by Brian Boyd
In Montreux, Véra allowed me to come and go as I liked into room 69 and the unheated former laundry storeroom at the end of the corridor, which we made into the new manuscript room. There I arranged and catalogued everything Nabokov had kept after settling in Montreux—all the manuscripts on index cards, the typescripts, galleys, page proofs, editorial correspondence, and material from his early years, especially the albums his mother had lovingly compiled of his first fifteen years’ work as a writer. These had arrived in the 1960s from Prague, where his mother had died in 1939, by way of his sisters, one still in Prague, one now near him in Geneva.
I soon found in the Montreux archives first one, then two manuscripts of Volshebnik (The Enchanter), the novella that we might now call “The Original of Lolita,” which Nabokov had written in Russian in 1939 but been advised not to publish. After writing Lolita itself, he thought he had destroyed its Russian precursor but then rediscovered it and considered translating and publishing it in the wake of Lolita’s international success. But the manuscript had again been misplaced for decades when I re-rediscovered what would be published in 1985, in Dmitri’s translation, as The Enchanter.
Despite my free access to everything in the Montreux archive room and controlled access to the Library of Congress Nabokoviana, I could not see other materials that Véra guarded in her bedroom: Nabokov’s letters to his parents and to her, his diaries, and The Original of Laura. Véra knew that as well as sorting the archive for her I was gathering information for a bibliography. She did not know that old photostats—negatives, on paper now turned brown—of some of the letters from Nabokov to his parents were among the material I was sorting. I transcribed them painstakingly by holding their reversed script up to a mirror, but Nabokov had crossed out personal details on the photostats, made for Field’s inspection in 1970, and many letters were missing altogether. I kept pressing Véra for access to what I had not yet been able to see.
In 1981 Véra formally agreed to condone a biography project. In November I returned to Montreux to begin. Several months later, I discovered, at the bottom of a pile of otherwise empty boxes behind a cupboard in room 69, a cardboard box full of manuscripts of Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature from its origins to the twentieth century, all the material other than the authors (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov) taught in his Masterpieces of European Fiction course and featured in the 1981 Lectures on Russian Literature. Véra had always been perturbed that her husband’s lectures on Russian poetry could not be found. “Eureka!” I wrote in headline-size capitals on a note I left for her to find the next morning.
The material found in that box almost thirty years ago has still not been published. Part of the problem of dealing with Nabokov’s legacy is that it is so vast that it can be hard to know where to turn next. I have worked on subjects other than Nabokov for most of this millennium, but in preparing a paper for a Nabokov conference three years ago, I was sent back to my notes on the unpublished Russian lectures and immediately stumbled on a paragraph I could not resist transcribing and sending to Dmitri Nabokov:
When examining a writer and his work, three points of view interest me above all. Individual genius, the position his work holds in the historical evolution of artistic vision and the artist’s struggle against public opinion and the current ideas of his time. Such things as Realism and Romanticism and the rest of the lot mean nothing to me. Absolute objective reality cannot exist or rather cannot be apprehended by the human mind. It is the approximation to it that only matters; and the reality with which human genius deals, be it the buffalo which the caveman painted on a rock or the lullaby sung by an Indian squaw, is but a series of illusions becoming more and more vivid according to the artist’s power and his position in time. What must always be remembered is that the reality of the world as imagined and conveyed by a writer is but the individual reality of his individual world. When people find this or that writer’s world to be true to nature, as the saying goes, it means that either 1) the writer has adopted a popular point of view—and that is the way of all second-rate writers from [Virgil,] the minor poet of Rome[,] to Mr Hemingway of Spain, —or 2) that the writer has made the general public see the world in his own terms—and this is the way of all great writers from William Shakespeare to James Joyce.3
As I wrote to Dmitri, the passage, although crossed out by Nabokov, seems invaluable for anyone with an interest in him—or in literature—and deserves publication, along with the rest of these lectures. Dmitri agreed. (This and similar passages in these lectures in fact led me to formulate a new appreciation of the role that a belief in cultural evolution plays in Nabokov’s thought and artistic judgments; see chapter 14, “Nabokov’s Transition from Russian to English: Repudiation or Evolution?”) The subjects covered by these “new” Russian lectures run all the way from saints’ lives to Vladislav Khodasevich, whom Nabokov considered the greatest twentieth-century Russian poet. They cover the literary material that Nabokov knew best, that he devoured as a boy, that he studied at Cambridge, and that he was brought to Cornell to teach. In these lectures he opens up the whole range of Russian literature and injects all his passion and imagination into discussions of Pushkin or digressions on literature, art, and life like the one above.
