Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  His imagery could turn the duty of reporting mundane details day by day in 1926 into delight (‘The weather this morning was so-so: dullish, but warm, a boiled-milk sky, with skin–but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers’), or amplify romance (‘You came into my life–not as one comes to visit (you know, “not taking one’s hat off”) but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads for your steps’), or immortalize a vista or a person (‘How he, Bunin, looks like a wasted old tortoise, stretching its old sinewy grey neck with a fold of skin instead of an Adam’s apple and chewing something and waving its dull-eyed ancient head!’), or alleviate the irritation of border bureaucracy (‘my German visa–that lichen on the dilapidating wall of my passport’).

  He observed everything with fascination, animals, plants, faces, character, speech, skyscapes, landscapes, cityscapes (‘In the métro it stinks like between the toes and it’s just as cramped. But I like the slamming of the iron turnstiles, the flourishes (“merde”) on the wall, the dyed brunettes, the men smelling of wine, the lifelessly sonorous names of the stations’). Oliver Sacks, musicophile and psychologist extraordinaire, rightly singles Nabokov out as a case of amusia (‘ “Music, I regret to say,” he confesses in his autobiography, “affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds” ’), yet the letters disclose him enjoying music in the right circumstances: ‘I read for an hour–while the “loudspeaker” in the yard played wonderful dancing music. The violin-like languor of the saxophone, reedy pirouettes, the even beat of strings’; ‘I went to the gypsies, to a very pleasant Russian establishment, Au Papillon bleu. There we drank white wine and listened to the truly beautiful singing. Real gypsies plus Polyakova.’

  Nabokov’s haphazard reading would be hard to anticipate: not just the expected re-reading of Flaubert, Proust and Joyce, but also surprises like the Soviet fiction he forces himself to read, or Henri Béraud, Ralph Hodgson or Arnold Bennett, all of whom he reads with enthusiasm. But even more valuably his letters to Véra reveal his writing. They document his creative energies, letting us see the plethora of projects–poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays, translations–that suggest themselves and go nowhere, like will-o’-the wisps around the forest of finished works. While most of the letters are too early to throw light on the great English works, or even on the great late Russian works–he was simply too busy pursuing contacts and prospects in his Paris and London trips of the 1930s to have much time to write–the letters of the 1920s show the creative intensities of the composition of his first long work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn, and the genesis and composition of two poems, including one of his best. A strange idea for a story about a room modulates into (and now helps explain) the poem ‘Komnata’ (‘The Room’). Most illuminating of all is the making of the poem ‘Tikhiy shum’ (‘Soft Sound’), which we can follow all the way from frustration to triumph. Nabokov had been a star of Berlin’s first Russian Culture Day in 1925, and the next year wanted to top this with something new. With only a few days left, he first felt anxiety at having nothing ready, then the rhythmic perturbance that precedes a poem, then disgust at the first snatches of nostalgic cliché washing back from the temporarily blocked drain of his imagination. Then recent impressions, including a memorable downpour in the letters a few days before he began to brood on a poem, and older memories, and current impressions, like a toilet’s persistent flush, coalesce in scraps that will become late stanzas in what gradually forces itself on him more insistently, as he falls to sleep, when he wakes, as he walks to the home of his pupil, until he finally sets it down on paper while visiting Véra’s cousin’s apartment, learns it by heart and then earns a rapturous reception, encore after encore, at Russian Culture Day.

  Nabokov wrote his letters for Véra, not for future readers, as we can see most clearly in the 1926 letters where he keeps his promise to report on each day’s meals, clothes and activities. In this, the letters to Véra contrast with those to Edmund Wilson, where, although Nabokov was spurred to write so intensely by the match-and-mismatch of their literary passions, he could also not help being conscious that the letters would see print one day. But by the late 1960s he had become probably the most famous writer alive. When Andrew Field, author of the first widely noticed critical book on Nabokov, heard from the Nabokovs in 1968 that they had received from Prague Nabokov’s letters to his parents, he asked if he could undertake a biography. They approved, and when he arrived in Montreux at the end of 1970 they had photocopied the letters to Nabokov’s parents, with some personal passages blocked out, and a few of the letters to Véra, especially those from 1932 that showed Nabokov’s reception in both Russian and French literary Paris. They kept passages of these letters too off limits, but Nabokov also wrote in for Field identifications of some of the individuals mentioned. Perhaps it was before Field arrived that Véra destroyed her own letters to Vladimir.

