Letters to Véra
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Hesperidae: A large family of small to medium butterflies, the skippers, taxonomically difficult because many species are very close to one another.
alveus, as well as armoricanus and foulquieri: Pyrgus alveus, the Large Grizzled Skipper, distributed through most of continental Europe; Pyrgus armoricanus, Oberthür’s Grizzled Skipper, also through continental Europe; Pyrgus foulquieri, Foulquieri’s Grizzled Skipper, central and southern France, northern Italy and Spain.
Vera Mark.: Vera Markovna Haskell.
Sir Bernard: Pares.
Yakobs.: Sergey (Sergius) Iosifovich (Osipovich) Yakobson (1901–79), lecturer at King’s College, University of London, and at Oxford and Cambridge; from 1934 to 1940 head of the library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London; later director of the Slavic and East European Division at the Library of Congress. His brother, Roman Osipovich Yakobson (Roman Jakobson, 1896–1982), was the famous linguist and literary scholar.
Nadya: Presumably, Nadezhda Sablin.
Arnold: Haskell.
Letter of 4 June 1939
Flora: Solomon.
Mme Levitsky: Possibly Aglaida Sergeevna Shimansky (née Levitsky, 1903–95), poet, novelist and literary critic.
Zin. Dav.: Zinaida Davydovna Shklovsky.
Vladimir Kirill.: Grand Prince Vladimir Kirillovich.
ungifted author of ‘Magnolia Street’: Louis Golding (1895–1958), the author of the novel Magnolia Street (1932).
le grand-duc et le duc moyen … crottin … : VN’s response to queries in translating into French the story ‘Poseshchenie muzeya’ (‘The Visit to the Museum’): ‘a pair of owls, Eagle Owl and Long-eared, with their French names reading “Grand Duke” and “Middle Duke” … frass’ (SoVN 274). No French translation of ‘The Visit to the Museum’ published in or soon after 1939 is known.
translate literally, about the hard sign, and provide a footnote: At the end of the story, the émigré protagonist steps out of the museum, in a French provincial town, in which he has become mysteriously lost, into a street where Russian shop signs are spelled without a yer (hard sign), a detail that makes him realize with horror that he has somehow resurfaced in Soviet Russia.
Letter of 5 June 1939
mihi: Lat. ‘for me’.
Arnold: Haskell.
Mus disneyi: i.e. Mickey Mouse.
the missionary David: Father Armand David (1826–1900), French Catholic priest, missionary, zoologist and botanist, received a giant panda skin from a hunter in 1869. The first live giant panda was brought to the West, to Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, in 1936; in 1938 five giant pandas were sent to London Zoo.
amuses himself every morning with the wolves: Douglas Stuart Spens Steuart (1872–1949), fellow of the British Zoological Society, known as ‘the wolf man of the London zoo’.
Savely: Grinberg.
the Colonel: Garsia.
Otto’s: Theis’s.
Tatishchev: Count Boris Alekseevich Tatishchev (1877–1949), formerly General Consul of the Russian Embassy in France.
Rodzyanko: Nikolay Rodzyanko, whom VN had already contacted about visas in 1937.
Kensington Regiment something: The Prince Louise’s Kensington Regiment monument, in Iverna Gardens, off Kensington High Street.
Letter of 6 June 1939
Dze book is as good as sold: Echoing the mock-Germanic English of the oddly sanguine Silbermann in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the book in question.
Milton Waldman: publishing consultant, editorial adviser (1895–1976).
dans le ventre: Fr. ‘in the womb’.
‘La Course du Fou’: The French translation of The Defence.
punning ‘translation’ of the word ‘fou’: French fou means ‘madman’, but also ‘bishop’ in chess, so La Course du fou means both ‘the bishop’s move’ and ‘the madman’s course’. The Fool’s Mate picks up on the sound of fou and anticipates the virtual ‘sui-mate’ of Luzhin in The Defence.
Otto’s: Theis’s.
Lovat Dickson: Horatio Henry Lovat Dickson (1902–87), Canadian-born British publisher and writer.
my Ullstein-Meriks period: VN’s first two novels, Mashen’ka (Mary, 1926) and Korol’, dama, valet (King, Queen, Knave, 1928) were published in German by Ullstein, in 1928 and 1930 respectively, translations for which the not-yet-established author was handsomely paid. Perhaps Meriks is a fusion of the start of the titles of Mary and King, Queen, Knave?
‘Le Carrefour’: Directed (1938) by Curtis Bernhardt (1899–1981).
Misha L.’s: Lubrzynsky’s.
