Nabokov in America (48 page)

——.
The American Jitters
:
A Year of the Slump
. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.

——.
The Shores of Light
. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.

Wilson, Rosalind Baker.
Near the Magician
:
A Memoir of My Father, Edmund Wilson
. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989.

Winawer, Jonathan, et. al. “Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discriminations.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104, no. 19 (May 2007): 7780–85.

Wolff, Tatiana, ed. and trans.
Pushkin on Literature
. Introductory essay by John Bayley. London: Athlone Press, 1986.

Wood, Michael. “Lolita in an American Fiction Class.” In Kuzmanovich and Diment,
Approaches to Teaching
.

——.
The Magician’s Doubts
:
Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.

Wyllie, Barbara. “Nabokov and Cinema.” In Connolly,
Cambridge Companion
.

Yochelson, Bonnie.
Berenice Abbott
:
Changing New York
. New York: The New Press and the Museum of the City of New York, 1997.

Zimmer, Dieter. The website of Dieter E. Zimmer.
http://dezimmer.net/index.htm
.

Zimmer, Dieter, and Sabine Hartmann. “ ‘The Amazing Music of Truth’: Nabokov’s Sources for Godunov’s Central Asian Travels in
The Gift
.”
Nabokov Studies
7 (2002/2003): 33–74.

Zverev, Alexei. “Nabokov, Updike, and American Literature.” In Alexandrov,
Garland Companion
.

Zweig, Paul.
Walt Whitman
:
The Making of the Poet
. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

NOTES

All
translations from Russian are by Simon Belokowsky.

The names of research archives and of works by Nabokov and others are abbreviated as follows:

Bagazh
Bagazh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan
, Nicolas Nabokov

Bakh
Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University

Beinecke
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Berg
Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library

Boyd 1
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
, Brian Boyd

Boyd 2
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
, Brian Boyd

BS
Bend Sinister

CE
Conclusive Evidence

“Close Calls”
“Close Calls and Fulfilled Dreams: Selected Entries from a Private Journal,” Dmitri Nabokov

DBDV
Dear Bunny Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters

D.N.
Dmitri Nabokov

DS
Dead Souls
, Garnett translation

EO
Eugene Onegin
, Nabokov translation

GIFT
The Gift

Houghton
Houghton Library, Harvard University

Letters
Letters on Literature and Politics
, Edmund Wilson

LITD
Laughter in the Dark

LOC
Library of Congress

NB
Nabokov’s Butterflies

NG
Nikolai Gogol

PF
Pale Fire

Schiff
Véra
, Stacy Schiff

SL
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters

SM
Speak, Memory

SO
Strong Opinions

TRLSK
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Introduction

1
      
“from 12 to 18 miles”:
DBDV
, 116.

2
      
specimens “on both sides”:
NB
, 436–7.

3
      
“man
without pants”:
Ibid., 52.

4
      
“My tongue is like”:
DBDV
, 123. Nabokov was remarkably unvain about his teeth. To friend Roman Grynberg he wrote on December 25, 1943, “The dentist with a crack tore out all my top teeth; I walked with a bare mouth for the rest of the month and then made efforts to get used to the wide and absolute erasure. Now I have gotten used and only sometimes notice that my conversational partner quietly wipes either his cheek or brow.” Bakh.

5
      
Had they been in France:
Pitzer, 173–74. Jews were first interned at Drancy in August ’41. The Nabokovs’ voyage to America was the last of the SS
Champlain;
upon its return to France the ship was sunk at anchor off the French coast by collision with an air-laid German mine. The dangers of embarkation at Saint-Nazaire, the port where the Nabokovs caught the
Champlain
, are suggested by the fate of the HMT
Lancastria
, a British Cunard liner commandeered by the UK government and sunk off Saint-Nazaire a month after the Nabokovs embarked, with the loss of more than four thousand: it was the greatest loss of life ever in the sinking of a British ship (more than the combined losses of the
Titanic
and the
Lusitania
).

6
      
“wondrous”:
Bakh, Véra to A. Goldenweiser, July 26, 1941.

7
      
“During our motor-car”:
DBDV
, 52.

8
      
Nabokov’s prolific tramping:
The Gift
, which tells of cramped émigré life in an inimical German city, finds ways to send out tendrils of mountain adoration even so. The hero imagines his late father, an explorer of Central Asia, in high-mountain surroundings whenever he wishes to suggest the explorer’s contentment, in an environment not unlike that of north-central Utah, in fact, a realm of snowmelt and granite. As if in uncanny foresight of his upcoming American adventures, Nabokov wrote (in 1938; first English translation, 1963) of “genuine Crimean rarities … to be found not here … but much higher, in the mountains, among the rocks”; of being “always off in wild lands, often mountainous, often high desert”; of “the constant feeling that our days here are only pocket money, farthings clinking in the dark, and that somewhere is stocked the real wealth, from which life should know how to get dividends in the shape of dreams, tears of happiness, distant mountains.”
Gift
, 128–29, 136, 164.

9
      
“one-sided conversation”:
NB
, 52–53.

10
      
reader of Whitman:
BS
, 83. N. entitles a fictitious book “When Lilacs Last” in a fictitious review chapter written for but not finally added to
Conclusive Evidence. SL
, 105.