  Nabokov wrote almost all his letters to Véra with little thought of posterity looking over his shoulder. But in Taormina in April 1970, knowing that Field would be undertaking his biography, and would be shown some of the letters he had written to Véra, Nabokov on his last multi-day separation from his wife–apart from the succession of enforced sojourns in nearby hospitals that would mark the 1970s–could not help, in his first letter back to Montreux, writing with a wider ultimate audience in mind. The letter splendidly combines his late public style–its parody, poetry, speed and verbal play–and his intimacy with Véra. Unlike so many of the earlier letters that testify to the tension of their uncertain lives, it bespeaks the serenity he had earned through fame, wealth, leisure and a near half-century with Véra. His subsequent letters in this final batch appear to become less conscious of posterity, as he settles back into daily dispatches to Véra. They end, as Véra is about to join him, with what seems a premonition that this may be the last occasion he will ever have to enjoy writing just for her day after day:

  Now I’m waiting for you. I’m a little sorry, in one sense, that this correspondence is coming to an end, hugs and adoration.

  Will note down the laundry, and then, around nine, go collecting.

  V

  ‘My beloved and precious darling’: Translating Letters to Véra

  Olga Voronina

  Matrimonial correspondence can be awkward to showcase. When even famous writers address their spouses, minutiae may smother amusement. Joyce’s letters to Nora Joyce are remembered mainly for their obscenities, rather than their lyricism. Among Virginia Woolf’s letters to her husband, only her last–the ‘suicide note’, in which she thanks him for ‘all the happiness in [her] life’–tends to be etched in the reader’s memory. Remarkably, Nabokov’s letters to his wife are memorable in their entirety. Almost always playful, romantic and pithy, they cannot be reduced to a few unforgettable lines.

  In Speak, Memory, Nabokov weaves patterns of the past into a ‘magic carpet’ that the reader can fold and unfold while traversing through the text. In The Gift, in Lolita, in Pnin, in Ada, he creates multi-dimensional artistic universes, in which every textual detail is intricately connected, bringing together each novel’s time and space and linking quasi-divine predestination and human consciousness. In spite of their spontaneity, the letters to Véra exhibit a similar integrity of vision. Two of them, for example–one from the beginning of the correspondence, the other from the end–form a narrative arc that spans forty-six years of meticulous observation and virtuoso storytelling.

  Visiting his family in Prague in 1924, Nabokov goes to see the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Vyšehrad. Generally displeased with the city, he nonetheless admires the heads of court jesters carved above the door of the cathedral’s Basilica Minor, writing in his report to Véra: ‘I like to think that the carver, insulted by the ungenerous reward, by the stinginess of the sullen monks he was ordered to depict on the walls, turned their faces, without altering th
e likenesses, into those of jesters.’ In 1970, he again notices a face of a friar–now in good spirits. It reappears on the wall of the Taormina hotel where Nabokov took rooms for a vacation with his wife: ‘The door right opposite yours is a funny trompe l’oeil: it’s fake, painted on, and from behind it a rather cheerful monk is sticking out his white-bearded head.’

