FIGURE 3. The first day of the experiment.
FIGURE 3. The first day of the experiment.
During the process of writing I was under the impression that I was turning out something very smart and witty; on occasions a like thing happens in dreams: you dream you are making a speech of the utmost brilliancy, but when you recall it upon awakening, it goes nonsensically: “Besides being silent before tea, I’m silent before eyes in mire and mirorage,” etc.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
Oct. 14, 1964
An Experiment
The following checking of dream events was undertaken to illustrate the principle of “reverse memory.”1 The waking event resembling or coinciding with the dream event does so not because the latter is a prophecy but because this would be the kind of dream that one might expect to have after the event. If the succession of dream and waking event were reversed, approximations are marked by underlined dates in red and indubitable repetitions thus: 
.2
Types of dreams3
1. Professional & vocational (in my case: literature, teaching, and lepidoptera).
2. Dim-doom dreams (in my case, fatidic-sign nightmares: thalamic calamities, menacing series and riddles).
3. Obvious influences of immediate occupations & impressions (Olympic games etc.).
4. Memories of the remote past (childhood, émigré life, school, parents).
5. “Precognitive.”
6. Erotic tenderness and heart-rending enchantment.
Curious features of my dreams:
1. Very exact clock time awareness but hazy passing-of-time feeling.
2. Many perfect strangers—some in almost every dream.
3. Verbal details.
4. Fairly sustained, fairly clear, fairly logical (within special limits) cogitation.
5. Great difficulty in recalling a complete dream even in outline.
6. Recurrent types and themes.
In connection with Dunne’s book.
1. Dream noted: Wednesday, Oct. 14, 1964, Montreux
Both running on asphalt (of street), Vé. behind.4 About to overtake (easily) a horse-drawn carriage. I ask myself, and her (but she is now no longer behind) on which side does a runner overtake a carriage? A stranger in the cab (round face, oldish) asks me in Russian (or German?) am I well off? Criticizes my clothes (those I wear to-day). I explain that the spots on my trousers (which are somewhat browner than any I wear to-day) are due to my splashing across a puddle. Cannot find the way to, or remember the name of, a certain square in Berlin <VERSO> where Vé. (now apparently somehow in front) wants to visit a museum.5 (We had been to an exposition of modern painting, in Lausanne, place Beaulieu, a few days before, but the atmosphere in my dream is different).
In the course of the day I remembered the “in front-behind” part of the dream when we walked with Vé., she in front, I behind on the very narrow sidewalk along which, very close to us, fast cars were overtaking us. But we are pestered by the traffic daily.
2. 
Thursday Oct. 15, 8.00 AM Detail of dream
Russian woman, stranger, speaking in glass telephone booth. Afterwards a few words exchanged. No longer young, ambitious make-up, coarse Slavic features. Wonders how I knew she was Russian. I answer dream-logically that only Russian women speak so loud on the phone. Asks if I like it here, in St-Martin. I correct her: Mentone (a dream substitute for Montreux). Clock, yellowish, half-past ten.6
FIGURE 4. The 
sign indicates that Nabokov thought this dream, seen already on the second day of the experiment, was of the “proleptic” sort, caused, as it were, by a later event. See pages 22–23 for an interesting and surprising confirmation.
Vé. & I have lived in Mentone twice, 1937–8, and for a shorter period five years ago. During the first winter I used to miscall Cap Martin, near Mentone, “Cap St Martin”—by association with Mont St Michel, in Mentone.7
<VERSO> 11.45 same day
Reading Dunne’s An experiment with Tıme came to the passage at the bottom of p. 100 (third edition) : . . . “the first image I saw and noted was a clock pointing to half-past-ten” (on which hangs the plot of a mystery story* he was using for an experiment—letting odds and ends of images come into the mind while thinking of the title of (or a name in) a book before reading it).
Evidence of “reverse memory”?
* Mason’s House of the Arrow. [This is nice! Had quite forgotten this when inventing Ardis. March 4, 1968].8
FIGURE 5. Another card, second in a row, marked as proving Dunne’s premise. A curious 1968 note at the bottom shows that Nabokov reread the dream records while composing Ada, or Ardor. “Ardis” is the Greek for the tip of an arrow, hence the exclamation mark.
Dancing with Vé. Her open dress, oddly speckled and summery. A man kisses her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked, on some fixtures on the wall (gleaming metal suggestive of ship). Detaches himself with face all bloody and stumbles away.
Thursday evening there was a reference on the TV to the butchery and hanging of the participants in the bomb-plot against Hitler.
4. 17 Oct. 1964—8.30 AM (see Oct. 20)
Sitting at round table in the office of the director of a small provincial museum. He (a stranger, a colorless administrator, neutral features, crewcut) is explaining something about the collections. I suddenly realize that all the while he was speaking I was absent-mindedly eating exhibits on the table—bricks of crumbly stuff which I had apparently taken for some kind of dusty insipid pastry but which were actually samples of rare soils in the compartments (of which most are now empty) of a tray-like wooden affair in which <VERSO> geological specimens are kept. Although he had pointed at the tray while speaking, the director has not noticed yet anything wrong. I am now wondering not so much about the effects upon me of those (very slightly sugary) samples of soils but about the method of restoring them and what exactly they were—perhaps very precious, hard to procure, long kept in the museum (the labels on the empty compartments are reproachful but dim). The director is called to the telephone and <NEW CARD> [17 Oct. cont.] abruptly leaves the room. I am now talking to his assistant (German, wears glasses, youngish) who is very hard on the doctor who had been looking after me before I came to this clinic (ex-museum). In fact, that doctor’s treatment (rather than the exhibits I have just consumed—which surely must aggravate my condition) has resulted in the possibility of an “iron-infection”. He says I will be threatened by it at least during a whole year, will “live under the menace.” <VERSO> He mispronounces this word as “mans” and turns apologetically and questioningly to the director of the clinic (who has now returned to his place at the table). The director whose native language is English nods and says “yes, there will be a mans.” I correct him: menace, and am aware I have offended him.
(Quite recently—the day before yesterday—I had read of edible mushrooms, dry samples of which were offered, to be handled and sniffed at, to the visitors9 to an exhibition. And last year we had been highly critical of one of D’s doctors).10
Nabokov calls this second day the “first incontestable success in the Dunne experiment,” because he had “the absolutely clear feeling” that a TV film he watched three days after was the source of that dream—“had the latter followed the former,” he hastens to explain (see Dream 7, October 20, 9.45). What he fails to recollect is that, as recorded, his dream distinctly and closely followed two scenes in his 1939 short story “The Visit to the Museum,” namely, the dream-logical encounter of the narrator with the museum’s director in the latter’s office and the strange exhibits in the local museum that looked like spherical soil samples, the chief subject of his dream. See also note to Dream 1.
5. Oct. 18, 1964 8.30 AM
Several dreams which jostled each other out as I tried to remember; could only retrieve a few broken bits. A patch or pattern of ivy-like leaves or light-and-shadow with an after-image effect, suspended near me, was recognized as the fatidic sign of imminent dissolution: a “this-is-it” feeling, frequently experienced. Another dream, also recurrent, was the nightmare of finding myself in the haunts of interesting butterflies without my butterfly net and being reduced to capturing and messing up a rarity with my fingers—in this case a Spanish insect, a bleached Blue.
A “lepidopterist of consequence,” as another professional lepidopterist called him, Nabokov was a particular expert in the Blues family of butterflies. See footnote 41. The best assessment of the reciprocal relationship between his writing and his entomology can be found in the brilliant introductory essays by Brian Boyd and Robert Pyle to their book Nabokov’s Butterflies (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
Oct. 18, 1964—Evening
On TV: Olympics: runners (and walkers) splashing across puddles, all muddy, Vé. wonders how do they manage to overtake one another when bunched up. Compare dream of Oct. 14. Any connection?
Dream constipation continues. Managed to recall only one image, on the fringe of waking—hardly the dream itself, disjointed nothings, rudiments or dregs—namely a dim white propeller-like thing on a chair in a leafy avenue; and the words “Kars” (or “Kans”) and “Etan,” in another piece of dream stuff.
Webster says “Etana” was a Babylonian spaceman “who, attempting to mount to heaven on an eagle, became frightened and fell to his death.”
7. Oct. 20, 1964—7.00 AM
Travel dream. Have just woken up in tawny-plush compartment of sleeping car, misty dawn in window on my right, green steel door of bathroom before me separating my compartment from Véra’s (blend of European & American types of trains). Am surprised that had gone to sleep without the bed having been made, in a sitting corner position and fully dressed, and that the doors between us have remained closed. Suddenly realize, before even investigating my pockets, <VERSO> that my passport has remained where it always lies—in the left drawer of my desk in Montreux. In the meantime the train is approaching the border (apparently Belgium, which I crossed so often in the past). I ponder the question—shall I telephone to our concierge at the Palace Hotel to have him forward the thing? Shall I wake Vé.?
In a second instalment of the dream we have trouble finding our luggage at the customs.
Long-distance trains were VN’s boyhood special passion—see chapter 7 of Speak, Memory.
Oct. 20, 1964—12.00 AM11
Read in the N.Y. Times about the death, in aircrash near Belgrade, of several Red Army officers. The plane hit a hill in the fog and one engine landed on a forest road that winds to the top of Avala Hill. Cp. dream jotted down yesterday. Good enough?
