Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977
Page 58
[back]
***
4. Gore Vidal.
[back]
***
1. Nabokov: His Life in Part (New York: Viking, 1977).
[back]
***
1. View of Venice (Ivrea, Italy: Olivetti, 1972).
[back]
***
1. London: Thames & Hudson, 1973.
[back]
***
1. Translated from Russian by DN.
[back]
***
1. Editor of The National Review.
[back]
***
2. There had been a serious fire at the Buckleys' residence of Rougemont, near Gstaad.
[back]
***
3. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
[back]
***
1. Editor-in-Chief, McGraw-Hill.
[back]
***
2. Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975).
[back]
***
1. See DN's review of Field's The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. "Did He Really Call His Mum Lolita?" London Observer (26 April 1987).
[back]
***
1. Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the University of Kansas; later editor of the Nabokovian.
[back]
***
2. A Russian translation of Remain Rolland's Colas Breugnon (1922).
[back]
***
3. Parker had asked if VN was aware of other Russian translations of Alice.
[back]
***
1. Look at the Harlequins!
[back]
***
2. Translated from Russian by DN.
[back]
***
1. Of Chadbourne, Parke, Whiteside, & Wolff, New York attorneys at law.
[back]
***
2. VN's position was in accord with American common-law copyright and has been upheld by the courts in the case involving Ian Hamilton's biography of J. D. Salinger.
[back]
***
1. Parker's interview with VN was not published.
[back]
***
2. The words for "seed" and "family"—spelled and pronounced differently in Russian—can both be transliterated into English as "semya," an error analogous, for instance, to translating the English expression "peace on earth" into another language as "a story [piece] about earth." DN.
[back]
***
3. Charles Moser, "The Problem of the Igor Tale," Canadian-American Slavic Studies (Summer 1973).
[back]
***
4. Look, at the Harlequins!
[back]
***
1. VN had been awarded the National Medal for Literature.
[back]
***
1. Editor of the Boston University Journal.
[back]
***
2. German comic-strip characters.
[back]
***
1. On 30 November Updike wrote congratulating VN on Strong Opinions.
[back]
***
1. Russian novelist and Nobel laureate, now exiled.
[back]
***
2. Solzhenitsyn had spontaneously recommended VN for the Nobel Prize.
[back]
***
3. Solzhenitsyn replied warmly, saying that fate had brought them both to Switzerland, and would make it possible for them to meet. The Nabokovs invited him, but, through an odd misunderstanding, the encounter never took place. DN.
[back]
***
4. Translated from Russian by DN.
[back]
***
1. Editor, New York (Times Magazine.
[back]
***
1. Executive Chairman, National Book Committee.
[back]
***
1. Published 26 May 1974.
[back]
***
2. Dissident writer who accused Soviet authorities of imprisoning dissidents in mental hospitals.
[back]
***
1. Slippers.
[back]
***
2. Note accompanying proofs for Look at the Harlequins!. See "On Revisiting Father's Room," Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quennell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
[back]
***
1. Directeur Littéraire, Librairie Arthème Fayard.
[back]
***
1. Ludmila A. Foster, "Nabokov in Russian Émigré Criticism," A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Carl R. Proffer (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1974), pp. 42–53.
[back]
***
1. A story by VN.
[back]
***
2. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories.
[back]
***
3. The 63-word postscript has been omitted.
[back]
***
1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
[back]
***
1. No VN interview appeared in the French edition of Playboy.
[back]
***
1. Leningrad Division of the Union of Writers of the USSR.
[back]
***
2. Vladimir Rafailovich Maramzin, writer of short fiction, was arrested in Leningrad for "anti-Soviet activity." He emigrated in 1975.
[back]
***
1. Président Directeur Général, Librairie Arthème Fayard.
[back]
***
2. My English equivalent of a French verb coined by VN for the occasion, referring to Chahine's difficulties with time limits. DN.
[back]
***
3. Translated from French by DN.
[back]
***
1. Correspondent for Time-Life.
[back]
***
2. James Salter, "An Old Magician Named Nabokov Writes and Lives in Splendid Exile," People (17 March 1975).
[back]
***
Tyrants Destroyed had a gold-colored dust jacket.
[back]
***
1. Of Joseph S. Iseman, law firm.
[back]
***
1. Look at the Harlequins! had been short-listed for the National Book Award; the award went jointly to Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and Thomas Williams's The Hair of Harold Roux. VN's speech has not been located.
[back]
***
2. New York: Random House, 1973; "A Woman Reading Pascal" was not published.
[back]
***
1. VN's fiftieth-anniversary greeting to Vera Nabokov on 2" x 4" section cut from a checked index card, perhaps attached to a present, and illustrated with a beautiful iridescent butterfly. DN.
[back]
***
2. Translated from Russian by DN.
[back]
***
1. Of the New York Times Magazine.
[back]
***
2. New York Times Magazine (27 July 1975).
[back]
***
1. Father erred. He meant Varlaam, the other of the pair of monks in Pushkin's Boris Godunov. Varlaam, who presumably cannot read, makes a supreme effort to decipher an ukase being read aloud by the fleeing Grigori (the future false Dmitri) who has volunteered his services when it turns out that the police who have arrived in a border tavern in pursuit of him are also illiterate. Grigori substitutes Varlaam's description for his own to save his skin. Varlaam has no choice but to snatch the thing and do it himself, as VN said he would do, in extremis, with Ada. It is a pity he did not live to do it. DN.
[back]
***
&nbs
p; 2. Richard Poirier's review of Look at the Harlequins! (New )br Times Book Review, 13 October 1974) speculated that the character Osip Oksman was drawn from Nicholas Otsup, a Russian émigré poet and editor in Paris. Struve's letter of correction (New York Times Book Review, 3 November 1974) also noted that there was a Pushkin scholar named Julian Oksman.
[back]
***
3. Novel by H. G. Wells, 1896.
[back]
***
1. Of the Karner Blue Project, Xerces Society, Cornell University; VN was a member of the Xerces Society.
[back]
***
1. Nine words deleted.
[back]
***
1. Of the New Times Sunday Magazine. On 6 June Collins proposed "the ultimate interview": VN interviewing VN. Although the Times agreed to VN's conditions, the project did not reach fruition.
[back]
***
1. VN had received a Playboy Editorial Award for his story "The Admiralty Spire."
[back]
***
1. British novelist, poet, and critic Wain had invited VN to contribute to a volume of essays on Edmund Wilson.
[back]
***
2. "The Original of Laura." Uncompleted and unpublished.
[back]
***
1. "The Original of Laura."
[back]
***
2. Translated from Russian by DN.
[back]
***
1. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Arctic explorer and Curator of Polar material at Dartmouth College.
[back]
***
Paintings and photographs by Graham Ovenden.
[back]
***
1. President, Harvard University.
[back]
***
1. By Hugh Honour (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
[back]
***
2. Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship.
[back]
***
1. Russian writer Sasha Sokolov, author of School for Fools.
[back]
***
1. Of the New Times Bool( Review.
[back]
***
2. "Authors' Authors," New Times Book Review (5 December 1976).
[back]
***
The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
[back]
***
1. Published with editorial alterations in "Reputations Revisited," Times Literary Supplement (21 January 1977).
[back]
***
1. There is no reply from Leonard in the VN Archive.
[back]
***
1. Sent for Mother's Day.
[back]
***
2. Diminutive for the Russian word for "Tribune." See preceding letter.
[back]
***
3. Translated from Russian by DN. This was the last letter DN received from his father.
[back]