by Brian Boyd
7. Nabokov, Mary, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 1.
8. Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1982).
9. Dieter E. Zimmer argues that the ordered sequence of Ganin’s recollections in Mary reflect a psychological truth in line with F.C. Bartlett’s 1932 demonstration of memory as “constructional” (“Mary,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov [New York: Garland, 1995], 354–55). But this seriously misreads Bartlett. The mind does reconstruct memories as they emerge into consciousness rather than upload exactly from a veridical databank, but memory does not and could not suppress details as they emerge to consciousness in order to recollect them only in the correct sequence. Nabokov does explain Ganin’s deliberate private reconstruction of his past with Mary in order to motivate the narrative sequence (Mary, 33), but he carries on the orderly retelling of Ganin’s past even unprompted by Ganin’s memory (Mary, 99–102), only to provide an after-the-fact motivation in terms of memories that are explicitly not orderly: “All this now unfolded in his memory, flashing disjointedly, and shrank again into a warm lump when Podtyagin, with a great effort, asked him ‘How long ago did you leave Russia?’ ” (Mary, 102).
10. The text should read “passions,” as here and in the manuscript in VNA, not “passing” as in the published version.
11. See my analysis of this layering of past on past in the afterword to Ada (London: Penguin, 1999), rpt., in NAPC.
14. NABOKOV’S TRANSITION FROM RUSSIAN TO ENGLISH: REPUDIATION OR EVOLUTION?
1. Alexander A. Dolinin, “Nabokov as a Russian Writer,” in Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Julian Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 49–64; hereafter cited by page number in the text.
2. “Anniversary Notes,” Supplement to Triquarterly 17 (1970); reprinted in SO.
3. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: Russkie gody, trans. Galina Lapina (Moscow and St.Petersburg: Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Symposium, 2001), 470. Martin Amis and I agreed, after an April 1999 talk at the Town Hall in New York in which he had named Nabokov rather than Joyce his novelist of the century, that Ulysses was the greatest single novel of the century but, as Martin added and I concurred, it has its longueurs.
4. See KQK x; LL 144, 147; VN to Mark Aldanov, May 6, 1942, Bakhmeteff Collection, Columbia University Library.
5. On Hamlet as a “miracle,” see unpublished lecture notes, cited in VNAY 100; and on its not being “flawless,” see unpublished lectures notes for Russian Survey course, VNA.
6. Véra Nabokov to Rebekka Candreia, December 29, 1966, VNA.
7. Nabokov, Glory, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), x–xi.
8. Nabokov, Mary, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), xii.
9. Nabokov to Guggenheim Foundation, October 8, 1951, VNA.
10. Nabokov to Elena Sikorskiy, October 25, 1945, in Perepiska s sestroy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985), 18; SO 89, 190; PP 14.
11. Another claim Dolinin makes is that he de-Russianized his Russian works, sometimes substituting for Russian references in the originals English or “international” references. But Nabokov had done the same in translating Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon from French into Russian in 1922 as Nikolka Persik or in translating his own Lolita from English into Russian in the early 1960s. For the former example, see Stanislav Shvabrin, “Vladimir Nabokov as Translator: The Multilingual Works of the Russian Period,” Ph.D. diss., UCLA. 2007: “Nabokov amplifies the ‘Russianness’ of Nikolka Persik not only by means of addition, but also by means of subtraction” (146); Shvabrin characterizes Nabokov’s practice, as early as 1922, as “resolute imaginative conversion of the traits peculiar to the native literary tradition to those specific to the literary tradition active in the target language” (180).
12. Andrew Field, Nabokov: Life in Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 381; VNAY 515–16.
13. Unpublished, from Lectures on Russian Literature MS, VNA.
14. Unpublished letter, Nabokov to Andrew Field, September 26, 1966, VNA.
15. Nabokov responded after reading the book at the galley stage: “A marvelous achievement … and a fascinating story”: unpublished letter, Nabokov to Field, February 3, 1967, VNA.
