Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  ‘Mme Kodryansky was here …’: Ellipsis in VéN’s citation of the original letter to Field. BB Archive. See p. xi. The children’s writer and memoirist Natalie Kodryansky (Natalia Vladimirovna Kodryansky, née von Gerngross, 1901–1983) had arrived in New York from France in June 1940.

  Perepiska s sestroy: VN, Perepiska s sestroy, ed. Elena Sikorski (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985).

  ‘ “You are voiceless …” ’: Letter of 12 January 1924.

  ‘Don’t you find …’: Letter of 14 January 1924.

  ‘Tufty, I think you write …’: Letter of 9 June 1926.

  ‘Will I get a letterlet …’: Letter of 28 June 1926.

  ‘I am sad …’: Letter of 19 May 1930.

  ‘Won’t I really …?’: Letter of 8–9 April 1970.

  ‘I received today …’: Letter of 8 January 1924.

  ‘My sweetheart …’: Letter of 19 August 1925.

  ‘My love …’: Letter of 10 February 1936.

  ‘I read parts …’: Letter of 6 April 1937.

  ‘And all your letters …’: Letter of c. 26 July 1923.

  ‘I can’t imagine …’: Letter of 8 November 1923.

  ‘I love you …’: Letter of 9 November 1942.

  ‘but why should I …’: Letter of 3–4 November 1932.

  ‘My darling, it is unfair …’: Letter of 6 April 1937.

  ‘I’m ready …’: Letter of 13 April 1939.

  ‘Do not write …’: Letter of 14 April 1939.

  ‘The Finnish president …’: Letter of 24 June 1926.

  ‘who’s not very pleasant …’: Letter of 21 April 1939.

  ‘ “let’s-talk-about-me” smile …’: Letter of 25 November 1932.

  ‘as if he drinks in praise’: Letter of 24 October 1932.

  ‘praise and more praise …’: Letter of 12 July 1926.

  ‘To avoid later embarrassments …’: Letter of c. 24 January 1936.

  ‘wants me to repeat …’: Letter of 4 February 1937.

  ‘Don’t know how …’: Letter of c. 24 January 1936.

  ‘I don’t give a damn …’: Letter of 12 February 1937.

  ‘And he, with his protruding eyes …’: Letter of 19 February 1936.

  ‘I am surrounded …’: Letter of 4 February 1937.

  ‘He turned out to be …’: Letter of 21 April 1939.

  ‘I once asked a conductor …’: Letter of 24 February 1936.

  ‘I save mice …’: Letter of 17 October 1932.

  ‘what a cat …’: Letter of 24 October 1932.

  ‘How light and obedient …’: Letter of c. 24 January 1936.

  ‘There’s a cat …’: Letter of 22 January 1936.

  ‘The servant here …’: Letter of 24 January c. 1936.

  ‘I feel agonizingly …’: Letter of 4 February 1937.

  ‘And he, my little one? …’: Letter of 6 February 1936.

  ‘How charming …’: Letter of 22 January 1937.

  ‘extremely attractive’: Letter of 4 April 1932.

  ‘I gave my mite …’: Letter of 6 April 1932.

  ‘Three of the children …’: Letter of 11 April 1939.

  ‘The teacher …’: Letter of 2 June1926.

  ‘Now I’m floundering …’: Letter of 14 January 1924.

  ‘I’ll go out to buy …’: Letter of 11–12 June 1926.

  ‘Semyonlyudvigoviches’: Letter of 27 January 1936.

  ‘The weather this morning …’: Letter of 10 June 1926.

  ‘You came into my life …’: Letter of 8 November 1923.

  ‘How he, Bunin …’: Letter of 13 February 1936.

  ‘my German visa …’: Letter of 24 February 1936.

  ‘In the métro …’: Letter of 2 February 1936.

  singles Nabokov out as a case of amusia: Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 102; SM, pp. 35–6.

  ‘I read for an hour …’: Letter of 27 June 1926.

  ‘I went to the gypsies …’: Letter of 28 or 29 October 1932.

  those to Edmund Wilson: See Simon Karlinsky (ed.), The Nabokov–Wilson Letters: Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940–1971 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), revised as DBDV, 1940–1971 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

  ‘Now I’m waiting …’: Letter of 10 April 1970.

  ‘MY BELOVED AND PRECIOUS DARLING’: TRANSLATING LETTERS TO VÉRA BY OLGA VORONINA

  ‘I like to think …’: Letter of 10 January 1924.

  ‘The door right opposite …’: Letter of 8 April 1970.

  a good writer is also an enchanter: LL, pp. 5–6.

  ‘Music’: ‘Music’ seems to have been written in February 1932 and was published in Poslednie novosti, 27 March 1932, p. 2.

