et tout ce qui … : Fr. ‘and all that follows from that’.
Zyoka: Georgy Hessen, now living in Paris but visiting Berlin.
N.R.F.: Nouvelle Revue Française.
Slonim’s: Mark Slonim, who ran an agency for placing books by Russian writers in translation. See letter of 22 November 1932.
Wallace: Unidentified.
Melo du d’y: Robert Mélot du Dy (1891–1956), Belgian poet and prose writer, a colleague of Hellens.
Mme Bataud: Unidentified.
Zen-Zin and Nikolay: Fondaminsky’s cats.
Elena Aleksandrovna: Possibly Elena Aleksandrovna Peltser (née Kovalyov, 1898–1983), a good acquaintance of the Fondaminskys. VN dictated some of his work to her in April 1937.
The old man … his memoirs: Not published in fact until long after his death: I. V. Hessen, Gody izgnaniya: Zhiznennyi otchyot (Years of Exile: A Life Record) (Paris: YMCA, 1981).
Letter postmarked 10 February 1936
‘Despair’: The typescript of VN’s translation into English.
Gleb: Struve.
The evening itself: A Sirin–Khodasevich double bill, 5 rue Las Cases, 8 February 1936.
a charming thing – a subtle concoction: Khodasevich read ‘Zhizn’ Vasiliya Travnikova’ (‘The Life of Vasily Travnikov’), a literary hoax, dedicated to the life and poetry of an invented early nineteenth-century Russian poet. The essay was published in Vozrozhdenie, 13, 20, 27 February 1936.
qui m’a fait … : Fr. ‘who gave me a pederast’s compliment’.
The old man: Iosif Hessen.
Miten’ka’s: DN’s.
Vladislav: Khodasevich.
Nina: Berberova.
Ça m’a fait rêver: Fr. ‘It felt like I was dreaming’.
give him your ring: Aldanov, calling on Bunin, refers to the story of the leading eighteenth-century Russian poet, Derzhavin, welcoming Pushkin in 1815 as the next great Russian poet. According to a popular legend, Pushkin, who read a poem in Derzhavin’s honour and in his presence at a public exam in his school, the Lyceum, received a ring from the old man. In his own account Pushkin does not mention the ring (‘Derzhavin’, 1835–6).
Pole: Khodasevich’s father was Polish.
La Skaz: The reading took place in a hall on rue Las Cases; perhaps a pun on Russian skaz, ‘tale’.
‘sans rancune’: Fr. ‘without bitterness’.
the old man: Iosif Hessen.
Denis: Roche.
Lolly: Possibly Lolly Lvov.
Heath: A. M. Heath and Co., authors’ agents in London.
Berta: Zeldovich.
Anna: Unidentified.
Letter postmarked 13 February 1936
au plus tard: Fr. ‘at the latest’.
ten Belgian Semyonlyudvigoviches each: Decoded, this means ‘at ten Belgian francs apiece’.
Grigory Abramovich: VN invents this new character to report to VéN in coded form about his own earnings abroad.
Doussia: Ergaz.
du Boz: Du Bos.
‘Society of Northerners’: The most influential Russian émigré cultural group in England (full title, ‘Society of Northerners and Siberians of Great Britain’), founded in 1926. It published the newspaper Russians in England, in which Gleb Struve’s article on Sirin would appear on 15 May 1936 (‘O V. Sirine’, Russkie v Anglii, p. 3).
‘Despair’: The typescript of the translation into English.
tu vas te tuer, Edmond: Fr. ‘you’re going to kill yourself, Edmond’.
Berta Grigor.’s: Zeldovich.
Varshavsky: Vladimir Varshavsky.
Stendhal: pen-name of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), French novelist whom VN did not care for.
‘Pilgram’: ‘The Aurelian’.
Campaux: Mark Slonim’s ex-wife Suzanne Campaux (1904–?).
Vava: Vladimir Hessen.
the old man: Iosif Hessen, who lived in Berlin.
Falkovsky: The lawyer and journalist Evgeny Falkovsky, whom VN had met in Berlin in the 1920s. In 1938, Falkovsky moved to Paris, where he served on the Russian Émigré Committee, chaired by Vasily Maklakov.
Shifr.: Shifrin. Nothing of these appears to have survived.
Nina: VN has absentmindedly written ‘Kita’.
Aguet: The Eye in French.
Eva!: Eva Efimovna Lutyens (née Lubrzynska (Lubryjinska), 1894–1963), VN’s girlfriend in St Petersburg in 1917 and London in 1919.
Letter postmarked 17 February 1936
S. Ridel: Unidentified.
Stock: French publishing firm, founded in Paris in 1708.
