Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  On Sunday, I had lunch at Muma’s, who, according to Natasha, is performing with a group of women singers. She sang a few romances rather well. Then I went to Vishnyak’s. I had tea there. He gave me 300 francs more towards the Camera payment, which will be enough for me till I leave. With the receipt of this it comes to (350+200+300) 850, of which this 300 is still almost intact. Besides, I am getting 1,000 francs on November 22 from Ergaz. Brussels and Antwerp will pay for my trip to Berlin and more, if I’m going to Berlin. I’m more and more inclined for you to come here. The evening will yield, according to Fond’s estimates, 2,500–3,000 francs net. He is an optimist, but, it’s true, the tickets are selling well. I didn’t get especially involved in this, and I’ve already sold 690 francs worth, 480 of which I got in cash and submitted to Fond for accounting. From Vishnyak I went to the Levinsons’, and here I must sharply change the tone of my narrative. An epic begins. In the midst of a luxurious apartment there sits in armchairs (note the plural form) the long-unshaven, fat-faced, big-nosed Andrey Yakovlevich, in a red dressing gown; he speaks through clenched teeth, savouring and weighing his words. Sometimes, the weighing lasts half or minute or so, during which time his face acquires the fastidiously haughty expression of some kind of well-fed Roman proconsul whose mother had once fallen into sin with a little provincial tailor. This continues, but the violin begins, namely, at a certain distance from him, from the idol, sits his wife, a lady of Krymov’s wife’s type, but, unlike her, unbearably talkative, she skips from word to word, as if detouring by swoops, quickly inserts the supposed answer in the mouth of an interlocutor, saying God knows what kind of nonsense, and, most importantly, she talks about her husband in his presence (whereupon his heavy lids lower ceremonially and benevolently) as if he were, for example, Leo Tolstoy. Andrey Yakovlevich says, or Andrey Yakovlevich wants to tell you, or, finally, Andrey Yakovlevich was very upset by the dry tone of your letters. In the background – homely, squashed by the greatness of the father and the energetic mother – the thin little Mlle Levinson, who told me on the staircase: ‘I am your great admirer. Papa is waiting for you, M’sieur Sirin.’ I was informed: ‘Andrey Yakovlevich is your friend, yes, your friend.’ He solemnly confirms it himself. Inside, I was dying from laughter. It was phenomenal and amusing. He talks about himself, too, as of an older friend. A little phrase goes on for five minutes or so. He is doing what he can: that is, for placing my stories in Candide and for printing The Defence in some newspaper. They both despise the émigré press like some emperor despises a small far-away rebellious country. It was a rare treat. I will call on them again in a few days. In the evening I was at Mme Adamov’s, where I met Vadim Andreev.

  ____________________

  [VÉNAF]

  [10 November (?)1932]

  [TO: Berlin]

  [Paris]

  Somehow I didn’t have time to write to you yesterday, although the day was relatively dull. I had lunch at the Kyandzhuntsevs’, and dinner with Sergey, his boyfriend and Natasha, after which we went to the cinema. But I began to work seriously on a new story yesterday. I definitely want – on this occasion re-read Ronsard’s sonnet ‘Je veux lire en trois jours’ – to finish this on Tuesday. So I’ll try to seclude myself over these last few days, too, although they are already very much coloured in ahead with all sorts of tasks and meetings. I get terribly tired here. I’m absolutely confident that my career will thrive here, but all the same I’m afraid to summon you here completely decidedly and without question, that is, you should join your will to mine, and you haven’t made up your mind either. Nika is arriving in a day or two. He’ll take me various places. You know, when she was putting Vanya to sleep and pinning his clothes on him with a large safety pin, Natasha pierced his skin through and didn’t notice, while he, of course, screamed; at last she suddenly thought, looked him over and then saw that his little tummy was neatly pierced and fastened with the pin. I have received a very sweet letter from Zyoka and another from Gleb in London. He is giving a whole lecture on me. I’m sending you the idiotic advertisement.

