Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Although there could be found a number of decent elderly persons among the Russian monarchists in Berlin and Paris, there were no original minds or influential personalities among them. The stauncher reactionaries, Black Hundred groups, votaries of new and better dictatorships, shady journalists who claimed that Kerenski's real name was Kirschbaum, budding Nazis, blooming Fascists, pogromystics, and agents-provocateurs, remained on the lurid fringe of Russian expatriation and were not representative in any way of the liberal intelligentsia, which was the backbone and marrow of emigre culture, a fact deliberately played down by Soviet historians; and no wonder: it was that liberal cultural core, and certainly not the crude and ambiguous activities of extreme rightists, that formed a genuine anti-Bolshevist opposition (still working today), and it was people like my father who pronounced the first and final verdict on the Soviet police state.

  The two sinister ruffians who attacked P. N. Milyukov at a public lecture in Berlin on March 28, 1922, had planned to assassinate him, not my father; but it was my father who shielded his old friend from their pistol bullets and while vigorously knocking down one of the assailants was fatally shot by the other.

  I wish to submit that at a time when in so many eastern countries history has become a joke, this precise beam of light upon a precious detail may be of some help to the next investigator.

  5 TO THE EDITOR OF ENCOUNTER

  published February, 1967

  Sir,

  I welcome Freud's «Woodrow Wilson» not only because of its comic appeal, which is great, but because that surely must be the last rusty nail in the Viennese Quack's coffin.

  6 TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW STATESMAN

  Pushkin and Byron

  published November 17, 1967

  Sir,

  Mr. Pritchett (NS, 27 Oct.) says he would have liked Mr. Magarshack to tell him in what language Pushkin read Byron and other English authors. I do not know Mr. Magarshack's work or works, but I do know that since neither he, nor anybody else, could answer Mr. Pritchett without dipping into me, a vicious spiral is formed with an additional coy little coil supplied by Mr. Prichett's alluding to the «diverting» article I published in Encounter (Feb. 1966). If, however, your reviewer would care to combine the diverting with the instructive I suggest he consult the pages (enumerated in the index to my work on Eugene Onegin under Pushkiniana, English) wherein 1 explain, quite clearly, that most Russians of Pushkin's time, including Pushkin himself, read English authors in French versions.

  By a pleasing coincidence the same issue of your journal contains another item worth straightening out. Mr. Desmond MacNamara, writing on a New Zealand novel, thinks that there should be coined a male equivalent of «nymphet» in the sense I gave it. He is welcome to my «faunlet», first mentioned in 1955 (Lolita, Chapter 5). How time flies! How attention flags!

  7

  Answer cabled on March 13, 1969, to William Honon who had asked me, for quotation in Esquire magazine, what I would like to hear an astronaut say when landing on the moon for the first time.

  Published in the July, 1969 issue of Esquire

  I WANT A LUMP IN HIS THROAT TO OBSTRUCT THE WISECRACK

  8

  Answer cabled July 3, 1969, to Thomas Hamilton, who had asked me, for publication in The New York Times, what the moon landing means to me. Published *** 1969, with a disastrous misprint in the seventh word.

  «TREADING THE SOIL OF THE MOON PALPATING ITS PEBBLES TASTING THE PANIC AND SPLENDOR OF THE EVENT FEELING IN THE PIT OF ONES STOMACH THE SEPARATION^ FROM TERRA THESE FORM THE MOST ROMANTIC SENSATION AN EXPLORER HAS EVER KNOWN»

  9 TO THE EDITOR OF Time MAGAZINE

  published on January 18, 1971

  I find highly objectionable the title of the piece («Profit without Honor», December 21, 1970) on the musical adaptation of Lolita as well as your sermonet on the scruples that I once happened to voice concerning its filming (« . . . to make a real twelve-year-old girl play such a part would be sinful and immoral. . . ). When cast in the title role of Kubrick's neither very sinful nor very immoral picture, Miss Lyon was a wellchaperoned young lady, and I suspect that her Broadway successor will be as old as she was at the time. Fourteen is not twelve, 1970 is not 1958, and the sum of $150,000 you mention is not correct.