Oct. 20 9.45 PM, Tuesday
Turned on at 9 AM the TV (France), educational film, Le Pédologue (thought it was about children).12 But pedology is also the science treating of soils. Three men (two Negro geologists & a French interviewer) were revealed seated around an ordinary table placed near a tent in the Senegal brush—and I immediately recalled my dream noted last Saturday, Oct. 17. The échantillons de sols13 discussed by them were the samples of soils of that dream. The samples in appetizing little bags (des sachets) were presently brought in a wooden tray into a Dakar office where brick-like boxes of specimens lined the wall. The soils turned <VERSO> into eatables—vegetables and fruit collected by the natives. One of the pedologists spoke French with what sounded like a Russian accent. I would have looked at the film, anyway, because [I was] trying to glimpse butterflies in the several excellent views of the brousse.14
I note the absolutely clear feeling I had of this film being the source of my dream (had the latter followed the former).
This is my first incontestable success in the Dunne experiment. Two or three less definite ones occurred in connection with dreams jotted down on Oct. 14, 15, & 19.
8. Oct. 21, 8 AM
Had rich and strange visions, remembered them between two abysses of sleep but now cannot recollect anything save some vague fragments of a trivial erotic dream. (Vé. tells me she saw a big elevator: seven people in it, with furniture, she talks to a German girl who complains she is ill-paid. Complicated details of ringing bells. Connected with a slow lift she used when visiting doctor in Geneva yesterday).
9. Jotted down at 8.30 AM—Oct. 22
Two fragments of Véra’s dreams.
a. Sports in Africa. Long necklace of black and white alternating, worn by one of the runners.
b. We were representatives of Fiat. They met us rather coolly. They had built a white bungalow-like house for us. Figure 29 dominated the whole thing.
I gleaned only a communication at the moment of awakening that “Somnambule Bureau had been accused of malpractices.”
10. Oct. 23—6.00 AM
Several dreams, a fragment of one recalled. Am in a kind of gym or barbershop. At some distance from me, Dm., wrapped up in sheet, is being massaged or having his hair cut. A phonograph is put on for him. It is a record I made to amuse him—I’m singing an aria (from Bor. Godunov, perhaps), but it is less funny than I had hoped, the tune is quite unrecognizable and even the “ha-ha” laugh into which I break off at the end sounds false.
Dmitri Nabokov was an operatic basso profundo. He was to sing “Death of Boris,” the star aria from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, three years after this dream. Nine years later, Nabokov wrote the liner notes for an album of the Russian songs and romances that his son recorded for BASF.
8.00 AM: another dream
Trudging up a steep plank-laid way between boulders. Higher up, a sunny slope, in a Spanish town. Many butterflies flying <VERSO> about. A local lepidopterist introduces me to the fauna. With the dark common thing I catch, there is in my net a marvelously fresh specimen of a greatly enlarged and brightened Triphysa phryne—a subspecies of it unknown to me with a splendid orange flush around the ocelli. The local chap explains in English it is the progeny of a population imported from the steppes of S.E. Russia (There are several S. Russian butterflies represented in Spain, but not this species).
(Since the beginning of the month we have been toying with the idea of going in spring to S. Spain).
Oct. 23—8.15 AM
(Véra’s dream.
Certain Olympics participants, found them<selves?> very far out in the ocean—perhaps shipwrecked. They were forced, on purpose or by circumstances, to swim shoreward. Although the officials had no right to let them be even seen, let alone rewarded, they still were, illegally, listed as have performed in the Olympics).
11. Saturday, Oct. 24, 1964 8.00 AM
The fact of being able to retrieve only the very end of a long interesting dream is most annoying:
V. & I are seeing Dm. off. We are standing at the tram stop and looking at the tramcar he has just boarded. We can’t see him but presently hear him lustily singing inside. I realize that he is placed somehow above the occupants of the car—they are looking up with appreciative expressions on their faces. I climb upon some kind of stand to see him, but am unable to do so.
(Dm. is taking part in autom<obile> races in Italy this afternoon & to-morrow).
Oct. 24—8.30 AM
(Véra’s dreams :
1. We are shown a film of a jumping match between two countries one of which is African and begin<s> with M. It turns out to be the performance of a play of mine, with Brialy.15
2. and 3 mingled: a town where it was impossible to find a taxi. We were finally given one with its keys and no driver. A hotel room with a chest of (4) drawer<s> and two faucets on top: one could take a bath in the third drawer from the top. She let the water run & <VERSO> got in the back of taxi to clean the window or something. A couple comes up and wants to take the taxi. The woman reminds her of a person she knew years ago in Cambridge, Mass. She tells her it is not a taxi for rent, then remembers the running faucets and goes upstairs. They threaten to find the man who owns the taxi. She is aware that all the drawers must be very wet though only the lower one is being filled with water. The couple, and the landlady, come up. The former want the keys of the car. V. says she won’t give them. They say, who has a key: Well, Miss Shapiro (the housekeeper) will drive us. V. wants to telephone to get the key back. All this against the background of a big ocean liner—possibly on board.
Curiously, a number of verbs in this note (“are,” “begins,” “turns”) were at first written in the past tense, then changed to the dramatic present.
12. Oct. 25, 1964 9.30
Slept much longer than usual, woke up with neuralgia—and only a very dim recollection of several dreams. The influence of the Olympics TV pictures on V’s and my dreams lately is quite obvious. It was combined this time with a familiar nightmare accompanying neuralgia in the temple: dim gloomy riddles which I must solve in a kind of dreadful “quiz” involving the necessity to memorize sequences of more or less abstract, insipid, ragged images, surds and shadows of surds.16
13. Oct. 26, 1964. Blank17
14. Oct. 27, 1964. 8.30 AM
Several vivid dreams besides some tender erotic stuff and a fatidic-sign nightmare (flags ascending very olympically, one of them meaningfully Turkish). The word “Synecampus.”
Memorized final fragments of two long dreams: V. urges me to hurry as we escape from a hotel (not this one) in the middle of the night. Helps me to find my blue raincoat. We rush out and she instantly vanishes. Vast hotel grounds, artistically bathed in diffuse moonlight, everything flaky and fluid, dim outlines of shrubs, dim figures, children still-out-so-late, a miniature dachshund, the sonorous voices of a party of Russians <VERSO> taking leave of one another in the darkness beyond the moonlight. I decide to wait for V. and sit down on the gravel; sitting beside me is a fat youngish Russian, a stranger in a grey suit. Some ceremony is about to take place and he tells me that as a political gesture we’d better stand up to attention. I peevishly refuse, he stands up alone, is angry, threatens me. I take the stick of my butterfly net, light metal, vulcanized handle, and attack him. He flinches and crouches with his back to me, groping for his thick cane which is tipped with iron. I strike him across the shoulder blades—not quite the tremendous whack I intended, but still quite a rap.
14-A. Oct. 27, 1964 8.30 AM, cont.
The other fragment same night (27 Oct., 1964): have called on M. Kalashnikov, a friend of the early 20-ties (whose farcical personality must be described some day).18 He is staying with a titled Russian family, in a large rambling house. We sit down to a rambling dinner, lots of people, I do not know anybody, am bored and exasperated. M. K., a little apart, gloomily consumes a thick red steak, holding it rather daintily, the nails of his long fingers glisten with cherry-red varnish. I get up and wander away. Failed to memorize the long middle. The setting has analogies with the past but the details of the last scene have none.
15. Oct. 28, 1964 6.00 AM
A long dream which I can only recall vaguely. It is a lecture room dream and I am the lecturer. Cannot decipher my notes, fuzzy lines with illegible corrections, murky insertions, messy deletions. (This type of dream is really not so much an echo of my lectures at American colleges, as a much older, disguised, recollection of my not knowing the lesson as a schoolboy—dreams that continued to haunt me well into my thirties).
Cf. “But alas, even when you do happen, in a dream, to make such a return journey, then, at the border of the past your present intellect is completely invalidated, and amid the surroundings of a classroom hastily assembled by the nightmare’s clumsy property man, you again do not know your lesson—with all the forgotten shades of those school throes of old” (The Gift, 54) and “the recurrent dream we all know (finding ourselves in the old classroom, with our homework not done because of our having unwittingly missed ten thousand days of school)” (Bend Sinister, 55).
15-A. Oct. 28, 1964 8.30 AM, same morning
V. and I are on our way to Wellesley where I have to deliver the first lecture of the year—and my first lecture at that college.19 At the railway station somewhat resembling South station in Boston, but then degenerating into a Swiss station. I linger near a newspaper stand, while V., who has the tickets, hurries onto the platform. I look at the clock and see it is 12.10: I have fourteen minutes. I cannot find the paper I want and decide to try the stand on the platform but when I arrive at the gate I realize V. has my ticket. The two <VERSO> men at the gate refuse to let me through, refuse to be bribed, and tell me to go back to the nearest ticket-office. Happily I know where to find it, right, left, and right again. It is 12.20 when I reach it. Two or three fat nuns are before me, but I manage to push through into a small room with a counter. The man suspiciously inquires why I am in such a hurry. “Are you a medecine?” (médecin). I say no and urge him to go on with my ticket which is a booklet the blanks of which he has to fill in. He says that if I were <NEW CARD>
Oct. 28, 1964 8.30 AM, cont.
a doctor I would have known I should comply with the instructions on “bacteria” in one of the sections of the ticket. He starts to cross out the sentence, remarking he hopes the conductor will still let me get on the train. I am now in a rage and tell him I am “an American Subject”. The clock-hand is now at 12.23, and jerks forward as I look. I shout at him it is now too late, he comes out from behind the counter, and <I> kick him before rushing out. I am now in despair: what has V. done: has she boarded the train? Will she find me? Greatly relieved it is only a dream.
This familiar type of nightmare—being late to a train, mad haste in slow-motion, fairy-tale obstacles—is rather frequent in VN’s writing: see especially The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and note to Dream 23, November 5.
The verso of this card has a working note, unrelated to the experiment, headed by the instruction to self (“Rewrite”) and later crossed out:
FIGURE 6. Verso of the card describing Dream 15-A (October 28, 8.30 AM).