  ____________________

  [VÉNAF]

  [11 November 1932]

  [TO: Berlin]

  [Paris]

  I’m carrying out your little instructions. I think that the translations will be ready in a day or two, and, of course, I’ll deliver them in person. Yesterday in the metro I met the Elkins, who told me that in Revue de Paris, it’s a journal, on the list of forthcoming books there is a King, Queen, Knave, but by another author. It may even be Giraudoux. The same happened to Aldanov. The book Sainte-Hélène, petite île came out, he met the author, who in his foreword mentioned the coincidence of titles. I’ll find out the details of the case. Yesterday I was at Osorgin’s: a youthful-looking, slender man with a hint of a mane, in some kind of a belted velvet jacket and an unbuttoned tennis collar. Our conversation was not very interesting, he hates Khodasevich and is friends with Otsup. He calls him a remarkable, decent man. From there I went to see the Zaytsevs: icons and patriarchs. They are rather nice, simple-hearted, and, among other things, they told me that Remizov is mortally offended by me. They have tons of Jewish friends, but, at the same time, Zaytsev likes to savour, now and then, a Jewish accent. And overall, there is something a little off in them, some rather unpleasant little quirk. I had tea with them and went to Lolly who happens to have a very likeable young wife with a hairdo in the mode of a Pushkin miss. I saw Mme [Mlle?] Rachmaninov there and the Pohl couple. It was hellishly boring. But then Rachmaninov took me home in her car. And I was simply collapsing from fatigue, since I also had supper at the Kyandzhuntsevs’ and the Portnovs’. Today I wrote several letters to Yulia, poor Raisa, etc. And I was writing a story. At five I must call in on Fondaminsky, and from there go to dinner at the Thompsons’. I forgot last time to enclose in the letter to you the advertising flyer about Glory. And now I cannot find it.

  I am sorry you had to retype the reviews. This was on Nika’s advice. I have almost completely evened the score and dined with Natasha at a café, drank and so on. And Nika will be at my evening and, of course, I’ll arrange seats for them. Yan Ruban still sings romances in my translations. She and Pohl, her husband, have come back from Saurat and even ate at that same hotel where, remember, it was so delicious, and he has landscapes from Saurat. He is a musician, an artist, and an occultist. But overall, he looks like that homeopathic doctor we once went to. Isn’t that funny? Ruban is in the Society for Animal Protection; she was very upset about the little ears. I am now sitting in the Rausches’ tiny living room, where I sleep too. Portraits of his ancestors, and of Uncle Zhenya and Yurik are on the wall. Above the couch, where I sleep, hangs a guitar, all the chairs are so worn out you need to add a cushion when you sit down. They are very sweet people, and the children, Maria Vasilievna’s daughter and Koka’s son, are very sweet too, and are living in terrible poverty. I will soon call on the old man Kuprin. If you see Zyoka, tell him I’m writing to him. It is too late to put off ‘the Belgians’, and I think anyway I’ll manage by the 26th to do everything I need to do.

  ____________________

  [VÉNAF]

  [12 November 1932]

  [TO: Berlin]

  [Paris]

  On Sunday evening, I’m moving to the Fondaminskys’ for three days, since I want to rest a little till Tuesday, and here, in spite of the Rausches’ charm, resting is tricky. On Wednesday, their back room comes free, the tenant leaves, and I’ll move in there till the end of my stay here. I am offering them to pay for it, but, so far, they’ve been saying no. But I think I need to talk them into it. Keep on writing to this address, or do the calculations right, I will get back here on Wednesday or Thursday, or there’ll be a mix-up. I’ll read, probably (still can’t make a final decision), the first and, maybe, the second chapter of the novel. No, I will begin with poems, then the chapter, then a break, then ‘A Dashing Fellow’ and ‘Music’. I’ve sent an invitation to the poor Yu. Yu. and Aunt Nina. Yesterday I was at Fond
’s, and from there – by foot – went to the Thompsons’ along the charming rue du Docteur Blanche, where the walls in the summer are covered in roses. Write a letter to Lizaveta, since you’ve written her only a few words. Today I had lunch with Natasha. I came back around four and will pop out only to post this letter and call in for a minute on Aldanov, who lives nearby. I feel extremely tired, but still I’m very sweet and cheery. I’m still writing in the same little living room. They’re talking here too, and creating some kind of canvases on the table. I absolutely cannot concentrate. And everything here is very uncomfortable: the table, the chair, the pen. Tomorrow I will have dinner at the Evreinovs’. I am terribly annoyed that I won’t finish my story for Tuesday. Let’s see how it goes at Fond’s. But here writing’s impossible. This evening the Don Aminados and Muma and her husband will come to dinner. The letter today is somewhat scanty and a little sour. You can find quite a lot of vulgarity even in these Nouvelles Littéraires and Candides after all. I am very very sorry for old Mme Teisch. I haven’t seen Berberova for quite a while.