16. Unpublished lecture for Russian Survey course, VNA.
17. Unpublished letter, Véra Nabokov to Heinrich-Maria Ledwig Rowohlt, January 30, 1966, VNA: “The translator should follow faithfully the English text [of The Gift], and the English text only. Whenever there is a discrepancy between the English and the Russian texts, it was done by my husband himself quite deliberately.”
18. Daniil Pasmanik, cited in VNRY 156.
19. Daily Dispatch and Manchester Morning Chronicle, March 31, 1922, 6; VNRY 34.
20. Among other ideas Nabokov may have found congenial were Spencer’s stress on benevolent design and Haeckel’s stress on monism and on evolution’s achieving artistic perfection.
21. Nabokov, “The Lermontov Mirage,” Russian Review 1, no. 1 (1941): 32.
22. Nabokov, “The Lermontov Mirage,” 32.
23. Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.
24. Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.
25. Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.
26. Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.
27. Unclear in original; perhaps “considerations.”
28. Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.
29. In original, “stops to be.”
30. Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.
31. Also known as “Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers” (LRL).
32. Nabokov, The Eye, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Phaedra, 1965), 8; Gift 9, Glory, xii.
33. Boyd, Russkie gody, 284, 328.
34. Among the challenges to Joyce: a portrait of an artist as a young man, providing ample rather than insufficient evidence of the artist’s artistic growth, even to the point where he writes the work in question; close confinement in a closely observed city and a natural motivation for fabulous voyages beyond; and a subtle Odyssean parallel, a son brooding on his father’s apparent failure to return from distant voyages, and his search for him, incorporated within the story rather than imposed from without. Among the challenges to Proust: lost time regained both in small witty ways throughout the course of the story and unexpectedly at a higher level and to a deeper degree at the end of the work, and assertion of the significance of voluntary over involuntary memory.
15. NABOKOV, PUSHKIN, SHAKESPEARE: GENIUS, GENEROSITY, AND GRATITUDE IN THE GIFT AND PALE FIRE
1. For excellent discussions of the presence of Pushkin in The Gift, which, however, come short of identifying Pushkin as part of the fate Fyodor senses surrounding him, see Simon Karlinsky, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel Dar as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis,” Slavonic and East European Journal 7 (1963): 284–96; Sergei Davydov, “Weighing Nabokov’s Gift on Push-kin’s Scales,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 419–30; Davydov, “Nabokov and Pushkin,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 482–96.; and Alexander Dolinin, “The Gift,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 135–69; and the first of his “Tri zametki o romane Vladimira Nabokova ‘Dar,’ ” in V. V. Nabokov: Pro et Contra, ed. B. Averin, Maria Malikova, and T. Smirnova (St. Petersburg: Russkiy Khristianskiy Gumanitarniy Institut, 1997), 697–740.
2. Pushkin (1828), Sobranie sochineniy v desyati tomakh, vol.2: Stikhotvoreniya 1824–1836 (Moscow: Pravda, 1981), 125 (translation by BB). Dolinin, “The Gift,” 166n. 29. Dolinin follows “dar” as a theme t
hroughout the novel, in its relation to Pushkin and Lermontov and to Dovid Knut and Adamovich in “Tri zametki,” and shows that Nabokov all but explicitly had “Dar naprasnyy, dar sluchaynyy” in mind at the end of the “Vtoroe dopolnenie k ‘Daru’ ” (698n).
3. See Davydov, “Weighing Nabokov’s Gift,” 420.
4. Cf. Clarence Brown, “Nabokov’s Pushkin and Nabokov’s Nabokov,” in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison: University of Wiscon-sin Press, 1967), 207: “Fate and Pushkin are identical. Pushkin is Nabokov’s fate.” Brown means this, though, in a different sense from mine.
5. Unpublished lecture notes, VNA.
16. NABOKOV AS VERSE TRANSLATOR: INTRODUCTION TO VERSES AND VERSIONS
1. To follow the lead of Nabokov (see below) and the lilt of his friend Dr. Seuss. Nabokov met Theodore Seuss Geisel at a writers conference in Utah in the summer of 1949. During the conference, “Dr. Seuss” wrote a butterfly poem for Nabokov; years later, in Horton Hears a Who! (1954), he introduced an incidental “black-bottomed eagle named Vlad Vlad-i-koff,” after Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokoff (as Nabokov once spelled his name).