The way certain biographers have of calling an incidental personage, whenever he appears, by the nickname given him by their hero.
Italicized passages in a novel—to represent a character’s cloudbursts of thought.
Oct. 28, 1964 9.30 same morning
Remembered a frayed bit of yet another dream at the moment I was taking out my sponge from its bag hanging above the bath. In that dream I had become aware that I now noticed for the first time a kind of sack modestly hiding among the towels near the bath where as I now realized Mme Cavin, the woman who cooks for us, leaves her things when she comes—ah, that’s where! (not an actual arrangement, of course!)
16. Oct. 29, 1964 8.30 AM
(V.’s dream, a retrieved fragment. We are all to dine with Sonia20 who lives in a pension owned by the French consul who closely supervises it. Since he is one of S.’s guests, someone says we can be sure of a good dinner and S. affirms it will be carefully prepared but very simple. A dachshund participated.)
17. Oct. 30, 1964—8.00 AM Nothing
18. Oct. 31—8.00 AM
Among several dreams was a really stunning recollection of early childhood. I was again immersed in these dreadful tantrums, those storms of tears with which my mother had to cope when I was 4–5 years of age and we were abroad. The dream beautifully brought back the sensation of utter disaster when letting myself completely go I simultaneously realized that I was removing further and further, with every sob, and howl a reconciliation with my helpless, distraught mother. In to-night’s dream, I was <NEW CARD> already in such a tempest as I rushed from my and S.’s21 bedroom in a hotel into the white corridor and endeavored to break into mother’s room. She would not let me in—cried out abruptly and jarringly that she was trying on something. I dashed into a water closet and next moment was oddly standing on the lid and hugging the whitewashed pipe that went upward to a basin-like affair in which I plunged my face (the dream rather eccentrically gave the measure <NEW CARD> of my height by means of this position which apparently had no other purpose or meaning). My mother with bright eyes and flushed face opened the door at the end of a kind of vestibule leading to the place where I sobbed. There I let myself go completely. Unfortunately at this moment my brother S. whom the English governess was dressing heard my sobbing and joined in. This double performance spoilt the matter and M.22 instead of consoling me broke into tears herself.
Had been rereading (Oct. 29) the Russian version of Speak, Memory.23
19. Nov. 1, 1964 8.30 AM24
Many dreams, among them one erotic vision, then a long rambling dream: am coming home at noon with butterfly net. On my left, through sparse wood across grass, across paths walks woman in white talking to herself and humming—resembling the lady who kept trying to waylay me in the neighborhood of Loèche-les-Bains,25 summer 1963. A kind of short causeway on my right leads me out of the grove to the opposite side of the valley where after a rond-point the path ends at the door of pink-brick villa V. & I have rented; but the door is locked, I do not have the key. I ponder how to get in and wake up. Landscape quite unknown to me.
FIGURE 7. The third card recording the dream on October 31.
Several dreams in succession as usual, last one dimly recollected: Dm. and I are trying to track down a repulsive plump little boy who has killed another child—perhaps his sister.
— — 8.00 AM
Somehow am unable to find the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.26 Seem to have got out at the wrong underground station. Upon entering a building find several people conversing in Russian in a kind of entrance hall. I surprise them by addressing them in Russian. One of them—<VERSO> a small frail man (funny how many of my dream characters are perfect strangers!) whom I ask to direct me, replies it’s at least half an hour’s walk—though I know it must be just round the corner. He says he had “big unpleasantnesses” (in Russian)27 at the MCZ which he had just visited on business (and at this point, i.e. long before waking, I have briefly the eerie feeling that I should write down all this! The Dunne Interference!28) He also refers to a Professor Lag—unknown to me, offers to walk thither with
<NEW CARD> Nov. 2, 1964 8.00 AM, continued.
me and puts on his pointed karakul shapska.29 I say I think I’ll manage alone and start to go. But the exit is now a trapdoor or roofdoor—opens up, does not stay up, cannot wriggle through (have a parcel), some old rag falls from top as I try to adjust the frame—and here I wake up.
(One of my “professional” dreams, but also connected with the difficulty I have these days in settling the location of specimens at the Nat. Hist. Mus. (B.M.) which I need for my book on European butterflies.).30
21. Nov. 3, 1964 9.00 AM
(Woke up much later than usual, recalled end of dream)
After grave illness put on hurriedly white flannel trousers and dark blue jacket with the intention of bicycling to the end of our park where my cousin Yuric (he was killed in 1919 and I am fifteen in my dream)31 is cycling. Deliberate with myself should I take my butterfly net. Decide not to. Am wearing white shoes with heels. Rush down to dining room (of Vyra house32) to eat something, but it is late, the table has been cleared of breakfast. Find some fruit in vase on side board, take a banana after making sure there is one left for Dm. Nice blend!
22. Nov. 4, 1964 9.00 AM
Again slept late. Several dreams, both V’s and mine, irretrievable (or, as she says “tried in vain to pull one of them out by the end of the thread”). Just before waking saw on my right (I always sleep on the right side33) one of my “fatidic signs”, this time a thick orange-red spiral on a dull brown field—the blazon of a vanished nightmare—on the back of its receding coach. (Have been thinking a good deal about spirals lately in connection with my work on space and time).34
23. Nov. 5, 1964, 7.30 AM
End of a dream, but recalled rather long bit (the longest since I started to check): seeing my mother off. Ten minutes to 1 PM—her train leaves at 1 PM. We take a taxi and arrive at four minutes to one. By now the railway station idea has been dropped and she must walk up to a kind of téléphérique station35 on the top of a hill. At one moment I am helping her with her bags—relieving her of the larger one of two—she carries a small old black attaché-case. I realize that I have not paid the taxi and run back leaving M. and her bags, but the taxi
FIGURE 8. The beginning of the longest record of a dream Nabokov managed to retain on awakening.
has gone. I know, however, that he will presently come back with another fare—try to figure out how soon—realize it’s quite a way, also realize that his method was to leave the small contraption or essential part of it, with running motor—all this securely attached and locked—I see the gap in the queue and take one of the empty cars at the taxi stand—a common procedure in my dream. Meanwhile M. has followed a porter up the hill to the circular pavilion-like affair at the top. I have not kissed her goodbye and this bothers me, but as I start hurrying
<NEW CARD> Nov. 5, cont.
up the hill I become aware that the entire hill—or island-like hill—or island-like hill-like liner—is about to move away. I wonder how more people are not carried away since visitors are not warned to get off, and now decide to do so at once. I scramble and slide down a kind of moraine slope feeling that I am taking a dangerous course on an unusual side of the hill-island. Still hope to glimpse my mother from some point before the whole thing moves away. Apparently it is
<NEW CARD> Nov. 5, cont.
moving already and I am worried by the possibility of a fissure opening under my feet. I am now above a sheer drop of rock and there is water below, we are definitely moving, I must get off, but do not want to get wet. A jutting branch helps me to swing across the water and drop on the safe side without wetting my feet. I make my way along a scrubby path. Young woman with little boy, older woman presently appears, and they walk towards the landing. (The woman says to her aunt:
<NEW CARD> Nov. 5, cont.
“Tu sais, il fera si bon dormir bien au chaud là-bas”.36 The little boy raises some objection but smilingly, and I think he must be sort of bored to be with those two women to whom he is not related—but a polite, good-natured little boy. I now see from the footpath along which they have wandered away the entire—receding—hill-liner with a lot of newcomers and their luggage and cars at the foot of the thing. But I cannot make out my mother among small silhouettes high up in the pavilion.
The beginning of this dream has an antecedent in chapter 3 of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: V. and his mother frantically pacing the platform because they can’t board the train, in which to escape the Bolshevik-overrun Russia, without Sebastian, who is nightmare-worthy late: “The thought that in a minute or two the train would move off and that we should have to return to a dark cold attic . . . was utterly disastrous. . . . Eight forty-five, eight-fifty . . .” The train was scheduled to depart at 8:40. Likewise, the second part at once brings to mind the ending of that novel: there, a dying man is fancying “. . . the wrench, the parting, the quay of life gently moving away aflutter with handkerchiefs: ah! He was already on the other side, if he could see the beach receding; no, not quite . . . thus one who has come to see a friend away, may stay on deck too late, but still not become a traveller.”
“The Enchanter” (1939) has a sentence resembling the initial setting of the dream: “He refused tea, explaining that at any moment the car he had ordered at the station would arrive, that it already contained his luggage (this detail, as occurs in dreams, had a certain glimmer of meaning).”
The mention of a téléphérique lift points in the opposite direction in time: in 1975, hunting butterflies in the Alps, Nabokov fell down a steep slope and lay helpless for some time while cable cars glided above him at regular intervals, their fares apparently taking an elderly gentleman, sprawling supine and gesturing for attention, for a jolly and drunken tourist.
24. Nov. 6, 1964 10.30 PM
Watching a series entitled Cinq colonnes à la une on the French television programme37 at around 9.30 PM (did not note the time and did not stay till the end), saw an island with “passengers’’ that broke off the mainland, sailing out into the ocean—an illustration from a Jules Verne book shown in connection with a village built on water in South America.
Reminded me of the “island-full-liner” dream jotted down yesterday morning!
25. Nov. 6, 1964, 8.00 AM—could recall nothing.38
Nov. 7 — —
End of dream: my mother is upset about something and everything my father says makes it worse. He gives me a bound volume of the Illustration or Graphic. I turn the pages, sitting with legs crossed. My mother on the verge of tears quietly leaves the room (we seem to be abroad in a hotel or a villa, my parents are young but I am a grown man). My father follows her. I hear his voice going on and on in the next room. “Ne descendez pas si vous êtes indispose, et tous seront contents”39 (an impossible scene in the real past) I feel dreadfully embarrassed and cannot decide <VERSO> whether to concentrate on the magazine (where there is a chess diagram on the right-side page) so as not to hear what is being said, or shut the heavy volume and go away. He also says something about her wishing only that a street be named after him.