  ____________________

  [VÉNAF]

  [14 November 1932]

  [TO: Berlin]

  [Paris]

  What a wonderful sleep I had last night! What a great rest! In a charming room on rue Chernoviz, under a canopy of bookshelves, from 1 a.m. till two the next afternoon, and Fondik himself filled up my bath. I have finally settled on the programme. I will read six poems, those I usually read, then ‘Music’, and after the break, a chapter and a half of ‘Despair’. I have just dictated four pages for Amalia Osipovna to type – to the point where he arrives from Prague and she makes eggnog for him. You’ll have to retype these pages again anyway, if only because here they have no hard signs. The marvellous Siamese cat. His name is Zen-Zin (Zenzinov got him), he warms himself at the fireplace. It’s quiet, cosy, nice. The pen writes beautifully. On Saturday night at the Rausches’, Aminado with his wife and the Zapolsky couple, Muma with her husband, were there. They are all very good friends, they played guitar. Zapolsky lived in Siverskaya and courted Lyussya’s sister, then he saw them in Poltava. A surprisingly funny combination. From the touching Thompsons I got an invitation to work, live and eat with them. I called them yesterday. I’ll have dinner at their place on Wednesday. I was feeling disgustingly tired yesterday. I hadn’t been sleeping enough for a week. I played chess with Koka, then took my suitcase off to the Fondaminskys’, then dropped in to pick Muma up and we went to the Evreinovs’. Sofia Pregel and someone called Shaykevich were there, he an art connoisseur, director of the former Romantic Theatre. He spoke rather amusingly about the Armenian Gurdjieff, a Rasputin-like personality with huge hypnotic power. Overall a mystical-Freudian-Goyan spirit reigns in Evreinov’s house. Not from ‘goy’, but from the Spanish artist. Mrs Evreinov, the author of the much-talked-of novel Je veux qu’on se voit, has excellent connections with the newspaper Gringoire, but she warned me that if I’m published in Candide, I can’t be in Gringoire, and vice versa. She is ‘from the merchants’, as she says herself, emits torrents of words, is rather attractive, slender, near-sighted, with long earrings. We talked, of course, about Plaksin, while Pregel looked up Yuzya Bilig’s telephone number, but I forgot to write it down. Evreinov himself is a person of a type absolutely alien to me, but very funny, and friendly and ardent. When he portrays someone or something, the result’s talented and wonderful. But when he philosophizes, it’s terribly crass. He said, for example, that all people can be divided into types, he’s read a pile of some German, and that Dostoevsky is the greatest writer in the world. Rausch is a hopeless dreamer. […] I’m going over what I’ll be reading. It’s already five o’clock today. At seven, I’ll have dinner at the Kyandzhuntsevs’. A poor relative has come to see the Fonds now and brought teiglach. Aleksandr Fyodorovich has come and is already booming throughout the house.

  ____________________

  [VÉNAF]

  [16 November 1932]

  [TO: Berlin]

  [Paris]

  Tuesday, 2 a.m.