DO YOU LIKE THIS PICTURE?: The manuscript original has an outline of a peeled-off sticker at the bottom of the page. Judging by its contour, the sticker could have featured a car.
Letter of 7 June 1939
Pas gentil: Fr. ‘not nice’.
types: A type, in taxonomy, is the specimen after which the published ‘original description’ of a species has been made, and is therefore the prized standard and reference for future work on the species. See also letter of 7 December 1942.
Misha: Lubrzynsky.
champion my play seriously: Presumably to arrange for the staging of either The Event or The Waltz Invention.
curric.: Curriculum vitae.
Maria Solomoylovna: Maria Samoylovna Tsetlin. Samoylovna and Solomonovna are distinct patronymics, but VN’s regular contact with Flora Solomon seems to have caused a slip of mind and pen.
fallow furlough: VN is using the Russian word mezhmolok, which refers to the period of milklessness, when a cow cannot be milked.
Ariadna: Tyrkov-Williams.
St Thorax: The village of Seythenex in the Savoy Alps, where they planned to spend their summer vacation.
Sergey R.: Rodzyanko.
ça va sans dire: Fr. ‘That goes without saying’.
Letter of 8 June 1939
first generations: First generations of butterflies that summer.
mais c’est toujours quelque chose: Fr. ‘but it’s still something’.
vu: Fr. ‘in view of the fact’.
Otto’s: Theis’s.
once published ‘The Passenger’: ‘Passazhir’ (1927) became VN’s first short story translated into English, by Gleb Struve, as ‘The Passenger’, in Lovat Dickson’s Magazine, 1:6 (June 1934), pp. 719–25.
Thomson: David Cleghorn Thomson (1900–?), secretary and councillor (1938–54) of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (1933–87).
Letter of 9 June 1939
Khodasevich ‘has ended his earthly existence’: Vladislav Khodasevich had cancer. When VN had visited his ailing friend in Paris in late May, Khodasevich was already too ill to see him. He died on 14 June.
5+10+30+7½ … : The number of pounds he has earned on this trip.
Rostik: VN’s nephew Rostislav Petkevich and the former governess of VN’s sisters, Evgenia Hofeld, now his guardian.
Birch: Francis (Frank) Birch (1889–1956), British cryptographer, served in the Navy. In VN’s days at Cambridge, Birch was a Fellow of King’s College (1915–34) and a university lecturer in history (1921–8).
Vera Markovna: Haskell.
Lovat: Dickson.
send the Churches to the chort: Chort means ‘devil’ in Russian (and is used as an expletive like ‘Damn!’). VN is punning, spelling the Russian word in Roman script.
Letter of 10 June 1939
Frank: Victor Frank.
Buchanan: Unidentified.
Pollizer: Polizer.
baroness Bugbear or Bedbug: Budberg.
je suis sensé: Fr. ‘I’m supposed’.
the essay for Rudnev: An essay, ‘O Khodaseviche’ (‘On Khodasevich’), Sovremennye zapiski, 69 (July 1939), pp. 262–4, to which VN had agreed on 29 May (Russkiy Arkhiv Literatury, MS 1500/7, details supplied by Andrey Babikov, personal communication). Khodasevich did not die until 14 June, but the émigré literary community in Paris knew the operation scheduled for him at the end of May was well-
nigh hopeless.
Letter of 11 June 1939
Vera Mark.: Vera Markovna Haskell.
Aunt Baby: Nadezhda Wonlyar-Lyarsky.
Fulda’s son: Possibly Ludwig Anton Solomon Fulda (1862–1939), German writer and poet. Fulda, however, committed suicide in Berlin in March 1939, which his son would have known about. Or perhaps German lepidopterist Oscar Fulda, who ran a famous butterfly store in New York from 1904 to 1945.
Merana: In the Italian Piedmont.
COMING ON WEDNESDAY. IT’S A RHYME: V sredu priedu in Russian.
Letter of 12 June 1939
Rostik: VN’s nephew Rostislav Petkevich, then in Prague.
1941
Letter postmarked 18 March 1941
WELLESLEY COLLEGE … : Letterhead. On 15 March, VN began a two-week series of guest lectures at Wellesley College.
miss W. and L.: Hilda Ward, whom he was tutoring in Russian in New York, and Lisbet Thompson.
Mansvetov: Vladimir Mansvetov.
Boris Vasilievich: Boris Vasilievich Bogoslovsky (1890–1966), former officer in the White Army; in emigration, Columbia-educated philosopher and educational theorist. In 1935–45 he taught at and was one of the directors of the progressive Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut.
Borodin: Unidentified.