25-A. Nov. 7, 1964 3.00 PM
Slept after lunch, which seldom do. End of vivid dream: V. and I are buying Christmas presents. She warmly greets a young woman who comes in as we are about to go. They chat for a moment and then part. I wonder who she is and reflect that it is probably a “nice nurse” she had at the hospital. I stretch my hand to shake hands with the girl who hesitates clumsily for a moment before taking it. (During our morning walk we had met the small boy of V’s hairdresser. He had had an operation—leg—but now walked quite well. She shook hands with him, I did not).
26. Nov. 8, 1964 9.15
Woke up very late. Some kind of party connected with the (real) fact that my nephew V.S. is about to get married.40 He wants to show me something. We go out: we are now in a large field for rifle practice. He gives me something extremely precious to hold, saying “this will interest you,” and goes away with his rifle gaily and rather carelessly twirling it: I cry out jokingly that I hope he knows at what end of the field the targets are—my end or his—but he is already far. I examine what he has given me to hold. It is something he <NEW CARD> had to construct for the same competitional purpose as his rifle shooting. It is a butterfly very neatly spread between two leaves of cellophane somehow glued together. The thing can be folded but the fold must not come across the butterfly, which would be fatal. I am terribly afraid to spoil the precious object. The butterfly itself is particularly rare—a remarkable aberration of a ♂ [male] Plebejus,41 with an extensive spread of golden orange over the upper side as in a ♀ [female]. I tell myself that these auroral scales <NEW CARD> are more physical (structural) than chemical (which scientifically is not nonsense). It glistens beautifully in the sun. I decide to fold the object, do so very carefully, but having done so am not sure I have folded it properly. His mother42 has now appeared and I give her the thing half-afraid she’ll open it and perhaps find something is dreadfully wrong.
(On the 6th V. had been asked by my nephew to visit the flat he was arranging for himself and his bride, and yesterday I had been coloring with a yellow crayon the outline figure of a machaon).43
Could not recall anything.
End of V’s dream:
She is being released from a Portuguese prison with the stipulation that the release has to be repeated four times. She is walking out of the stone gateway, she is barefoot, carrying baby Dm., stepping upon the old St Petersburg type of cobbled pavement. The atmosphere is rather like that of the Inquisition than of Nazism. (We have never been to Portugal, and Dm. is now 30 years of age)
The sentence in parentheses is one of several that seem to point up that Nabokov entertained the idea of publishing selected records from his experiment, perhaps together with some other dreams of his; else it is difficult to explain why he often furnishes information for the benefit of an outside reader: his son’s age or the fact that his wife does not smoke (see the last phrase, also in parentheses, in the next record).
28. Nov. 10, 1964 8.00 AM
Ragged end only: Dm. returns from trip out of town where he had been to a drugstore or barbershop (quite unknown in waking life) and tells V. that they are a little surprised and hurt I have not called for a lotion I had ordered long ago and which—as he says—they have lovingly prepared. I had completely forgotten it and am now annoyed with Dm. that he did not tell me he was going there. In the meantime V. is sitting in the armchair of our living room here, reading and smoking (she does not smoke).
V’s dream: Topazia Markevich44 tells us that she finds it very difficult to begin making the Italian translation of my story (“Lik”).45 V. says she will start for her. T.M. has brought down (from Villars?46) Dm.’s car so V. can start right away (!) The hood is open and all one has to do is detach the denture like dark thing along the edge of the car’s inner mouth (!) using a stameska-like instrument;47 but one has to be careful because at the very front, where the sides meet, Dm.’s artificial dentures (does not have any) are enclosed in the brown, earthen, curtain-like projections. <VERSO> Now Dm. stands at my elbow warning me to be careful and not to break the plates. I manage to take them out with perfect ease, and the rest of the work (removing the brown things) should be now quite easy for Topazia. Meantime Dm. is quite gay, has his own teeth.
29. Nov. 11, 1964 6.00 AM Four cards
Woke up early, decided to jot this down though very sleepy. I was thinking the other day about the odd fact that in my “professional” dreams I so very seldom actually compose anything. But to-night, at the end of a dream, I was granted a very nice sample. I am lying on a couch and dictating to V. Apparently I have been dictating from written cards in my hand, but this I dictate in the act of composing it. It refers to a new, expanded The Gift. My young man F. <NEW CARD> is speaking of his destiny, already accomplished, and of his having vaguely but constantly known that it was to be a great one. I am saying this slowly in Russian:48 «о чем бы я ни думал, от каждой мысли откидывалось как тень, простираясь внутрь меня, мое великое будущее».49 I am dictating this very slowly, strongly stressing the внутрь меня,50 weighing every word, hesitating whether to use великое or великолепнoe,51 wondering if «великое» did not make the inward extending shadow too long and large, finally settling for that epithet. Simultaneously I am thinking rather <NEW CARD> smugly that nobody had ever rendered the theme of nostalgia better than I and that I had subtly introduced (in a wholly imaginary passage of The Gift in Russian) a certain secret strain: before actually anybody had left forever those avenues and fields, a sense of never-returning was already inscribed into them. I am also conscious, while slowly, word by word, dictating “Fyodor’s” phrase, that it will please and surprise Vé. because I am generally not good at evolving orally anything out of the ordinary unless I have written it down, <NEW CARD> and moreover I quite clearly appreciate the fact that this metaphorical shadow of the future cast by every thought in F.’s youth extended back into the psyche (instead of lying ahead as it would be more customary for the future to do).
I should note that some twenty-five years ago, in New York,52 I had been toying with the idea of continuing my Дар,53 i.e. going on to F’s & Z’s life in Paris.
Nabokov used to dictate his manuscripts to his wife, who would type them up (and often retype more than once, after heavy correction). Dar (The Gift), his last Russian novel, was finished in 1937, published in 1952, in English in 1963. Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is the main actor and occasional narrator; Zinaida Mertz is his love. A projection of the Russian phrase from this dream runs throughout the novel. The sequel Nabokov mentions has in part survived: it takes the couple to 1939 Paris, where Fyodor is unrecognizably abrasive and even boorish while Zina soon gets run over by a car in an accident reminiscent of Lolita’s mother’s death.
30. Nov. 12, 1964 7.30 AM Could not recall
31. Nov. 13, 1964 6.30 AM
Poignant bitter-sweet dream permeated with tenderness and hopelessness. Short girl, rather dumpy, slatternly dressed, bare-necked, face very attractive but not flawlessly pretty, broadish jaws, flattish nose, wonderful complexion, smooth, warmly colored skin, pale-blue eyes, bedraggled fair hair. Am trying in vain to console her: she has been badly hurt by faithless heartless young husband, a shadowy gay-dog figure in the background. I am doing my best to make her understand how dreadfully sorry I am for her, but she is completely wrapped up <NEW CARD> in her taciturn grief, is absolutely impenetrable no matter how I strain to “reach her,” «пробиться к ней»,54 as I tell her in Russian—but all in vain, she looks up at me with apprehensive hunted gaze, ready to stiffen, bothered, resenting my sympathy which is quite genuine but not free from desire. (The young man is—a very obscure feeling—related to me—perhaps Dm.?!)
Oct. 14, 1964 cont.55
Later, a “museum” dream, ending in my picking up an autobiographical work by Dobuzhinsky the painter,56 but here writing about butterfly-collecting. (He had been my teacher of drawing and I had seen him many years later in New York and Vermont). I cannot find the index, but then realize the volume consists of two books bound together and the index comes after the first.
32. Oct. <sic> 14, 1964, 8.30 AM
Several dreams, one of them keenly erotic, replaying (for perhaps the five-hundredth time) with perfect freshness a fugue of my early youth.
At around 3 AM an abstract, fatidic vision: a death-sign consisting of two roundish golden-yellow blobs with blurred edges, placed not quite side by side but more so than one above the other, for an instant, on my right. The point was that I was supposed to be competing in this specific vision with V.—who would see it first?—but was now too sleepy to check with her and fell asleep again.57
FIGURE 9. For three days Nabokov marked his November records as “October,” as if restarting the experiment from day one.
33. Oct. <sic> 15, 1964 8.30 AM
Good “artistic” dream.
Am in motel, have just awoken, V. not there (she is spending the night with A. in town),58 Dm. still asleep in next room. Suddenly I see from window a number of men whom I immediately place as the Red Army performers (singers, dancers) who I know are given <sic> a show in town that night. I tell V. (who is with me after all): Look, the Russians! They are making their way, one after the other, in the wake of a tall fellow with a fishing rod, along a strip of riverside grass and then along another strip at right angles—heading for the rive to fish.59
<NEW CARD> Oct. 15, 1964 cont.
All of them in natty uniforms, blue trousers, brown tunics, carrying fishing rods. As they reach the corner of the lawn and are about to turn they do so in a deliberately comic manner, especially a short fellow in very wide pants. They are all humming and softly oozing string-music, and the villagers (Minnesotans or Dakotans) are very much amused and interested. The weather is bleak and rough, with ragged dark grey clouds, a strong wind impedes their progress, it is about to rain, but I realize that for a Russian it is wonderful fishing weather.
34. After a blank spell: could not recall anything yesterday or the day before yesterday.
Several nasty dreams & dreamlets:
Leaving the stranger, a Russian or Spanish general to his tea, I slipped into the next room: I knew he was dangerous—a ruthless agent. I tried to bolt the door, fumbled at the latch, it was hard to push in. Suddenly I collected my wits, I told myself it was shameful to fear that man. I decided to go back and as I re-entered the living room I stepped into a blast of blackness.
