Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977

by Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: FREDERIC W. HILLS

  TL (XEROX), 1 p.

  Montreux-Palace Hotel

  1820 Montreux, Switzerland

  February 11, 1974

  Dear Mr. Hills,

  I am a little upset by your cable of February 7 in which you ask me to provide a description of my new novel for your Fall catalogue.

  In the case of ADA, the parody of a blurb, a built-in finale within the novel, took me at least a week to compose. I have not prepared a similar inset for LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS. Believe me, to produce the description of a book which I have not finished writing is for me no less difficult than the writing about an unread book is for you. I have suffered some perilous interruptions in the course of the last three weeks, and cannot afford now to squander even one day of work. Four fifths of the book are completed; there remain some fifty pages to write, and I must be allowed to do so at my own pace. I can only say that LATH is a multiple-love story and that during a span of fifty years the scene shifts from my desk to Old Russia, from there to England, from England to France, from France to America and thence to Bolshevisia and back to this lake.

  Cordially yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN1

  TL (XEROX), 1 p.

  Palace Hotel

  Montreux,

  Suisse

  14.II.1974

  Dear Aleksandr Isaevich,

  I was happy to learn today of your passage to the free world from our dreadful homeland. I am happy as well that your children will be attending schools for humans, not for slaves.

  Only now is it possible for me to thank you for your letter of 16.V.1972, with your appeal to the Swedish Academy enclosed.21 was keenly touched by your words. If I have not answered you until now, it is because for a long time I have made it a rule not to write to Soviet Russia, so as not to subject my benevolent correspondents to additional danger: I am, after all, some kind of scaly devil to the Bolshevik authorities—something that not everyone in Russia realizes. I doubt if even you have read my poems, articles, stories and such novels of mine as Dar, Podvig, Priglashenie na kazn, and especially Bend Sinister, in which, ever since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write and of which you will now write freely.

  The newspapers cannot decide in which country you will settle; but if you should happen to visit Switzerland, let me know and we shall get together.

  I never make official "political" statements. Privately, though, I could not refrain from welcoming you.3

  I shake your hand

  Vladimir Nabokov4

  TO: HARVEY SHAPIRO1

  TL (XEROX), 1 p.

  Montreux-Palace Hotel

  1820 Montreux, Switzerland

  March 1, 1974

  Dear Mr. Shapiro,

  My husband asks me to thank you for your cable. He regrets he cannot write a "Letter to Solzhenitsyn"—not only because he cannot interrupt work on a new novel he is writing but also because writing such a letter would interest him as little as reading it would Solzhenitsyn.

  Sincerely yours,

  (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

  TO: JOHN C. FRANTZ1

  TLS (XEROX), 1 p; with statement.

  Montreux-Palace Hotel

  1820 Montreux, Switzerland

  March 11, 1974

  Dear Mr. Frantz,

  I hasten to send this letter in the wake of the one I mailed you on March 5. In a moment of reckless optimism, I had accepted the kind invitation contained in your letter of February 28. Now I have looked at the calendar, stared at the manuscript of my novel, looked at the calendar again, and am appalled by the difficulties of the situation.

  The dilemma confronting me is either:

  to spend the next three weeks here in a chaos of preparation, amidst all kinds of worries (monstrously magnified by the lens of nervous exhaustion), preceding an altogether delightful but very complicated voyage (note that I have never flown across the Atlantic and that all my favourite liners have been scrapped), in which case I could not possibly carve out the piece of time and the peace of mind needed to finish my novel before leaving;

  or

  to deprive myself of the immense pleasure that the National Medal dinner on April 16 would give me and use instead the next weeks to complete the ascetic and rather grim but inly sparked task of working seven hours a day in order to finish turning by hand a roughish draft, of some 80,000 words in all, into a fair copy which would gradually make, in regular batches, over 250 typed pages of "LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!"

  After careful consideration I choose the second course, and send you my deepest apologies.

  Sincerely yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  A statement by Vladimir Nabokov

  to be read by his son Dmitri Nabokov on April 16, 1974 at the New York Public Library for the Presentation of the 1973 National Medal for Literature.

  My son, who represents me here, knows how hard it was for me to decide not to come to New York, not to leave my writing desk in Montreux, not to enjoy in person an honor I so highly appreciate. By some quirk of spacetime, the date of the National Medal Dinner happened to clash with the final, most demanding and dramatic lap of work on the new novel which I have been writing since the beginning of last year. The festive break might have proved a formidable interruption. The lone lamp had to be preferred to the blaze of the feast.

  I am never sure how many hours, five or six, are deductable or addable when one tries to clock a coincidence of two events separated by a sprawling body of salt water. I wish you to know, however, that at the very moment you are hearing the voice of my son I am either at my desk or in bed, writing the last paragraphs of my book with a stubby but stubborn pencil.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Montreux, March 15, 1974

  TO: THE OBSERVER

  TL (XEROX), 1 p.1

  Montreux, Switzerland

  To the editor

  Although I doubt that any words of mine can elicit the slightest reverberation amidst the unimaginable magistrates of the Soviet Union I feel compelled to raise my voice in response to the appeal Victor Fainberg sent you concerning the hideous plight of Vladimir Bukovski.2 Bukovski's heroic speech to the court in defense of freedom and his five years of martyrdom in a despicable psychiatric jail will be remembered long after the torturers he defied have rotted away. But that is poor consolation for a prisoner with rheumatic carditis who has been transferred now to a Permian camp and will perish there unless a public miracle rescues him. I wish to urge all persons and organizations that have more contact with Russia than I have to do whatever can be done to help that courageous and precious man. Please publish.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: DMITRI NABOKOV

  ALS, 1 p.

