Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Following modern practice, inside and outside Russia, Letters to Véra retains Nabokov’s politically and culturally pointed use of the old orthography only in commentaries or in the snippets of manuscript reproduced as illustrations. Neither this English edition, nor other translations, will be able to pay full tribute to his nostalgia for the lost spelling. Yet it would be hard to appreciate the letters without understanding Nabokov’s yearning to cross boundaries of time as well as space by eloping through language. In the story ‘The Visit to the Museum’, written in 1938, he clinches the protagonist’s nightmarish journey from France to Soviet Russia with an image of a lonely street sign, ‘… OE REPAIR’, where the Russian genitive plural for ‘shoes’ (‘… САПОГ’) is spelled without a yer. To his horror, the character realizes that ‘it was not the snow that had obliterated the “hard sign” at the end’. But if in the story the abolition of the ‘ъ’ signifies the definitive and irrevocable loss of one’s native land, its reappearance in Nabokov’s letter of 19 March 1941 intimates hope. Having playfully composed a quotation from a future Russian book about himself, Nabokov deliberately, and perhaps even triumphantly, has the yet unborn reviewer use the old-fashioned spelling: “Living at Wellesley College, among the oaks and sunsets of peaceful New England, he dreamed of changing his American fountain-pen for his own incomparable Russian feather-pen.” (From “Vladimir Sirin and His Time”, 2074, Moscow)’.

  Not only idiosyncrasies of the old orthography disappear in translation–some stylistic deviations become invisible as well. For example, in this edition we had to leave unmarked Nabokov’s spelling of certain Russian words which now would seem charmingly antiquated (‘галстухъ’, ‘шофферъ’, ‘притти’). Aware of the dearth of suffixes denoting smallness or more or less tender familiarity in English, by contrast with their abundance and naturalness in Russian, we also reduced the number of diminutive noun forms, rampant in Nabokov’s early letters, especially in descriptions of food, clothes and other trivia (the phrase ‘cold-cuts and macaroni’ in the letter of 3 July 1926 would otherwise have to be rendered something like ‘teeny cold-cuts and macaronikins’). When translating the intimate-sounding word ‘mama’ Nabokov used to refer to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, we chose the more reserved ‘Mother’ and thus avoided contemporary ‘mom’ or ‘mum’ as words that would not have belonged to the Nabokov family in that era.

  We have transliterated Russian proper names, as well as the names of periodicals, according to a simplified version of the Library of Congress system, introducing a number of deviations from the norm in favour of the spelling accepted in Nabokov studies and Anglophone academia. Fixed English spellings remain intact (‘Rachmaninov’ instead of ‘Rakhmaninov’). We used y for the spelling of й and jot-based vowel sequences, such as ая and ую, as well as for rendering ы (‘Sergey’ but ‘Sovremennye’; ‘novyi’ but ‘goluboy’). Adjectival masculine name endings ий or ый are transliterated as y (‘Fondaminsky’ instead of ‘Fondaminskiy’). We have omitted the Russian soft sign whenever reasonable (‘Gogol’ instead of ‘Gogol’’), transliterating it as ie in some names (Vasilievna) and as ’ before a consonant and in word-end positions (‘Izobretenie Val’sa’; ‘Rul’’) or before a vowel (p’esy). The vowel ë is transliterated as yo (Fyodor, Seryozha, Zyoka).

  Like all other correspondents of his era and upbringing, Nabokov customarily used name and patronymic (‘Vadim Victorovich’), calling only some family members and intimate friends by their first names (Kirill, Ilya, Sonya). We have retained all the patronymics as well as affectionate names (Ilyusha, Fondik), providing the latter with explanations in endnotes.

  When rendering Russian feminine surnames in English, we have adhered to the system which Nabokov preferred, dropping the final ‘a’ in ‘Anna Karenin’, unless it was a well-established literary or artistic name (Berberova, Akhmatova). In several cases, it proved impossible for us to figure out whether the woman in question was married or not. Thus, in the letters of 3 and 11 November 1932, Nabokov mentions either a daughter or wife of Sergey Rachmaninov. We had to preface the name with ‘Mme [Mlle?]’ to avoid suggesting with certainty that it was the composer’s wife. In another case, it was easier to surmise that Mlle Novotvortsev, Nabokov’s former girlfriend who kept accosting him at readings in Paris in 1932 and 1936, remained single and thus was able to profess her feelings freely.

  When writing to Véra about his diet in 1926, family matters in 1924 and 1932, his income or the women who commented on the colour of his eyes in 1937, Nabokov’s diction is the same as when he describes his hospital stay in 1944 or butterfly collecting in 1942 and 1970. From the first letter to the last, his writing remains buoyant and whimsical, lyrical and lucid, rich and nimble. This stylistic consistency is one of the noteworthy features of the letters, especially in view of the fact that at the end of his life he became painfully self-conscious about his Russian. Reaching out to readers to whom Nabokov is, first and foremost, a master of English prose, this translation aims at preserving the lushness, flow and tang of Nabokov’s more intimate style.