In another dream I had to prepare a lecture consisting of four parts or rather
<NEW CARD> Nov. 18, 1964 cont.
answers to questions (confusion with remembered exams of my own student days) and had only ten minutes (it was 8.50 AM) to finish the thing before my lecture began. I knew the subject very vaguely and what I had written down was illegible.
In a third dream I had got out of bed and realized that in addition to some basic dreary old illness I had developed suddenly a deep case of bronchitis.60
35. Nov. 19, 1964 8.00 AM
Several fast-fading dreams. In one, I learned that Paulhan61 had died of a stroke; in another somebody discussed “antisemitism in the world of waiters.”
FIGURE 10. One of Nabokov’s wife’s dreams recorded.
V. dreamt that we have on our table an object resembling a travelling-clock made of a square piece of wood with a small dial in the middle but only one figure. Suddenly somebody (another doctor?) tells us that this is Dr. Spuler’s diploma: that he has just passed his Ph.D. (sic!).62 We wonder why it is there and decide to send it to him. Somebody drops it—the <VERSO> back partly falls out, has to be repaired before being sent back to Dr. Spuler.
Another dream she recalls: she shares a room with an old lady—fussy and very old. Call a nurse & step out into the corridor to tell her something the old lady wants but cannot identify her either by name or descriptively. Nurse says: admiralsha.63
Another bit of same dream; she and I go to visit Elena: large room, low ceiling, shabby red carpet from wall to wall, glass sliding double-leaf door near the body, hum of talk coming through.64 Slightly open—she closes it. Another Admiralsha, this time rather noisy, in the next room. We find note from E., big scrawl—she has gone for several days. A delivery man is about. All this bizarre. V. feels something under her foot, looks under carpet & finds a four-inch wide fissure across the whole floor, wants to call repairman, but I & delivery man say it would be wrong and push the two parts of floor together (they almost touch) and replace rug.
36. Nov. 20, 1964 8.30 AM
Walking in town (anonymous), notice that am on asphalt, empty, between barricades. There is shooting all around. A helmeted man in blue yells at me to take cover. I ponder—should I listen to him? However, I do—I jump into a kind of excavation. One of several dreams.
Compare to Véra’s second dream under same date!
Nov. 20, 1964, 9.00 AM
V’s dream, first one. At station or port we go to meet the Ustinovs.65 Only Suzanne is clear: she is the star, she is “entourée”<,> children in background. New governess with her young man, a pimp who thinks that I am interested in his lady, and nudges Véra cockily. Before a fight can develop Véra says: come, come he is married. Present in her mind is the girl they had before with her “pimp” who also etc. (an old story). Suzanne has many dogs with her and suddenly everything is held up—one of them, a large poodle, raises his hind-leg in <VERSO> the middle of the stage. Also two small poodle pups, one grey, one black, Véra takes up and carries the grey which at first is nervous, but then surrenders. We go into large building with a helpful concierge. Lots of people want to take the lift which goes up & down below our level. In the lift V. realizes that the dog in her arms has been replaced by a still smaller black one. Search for the grey. The concierge thinks it might be in the flat of Lord Torno (or Tornu) a newspaper magnate recently knighted. We go there. Maid, lord. He finally returns the dog. It welcomes V. ecstatically though had been grumpy before.
Nov. 20, 1964 9.00 AMCompare to my dream same night!
Second dream, Véra’s: we see from our high floor window revolutionary crowds coming in trucks who begin: (1) playing soccer on a field beyond the road, and (2) digging a wide trench across the road for the police cars to fall in. A moment later the trench is ready and they leave in a hurry with much noise—to attract the police. We begin to search feverishly for a red rag to stop the cars before they can fall in the trap.
FIGURE 11. His wife had a dream akin to his own the night before.
Véra’s dream: we’re in Denmark, on a tour of the country, with motocycle <sic> & sidecar to be driven by a young Danish woman slightly recalling Filippa.66 Sometimes I am outside and somebody, sister or Dm., also is inside with V. in this hybridish car, Véra being in the left corner. The Danish girl arrives with a black suitcase at the last moment and sits in the sidecar. Two trucks (one parked)—we pass between. We reach a narrow river, we stop at the bank, unlawfully, and I cross toward the hills on a private quest. Danish girl follows me and V. is left with small Dm. and vehicle. V. rather complicatedly <sic> removes the car with girl (who has run back) to path going up through <NEW CARD> (cont.) small cafe. As we come back we find a man who rocks <?> his chair to block the path and is reading a book, leg<s> cross<ed>. We squeeze through. He becomes abusive. Véra says: “you are not a European (meaning he might be a German from the colonies), I dont know what you are”—and then it dawns upon her that he is simply a rude Dane at home resentful of foreigners.
38. 22 Nov. 1964 3.15 AM
In a kind of lecture-hall during an informal performance or rehearsal of lecture. On the platform my father seated at a small table is reading and discussing something. Several people between the stage and me. Am eagerly taking down what he says. My mother is among the four or five people sitting in front of me. My father is now elucidating a point. I see and appreciate it and clear my throat a trifle too loudly while trying to jot down his argument as fully as possible. From the stage he suddenly addresses me—I nod my head supposing he is making the possible objection I have foreseen; but instead, he says to me: “Even if you are <NEW CARD> bored you might have the decency to sit quietly.” I feel deeply injured and reply (textual words [transl. from Russian], chosen and uttered with great care and dignity): “I think your observation to me is most unjust. I was listening attentively and with enormous interest.” I get up and start to leave hoping I shall be called back. But I hear behind me my father’s voice resuming his speech with a little less force than before. I visualize in a medallion of light to-morrow morning’s interview with him—imagine him in his beige dressing—<NEW CARD> gown. Shall I ignore what happened? Will he refer to it? I decide philosophically—a similar case has come up before within dream experience—that time will decide (curious that I saw myself imagining the future in my dream and vaguely recalling a past and that a sense of future, of time, clearly though somewhat crudely existed in my mind, i.e. I distinctly perceived the degree of difference in comparative reality between the dream vision and the dream prevision). It is odd that my father who was so good-natured, and gay, is always so morose and grim in my dreams.
VN’s father was killed in a lecture-hall of sorts (the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, used for public lectures) in March 1922 by a bullet intended for another man, Pavel Miliukov, a prominent left-wing member of the Russian liberal party of which V. D. Nabokov was a (moderate) founding member. Cf. the earlier Dream III, also a later one, Dream X, in part 3. Cf. also:
“His father often appeared to him in dreams, as if just returned from some monstrous penal servitude, having experienced physical tortures which it was forbidden to mention, now changed into clean linen—it was impossible to think of the body underneath—and with a completely uncharacteristic expression of unpleasant, momentous sullenness, with a sweaty brow and slightly bared teeth, sitting at table in the circle of his hushed family. But when, overcoming his sensation of the spuriousness of the very style foisted on fate, he nevertheless forced himself to imagine the arrival of a live father, aged but undoubtedly his, and the most complete, most convincing possible explanation of his silent absence, he was seized, not by happiness, but by a sickening terror—which, however, immediately disappeared and yielded to a feeling of satisfied harmony when he removed this meeting beyond the boundary of earthly life.” (The Gift, 99–100)
In his lectures The Borders of Gnoseology, Florensky calls this phenomenon paramnesia: “There is, strictly speaking, memory of the future just as there is memory of the past, both having to do with the proceeding order of time but shifting the past and the future, along with their temporal characteristics, to the present” (Florensky 1996, 56–57).
39. 23 Nov. 1964 6.45 AM
End of a long “butterfly” dream which started after I had fallen asleep following upon a sterile awakening at 6.15 AM. Have arrived (by funiculaire?) to a collecting ground at timberland (in Switzerland? in Spain?), but in order to get to it have to cross the hall of a large gay hotel. Very spry and thin, dressed in white, skip down the steps on the other side and find myself on the marshy border of a lake. Lots of bog flowers, rich soil, colorful, sunny, but not one single butterfly (familiar sensation in dream). Instead of a net am carrying a huge spoon [see next]
—cannot understand how I managed to forget my net and bring this thing—wonder how I shall catch anything with it. Notice a kind of letter box open on the right side, full of butterflies somebody has collected and left there. One is alive—a marvellous aberration of the Green fritillary with unusually elongated wings, the green all fused together and the brown of an extraordinary variegated hue. It eyes me in conscious agony as I try to kill it by pinching its thick thorax—very tenacious of life. Finally slip it into
<NEW CARD> 23 Nov., cont.
a Morocco case—old, red, zippered. Then realize that all the time a man camouflaged in some way is seated next to me to the left in front of the receptacle in which the butterflies are; and prepares a slide for the microscope. We converse in English. He is the owner of the butterflies. I am very much embarrassed. Offer to return the fritillary. He declines with polite half-heartedness.
When Dmitri Nabokov later described the falling episode, he mentioned that his father “was subsequently reprimanded by the [Davos] hotel staff for stumbling back into the lobby, supported by two bellhops, with his shorts in disarray.”67
Verso has a sketched (diagrammed) idea for a chess problem, crossed out. It is very cursorily drawn and lacks the white king; what can be made out seems to form the following position:
White: K??, Qb7, Rf8, Ne2.
Black: Kd5, Rc5, Rd4, Nc6, pawns c3, d3, e4, e5.
Very end of dream: dining here in the restaurant downstairs.68 My nephew, to the right of me, tastes the chicken on his plate and complains to the waiter that it tastes exactly like candle grease.69 I confirm this.