  Thematic designs created by recurrent images exemplify the continuity of Nabokov’s personality and illuminate the consistency of his epistolary style. We deferred to both when translating the letters. We also paid tribute to the master’s own creed that a good writer is also an enchanter whose deceptions readers should at least acknowledge and, ideally, see through. An ardent chess problem composer, dedicated maze-maker, and inveterate punster, Nabokov turned quite a few of his letters into a game of codes and brief forays into fiction. In the letters from 1937 in particular, his whimsical aliases acquired personalities, itineraries, even biographies. Giving readings and selling his novels to publishers in Brussels, Paris and London, he avoided reporting his income to Véra directly–a comment not only on his reluctance to deal with the German Finanzamt, but also on his disgust over the vigilance of a putative perlustrator. Instead, he invented two characters to convey by post how much he had earned. The Doppelgängers parody their creator while featuring certain qualities bizarrely unlike those of Nabokov. Grigory Abramovich, who makes his appearance on 13 February 1936, is ‘sharp, businesslike, good-looking’ (19 February 1936), has a family and wishes to settle down in Paris (17 February 1936), and cannot travel to London as Nabokov plans to do because he is unable to procure a visa (4 February 1937). Victor, the other double, emerges on 22 January 1937, has a less comprehensive life-story, and temporarily vanishes two weeks later (5 February 1937). He is somewhat closer to his maker: Nabokov, who was almost christened Victor owing to a mistake of a half-deaf priest, gave the name to the narrator and hero of ‘Music’, then allotted it to Victor Wind, the young artist of genius in Pnin. In the letters, Victor possesses greater vitality than Grigory, reappearing right after getting kicked out, making more money, and begetting, in a confounding stunt of identity alteration, a flesh-and-blood father in the person of Vadim Victorovich Rudnev, the editor of the Russian émigré journal, Sovremennye zapiski (‘Vadim Victorovich was offering his father a few hundred as an honorarium. Father will take it.’). Four years after composing the letter about Rudnev, Nabokov would praise Gogol’s knack for creating ‘peripheral personages’ who ‘are engendered by the subordinate clauses of ... various metaphors, comparisons, and lyrical outbursts’. No doubt he knew exactly how Gogolian his own epistolary prose was.

  Like Gogol, Nabokov did not miss a chance to turn a morsel of life–or a crumb of language–into a feast of fiction. Even his fiscal reports surround factual detail with fictional curlicues. The transformation of the Belgian franc into Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank, the philosopher and a personal acquaintance, allows Nabokov to write about the currency as if it were hundreds of men replicating themselves in quick succession. His earnings in Britain and France become ‘butterflies’ (in a letter of 5 February 1937, he talks about amassing ‘a collection of three thousand butterflies–so far’), which ‘Victor’, now turned a butterfly expert, accumulates at the British Museum, a place Nabokov dreams of as a scholarly paradise free of financial worry and other earthly considerations. Eventually the butterfly code too loses its lustre. In the spring of 1937, he starts writing about collecting, storing and sending his mother ‘books’–the money transfers she desperately needed. ‘Journals’ or ‘books’ add to his fiscal ciphers, with ‘pages’–in an array of languages–representing amounts earned in a succession of currencies.

  Nabokov’s preoccupation with encoding his earnings can make this game seem mundane and even drab in comparison to the sheer exuberance of Gogol’s literary imagination. But most of his fictional inventions in the letters spring from pranksterism, not pragmatism. In 1926, when Véra was recuperating at a sanatorium in Southern Germany, he invented a zoo of minuscule creatures, some of which may be spin-offs from the unheard-of names he painstakingly coined for her, a fresh appellation in every letter. Many of these ‘beasties’ are indeed little animals, feline and canine in origin–for instance, Pooch, a relative of Poochums, one of Nabokov’s pet-names for his wife in 1925 and 1926. Others are strikingly human, such as Mrs Tufty, a snappy dresser, or Mr Darling, the lisping, sensitive German-born ‘editor’ of the letters’ ‘puzzle department’, who is in love with Véra and takes an easy offence at her reluctance to respond to ‘his’ numerous crosswords and verbal games. Mr Darling’s crying in a wastebasket, or his brave attempt to steal Nabokov’s pen to add a few words to the letter to his beloved, are chefs-d’oeuvre of the art which, just as Darling himself, has a name but avoids classification. It is literary tightrope-walking, an exercise in ‘life-generating’ fiction.