‘Pilgram’ and ‘Aguet’: French versions of ‘The Aurelian’ and ‘The Eye’.
the king: Belgian King Leopold III (1901–83), amateur entomologist, reigned from 1934 until his abdication in 1951.
the Club: The Russian Jewish Club, 65 rue de la Concorde, Brussels.
Elle est plus … : Fr. ‘She’s more of an angel than ever’.
very hard … to write on this paper: The ink shows through badly from the other side.
Grishen’ka: Grigory Abramovich, VN’s alias.
Letter postmarked 19 February 1936
the novel will have a different name: VN had planned to call his novel Da (Yes); adding the letter ‘r’ turned it into Dar (The Gift). He began researching the novel in 1932 and completed its composition in January 1938. The Gift, except for Ch. 4, was serialized in Sovremennye zapiski, 63–7 (1937–8). Its first book form and first full text was Dar (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1952); trans. Michael Scammell and DN with VN, The Gift (New York: Putnam, 1963).
Zinochka’s: Zinaida Shakhovskoy.
Grigory Abramovich: VN’s alias.
has left the excess with her … : Decoded: VN left some of his earnings with Zinaida Shakhovskoy, without telling his brother about this.
Shik: Aleksandr Adolfovich Shik (1887–1968), lawyer, journalist and translator.
mon premier movement: Fr. ‘my first impulse’.
‘Glory’: Podvig (Glory) (Paris: Sovremennye Zapiski, 1932).
‘Naif’: ‘By Hellens’ added in VéN’s hand, indicating this was a letter shown to Andrew Field in January 1971 for his Nabokov: His Life in Part. Franz Hellens, Le naïf (Paris: Éditions Émile-Paul, 1926).
‘fente’ … ‘barre lumineuse’ … ‘perche lumineuse’: Fr. ‘chink’, ‘bar of light’, ‘pole of light’ (‘Mademoiselle O’, Mesures, 15 April 1936, p. 161).
Brunst: Apparently, the married name of Irina Kyandzhuntsev (who later became Irina Komarov).
Hellin: Unidentified.
‘Arme Dichter’: Carl Spitzweg (1808–85), Der arme Dichter (‘The Poor Poet’, 1839), Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
au fond: Fr. ‘after all’.
Balmont: Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867–1942), prominent Symbolist poet, translator, literary scholar and memoirist.
‘cochons’: Fr. ‘pigs’.
Letter postmarked 21 February 1936
Rabinovich: Unidentified.
Ira: Irina Kyandzhuntsev.
Sofa: Thickly crossed out, like the two later references, in VéN’s later hand.
Elizaveta Samoylovna: Elizaveta Samoylovna Kyandzhuntsev, Savely’s mother.
Ratner: Unidentified.
Katherine Berlin: Ekaterina Leopoldovna Berling (née Leon), a former girlfriend of VN’s. See next letter.
Ald. and Zayts.: Aldanov and Boris Zaytsev.
Küfferle: Rinaldo Küfferle (1903–55), writer (including a novel about the Russian emigration, Ex Russia, 1935), essayist and translator from the Russian.
Mme Kokoshkin’s: Vera Evgenievna Kokoshkin (1879–1968), first marriage to Yury Ivanovich Guadanini (?–1911); second marriage to Vladimir Fyodorovich Kokoshkin (1874–1926), youngest brother of the prominent member of the Constitutional Democratic party, Fyodor Fyodorovich Kokoshkin (1871–1918), who was an acquaintance of VDN.
Kyandzhun.: Kyandzhuntsevs.
the old man: Iosif Hessen.
‘P. N.
’: Poslednie novosti.
Letter postmarked 24 February 1936
my passport: VN and VéN each had a ‘Nansen passport’, an identity card issued to stateless refugees by the League of Nations; a sheet of paper folded in half, it could easily tear.
‘c’est avec ça …’: Fr. ‘That’s what you travel with?’
the American one: Possibly Bobbs-Merrill, with whom VN would sign a contract for Laughter in the Dark, his reworking of Kamera obskura, in September 1937.
Matveev: Unidentified.
McBride’s: Unidentified.
Aristarkhov: Otherwise unidentified.
Kokoshkins: Vera Kokoshkin and her daughter Irina Yurievna Guadanini, pen-name Aletrus (1905–76), a poet, who lived with her mother and earned an income as a dog-groomer. In the first half of 1937 Nabokov would have an affair with Irina.
Pushkin … he began to look like him: Khodasevich was a Pushkin scholar as well as a poet very much inspired by Pushkin’s clarity and command of form.
Léon’s: Paul Léon, Joyce’s secretary, and his wife Lucie Léon Noel.
Girshman: Henrietta (Evgeniya) Leopoldovna Girshman (née Léon, 1885–1970), collector, artist and wife of art collector Vladimir Osipovich Girshman (1867–1936).