By the time I unearthed this treasure, Véra had already let me see Nabokov’s diaries and his letters to his parents. But it was not until I returned to Montreux in the winter of 1984–85, after she had seen the first chapters of my biography and realized she would not regret trusting me, that she allowed me oblique access to Nabokov’s letters to her. She would not let me read or hold them, but sat at the small round dining table in her sitting room—the one where she and Vladimir were photographed playing chess—while I sat opposite. In her eighties, still coughing and husky from a recent cold, she read aloud from the letters into my tape recorder, session after session, skipping endearments and anything else she thought too personal, announcing “propusk” (“omission”) at each cut. Now these splendid letters are being produced in their own volume, transcribed and translated from the Russian by Olga Voronina, former deputy director of the Nabokov Museum, and by me, with Dmitri Nabokov adding the final polish and familial tone. They will also be released in the original Russian.
Late in 1984 Véra had told me she would “of course” eventually let me see The Original of Laura, but she offered such concessions mainly to buy time. But in February 1987, as I was writing on Nabokov’s American years, she at last handed me the little box of index cards. My awe at holding Nabokov’s manuscripts had long passed. For seven years I had been cataloguing and rearranging them for Véra and transcribing and indexing them for my own purposes, letting myself into the archive room and the “library” in the Nabokov rooms of the Montreux Palace Hotel’s Cygne wing, often working there from morning till after midnight.
I explain in this book’s last chapter the unpropitious circumstances of my reading The Original of Laura at last, and my negative reaction. Not long after I read it, Véra and Dmitri asked me what I thought they should do with it. Though I had religiously preserved every relic of paper, envelope, or cardboard in the archives that bore his handwriting, I now said, to my own surprise, “Destroy it.” A whole novel! I will explain in that chapter why I changed my evaluation of Laura so radically and how glad I am now that my original advice went unheeded.
While I worked in the archives, Véra told me many times how keenly she wanted to assemble a volume of Nabokov’s verse translations. I promised to keep track of all I discovered as I sorted and sifted. But Véra had neither the health nor the time to edit the translations. She was already seventy-seven when I met her, frail after the shock of Nabokov’s death, and always busy as agent for the Nabokov estate and as translator or indefatigable checker of translations into Russian, English, French, and German.
When Stanislav Shvabrin, in the course of his doctoral research on Nabokov’s verse translations, discovered in 2003 some unpublished Nabokov verse transla
tions in Harvard’s libraries, he asked Dmitri Nabokov whether he could publish them. Dmitri asked my advice. I pointed out all the other uncollected verse translations and suggested to Stas that we edit together a volume of Nabokov’s collected verse translations. He and Dmitri readily agreed. At 441 pages, the resulting volume, Verses and Versions (2008), is not skimpy, but even so it could not include a large fraction of Nabokov’s verse translations: those before 1923, those into Russian (including Ronsard, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, Rimbaud), and those into French (especially Pushkin). That reflects one constraint on all Nabokov’s posthumous publications. Since the volumes can sell well, trade publishers naturally prefer selectiveness to the exhaustiveness that eager scholars would like and that some university presses might permit.
Another constraint is manpower. Véra Nabokov had a hands-on approach to all the Nabokov material published in her lifetime. She was even a meticulous first editor for me on the half-million words of the Nabokov biography. After a high-speed crash in one of his Ferraris in 1982, leading to severe burns, a broken neck, and ten months in hospital, Dmitri Nabokov—already his father’s main translator into English during his lifetime—decided to set aside his career as an opera basso profundo and to dedicate the remainder of his life to serving the Nabokov literary legacy.
