Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  the President: Mildred Helen McAfee (1900–1994; from 1945, Mildred Horton), President of Wellesley College 1936–49, with a three-year leave of absence 1942–5.

  a professor of English literature: Presumably Charles Kerby-Miller (1903–71), assistant professor of English literature. He and his wife Wilma (1897–1990) would become friends of VN and VéN in their Wellesley and Cambridge years.

  I kiss you on the clavicle, my bird: In Russian, a part-rhyme: ‘Tseluyu tebya v klyuchitsu, moya ptitsa’.

  Letter postmarked 26 March 1941

  WELLESLEY COLLEGE … : Letterhead.

  Vosstorg and Vdakhnovenia: Russ. ‘Rapture’ and ‘Inspiration’. VN pointedly mistransliterates the Russian words to imitate his exaggerated pronunciation for an English-speaking audience. In his Lectures on Literature, he explains the terms (the pairing and the distinction derives from Pushkin): ‘vostorg and vdokhnovenie, which can be paraphrased as “rapture” and “recapture”… the first being hot and brief, the second cool and sustained … the pure flame of vostorg, initial rapture … has no conscious purpose in view but … is all-important in linking the breaking-up of the old world with the building up of a new one. When the time is ripe and the writer settles down to the actual composing of his book, he will rely on the second serene and steady kind of inspiration, vdokhnovenie, the trusted mate who helps to recapture and reconstruct the world’ (pp. 378–9).

  Brown: Harper Glover Brown (1907–85), a lecturer in English.

  Tatyana Nik.: Tatyana Nikolaevna Karpovich.

  the Anyuta situation: Anna Feigin remained in occupied France and did not manage to escape until September 1941.

  Karpovich … will do everything: Karpovich had already helped the Nabokovs move to the US, and VN solicited his support again in bringing Anna Feigin to join them.

  Ridgefield: Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he was seeing Mikhail Chekhov.

  Sov. short: ‘The Soviet Short Story’.

  refanglicize: From perelitsevat’, to take a piece of clothing apart, turn every piece of cloth inside out and stitch everything back together again (this way the unworn side of cloth will make the garment look like new).

  ‘Spring’ pretty soon: The VN–Peter Pertzov translation ‘Spring in Fialta’ was not published until May 1947, in Harper’s Bazaar, pp. 138ff.

  THINK IT WILL ARRIVE TOMORROW: VN’s letter to DN occupies a separate page.

  Letter of 28 March 1941

  WELLESLEY COLLEGE … : Letterhead.

  Dennis: Nigel Dennis (1912–89), assistant editor at the New Republic; in early 1941 he was in charge of the literary department.

  ‘Art of Translating’: ‘The Art of Translation’, New Republic, 4 August 1941, pp. 160–62.

  March 28th: The anniversary of his father’s death.

  Bertrand: Thompson.

  Schwartz: Delmore Schwartz (1913–66), American poet and short-story writer.

  Wilson: VN’s relationship with Edmund Wilson was about to become an intense friendship. For its full course, see DBDV.

  Sedykh: Andrey Sedykh (Tsvibakh).

  Edgar Fisher: Edgar Fisher (c. 1884–1968), of the Institute of International Education, which organized VN’s lecture tours.

  Lorrimer: Burford Lorrimer (1908–1952), editor at Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company.

  Aldanov: Mark Aldanov emigrated to the US in 1940, where in 1942 he would co-found Novyi Zhurnal.

  the proofs: Of his translation of Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri (see note to letter of 20 March 1941).

  Lilly Pons: Lily Pons (1898–1976), famous French-American operatic soprano.

  elderly males and females of the New Yorker: In its cartooning style, presumably. Founded in 1925, the New Yorker had already become the leading outlet for American writers and readers.

  Koussevitzky: Sergey Aleksandrovich Kusevitsky (Serge Koussevitzky, 1874–1951), Russian-born conductor and composer; music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1924–49), he had performed in the Nabokov family home in St Petersburg. In 1940, Aleksandra Lvovna Tolstoy (1884–1979) of the Tolstoy Foundation had obtained from Koussevitzky a letter of support for VN, which may have eased his entry into the US.

  Mansfield: Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), New Zealand-born short-story writer.

  Russian Tea-room: In New York City.

  Wellesley-rein?: From the German for ‘pure’: will Véra be a presentable Wellesley wife?

