magazine—airplanes, to him, are what butterflies are to me; he can unerringly identify types of aircraft by a distant silhouette in the sky or even by a buzz, and loves to assemble and glue together various models. During our travels in the Rocky Mountains and in Utah he accompanied me on my hunts, but he does not have a real passion for butterflies. He sees letters in color as Véra and I do and as Mother used to, but each of us has his own colors: for instance my M is a flannel pink, while his is light-blue. He is exceptionally musical, takes music lessons, and sings charmingly. He is vain, quick-tempered, pugnacious, and flaunts American expressions (which are sometimes pretty crude) current among schoolboys here—but, next to them, he is a white-and-silver little crow, infinitely gentle and generally very lovable. Something I find particularly touching is that he tells us absolutely everything with a naive kind of truthfulness. After an early dinner I lie down for a rest with a book or a final bit of unfinished (museum) work; around nine there is a loud noise—a harplike glissando on the other side of my wall; it is Mityushenka rattling on the uprights at the head of his bed, summoning me to come say goodnight. This is when he is especially nice and warm.