The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Page 86
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
PERFECTION
“Sovershenstvo” was written in Berlin in June 1932. It appeared in the Paris daily Poslednie Novosti (July 3, 1932) and was included in my collection Soglyadatay, Paris, 1938. Although I did tutor boys in my years of expatriation, I disclaim any other resemblance between myself and Ivanov.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
THE ADMIRALTY SPIRE
Although various details of the narrator’s love affair match in one way or another those found in my autobiographical works, it should be firmly borne in mind that the “Katya” of the present story is an invented girl. The “Admiralteyskaya igla” was written in May 1933, in Berlin, and serialized in Poslednie Novosti, Paris, in the issues of June 4 and 5 of that year. It was collected in Vesna v Fialte, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
THE LEONARDO
“The Leonardo” (Korolyok) was composed in Berlin, on the piney Links of the Grunewald Lake, in the summer of 1933. First published in Poslednie rouvosti, Paris, July 23 and 24, 1933. Collected in Vesna v Fialte, New York, 1956.
Korolyok (literally: kinglet) is, or is supposed to be, a Russian cant term for “counterfeiter.” I am deeply indebted to Professor Stephen Jan Parker for suggesting a corresponding American underground slang word which delightfully glitters with the kingly gold dust of the Old Master’s name. Hitler’s grotesque and ferocious shadow was falling on Germany at the time I imagined those two brutes and my poor Romantovski.
The English translation appeared in Vogue, April, 1973.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
IN MEMORY OF L. I. SHIGAEV
Andrew Field in his bibliography of my works says he has not been able to ascertain the exact date for “Pamyati L. I. Shigaeva,” written in the early 1930s in Berlin, and published probably in Poslednie Novosti. I am practically sure that I wrote it in the beginning of 1934. My wife and I were sharing with her cousin, Anna Feigin, the latter’s charming flat in a corner house (Number 22) of Nestorstrasse, Berlin, Grunewald (where Invitation to a Beheading and most of The Gift were composed). The rather attractive, small devils in the story belong to a subspecies described there for the first time.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
THE CIRCLE
By the middle of 1936, not long before leaving Berlin forever and finishing Dar (The Gift) in France, I must have completed at least four-fifths of its last chapter when at some point a small satellite separated itself from the main body of the novel and started to revolve around it. Psychologically, the separation may have been sparked either by the mention of Tanya’s baby in her brother’s letter or by his recalling the village schoolmaster in a doomful dream. Technically, the circle which the present corollary describes (its last sentence existing implicitly before its first one) belongs to the same serpent-biting-its-tail type as the circular structure of the fourth chapter in Dar (or, for that matter, Finnegans Wake, which it preceded). A knowledge of the novel is not required for the enjoyment of the corollary which has its own orbit and colored fire, but some practical help may be derived from the reader’s knowing that the action of The Gift starts on April 1, 1926, and ends on June 29, 1929 (spanning three years in the life of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a young émigré in Berlin); that his sister’s marriage takes place in Paris at the end of 1926; and that her daughter is born three years later, and is only seven in June 1936, and not “around ten,” as Innokentiy, the schoolmaster’s son, is permitted to assume (behind the author’s back) when he visits Paris in “The Circle.” It may be added that the story will produce upon readers who are familiar with the novel a delightful effect of oblique recognition, of shifting shades enriched with new sense, owing to the world’s being seen not through the eyes of Fyodor, but through those of an outsider less close to him than to old Russia’s idealistic radicals (who, let it be said in passing, were to loathe Bolshevist tyranny as much as liberal aristocrats did).
“Krug” was published in 1936, in Paris, but the exact date and periodical (presumably, Poslednie Novosti) have not yet been established in bibliographic retrospect. It was reprinted twenty years later in the collection of my short stories Vesna v Fialte, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
A RUSSIAN BEAUTY
“A Russian Beauty” (Krasavitsa) is an amusing miniature, with an unexpected solution. The original text appeared in the émigré daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris, August 18, 1934, and was included in Soglyadatay, the collection of the author’s stories published by Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, 1938. The English translation appeared in Esquire in April, 1973.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
BREAKING THE NEWS
“Breaking the News” appeared under the title “Opoveshchenie” (Notification) in an émigré periodical around 1935 and was included in my collection Soglyadatay (Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, 1938).
The milieu and the theme both correspond to those of “Signs and Symbols,” written ten years later in English (see The New Yorker, May 15, 1948, and Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958).
