Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Kadashev-Amfiteatrov: Vladimir Aleksandrovich Amfiteatrov-Kadashev (1888–1942), poet; member of the ‘Brotherhood of the Round Table’, a literary group VN and others formed in 1922.

  ‘veterinary’ instead of ‘Virgin Mary’: In the original: bogoroditsa (‘Mother of God’), pugovitsa (‘button’).

  Nemirovich-Danchenko: The writer Vasily Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko (1844/5–1936) lived in Berlin before emigrating to Prague in 1923.

  ‘Spolokhi’: Northern Lights, Russian literary journal founded in Berlin in 1921 by the émigré writer Aleksandr Drozdov (see note to next letter).

  ‘paddle the horse!’: In the original: sedlay konya (‘saddle the horse’), sdelay konya (‘make a horse’).

  You will leave … : TMM, Act IV, p. 107. Italics mark differences between this draft and the published translation.

  Letter postmarked 14 January 1924

  Date: Berlin postmark on verso; the original Prague postmark, presumably a day or more earlier, has disappeared with the stamp, cut off the envelope.

  my boss: Probably Yakov Davidovich Yuzhny (1884–1938), director of Berlin’s Bluebird cabaret, who paid VN for sketches, especially in late 1923 and 1924.

  Drozdov: Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Drozdov (1896–1963), writer, translator, founding editor of the journal Spolokhi, editor of the literary miscellany Vereteno, to both of which VN contributed. During the course of 1923, he had denounced the emigration and Rul’ in a way that prompted VN to consider calling him out to a duel (VNRY 203); in December 1923, he returned to the Soviet Union.

  Letter of 16 January 1924

  Date: Found in an envelope postmarked 26 January 1924; but VN’s date and the reference to 17 January show it was written earlier.

  those elders: Presumably the notorious anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), which purported to document Jewish plans for world domination and was popular among conservative Russian émigrés.

  Nilus: Sergey Aleksandrovich Nilus (1862–1929), religious writer, published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as part of his book Velikoe v malom i antikhrist, kak blizkaya politicheskaya vozmozhnost’: Zapiski pravoslavnogo (The Great within the Small and Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility: Notes of an Orthodox Believer, 1903).

  Krasnov: Pyotr Nikolaevich Krasnov (1869–1947), general in the Russian and Cossack armies, novelist and publicist.

  c’est tout dire: Fr. ‘that says it all’.

  A Vision: The poem (‘Videnie’) is written on the back of the letter. Published Rul’, 27 January 1924, p. 2; Stikhi, p. 126.

  Letter of 17 January 1924

  Frost and sunshine: Echo of the poem ‘Zimnee utro’ (‘A Winter Morning’, 1829), by Pushkin.

  Sadko: A hero of the Novgorod epics. In the opera Sadko (1897), by Nikolay Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), the hero enchants the daughter of the sea king with his music, and descends into the Volkhov to find treasure and save his honour.

  I will Amerigo: In Russian, ameríknu.

  Flaubert … ‘Madame Bovary’: Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), Madame Bovary (1857). VN kept his high opinion of Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary he taught at Cornell and Harvard (LL).

  lacrimae arsi: Lacrimae – ‘tears’; arsi – ‘I burned’. A pun on Latin ars, ‘art’ (although ‘tears of art’ would be lacrimae artis).

  ‘The scarlet ribbon …’: From Lermontov’s long poem ‘Demon’ (1829–39), Canto X, ll. 5–6: ‘Luchom rumyanogo zakata / Tvoy stan, kak lentoy, obov’yu.’

  Letter of 24 January 1924

  frustrations flock: In the Russian, khlop’ya khlopot, ‘flakes of troubles’.

  Asta Nielsen: Danish silent-film actress (1881–1972).

  ‘The Living Water’ … ‘Sinyaya ptitsa’: The Living Water, which VN co-wrote with Lukash, ran for more than a month (January–February 1924). ‘Bluebird’ (‘Sinyaya ptitsa’) was a Russian cabaret club in Berlin.

  Medes: Ancient Persian people. One of the main characters in TMM is called Midia.

  my estate: VN inherited the Rozhdestveno estate from his uncle, Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov (1872–1916), the ‘Ruka’ of SM (especially Ch. 3).

  Lenin is dead: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Ulyanov) (b. 1870), leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Premier, died on 21 January 1924.

  Marina Tsvetaeva’s: Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), a leading Russian poet, and an essayist and playwright, emigrated in 1922 to join her husband, then a student at Prague University. From 1925, she lived in Paris until her departure for Soviet Russia in 1939.