‘Antlantic’: VN’s persistent misspelling, for a time, of the Atlantic Monthly, an American magazine of literature and culture, founded in Boston in 1857. It was edited from 1938 to 1966 by Edward Weeks (1898–1989).
New Rep.: The New Republic, an American magazine of politics and the arts, founded in New York in 1914, at that time published weekly. Through his new friend, the prominent literary and social critic Edmund Wilson (1895–1972), long-time writer for the magazine and briefly, in late 1940, its editor, VN had published book reviews in it four times since mid-November 1940.
Bogoslavskys: Boris Bogoslovsky and his wife, Christina Staël von Holstein (1888–1974), who was the co-principal and then principal of the Cherry Lawn School (1935–65).
Bellofolit: Probably Bellafolin, medicine used as an anti-spasmodic.
temperature of forty: 40 degrees Celsius; 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
telegraph to Wellesley: In 1940, VN joined the New York-based Institute of International Education, through which he had been invited to lecture at Wellesley College.
the new ‘Gift’: After VN finished The Gift in January 1938 (published, except for Ch. 4, in Sovremennye zapiski, 63–7 (April 1937–October 1938)) the novel continued to reverberate in his imagination. Probably in the spring of 1939, he added to it another significant piece, first published in English in DN’s translation as ‘Father’s Butterflies: Second Addendum to the Gift’ (N’sBs, pp. 198–234); ‘second addendum’ because the 1934 story ‘Krug’ (‘The Circle’) was a first ‘addendum’ (LCNA, Box 6, fol. 5; for the Russian, see also ‘Vtoroe dobavlenie k Daru’, ed. Aleksandr Dolinin, Zvezda, 2001: 1, pp. 85–109). A folder survives, apparently begun no earlier than September 1939, marked ‘The Gift, Part II’ with other materials apparently being considered for a second volume of the novel (LCNA, Box 6, fol. 4). At one stage the second volume was to conclude with the completion, by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, protagonist of The Gift, of Pushkin’s unfinished verse drama, Rusalka, which VN ended up publishing under his own name in Novyi zhurnal, 2 (1942), pp. 181–4. Where the new idea expressed in this letter would have fitted into the fluid plans for the continuation of The Gift remains impossible to say without more evidence.
Boris Vas.: Boris Vasilievich Bogoslovsky.
Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Miss Kelly: Amy Ruth Kelly (1882–1962), associate professor of English composition at Wellesley College.
two morning lectures (Russian Novel …): While living in New York in 1940–41, VN prepared hundreds of pages of lectures on Russian literature for teaching in the US. Some of this material was presumably used for the 1941 guest Wellesley lectures, and later reworked for Russian literature courses at Wellesley (1946–8), Cornell (1948–58), and Harvard (1952), and published in LRL, where he discusses Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky.
Miss Perkins: Agnes Frances Perkins (1877?–1959), professor of English literature at Wellesley, who was VN’s hostess and friend at Wellesley College. She was near retirement age when VN arrived at Wellesley.
Karpovich: Mikhail Karpovich, a professor of history at Harvard University and, from 1942 on, editor of Novyi Zhurnal. VN first met Karpovich in 1932 in Prague, but became close friends with him only after moving to the United States.
be fit and strong: VéN had been ‘in bed with a crippling case of sciatica’ (Schiff, p. 113).
my exile: Nikolay Chernyshevsky, exiled to Siberia, whose epistolary style VN mocks in Ch. 4 of The Gift.
Letter of 19 March 1941
the editor of the ‘Antlantic’: Edward Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly.
your story: ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ (translated from the 1937 story ‘Ozero, oblako, bashnya’), Atlantic Monthly, June 1941, pp. 737–41. It is one of VN’s best stories, but its strongly anti-totalitarian and specifically anti-Nazi themes help explain the particular enthusiasm recorded here and later in the letter.
Pertzov: Pyotr Aleksandrovich Pertzov (1908–67), Russian-born, Harvard-educated translator of VN’s short stories, ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’, ‘The Aurelian’ and ‘Spring in Fialta’. See Maxim Shrayer, ‘Nabokov: Letters to the American Translator’, AGNI, 50 (October 1999), pp. 128–45.
the lectures … ‘The Soviet Drama’ … applause, and praise, and invitations: Since the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, signed in August 1939, had made it feasible for Hitler to invade Poland and precipitate the Second World War, VN’s frank and vivid anti-Sovietism made him particularly appealing at this time to an American audience lending support to, if not yet joining, the Allies.
on the lake of the price: VN echoes the lake and its reflected cloud, a vision of elusive happiness, in ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’, and puns: the Russian ozero (‘lake’) suggests that he hopes another zero may be added to the Atlantic Monthly’s usual rate.