In the 1970s Matthew Bruccoli, a former student of Nabokov’s at Cornell and already the leading Fitzgerald scholar, set up a publishing company that, in partnership with an established New York publisher, published four volumes of Nabokov’s Cornell and Harvard lectures in swift succession: Lectures on Literature and a facsimile edition of one part, Lectures on Ulysses (1980); Lectures on Russian Literature (1981); and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983). Two important lectures on drama did not fit into these volumes. Recovered from his accident, Dmitri Nabokov took it upon himself as his first major task to translate four of Nabokov’s one-act plays and one three-act play into English and publish them with the essays and his own introduction (The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, 1985).
His next task was to translate the manuscript of Volshebnik (The Enchanter, 1986) that I had rediscovered while sorting out the archive for Véra. While he was translating, I was beginning to write the biography, very conscious that other Nabokov scholars would benefit enormously from the archival material that only I had access to in Montreux and Washington. I was determined to make available in the biography as much as I could that was relevant to Nabokov scholars, while not overloading other readers—not that they would object to more unpublished Nabokov.
During my research on the biography I had come to know and love Nabokov’s favorite sibling, Elena Sikorski, who was living in Geneva and published her fascinating correspondence with her brother in 1986 (in Russian, of course). A much larger but much more selective Selected Letters, 1940–1977, chosen rather hastily by Matthew Bruccoli and Dmitri Nabokov, appeared three years later.
Véra Nabokov’s decline and her death in 1991 slowed the flow of Dmitri’s work as translator and editor. He had translated in 1985 one story Nabokov had chosen not to republish, and he now translated another eleven in his edition of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1995). The sale of his father’s remaining manuscripts to the New York Public Library and of his father’s books inscribed to his mother, usually with wonderful drawings of invented butterflies, and his dealing with the duties of the estate, the persistent problem of Russian piracies, and a ten-volume collected works in Russian took up much of his time. Nabokov scholarship was also powering ahead elsewhere, in the Pléiade edition of Nabokov in France (begun in 1986, with the second of the projected three volumes published only in 2010), and Dieter E. Zimmer’s annotated twenty-five-volume German edition.
In the early 1990s I teamed up with lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle to edit Nabokov’s butterfly writings. The thick tome that resulted included not only the scientific papers but also many unpublished notes from the 1940s, when Nabokov was working at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology; an abandoned Butterflies of Europe from 1963–65; all the lepidopterological references in his creative works; an abandoned story, his last, “The Admirable Anglewing”; and his longest story still unpublished at the time, “Father’s Butterflies,” an appendix to his longest and greatest Russian novel, The Gift. The incompletely revised and sometimes barely legible manuscript of this complex appendix proved Dmitri’s most difficult translating task, occupying him on and off through the late 1990s. Nabokov’s Butterflies (2000) was preceded, in 1999, the centenary of Nabokov’s birth, by my Knopf edition of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory with, for the first time, chapter 16, a key to the rest that Nabokov had written immediately after the other chapters but then decided not to publish.
For much of the last decade Dmitri’s health has been under serious assault. At seventy-six he has slowed from five Ferraris and a Dodge Viper to a wheelchair. Nevertheless, alongside his editing and translating his father’s fiction, he has continued to enjoying translating and publishing his father’s Russian poems, a diversion that began in the 1980s. Nabokov had published his own translations of thirty-nine Russian poems, along with fourteen English poems and some of his chess problems, in Poems and Problems (1970). In 1975 and 1976, often bedridden, he had selected the Russian poems he thought worth collecting, and these were published, two years after his death, as Stikhi (Poems, 1979). Dmitri has translated for the first time many other poems in Stikhi and “A University Poem,” his father’s longest Russian poem, for an imminent Collected Poems, along with the last, previously unrecovered or unpublished, Russian stories, including “Natasha,” for an expanded and final version of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.
