by Alex Beam
As for reviews by distinguished commentators, Nabokov declared:
I would like to add that I do not believe that a distinguished critic’s review (or indeed any review) helps to sell a book. Readers are not sheep, and not every pen (pun) tempts them. Some of my best flops had been ushered in by extravagant (albeit well deserved) praise from eminent critics. The only thing that is of some help to the commercial success of a book (apart from topicality or sexuality) is a sustained advertising campaign, lots of ads everywhere.5
“I am not interested in the question of Edmund Wilson’s writing or not writing about my EO,” he concluded.
Shortly after the book was released in June, reviews started to appear. The New York Times loved it twice, in an appreciative squib by the legendary Moscow correspondent Harrison Salisbury (“He has given Pushkin’s wondrous lines the glow and sparkle of their Russian original”), and in a lengthy Sunday excursus by Ernest Simmons, the Russian studies stalwart, (“Nabokov is peculiarly attuned to the music and mystery of Pushkin’s verse”). In a succinct but pointed Los Angeles Times review (“Nabokov Fails as a Translator”), the scholar Stephen Nichols evinced little use for this “voluminous compilation of fact and prejudice.” The unnamed, clearly fatigued Boston Globe reviewer praised the work’s “exhaustiveness”: “If anything more remains to be uncovered about Pushkin and Onegin it will be a surprise.”
Nabokov cared little for the idle praise of nobodies. “Poor Simmons…is no scholar, and his knowledge of Russian has always been very patchy,” he wrote to Bollingen. Salisbury is “a well-meaning journalist,” but not someone to be taken very seriously, and so on.
Nabokov’s editors were hoping against hope that a prominent Edmund Wilson review might move some product, but Nabokov was chary, and suspicious. “The Foundation keeps looking forward to the Edmund Wilson article,” he wrote in a 1964 letter,
but as I have mentioned before his Russian is primitive, and his knowledge of Russian literature gappy and grotesque. (He is a very old friend of mine, and I do hope our quarter-of-a-century correspondence in the course of which I attempted not quite successfully to explain to him such matters as the mechanism of Russian—and English—verse will be published some day.)6
—
NOTA BENE: Edmund Wilson knew something about Alexander Pushkin, and about his poetry. The world-famous, anathematizing Vladimir Nabokov would later make Wilson out to be the dunce nonpareil of Russian letters, but that wasn’t the case at all. We saw Wilson trying to puzzle out some Pushkin in his Odessa hospital bed in 1935, and two years later, on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death, he published a lengthy tribute, “In Honor of Pushkin,” in The New Republic. “I don’t think you can give Pushkin too much space,” Wilson wrote to the magazine’s literary editor, Malcolm Cowley. “He was the greatest poet of the nineteenth century.”7
Wilson’s 1937 article is quite smart. It analyzes Eugene Onegin at some length, and places Pushkin right where he belongs, alongside Keats (“He can make us see and hear things as Keats can, but his range is very much greater”) and Dante, and above many others (“much more vigorous than Jane Austen”). Wilson noted that Pushkin’s work wasn’t widely appreciated outside Russia because it was “particularly difficult to translate.”