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
TORPID SMOKE
“Torpid Smoke” (Tyazhyolyy dym) appeared in the daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris, March 3, 1935, and was reprinted in Vesna v Fialte, New York, 1956. The present translation has been published in Triquarterly, no. 27, Spring 1973. In two or three passages brief phrases have been introduced to elucidate points of habitus and locale, unfamiliar today not only to foreign readers but to the incurious grandchildren of the Russians who fled to western Europe in the first three or four years after the Bolshevist Revolution; otherwise the translation is acrobatically faithful—beginning with the title, which in a coarse lexical rendering that did not take familiar associations into account would read “Heavy Smoke.”
The story belongs to that portion of my short fiction which refers to émigré, life in Berlin between 1920 and the late thirties. Seekers of biographical tidbits should be warned that my main delight in composing those things was to invent ruthlessly assortments of exiles who in character, class, exterior features, and so forth were utterly unlike any of the Nabokovs. The only two affinities here between author and hero are that both wrote Russian verse and that I had lived at one time or another in the same kind of lugubrious Berlin apartment as he. Only very poor readers (or perhaps some exceptionally good ones) will scold me for not letting them into its parlor.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
RECRUITING
“Nabor” was written in the summer of 1935 in Berlin. It appeared on August 18 of that year in Poslednie Novosti, Paris, and was included twenty-one years later in my Vesna v Fialte collection, published by the Chekhov Publishing House in New York.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
A SLICE OF LIFE
The original title of this entertaining tale is “Sluchay in zhizni.” The first word means “occurrence,” or “case,” and the last two “from life.” The combination has a deliberately commonplace, newspaper nuance in Russian which is lost in a lexical version. The present formula is truer in English tone, especially as it fits so well my man’s primitive jargon (hear his barroom maunder just before the fracas).
What was your purpose, sir, in penning this story, forty years ago in Berlin? Well, I did pen it (for I never learned to type and the long reign of the 3B pencil, capped with an eraser, was to start much later—in parked motorcars and motels); but I had never any “purpose” in mind when writing stories—for myself, my wife, and half a dozen dear dead chuckling friends. It was first published in Poslednie Novosti, an émigré daily in Paris, on September 22, 1935, and collected three years later in Soglyadatay, Russkiya Zapiski (Annales Russes, 51, rue de Turbigo, Paris, a legendary address).
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V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
SPRING IN FIALTA
“Spring in Fialta” is from Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE
“Cloud, Castle, Lake” is from Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
TYRANTS DESTROYED
“Istreblenie tiranov” was written in Mentone in spring or early summer 1938. It appeared in the Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, August 1938, and in my Vesna v Fialte collection of short stories, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956. Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin dispute my tyrant’s throne in this story—and meet again in Bend Sinister, 1947, with a fifth toad. The destruction is thus complete.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
LIK
“Lik” was published in the émigré review Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, February 1939, and in my third Russian collection (Vesna v Fialtre, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956). “Lik” reflects the miragy Riviera surroundings among which I composed it and attempts to create the impression of a stage performance engulfing a neurotic performer, though not quite in the way that the trapped actor expected when dreaming of such an experience.
The present English translation appeared first in The New Yorker, October 10, 1964, and was included in Nabokov’s Quartet, Phaedra Publishers, New York, 1966.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
MADEMOISELLE O
“Mademoiselle O” is from Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
VASILIY SHISHKOV
To relieve the dreariness of life in Paris at the end of 1939 (about six months later I was to migrate to America) I decided one day to play an innocent joke on the most famous of émigré critics, George Adamovich (who used to condemn my stuff as regularly as I did the verse of his disciples) by publishing in one of the two leading magazines a poem signed with a new pen name, so as to see what he would say, about that freshly emerged author, in the weekly literary column he contributed to the Paris émigré daily Poslednie Novosti. Here is the poem, as translated by me in 1970 (Poems and Problems, McGraw-Hill, New York):
THE POETS
From room to hallway a candle passes
and is extinguished. Its imprint swims in one’s eyes,
until, among the blue-black branches,
a starless night its contours finds.
It is time, we are going away: still youthful,
with a list of dreams not yet dreamt,
with the last, hardly visible radiance of Russia
on the phosphorent rhymes of our last verse.
And yet we did know—didn’t we?—inspiration,
we would live, it seemed, and our books would grow
but the kithless muses at last have destroyed us,
and it is time now for us to go.
And this not because we’re afraid of offending
with our freedom good people; simply, it’s time
for us to depart—and besides we prefer not
to see what lies hidden from other eyes;
not to see all this world’s enchantment and torment,
the casement that catches a sunbeam afar,
humble somnambulists in soldier’s niform,
the lofty sky, the attentive clouds;
the beauty, the look of reproach; the young children
who play hide-and-seek inside and around
the latrine that revolves in the summer twilight;
the sunset’s beauty, its look of reproach;
all that weighs upon one, entwines one, wounds one;
an electric sign’s tears on the opposite bank;
through the mist the stream of its emeralds running;
all the things that already I cannot express.