  Nabokovian verbal jauntiness has overwhelmed many a translator, but his quirky Russian endearments are a new challenge: never before have they been converted to English in such profusion. The letters of 1926 abound in sweet talk with a ‘sch’ or ‘shch’ attached to some words. Thus the Russian ‘мышь’ (mysh’, mouse) becomes ‘мысч’ (mysch) and even ‘мыс-ш-с-ч-щ-с-ш’ (mys-sh-s-ch-shch-s-sh), with several other variations of such spelling to follow (‘ознобысч,’ ‘обезьянысч,’ ‘тушканысч,’ ‘ужинысч,’ etc.). It is unclear whether the wordplay originated in an attempt to recreate the scurrying rodent by means of alliterative animation and then went rampant, drawing in other creatures and objects, or whether Nabokov borrowed part of the German diminutive ‘-chen’ suffix (as in ‘Greta–Gretchen’ or ‘Brot–Brötchen’), truncating it for a half-soothing, half-grating effect. In translation, we relied on our stylistic intuition to choose between adding ‘sch’ to English roots (‘Mousch,’ ‘Feverisch’) or replacing Nabokov’s ending made of Russian hushings with an English diminutive suffix, ‘-kin(s)’ (as in ‘monkeykins’).

  Even when Nabokov chooses to address Véra in a less eccentric fashion, his choices may not have English equivalents. Most often, he prefers to call his wife dushen’ka, literally a diminutive of the Russian word dusha (‘soul’, ‘psyche’). It would have been possible to translate this word as ‘darling’ (our choice), ‘sweetheart’ or ‘dearest’ (options from a discard pile), had the writer not bedecked it with other tender adjectives: dorogaya (‘dear’), lyubimaya (‘beloved’), milaya (‘lovely’, ‘sweet’), and bestsennaya (‘priceless’). We used ‘dear darling’ a few times in spite of its sounding too alliterative, resorted to ‘beloved darling’ rarely, tried ‘sweet darling’ once or twice, and once (15 April 1939) had to go along with ‘My beloved and precious darling’. Unfortunately, even that baroque phrase does not fully convey the fretful and persistent affection of the Russian ‘dushen’ka moya lyubimaya i dragotsennaya’, with its one and half times as many syllables and with the adjectives coming cajolingly after the noun.

  In some cases, readers simply have to accept it as a given that Nabokov did not use his tenderness sparingly. The closest they can get, in English, to the understanding of his epistolary passion, is by comparing the sentence from the letter of 3 July 1926 (‘I love you, my Pussms, my life, my flight, my flow, darling pooch …’) to the beginning of his most famous novel: ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta.’

  Nabokov’s endearments reflect his fascination with verbal games in his native tongue. His move to the United States and the transition to English opened even greater prospects for exploring new lexical possibilities. The letters are full of enthralling details of the writer’s linguistic adjustment to his post-European American existence. Unlike his Russian translation of Lolita, jammed with carefully chosen equivalents of English expressions, they boldly slip transliterated English into Russian grammatical slots. This is especially noticeable in Nabokov’s reports of his adventures in the American South in 1941–2, which he pepper
s with such words as khintiki (‘little hints’), prufsy (‘proofs’), glimpsnul (‘I’ve glimpsed’), brekfastayu (‘I am having breakfast’) and tribulatsii (‘tribulations’). We have italicized English (as well as French and German) words Nabokov used in the letters, but these Cyrillic steals have remained unmarked.

  From his first letter to his last note, Nabokov used the pre-revolutionary orthography to write to Véra. Echoing his father, who called the spelling reform of 1917–18 a ‘disgrace’, he could never disconnect his awareness of the cultural loss from the perception that there was something vaguely criminal about the outlawing of the old spelling. No matter where the Nabokovs lived, the endearment ‘Vérochka’ would always be written with a yat’, while all hard consonants at the end of words would invariably be followed with a yer, letters expelled, along with three others, from the Russian language. A deviation from this rule could mean only a joke or a scornful remark on Nabokov’s part, as in the riddle in the letter of 11 July 1926. He asks Véra why ‘M. M. Sukotin’–a fabricated ‘peripheral character’–writes his name without the hard sign at the end. The answer: because M. M. Sukotin is an anagram of ‘communist’ and therefore a barbarian mutilator of language.