Ekaterina: Ekaterina Berling (the ‘Katherine Berlin’ of the previous letter), sister of Henrietta Girshman.
creaming at the pot of his Joyce: Screaming at the top of his voice; becoming over-rich (turning to cream, or floating like cream) in his Joycean word-pail. VN parodies Joyce’s Work in Progress, the working title of the advance portions of Finnegans Wake.
aurait chaud: Fr. ‘it would be warm’. VN puns on the sound of the Russian proverb ‘Kuy zhelezo poka goryacho’ (‘Strike the iron while is hot’). Aurait chaud vaguely resembles goryacho in sound and sense, but sounds still more like Russian khorosho, ‘good’ or ‘nice’.
les honneurs du Métro: Fr. ‘the honours of the metro’ (instead of the usual les honneurs de la maison, ‘the honours of the house’).
Postcard postmarked 26 February 1936
Date: Postmark not fully legible (‘26-[II?]-36’) but sequence and the ‘stay here for two more days, that is will leave on Friday’ suggest the letter was written on Wednesday 26 February.
matinée: At Mme Ridel’s, 12 Quai de Passy.
‘Désespoir’: The French version of Despair, trans. Marcel Stora, would in fact be entitled La Méprise and be published by Gallimard, but not until 1939.
Grigory Abramovich has topped the previous trip: Meaning that VN has earned more than on his last trip.
An. Nat.: Anna Natanovna. Unidentified.
Letter of 27 February 1936
Date: No envelope. VéN later dated the first page ‘26? Febr 36’, but since the letter was written on a Thursday, it must be 27 February 1936.
Cook: Thomas Cook, the travel agency.
Sofa: See VN’s letter of 21 February, where the same name is similarly crossed out.
Raisa: Tatarinov.
overboard: Since za can be both ‘for’ and ‘over’, za bort puns: she obtained money for Sofia Slonim to pay ‘for [room and] board’ but was then thrown out, ‘overboard’.
Irina’s: Kyandzhuntsev.
Vera Nikolaevna: Muromtsev-Bunin.
tout compris: Fr. ‘altogether’.
Teffi: Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Buchinsky (née Lokhvitsky), pen-name Teffi (1872–1952), popular writer of humorous, satirical fiction.
definitely wants ‘Chernyshevsky’ for the next issue: In fact Rudnev would turn down the ‘Life of Chernyshevsky’, Ch. 4 of The Gift, considering it an insult to Russia’s radical intelligentsia and one of its idols, the writer Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828–89).
Poncet: André François-Poncet (1887–1978), French ambassador to Germany (1931–1938).
Stray Dog: ‘Brodyachaya sobaka’, cabaret in St Petersburg, a meeting place of artists and writers from 1911 to 1915.
Postcard postmarked 10 June 1936
Fid. Com.: Fiduciary Committee of the Supreme Court (Fideikommisssenat des Kammergerichts) responsible for setting the inheritance from the Graun estate that VN unexpectedly received in the summer of 1936.
Weidle’s article about me: Review, ‘Otchayanie. Berlin: Izd. Petropolis’, Krug (The Circle), 1 (July) 1936, pp. 185–7.
Elena Lvovna: Elena Lvovna Bromberg, Anna Feigin’s cousin.
Postcard postmarked 11 June 1936
‘… this book …’: Despair.
‘… the translation that the American publishers used?’: The translation was VN’s own, and he had not sent it to an American publisher, let alone had it published there.
Nina P.: Nina Alekseevna Korvin-Piotrovsky (née Kaplun, 1906–75), wife of Vladimir Lvovich Korvin-Piotrovsky (1891–1966), poet, playwright and member, with VN, of the Poets’ Club (1928–33).
French Verkehr Society: society for Franco-German Exchange.
Zhdanov: Georgy Semyonovich Zhdanov (1905–98), actor and director, closely associated with theatre director Mikhail Chekhov.
the manuscript: Unidentified. No evidence suggests Nabokov wrote any dramatic work between Chelovek iz SSSR (The Man from the USSR) in 1926 and Sobytie (The Event) in 1937. Perhaps a prose fiction that offered dramatic possibilities?
composing a play and slept terribly: Possibly the first inklings of what would become Sobytie; although he did not write this play until November–December 1937, he could talk over his plans with actors in January 1937 (see letter of 25 January 1937).
can imagine what kind of ‘readers’ they have: John Long Ltd had a strong detective fiction list.
Postcard postmarked 12 June 1936
F.: Presumably Fierens.
Aksyonov’s: Unidentified.
princess Sh.: Anna Leonidovna Shakhovskoy (née von Knienen, 1872–1963), mother of Zinaida Shakhovskoy and Nathalie Nabokov.
Adamovich’s review of ‘The Cave’: ‘Po povodu “Peshchery” ’ (‘On the Occasion of “The Cave” ’), Poslednie novosti, 28 May 1936, p. 2.