Nov. 24, 1964 9.00 AM
Véra’s dream. Going in two cars to railway station. Ustinovs in first car, we in the second. Policeman stops us and takes us to some kind of establishment. Eventually she and Dm. are sitting on a bench in a snowy park. He says: let us take that car—a kind of open van. He gets in and a man comes up and pulls the car (sic!) to start it rolling. V. is supposed to sit behind but it is waist-full of sand. They get out and the man pushes it back to the curb, saying he’s doing it the third time. She says: OK, I’ll just take my muff out. She does and next moment she and Dm. are riding along in the car. They go to the police-station to return the car <VERSO> Dm. objects, V. says: ok I’ll return the muff. Next moment in room with a policeman who pesters Dm. for something. She says: give the policeman five francs and then: give them to me (being afraid Dm. will be arrested for bribing). She hands it to a grateful policeman.
41. Nov. 25 & 26, 1964 Forenoon
Did not jot down dreams immediately because too trivial but oddly enough remember both quite clearly. Last night dreamt that got off a transatlantic liner to stroll about a bit—was a few miles from my destination—a tennis club where I was to take part in a match but suddenly noticed the white stack of the ship was smoking and moving away;70 and to-night dreamt I was in a railway coach (American) and a voice on the radio was giving a little talk about me in French. Presently the speaker came across to us and we chatted.
42. 27 Nov. 7.30 AM
Bits of four dreams:
1. Have come home, find Dm. unexpectedly arrived from Milan, at the same time V.’s voice comes gaily from bedroom. Find her lying in bed with books. On floor near bed a basin—a washstand basin—almost full of brown bile. The doctor has been already called.
2. Am reading my father’s diary. He writes that he roared with laughter upon finding the minutes of mediumistic séances on the kitchen table (our cook Nikolay Andreevich <NEW CARD> was indeed a spiritist).71 The cook’s papers and various vague objects are displayed before me.
3. In a big bathroom, in an (Italian?) hotel, cannot get to the toilet because [of] hole in ceiling, excrements have fallen into tub. I rush to another toilet in another part of our apartment, but Dm. is there—catches the door I’m opening. Dash down to a third in the corridor. A maid is there cleaning up—tells me that Chaykovski the composer is too ill with cancer to be operated.
4. Am writing down a colorful dream—which on waking up I cannot recall!
27 Nov., 1964 8.00 AM
Some points in those dreams were taken up by reality without delay! Among the letters in the mail this morning was a blurb sent for approval by my London publisher of EO72 in which I cannot approve a conspicuous reference to Chaykovski’s opera. Another correspondent sends me the galley proof [of] my father’s prison diary. And V. complains she feels a pain in her vesicle and suggests cancelling the marcassin Mme C. is about to buy.73
43. Three sterile nights in a row!
Nov. 30, 1964 4.00 AM
End of muddled dream—an exhibition of Spanish cars which was also an exhibition of specimens of a (unknown) Sierra Nevada race of Parnassius mnemosyne.74 In the far vista of the dream two men in overalls were holding and hoisting a whitish gate-like affair.
5.30 AM
Verbal dream. I frequently dream of extraordinarily elaborate—sometimes even international—rhyme words. In the present case all faded too fast and I must content myself with the following example edited by the waking mind:
FIGURE 12. “Three sterile nights in a row!” at the top records a gap in recording, when Nabokov could not recollect his dreams directly after the odd month confusion (see fig. 9).
The words: авось кривая вывезет
Were said,
And I awoke. Is it a weave? is it
A thread?75
44. Dec. 2, 1964 8.15 AM
Véra’s dream: Wild West frontier. The landlady of our rooming place is a cosy old soul resembling the owner of “Rodnoy” (thirty years ago)76 but at the same time it is M. Bourguer (papeterie here).77 Glass rotating door in the hall. Alsatian in it, one quarter out, patiently waiting to get out. She lets him out in passing and he at once becomes our dog. Dish of food for him appears in her hand—carrots etc. Problem: is he a vegetarian? He is given the food when we come home.
New instalment: she has bought some stuff for a jumper, Lena78 likes it very much, V. suggests she buy what <VERSO> is left of it at shop. It is somehow illogical, and V. knows it in her dream—that she cannot buy the same stuff for a skirt yet there is enough of it to give this advice to her sister. We both look for the trade mark on the edge to establish if this fabric is a “teetotaller tissue” <sic> or not.
Vague tender erotic dream in a curiously stylized landscape with pale trees.
Then the end of another: V. and I sitting at a table with a small garage-man at one end. He is mapping out Dm.’s careers. It consists of four parts and one of these is in the margin of the sheet of paper which has to be turned clockwise—it is spread on the deal table.
46. Dec. 4, 1964, 8.00 AM
Am coming down steps of Lausanne-like railway station and meet Edmund Wilson.79 He is about to catch a train. I tell him I’ll go “upstairs” to see him off. He says: only Russians use “upstairs” in that sense. He walks briskly along the platform and I notice how fit he looks in a dark-grey suit. We lose each other in the crowd and the train glides away. I leave the station. I am carrying V’s mink coat. Cannot find a taxi.80 Very muddy. Have I lost her scarf? No, in the sleeve of the coat.
47. Dec. 5, 1964, 12.00 PM
Tested memory by writing dream down at least 18 hours after I had had it. As clear as it was at 7.00 AM. Came back from somewhere. Had trouble in finding my room in building resembling Goldwyn Hall, Cornell. Met my cousin S. on the stairs, she had also come to that reunion—whatever it was—with all her family.81 They had their rooms where mine ought to be. She looked singularly young and I could not quite decide if she was she or her daughter—or granddaughter.82 Finally I remember that my room was on the third floor but when I got there the corridor was full of garbage, servants were cleaning it up after the Officers Ball.
Dunne insists that the effect of recognizing a daytime event in the preceding dream “escapes attention because observation must be directed precisely and definitely, and the dreams recorded at once.”
48. Dec. 6, 1964, 8.00 AM
Fatidic-sign dream. Awoke with a pang. An abstract, terrible, accident slices apart our life’s monogram, instantly separating us. A nightmare blazon, Vé. and VN with profiles in opposite directions.
C’était le marcassin, probably.83
Dec. 6, 1964, 8.30 AM
Véra’s dream: a huge gray-stone old fashioned ornate hotel. We have looked over one or two and now this is the third. They stand in water, a kind of granite Venice. Passages full of cabinets, galleries, balconies. From time to time big caterpillars, white with black faces, naked, crawl over the furniture. We reach at the end of a passage a great vestibule. The staff ring a bell every time they notice a caterpillar. I go away to look up a friend. V. notices <VERSO> a long larva crawling along the top of a chest of drawers.
Another bit of dream: Elena Bromberg84 has sent a trunkful of clothes for Dm. and, with Anuta, Véra is looking them over, wondering how they can fit since he is bigger than everybody; but A. says it will be all right.
In a third bit, Dm. has to sing in a performance. V. finds herself in garden with several rooms. In one of them a girl resembling Petula Clark85 is singing, loudly, to be noticed, but badly. Dm. says he also lost his part—his “permit” had expired. V. energetically tries to get him <to> extend it.
49. Dec. 8, 1964 9.00 AM
Having tea with friends (Karpoviches?)86 on lawn before their house. In a deck chair reclining, very old, sick looking, & sweaty, Leo Tolstoy. I wonder if “Karpovich” knows I dont know him or thinks I would not care to know him. I hear him saying to “Karpovich” in vehement Russian: “I do not like his ‘Lolita,’ but how well he describes the Russian landscape!” Silly.
50. Dec. 13, 1964 8.30 AM
Skipped four nights
(Did not take down the banal dreams I had lately).
Intensely erotic dream. Blood on sheet.
End of dream: my sister O.,87 strangely young and languorous. Then V. tells me I must not forget to go to the oculist. I find his street but cannot remember the house number. Am agonizingly searching in the telephone book but do not recall his name and, moreover, do not know how to dial the vague number I have in mind—something ending in 492. Then stand near a window, sighing, half-seeing view, brooding over the possible consequence of incest.
This reminds the Nabokov reader—but not Nabokov—of a critical episode at the end of his 1941 novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, with its nightmarishly urgent steeple-chase in pursuit of the narrator’s half-brother: “I went to the telephone. < . . . > I thumbed the soft greasy book, looking for Dr Starov’s number < . . . > ah, there it was: Jasmin 61–93. < . . . > I performed some dreadful manipulations and forgot the number in the middle, and struggled again with the book, and re-dialed, and listened for a while to an ominous buzzing. < . . . > My nerves were on edge” (LOA, 153).
51. Abano88
Dec. 26, 1964 7.00 AM
Nina Berberov89 in black open-necked dress was arranging to take me to a distant suburb to fetch Georges Chklaver90 who was to have dinner with V. and me at our place—wherever that was. I tell V. that I knew very well we had planned to meet Chkl. half-way but N.B. had overruled me. However, V. said, it’s OK, we owe him that much (which we don’t). I have never seen these people in dream, and it is perhaps worthwhile to jot this down after a considerable interval.
Dunne advises to be on the alert for the time-reversal effect particularly on nights preceding a journey or some other expected break in the routine humdrum, but by this time Nabokov seems tired of the experiment, his attention dulled, and in any event he must have forgotten this tip.
52. 28 Dec. 1964 7.00 AM
On second night here (Hotel Due Torri with large coniferous garden)91 in doomful half-dream saw the scattered streaks of dim light between the slats of the shutters as a passage which I could not identify translated into French (have been strenuously checking during the last week, in Montreux, Coindreau’s French translation of Pale Fire).92 That was on the night of 26–27. This night another much more sustained doomful dream: a tremendous very black larch paradoxically posing as a
<NEW CARD> Dec. 28, 1964, cont.