In the very thick of the two men’s friendship, Wilson sent Nabokov the revised edition of his collection, The Triple Thinkers, which included the New Republic Pushkin essay. Nabokov pounced on what he called Wilson’s “dreadful mistake” in retelling the crucial duel between Onegin and the feckless poet Vladimir Lensky. Wilson described the protagonists starting the encounter back-to-back, and walking away from each other, as “popularized by movies and cartoons,” according to Nabokov. “This variant did not exist in Pushkin’s Russia,” Nabokov scolded. The actual format was the French “duel à volonté” with the combatants facing each other from about thirty paces apart. Wilson corrected his account in later editions of the book.8
In his early forties, with the memory of Russia and the timbre of the language still fresh in his ear, Wilson was besotted by Pushkin. He loved Babette Deutsch’s and Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s 1937 Onegin translation, telling them, “It was a heroic feat to have carried it through in the original meter and rhyme scheme!”9 Wilson even dreamed of Pushkin. In a 1937 letter to his longtime friend, the poet Louise Bogan, he wrote: “I had a dream the other night in which I thought I was reading a poem by Pushkin about a trout: he addressed the trout as ‘little fox,’ which seemed to me very apt.”10
A few years later Wilson wrote a second essay on Pushkin, for The Atlantic Monthly, praising “the texture of Pushkin’s language and its marvelous adaptation to whatever it describes….The timing in Pushkin is perfect. He never for a moment bores you,” Wilson wrote, “yet he covers an immense amount of ground.”11 This appeared in 1943, after he and Nabokov had known each other for three years. Was Wilson cribbing from his Russian friend? One critic thought so. Stanley Edgar Hyman accused Wilson of using “many of the specific insights of Vladimir Nabokov, whose translations he has been working with for several years.” In a 1948 book Hyman added that “Wilson is quite possibly indebted to Nabokov for the remarkable and quite uncharacteristic, detailed analysis of musicality in a poem by Pushkin he printed in his Pushkin article in the Atlantic Monthly, an analysis that seems to represent a remarkable acquaintance with the Russian language on Wilson’s part and seems at the same time very characteristic of Nabokov.”12
All this to say that Wilson must have been genuinely interested in what Nabokov proposed to do with, or to, Onegin. He finally got his hands on the book after its publication in June 1964. Writing from Wellfleet in June, he told the New York Review editor Barbara Epstein that he planned to spend the summer with the book in Talcottville, “go through it very carefully,” and have his review ready in a few months. “Just looking through it,” he wrote, “I can see that Volodya’s translation is almost as much open to objection as Arndt’s. It is full of flat writing, outlandish words, and awkward phrases. And some of the things he says about the Russian language are inaccurate.”13
Wilson’s long-awaited, 6,600-word review, “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” finally appeared in July 1965, more than a year after Onegin’s publication. It remains a classic of its genre, the genre being an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job, the yawning, massive load of boiling pitch that inevitably ends up scalding the grinning fiend pouring the hot oil over the battlement as much as it harms the intended victim.
Setting the tone for the ensuing seven-plus years of malicious rhetoric, Wilson reminded New York Review readers that he and Nabokov were “personal friends” and that he remained “an admirer of much of his work.” Recalling that Nabokov had tap-danced over Arndt in those very pages, Wilson wrote that Nabokov’s own Onegin ventures “have been more disastrous than those of Arndt’s heroic effort.”
How so? Let us count the ways.
· Recondite vocabulary: “The only characteristic Nabokov trait that one recognizes in this uneven and sometimes banal translation is the addiction to rare and unfamiliar words.” Examples, please? Wilson is glad you asked: “rememorating, producement, curvate, habitude, rummers, familistic, gloam, dit, shippon and scrab,” to name just a few. (Did he miss “catopromantic”?) Wilson inquired, reasonably, why Nabokov had translated “monkeys” as “sapajous,” “langour” as “mollitude,” and what in heaven’s name is “stuss”? “Nabokov’s aberrations in this line are a good deal more objectionable than anything I have found in Arndt,” Wilson concluded.
· Broken English: “I have never seen the word loadened before, and I had found, on looking it up…that it is not a past participle, as Nabokov makes it.” “The past of dwell is dwelt not dwelled”; “ ‘Remind one about me’ is hardly English.”
And what, Wilson asked, is Tatiana supposed to be saying here, as she bids farewell to her country home (7.32)?: “Farewell
pacific sites/Farewell secluded refuge!/Shall I see you?” “Such passages sound like the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English,” according to Wilson.
· I know Russian, too: Wilson launched what would become a multi-year debate about the gerund pochuya, which means “sniffing” or “smelling,” if you are a horse. Wilson rolled out seven different dictionaries*4 to buttress his insistence on “smelling.” (Nabokov had sniffed at Wilson’s horse “sniffing” in the footnote where he derided his former friend’s 1936 translation effort.) Nabokov translated the line as the “naggy having sensed the snow,” “an egregious example of his style at its most perversepedantic impossible,” according to Wilson. One’s heart goes out to the tired spines of the reference works in the two men’s respective homes, clearly in need of bibliorthopedic intervention.