Karpovich’s : In Cambridge, Massachusetts.
a Menton tone: The Nabokovs had lived in Menton (or Mentone), France, from October 1937 to July 1938.
Et je t’aime: Fr. ‘and I love you’.
Chekhov: Mikhail Chekhov, the theatre director. In late 1940 VN had written to Chekhov (by then running a theatre studio in Connecticut), suggesting he produce an adaptation of Don Quixote which VN would write for him. Chekhov was interested, although the project was never realized.
Dasha: Dorothy Leuthold.
Natasha: Nathalie Nabokov.
Lisbetsha: Lisbet Thompson.
très bien, très beau parleur: Fr. ‘a very fine, very glib speaker’.
La rosse rousse sera bien enfoncée: Fr. ‘The Russian rotter will be thoroughly smashed up’. An allusion to the beating the Russian émigré receives at the hands of German excursionists in ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’?
P.: Pertzov.
what do you think?: After completing his translation of ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’, Pertzov would translate ‘The Aurelian’.
Tyrants: ‘Tyrants Destroyed’ (1938 story).
Breaking the News: Story from 1934.
Letter of 20 March 1941
WELLESLEY COLLEGE … : Letterhead.
From that night on … : Written vertically along the left margin of the letter’s first page.
translations from Pushkin: He had begun a translation of Pushkin’s mini-tragedy Mozart and Salieri in late December 1940 (published New Republic, 21 April 1941, pp. 559–60) and would publish other translations of Pushkin in Three Russian Poets: Selections from Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1944).
Soviet Short: The Soviet Short Story.
[tempest nighing] … : The opening of Eugene Onegin, Ch. I, stanza 33, was one of VN’s favourite passages in Push
kin: ‘Ya pomnyu more pred grozoyu: / Kak ya zavidoval volnam, / Begushchim burnoy cheredoyu / S lyubov’yu lech’ k eyo nogam!’ His 1945 translation (‘From Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, The Russian Review, 4:2 [Spring 1945], pp. 38–9) read: ‘I see the surf, the storm-rack flying … / Oh, how I wanted to compete / with the tumultuous breakers dying / in adoration at her feet!’ His literal 1976 translation renders the lines: ‘I recollect the sea before a tempest: / how I envied the waves / running in turbulent succession / with love to lie down at her feet!’ (EO [1976], I, l. 110).
Ich hab gedacht … : Ger.: ‘I thought that I would get a letter from you today’. Ungrammatical: should be ‘Ich hab(e) gedacht, dass ich heute einen Brief von Dir bekomme’. VN’s German translator and editor Dieter E. Zimmer comments: ‘His slips go to disprove the theory that he only pretended not to speak German fluently.’
Letter of 24 March 1941
WELLESLEY COLLEGE … : Letterhead
H.: Probably Hilda Ward.
L.: Lisbet Thompson.
Musinka Nabokov: DN.
Tatyana: Tatyana Nikolaevna Karpovich (née Potapov, 1897–1973), wife of Mikhail Karpovich.
Evgeny Rabinovich: Evgeny Isaakovich Rabinovich, pen-name Evgeny Raich (1901–73), biochemist, poet.
Pertsov’s brother: Konstantin Aleksandrovich Pertzov (1899–1960) worked at various architectural firms in Boston before opening his own in 1945.
Lednitsky: Vatslav Aleksandrovich Lednitsky (1891–1967), literary historian, professor at Harvard and Berkeley, contributor to Novyi Zhurnal.
THE BIKE … : The bike VN was shipping to New York for DN.
Letter postmarked 25 March 1941
WELLESLEY COLLEGE … : Letterhead.
Mr Dimwitsvetov: Mansvetov, the ‘fool and scoundrel’ of the 18 March 1941 letter.
Chairman Sedykh: Andrey Sedykh, pen-name of Yakov Moiseevich Tsvibakh, whom VN first met in 1932 in Paris, came to the US in 1941. He soon became editor-in-chief of Novoe russkoe slovo and President of the Literary Fund in Aid of Russian Writers and Scholars in Exile.
Sergey Volkonsky: Sergey Mikhaylovich Volkonsky (1860–1937), theatre and dance theoretician and director of the Imperial Theatres, travelled to the US in 1893 to give a talk at the World’s Fair in Chicago. ‘What a charming sight it is to see these young girls surrounded by nature and science. And everywhere – in the woods, on the lake, in the lofty corridors, you hear the Wellesley cheer in young ringing voices’: Prince Serge Wolkonsky, My Reminiscences, trans. A. E. Chamot (London: Hutchinson, 1924), vol. 1, p. 242.