Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977
Page 53
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15. Véra Nabokov's cousin Anna Feigin.
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16. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Not a regular French passport, but a "Nansen" passport issued, under an international convention, to stateless emigres.
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2. Ilya Feigin, brother of Anna Feigin.
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3. Vladislav Felitseanovich Khodasevich, one of the greatest Russian poets of the century.
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4. A play by Count Aleksey Tolstoy about a famous double agent in the service of the pre-revolutionary Russian government.
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5. The French translation of "Spring in Fialta."
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6. For psoriasis.
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7. Ilya Fondaminsky and V. M. Zenzinov.
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8. Doctor and personal friend, whom VN met through Fondaminsky.
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9. Two sentences in English.
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10. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Unidentified.
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2. Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevski (1828–1889), highly influential leftist political writer, subsequently very popular with the Soviets.
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3. When Dar (The Gift) was published in installments in 1937–38 in Sovremennye Zapisk} (Paris), Chapter Four, which consists entirely of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev's biography of Chernyshevski, was omitted because of pressures from part of the editorial staff. It was one of the few instances when Nabokov agreed (albeit with great reluctance) to a deletion, for he realized that this price had to be paid to have the novel published at all. It is also interesting that, in its March 1988 issue, the Soviet magazine Ural began serialized publication of what was announced as an unabridged version of Dar, with only a moderate obbligato of adverse comment to mitigate the viewpoints of Chapter Four, but nonetheless with other omissions and alterations. DN.
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1. Paris: Fayard, 1934; later published in English as The Defense.
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1. Bunin and Nabokov were friends.
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1. Elizabeth (Lisa) Gutman—who later married Aron Allan—was an old and dear friend of the Nabokov family. She and her two sisters, Marussya and Ina, performed as a harp trio, under the stagename Marinel. This letter was written when Elizabeth and Marussya were trying to get out of Europe.
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2. Invitation to a Beheading.
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3. Gregor Pyatigorsky, cellist.
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4. Dmitri Nabokov.
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5. Mikhail Mikhailovich Karpovich, representative to the U.S. from the Provisional Government after the first 1917 revolution; later professor of Russian literature at Harvard and long-time editor of Novïy Zhurnal. He helped the Nabokovs to emigrate by furnishing a necessary affidavit.
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6. Altagracia de Jannelli
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7. Translated from Russian by DN. The original includes a fourth page by Véra Nabokov.
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1. Head of New Directions.
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2. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941.
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1. Translated from Russian by DN. The rest of the letter is by Véra Nabokov and has been omitted.
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1. Edmund Wilson.
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2. Series published by New Directions. VN's Three Russian Poets was published by New Directions in 1944.
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3. Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly.
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4. "The Aurelian," VN story translated by VN and Peter Pertzov from Russian.
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1. Edmund Wilson.
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2. "Mademoiselle O," VN story translated by VN and Hilda Ward from Russian.
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1. Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1944).
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2. Reference to The Opinions of Oliver Allston by Van Wyck Brooks (1941).
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1. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, former director of the Slavonic Section of the New York Public Library. Translator, with his wife, Babette Deutsch, of Russian classical verse. He would supply a literal text on which she based the English version.
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2. Gogol's Dead Souls, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney as Chichikpv's Journeys; or Home Life in Old Russia; introduction by Clifton Fadiman.
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1. This letter was not published.
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2. 29 March 1943.
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3. Tableau of Russian women athletes in front of Stalin's portrait.
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1. A projected translation of The Defense; the project was dropped.
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1. Translator of Russian literature.
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2. Twelfth-century Russian epic. Later translated by VN as The Song of Igor's Campaign (New York: Vintage, 1960).
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3. "The Potato-Elf," trans. Serge Bertensson and Irene Kosinka, Esquire, 12 (December 1939), 70–71, 228, 230–235. VN's first American publication. This story was subsequently retranslated by VN and DN and republished in the October 1973 Esquire-, collected in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
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1. Chairman of the New York Browning Society.