I had more than enough projects of my own and was pleased to see Dmitri preparing for publication whatever he could. But now Dmitri has recognized that he cannot deal with all the business of the estate, all the scores of countries interested in publishing, translating, or adapting Nabokov works, and translate the primary literary texts—there still remain other poems and Nabokov’s longest and most exuberant play, Tragediya Gospodina Morna (The Tragedy of Mister Morn, not published even in Russian until 1997)—and edit the remaining texts, the uncollected prose and interviews, the remaining lectures, and the remaining letters. I did not initiate Nabokov’s Butterflies, or Verses and Versions, but I have been interested for many years in editing Nabokov’s uncollected prose and am happy also to edit his remaining Russian lectures and his Russian letters, and eventually the still-unpublished English letters.
What difference can Nabokov’s posthumous literary legacy make? What has changed in our understanding of Nabokov since his death, and what chances for further change do we have?
Perhaps the first was our growth in knowledge of Nabokov the man. Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Part was published in 1977, in the month Nabokov died, but what one reviewer called its “incompetence and malice” meant that despite Nabokov’s hundreds of pages of corrections to Field’s typescripts, it still offered very little knowledge of or insight into the man.4 The editing of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979) had begun while Nabokov was still alive. This rich correspondence showed the back story to the fierce public rift in the mid-1960s between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, the leading American critic from the 1930s to the 1960s, and Nabokov’s close involvement in American literary life from 1940, despite to many seeming to arrive like a bolt from the blue in the late 1950s. Selected Letters, 1940–1977 offered more glimpses of Nabokov while leaving many gaps, but as John Updike wrote in response: “What a writer! And, really, what a basically reasonable and decent man.” My Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) benefitted from years in Nabokov’s and other archives from Moscow to Stanford and from interview leads the archives suggested. The two volumes allowed a full treatment of Nabokov’s Russian context; his Russian writing; his other American careers as a lepidopterist and a teacher, translator, and scholar; and the protective withdrawal of his final European years from 1959 to 1
977. Stacey Schiff’s Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) offered another perspective. When Letters to Véra appears in 2011 it will finally correct the image some still have, despite all the evidence in his literary work and outside, of Nabokov as somehow cold and aloof. When his letters to his family—to his parents, sister, and brother—appear a little later, they will show a loving and playful son, a supportive and sometimes critically corrective brother. When his letters to his other Russian friends, especially other writers, artists, and musicians, appear—usually much more intense and intimate than the equivalent letters in English—they will illuminate his intense engagement in, as well as his self-protective creative detachment from, Russian émigré cultural life.
Many have read Lolita but little else of Nabokov. Even many much better acquainted with his work knew little, for a long time, beyond his prose fiction and his memoirs. In his own late years Nabokov wanted to make less-prominent sides of his achievement visible when he translated his Russian poems, collected his English poems, republished his chess problems in Poems and Problems, and, with Dmitri’s help, translated three volumes of Russian stories in the 1970s. When he was too unwell to write more, in his last years, he selected his Russian poems, published as Stikhi two years after his death. Nabokov’s poetry has always divided readers. Some see it as light, brittle, old-fashioned. Georgiy Adamovich, the most influential émigré critic, regularly dismissed it, only to fall into Nabokov’s trap and hail as works of a new genius two poems Nabokov published not under his regular Russian pseudonym, Vladimir Sirin, but under the pseudonym Vasily Shishkov. Some keen readers of Nabokov think the poetry he writes for John Shade intentionally poor. Other excellent readers of poetry, such as the critic Helen Vendler and the poet R. S. Gwynn, consider his poetry first-rate, hiding depths of concealed design under its glittering surface patterns. A forthcoming publication of Shade’s “Pale Fire” unencumbered by Kinbote (see chapter 24, “ ‘Pale Fire’: Poem and Pattern”); a pseudo-facsimile edition of the poem, on index cards, as if Shade’s own manuscript; and the translations Dmitri continues to produce, including his excellent version of his father’s longest Russian poem, “A University Poem,” should help in the reappraisal of Nabokov’s lifelong commitment to poetry launched in Paul Morris’s hefty Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice (2010).