In my mind Iosif Vladimirovich’s past, tied to my late father’s past, was tied by a second, live, knot, to my present: I simultaneously saw I.V. in the fabled distance of Party meetings,1 in historical perspective, where my childhood narrowed like a reversed cone of lines, and in human reality, with a glass of tea and biscuits, in the warmth of a world accessible to me. That I grew up to be friends with him is a magical anachronism;2 I was proud of our friendship; the cathetus of its reality extended deep into my soul, the long hypotenuse mysteriously connected me with the courageous and pure worlds of Pravo3 and Rech’,4 once surrounding my heedless infancy. The Russian Berlin of the 1920s was nothing more than a furnished room, rented out by a rude and rank-smelling German woman (the foul sweat of that unfortunate people is unforgettable), but I.V. was also in this room, and, by avoiding the natives, we managed to extract a peculiar charm from this or that combination of furnishings and lighting. My youth arrived just in time for I.V.’s second youth, and we set off jovially, side by side.
He was my first reader. Long before my first books began to be brought out by his publishing house he would allow me, with paternalistic connivance, to feed Rul’ with my unripe poetry.5 The blue hues of Berlin’s twilights, the tent made by the corner chestnut tree, faint light-headedness, poverty, being in love, the mandarin tinge of a prematurely lit neon sign, and the animal yearning for a still-fresh Russia—all this was dragged in iambic form to the editorial office, where I.V. would bring the page up close to his face, as though he was latching on to what was written from its hem, from the bottom up, with a parabolic movement of his eye, after which he would look at me with a half-sarcastic benevolence, lightly shaking the page, but he would say only: “Hmm, hmm…,” and, without hurrying, add it to his publication material.
Indifferent to readers’ reviews, I cherished the exception that I was accustomed to make for I.V.’s opinion. The complete candor of his judgments, sometimes so dreadfully cutting an author’s vanity into quarters, lent a special significance to his slightest praise. I will forever be able to hear the bronze and booming force with which he would pronounce, over a book’s corpse, “How could he write this—it’s unfathomable!,” with a terrible stress on “could” and “fath.” For him, as for me, Pushkin alone was above human criticism; how well he knew his tragic, languid, mysterious poetry, familiar to most only from tear-off calendars and four operas.
The adventures and transformations of human nature constantly fascinated him, no matter whether we talked about a fictional hero, the Bolsheviks, or a mutual friend. He could simultaneously be engrossed in the political machinations of a hefty dictator and the question whether Hamlet’s madness was feigned. He was living proof of the fact that a genuine person is a person interested in everything, including what interests others. Telling him anything was an extraordinary delight, since his engagement as an interlocutor, his very sharp mind, and the phenomenal appetite with which he consumed your rather unripe fruits transformed any trifle into an epic phenomenon. His curiosity was so pure it seemed almost childlike. Human characters or changes in the weather would become, in his energetic appraisal, extraordinary, unique: “I can’t remember such a spring,” he would say, and spread his hands and shrug in amazement.
I was delighted by the union in him of his Russian Europeanness merging so harmoniously with his membership in that most inspired tribe.6 I infinitely respected his physical and moral courage; hundreds of times in my life I experienced his touching, angular, kindness. His weak eyesight and hearing in conjunction with his talented absentmindedness served him as purveyors of his own humor. With what glee he would tell me about the time he was visited by the actress Polevitskaya, and, wishing to please her, carefully took down and handed her a photograph of the singer Plevitskaya, with the words: “Look, I have your portrait hanging on my wall.”7 I feel that I, too, might be offering up a portrait of someone else when I speak of I.V., for a strange shortsightedness overpowers the soul after the death of someone one loves, and all sorts of empty trivialities pop up instead of the quintessence of his character.
I.V. once confessed to me that in his youth he had been seduced by Hegel’s fallacious triad.8 I think of the dialectic of fate. In the spring of 1940, before I left for here, I bade farewell to I.V. on a black Parisian street, trying to quell the painful thought that he was very old and not planning to come to America, which meant I would never see him again. So when I heard the news, here in Boston, that by a miracle he had arrived in New York, bigger than life (as he had always seemed to me), keen to get to work, bubbling over with his own and others’ news, I hastened to give the lie to my premonition. Various circumstances forced me to postpone our meeting until April. In the meantime, the miracle of his arrival turned out to be only an antithesis, and now the syllogism is complete.9
* V. Nabokov-Sirin, “Pamyati I. V. Gessena,” Novoe russkoe slovo, March 31, 1943, 2.