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1. Editor at Doubleday, Doran.
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2. Published as Bend Sinister (New York: Holt, 1947). The working title refers to the bill-collector who interrupted Coleridge's work on "Kubla Khan."
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1. Last paragraph written along left margin of letter.
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1. New Yorker editor.
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2. "Time and Ebb," The Atlantic Monthly (January 1945). Collected in Nine Stories (New York: New Directions, 1947) and Nabokpv's Dozen (New York: Doubleday, 1958).
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3. Butterfly drawing below signature.
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1. "Double Talk," The New Yorker (23 June 1945). Retitled "Conversation Piece" when collected in Nine Stories.
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2. Adolf Hitler.
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3. This sentence added in holograph.
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1. Department of Entomology, Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station.
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1. Slavic Department, University of California, Berkeley.
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2. Probably English translations from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, The Russian Review (Spring 1945).
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3. Both by Tolstoy.
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1. VN's sister.
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2. In this connection it is interesting to note the bizarre comments of Professor Emeritus Frank Carpenter (who was not a lepidopterist), a colleague of whom VN had thought as a friend, and of certain other "wonderful people" whose cordiality toward Nabokov seems to have altered in inverse proportion to the latter's fame. In the July-August 1986 issue of Harvard Magazine, dedicated in part to reminiscences of Nabokov's entomological work at Harvard, Carpenter is quoted as saying, with a soupçon of patronizing envy: "He was seriously interested in butterflies, but the level of his interest was that which we find in the majority of amateurs. Of course, within two or three species of the so-called Blues, he obviously knew what he was doing ... It's an Old World tradition, particularly in the wealthy families...." Assistant Professor Deane Bowers, current curator of lepidoptera at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, clarifies matters by explaining in the same article, that, while he published in professional journals, Nabokov was not a professional scientist only in a strictly academic sense: he was not armed with a Ph.D. in biology and "didn't work full-time in entomology." He did invent a radically new paradigm for the classification of an entire group of Blues, and his scientific approach in general, ahead of its time in certain ways, has gained increasing respect against a background of changing scientific perspectives. A splendid exhibit entitled "Nabokov's Butterflies" has subsequently been mounted at Harvard, and a collection of VN's entomological studies will be published in France. DN.
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3. References, veiled of necessity, to the obstacles of Iron-Curtain censorship and retribution.
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4. VN's brother Sergey, who died in a German concentration camp.
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5. Rostislav, son of VN's sister Olga.
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6. Evgeniya Konstantinovna Hofeld (1884–1957), governess of VN's sisters Olga and Elena from 1914 on, who had accompanied the family to Prague. She, VN's mother, and his sister Olga were to remain there until their deaths.
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7. Yosif V. Hessen.
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8. Nina Dmitrievna Kolomeytsev, VN's aunt.
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9. Nikolay Nikolaevich Kolomeytsev, admiral, husband of Nina Dmitrievna.
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10. Natalia Alekseevna Nabokov, wife of Nikolay Dmitrievich Nabokov, VN's first cousin.
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11. Aleksey Apukhtin, a plump society poet.
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12. Translated from Russian by DN, with a few deletions for personal reasons.
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1. Rector of Christ Church, Cambridge, Mass.
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1. Evgeniya Konstantinovna Hofeld.
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2. VN's cousin, composer Nicholas Nabokov.
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3. Final paragraph in Russian.
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1. "A Reporter at Large: The Crown versus William Joyce" (29 September 1945).
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2. "A Reporter at Large: Stuff of Dreams" (5 January 1946).
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3. Wolcott Gibbs, "Outline of Victoria" (15 December 1945).
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4. Stuart Little (New York & London: Harper, 1945).
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1. Tyutchev's poem "Last Love." English translation by VN. Copyright © 1944 Vladimir Nabokov.
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2. Original in English.