  10 TO JOHN LEONARD, ЕDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  published on November 7, 1971

  I seek the shelter of your columns to help me establish the truth in the following case:

  A kind correspondent Xeroxed and mailed me pp. 154162 referring to my person as imagined by Edmund Wilson in his recent work Upstate.* [* Upstate. Records and Recollections of Northern New York. 386 pages. Farrar. Straus and Giroux.]

  Since a number of statements therein wobble on the brink of libel, I must clear up some matters that might mislead trustful readers.

  First of all, the «miseries, horrors, and handicaps» that he assumes I was subjected to during forty years before we first met in New York are mostly figments of his warped fancy. He has no direct knowledge of my past. He has not even bothered to read my Speak, Memory, the records and recollections of a happy expatriation that began practically on the day of my birth. The method he favors is gleaning from my fiction what he supposes to be actual, «real-life» impressions and then popping them back into my novels and considering my characters in that inept light — rather like the Shakespearian scholar who deduced Shakespeare's mother from the plays and then discovered allusions to her in the very passages he had twisted to manufacture the lady. What surprises me, however, is not so much Wilson's aplomb as the fact that in the diary he kept while he was my guest in Ithaca he pictures himself as nursing feelings and ideas so vindictive and fatuous that if expressed they should have made me demand his immediate departure.

  A few of the ineptitudes I notice in these pages of Upstate are worth considering here. His conviction that my insistence on basic similarities between Russian and English verse is «a part of [my] inheritance of [my] father . . . champion of a constitutional monarchy for Russia after the liritish model» is too silly to refute; and his muddleheaded and ill-informed description of Russian prosody only proves that he remains organically incapable of reading, let alone understanding, my work on the subject. Equally inconsistent with facts — and typical of his Philistine imagination — is his impression that at parties in our Ithaca house my wife «concentrated» on me and grudged «special attention to anyone else».

  A particularly repulsive blend of vulgarity and naivete is reflected in his notion that I must have suffered «a good deal of humiliation», because as the son of a liberal noble I was not «accepted (!) by the strictly illiberal nobility» — where? when, good God? — and by whom exactly, by my uncles aunts? or by the great grim boyars haunting a plebeian's fancy?

  I am aware that my former friend is in poor^health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins. Indeed, the publication of those «old diaries» (doctored, I hope, to fit the present requirements of what was then the future), in which living persons are but the performing poodles of the diarist's act, should be subject to a rule or law that would require some kind of formal consent from the victims of conjecture, ignorance, and invention.

  11 TO JOHN LEONARD, EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  published March 5, 1972

  Puzzled queries from correspondents oblige me to react, with some delay, to the tasteless parody posing as letters (New York Times Book Review, Jan. 16, IV72) from «Diron Frieders» and «Mark Hamburg» which I take to be the phony names of one or two facetious undergraduates judging by the style and the piffle. I think, Sir, you would do a service to Mr. Wilson as well as to truth if you were to point out in your next issue that neither he nor 1 composed those letters.

  I might add that I detected in them only one nice point, namely the suggestion that Schadenfreude, as used by Mr. Wilson in regard to a special characteristic of mine, really means «hatred of Freud» —
but that is poetic justice, not wit.