  ‘Vadim Victorovich was offering … ’: Letter of 10 March 1937. Since a patronymic is a derivative of one’s father’s name, the real Vadim Victorovich Rudnev appears to be Vadim, son of Victor – Nabokov’s fictional creation and alter ego.

  Gogol’s knack: NG, p. 78.

  transformation of the Belgian franc: Letter of 27 January 1936.

  ‘Victor’ … accumulates: ‘Victor, whom I also visited at the museum, has now accumulated a hundred and twenty-nine cases of butterflies – from the British fauna.’ Letter of 27 February 1937.

  ‘Journals’ or ‘books’ … with ‘pages’: ‘… altogether, nine hundred Czech pages have been set from my “encyclopedia’’’ (Letter of 4 March 1937); ‘Victor sent his mother the fourth copy yesterday – in all one thousand two hundred pages of Czech translation over these two months’ (Letter of 7 April 1937).

  Pooch, a relative of Poochums: Letters of 27 August 1925, 29 August 1925, 6 June 1926, 3 July 1926.

  Mr Darling’s crying: Letter of 10 July 1926.

  to steal Nabokov’s pen: Letter of 15 July 1926.

  ‘life-generating’ fiction: Nabokov writes about Gogol’s ‘life-generating syntax’ in his essay on Dead Souls (LRL, p. 20).

  with a ‘sch’ or ‘shch’: Letters of 4, 5, 7, 10, 15 June 1926.

  ‘Lolita, light of my life …’: Lolita (New York: Putnam, 1958), p. 9.

  Russian translation of Lolita: Lolita, trans. into Russian by VN (New York: Phaedra, 1967).

  ‘disgrace’: V. D. Nabokov, The Provisional Government, in V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917, ed. and trans. Virgil D. Medlin and Steven L. Parsons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 100.

  with a yat’ … with a yer: In the spelling reform of 1917, the yat’, ‘Ѣ’, was replaced with ‘e’, already used in other semantic contexts, and the yer, ‘Ъ’, ‘hard sign’, was eliminated in most environments.

  ‘it was not the snow …’: ‘The Visit to the Museum’, SoVN, p. 284.

  ‘ “Living at Wellesley …” ’: Letter of 19 March 1941.

  charmingly antiquated: Modern spelling: ‘галстук’, galstuk, necktie; ‘шофер’, shofyor, chauffeur; ‘прийти’, priyti, to arrive.

  dropping the final ‘a’ in ‘Anna Karenin’: LRL, p. 137.

  1923

  Letter of c. 26 July 1923

  Date: Though undated, the letter encloses the poem ‘Evening’, dated 26 July 1923 in Nabokov’s mother’s album (VNA), and must be written on or shortly after that date.

  masquerade trick: VN first met Véra Slonim on 8 May 1923, at a Russian émigré charity ball, where she wore – and did not lower – a masquerade mask.

  Ronsard: Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), French poet, whom VN had translated the previous year (‘Sonet (iz P’era Ronsora)’ (‘Quand vous serez bien vieille’), Rul’, 13 August 1922) and would allude to later, most memorably in Lolita (Pt 1 Ch. 11).

  It was strange: The thoughts expressed here find an echo in the second part of the two-part poem ‘Provans’ (‘Provence’), ‘Slonyayus’ pereulkami bez tseli’ (‘I wander aimlessly from lane to lane’, written on 19 August 1923, just after he arrived back in Berlin), published Rul’,
1 September 1923, p. 2. VN translated it in PP, p. 27, where he retrospectively misassigned it to ‘Solliès-Pont, 1923’.

  Mother: Elena Ivanovna Nabokov (née Rukavishnikov, 1876–1939), to whom VN was very close: see SM, Ch. 2.

  Evening: Published (without title) in Stikhi, p. 112; dated 26 July 1923 in EN’s album of VN’s verse, VNA. VN’s sister Elena Sikorski understood this poem, with its ‘You call’, as her brother’s response to Véra’s first letters to Domaine-Beaulieu (interview with BB, 24 December 1981).

  Swelter: Unpublished. Dated 7 July 1923, Domaine-Beaulieu, in EN’s transcript in her album of VN’s verse, VNA, and marked in VN’s hand for inclusion in Stikhi, but not included there.

  ‘The Granddad’: Dedushka, written 30 June 1923, published Rul’, 14 October 1923; trans. by DN in MUSSR.

  ‘The Pole’: Polyus, written 6 and 8 July 1923, published Rul’, 14 August 1924, pp. 2–3, and 16 August 1924, pp. 2–3; trans. by DN in MUSSR.