Christmas tree completely stripped of its toys, tinsel, and lights, appeared in its abstract starkness as the emblem of permanent dissolution. There was nothing but this bleak tree which was not even a homely fir. (was bothered again by the lights through the slats and, probably, echoes of my own lines on various trees—the if, & the hickory, in Pale Fire;93 moreover: a few days ago, on the 23rd, while coming back in a taxi from Geneva to Montreux after my nephew’s wedding party I said about a festively lit tree near a villa, ce n’est pas même un sapin—c’est un mélèze; but the chauffeur said non, c’est bien un sapin).94
53. Dec. 29, 1964 7.30 AM
Many dreams more or less forgotten:
Clear end of one: am correcting, with other people, students’ examination papers. Of the three I get, the first read proves to be a little masterpiece. The name of the student is Mostel (not known in waking life)*. I am wondering what to give him, an A or an A+. Cannot find my pencil and am, moreover, upset by a sordid and complicated love affair with another’s wife (unknown in waking life and not shown in dream). A colleague (I have never in my life corrected
* (V. says there is a famous American actor of that name).95
<NEW CARD> Dec. 29, 1964 cont.
papers collectively!) urges me to finish my batch. I still can’t find an implement to write with and furthermore am badgered and hampered in my movements by the betrayed husband, a very small man who works with his arms as he pours out a torrent of complaints. In exasperation I take him and send him flying and spinning into a revolving door where he continues to twist at some distance from the ground, in a horizontal position, before falling. Awkward suspense: is he dead? No, he picks himself up and staggers away. We return to the exam. papers.
<NEW CARD> Dec. 29, 1964 concl.
Dreamt of Cyr. first time since his death in April.96 Very young—about 15—, slim, handsome, rosy-cheeked, extremely attractive but not too cheerful, at some picnic in the woods (near Praha?97); he takes bottles out of a hamper.
Again bothered by lights, this time a large patch on the wall next to my bed (V. says she managed to close her shutters completely, I did not in my room). Half-waking, am told that the patch is now higher because it is the badge or <coat of> arms of some nation or other and they were displeased that it was lower than the head of my bed—so hitched it up. A fussy light, with fate and farce merging.
54. Dec. 30, 1964, 7.30 AM
Have been apparently sunbathing but then dressed and fallen asleep. Woke up not in the usual pinegrove but where there is a path going up diagonally (brief vision of girl in blue dashing up on a bicycle “as she alway [sic] does”98 but in a kind of small hollow, sandy and dingy, right beside the highway (on my left). Am dressed in pale green pyjama top (unfamiliar) and dark pants, barefooted, cold feet, looking for my socks. Soviet delegates pass along the road. Then, out of the woods comes a woman and a child, Russians. She tells
<NEW CARD> Dec. 30, 1964, cont.
me: I know very well your great friend Mrs Shifrin-Panskaya (never heard of her).99 I reply perhaps V. has met her, don’t remember. The little boy, of 6 or 7, very rosy and bright-eyed and dirty with pinewood sand, vaguely Dm. as a child with a streak of Alexander, N.’s boy, says he’s sleepy. Does he take a bath before going to bed? No, no more baths, but a lot of Molière here (tapping his forehead).
55. Abano
Jan. 3, 1965100
Philippa Rolf who came here to see us, told us that Nina Berberov had exhibited a letter I had written her (thirty years ago) at the Yale Library.101 Does not connect very sharply with dream of Dec. 26, 1964, except that I never hear anything about that lady.102
FIGURE 13. The end of the experiment.
1. Some of Nabokov’s spelling idiosyncrasies, such as omitting the apostrophe in “don’t,” were left alone; some inconsistencies (“gray” / “grey” on the same card) have been normalized; obvious pencil slips have been corrected silently.
2. Dunne marks “singly decisive results” with a plus sign; those “nearly decisive” with a circled cross, which he calls a “sort of hot-cross-bun.” VN does not follow this system for long, soon bungles it by simply circling a few dates, then abandons it altogether. My occasional commentaries under an entry are marked by a red square.
3. These are on the recto and verso of an undated card inserted toward the end of the experiment, between records of December 6 and 7 in the extant batch, thus likely a postfactum summation.
4. Vé (sometimes just V.) refers to VN’s wife, Véra Nabokov, née Slonim (1902–1991).
5. Visiting a museum—a plot-carrying truss of one of VN’s most significant short stories, “Poseshchenie muzeia” [The Visit to the Museum], 1939—is something of a theme in this series of dreams: cf. next and Dream 3.
6. See footnote 8.
7. Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where Sebastian Knight assumes (wrongly) his mother died (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1939). Mont St Michel is in Normandy, on the other end of France, about eight hundred miles from Menton. For the significance of this twofold slip of memory for VN’s experiment, see pp. 22–23. Cf. the critical confusion of the church of St. Michel and that of Notre Dame in Dijon on the last page of The House of the Arrow—see next footnote.
8. The House of the Arrow, a 1924 novel by A. E. W. Mason. Here is a full quotation of that place: “I do not know if the present reader is acquainted with [it], and, if he is not, I am most unwilling to spoil for him, even in the interests of science, the enjoyment of a first-class detective story. So I will merely say that the centre knot of the whole tangle—the thing upon which everything in the plot hangs—is a clock pointing to half-past ten. This feature, however, does not come into the story till halfway through the book. The character I had chosen from the opening pages as an associational link accompanied the detective throughout the latter’s investigation. Concentrating attention on that character, the first image I saw and noted was that of a clock pointing to half-past ten” (Dunne, 100, emphasis his). The character mentioned is Jim Frobisher, a young London solicitor. The book is indeed a first-rate example of its kind, the most curious facet of which is that the chief sleuth, M. Hanaud, and some critical turns are transferred from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (except that its deductive plot is replaced here by a detective one), some episodes appearing almost as quotations from the earlier psycho-crime novel (such as the reconstruction of the murder of Jean Cladel in chapter 17). It is unknown whether Nabokov read Mason, but see note to the previous dream.
The main plot of VN’s novel Ada (1968) unfolds on the country estate Ardis, the Greek word for arrow point, but also a derivative of the Latin for “ardent,” a homophonous echo (“. . . or Ardor”) of the book’s title and one of its main themes. This later note is evidence that Nabokov reread his dream records later, perhaps with the view to preparing them for publication, an old idea of his: see pp. 2–3.
9. The original has “by the visitors,” surely a slip.
10. D (sometimes “Dm.”) refers to Dmitri Nabokov (1934–2012), VN’s son.
11. Surely a slip (PM).
12. Because it looks exactly like the American spelling of paedology.
13. Soil samples.
14. Underbrush.
15. Jean-Claude Brialy (1933–2007), French cinematic actor born in Algeria.
16. A mathematical term (Latin translation of the original Arabic for “inaudible”) for a certain kind of irrational number (e.g., the square root of two). In Pnin, Nabokov uses it as shorthand for an intellectually attractive eccentric.
17. “A dreamless sleep is an illusion of memory,” quoth Dunne (64).
18. A scathing sketch of Mikhail Kalashnikov, VN’s onetime classmate at Cambridge, can be found in his letter to Wilson (Nabokov–Wilson, 181). He is also mentioned in Speak, Memory (259).
19. VN taught at Wellesley College as an untenured lecturer of Russian from 1941 to 1947.
20. Sophia Slonim, the younger sister of VN’s wife (1908–1996).
21. Here the initial stands for Sergey Nabokov, VN’s younger brother (1900–1945). See p. 27, note 27.
22. Elena Nabokov, née Rukavishnikov, Nabokov’s mother (1876–1939).
23. In 1954 Nabokov revised and translated into Russian his autobiography (Speak, Memory, originally Conclusive Evidence, 1951) under the title Drugie berega (Other Shores).
24. The original has “Oct. 1,” a slip of the pen.
25. An ancient Swiss thermal spa in canton Valais. Dmitri Nabokov was treated in Rheumaklinik there from May to August of 1963.
26. VN worked there as a research fellow and de facto curator of lepidoptera from 1942 to 1948.
27. A literal translation of the idiomatic Russian for contretemps (nepriyatnosti).
28. VN probably means “intervention”: “As the result of observing an image of future experience, the experimenter takes pencil and paper, and notes down, or even makes a sketch of, the details of the pre-image observed. In so doing, he is performing a definite physical act. But it is an act which would never have been performed had he not observed that pre-image. In other words, he interferes with that particular sequence of mechanical events which we postulate as the backbone of our ‘conscious automaton’ or materialistic theories. This is barefaced ‘intervention’” (105–6, italics Dunne’s).
29. A hat of black, tightly curled sheep fur.
30. From September 1963 to August 1965 Nabokov worked on The Butterflies of Europe, his unfinished book project intended for publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. His letters, drafts, and notes on the matter are in Nabokov’s Butterflies (569ff.). He intended to do research, among other depositories and libraries, at London’s Museum of Natural History and the British Museum.
31. Baron George (Yuri) Rausch von Traubenberg (1897–1919) joined as a cavalry officer the volunteer army in the South fighting the Bolsheviks and was killed during an attack. See Speak, Memory, 188, 196–200, 203 (“All emotions, all thoughts, were governed in Yuri by one gift: a sense of honor equivalent, morally, to absolute pitch,” Speak, Memory, 200).
32. The Nabokov country estate south of St. Petersburg.
33. Pnin, keenly conscious of his heart’s uncertain condition, “never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has” (311).
34. This apparently evolved into Ada, whose origin and philosophical core is discussed in part 4 of the novel, which takes up the problem of Time in motion.
35. Aerial cable lift.
36. “It will be so nice to sleep well in that warm place, you know.”
37. An evening news report program that ran from 1959 to 1968.
38. Recorded retroactively.
39. “If you are unwell, then don’t come down, it will make everybody happy.”
40. Vladimir Sikorski, only son of Elena Sikorski, VN’s sister (born in 1939 on the same day as VN, April 23), a United Nations interpreter and translator of VN’s Strong Opinions into French (Intransigeances, Paris: Julliard, 1985), married to Nilly Sikorski, née Harounoff, on December 23, 1964.