  ARTICLES

  4 On Hodasevich (1939)

  2 Sartre's First Try (1949)

  3 Pounding the Clavichord (1963)

  4 Reply to My Critics (1966)

  5 Lolita and Mr. Girodias (1967)

  6 On Adaptation (1969)

  7 Anniversary Notes (1970)

  8 Rowe's Symbols (1971)

  9 Inspiration (1972)

  10 Five Lepidoptera Papers (19521953, 1970)

  44 On Some Inaccuracies in Klots' Field Guide (1952)

  12 Butterfly Collecting in Wyoming, 1952 (1953)

  13 Audubon's Butterflies, Moths and Other Studies (1952)

  14 L. C. Higgins and N. D. Riley (1970)

  ON HODASEV1CH

  (Sovremennyya zapiski LIX, Paris 1939)

  1 his poet, the greatest Russian poet ot our time, Pushkin's literary descendant in Tyutchev's line of succession, shall remain the pride of Russian poetry as long as its last memory lives. What makes his genius particularly striking is that it matured in the years of our literature's torpescence, when the Bolshevist era neatly divided poets into established optimists and demoted pessimists, endemic hearties and exiled hypochondriacs; a classification which, incidentally, leads to an instructive paradox: inside Russia the dictate acts from outside; outside Russia, it acts from within. The will of the government which implicitly demands a writer's affectionate attention toward a parachute, a farm tractor, a Red Army soldier, or the participant in some polar venture (i.e., toward this or that externality of the world) is naturally considerably more powerful than the injunction of exile, addressed to man's inner world. The latter precept is barely sensed by the weak and is scorned by the strong. In the nineteen twenties it induced nostalgic rhymes about St. Petersburg's rostral columns, and now, in the late thirties, it has evolved rhymed religious concerns, not always deep but always honest. Art, authentic art, whose object lies next to art's source (that is in lofty and desert places — and certainly not in the overpopulated vale of soulful effusions) has degenerated in our midst to the level, alas, of remedial lyricism; and although one understands that private despair cannot help seeking a public path for its easement, poetry has nothing to do with it: the bosom of the Church or that of the Seine is more competent in these matters. The public path, whatever it looks like, is, artistically, always a paltry one, precisely because of its being public. If, however, one finds hard to imagine a poet, in the confines of Russia, refusing to bend under the yoke (such as, for example, declining to translate a Caucasian poetaster's jingles) and behaving rashly enough to put the muse's liberty above his own, one should expect to find more easily in emigre Russia plucky loners who would not wish to unite and pool their poetical preoccupations in a sort ot communistery ot the spirit.

  Even genius does not save one in Russia; in exile, one is saved by genius alone. No matter how difficult Hodasevich's last years were, no matter how sorely the banality of an emigre's lot irked him, no matter, too, how much the good old indifference of fellow mortals contributed to his mortal extinction, Hodasevich is safely enshrined in timeless Russia. Indeed, he himself was ready to admit, through the hiss of his bilious banter, through the «cold and murk» of the days predicted by Blok,* that he occupied a special position: the blissful solitude of a height others could not attain.

  Here I have no intention of hitting bystanders with a swing of the thurible.**

  *In verses written by Blok on the eve of our era:

  If only you knew, oh children you,

  The cold and murk of the coming days

  **The metaphor is borrowed from a poem by Baratynski (1800 — 1844) accusing critics of lauding Lermontov (18141841) on the occasion of his death with the unique object of disparaging living poets. Incidentally, the dry little notice accorded to Baratynski in Pavlenkov's encyclopedia (St. Petersburg, 1913) ends with the marvelous misprint: «Complete Works, 1984».

  A few poets of the emigr6 generation are still on their way up and, who knows, may reach the summits of art — if only they do not fritter away life in a second-rate Paris of their own which sails by with a slight list in the mirrors of taverns without mingling in any way with the French Paris, a motionless and impenetrable town. Hodasevich seemed to have sensed in his very fingers the branching influence of the poetry he created in exile and therefore felt a certain responsibility for its destiny, a destiny which irritated him more than it saddened him. The glum notes of cheap verse struck him more as a parody than as the echo of his collection Evropeyskaya Noch'(European Night), where hitterness, anger, angels, the gulfs of adjacent vowels — everything, in short, was genuine, unique, and quite unrelated to the current moods which clouded the verse of many of those who were more or less his disciples.