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3. Original in English.
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4. Nicholas Nabokov.
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5. Soviet general during World War II.
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6. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. The first of several live and studio recordings that VN made at Harvard over the years, material from which was issued on cassette in 1988 by the Harvard Poetry Room. DN.
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2. Bend Sinister.
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3. An allusion to Iron-Curtain censorship and the perilous consequences for a Prague recipient of such material. DN.
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4. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Bend Sinister.
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2. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Editor at Doubleday.
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2. Conclusive Evidence—A Memoir (New York: Harper, 1951); retitled Speak, Memory.
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3. The work originally destined to bear the tide Solus Rex was never completed. Portions of it were published as two short stories, "Solus Rex" and "Ultima Thule," in Russian émigré journals in 1940 and 1942, and in English, translated by VN and DN, in A Russian Beauty (1973). "Solus Rex", as used here, was also a working title for Bend Sinister, which Holt published in 1947.
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1. Poet, at that time employed as an editor at Henry Holt.
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2. See 22 September letter to Kenneth D. McCormick. VN's novel in progress was Lolita in its earliest stages.
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1. Of the American Society for the Study of Russian Culture.
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1. Chief, Radio Program Branch, International Broadcasting Division, Department of State.
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1. Bend Sinister.
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1. The "bird" is drawn from a popular jingle that was improvised upon for various festive occasions and probably refers to a gift sent for VN's birthday. DN.
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2. "To Prince S.M. Kachurin," published in VN's English translation in Poems and Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).
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3. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. President of Wellesley College.
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1. Chairman, Department of Romance Literature, Cornell University.
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1. "Portrait of My Uncle," The New Yorker (3 January 1948); collected in Conclusive Evidence.
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2. Signed with butterfly drawing.
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1. Division of Literature, Cornell University
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1. Lapel emblem of the Légion d'Honneur.
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1. Infantry Journal, Washington, D.C.
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1. The son of VN's sister Olga did not emigrate.
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1. College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University.
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1. Literary agent in London.
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1. The project was dropped. Bend Sinister appeared in German as Das Bastardzeichen, trans. Dieter E. Zimmer (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1962).
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&nbs
p; 2. This sentence in holograph.
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1. On 30 September Weeks declined a section of Conclusive Evidence for the Atlantic Monthly and reproached VN for reserving his best work for the New Yorker.
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1. Editor at Harper & Brothers.
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2. VN did not receive the fellowship.
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3. End of letter missing in carbon copy.
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1. Chairman of the Cornell Division of Literature.
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1. Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker.
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2. "Portrait of my Mother," The New Yorker (9 April 1949). Collected in Conclusive Evidence.
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3. Final twelve words are in holograph.
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4. Holograph note in Russian at bottom of copy.
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1. On the staff of the New York Times Book Review.
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1. Editor at Alfred A. Knopf.
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2. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, 1927; republished by Knopf in 1949.
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1. Review of Sartre's La Nausée, New Times Book Review (24 April 1949).
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1. Editor of Partisan Review.
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2. Not separately published; incorporated in VN's edition of The Song of Igor's Campaign (1960).
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3. Partisan Review (September 1949). Collected in Conclusive Evidence.
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1. Published in edited form by Life, 27 (5 December 1949).
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2. A reference to Hieronymus Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Delights." DN.
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1. The New Yorker (ii February 1950). Collected in Conclusive Evidence.
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2. "Notes and Comments," The New 1Yorker (26 November 1949). An unsigned fable by E. B. White about international relations.
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1. Conclusive Evidence.
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1. Editor at Viking Press.
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2. VN's projected translation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; VN relinquished the project in April after he was hospitalized.
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1. The New Yorker (27 January 1951). Collected in Poems (1959) and Poems and Problems (1971).
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2. "From Glen Lake to Restricted Rest." The last two words refer to the practice of refusing accommodations to Jews.
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3. See 24 March 1950 letter to White.
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