2. Page a Day Diary, November 11, 1958, VNA.
3. Jason Epstein to VN, December 2, 1958, VNA.
4. VéN to Jason Esptein, January 18, 1959, VNA.
5. VN to Jason Epstein, June 6, 1959, VNA.
6. VéN to Ray Mantle, October 22, 1968, VNA.
7. Cited in Ljuba Tarvi, Comparative Translation Assessment: Quantifying Quality (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2004), 230.
8. I kicked myself when, after the publication of Verses and Versions, while writing obituaries for both Alfred Appel Jr., and Simon Karlinsky, I came across Nabokov’s translation of a four-line poem by Marina Tsvetaeva that I should have noted or recalled in time. Appel and Karlinsky coedited a special issue of Triquarterly (27–28 [1973]), published in book form as The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922–1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Nabokov knew both editors and, recalling Karlinsky’s book on Tsvetaeva, translated for him, on November 12, 1972, this verse, the last quatrain of an untitled poem (first line, “Moim stiham, napisannym tak rano,” “To my poems composed so early”), which Tsvetaeva composed in 1913 (Bitter Air, 93):
Amidst the dust of bookshops, wide dispersed
And never purchased there by anyone,
Yet similar to precious wines, my verse
Can wait: its turn shall come.
9. Tarvi, Comparative Translation, 228.
10. In Tarvi, Comparative Translation, 234.
11. Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 548,268, 270, 269.
12. Unpublished. From TS note, VNA, which may have been the beginning of a talk that Nabokov was invited to delivered to the English Institute on September 14, 1954, as he wrote Edmund Wilson on July 30, “on the Art of Translation” (DBDV 317).
13. Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: ‘Onegin’ in English,” Partisan Review 22 (1955): 498.
14. Elaine Feinstein, ed., After Pushkin (London: Folio Society, 1999), 18.
15. Alexander Zholkovsky, “ ‘Ya vas lyubil… ’ Pushkina: invarianty i struktura” (Pushikin’s “I loved you”: variants and structure), http://college.usc.edu/alik/rus/ess/bib21.html.
17. TOLSTOY AND NABOKOV
1. LRL manuscript, VNA.
2. Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987).
3. Unpublished letter, Nabokov to Mark Aldanov, May 6, 1942, Bakhmeteff Collection, Columbia University.
4. LRL manuscript, VNA.
5. Unpublished Russian survey course lecture, VNA.
6. I have placed this word in square brackets, because the Russian “ekonomka” can be translated only as “housekeeper,” but does not belong to the dom (house, home)—domochadtsy (household) pattern I have translated via the English “house.”
7. Cited in Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3:53, 94.
8. National Educational Television interview with Robert Hughes, 1965.
9. John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (1966; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 242.
10. Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Further Reflections in Natural History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 476.
11. Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 198–227.
12. Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel, 207.
13. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956).
14. Quoted in Gary Adelman, Anna Karenina: The Bitterness of Ecstasy (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 109.
15. Craig Raine, “Craig Raine Fondles Vladimir Nabokov,” London Review of Books, May 14, 1992, 6.
16. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).
18. NABOKOV AND MACHADO DE ASSIS
1. Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; hereafter, BC.
2. Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (1899), trans. John Gledson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 186; hereafter DC.
3. Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis, Quincas Borba (1891), trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 102; hereafter QB.
4. Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis, The Devil’s Church and Other Stories, trans. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsua (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 102–3; hereafter DCh.
5. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Obras Completa, 3 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora José Aguilar, 1962), 3:398, cited in Maria Manuel Lisboa, “Machado de Assis and the Beloved Reader: Squatters in the Text,” in Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s, ed. Nicholas White and Naomi Segal (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 160.