  Letter of 13 August 1924

  Date: VN appears to have mistakenly written ‘VII’ for ‘VIII’ (as in the next letter); this and the next three, the last two dated ‘VIII’, seem in fact to cover just over a week in Prague and the Czech resort of Dobřichovice. VN has returned to Prague after seven months in Berlin with VéN.

  Letter of 17 August 1924

  Date: see note on date of previous letter.

  Chirikovs: Evgeny Nikolaevich Chirikov (1864–1932), writer, member of several Russian literary unions in Prague.

  Olga: The older of VN’s two sisters, Olga Vladimirovna Nabokov (1903–78), to become Shakhovskoy by her first husband, Sergey Sergeevich Shakhovskoy, and Petkevich by her second, Boris Vladmirovich Petkevich.

  her grant: To which she was entitled as a member of the family of a Russian émigré scholar or writer (her father) and living in Czechoslovakia.

  your cousin: Probably Véra’s cousin Anna Lazarevna Feigin (1890–1973), to whom she was very close, who had a cousin, Herman Bromberg, in Leipzig.

  Tegel: Berlin suburb, in whose Russian cemetery (the Russisch-Orthodoxer Friedhof) VDN was buried. VN sent money there for the upkeep of the grave and for memorial services.

  ‘Prayer’ … and ‘Rivers’: ‘Molitva’ (‘Prayer’), Rul’, 24 August 1924, p. 2, and Stikhi, pp. 140–41; ‘Russkaya reka’ (‘Russian River’), Nash mir, 14 September 1924, pp. 264–6, and as ‘Reka’ (‘River’), Stikhi, pp. 97–100.

  whether anything’s appeared in ‘Segodnya’: Today, émigré daily, published in Riga (Latvia was independent between the wars) from 1919 to 1940. The poem ‘Gadanie’ (‘Fortune-Telling’) would appear in Segodnya on 26 August 1924, p. 11.

  Letter of 18 August 1924

  hope (with a small ‘h’): Nadezhda (Hope) is a common name for a woman in Russian.

  Mokropsy (there is such a hamlet): To a Russian ear the name sounds like ‘wet dogs’.

  lots of new English words: VéN already knew English well enough to give lessons in it, but wanted to expand her vocabulary.

  Korostovets’s: Vladimir Konstantinovich Korostovets, until 1930 Berlin-based Russian correspondent of the Westminster Gazette and The Times, who paid VN well to turn his articles into English.

  Letter of 24 August 1924

  my youngest sister: Elena, who was eighteen.

  Vrubel: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856–1910), Russian painter famous especially for his dark, intense images illustrating Russian literary and folk themes.

  Alkonost: In Slavic mythology, a bird of paradise with the head of a woman, whose beautiful song makes mortals forget everything else. Alkonost is often portrayed together with Sirin, another prophetic bird, as in the famous painting Sirin i Alkonost: Pesn’ radosti i pechali (Sirin and Alkonost: Song of Joy and Grief, 1896), by Victor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov (1848–1926). (See the note on Gamayun to the first of VN’s letters to VéN, c. 26 July 1923.)

  faithlessness (is this witty?): Vera in Russian means ‘faith’.

  Kresty: ‘The Crosses’, a prison in St Petersburg.

  Vyborg Appeal: After Tsar Nicholas II unexpectedly dissolved the First Duma in July 1906, many of its deputies (representatives) travelled from St Petersburg the next day to nearby Vyborg, Finland, and there issued a proclamation exhorting the populace to such civil disobedience as resisting military service and taxation. VDN, a leader in the Duma, helped draft the appeal and s
igned it, for which he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

  bread-and-salt: A Slavic greeting of welcome for an honoured guest.

  1925

  Letter of 19 January 1925

  Date: The date is marked on the back of the envelope, in pencil, by VéN. The stamp is missing.

  Letter of c. March–April 1925?

  Date: Undated letter in an unstamped envelope.

  Letter of 14 June 1925

  Date: A note written on the front of a small envelope, dated on the back, in pencil, in VéN’s hand ‘14.VI.25’.

  I Love you: In Russian, the capitalized and carefully aligned first letters of words Lyublyu (‘I love’), Obozhayu (‘I adore’) and Radost’ (‘joy’) form the word LOR (‘LAUR[A]’?) when read vertically.

  Letter postmarked 19 August 1925

  Zoppot: A Pomeranian beach resort town in the then Free City of Danzig; now Sopot, Poland.

  Shura: Aleksandr (Shura) Sack, whom VN tutored in Berlin and was escorting to Zoppot.