  Montreux, Switzerland

  You can use my toilet remains and nochnye tooflil1

  June 4, 1974

  (Auction price of this card circa 2000 AD at least 5,000 roubles.) Dmitrichko [a diminutive not used before or since]!

  Here is a copy of LATH (acronym) for you to read carefully and lovingly.

  Main queries: technical or idiomatic slips. Mark your queries or corrections with birdies in margin and explain them on a page of the notebook (with butterflies) provided by the author.

  Easy on spelling and punctuation: there are editors for that.

  ...words unfamiliar (or objectionable) to you ... are likely to be in my large Webster or 13-vols OED, or else are noncewords (from 'once' not from 'nonsense') of my make.

  Loving regards

  VN2

  TO: HENRI HELL1

  CC, 1 p.

  Hotel Mont-Cervin, Zermatt

  Le 17 juillet 1974

  Dear Mr. Hell,

  I shall be mailing you early next week, before leaving Zermatt for Italy, a first batch of Gilles Chahine's ADA with my revisions and a separate report on his type of m
istakes. The dreary difficulty of correcting his translation is increased by my having to weed out those recurrent flaws, besides dealing with the big blunders. His fear of saying "d'Ada" ou "à Ada" enmeshes him in ridiculous paraphrases. I am not Racine and neither is he.

  I appreciated your kindly sending me your elegant piece on PALE FIRE—I confess, however, to being puzzled by the connection you find between my work and Borges' flimsy little fables.

  Best regards from my wife and me.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: HENRI HELL

  CC, 2 pp.

  Hotel Mont-Cervin

  Zermatt, Suisse

  July 23, 1974

  Dear Mr. Hell,

  I am sending you sou pli séparé 150 pp., Chapters I-XVIII, of the corrected typescript of Gilles Chahine's translation of ADA. Please have all my revisions taken into account. A foreigner's slip may well have occurred here and there in my French; this is easy to straighten out—but should always remain in keeping with the sense of the revision.

  Many passages in Chahine's work are brilliantly translated. The flawless flow, however, is interrupted by monstrous mistakes and impossible mannerisms. I shall content myself with listing a few examples of his main verbal transgressions:

  The dead metaphor which replaces a plain English word. "She cowered" (elle tremblait), p. 147, becomes "elle souhaitait disparaître sous terre."

  A mess of images. On p. 103, the bird "huppe" (hoopoe) is rendered as "bécasse perchante", a horrible dictionary translation, this "bécasse"—perchante or not—destroying the idea of the floppy motion of descent in the comparison; and the ornithological confusion is immediately continued by Chahine's addressing Ada as "mésange ' in the same passage!

  When he tries especially hard to render what he assumes to be yet another arbitrary ye‹ de mots on the author's part, he lapses into macaronic nonsense. This is especially painful when an alliteration is involved. He should never try to copy alliterations which come naturally in English and do not stick out in awkward, irrelevant and artificial postures. A good example is his "marmoréen marmonneur" (!?), p. 147, for "immemorial ghost."

  The urge to escape hiatus or repetition by such awful paraphrases for simple "Ada" as "la mignonne," "l'adorée," "la belle enfant," "la jeune dame" etc. Who cares if in a faithful translation "d'Ada" or "à Ada" shocks the ear! Literature is a visual, not auditive phenomenon.

  His own unsolicited contributions and the explanatory phrases that he throws in for good measure. Examples: "Dawn's doigts de rose", p. 98, or the "tilleuls et grillons," p. 109, or "que la perle n'était point huitre", etc.

  I do not speak of the numerous mistranslations, due to insufficient knowledge of English, in Chahine's work—I am there to correct them. But in the given circumstances my task seems to be unnecessarily complicated. I wonder if something could not be done about it—by an editor's checking in the remaining pages of Chahine's text the kind of errors I list above? At present one page takes me half-an-hour at least to correct and since I cannot devote more than a couple of hours per day to the revising of this translation I dare not imagine the amount of time I may need to terminate my task. I am sure you will agree with me that this is an impossible demand to place on an author.

  Best regards.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  PS. Notez je vous prie que nous quittons Zermatt dans quelques jours pour l'Italie et que nous serons de retour à Montreux le 4 ou 5 août.

  TO: PROF. GLEB STRUVE

  TL (XEROX), 1 p.

  Montreux-Palace Hotel

  1820 Montreux, Switzerland

  September 13, 1974

  Dear Gleb Petrovich,

  Forgive me for replying in English to your Russian letter of August 15th.