  To speak of his masterstvo, Meisterschaft, «mastery», i.e. «technique», would be meaningless and even blasphemous in relation to poetry in general, and to his own verse in a sharply specific sense, since the notion of «mastery», which automatically supplies its own quotation marks, turns thereby into an appendage, a shadow demanding logical compensation in the guise of any positive quantity, and this easily brings us to that peculiar, soulful attitude toward poetry in result of which nothing remains of squashed art but a damp spot or tear stain. This is condemnable not because even the most purs sanglots require a perfect knowledge of prosody, language, verbal equipoise; and this is also absurd not because the poetaster intimating in slatternly verse that art dwindles to nought in the face of human suffering is indulging in coy deceit (comparable, say, to an undertaker's murmuring against human life because of its brevity); no: the split perceived by the brain between the thing and its fashioning is condemnable and absurd because it vitiates the essence of what actually (whatever you call the thing — «art», «poetry», «beauty») is inseparable from all its mysteriously indispensable properties. In other words, the perfect poem (at least three hundred examples of which can be found in Russian literature) is capable of being examined from all angles by the reader in search of its idea or only its sentiment, or only the picture, or only the sound (many things of that kind can be thought up, from «instrumentation» to «imaginization»), but all this amounts to a random selection of an entity's facet, none of which would deserve, really, a moment of our attention (nor could it of course induce in us any thrill except, maybe, obliquely, in making us recall some other «entity», somebody's voice, a room, a night), had not the poem possessed that resplendent independence in respect of which the term «masterly technique» rings as insultingly as its antonym «winning sincerity».

  What I am saying here is far from being new; yet one is impelled to repeat it when speaking of Hodasevich. There exists not quite exact verse (whose very blurriness can have an appeal of its own like that of lovely nearsighted eyes) which makes a virtue of approximation by the poet's striving toward it with the same precision in selecting his words as would pass for «mastery» in more picturesque circumstances. Compared to those artful blurrings, the poetry of Hodasevich may strike the gentle reader as an over-polishing of form — I am deliberately using this unappetizing epithet. But the whole point is that his poetry — or indeed any authentic poetry — does not require any definition in terms of «form.''

  I find it most odd myself that in this article, in this rapid inventory of thoughts prompted by Hodasevich's death, I seem to imply a vague non-recognition of his genius and engage in vague polemics with such phantoms as would question the enchantment and importance of his poetry. Fame, recognition — all that kind of thing is a phenomenon of rather dubious shape which death alone places in true perspective. I am ready to assume that there might have

  I seen quite a few people who when reading with interest the weekly critique that Hodasevich wrote for Vozrozhdenie* (and it should be admitted that his reviews, with all their wit and allure, were not on the level of his poetry, for they lucked somehow its throb and magic) simply did not know that the reviewer was also a poet. I should not be surprised if this person or
that finds Hodasevich's posthumous fame inexplicable at first blush. Furthermore, he published no poems lately — and readers are forgetful, and our literary critics are too excited and preoccupied by evanescent topical themes to have the time or occasion to remind the public of important matters. Be it as it may, all is finished now: the bequeathed gold shines on a shelf in full view of the future, whilst the gold-miner has left for the region from where, perhaps, a taint something reaches the cars ot good poets, penetrating our being with the beyond's fresh breath and conferring upon art that mystery which more than anything characterizes its essence.

  Well, so it goes, yet another plane of life has been slightly displaced, yet another habit — the habit (one's own) of (another person's) existence — has been broken. There is no consolation, if one starts to encourage the sense of loss by one's private recollections of a brief, brittle, human image that melts like a hailstone on a window sill. Let us turn to the poems.

  * An emigre daily in Paris before World War II.

  (This article, signed «V. Sirin», the penname I used in the twenties and thirties, in Berlin and Paris, appeared in the emigre literary magazine Sovremennyya zapiski, LIX, 1939, Paris. I have clung closely to my tortuous Russian text in the present translation into English.)