  Write to the Fonds’ address. I’m sending 600 francs to Mother. In any event at Christmas we will have to be in Berlin for Mother’s visit, so it probably makes no sense for us to move here and so on. But what a success! The huge hall was packed, I have three thousand already in my wallet, raptures, the love of the crowd, all in all, wonderful. Saint Fondik is literally jumping with joy. This morning I swotted up my poems and tried the same with the prose. At three I went to bed, that is, at three p.m., to sleep for a couple of hours before the evening. But as soon as I began to slide very sweetly into sleep, Rausch arrived and brought your letter from Boulevard Murat. It was wonderful, but he, unfortunately, came on another mission too. He sat at the foot of my bed for a solid hour and laid out his cinematographic plans in detail. But yesterday I talked to Saba, who’d been able to make enquiries, and found out that in Vozrozhdenie, for example, Rausch worked very muddle-headedly and awkwardly and, in general, it doesn’t depend on him but on his companion to give him the job; moreover, the job Rausch might count on pays so little, and so on, but still, the main thing is that it’s impossible to cool his ardour. No matter what I say to shrink or cool his prospects, he manages to turn everything for the best. In a word, he was full of energy – and talked and talked, and then I had to put on my dressing gown and lead him to the telephone, on which he called but did not reach some third person close to Kyandzhuntsev’s companion. Terrible nonsense. Finally, he put on his poor gentilhommish coat with two buttons in the back, took his gloves and left, full of energy. I lolled about till six, heard in the distance the tiny voices of the Merezhkovskys, then again quiet footsteps. Afraid to wake me up, the Fonds and Kerensky were walking on tiptoe along the hallway to the office, to proofread some article or other, but right on the threshold they couldn’t hold out any longer. An explosion, an argument about Mussolini, somewhere the door closed, but through it the booming and yellings of peremptory conversation continued. I had a great shave and began to dress. It turned out that the sleeves of my tuxedo were too short, that is, that the cuffs of the beautiful silk shirt of the same provenance stuck out too far. Besides, the belt was peeking out from underneath the vest when I stood up straight. So Amalia Osipovna quickly had, first of all, to make me those, you know, armbands, out of elastic and Zenzinov had to give me his suspenders. His trousers later kept falling down. He would hold himself around the stomach, since he couldn’t use my belt. When all of that had been sorted, I looked very smart. Three of us sat down to dinner: Aleksandr Fyodorovich, Amalia and I; the rest had set out early. I had an eggnog, and the three of us went around nine, in a taxi cab, to rue Las Cases. I arrived – it was packed. There were no more seats or tickets. But people kept squeezing in, crowding forward. I won’t list those we know – they were all there. And even before I began, those I knew and those I didn’t were coming up to me endlessly. I was so tired of smiling I didn’t even try any longer to establish whom, in fact, I was talking to. Fortunately, it soon began. I ran on stage like a fop, and, to the thunder of applause … Before I forget, I did send Mme Veryovkin an invitation, but I don’t think she was in the hall. In the front row sat the Kyandzhuntsevs, Sergey and Natasha (I enclose Nika’s telegram) and more relatives. The writers were all there, Adamovich, thousands of ladies, Mit’ka Rubenstein, in a word, everyone. A long, comfortable table, the cosiest of armchairs, a carafe with water. Taking my time I spread out all of my little things from the very nice briefcase I’d borrowed from Rudnev, felt myself completely at home, and, taking my time, began to recite my poems by heart. I recited ‘To the Muse’, ‘Aerial Island’, ‘The Window’, ‘To an Unborn Reader’, ‘First Love’, ‘The Little Angel’ and ‘Inspiration, Pink Sky …’ The most gratifying applause after every poem. I had a sip of water and began to tackle ‘Music’. Magnificent acoustics. They listened marvellously. In a word, it all got to them. Again, thunder and then intermission. There they completely crowded me, and some dreadful woman
, who reeked impossibly of sweat, turned out to be Mlle Novotvortsev, my Phalero girlfriend. God knows what she was saying. I got a glimpse of Denis Roche, of old Avgust, of some Tenishev old boys, of Aunt Nina, the Tatarinov girls, Khodasevich, Berberova, and many more I didn’t know. The real enjoyment began, however, when I took up Despair. I read 34 pages. They got everything. I read, speaking modestly, absolutely remarkably. It’s awfully silly to write about this, but I really was on form. And somehow, from the very beginning, there was a gleam of success, and the audience was good, simply wonderful. Such a big, sweet, receptive, pulsing animal, grunting and chuckling in the places I needed, and then obediently dying down again. It finished at half past eleven, and again – rapture. A handshake, Fondik’s wonderful smile. In a word, all a vainglorious man could ask for. We crowded into a café, a large group of us. I gave a short speech, and so on. Finally, home. And there were we, the Fondiks and I, sitting down à trois. He counted the money. Tomorrow I’ll send you 1,200 francs. He was so thrilled with every new hundred-franc bill. My share – that is, minus the expenses for the hall and the tickets – comes, as I have already said, to 3,000.

  Suddenly something else has come up. Actually, I shouldn’t be telling you this till I’ve looked into it properly. But anyway. I’ll give you a general outline. One lady I don’t yet know – Amalia Osipovna and I are going to see her in a few days – has offered you and me 3–4 months in her castle near Pau, and she’ll not even be there, while we will have the servants, the car and so on at our disposal. I’ll be at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the day after tomorrow, where I am nudging our visas along. (Although could this be under the influence of Rausch and his wild imagination?) We will see, but how good it would be if something like this happened. I feel somehow quite joyful. Touch wood. I have a comfortable bed, I’m writing comfortably. But oh, how late it is, and tomorrow I’ve decided to go with the Fonds to the memorial service for Demidov’s wife. I have to. He was awfully nice to me. In general, I’m just surprised by the charming, somehow selfless, tender relationship everyone has towards me. This was not an easy thing – to organize this evening. I’m enclosing another photo, I’ve found the advertisement.