  VN appreciates all the errors you catch in Field's Bibliography (although he still thinks that Field produced a valuable book in which he invested a lot of labor). We don't know who is Foster.1 It really does not matter, says V.V., what he (or she) included or left out of his (her) bibliography. But Field's was meant to cover the entire ground and every omission he allowed to occur is regrettable.

  V.V. says that "Valentin Nabokov" was used by him to avoid confusion with his father's signature. He chose "Valentin" because the girl he was courting at that time (the heroine of Mashenka) was called "Valentina." With it he signed either "Lunnaya Gryoza" in Vestnik Evropy (Field 0407) or "Zimnyaya Noch'" in Russkaya Mysl' (Field 0408) (or both).

  Thank you for the offer to send us xerox copies of the poems, but we do have the text of both.

  The copy of V.V.'s new novel—LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!—that he asked McGraw to send you should be in your hands by now.

  We hope your health has improved.

  Our cordial greetings to you and your wife.

  TO: FREDERIC W. HILLS

  TL (XEROX), 2 p.

  Montreux-Palace Hotel

  1820 Montreux, Switzerland

  November 4, 1974

  Dear Mr. Hills,

  I see that I have not replied to your charming and very kind (the second especially) letters of October 8 and 11. Your two (thoughtful) sets of queries have been received, and I am awaiting the proof to deal with them—they seem pretty innocuous. Thanks for the information about The Admiralty Spire.1 I was most interested in your tabletalk with Gillon Aitken and am enclosing for your information a recent letter, registered, that I airmailed to Miss Sifton of Viking a few days ago. In no circumstance, even on the way to the scaffold, will I ever use "Ms". I shall give Miss Sifton another week for a reply, after which, I think, I shall take advantage of a very sweet suggestion of yours to beg you to talk to Thomas Guinsburg, showing him my missive to Miss Sifton and asking him to examine all the material I had sent to her. If Field insists on telling the "history of bastardy and buggery" inherent in the Nabokov family, as well as publishing bits of my working notes toward a novel, and distorting information I gave him in idiotic ways (by asking strangers to check details of incidents that I alone could know), then I shall do everything to stop him in his stride, besides composing for a sympathizing periodical a special article about his dishonest behaviour and blunders.

  I have spent most of October preparing our third collection of 13 stories (very temporarily entitled A Letter to Russia).2 Three of them are completely ready:

  The Return of Chorb

  The Passenger

  and A Bad Day.

  Six others are in the making. I am taking advantage of Dmitri's stay with us here. He has done a splendid translation into Italian of TRANSPARENT THINGS for Mondadori.

  Miss Loo has seen no doubt the huge purple effigy of German ADA (another excellent translation) at the Frankfurter Fair's Rowohlt stand.

  I want to get rid of all translations (including the harrowing French ADA!) before settling down to a new novel that keeps adding nightly a couple of hours to my habitual insomnias. I am trying an old somnifacient whose name—Sanalepsi—, if I mentioned it in my fiction, would be at once attached by some aha!-criticule to both nympholepsy and lepidoptera.

  Very cordially yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov3

  TO: PROF. ALFRED APPEL, JR.

  TL (XEROX), 1 p.

  Montreux-Palace Hotel

  1820 Montreux, Switzerland

  November 8, 1974

  Dear Alfred,

  Thanks for N.'s Dark Cinema,1 a brilliant and delightful book. I found the material beautifully arranged throughout—not an easy job, I suspect. The illustrations are fascinating. Your basic idea, my constantly introducing cinema themes, and cinema lore, and cinematophors (VN) into my literary compositions cannot be contested of course, but your readers may be inclined to forget that I know very little about avant-garde German and American pictures of the 1930's and that my wife and I have virtually not been to the cinema more than two or three times in fifteen years, nor do we have a TV at home (except when soccer competitions take place). I have not yet had time to read the whole book but the spots I dipped into are pleasant cool spot
s, where I enjoyed your good-natured touch and comfortable erudition. I was also tickled by your biographical forays—they will enrage Field. In due time I may add some remarks, but I already note that for the sake of an elegant generalization, you connect me, now and then, with films and actors whom I have never seen in my life. (I still do not quite know, for example, who this "James Bond" is). You and I and other Nabokovians will readily realize that stylistically you are slanting my works movieward in pursuit of your main thought; yet it would be rather unfair if less subtle people—poor, benighted sheep and so on—were to conclude I had simply lifted my characters (say, Gradus) from films which you know and I don't. These are trivial complaints, Alfred, but I am sure that our friendship and the susceptibilities of advanced age warrant my making them. Your book, I repeat, is delightful and you are most kind to me and I am going to re-enjoy it to-night and to-morrow and in between the ridges of insomnia. Thanks also for the description of your longshoreman, he is marvelous.

  Very cordially yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: HENRI HELL

  TL (XEROX), 2 p.

  Montreux-Palace Hotel

  1820 Montreux, Switzerland

  November 30, 1974

  Dear Mr. Hell,

  Thanks for the XXXIV-XLIII batch of ADA, in two copies this time. I have not yet finished the XIX-XXXIII chapters the first of which had to be redone in the light of your corrections.