  Bobbs-Merr.: In 1938, the Indianapolis publisher Bobbs-Merrill published VN’s Laughter in the Dark. Was the publisher wanting to sell film rights to the novel? In 1945, VN would sell the rights for $2,500, but no film of the novel was made until 1969.

  M. M.: Karpovich. VN was seeking an affidavit for Anna Feigin, who was trying to leave occupied France for the US.

  old man H.: Probably Iosif Hessen, who remained in occupied France. He would move to the US in 1942.

  written to the Russian club for 50: Presumably to Andrey Sedykh (Tsvibakh), about the lecture discussed in the letter of 25 March 1941.

  Norwork: Norwalk, Connecticut.

  Chekh.: Mikhail Chekhov, with whom VN wanted to discuss the production of his play Don Quixote; he was based in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

  MY DARLING: VN’s letter to DN begins on a separate page. The word ‘darling’ (dushen’ka) features a prominently enlarged soft sign (Ь).

  MY DEAR: This letter to DN is written on a separate page; it may have been enclosed in another letter to Véra and mailed either earlier or later than 28 March. Some Russian letters are replaced with English letters that look similar: Я (R) and И (U).

  Letter of 31 March 1941

  the collector Denton: A collection of approximately 1,500 specimens hosted at the Wellesley Historical Society. William Dixon Denton (1865–1923) and Robert Winsford Denton (1868–1941) collected butterflies and mounted them according to a method invented by their brother Sherman (1856–1937).

  Tatyana: Mrs Karpovich.

  M. M.: Mikhail Mikhaylovich Karpovich.

  Zhukovsky’s paintings: Stanislav Yulianovich Zhukovsky (1873–1944), Polish-born Russian landscape painter.

  Zhdanov: VN had met with Georgy Zhdanov, actor and director, associated with Mikhail Chekhov, in Paris in 1936.

  Undated note (1941–2?)

  Date: Dated in pencil at the bottom of the note, possibly in VéN’s later hand: ‘1941–2’.

  1942

  Note of May 1942 or later

  May 1942 or later: This list requested from Dead Souls (1842) by Gogol was perhaps early on in VN’s preparation for Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1944), which he was commissioned to write in May 1942.

  breakfast (two): In Russian at this time, zavtrak could refer to ‘breakfast’ (to be explicit, pervyi zavtrak, ‘first breakfast’) and to ‘lunch’ (to be explicit, vtoroy zavtrak, ‘second breakfast’). ‘Lunch’ is now obed.

  one day of 75 pages ( ): VN drew an arrow from the space between the empty brackets to the calculations at the top of the page. 115–38 = 76 is an error: the answer should be 77.

  Letter of 3 August 1942

  c/o Mrs Bertrand Thompson … : No stamp; possibly delivered by hand. At the top of the envelope, in VéN’s hand: ‘From Brattleboro, Karpovichs’ summer home’. On the other side, in unknown hand, across the flap: ‘Vladimirych asked you not to forget about rum and to buy him shoes (sneakers) probably size 10 and probably dark blue.’ Vladimirych is a colloquial variant of VN’s patronymic, Vladimirovich. The rum was for a sticky lure to catch moths.

  West Wardsboro, Vermont: In 1942, the Nabokovs spent several weeks at the Karpoviches’ spacious summer home in West Wardsboro. At the beginning of August, VéN travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to find an apartment for the coming year in the vicinity of Harvard University, where VN was to start a job at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

  Newell: Unidentified.

  Derricks: Unidentified.

  Natasha: Nathalie Nabokov.

  Mrs L
evin: Elena Ivanovna Levin (née Zarudny, 1913–2006), wife of Harry Levin (1912–94), a professor of English literature at Harvard and from 1960 Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature.

  ‘I. Feigin’: Ilya Feigin.

  Brombergs: Anna Feigin’s relatives.

  Marisha: The Karpoviches’ daughter Marina (later Mrs Lee Hydeman).

  Superman: Comic book series begun in 1939. VN had written a poem about Superman’s and Lois Lane’s honeymoon night, ‘The Man of Tomorrow’s Lament’, which he sent to the New Yorker in June 1942, but which was not accepted for publication.

  ‘The Nose’: Gogol’s short story ‘The Nose’ (1836).

  Banks: Nathan Banks (1868–1953), head curator of insects at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. In October 1941 VN began to work gratis at the MCZ, reordering their butterfly collections; from 1942 to 1948 he was a paid research associate there and de facto curator of Lepidoptera.