  S. A.: Sofia Adamovna Sack, Aleksandr’s mother.

  Postcard of 27 August 1925

  Bol[l]: Boll, a hamlet a mile north of Bonndorf, into which it would be incorporated in 1971, between Bonndorf and Reiselfingen (see next letter).

  Postcard of 28 August 1925

  20 versts: A verst is two-thirds of a mile or just over a kilometre; twenty versts = thirteen miles.

  Bad-Bol[l]: Not to be confused with Bad-Boll, a well-known town over a hundred miles away. A small Bad-Boll stood near the Boll now incorporated into Bonndorf, although only a few traces remain.

  Postcard of 29 August 1925

  We passed through here: Inscription over the image on the picture side of the postcard, a photograph of a steam locomotive crossing the well-known railway bridge Ravennaviadukt across the Black Forest valley of Höllental. There is a caption at the bottom of the card: ‘Höllental — bad. Schwarzwald. Ravennaviadukt’.

  Postcard postmarked 30 August 1925

  We’ll spend … St Blasien: Written on the picture side of the postcard, across the sky of a landscape captioned ‘Zastlerhütte’.

  Postcard 1 of 31 August 1925

  Shura suggests … plant: The date was written first; the top two lines were written around this point, after the postcard and the poem had been finished.

  The Summit: The poem (‘Vershina’) is inscribed on the other side of the card. Published, Rul’, 19 September 1925, p. 2; trans. by VN as ‘I Like That Mountain’ in PP, p. 35.

  Postcard 2 of 31 August 1925

  Pension Zeiss … little card: VéN had just written to say she had rented a room at Pension Zeiss in Konstanz.

  Postcard of 1 September 1925

  Säckingen: Bad Säckingen am Rhein.

  follow the route we covered today: The route is marked on the map of Todtmoos and St Blasien on the picture side of the postcard.

  Postcard 1 of 2 September 1925

  Postcard, captioned ‘Wehr (Baden)’ with an image of the little town as seen across the railroad tracks.

  in your namesake: i.e. in Wehr (in Russian the phrase for ‘in Wehr’ sounds, and is spelled, like ‘in Véra’).

  30 versts: About twenty miles.

  Postcard 2 of 2 September 1925

  my song: A reference to the picture side of the postcard: a gentleman in theatrical ‘Renaissance’ dress, pressing a similarly dressed lady to his heart, and holding a trumpet in his left hand; his horse is behind them. Below the image there is a caption in verse, from the 1853 poem by Joseph Victor von Scheffel (1826–86), set to music in, for instance, the opera Der Trompeter von Säckingen (1884) by Victor Ernst Nessler (1841–90): ‘Behüt’ dich Gott. / Die Wolken flieh’n, der Wind saust durch die Blätter, / Ein Regenschauer zieht durch Wald und Feld, / Zum Abschiednehmen just das rechte Wetter, / Grau, wie der Himmel, steht vor mir die Welt’ (‘God protect you. / The clouds fly, the wind whistles through the leaves / A rainshower drifts through wood and field, / Just the right weather for leavetaking. / The world stands before me grey as the sky’).

  1926

  Letter of 26 April 1926

  Ivan Vernykh: Manuscript of abandoned short story (VNA, Box 1) that turns into a letter to Véra. The ‘1.’ at the beginning indicates that this was to be the first section of a multi-section story. Vernykh, ‘true’ or ‘faithful’, shares a root with vera, ‘faith’. Thanks to Gennady Barabtarlo for reminding us that this story becomes a ‘letter to Véra’.

  Letter of 2 June 1926

  Date: VéN left her husband a letterpad on which she had written the day and month (from 2/VI to 30/VI); VN added the year. See start of letter of 30 June 1926.

  I don’t even know where you are: In the summer of 1926, VéN spent two months at several health resorts in southern Germany with her mother, Slava Borisovna Slonim (1872–1928). VN remained in Berlin in a Russian pension in Nürnberger Strasse.

  Gotter-knows-where: Pun on ‘God-knows-where’, using a mistransliterated German Götter (gods).

  ‘Zveno’: Zveno (The Link), a Russian weekly edited in Paris from 1923 to 1928 by Pavel Milyukov and Maksim Vinaver.

  a song: my dress is blue, blue: ‘Blau, blau, blau sind alle meine Kleider’, a German children’s song.

  Albertine: Albertine disparue (also La Fugitive; Albertine Gone), the sixth volume (1925) in À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), by Marcel Proust (1871–1922).

  Kaplan’s: Sergey Kaplan was a regular pupil of VN’s in 1925–6, his mother an occasional one.