41. A genus of the Lycaenidae family of butterflies, the so-called Blues, in which VN was a recognized expert, having named and described one European species, Lysandra cormion Nabokov, 1941 (it later turned out to be a hybrid), to which he dedicated a poem (“A Discovery,” 1943) and several Nearctic ones, including the famous protected “Karner Blue,” Plebejus samuelis Nabokov, 1943.
42. Elena Sikorski (1906–2000), née Nabokov, VN’s younger sister.
43. Papilio machaon Linnaeus, 1758, a large, brightly colored, spur-winged butterfly commonly known as the swallowtail. It visits three of VN’s novels, a short story, and the book of memoirs; there, he recollects the event that started his lifelong entomology passion: in June 1906 on the Vyra estate his “guiding angel [ . . . ] pointed out [ . . . ] a rare visitor, a splendid, pale-yellow creature with black blotches, blue crenels, and a cinnabar eyespot above each chrome-rimmed black tail. As it probed the inclined flower from which it hung, its powdery body slightly bent, it kept restlessly jerking its great wings, and my desire for it was one of the most intense I have ever experienced” (Speak, Memory, 120).
44. Topazia Markevitch, née Princess Caetani (1921–1990), ex-wife of Igor Markevitch, a prominent composer and conductor, was the Nabokovs’ close acquaintance from neighboring Vevey.
45. A 1938 short story that Nabokov included in a special collection of four select stories (Nabokov’s Quartet, 1966).
46. A village in canton Vaud, near Montreux.
47. Stameska is Russian for a chisel.
48. “. . . in Russia” in the original, a slip.
49. “No matter what I was thinking of, every thought cast forth my great future like a shadow, extending inward.”
50. Inward, inside of me.
51. Great or magnificent.
52. In 1939 the Nabokovs were still in Paris, sailing to New York in May 1940.
53. The Russian title of what was later translated as The Gift.
54. Get through to her.
55. This is a continuation of the record of the same day. By a curious mistake, VN puts, instead of Nov. 14, the date on which he started his experiment. He continues to write the erroneous “Oct.” for the next two days.
56. Mstislav Dobuzhinski (1875–1957), a famous Russian artist. This is another note that seems to be done for the benefit of an outside reader.
57. At the time, Nabokov had as many years to live as his wife would outlive him by. This strange dream, with its curious competition—who would see the death sign first—has an even stranger antecedent in Mandelstam’s piercing 1931 poem “Net, ne spriatat’sia mne . . .” [No, I can’t hide . . .], addressing his wife: “My s toboiu poedem na ‘A’ i na ‘B’, posmotret’ kto skoree umret” [You and I will ride tram ‘A’ and tram ‘B,’ to see who is to die first]. The Nabokovs read and liked Mandelstam’s late poems, published only posthumously, this one in 1961, in the second issue of the Russian almanac Vozdushnye puti (Aerial Ways, New York).
58. Probably Anna Feigin (1890–1973), VN’s wife’s cousin. The Nabokovs shared a Berlin apartment with her in 1932–37 and later cared for her in New York and, from 1968, in Montreux.
59. It could be indeed rive (French for riverbank), or just “river” missing the ultima.
60. Thirteen years later, bronchitis will be an immediate cause of his death. On March 19, 1977, his last year, Nabokov jots down in his agenda book: “Beginning of anoth. bout with бронchitis” (sic: a Russian-English hybrid).
61. Jean Paulhan (1884–1968), French writer and publisher whom Nabokov met in Paris in 1932.
62. Dr. Spuhler was the Nabokovs’ Swiss physician through the 1970s. VN spells his name correctly in his diaries of later years.
63. Wife of an admiral, in informal Russian.
64. VN’s sister (see p. 63, note 42), who lived in Geneva.
65. Peter Ustinov (1921–2004), English actor and the Nabokovs’ neighbor and acquaintance. Suzanne Ustinov, née Cloutier, his second wife (from 1954 to 1971).
66. Anna Filippa Rolf (1924–1978), Swedish poet, Nabokov’s admirer and translator into Swedish. The admiration of this high-strung woman grew burdensome for the Nabokovs—see Stacy Schiff, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), 272–87, 326–29.
67. The Original of Laura, xi.
68. That is, in Montreux Palace Hotel.
69. Vladimir Sikorski (see p. 62, note 40).
70. Cf. the ending of Speak, Memory: “. . . it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.”
71. The fellow was not, apparently, alien to a form of materialism as well: after the coup d’état of October 1917 and subsequent fleeing of the Nabokovs, their cook appropriated some items belonging to his former masters, among them a photograph picture album that surfaced, minus the silver plating on the covers, in the 1970s.
72. Eugene Onegin, which VN translated and supplied with a thousand pages of copious commentary, was brought out in Great Britain in late 1964 by Routledge & Kegan Paul.
73. Jacqueline Callier, the Nabokovs’ secretary and typist in Montreux who continued for many years to assist Véra Nabokov after VN’s death.
74. Clouded Apollo, a beautiful swallowtail butterfly, appearing in the pages of many of VN’s writings, esp. in The Gift and Ada.
75. The Russian saying goes kuda krivaia vyvezet, lit. “wherever the curved road will take”—to rely on the off-chance. The colloquial avos’ adds to the haphazardness. The verb vyvezet, with its stress on the first syllable, makes a rich English compound rhyme here.
76. The Nabokovs stayed at pension “Rodnoy” in Fréjus, the French Riviera, in the summer of 1939.
77. Stationer’s shop.
78. Princess Elena Massalsky (1900–1975), née Slonim, Véra Nabokov’s older sister.
79. VN and Wilson (1895–1972), prominent American man of letters, were close friends from the early 1940s to the late 1950s, drifting apart in later years.
80. Cf. “For some reason, taxis, as in a bad dream, were unobtainable” (Look at the Harlequins!, 4).
81. Sophia (“Onya”) Fasolt (1899–1982), née Nabokov, daughter of VN’s uncle Dmitri. She is mentioned in Speak, Memory, 26. The 1920 group picture, with VN in the back row, is of her wedding.
82. Marina Ledkovski (1924–2014), née Fasolt, professor of Russian at Barnard College, New York, and Tatiana Selivonik, née Ledkovski (b. 1949), respectively.
83. The wine mentioned in Dream 42. The monogram of their names, forming as it does a “double V,” is strangely reproduced, both in French and in Russian, in the name of the place where both of them were to be cremated, fourteen years apart (Vevey).
84. Anna (“Anuta”) Feigin’s second cousin (see p. 70, note 58).
85. A popular English songstress (b. 1932), professionally singing since age seven, a star at eleven.
86. Mikhail Karpovich (1888–1959), professor of history at Harvard and publisher of the main Russian literary magazine in America, The New Review, and his wife, Tatiana Karpovich (1897–1973), née Potapov. At their country estate near West Wardsboro, Vermont, the Nabokovs spent their first summer in America in 1940 (and then again in 1942).
87. Olga Petkevich (1903–1978), née Nabokov.
88. Abano Terme, near Padua.
89. Nina Berberov (1901–1993), a writer and former wife of poet Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939), Nabokov’s friend.
90. Georges Chklaver, or Georgy Shklyaver (1897–1970), professor of law at the University of Paris, VN’s acquaintance.
91. A five-star hotel in Abano Terme, with thermal pools, etc.
92. Feu pâle, trans. R. Girard et M.-E. Coindreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
93. L’if, French for the yew-tree. In that novel, both trees are part of the main theme of death and its aftermath, the first, as an Anglo-French pun (see Ode 3 of Shade’s poem “Pale Fire”), the second, as a familiar memento mori.
94. “This is not really a fir-tree—that’s a larch” < . . . > “No, this is a fir all right.” The point related to VN’s dream here is that un sapin may colloquially stand for coffin: sentir déjà le sapin means to sense one’s end approaching, have one foot in the grave.
95. Samuel “Zero” Mostel (1915–1977), a comedian, survived Nabokov by two months.
96. Kirill (Cyril) Nabokov (1911–1964), VN’s youngest brother.
97. After V. D. Nabokov was killed in Berlin in 1922, Kirill Nabokov lived in Prague with his mother and two sisters, where VN visited them several times before World War II.
98. The source of the phrase within the quotation marks is obscure. It is remotely possible that it was lifted from Edmund Clerihew Bentley’s famous detective novel Trent’s Last Case (1913). The spot has remarkably to do with being roused from sleep early and crudely, as the heroine’s husband was found murdered: “I never woke until my maid brought my tea in the morning at seven o’clock. She closed the door leading to my husband’s room as she alway did, and I supposed him to be still there. . . . He sometimes slept until quite late in the morning.” This book was convolved with Francis Iles’s Before the Fact and A. Mason’s The House of the Arrow (see p. 37, note 8) under the title Three Famous Murder Novels, selected and exquisitely introduced by Bennett A. Cerf, editor of the Modern Library, and published by Random House in 1941, and it is not improbable that this was the edition that VN read.
99. In his letter of Feb. 2, 1936, from Paris (Letters to Véra, 243), VN mentions an émigré cinematic studio manager Semyon Shifrin (1894–1985) who was recommended to him as a possible producer for a film script he was drafting, under the title Hôtel Magique—especially curious, given that VN saw that dream in a grand hotel at an Italian spa, with bothersome shafts of light penetrating through the closed slats of the window blinds. In the TLS publication, I misspelled the name as “Shigrin,” following the misreading in Transcription.
100. The experiment ends two days before Véra Nabokov’s birthday (January 5).
101. See p. 76, note 66. Nabokov spelled her Christian name (Filippa) variously.
102. Their postwar relationship grew cold.