  Dmitri Nabokov, who endorsed this publication of his father’s letters to his mother, looked forward to editing our translation. It is sad indeed to recall that his health declined so that he could see only the earliest preparation for this edition and would never see the final product. We missed his insights, his touch and tone, his irreplaceable knowledge of the details that constituted Vladimir and Véra Nabokovs’ biography and, to a large degree, his own.

  1923*

  ____________________

  [ALS, 2 PP.]

  [c. 26 July 1923]

  [TO: Berlin]

  [Domaine de Beaulieu, Solliès-Pont, Var, France]

  I won’t hide it: I’m so unused to being – well, understood, perhaps, – so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting I thought: this is a joke, a masquerade trick … But then … And there are things that are hard to talk about – you’ll rub off their marvellous pollen at the touch of a word … They write me from home about mysterious flowers. You are lovely …

  And all your letters, too, are lovely, like the white nights – even the one where you so resolutely underlined several words. I found it and the previous one when I got back from Marseilles, where I was working in the port. It was the day before yesterday, and I decided not to reply to you till you wrote me more. A little joke …

  Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought – and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds. There is a tiny Russian restaurant in the dirtiest part of Marseilles. I ate my grub there with Russian sailors – and no one knew who I was and where I was from, and I was surprised myself that I used to wear a tie and thin socks. Flies circled over spots of borsch and wine, a sourish chill and the hum of portside nights wafted in from the street. And listening, and watching – I thought that I remember Ronsard by heart and know the names of skull bones, bacteria, plant juices. It was strange.

  I am very drawn to Africa and Asia: I was offered a place as a stoker on a boat going to Indochina. But two things are forcing me to return to Berlin for a while: the first is that Mother must be so very lonely – the second … a mystery – or rather a mystery I desperately want to resolve … I leave on the 6th, but will spend some time in Nice and in Paris – at the home of a man I studied with in Cambridge. You probably know him. So I will be in Berlin on the 10th or 11th … And if you’re not there I will come to you, and find you … See you soon, my strange joy, my tender night. Here are poems for you:

  EVENING

  You call – and in a little pomegranate tree

  an owlet barks like a puppy.

  In the evening height the moon’s curved blade

  is so lonely and ringing.

  You call – and a spring splashes with the turquoise of evening:

 
the water is fresh, like your voice,

  and the moon, quivering, pierces a clay jug,

  gleaming with its glaze.

  SWELTER

  I wiped the prickles of burning drops off my forehead

  and lay supine on the slippery warm slope,

  where the sun thundered among fragrant pines

  with the voices of flattened cicadas.

  And I floated into the scorching darkness

  of the southern day, to the drunken swash of a timbrel,

  to the babbling of flutes, and Pan’s purple mouth

  pressed greedily to my heart.

  I have written an awful lot here. Among other things, two plays, ‘The Granddad’ and ‘The Pole’. The first will be in the collection ‘Gamayun’ – the second, in the next issue of ‘Russkaya Mysl’’.

  V.

  ____________________

  [ALS, 4 PP.]

  [8 November 1923]

  TO: 41, Landhausstrasse, Berlin W.

  [Berlin]

  8–XI–23

  How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden, wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours – with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it – and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret – so sharp! – that we haven’t lived through it together – whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissible – or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road – you see what I mean, my happiness?

  And I know: I can’t tell you anything in words – and when I do on the phone then it comes out completely wrong. Because with you one needs to talk wonderfully, the way we talk with people long gone, do you know what I mean, in terms of purity and lightness and spiritual precision – but I – je patauge terribly. Yet you can be bruised by an ugly diminutive – because you are so absolutely resonant – like seawater, my lovely.

  I swear – and the inkblot has nothing to do with it – I swear by all that’s dear to me, all I believe in – I swear that I have never loved before as I love you, – with such tenderness – to the point of tears – and with such a sense of radiance. On this page, my love, I once (Your face betw) began to write a poem for you and this very inconvenient little tail got left – I’ve lost my footing. But there’s no other paper. And most of all I want you to be happy and it seems to me that I could give you that happiness – a sunny, simple happiness – and not an altogether common one.

  And you should forgive me for my pettiness – that I am thinking with aversion about how – practically – I will mail this letter tomorrow – and yet I am ready to give you all of my blood, if I had to – it’s hard to explain – sounds flat – but that’s how it is. Here, I’ll tell you – with my love I could have filled ten centuries of fire, songs, and valour – ten whole centuries, enormous and winged, – full of knights riding up blazing hills – and legends about giants – and fierce Troys – and orange sails – and pirates – and poets. And this is not literature since if you reread carefully you will see that the knights have turned out to be fat.

  No – I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine life without you – in spite of your thinking that it is ‘fun’ for me not to see you for two days. And you know, it turns out that it wasn’t Edison at all who thought up the telephone but some other American, a quiet little man whose name no one remembers. It serves him right.