11
    
taught to read English … before he learned to read Russian:
SM
, 79. On p. 80, N. speaks of being with Miss Clayton, his governess, learning basic English from a grammar book; on p. 87, he is again with her and is aged four.

Chapter One

1
    
trying to put together:
Schiff, 73–78.

2
    
“afraid of living”:
Bakh, May 24, 1936. N.’s productions—his novels and novellas, with which this book is centrally concerned—are:

In Russian: (1926)
Mashenka
(
Машенька
); English translation:
Mary
(1970)

(1928)
Korol, dama, valet
(
Король, дама, валет
); English translation:
King, Queen, Knave
(1968)

(1930)
Zashchita
Luzhina
(
Защита Лужина
); English translation:
The Luzhin Defense
or
The Defense
(1964); also adapted to film,
The Luzhin Defence
(2000)

(1930)
Sogliadatay
(
Соглядатай
), novella; first publication as a book, 1938; English translation:
The Eye
(1965)

(1932)
Podvig
(
Подвиг
[Deed]); English translation:
Glory
(1971)

(1933)
Kamera obskura
(
Камера oбскура
); English translations:
Camera Obscura
(1936)
Laughter in the Dark
(1938)

(1934)
Otchaianie
(
Отчаяние
); English translation:
Despair
(1937, 1965)

(1936)
Priglashenie na kazn’
(
Приглашение на Казнь
[Invitation to an Execution]); English translation:
Invitation to a Beheading
(1959)

(1938)
Dar
(
Дар
); English translation:
The Gift
(1963)

(1939)
Volshebnik
(
Волшебник
); unpublished; English translation:
The Enchanter
(1986)

In English:

(1941)
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

(1947)
Bend Sinister

(1955)
Lolita
; self-translated into Russian (1965)

(1957)
Pnin

(1962)
Pale Fire

(1969)
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

(1972)
Transparent Things

(1973)
Strong Opinions

(1974)
Look at the Harlequins!

(mid-1970s)
The Original of Laura
; fragmentary, published posthumously (2009)

3
    
wrote her once a day:
Schiff, 78.

4
    
“My life, my love”:
SL
, 22–24.

5
    
pack of lies:
Both Boyd and Schiff say that the affair began in February ’37, but Michael Maar, in his book
Speak, Nabokov
(2009), says it began in early ’36. His evidence is the short story “Spring in Fialta,” written April ’36 and containing an “erotically irresistible” female “angel of death” figure such as would show up in many later works by Nabokov. There is already a figure of this kind in his novel
Laughter in the Dark
(first serialized in 1932), and the hero of
The Eye
(1930) has an affair with an irresistible, conscienceless woman whose husband beats him up.

6
    
to judge by a story:
Boyd 1, 577n48.

7
    
The crisis:
By some accounts, the Nabokovs’ marriage was almost the last Russian marriage under the old dispensation, whereby the wife serves the immortal genius husband. Véra, in this version, joins the exalted ranks of Sophia Tolstoy, Anna Dostoevsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn. Schiff’s
Véra
is, among other things, an attempt to wrestle with this tradition and with Véra’s extraordinary lifelong devotion in light of contemporary feminism.

8
    
“Berlin is very fine”:
Schiff, 92n.

9
    
second child:
Ibid., 76.

10
    
not a marriage:
Ibid., 139–41.

11
    
two other novels:
Boyd 1, 407.

12
    
“loose, shapeless”:
SL
, 13, 15.

13
    
less than fully confident:
Boyd 1, 420. Altagracia de Jannelli was N.’s agent beginning 1934.

14
    
Mandelstam’s
famous:
Prieto, “Reading.”

15
    
given him a vision:
Espey, “Speak.”

16
    
“Far as the eye”:
Headless Horseman
, 25.

17
    
“The landscape”:
Ibid., 26.

18
    
“Through the curtains”:
Ibid.

19
    
“The edition I had”:
SM
, 195–96. There are traces of Mayne Reid in
Ada
,
Lolita
,
Glory
, and
The Gift
: Johnson, “Nabokov and Reid.” Czesław Miłosz says that to “explore Reid’s influence in Russia and Poland would call for a special study,” noting that “Chekhov and other writers take for granted the reader’s familiarity with the scenery of Reid’s novels.”
Emperor of the Earth
, 154–55. In a prose translation, with commentaries, that N. wrote for Edmund Wilson about his poem “To Prince S. M. Kachurin” (1947), he says, “I am asking you, is it not time to return to the theme of the (Indian) bow-string, to the enchantment of the chaparral (the birds are already there) of which we read in The Headless Horseman? Is it not time to go back to Matagorda Canyon (place in Texas mountains) and there fall asleep on the burning stones—with the skin of one’s face prickly dry from the aquarelle paints (with which we used to daub our faces when we played Indians) and with a crow’s feather in one’s hair? (in other words, let me take the direct road to America straight from my boyhood and the Wild West novels I used to love).” Barabtarlo, “Nabokov in the Wilson Archive.”

20
    
“Please find enclosed”:
LOC.

21
    
“We feel that”:
Ibid.

22
    
“occupy themselves”:
Boyd 1, 409. In somewhat the same spirit, Ernest Hemingway, born the same year as Nabokov, writes in
A Farewell to Arms
, “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity… . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”