In a moment we’ll pass across the world’s threshold
into a region—name it as you please:
wilderness, death, disavowal of language,
or maybe simpler: the silence of love;
the silence of a distant cartway, its furrow,
beneath the foam of flowers concealed;
my silent country (the love that is hopeless);
the silent sheet lightning, the silent seed.
Signed: Vasiliy Shishkov
The Russian original appeared in October or November 1939 in the Russkiya Zapiski, if I remember correctly, and was acclaimed by Adamovich in his review of that issue with quite exceptional enthusiasm. (“At last a great poet has been born in our midst,” etc.—I quote from memory, but I believe a bibliographer is in the process of tracking down this item.) I could not resist elaborating the fun and, shortly after the eulogy appeared, I published in the same Poslednie Novosti (December 1939? Here again the precise date eludes me) my prose piece “Vasiliy Shishkov” (collected in Vesna v Fialte, New York, 1956), which could be regarded, according to the émigré reader’s degree of acumen, either as an actual occurrence involving a real person called Shishkov, or as a tongue-in-cheek story about the strange case of one poet dissolving in another. Adamovich refused at first to believe eager friends and foes who drew his attention to my having invented Shishkov; finally, he gave in and explained in his next essay that I “was a sufficiently skillful parodist to mimic genius.” I fervently wish all critics to be as generous as he. I met him, briefly, only twice; but many old literati have spoken a lot, on the occasion of his recent death, about his kindliness and penetrativeness. He had really only two passions in life: Russian poetry and French sailors.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
ULTIMA THULE and SOLUS REX
The winter of 1939–40 was my last season of Russian prose writing. In spring I left for America, where I was to spend twenty years in a row writing fiction solely in English. Among the works of those farewell months in Paris was a novel which I did not complete before my departure, and to which I never went back. Except for two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed the unfinished thing. Chapter 1, entitled “Ultima Thule,” appeared in 1942 (Novyy Zhurnal, vol. 1, New York). It had been preceded by the publication of chapter 2, “Solus Rex,” in early 1940 (Sovremennyya Zapiski, vol. 70, Paris). The present translation, made in February 1971 by my son with my collaboration, is scrupulously faithful to the original text, including the restoration of a scene that had been marked in the Sovremennyya Zapiski by suspension points.
Perhaps, had I finished my book, readers would not have been left wondering about a few things: was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator’s dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognize? Be that as it may, one thing is clear enough. In the course of evolving an imaginary country (which at first merely diverted him from his grief, but then grew into a self-contained artistic obsession), the widower becomes so engrossed in Thule that the latter starts to develop its own reality, Sineusov mentions in chapter 1 that he is moving from the Riviera to his former apartment in Paris; actually, he moves into a bleak palace on a remote northern island. His art helps him to resurrect his wife in the disguise of Queen Belinda, a pathetic act which does not let him triumph over death even in the world of free fancy. In chapter 3 she was to die again, killed by a bomb meant for her husband, on the new bridge across the Egel, a few minutes after returning from the Riviera. That is about all I can make out through the dust and debris of my old fancies.
A word about K. The translators had some difficulty about that designation because the Russian for “king,” korol, is abbreviated as “Kr” in the sense it is used here, which sense can be rendered only by “K” in English. To put it rather neatly, my “K” refers to a chessman, not to a Czech. As to the title of the fragment, let me quote Blackburne, Terms & Themes of Chess Problems (London, 1907): “If the King is the only Black man on the board, the problem is said to be of the ‘Solus Rex’ variety.”
Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S. P. D
iaghilev (1872–1929), remains one of my favorite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises. I do not remember the details of poor Adulf’s death, except that he was dispatched, in some horrible, clumsy manner, by Sien and his companions, exactly five years before the inauguration of the Egel bridge.
Freudians are no longer around, I understand, so I do not need to warn them not to touch my circles with their symbols. The good reader, on the other hand, will certainly distinguish garbled English echoes of this last Russian novel of mine in Bend Sinister (1947) and, especially, Pale Fire (1962); I find those echoes a little annoying, but what really makes me regret its noncompletion is that it promised to differ radically, by the quality of its coloration, by the amplitude of its style, by something undefinable about its powerful underflow, from all my other works in Russian. The present translation of “Ultima Thule” appeared in The New Yorker, April 7, 1973.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
THE ASSISTANT PRODUCER
“The Assistant Producer” is from Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
“THAT IN ALEPPO ONCE …”
“ ‘That in Aleppo Once …’ ” is from Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
A FORGOTTEN POET