6. Unpublished lecture on Soviet drama, VNA.
7. Not “passing,” as MUSSR incorrectly transcribes.
8. “Actually, of course, any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror” (Gift 239).
9. For this at the cultural level, see chapter 14.
10. Cited by Helen Caldwell, The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1960, 150.
11. Nabokov wrote “between the author and the world,” but corrected this in memory in SO 183 to “between the author and the reader.”
19. SPEAK, MEMORY: THE LIFE AND THE ART
1. See my “In Memory of Simon Karlinsky,” The Nabokovian 63 (Fall 2009): 7–14.
22. EVEN HOMAIS NODS: NABOKOV’S FALLIBILITY; OR, HOW TO REVISE LOLITA
1. From Nabokov’s pseudo-review of Conclusive Evidence, intended at the time of writing to form a sixteenth chapter in the book version, but then omitted; published in SM 1999.
2. “ ‘And there happening through the whole kingdom of Bohemia, to be no seaport town whatever’
“ ‘How the deuce could there—Trim?’ cried my uncle Toby; ‘for Bohemia being totally inland, it could have happened no otherwise.’
“ ‘—It might,’ said Trim, ‘if it had pleased God’ ” (Sterne, Tristram Shandy, book 8, chap. 19).
3. There were a couple of occasions when Bohemia had a brief toe hold on the Adriatic, in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Shakespeare’s source for The Winter’s Tale, Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), did once mention the coast of Bohemia. But Greene does not make it a turning point of the plot, as Johnson observes Shakespeare has made it.
4. Ably exposed by Richard Levin in New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) and many subsequent articles, most collected in Looking for an Argument: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism
of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).
5. Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 145–46; Christina Tekiner, “Time in Lolita,” Modern Fiction Studies 25 (1979): 463–69; Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 198–227, esp. 208–11, quotation at 209; Alexander Dolinin, “Dvoinoe vremia u Nabokova: ot Dara k Lolite,” revised in “Nabokov’s Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita,” Nabokov Studies 2 (1995): 3–40 (see his n. 1); Julian Connolly, “ ‘Nature’s Reality’ or Humbert’s ‘Fancy’? Scenes of Reunion and Murder in Lolita,” Nabokov Studies 2 (1995): 41–61; Dieter Zimmer, in a forthcoming limited edition, to be published in Switzerland, of the German Lolita (personal communication); Barbara Wyllie, “ ‘Guilty of Killing Quilty’: The Central Dilemma of Nabokov’s Lolita,” NABOKV-L, November 21, 1994.
6. Note in Conclusive Evidence MS, VNA, cited VNAY 147.
7. VN to Morris Bishop, October 12, 1947 (marked “46”), VNA.
8. Nabokov, A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 220.
9. Interview of June 28, 1979.
10. Cf. Maurice Couturier, Textual Communication: A Print-Based Theory of the Novel (London: Routledge, 1991), 89.
11. Nabokov, Ada oder Das Verlangen, trans. Uwe Friesel and Marianne Therstappen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1974).
12. Nabokov, Ada ou l’ardeur, trans. Gilles Chahine with Jean-Bernard Blandenier (Paris: Fayard, 1975).
13. Cf. my “Annotations to Ada, 2: Part 1 Chapter 2,” Nabokovian 31 (1993): 39, and AdaOnline.
14. MSS, VNA.
15. Tekiner, “Time in Lolita,” 468, writes however that “the chronology implies that Humbert is in jail for his actions toward Lolita, rather than Quilty,” but does not explain how or why Humbert has been tracked down or at what point before the supposed arrest for his treatment of Lolita (an arrest, of course, entirely without textual foundation) he began, as this conjecture would require, to suppress what was really happening to him, or why the conjecture does not square with the foreword (see below). Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery, 218, suggests as one possibility (though she seems to prefer another) that “Humbert may have been arrested on the same day, almost immediately after reading Dolly’s letter, and placed in a psychiatric ward ‘for observation’ . . . prior to being scheduled for trial,” but though she rules out the murder of Quilty she does not suggest why he is being tried.