  Arctia virgo: Actually Grammia virgo, the Virgin Tiger Moth. Virgo had not been in the genus Arctia since 1866. The genera Arctia and Grammia look quite similar; perhaps VN remembered early nineteenth-century images where this moth still featured as Arctia virgo.

  Goldenweiser: Aleksey Aleksandrovich Goldenweiser (1890–1979), Russian-born lawyer; in the 1940s he helped many of his compatriots emigrate from Europe to the United States, including the Nabokovs, the Feigins and the Hessens. (See Galina Glushanok, ‘Vera Nabokova’s Correspondence with A. Goldenveizer’, Nabokov Online Journal, 1, 2007, http://etc.dal.ca/noj/articles/volume1/GLUSHANOK_Vera_Nabokova_A.A.Golqdenv.pdf)

  Letter postmarked 2 October 1942

  I arrived happily: The beginning of VN’s lecture tour through the American South. His first stop was at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina.

  Letter of 2–3 October 1942

  Potter: Paulus Potter (1625–54), Dutch artist famous for his animal paintings in landscape settings.

  Corot: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), French landscape painter.

  ‘enchantment of the eyes’: VN echoes Pushkin’s poem ‘Osen” (‘Autumn’, 1833), stanza 7, l. 1: ‘Unylaya pora! Ochey ocharovan’e! / Priyatna mne tvoya proshchalnaya krasa …’ (‘Doleful time! Enchantment of the eyes! / Your farewell beauty pleases me …’).

  Coker: Coker College, Hartsville, South Carolina, where VN was to lecture.

  Ingram: Dr Benjamin Clayton Ingram, professor of religion, head of the Christian Education Department at Coker College.

  Mrs Coker: Vivian Coker (née Gay), widow of James Lide Coker (1863–1931), son of Major Coker.

  belle-fille: Fr. ‘daughter-in-law’.

  the college founder, Major Coker: Major James Lide Coker (1837–1918) founded Welsh Neck High School in 1894; in 1908 it became Coker College.

  President Greene: Dr Charles Sylvester Green (1900–1980), president of Coker College (1936–44).

  ‘common sense’: ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, a revised version of ‘The Creative Writer’, Bulletin of the New England Modern Languages Association, January 1942, pp. 21–9, in LL, pp. 371–80.

  tragedy of tragedy: Essay entitled ‘The Tragedy of Tragedy’, published in MUSSR, pp. 323–42.

  tea olive: Osmanthus americanus, an evergreen native to south-eastern North America.

  McCosh: Dr Gladys Kathryn McCosh, professor of zoology at Wellesley College.

  Hesperids: Skippers.

  Pierids: A large family of mostly white, yellow or orange butterflies.

  Papilio: A genus of the Swallowtail butterflies, usually large and brightly coloured. The Tiger Swallowtail, Papilio glaucus, would be one of the largest in this region.

  ‘eubule’: Phoebis sennae eubule, the bright-yellow Cloudless Sulphur.

  ‘Yid’: Zhid, zhidok, a derogatory name for a Jew in Russia.

  father of my hostess was a famous artist: Irish-American landscape painter Edward Gay (1837–1928).

  beau-père: Fr. ‘father-in-law’.

  minister, Smythe: Ellison Adger Smyth (1903–98), Presbyterian minister.

  the famous lepidopterologist Smythe: Ellison Adger Smyth (1863–1941), lepidopterologist, founding chair of the biology department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

  Sphingids: Hawk Moths.

  Charles Morgan: Charles Langbridge Morgan (1894–1958), British playwright and novelist, who had won the James Tait Black Prize in 1940 for The Voyage.

  Valdosta: VN was to lecture at Georgia State Women’s College in Valdosta.

  museum: The Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

  Thecla: A genus of lycaenid butterflies.

  ‘Geh zu deine Kabine: ich bin müde!’: Ger. ‘Go to your cabin: I’m tired!’ Geh zu deine Kabine: ich bin müde! is ungrammatical. It should be geh zu deiner Kabine or geh in deine Kabine.

  Acidalia: An abandoned name for a genus of Noctuid (owlet) moths.

  Letter of 5 October 1942

  Richmond: VN does not know yet that his lecture in Richmond has been cancelled.

  not quite Tertiary: i.e. Cenozoic. In Russian, ‘ne to tropicheskoe, ne to treteyskoe’.

  Morrison: Samuel Eliot Morison (1887–1976), prominent historian, from 1941 Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard.