  Regensburger Str.: VéN’s parents separated in 1924. Her cousin Anna Feigin joined her father, Evsey Lazarevich Slonim (1865–1928), and others, in an apartment in Regensburger Strasse.

  Sofa: Sofia Evseevna Slonim (1908–96), VéN’s youngest sister.

  Arctia hebe: The arctiid moth Arctia (hebe) festiva, the Hebe Tiger Moth.

  Daphnis nerii: The sphingid moth, the Oleander Hawk Moth, present in parts of Africa and Southern Asia all year round and in summer in much of Europe.

  livornica: The sphingid moth Hyles livornica, the Striped Hawk Moth, found in Africa, Southern Europe and Central and East Asia.

  celerio: The sphingid moth Hippotion celerio, the Vine Hawk Moth, permanently present in Africa and Southern Asia and a migrant in Europe.

  niceae: The nymphalid butterfly Stibochiona nicea, the Popinjay, occurs usually in the Australo-Indomalay ecozone.

  Aporia crataegi-augusta: The pierid butterfly Aporia crataegi, the Black-Veined White, a rather large white with prominent dark veins. The sub-species Aporia crataegi augusta was named in 1905 by Eurilio Turati (1858–1938), after whom VN named Luzhin’s opponent in his fateful last chess game (The Defence).

  Shura’s: The home of VN’s pupil, Aleksandr Sack.

  Sofia Ad.: Sofia Ad[amovna?], possibly Mme Sack, Aleksandr’s mother.

  B. G.: Spelled out in letter of 21 June 1926 as Berta Gavrilovna, otherwise unidentified.

  my own club: One of the best tennis clubs in Berlin, where VN played almost for free thanks to his strong game.

  Finanzamt: German tax office, here trying to collect the mandatory ‘Church Tax’.

  pusschen: For the next few months, VN often adds diminutive suffixes ‘ch’, ‘sch’ or ‘shch’ to his endearments and other nonce words, possibly in imitation of the German diminutive ‘-chen’ suffixes.

  Letter of 3 June 1926

  Observer: The world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, founded in London in 1791.

  Anyuta’s: Anna Feigin’s.

  Letter of 4 June 1926

  Stein: Semyon Ilyich Stein (1887–1951), half-brother of VN’s close friend Georgy Iosifovich Hessen. See next note but one below.

  ‘Mary’: VN’s first novel, Mashen’ka (Mary), published in Russian (Berlin: Slovo, 1926). In German it would appear as Sie kommt – kommt sie?, trans. Jakob Margot Schubert and G. Jarcho (Berlin: Ullstein, 1928).

  ‘Slovo’: Slovo (The Word), a Berlin publishing house establis
hed in 1920, on the suggestion of VDN and his friends Iosif Hessen and Avgust Kaminka, as a branch of the major German publisher, Ullstein. VN published with Slovo his translation of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon (Nikolka Persik, 1922), his novels Mary (Mashen’ka, 1926) and King, Queen, Knave (Korol’, dama, valet, 1928), and his collection of short stories The Return of Chorb (Vozvrashchenie Chorba, 1930).

  Gräger: Unidentified.

  and no Spaniards: May combine a pun on marok, the genitive case of ‘marks’ and a homophone of ‘Maroc’, the French for Morocco, and an echo of a line (‘and no Spaniards’) from ‘The Fifth International’ (1922), by Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930), which had quickly become a catchphrase.

  the book of short stories: No volume of Nabokov short stories would appear in German until Frühling in Fialta: Dreiundzwanzig Erzählungen, ed. Dieter E. Zimmer, trans. Wassili Berger, Dieter E. Zimmer, Renate Gerhardt and René Drommert (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966).

  Evsey Lazarevich: Slonim, VéN’s father, consulted here for his business sense.

  By some miracle I received ‘Rul’’: Despite his having changed addresses and not informed Rul’’s delivery service.

  composing a poem about Russia: He hoped to have a new poem to read for his performance on Russian Culture Day, 8 June.

  ‘il est evidang’: Mispronunciation of ‘il est évident’ (Fr. ‘it is obvious’).

  ‘Ouna lettra por vous, mossieu’: Provençal Fr. ‘A letter for you, sir.’

  Letter of 5 June 1926

  Slava Borisovna: VéN’s mother. Referring to others by the initial letter of first name and patronymic is standard Russian practice.

  Ladyzhnikov’s: A Russian bookstore and lending library in Berlin (Rankestrasse 33).

  Zoshchenko: Mikhail Mikhaylovich Zoshchenko (1895–1958), master of short satirical fiction, whom VN would later come to appreciate more.