  ‘Gamayun’: Gamayun, one of the three prophetic birds in Russian mythology, the other two being Sirin and Alkonost’, gave its name to a short-lived (1922–23)Berlin émigré publishing house, which published only seven books before folding, including VN’s verse collection Grozd’ (The Cluster, 1923), and his translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anya v strane chudes (1923).

  ‘Russkaya mysl’: Russian Thought, literary and political monthly founded in 1921, in Sofia, then published intermittently, first in Prague, then in Paris. Its lapse between 1924 and 1927 presumably explains the eventual publication of Polyus in Rul’.

  Letter of 8 November 1923

  je patauge: Fr. ‘I’m floundering about’.

  (Your face betw): The start of the abandoned draft sits at right angles to the text of the letter, which skirts around it.

  turned out to be fat: The words translated ‘full of knights’ can also be read, grammatically, as ‘plump knights’.

  some other American: Presumably VN had in mind the American Elisha Gray (1835–1901), who invented a telephone in 1876, rather than the better-known Scots-Canadian Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), who also invented the telephone, and won the American patent for it, in the same year.

  Yes … flight … : These lines break the text of the letter vertically in two.

  Letter of 30 December 1923

  en trois quarts: Fr. ‘in three-quarter view’.

  our trip … awful: EN with her younger children relocated to Prague, where she was offered a modest pension by the Czech government. VN came to help with the move.

  Kirill: Kirill Vladimirovich Nabokov (1911–64), VN’s youngest brother and godson.

  twelve (… with an ‘e’): VN ironically refers to the Russian spelling of the word for ‘twelve’, ‘двенадцать’ (dvenadtsat’) which, in pre-revolutionary orthography, was spelled ‘двѣнадцать’.

  Kramář’s house: Karel Kramář (1860–1937), Czech nationalist statesman and Czechoslovakia’s first prime minister (1918–19). A Russophile, and married to a Russian (Nadezhda Nikolaevna Kramář-Abrikosov, née Khludov, 1862–1936), he strongly disliked Bolshevism and welcomed prominent Russian émigrés into Czechoslovakia and to his Prague home.

  the twenty-third (old style): On 5 January 1924 (New Style), Véra’s twenty-second birthday.

  Morn sat down here with me: The hero of the five-act play Tragediya gospodina Morna, which VN began in December 1923 and completed in January 1924, and was published only posthumously, in Zvezda (1997: 4), and, in book form, TGM and in English as TMM.

  Letter postmarked 2 January 1924

  Date: VN’s date looks like ‘3-XII-23’ (although the ‘3’ appears to rework or overwrite another numeral). The postmark of the envelope with which VéN kept this letter is ‘2.1.24’ (that is, 2 January 1924). VN may have written ‘31-XII-23’; the letter certainly follows the previous, whose own probable ‘30-XII-23’ also has an unclear first digit, which could be ‘2’ rather than ‘3’, but VN seems to have been in Berlin until late December 1923 (Rul’, 8 January 1924, p. 5). If we take the previous letter as correctly dated 30 December 1923 and the ‘2.1.24’ postmark as belonging to this letter, 31 December 1923 seems the least unlikely.

  my father: Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870–1922), criminologist, liberal statesman, journalist and editor, and patron of the arts. VN admired him boundlessly (see SM, Chs. 1 and 9) and set great store by his moral, political, literary and artistic judgement. In 1923, he was still deeply affected by his father’s assassination in March 1922; almost a quarter of a century later, he could still write of the ‘very special emotional abyss’ caused by his father’s death (SM, p. 191).

  Tatarinov: Vladimir Evgenievich Tatarinov (1892–1961), journalist and regular contributor to Rul’.

  Rul’: The Rudder, liberal Russian-language daily published in Berlin between 1920 and 1931, founded by VDN and his two close pre-revolutionary colleagues, Avgust Kaminka and Iosif Hessen; the dominant Russian newspaper in Berlin, which until 1924 was the dominant Russian émigré centre. While Rul’ lasted, VN published there (under the pen-name Vladimir Sirin) scores of poems, stories, plays, reviews, essays, chess problems and crossword puzzles.

  Buffon: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), French naturalist and encyclopaedist.

  Monte Cristo … you and me: Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1844–5) by Alexandre Dumas (1802–70). When Monte Cristo asks Berticcio about visiting cards, he expects the cards to be made; Berticcio tells him that one of them has already been delivered and the rest are waiting on the mantelpiece in his bedroom.

  Tatarinovs: Vladimir Tatarinov and his wife Raisa Abramovna Tatarinov (née Fleyshits, pen-name Raissa Tarr, 1889–1974), Sorbonne-educated lawyer, and decades later, a well-known French writer. Raisa Tatarinov was known for her remarkable talent at bringing together the Russian émigré writers, artists and thinkers she regularly invited to her apartment in Berlin.