· I know Russian, too, II: Several of Wilson’s friends, most notably his Wellfleet neighbor Nina Chavchavadze, warned him not to engage Nabokov on his home turf. Wilson’s Russian was fine, for an outlander, and yes, he doggedly burrowed into the appropriate reference works, but still. Nabokov doesn’t know the meaning of nyetu (“no,” or “none”), Wilson insisted. Nabokov errs when he writes that zloi (evil) is the only one-syllable adjective in Russian. What about—and Wilson named several others in current use. He accused Nabokov of muffing his explanation of the Russian e topped with a diaeresis, which is pronounced “yo.” (The classic example being the name Khrushchev, which Russians properly pronounce “Khroosh-CHYOFF,” or Potemkin, actually “Pot-YOM-kin.”)
Wilson is overextending himself here, to put it gently. But, in the manner of Napoleon’s favorite generals, he presses forward, nothing loath. Toujours l’audace!
“In a tedious and interminable appendix”—we are about 3,200 words into the critique by now—“Nabokov expounds a system of prosody, also invented by himself.” For a quarter century, each man had proclaimed himself to be an expert on the intricacies of scansion, pronunciation, and phonometrics, to borrow Arndt’s term, of Russian and English verse. “Edmund Wilson never did learn how the Russian stress system, metrics or prosody work,” Simon Karlinsky wrote long after both men were dead.14
Yet another theme: Nabokov longa, Pushkin brevis. Addressing Nabokov’s crazy tutorial on “racemosa,” Wilson wrote: “This is the Nabokov we know. The Nabokov who bores and fatigues by overaccumulation.” By contrast, “no poet surpasses Pushkin—not even Dante—for the speed, point and neatness of his narrative.”
“And now for the positive side,” Wilson wrote, with the end in sight. But the positive would have to wait. Instead Wilson chose to pull yet another bone out of the muck, a long-running dispute about Pushkin’s knowledge, or ignorance, of English. It’s an interesting question, because Pushkin was nothing if not Byronesque, and he once called Onegin “a novel in verse in the manner of Byron’s Don Juan,”15 which shares a discursive narrative style with its Russian counterpart. Nabokov dogmatically insisted that Pushkin didn’t know much English and had read Byron only in French, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Wilson noted that Pushkin’s notebooks quoted passages from, and whole English poems by, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, among others. “Nabokov himself notes that Pushkin had English books in his library, but asserts that he could not read them,” Wilson wrote. Another sticking point.*5
What about the positive side? “There is a good deal of excellent literary criticism” buried in Nabokov’s nineteen hundred pages, Wilson allowed. “When Nabokov is not being merely snide and silly but taking his subject seriously, he gives us excellent little essays.” Furthermore, Nabokov abhors talk of literary “schools,” Wilson wrote, and so do I.
It seemed inevitable that Wilson’s symphony of bile and sly diggery would build to a climactic crescendo, and it does. “There is a drama in [Nabokov’s] Eugene Onegin which is not Onegin’s drama,” Wilson concluded. “It is the drama of Nabokov himself attempting to correlate his English and his Russian sides.” “Not quite at home with Russia,” Nabokov, per Wilson, shows with his stilted literal translation of Onegin that “what he writes is not always really English.”
Poor Vladimir. An exile. An orphan. A stranger to two worlds, and in two languages. A Conrad manqué. Wilson was trafficking in precisely the kind of “human interest” twaddle that Nabokov reviled.
After reading Wilson’s piece at home in Montreux, Nabokov cabled Barbara Epstein in New York: “Please reserve space in next issue for my thunder.”
* * *
*1 Nabokov blissfully ignored the near-impossibility of scanning “racemose bird cherry” into iambic tetrameter, but never mind that. How did he translate cheryomuha in his Onegin? Nabokov devoted several pages of his “Commentary” to this (un)thorny question, again reviling the “harmful drudges,” the dictionarists, and even eschewing the “usually reliable [four volume, Vladimir] Dahl’s dictionary,” which calls the tree mahaleb. [Nabokov instead appealed to the most trusted lexicological source of all: himself. “I now formally introduce the simple and euphonious ‘racemosa,’ used as a noun and rhyming with ‘mimosa.’ ”
*2 Ivy League jurors were a novelty. The Library of Congress had awarded the prize until 1948, when it was bestowed on Ezra Pound, who had suffered a mental breakdown after being indicted for treason during World War II. The government exited the laurels-on-Parnassus business double-quick and handed it over to Bollingen.