  Listen, my happiness – you won’t say again that I’m torturing you? How I’d like to take you off somewhere with me – you know how those highwaymen of old did: a wide-brimmed hat, a black mask, and a bell-shaped musket. I love you, I want you, I need you unbearably … Your eyes – which shine so wonder-struck when, with your head thrown back, you tell something funny – your eyes, your voice, lips, your shoulders – so light, sunny …

  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. Fate wanted to correct its mistake – as if it has asked my forgiveness for all of its previous deceptions. So how can I leave you, my fairy-tale, my sun? You see, if I’d loved you less, then I would have had to go. But this way – it makes no sense. And I don’t want to die, either. There are two kinds of ‘come what may’. Involuntary and deliberate. Forgive me – but I live by the second one. And you can’t take away my faith in what I am afraid to think about – it would have been such happiness … And here’s another little tail.

  Yes: an old-fashioned slowness of speech,

  steely simplicity … Thus the heart’s more ardent:

  steel, incandesced by flight …

  This is a fragment of my long poem – but didn’t go in it. Wrote it down once, so not to forget, and here it is now – a splinter.

  All of this I’m writing lying in bed, resting the page on a huge book. When I work long into the night, the eyes of one of the portraits on the wall (some great-grandmother of our landlord) become intent and very unpleasant. So good to have reached the end of this little tail, such a nuisance.

  My love, good night …

  Don’t know whether you’ll be able to make sense of this illiterate letter … But never mind … I love you. Will wait for you tomorrow at 11 p.m. – otherwise call me after 9.

  V.

  ____________________

  [ALS, 1 p.]

  [30 December 1923]

  [TO: Berlin]

  [Prague]

  30–XII–23

  Praha Třida Svornosti 37

  Smichov

  My dear happiness,

  How charming, lovely, light you were at that bustling station … didn’t have time to say anything to you, my happiness. But I could see you through the window of the carriage, and, for some reason, while looking at you standing there pressing the fur coat to your sides with your elbows, hands deep in your sleeves – looking at you, at the yellow glass in the station window behind you, and at your grey little booties – one in profile, another en trois quarts – for some reason it was precisely then that I realized how I loved you – and then you had such a fine smile when the train began to glide off. But you know – our trip was absolutely, exceptionally awful. Our things were scattered all over the train, and we had to hang about standing upright, in the draught, till the border. I wanted so much to show you how amusingly the frozen snow, like kernels of silver corn, attached itself to the inner side of those, you know, leather aprons that connect the carriages. You’d have enjoyed it.

  Imagine three little rooms: furniture, a deal table, a dozen chairs hiding splinters, seven beds – entirely wooden, without mattresses, with crosspieces instead of bottoms – and one couch, bought by chance. That’s it. A thin mattress is stretched along the crosspieces – but you can feel these wooden ribs through it, so in the morning you’re all aches … and bed-bugs inhabit the couch. They’d almost vanished after a turpentine attack, but here today they’ve reappeared, on the ceiling, from where they will, at night, like larks, fall onto those asleep – onto Kirill and me. I told him that twelve (it is more correct to spell it with an ‘e’) bed-bugs would be enough to kill a man, but having remembered how charmingly you say: ‘But he’s so small!’ I took, as they say, my words back. Add to this the furious cold in the rooms and the two tiled stoves’ unwillingness to give off warmth (which, of course, would be unpleasant for them), and you get the picture of our life here. No money at all, no forks either – so we have to subsist on sandwiches. At the first opportunity I’ll bring Mother back to Berlin, where I’ll arrive myself on April 5th – minus eighty-five days (have you worked this out?). I have not seen Prague yet – and generally we’re on bad terms with each other.

  Listen: as soon as I have a chance, I will call you on the only telephone to be found in this city: in Kramář’s house. I will try it on the twenty-third (old style), at seven o’clock.

  I love you very much. Love you in a
bad way (don’t be angry, my happiness). Love you in a good way. Love your teeth. I have been working, Morn sat down here with me. He asks me to send you his ‘cordial greetings’. My love, you know, I’m simply very bored without you. I have a feeling you’re still standing at the station as I saw you at that last moment – just as you, probably, still think I’m standing at the carriage window, in my bowler. Till the court scene, your Spanish novel is enchanting; after that, it’s bad. I will give them the package tomorrow.

  How I wish you were saying, right now, with feeling: ‘But you promised me!?…’ I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes – closed – all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels. I’m tired, off to bed. I love you.

  V.

  ____________________

  [ALS, 2 PP.]

  [postmarked 2 January 1924]

  TO: 41 Landhausstr., Berlin W. 15

  [Prague]

  3[1] –XII–23

  Trida Svornosty, 37

  Smichov Praha.

  Not a word from you yet, my love – probably, tomorrow. But if not? You know, I didn’t think I’d miss you so much (‘Ah, you didn’t think! …’). No – it’s just a turn of phrase – to tell you, my lovely, my happiness, how I long for you (how I need you). Meanwhile, I’ll get out of here only on the 17th – I want to finish my Morn – If there were yet another move, he’d fall apart. He’s a man who absolutely cannot bear the feeling of relocation. Yesterday I wrote only two lines all day, and even those I crossed out today. Now it’s been going unexpectedly well, so tomorrow I’ll finish the first scene of the third act. For some reason I am very touchy about this thing. And yet, what a pleasure it’s been to read it to two people – to you and, the other day, to Mother. The third person who understood every comma and appreciated the trifles dear to me was my father. Mother always recalls this when I read her something – and it hurts.