  Struves: Gleb Petrovich Struve (1898–1985), a friend of VN’s, especially in the 1920s, and his wife Yulia Yulievna (née André, 1902–91). Before the October 1917 Revolution, Struve’s father Pyotr Berngardovich Struve (1870–1944) had been, like VDN, a leading liberal opponent of the Tsar, and, in emigration, was a political spokesman and editor of influential Russian periodicals. Gleb had been a student at Oxford while VN was at Cambridge, and both lived in Berlin through much of the 1920s; he would become the first literary historian of the Russian emigration.

  1924

  Letter of 8 January 1924

  Date: The envelope bears a Berlin postmark, ‘12.1.24’ on the verso (therefore not the initial postmark); the stamp, with its Czech postmark, has been cut off. VéN has dated the letter on the envelope, under the absent stamp, ‘8-I-24’.

  Moldau: The German name for the Czech Vltava, the river bisecting Prague.

  Lukash: Ivan Sozontovich Lukash (1892–1940), prolific writer, journalist, literary critic. In the early 1920s, before he left Berlin for Riga, he and VN were close friends and collaborated on several projects, including the pantomimes Agasfer (Ahasuerus) and Voda zhivaya (The Living Water).

  Sergey Makovsky: Sergey Konstantinovich Makovsky (1877–1962), poet and art historian.

  gymnasium: Traditional high school, emphasizing classics.

  Aldanov: Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov (Landau) (1886–1957), former chemist, a historical novelist since just before the First World War and especially successful in the emigration.

  Voloshin: Maksimilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (1877–1932), prominent Russian (but not émigré) poet. VN, who met him in Crimea in 1918, thought highly of his poetry and appreciated his mentoring.

  Sirin: VN adopted ‘Vladimir Sirin’ as his regular pen-name in January 1921, partly to distinguish himself from his father, also Vladimir Nabokov, who edited and contributed to Rul’, where most of VN’s work was then appearing.

  fiancée: VN’s fiancée since 1922, Svetlana Romanovna Siewert (married name, Andrault de Langéron, 1905–2
000), broke off their engagement on 9 January 1923.

  ‘The Wanderers’: Skital’tsy, a short two-act play VN wrote in October–November 1921; published Grani, 2 (1923), pp. 69–99. VN first sent it to his parents as his translation of a work by an English playwright, Vivian Calmbrood (a near-anagram of Vladimir Nabokov).

  Letter of 10 January 1924

  my sister: His favourite sibling, his younger sister Elena Vladimirovna Nabokov (married name Sikorski, 1906–2000).

  Madame Bertran: Very private by nature, VéN assumed the name ‘Madame Bertran’ on envelopes and in messages to VN in the early days of their relationship, in Berlin and Prague.

  Mr Lermontov’s famous line: The motif of parting (razluka) is central in the poetry of Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov (1814–41), but VN here in fact reworks a famous two lines from ‘Razgovor Knigoprodavtsa s poetom’ (‘Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet’, 1824) by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837): ‘Chto slava? – Yarkaya zaplata / Na vetkhom rubishche pevtsa’ (‘What is fame? – A bright patch / On a bard’s tattered cloak’).

  punch lollipops: Hard candy on sticks, made of punch or toddy.

  Matter must decay … :, TMM, Act V, Scene 1, pp. 128–9. Italics mark differences between this draft and the published translation.

  a note in Rul’: L. L. [Lolly Lvov], review of ‘Agasfer, a Pantomime’, Rul’, 8 January 1924, p. 5.

  Mme Landau: Unidentified.

  Ahasuerus: Agasfer, a pantomime VN composed with Ivan Lukash to music by V. F. Yakobson. In late December 1923, VN and Lukash recited their play to a small audience at a friend’s home.

  Letter of 12 January 1924

  ‘voiceless’: Could also be translated ‘verbless’ if VN means to evoke the famous poem ‘Shopot, robkoe dykhan’e …’ (‘Whisper, timid breathing …’, 1850) written by Afanasy Afanasievich Fet (1820–92) without a single verb.

  u. s. w.: Ger. ‘and so on’.

  magic lantern show: See SM, Ch. 8, for VN’s reports of the magic lantern shows of his childhood.

  ‘Grani’: The ‘almanac’ (literary miscellany) Grani (Facets), Book 1, published in 1922, in which VN’s poem ‘Detstvo’ (‘Childhood’) and his essay ‘Rupert Bruk’ (‘Rupert Brooke’) appeared. It is unclear what VN refers to: ‘Slonim’ does not feature on the cover. Grani was published by a Russian press of the same name, founded in 1921 in Berlin by Sasha Chorny (Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Glikberg, 1880–1932), poet, satirist and friend of VDN; in 1923 it had published VN’s collection Gorniy Put’ (The Empyrean Path).