*3 Many felt that Elizabeth Hardwick’s waspish 1959 Harper’s essay, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” set the table for The New York Review. Hardwick mercilessly mocked the “unaccountable sluggishness” and “torpor” of the Times’s book reviews. To illustrate the prevailing cluelessness, she quoted the Times reviewer Orville Prescott’s offhand dismissal of Nabokov’s runaway best seller: “Lolita is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately it is bad news.” Hardwick went on to write: “The condition of popular reviewing has become so listless, the effect of its agreeable judgments so enervating to the general reading public that the sly publishers of Lolita have tried to stimulate sales by quoting bad reviews.” (Hardwick and her then-husband Robert Lowell also cofounded the Review.)
*4 “…the small Müller-Boyanus dictionary and two others…Segal’s larger dictionary…Daum and Schenk’s Die Russischen Verben…The great Russian dictionary of V. I. Dahl…The Soviet Pushkin Dictionary.”
*5 Two recent Pushkin biographers agree with Wilson. David Bethea writes that “by approximately 1828…Pushkin’s English was sufficient to read both Byron and Shakespeare in the original.” T. J. Binyon concurs, noting that Pushkin had extensive contacts with English writers and translated English poetry for his magazine The Contemporary.
8
We Are All Pushkinists Now
And so it began. The exchanges, which endured after both men’s deaths, were achingly serious and gloriously silly, catnip for editors who liked sprightly “knocking copy,” as the British call disputatious texts. There was plenty of it, free for the asking. The rival campaigns evoke Marshal Kutuzov reeling his forces backward in defense of Moscow, only to rally them forward again, staggering, against Murat’s serried and exhausted Frenchmen.
When Nabokov wearied of exchanging blows in The New York Review, he staged a massive attack in Stephen Spender’s Encounter magazine, shortly to be exposed as a CIA front. (Which doubtless concerned Nabokov not one whit.) Arcane, brief-lived skirmishes erupted in the New Statesman, avidly read by both Nabokov and Wilson, and finally in The New York Times Book Review. Sooner or later a motley crew of 1960s eminentos—Anthony Burgess, Robert Lowell, V. S. Pritchett, Robert Graves, and Paul Fussell, among many others—dipped their oars in the roiled Sargasso of Pushkin criticism. A subject, it’s fair to say, about which most of them knew absolutely nothing.
Jeffrey Meyers aptly compares the Wilson-Nabokov hostilities to a carefully choreographed nineteenth-century duel, with its balletic rules. Wilson had fired his LePage pistol, stuffed full of raking shot, in July 1
965. Now Nabokov, like the prostrate Pushkin wounded by his enemy D’Anthès’s opening salvo, was entitled to return fire.
So in August the Review printed Nabokov’s suspiciously short reply, with a brief rejoinder from Wilson, along with six letters from readers, known and unknown. Professor Ernest Simmons popped up again, to point out that Nabokov had succeeded in translating a few of Pushkin’s verses into rhyming stanzas, and “might have succeeded brilliantly” had he honored the Onegin stanza form throughout. Writing from London, the renowned translator David Magarshack “warmly agreed…with Edmund Wilson’s views of Nabokov’s incompetence as a translator. In fact, his ‘translation’ of Eugene Onegin is a grotesque travesty of that great poem.” Magarshack was precisely the kind of mainstream translator Nabokov disdained. Suffice it to say that Magarshack did not title his classic 1968 translation of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground “Memoirs from a Mousehole,” which Nabokov regarded as a more accurate translation.
Comes now the thunder. Nabokov acceded to Wilson’s observation that the two men “are indeed old friends….In the 1940s, during my first decade in America, he was most kind to me in various matters.” A kindness that Nabokov felt had long since been repaid, partly in the form of free Russian lessons from the master:
A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse.