1. SO, xi. Biographical information is based on Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).
2. VN to Stephen Jan Parker, Jan. 11, 1973, VNA Berg.
3. SM, 287. Boris Poplavsky (1903–35), Paris-based émigré poet and novelist who had published, however, only Flagi before dying accidentally from drugs laced with poison.
4. “Man and Things” (1928), p. 71.
5. See “On Opera” (1928), p. 74n.
6. SM, 35–36.
7. VN, Invitation to a Beheading, trans. DN with VN (New York: Putnam, 1959), 7.
8. “On Opera,” pp. 74, 75.
9. “A. Znosko-Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine” (1927), p. 59.
10. See VN, LTV.
11. “Un Portrait: Vladimir Nabokoff Sirine, l’amoureux de la vie” (“Portrait: Vladimir Nabokoff Sirine, Lover of Life”), Le Mois 6 (June–July 1931), 141.
12. “Interview with Andrey Sedykh for Poslednie novosti” (1932), p. 113.
13. “Mr. Masefield and Clio” (1940), p. 148.
14. “Prof. Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World” (1940), p. 152.
15. “The Innocence of Hilaire Belloc” (1941), p. 186.
16. VN, Bend Sinister (1947; New York: Vintage, 1990), xiii.
17. V&V, 2–11.
18. Published as “The Art of Literature and Common Sense,” in VN, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1980), 371–82; the omission is noted on p. 377; the reinstatement extends from p. 197 to p. 199.
19. VN, Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, ed. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle (Boston: Beacon, 1999).
20. “[On Democracy]” (1942), p. 203.
21. “In Memory of Iosif Hessen” (1943), pp. 208–9.
22. “The Place of Russian Studies in the Curriculum” (1948), p. 228.
23. “Interview with Mati Laansoo for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation” (1973), p. 422.
24. “Interview with Gerald Clarke for Esquire” (1974), p. 443.
25. “Interview with Robert Robinson for BBC Book Programme” (1977), p. 478.
26. SO, 312.
27. Transcript of “Interview with Pierre Burton and Lionel Trilling for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,” 1958, Dieter Zimmer collection.
28. Appel speaking at the Nabokov centenary tribute, Town Hall, New York, Apr. 15, 1999.
29. SO, 34.
30. SO, 20.
31. “Interview with Maurice Dolbier for New York Herald Tribune” (1962), p. 316.
32. VN to Robert Hughes, National Educational Television, Nov. 9, 1965, in VN, Selected Letters 1940–1977, ed. DN and Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1989), 382.
33. Helga Chudacoff and VN, typescript report of interview conducted on June 20, 1974, VNA Berg.
34. “Interview with James Salter for People” (1975), p. 449.
35. Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 180.
36. Alexander Dolinin, “Nabokov as a Russian Writer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Julian W. Connolly (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 53.
37. Ibid., 54, 56.
38. See Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 176–91.
39. “Interview with Sophie Lannes for L’Express” (1975), p. 454.
40. “Interview with Bernard Pivot for Apostrophes” (1975), p. 461.
41. “Interview with Martha MacGregor for New York Post” (1958), p. 243.
42. “Interview with Gerald Clarke for Esquire” (1974), p. 446.
43. “Interview of Vladimir Nabokov and Alain Robbe-Grillet with André Parinaud, Roger Nimier, and Paul Guimard for Arts (Paris)” (1959), p. 271.
44. “Interview for Newsweek” (1962), p. 320.
45. “Interview with Gerald Clarke for Esquire” (1974), p. 445.
46. Maurice Couturier, Nabokov, ou la tyranne de l’auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 350, 382.
47. “Interview with David Holmes for BBC Radio” (1959), p. 288.
48. “Interview with Robert Robinson for BBC Book Programme” (1977), p. 479.
49. “Unidentified Interview” (1962), p. 314.
50. “Interview with Dieter E. Zimmer for Norddeutscher Rundfunk” (1966), p. 357.
51. “Mr. Masefield and Clio” (1940), p. 148.
52. “Questionnaire on Proust” (1930), p. 90.
53. “The Triumph of Virtue” (1930), p. 92.
54. “Interview with Alberto Ongaro for L’Europeo” (1966), pp. 345, 346–47.
55. “Writers and the Era,” p. 106.
1. Rupert Brooke, “The Fish,” 1911, in Rupert Brooke, Collected Poems (London: Sidgwich & Jackson, 1918).
2. Rupert Brooke, “Heaven,” 1913.
3. Rupert Brooke, “Tiare Tahiti,” 1914.
4. Rupert Brooke, “The Life Beyond,” 1910.
5. Rupert Brooke, “Dust,” 1909–10.
6. Rupert Brooke, “Sonnet: ‘Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire,’ ” 1909.
7. Rupert Brooke, “Clouds,” 1913.
8. Rupert Brooke, “IV. The Dead,” 1914.
9. Rupert Brooke, “V. The Soldier,” 1914.
10. Rupert Brooke, “Mary and Gabriel,” 1912.
11. Rupert Brooke, “The Great Lover,” 1914.
12. Ibid.
13. Rupert Brooke, “Mutability,” 1913.
14. Rupert Brooke, “The Call,” 1907.
15. “Le grand peut-être,” Rabelais’s famous term for the hereafter, famously echoed in John Shade’s “Your great Maybe, Rabelais: The grand potato” (Pale Fire [1962; New York: Vintage, 1989], 52, lines 500–501).
16. Rupert Brooke, “Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body,” 1911.
17. Rupert Brooke, “Menelaus and Helen,” 1911.
18. Rupert Brooke, “Jealousy,” 1907.
19. Rupert Brooke, “A Channel Passage,” 1909.
20. Rupert Brooke, “The Voice,” 1909.
21. Rupert Brooke, “Sonnet: ‘I said I splendidly loved you; it’s not true,’ ” 1910.
22. Rupert Brooke, “Home,” 1913.
23. The courtesan Zuliette, in book 7 of Rousseau’s Confessions, trans. W. Conyngham Mallory (The Floating Press, 2012), 368–70.
24. Rupert Brooke, “The Jolly Company,” 1908.
25. Rupert Brooke, “Failure,” 1906.
26. Rupert Brooke, “The Vision of the Archangels,” 1906.
27. Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel’ (1856–1910), whose befeathered angels (e.g., Six-Winged Seraph [Azrael], 1904) and demons (e.g., Demon Downcast, 1902) VN would later extol, in, for instance, Ada.
28. Now called Victoria amazonica, Queen Victoria’s water lily, with white swanlike flowers and leaves up to three meters wide.
29. Rupert Brooke, “Lines Written in the Belief That the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead Was Called Ambarvalia,” 1910.
30. Ambarvalia: Roman private and public field lustration, or ceremony of purification and of averting evil, held in May (Oxford Classical Dictionary).
31. Rudyard Kipling, “Sussex,” 1902.
32. Alexander Pushkin, “Fragments of Onegin’s Journey,” xviii.3 in EO, I, 339 (“before a small isba two rowans”).
33. Mikhail Lermontov, “Otchizna” (“My Native Land,” 1841), in V&V, 291.
34. Rupert Brooke, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” 1912.
1. Compare this with the mature VN’s description of Catkin Week, SM, 239.
1. These poets included Valery Bryusov (1873–1924), Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942), and especially Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921).
2. The Guild of Poets, a group of poets, including Nikolay Gumilyov and Sergey Gorodetsky, formed in 1912. In opposition to the diffuse suggestiveness of the Symbolist poets, they stressed crisp form and cool craft.
3. VN crossed out “like masterov [masters] and bogov [gods].” In this example, the words rhyme only because they both share the same -ov case ending (genitive plural), as weak a rhyme as if one were to “rhyme” “Aldanov” and “Nabokov,” whereas “Bulgakov” and “Nabokov,” with the supporting “k” sound, would be less impoverished a rhyme.
1. In fact it was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, who is supposed to have said, “The battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton,” according to Montalembert, De l’avenir politique de l’Angleterre, 1855.
2. Thumbs down.
3. Cashel Byron’s Profession (1883).
4. The novels The Game (1905) and The Abysmal Brute (1911) and the stories “A Piece of Steak” (1909) and “The Mexican” (1911).
5. The novel Rodney Stone (1896).
6. The story “Boks” (“Boxing”), 1913.
7. James Figg, first English champion, 1719–30; James Corbett, first American world champion, 1892–97; Tom Cribb, English champion, 1809–22.
8. American John Sullivan, world champion 1882–92; Canadian Tommy Burns, world champion 1906–8; American James Jeffries, world champion, 1899–1905.
9. American Jack Johnson, world heavyweight champion, 1908–15.
10. In fact the bout took place on July 4, 1910.
11. Smith: unclear which of several boxers of this name active in the 1910s and 1920s VN means; Billy Wells, English champion, 1911; Frank Goddard, English champion, 1919; Englishman Jimmy Wilde, flyweight champion of the world, 1916–23; Joe Beckett, English champion, 1919; Frenchman Georges Carpentier, world light-heavyweight champion, 1920–22.
12. The fight took place on Dec. 4, 1919; the knockout came after seventy-seven seconds.
13. Paulino Uzcudun (1899–1985), known in the ring as Paolino, was European champion in 1926 and 1933, and claimed world championship in 1933. The match Nabokov describes took place in the Sport Palast.
14. Hans Breitensträter (1897–1972), German champion 1920–23, 1925.
15. This and the next quotation echo Lermontov’s “Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich: A Young Oprichnik and the Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov,” 1837. The oprichniks were Ivan the Terrible’s notorious enforcers.
16. Paolino Uzcudun recalls the fight in his autobiography: “My fight against Breitensträter took place at the very large Sport Palast, which, on the occasion of my fight against the local idol, the public had packed. Breitensträter boxed well and had a magnificent right, which he made reach its destination with wonderful speed; but I could tell from the first moment that sooner or later I would hunt him down and, that as soon as it happened, the fight would be over. And so it was, in effect: in the ninth round, one of my strong hooks exploded against his jaw and Breitensträter fell to the ground, and he remained on the floor while the referee counted out the regulation seconds. The public, who throughout the fight had not ceased to encourage the German, urging him not to lose faith and to defeat me, as soon as they saw me victorious rewarded me, with magnificent sportmanship, with one of the most unanimous and clamorous ovations that I have received in my life” (Mi Vida [Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1934], 67–68, translation by his granddaughter Paola Uzcudun).
1. Konstantin Mochulsky, review of Mashen’ka, Zveno, April 18, 1926. Mochulsky (1892–1948), historian and literary critic, frequently wrote for the émigré newspapers Zveno and Poslednie novosti. He would later take up a professorship at the Sorbonne.
1. “Predskazanie” (“A Prophecy,” 1830).
2. The text corresponding to the next two lines (“yavlenie ne strashnoe—ona proydyot—eta seraya pora—i shkol’niki gryadushchikh vekov,” msp. 1) is omitted in Dolinin’s edition of this essay, p. 9, although Dolinin notes the ungrammaticality of the text as he had transcribed it. Since Dolinin’s edition is the only published version of the essay in the original Russian, we will note where the translation follows the manuscript and not his omissions and misreadings.
3. As Russians called literary-intellectual journals, some of which might actually be thin.
4. Dolinin, p. 9, omits etot, “this” (msp. 2).
5. Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958), Tsement (Cement), published serially in Krasnaya nov’ 1–6 (1925), and in book form (Moscow, Leningrad) in 1926. The book form is cited in notes that follow.
6. Tsement, 26. Here, as elsewhere, VN sometimes omits occasional words from his source; Dolinin marks the elisions and one or two misquotations.
7. Ibid., 24.
8. Dolinin, p. 10, misreads kamore (“chamber”) (msp. 4) as kamorke (“cubbyhole”).
9. Tsement, 32, 33, 34, 35.
10. Ibid., 12.
11. Ibid.
12. Thomas Mayne Reid (1818–83), Scots-Irish-American novelist whose Westerns were particularly popular in Russia, and with VN as a boy (see SM, 195–207). VN’s reference to Mayne Reid harks back to a joke a couple of lines earlier that he deleted in the course of his hasty revision.
13. In Tsement: “How in the cooperages the saws used to sing like wenches in springtime.”
14. Ibid., 15.
15. Ibid., 46.
16. Dolinin, p. 11, omits akhnulo, “gasped.”
17. Tsement, 47.
18. Dolinin, p. 11, omits milym, “nice” (msp. 7).
19. David Margot, Grammaire théorique et pratique de la langue française: À l’usage des classes supérieures des écoles, 1877.
20. Tsement, 84.
21. Ibid., 92.
22. Ibid., 313.
23. Dolinin, p. 12, reads dolgo (“long”) rather than dole (“longer”) (msp. 9).
24. Soviet writer Lydia Seifullina (1889–1954).
25. Short story, 1924.
26. Evdokia Nagrodskaya (1866–1930), Russian novelist, whose highly popular first novel, Gnev Dionisa (1910), translated into English by Louise McReynolds as The Wrath of Dionysus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), focuses on sexual identity and gender roles; Lidia Charskaya (1875–1938), actress and prolific popular novelist. In his afterword to his Russian translation of Lolita, VN describes Doctor Zhivago as a book about a “lyrical doctor with penny dreadful mystical urges and philistine turns of speech and an enchantress straight out of Charskaya” (Lolita, trans. VN [New York: Phaedra, 1967], 298). Simon Karlinsky, quoting and translating this, explains, “Lydia Charskaya wrote widely popular treacly novels for and about teen-aged girls in pre-revolutionary Russia” (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, rev. ed., ed. Simon Karlinsky [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001], 27).
27. VN misquotes, writing I znachitel’no (“And significantly”) instead of Iznachal’no (“Primordially”).
28. L. N. Seifullina, Sobranie sochineniy (Collected Works), 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1925), vol. 2, pp. 18–19, 53.
29. Ibid., 25.
30. Dolinin, p. 13, omits msp. 11, “X…X’s.”
31. Claude Anet (1868–1931), pen name of Jean Schopfer, a French writer and journalist who lived in Russia for several years and set several of his novels there.
32. Seifullina, Sobranie sochineniy, vol. 2, p. 143.
33. Dolinin, p. 14, omits msp. 13’s i (“and”) and starts a new sentence here.
34. Soviet writer Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958).
35. Dolinin (p. 22, n. 23) notes that this story, published in the Soviet Literaturnaya nedelya 9 (1922), was not included in Zoshchenko’s collections between 1922 and 1926, so must have been encountered by VN in an émigré reprint.
36. Dolinin, p. 14, reads nashi (“ours”) rather than natsiya (“nation”) (msp. 14).
37. Seifullina, Sobranie sochineniy, vol. 1, p. 251.
38. “Lyal’ka pyat’desyat’,” Krasnaya nov’ 1 (1922), 35.
39. Stories from the collection Vesyolaya zhizn’ (Leningrad, 1924).
40. First novel (1924) of the Soviet writer Leonid Leonov (1899–1994).
41. Soviet writer Konstantin Fedin (1892–1977).
42. S. F. Bystrov and V. Puzanov are two little-known “peasant” writers VN must have encountered, Dolinin (p. 22, n. 28) suggests, in the eighth number of Krasnaya nov’ for 1925.
43. Soviet writer Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938).
44. Dolinin, p. 15, reads kak (“how”) instead of kogda (“when”) (msp. 16).
45. Boris Pilnyak, Sobranie sochineniy [Collected Works] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1925), vol. 5 (Mat’ syra-zemlya), p. 8.
46. Dolinin, p. 15, omits vovse, “at all” (msp. 17).
47. VN begins to waver between the correct “Nekuliev” and his more frequent (but erroneous) “Nikulin.”
48. Dolinin, p. 16, misreads voennaya khitrost’ s soboyu; oni (“strategic maneuver with themselves; they”) (msp. 17) as vesyolaya khitrost’;—s soboyu oni (“jolly tactics;—with themselves, they”).
49. Pilnyak, Sobranie sochineniy, vol. 5, p. 66.
50. P. N. Krasnov, lowbrow, anti-Semitic, and monarchist émigré writer.
51. Dolinin, p. 16, misreads Vozvrashchayus’ (“I’m going back”) as Vozvrashchayas’ (“Going back”) (msp. 19).
52. Lvov: in Chekhov’s play Ivanov, 1887. Bazarov: in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, 1862. Sanin: in Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel Sanin, 1907.
53. Dolinin, p. 17, omits tem (“of the themes”) (msp. 20).
54. Kavkazskie ocherki (Caucasian Sketches, 1834–1836), a five-story cycle by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.
55. Dolinin (p. 22, n. 35) identifies this 1903 story as the best known of Lidia Charskaya’s schoolgirl tales.
56. Vsevolod Ivanov, “Pustynya Tuub-Koya,” Krug (Moscow) 4 (1925), 199.
57. Pilnyak, Sobranie sochineniy, vol. 5, pp. 145–250. The Pomors (Russian Pomory) are long-established Russian settlers (originally from Novgorod) in the White Sea area.
58. VN admired Vladimir Dahl (1801–1872) as a lexicographer but was less interested in his folklore and ethnographic work.
59. Russian writer (1871–1919). VN has in mind the well-known comment of Lev Tolstoy on Leonid Andreev’s story “Bezdna” (“The Abyss”), which also features rape piled on rape: “He frightens, but I’m not scared.”
60. Dolinin, p. 18, misreads etakaya (“such a”) as takaya (“this”) (msp. 22).
61. Dolinin, p. 18, misreads avtomobili (“cars”) as “car” (msp. 22).
62. Boris Pilnyak, Angliyskie rasskazy (English Stories, Moscow-Leningrad, 1924), 7.
63. Wolfgang E. Groeger (1882–?), a German translator of Russian literature.
64. Dolinin, p. 18, omits v obshchem, “at all, in general” (msp. 23).
65. Fedin, Goroda i gody (Cities and Years) (Leningrad, 1924), 26.
66. Olga Forsh, author of the story collection Obyvateli (Ordinary Folk [Moscow-Petersburg, 1923]).
67. Despite the context, Dolinin, p. 20, misreads upoitel’noy (“entrancing”) as unizitel’noy (“humiliating”) (msp. 28).
68. Vladimir Lidin (1894–1979), Soviet writer highly prolific in the early 1920s.
69. Alexander Yakovlev (1886–1953), Soviet writer known for October, 1923, and other propagandistic works.
70. Dolinin, p. 21, omits nasmeshlivoy, “mocking, scornful” (msp. 28).
1. Alexander Dolinin suggests this refers to the émigré historian Nikolai Berdyaev’s 1923 essay on the postwar era, “Novoe srednevekov’e” (“The New Middle Ages,”), collected in his The End of Our Time, 1933 (“Clio laughs last: Nabokov’s answer to historicism,” in Julian W. Connolly, ed., Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives [Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 197–215, p. 204).
2. As a deleted fragment indicates, VN has in mind the presumably apocryphal anecdote about Sir Walter Raleigh, who completed only one of the five projected volumes of his History of the World (Milton Waldman, Walter Raleigh [London: 1950], 189).
3. In Oct. 1925, multilateral international treaties settling the borders of Western Europe after World War I were negotiated in Locarno, Switzerland.
4. The Charleston, wildly popular as a dance in 1925 and 1926, incorporated some highly modified African American elements. The African American dancer Josephine Baker popularized it in France in her skimpily clad erotic dances, including “Danse sauvage,” in Paris’s La Revue nègre, 1925.
5. Pageboy haircuts, at the peak of their popularity in 1926. Dolinin notes a letter of Madame de Sévigné of March 18, 1671, describing a short-cut, straight, wigless women’s hairdo.
6. A “little tragedy” in verse, 1830, by Alexander Pushkin.
7. A Russian team sport played with bat and ball, and not unlike cricket or baseball in involving running between marked zones. VN evokes it in The Defense (explained as “Russian baseball,” chap. 2), Glory (as “tag-bat,” chap. 42), and even in his Russian translation of Lolita, where “the crack of a bat” (II.36) in an American school playing field becomes bryak lapty (“the crack of lapta”).
8. “The young postwar generation.” Dolinin cites as examples Jacques de Lacretelle, La Vie inquiète de Jean Hermelin, 1920; Philippe Soupault, Le Bon Apôtre, 1923, and À la dérive, 1923; André Obey, L’Enfant inquiet, 1920.
9. Lenin’s real surname.
1. Invented as the goddess of chess in the poem Scacchia Ludus (1527) by Hieronymus Vida (1485?–1566).
1. The Lenin variant of the Marx species of ant.
2. Anastasia Verbitskaya (1861–1928), best-selling Russian popular novelist.
3. In Russian, seriy, eseseriy yubiley, “gray USSR jubilee.”
1. The epigraph to Khodasevich’s 1920–23 poem “Brenta,” from Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, I.xlix.1–2. In EO, I, 116: “Adrian waves, / O Brenta!”).
2. “Brenta,” line 1: “Brenta, rusty little stream.”
3. Closing lines (17–18) of “Brenta”: “From that time I love, Brenta, / Prose in life and in verse.”
4. In Russian, “Adriaticheskie volny.”
5. “Tak byvaet pochemu-to” (“This Is How It Happens for Some Reason,” 1920).
6. “Mel’nitsa,” 1920–23.
7. “Ballada” (“Sizhu, osveshchaemiy sverkhu”), 1921, trans. by VN as “Orpheus” in V&V, 345–47.
8. V&V, 345, lines 25–26. More literally: “And music, music, music, / threads its way into my singing,” trans. David Bethea, Khodasevich: His Life and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 239.
9. V&V, 347, lines 37–40; more literally, “And in a flowing, revolving dance / my entire room moves rhythmically, / and someone hands me / a heavy lyre through the wind” (Bethea, Khodasevich, 240).
10. “Okna vo dvor” (“Windows onto a Courtyard,” 1924).
11. “Ballada” (“Mne nevozhmozhno byt’ soboy,” “I can’t be myself”) 1925, lines 16–23, in Vladislav Khodasevich, Sobranie sochineniy, ed. John Malmstad and Robert Hughes (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1983), 164–66.
12. “Pod zemley” (“Underground,” 1923).
13. Masturbation in the men’s room of a subway public lavatory.
14. “Avtomobil’ ” (“The Automobile,” 1921).
15. “Pokrova Mayi potayennoy” (“The Cloak of Undercover Maya,” 1922).
16. “U morya. I” (“By the Sea: I,” 1922–23).
17. “Khranilishche” (“The Storehouse,” 1924).
18. “O, esli b v etot chas zhelannogo” (“Oh, If Only in That Hour Desired,” 1915).
19. “Iz dnevnika” (“From the Diary,” 1921).
20. “Probochka” (“The Cork,” 1921).
21. “Pro sebya. II” (“About Myself: II,” 1919).
22. “So slabykh vek” (“From Weak Eyelids,” 1914).
23. “Epizod” (“The Episode,” 1918). In the Russian VN emphasizes “Iznemogaya v istome tuskloy, kotoraya menya tomila.”
24. “Pro sebya. I” (“About Myself: I,” 1919). In the Russian VN emphasizes “chto znachit znak ego spiny mokhnatoy.”
25. “Obo vsem v odnikh stikhakh ne skazhesh’ ” (“You Can’t Speak of Everything in Verse Alone,” 1915).
26. “Na tuskneyushchie shpili” (“On Dimming Spires,” 1921).
27. “Burya” (“Tempest,” 1921).
28. “2-go noyabrya” (“November 2,” 1918).
29. “Glyazhu na grubye remesla” (“I Look at Coarse Trades,” 1922).
30. “Kogda b ya dolgo zhil na svete” (“When I’ve Lived a Long Time on Earth,” 1921).
1. VN misremembers who says this: not the doctor, Chebutykin, who will drop the gift, but Vershinin. Dolinin compounds the error by identifying the wrong speech from Chebutykin.
2. A “river of diamonds,” a diamond necklace.
3. In prerevolutionary Russia, Chelovek! (“Man!”) was a way of summoning a waiter, like the French Garçon!, whose literal meaning, “Boy!,” has similarly made the expression now offensive and obsolete in restaurants and bars.
4. Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), German emperor 1888–1918.
5. All are natural diminutives in Russian.
6. Nosik, “little nose.”
1. Edward FitzGerald (1809–83), The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (1859).
2. Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, Les Quatrains de Khayyam (Paris: Duprat, 1863).
1. Aleksey Remizov (1877–1957), medievalizing Russian writer.
1. VN here paraphrases a line from Alexander Blok’s poem “Za grobom” (“Behind the Coffin”).
2. Niva (Cornfield), Russian illustrated weekly magazine (1870–1918), the most popular of its time and a “thin journal” in contrast to the “thick journals” (of which the émigré Sovremmennye zapiski, for instance, was a descendant) with more heavyweight literary and political contributions.
3. “Ogon’ na machte” (“Fire on the Mast,” 1905).
4. “Val’s” (“Waltz,” 1906).
5. “Diya” (“Dia,” 1907).
6. “Karavan” (“Caravan,” 1908).
7. “Knyaz’ Vseslav” (“Prince Vseslav,” 1916).
8. “Shchegly, ikh zvon, steklyanny, nezhivoy” (“Goldfinches, Their Peal, Glassy, Unliving,” 1917).
9. “Sobaka” (“Dog,” 1909).
10. “Kray bez istorii. Vsyo les da les, bolota” (“A Land Without History. All Forest After Forest, Bogs,” 1916).
11. “Germon” (“Hermon,” 1907).
12. “Posle Messinskogo zemletryaseniya” (“After the Messina Earthquake,” 1909).
13. “V arkhipelage” (“In an Archipelago,” 1908).
14. “Mogila v skale” (“Grave in Rock,” 1909).
15. “Indiyskiy okean” (“The Indian Ocean,” 1916).
16. “Tseylon” (“Ceylon,” 1916).
17. “Liman peskom ot morya otdelen” (“Liman Is Separated from the Sea by Sand,” 1916).
18. “Lyublyu tsvetnye stekla okon” (“I Love Windows’ Colored Glass,” 1906).
19. “Ogromniy, krasniy, stariy parokhod” (“A Huge Old Red Steamer,” 1906).
20. “Raskrylos’ nebo goluboe” (“A Blue Sky Opened,” 1901).
21. “Petukh na tserkovnom kreste” (“The Cock on a Church Cross,” 1922).
22. “Grobnitsa Rakhili” (“Rachel’s Tomb,” 1907).
23. “Rastyot, rastyot mogilnaya trava” (“The Grave Grass Grows, Grows,” 1906).
24. “Kanun kupali” (“The Eve of Kupala,” 1903).
1. Alexander Kuprin (1870–1938), a writer well recognized in Russia from around 1900, but impoverished in the emigration. For VN’s later fondness for him as a person, see LTV, 230–31.
1. Otvetstvennyi rabotnik literally means simply “responsible worker,” but in Soviet usage meant an executive within the Soviet system. VN invokes this type as a Soviet’s idea of how the role of a Western “bourgeois” has been transformed in the Soviet world. (We owe this nuance to Stanislav Shvabrin.)
2. In prerevolutionary Russia, an intellectual not belonging to the gentry.
3. In Gogol’s Dead Souls.
4. Rich peasant exploiting others.
5. The Communist Youth League (Kommunisticheskiy soyuz molodyozhi) referred to two paragraphs previously.
1. “Sentimental’naia demonologia” (“Sentimental Demonology”). Translations follow Boris Poplavsky, Flags, trans. Belinda Cooke and Richard McKane (Bristol, U.K.: Shearsman Books, 2009).
2. “Devochka vozvratilas’, angel zapel naugad” (“The Little Girl Returned, the Angel Began to Sing at Random”).
3. “Solntse niskhodit, eshche tak zharko” (“The Sun Sinks, It’s Still So Hot”).
4. “Morella I” / “Morella I.” VN misremembers: the line is “О, Morella, usni, kak uzhasny ogromnyie zhizni,” where he has “orlinnye zhizni” (“aquiline lives” instead of “huge lives”). He retained this incorrect version of the line for the rest of his life.
5. “Don Kikhot” (“Don Quixote”) (translation amended).
6. Note the sound play: “Khokhotali motory, grokhotali monokli.”
7. Note the sound play: “Sineveli dni, sireneveli.”
8. VN is here alluding to the poetry of Igor Severyanin, and to the poems “Kenzeli” (“Quinzels”) and “Russkaya” (“Russian”), respectively.
9. VN here quotes from the songs of Alexander Vertinsky, “Oloviannoe serdtse” (“Tin Heart”) and “Bal Gospoden’’ (“The Lord’s Ball”).
10. “V bor’be so snegom” (“A Struggle with the Snow”: note sound play in “se slov igra mogla slomat’ osla, / no ya osel zhelezeniy, ya zhele,/ zhalel vsegda, zhalel, no an oslab”).
11. Word used to reinforce opposition to what has been proposed, something contrary or in contrast.
12. “Volshebnyi fonar’ ” (“The Magic Lantern”).
13. “Bor’ba so snom” (“A Struggle with Sleep”).
14. “Astral’nyi mir” (“Astral World”).
15. “Don Quixote”; Cooke and McKane translate it as “African style.”
16. “Angélique.”
17. “Astral’nyi mir” (“Astral World”); Cooke and McKane translate it as “stylish hall.”
18. “Otritsatel’nyi polyus molchit i siyayet” (“The Negative Pole Is Silent and Shines”).
19. “Dvoetsarstvie” (“Joint Reign”).
20. Rather than the correct oktyabr’, pyupitr, dirizhabl’, korabl’.
21. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia (1858–1915), a grandson of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, a poet and playwright who wrote under the pen name “K.R.,” initials of his given name and family name, Konstantin Romanov. His poetry is mocked in Ada, at the end of pt. 1, chap. 38.
22. Antonin Ladinsky (1895–1961), émigré poet, whose volume Chornoe i goluboe VN had very recently reviewed (Rul’, Jan. 28, 1931, 2–3).
23. “Morella I” / “Morella I.” VN misquotes here, as before.
1. Nina Berberova (1901–93), émigré novelist and short-story writer, based in Paris.
1. Allusion to the logo of the Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth brand of erasers, still in production.
2. Therefore, across Russia, or Europe; chorniy means “black.” An echo of line 9 of Gavriil Derzhavin’s 1795 variation, “Pamyatnik” (“The Monument”), on Horace’s famous poem “Exegi Monumentum,” which Pushkin in turn famously de-solemnized (see V&V, 32–33).
3. Gorniy put’ (The Empyrean Path) (Berlin: Grani, 1923).
1. Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946), Russian émigré from 1921, world chess champion 1927–35, 1937–46. Savielly Tartakower (1887–1956), Polish and French grandmaster.
2. Mark Aldanov (1886?–1957), émigré novelist. His Begstvo (The Escape) began serial publication in 1930 and was published in book form in 1932.
1. Fyodor Stepun (1884–1965), émigré writer and philosopher based in Germany.
2. The novel Nikolai Pereslegin (1929).
3. From the untitled poem beginning “Svoenravnoe prozvan’e / Dal ya miloy v lasku ey” (1834), by Evgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844), translated by VN as “To His Wife.” Opening lines in VN’s rhymed and approximate translation: “I have given her a nickname, just a fanciful caress,” V&V, 225.
1. DN note (from a longer introduction): “While my translation of the prose is as literal as I could make it, it is true that the special personality of the French language, where a nuance lurks behind the turn of every phrase and a botched idiom is idiotic, requires minor adjustments in order to obtain at least plausible English. A separate problem was what to do about Nabokov’s examples of Pushkin’s verse in French. Together with his considerations regarding the translation of Pushkin from Russian into French, they are specific and intimately related to the character of both the ‘from’ and ‘into’ languages. At the same time they reflect a general approach to translation that was to evolve substantially in the years that followed. Therefore I retained the French examples for the bilingual reader, and hoped to provide the ideal supplement: Nabokov’s own English versions from various periods. A search of readily accessible manuscripts and typescripts amid a treasure-trove of his translations revealed, alas, that he seems to have Englished only one of the four samples—the stanza which is misidentified, through an editorial error or a rare absentminded lapse of the author’s, as being from Eugene Onegin, but which is actually from ‘Yezerski’ (begun by Pushkin in 1830, when he was finishing Onegin).
“Nevertheless, this excerpt does make it possible to present, alongside Nabokov’s French illustrations of what he explains in his text, an additional peek into the evolution of his theory and technique as applied to the translation of Pushkin’s poetry, and poetry in general. Presumably done in connection with his U.S. university courses, this English fragment reflects a partial transition from the accommodations, made in the name of rhyme and musicality in the French verses and in other early translations, to the unflinching fidelity of his Onegin (which Nabokov deliberately conceived as an uncompromisingly literal ‘crib’).
“I have inserted in the text, together with Nabokov’s translation of a section of ‘Yezerski,’ my English versions of the other three examples. They are based on the Russian originals, with occasional assists from the solutions adopted in Nabokov’s French (e.g., the substitution of the Fate Lachesis for Pushkin’s generic Parca). One stringent test of rhymed translations, and of rhymed poetry in general (although most versifiers seem to prefer playing on a netless, unlined court these days), is to check how obvious it is that one part of a rhyme came first, and to what degree the other part protrudes like a sore toe of the prosodic foot. ‘Sing not, my fair’ best lent itself to an attempt at preserving not only meter but also rhyme, or at least assonance, and is to a degree analogous to the general method used in Nabokov’s somewhat freer French samples, which seem to pass that test with flying colors.
“In the remaining two poems I made no compromise whatever for the sake of rhymes, welcoming them only if they tumbled of their own accord into my lap, while the relative simplicity of the Russian originals allowed literality to cohabit pretty well with meter. Even though his English version of Onegin codified a rhymeless and meterless scholarly precision, what Vladimir Nabokov had indicated elsewhere about poetic translation suggests that, even in later years, he, too, might have chosen to retain at least the meter of these particular poems. Would that there were a Volapük or Esperanto rich enough for poetry.”
2. During the Crimean War, the Russians retreated from Sebastopol on Sept. 9, 1855, after a siege by the French, Ottoman, and English allies begun in Oct. 1854.
3. DN note: “A hotbed of counterrevolutionary insurrection in 1793.”
4. Iron Chancellor: Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), first chancellor of the German Empire, 1871–90.
5. French name of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades.
6. Nightclub (literally, “box of night”).
7. Heelless North African and Middle Eastern slipper, usually leather.
1. Prestataire, French for a person liable to statute labor. In accordance with the decrees issued by French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, in Jan. 1940, all refugees and those without citizenship were to become members of the unarmed auxiliary force and serve alongside the French army.
2. “Philistine vulgarity,” or “smug Philistinism,” as Nabokov translates it. For detailed discussions of this very Russian term, see his Nikolai Gogol (New Directions, 1944), pp. 63–74, and Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1981), 313.
3. Now Chişinău, Moldava. Pushkin spent three years in exile in Kishinev.
4. Where Pushkin and then Lermontov were exiled.
5. The grand central street of St. Petersburg, made strange by Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely.
6. VN probably has in mind Alexei Tolstoy’s historical novel Peter the First (1929–34), which suggested analogies between Peter I and Stalin, and which would win the Stalin Prize in 1941.
1. Stalin was born in Georgia and of Georgian ethnicity.
1. A Russian summer soup made with raw vegetables and kvass (a drink made from rye bread), typically served cold.
1. The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo were formed in 1932, after the death of Diaghilev.
1. Woodbridge (1867–1940) spent most of his career at Columbia University.
1. Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), theorist and Nazi Party ideologue. VN misspelled the name “Rozenberg.”
2. Alluding to Hamlet’s lament for his dead jester, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio” (Hamlet 5.1.180) and its echo in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Karl Radek was accused of treason in Stalin’s Great Purge, and sentenced in the Second Moscow Trial, 1937, to ten years’ hard labor, but was killed by an NKVD agent in 1939.
3. Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel (1929); the original, Menschen im Hotel, was the basis for the Edward Goulding film Grand Hotel (1932), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In his recent (and not yet published) first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, VN had written of “the fashionable trick of grouping a medley of people in a limited space (a hotel, an island, a street)” (chap. 10). Later, in his lectures on Don Quixote, he would note: “Cervantes has hit on the convenient ‘island’ device which consists in grouping characters in some isolated limited locus—an island, a hotel, a ship, an airplane, a country-house, a railway car. As a matter of fact, it is also Dostoevski’s device, in his completely irresponsible and somewhat antiquated novels, where a dozen of people have a tremendous row in a roomette on a train—a train that moves not. And to move still further, the same trick of grouping people in one place is, of course, used in the modern mystery story where a number of potential suspects are isolated in a snowbound hotel, or in a solitary country-house, et cetera, so as to neatly limit possible clues in the little reader’s mind.” (Lectures on Don Quixote, 147.)
4. Ilf (Ilya Feinsilberg, 1897–1937); with Evgeniy Petrov (1903–42), he formed the satiric writing duo Ilf and Petrov, whom VN rated highly.
5. Ruvim Freierman, Dikaya sobaka Dingo: ili, povest o pervoy lyubvi (Dingo the Wild Dog: or A Tale of First Love).
1. English-born painter Charles Conder (1868–1909) lived in Australia 1884–90, and thereafter in Europe, especially England and Paris.
2. French novelist Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949), whose 1888 novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés, is often seen as the first extensive use of stream-of-consciousness technique. When VN met Dujardin is not otherwise known.
3. Conder died of syphilis.
1. Where VN had never been.
1. Allusion to the underground, nocturnal species which has devolved from the working class in the distant future of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the upper classes having evolved into the effete Eloi.
2. The 1840s and the 1860s were particularly active periods of radical debate in the presses of imperial Russia.
1. VN’s Sobytie (The Event), which had premiered in Paris on March 4, 1938, in the Salle des Journaux of the Bibliothèque Nationale, was staged on April 4, 1941, in New York at the Heckscher Theatre. The actor Dolmatov played the role of “The Famous Writer” Pyotr Nikolaevich, in whom some contemporaries detected a caricature of Ivan Bunin. Zheleznov was the pseudonym of poet and journalist M. K. Aisenshtadt (1900–1970). For the first re-publication of Nabokov’s letter, and a brief discussion of the Paris and New York performances of The Event, see Vladimir Nabokov, Tragediya gospodina Morna, P’esy, Lektsii o drame, ed. Andrei Babikov (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2008), 591.
1. Bavarian town above which Hitler had built his Berghof in 1935.
2. Unser: German, “our.”
3. Alwin Thaler, Shakespere’s Silences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929).
4. John Bourchier, second Baron Berners (1467–1533), Huon of Burdeuxe, c. 1540.
5. W. W. Greg, “Hamlet’s Hallucination,” Modern Language Review 12, no. 4 (1917), 393–421.
6. John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1935).
1. First name and patronymic of Lenin; by itself the patronymic, “Ilyitch,” was often used as an affectionate name by his Soviet admirers.
1. City in the Volga region, between Nizhniy Novgorod and Kazan’, now known (since 1928) as Yoshkar-Ola.
1. “Caress the sentence, it will smile at you.” Anatole France’s phrase was actually “Caressez longuement votre phrase et elle finira par sourire” (“Caress your sentence at length and it will end up smiling”).
2. Probably Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936 (possibly blurred with Norman Douglas, South Wind, 1917); Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940; and James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939.
1. Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), Italian criminologist and physiognomist. His Genio e Follia (1864) and L’uomo di genio (1888) explained genius as a form of insanity.
2. British bacteriologist Frederick Griffith (1879–1941) in 1928 showed in mice, not rats, that bacterial strains could transform.
3. Johann Ludwig Rhumbler (1864–1936), German cell biologist.
4. VN ignores the letter-for-letter correspondence customary in transliteration (vdokhnovenie) to offer an Anglophone reader a closer approximation of the sound.
1. VN may in fact have said “Primitive art—that’s Mr. Boubou!” He disliked “primitive art” or “tribal art.” “Mr. Boubou” is a French term for a generic African.
1. The Constitutional Democratic Party, known by the nickname Kadet Party. VN’s father, V. D. Nabokov, was a leading Kadet in and outside the Russian Duma (parliament), and Iosif Vladimirovich Hessen (1865–1943), a lawyer and journalist, was also a Central Committee member.
2. Hessen was five years older than VN’s father.
3. Pravo (Law), a leading liberal journal, advocating legal and constitutional reforms, founded in 1898; V. D. Nabokov and I. V. Hessen were on its board from 1899; Hessen became editor-in-chief in 1906.
4. Rech’ (Speech), Russia’s leading liberal daily, 1906–17. The Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov and I. V. Hessen were founding coeditors, Hessen being in practice the editor-in-chief; V. D. Nabokov was a third on the editorial board of four.
5. Rul’ (The Rudder), émigré liberal daily founded in Berlin in 1920 by V. D. Nabokov, I. V. Hessen, and Avgust Kaminka; after V. D. Nabokov’s assassination on March 28, 1922, I. V. Hessen served as the sole editor until the newspaper folded in 1931.
6. Hessen was Jewish and, like the Gentile V. D. Nabokov, had been a champion of Jewish rights in Russia.
7. Elena Polevitskaya (1881–1973), leading stage actress in Russia, the emigration, and the USSR. Nadezhda Plevitskaya (1884–1940), Russian popular singer and from 1930 a Soviet agent, involved in the 1937 abduction of the White General Miller (as VN records in his 1943 story “The Assistant Producer”).
8. The so-called Hegelian triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, popular in Russian schools. A few years later, VN would blend it with the image of a spiral to summarize the phases of his own life to date in chap. 14 of his autobiography, Speak, Memory.
9. Hessen died on March 22, 1943.
1. The “h” here indicates Russian pronunciation, for Anglophones, rather than Russian spelling.
2. Again, VN here indicates approximate pronunciation rather than spelling. The usual transliteration (including VN’s elsewhere) is govorit’, the “t’ ” (“t” and soft sign in Cyrillic) indicating that the “t” is palatalized (as most consonants can be in Russian), which does make it sound rather like an English “tz.”
1. Reference point.
2. VN had accepted the offer of a position as professor of Russian literature at Cornell by Nov. 14, 1947, after the president of Wellesley declined to make a counteroffer to Cornell’s.
1. By Lynd Ward (1905–1985).
2. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (1876–1963).
3. “Das Eisenbahnunglück,” published 1909. “The Railway Accident,” one of three stories in Nocturnes, takes up pp. 28–44, with illustrations by Ward on pp. 28 and 34.
4. Die Verwandlung, published 1915.
5. Nabokov does not quote verbatim. The translation (pp. 30–31) reads “that guard with the leather cartridge belt, the prodigious sergeant-major’s moustache and the inhospitable eye. Watch him rebuking the old woman in the threadbare black cape—for two pins she would have got into a second-class carriage.”
6. The translation of Mann’s text here (p. 35) reads: “I heard his immediate and elemental burst of rage. ‘What do you want?’ he roared. ‘Leave me alone, you swine.’ He said swine. It was a lordly epithet, the epithet of a cavalry officer—it did my heart good to hear it….Just as I stepped into the corridor to get a better view the door of the compartment abruptly opened and the ticket flew out into the attendant’s face; yes, it was flung with violence straight in his face. He picked it up with both hands, and though he had got the corner of it in one eye, so that the tears came, he thanked the man, saluting and clicking his heels together.”
7. The translation of Mann’s text reads here (pp. 43–44): “And inside of an hour we were all stowed higgledy-piggledy into a special train.
“I had my first-class ticket—my journey being paid for—but it availed me nothing, for everybody wanted to ride first and my carriage was more crowded than the others. But just as I found me a little niche, whom do I see diagonally opposite to me, huddled in the corner? My hero, the gentleman with the spats and the vocabulary of a cavalry officer. He did not have his dog, it had been taken away from him in defiance of his rights as a nob, and now sat howling in a gloomy prison just behind the engine….And with a sour smile my gentleman resigned himself to the crazy situation.
“And now who got in, supported by two firemen? A wee little old grandmother in a tattered black cape, the very same who in Munich would for two pins have got into a second-class carriage. ‘Is this the first class?’ she kept asking. And when we made room and assured her that it was, she sank down with a ‘God be praised!’ onto the plush cushions as though only now was she safe and sound.”
1. Reuben Fine (1914–93), American psychologist and chess master and author in both fields.
2. Samuel Reshevsky (1911–92), Polish-born American chess grandmaster.
3. Not his first novel, which was Mashen’ka (1925; translated as Mary, 1970), but his first novel published in America.
1. Mark Aldanov (Nov. 7, 1886–1957), Russian émigré historical novelist.
2. The victim of such a celebration: in Russian, “zhertva takogo torzhestva” (where takogo is pronounced “takova”).
3. Svyataya Elena, malen’kiy ostrov (1921).
1. A 1956 novel by Grace Metalious (1924–64), one of the fastest-selling novels of all time, on The New York Times best-seller list for fifty-nine weeks, and considered at the time almost scandalously steamy. In 1957, it was made into a film produced by Twentieth Century–Fox and directed by Mark Robson.
1. Because there was no Department of Russian Literature at Cornell, Nabokov’s courses were all part of the Division of Literature, based in Goldwin Smith Hall, and specifically of its Department of Romance Literature, headed by Morris Bishop, who had recruited him for Cornell. Morrill Hall housed the Division of Languages, whose methods of teaching Russian Nabokov deplored, as the satire in Pnin also reveals.
1. In fact Mashen’ka (Mary) was published in 1926.
1. He would have gone on to explain that fou can mean “madman” or a chess bishop.
2. If the conversation was correctly transcribed, VN said “authors…translate” when he clearly meant “publishers…publish.”
1. On the last page of the novel, Humbert writes: “Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.”
2. Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), French dramatist, known as the model author of the “well-made play.”
3. Henri-René Lenormand (1882–1951), French dramatist.
1. The novel (or linked short stories) Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) was quickly banned in the United States and remained so until 1959.
2. “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae (Lycaenidae, Lepidoptera),” Psyche 52, no. 12 (March–June 1945), 1–61. Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, in Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland, 1999), dwell at length on the originality and continued impact of this paper.
1. Henry Popkin, “The Famous and Infamous Wares of Mr. Girodias,” New York Times Book Review, Apr. 7, 1960, 4.
1. So Dolbier noted. The correct text is: “The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.”
1. Rodion Berezov, “Pamyati Anny Leonidovny Shakhovskoy,” Russkaya mysl’, September 17, 1963, 6. Rodion Akulshin (1896–1988), pen name Berezov, emigrated to the United States after release from a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1945, rather than face prison or execution in the USSR.
1. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1922).”
1. Unfinished, after his British publisher, George Weidenfeld, backed out of VN’s ambitious plans. For some of the material, see Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, eds., Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (Boston: Beacon, 1999).
1. Lollobrigida.
1. To the USSR.
2. Love’s Labor’s Lost, 5.2.912.
3. From this point on, he is talking of Lolita, not The Enchanter.
1. Should be “Aber bitte schön mit doppelten Türen” (“But please, with double doors”).
1. Bertrand Russell.
2. There are forty members at any one time of the prestigious Académie Française, writers and thinkers chosen to guard over the traditions of the French language and literature. Their nickname is “the immortals.”
3. Painter Jean Holabird, without knowing this passage, proposed and executed AlphaBet in Color (Vladimir Nabokov: AlphaBet in Color [Corte Madera, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 2005]), which takes VN’s description of the colors he associates with letters in Russian, English, and French and devotes a page to each, with the edges of the gradually wider pages forming a rainbow effect.
4. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le Voyeur (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1955).
1. The Nabokov family estate and summer residence of VN’s Russian childhood, celebrated in Speak, Memory.
2. Yuri Olesha (1899–1960) and Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940), writers who remained in the Soviet Union yet wrote works of integrity without falling fatally foul of Soviet censorship.
1. “La pioggia nel pineto” (1902).
1. Jacques Martin (1933–2007) and Danièle Gilbert (1943– ) were hosts of the Monday-to-Friday television variety show Midi magazine (1968–69), which changed its name to Midi chez vous (1969–71) on ORTF’s Channel 1.
2. Mao’s Little Red Book was a fashionable accoutrement within the youth counterculture.
1. Nabokov’s younger sister (1906–2000), then living in Geneva.
2. All Petrograd, an address directory.
3. Tauride Garden.
4. “Shaken off the soft dust of Russia.” A pseudo-citation?
5. Horst Tappe.
6. VN’s cousin and best friend, Baron Georgiy Evgenievich (Yuri, Yurik) Rausch von Traubenberg (1897–1919).
7. VN’s misremembering of Chorny’s real name, Alexander Glikberg. For VN’s recollection of Chorny’s kindness toward his early verse, see pp. 111–12.
8. Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, where Nabokov was de facto curator of Lepidoptera, 1941–1948.
9. In fact producer David O. Selznick (1902–65).
10. Not house-trained.
11. Concert-chamber singer.
1. Karel Kramář (1860–1937), Czech nationalist politician, prime minister, 1918–19.
2. VN suspected, in other words, that the comment was Edmund Wilson’s. Wilson certainly made similar comments.
3. Alfred Appel, Jr. (1934–2009) had recently prepared, with VN’s help, The Annotated Lolita (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).
4. This response is from Alan Levy, Vladimir Nabokov: The Velvet Butterfly (Sag Harbor, N.Y.: Permanent Press, 1984), 34.
5. Pieris bryoniae, common name usually dark-veined or mountain green white, prized by collectors.
1. Maiden and pen name, Zinaida Shakhovskoy.
2. Oeil-de-Dieu (Eye of God, 1925).
3. La Femme partagée (The Shared Woman, 1929).
1. The novella “Rasskaz o semi poveshenykh” (“The Story of the Seven Hanged”) (1908), known in English as “The Seven Who Were Hanged.”
1. Alluding to the famous madeleine dipped in tea whose taste brings the past back in a rush for Marcel in the Swann’s Way section of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
2. Rest of answer omitted, since VN’s introductions to the translated novels spell out these details.
1. Now in SO.
1. SO, 120.
1. Instead of the idiomatic fleurs des champs (lexically, “flowers of the fields”), fleurs sauvages, “savage flowers.”
2. “The castle that my [River] Dore bathed,” a famous line from the poem “Le Montagnard émigré” (“The Émigré Highlander,” 1806, also known as “Romance à Hélène,” later incorporated into Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage, 1826) by the famously nostalgic François-René de Chateaubriand, one of VN’s favorite French authors; the poem is echoed and reworked in Ada (pt. 1, chap. 22), and this line was even once suggested by VN as the possible title for a French translation of his autobiography.
3. Another line (“and my mountain, and the big oak”) from Chateaubriand’s poem, also evoked and varied in Ada.
4. “The Carrick” (“The Overcoat”) and “The Death of Ivan Il’ich.”
5. Actually Une Passion dans le Désert (1830).
6. In French, “un gryphon sans griffes,” “a griffin without claws.”
7. “Voyelles” (“Vowels”), 1883.
8. Lannes’s confusion was with VN’s cousin Nicolas Nabokov, a composer, not a conductor, whose photograph often wrongly illustrated articles about VN.
9. “Pen” name of the French political cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré (1858–1909), from the Russian karandash, “pencil.”
10. VN crossed out the brand name.
11. In French, “La brutalité, la bêtise, le bruit.”
1. “…ne se plie pas si bien aux supplices de mon imagination.”
2. Crossed out: “in my grandfather’s library in the country and my father’s library in town.”
3. A play on the “accursed poets”: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé.
4. The first two lines and an approximation of the fourth of the sonnet “Nevermore” (1866), by Paul Verlaine (1844–96): “Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? L’automne / Faisait voler la grive à travers l’air atone, / Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone / Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détone.” (“Memory, memory, what do you want from me? I remember / Autumn made the thrush fly through the lifeless air, / And the sun launched a monotonous ray where / The north wind exploded in a wood growing yellower.”) (Translation, perhaps by Sydney Charles Nathan, at https://larencontrepoetique.com/2016/10/13/verlaine-rencontre-schiele/).
1. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. Trans. with commentary by Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Bollingen Series LXXX, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.