M. A.: Mark Aldanov or Mark Aleksandrovich [Aldanov]; Mark Aldanov, Peshchera (The Cave) (vol. 1, Berlin: Slovo, 1934; vol. 2, Berlin: Petropolis, 1936).
Postcard of 13(?) June 1936
Date: Stamp removed and postmark date therefore absent.
another article … from Gleb: Gleb Struve, ‘O V. Sirine’ (‘On V. Sirin’), Russkie v Anglii (Russians in England), 15 May 1936, p. 3.
K.: Kirill Nabokov.
Nika’s mother: Lydia Eduardovna Falz-Fein (1870–1937).
Postcard of 14(?) June 1936
Date: Undated, postmark illegible.
letter: Something is crossed out, probably by VN as he writes.
Mme Piotrovsky: Nina Korvin-Piotrovsky.
Gertruda: Unidentified.
Postcard postmarked 15 June 1936
the forest: Grunewald.
Hes.’s: Hessen’s.
caca-o: Instead of kakao (cocoa), VN writes kakoe.
‘Ruhe!’: Ger. ‘Quiet!’
Postcard postmarked 16 June 1936
passionate plea to write for them on ‘The Cave’: VN obliged: ‘M. A. Aldanov. Peshchera. Tom II. Izd. Petropolis. Berlin. 1936’ (‘M. A. Aldanov. The Cave. Vol. II. Petropolis Press. Berlin, 1936’), Sovremennye zapiski, 61 (1936), pp. 470–72.
The old man: Iosif Hessen.
Truda: The Gertruda of the 14(?) June 1936 letter.
1937
Postcard postmarked 20 January 1937
Pendant que l’avoine … : Fr. ‘While the oats grow, the horse will die.’
Letter of 22 January 1937
The French evening: VN read on 21 January at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, at an evening commemorating the hundreth anniversary of Pushkin’s death.
de Rieux: Paul de Reul, author of L’Œuvre de D. H. Lawrence (Paris: Vrin, 1937).
Lawrence, – not the colonel … : In other words, novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) (Sons and Lovers, 1913; Lady Chatterley
’s Lover, 1928), not autobiographer Lieutenant-Colonel T. E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’, 1888–1935).
qu’il n’aurait jamais cru: Fr. ‘that he would never have believed’.
l’étoile … : Fr. ‘the star is no longer there because the water ripples’.
Victor: Another invented proxy VN uses to camouflage references to his earnings abroad. VN reports he was almost baptized ‘Victor’ by a priest who misheard his parents, so that at the ceremony he was a ‘howling, half-drowned half-Victor’ (SM, p. 21).
Eleonora: Leonora Peltenburg.
Aleksandra Lazarevna’s mysterious hint (about the gift): Apparently another veiled message about money, with Anna Lazarevna Feigin disguised as Aleksandra Lazarevna.
Sergey and Anna: VN’s cousin, Sergey Sergeevich Nabokov, and his wife Anna.
Niki: Their son Nicolas.
Margarita: Wife of Jacques Masui.
Kir.: Kirill Nabokov.
‘l’outrage’: His story ‘Obida’ (‘A Bad Day’). No published 1930s translation into French located.
the lecture: ‘Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable’, Nouvelle Revue Française, 48 (1937), pp. 362–78; ‘Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible’, trans. DN, New York Review of Books, 31 March 1988, pp. 38–42.
my Greek: His psoriasis – as if it were a character in Greek tragedy.
ou presque: Fr. ‘or almost’.
Zina … and Svetik and Svyat. Adr.: Zinaida Shakhovskoy, her husband Svyatoslav Malevsky-Malevich, and her father-in-law, Svyatoslav Andreevich Malevsky-Malevich.
Victor settled his accounts … : Veiled talk about money: decoded, VN paid back Zinaida Shakhovskoy and paid for Kirill’s identity card.
‘Mesures’: Where ‘Mademoiselle O’ had been published.
Turovets: Unidentified.
Letter postmarked 25 January 1937
Russian reading: Solo ‘Sirin’ reading, 5 rue Las Cases. VN read parts of Ch. 1 of The Gift, dealing with the suicide of Yasha Chernyshevsky and a literary meeting at the Chernyshevskys’ where Hermann Ivanovich Bush reads his vacuously pretentious play in broken Russian.
‘the devices live and work’: See Vl[adimir] Khodasevich, ‘O Sirine’, Vozrozhdenie, 13 February 1937, p. 9; trans. Simon Karlinsky and Robert Hughes, ‘On Sirin’, TriQuarterly (Evanston, Ill.), Winter 1970, pp. 96–101.
Mme Morevsky: Unidentified.
On est très, très gentil avec moi: Fr. ‘People are very, very nice to me’.
Letters to Véra Page 61