  Letter postmarked 7 October 1942

  the woman president: Florence Matilda Read (1886–1973), president of Spelman College (1927–53). She remained a friend and supporter of VN’s for years.

  Letter of 11 October 1942

  Pushkin (Negro blood!): Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), was African, a fact of which Pushkin was proud. VN would explore Gannibal’s uncertain origins in ‘Abram Gannibal’, an appendix to his 1964 Eugene Onegin commentary.

  ‘Mozart and Salieri’: Pushkin’s verse drama Mozart and Salieri (1826–30) from the Little Tragedies cycle. On Edmund Wilson’s suggestion, VN translated it for the New Republic, 21 April 1941, pp. 559–60; in book form in Three Russian Poets and V&V.

  Lvov’s music: The Russian composer Aleksey Fyodorovich Lvov (1798–1870). VN quotes from ‘The Hymn of the Russian Empire’ (1833–1917).

  working on Gogol: On his book Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1944).

  Stuff the boxes: In VN’s absence, VéN repinned butterflies in their trays at the Harvard MCZ under his instructions.

  Letter of 12 October 1942

  done with Gogol: With writing his book, Nikolai Gogol.

  a short story: He would not write one until ‘The Assistant Producer’, his first in English, in January 1943 (Atlantic Monthly, May 1943, pp. 68–74).

  the play: Possibly The Event, staged in Russian in New York on 4 April 1941. Molly Carpenter-Lee seems to have translated this or The Waltz Invention into English in 1939: see letters of 5 and 8 April 1939.

  Bunny: The nickname of Edmund Wilson.

  Letter postmarked 14 October 1942

  Comstock’s: William Phillips Comstock (1880–1956), a leading lepidopterologist, at the American Museum of Natural History.

  ‘commonsense’: ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’.

  president: Frank Robertson Reade (1895–1957), President of Georgia State Women’s College in Valdosta.

  Bunny’s: Wilson’s.

  Letter of 17–18 October 1942

  Enclosed is a letter from Charles A. Pearce (1906–70), poetry editor at the New Yorker.

  the forms … laborious procedure: An application to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship to allow VN to complete his current novel, which would ultimately become Bend Sinister (New York: Henry Holt, 1947).

  Mikh. Mikh.: Mikhail Mikhaylovich Karpovich.

  Browning: Robert Browning (1812–89), English poet, and one of VN’s favourites.

  Kadish: Journalist Mikhail Kadish, whom VN knew from Berlin.

  Calocarpa americana: Callicarpa americana, American Beautyberry.

  Myrica bushes: Myrica, a genus of small trees, the bayberries.

  Neo
nympha: On 9 June 1941, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, VN and VéN, at different altitudes, caught a specimen each of what VN would name as Neonympha dorothea, in ‘Some New or Little Known Nearctic Neonympha (Lepidoptera: Satyridae)’, Psyche, 49, pp. 3–4, 61–80 (see also N’sB’s). The genus would be renamed, and the butterfly recognized as not a new species but as a new sub-species, Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea, of a butterfly hitherto not known north of Mexico. The Neonympha he has seen near Valdosta is of a different species within the same genus.

  One picture shows … : See previous letter, where VN has asked VéN to imagine the paintings on his wall, as a telepathy experiment.

  Letter of 20 October 1942

  an Egyptian fresco with butterflies: According to Dieter E. Zimmer, the Egyptian fresco with several butterflies is in the Tomb of Nakht in West Thebes; there is a figure in his Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths (www.dezimmer.net/eGuide/Lep2.1-D-E.htm, under Danaus plexippus). VN began a book on Butterflies in Art in the mid-1960s, but did not complete the project; an Egyptian fresco features in Ada (1969, pt. 2 ch. 3).

  Moe: Henry Allen Moe (1894–1975), secretary, administrator and then president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (c. 1925–63).

  the old man: Iosif Hessen, who had recently arrived in the US after escaping from occupied France.

  Letter of 5 November 1942

  an ideal trip to Chicago: On the second part of VN’s 1942 American lecture tour, to Springfield, Illinois, St Paul, Minnesota, and Galesburg, Illinois.

  Field Museum: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, one of the world’s largest natural history museums.

  RAILROAD STATION: Chicago’s Union Station, built in 1925 and designed by Daniel Burnham (1846–1912).

  Letter of 7 November 1942

  Lincoln’s house and grave: The only home that Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) owned, and where he lived from 1844 to 1861, before becoming President. His tomb is also in Springfield.