Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977
Page 26
CC, 2 pp.
Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, N.Y., USA.
February 3, 1959
Dear Miss Gillmor,
I am sending you today, by Railway Express, my translation of EUGENE ONEGIN, with commentaries—eleven folders, or volumes, in all. You will find a Table of Contents at the beginning of vol. 1. The Index, now in three shoe boxes, is not quite ready; it and a brief bibliography (explaining some abbreviations in my text) will be added later.1
I realize that a number of pages are smudgy and messy, but they are legible, and I did not want to delay matters by having them tran scribed for the third or fourth time. You will also note that the first three chapters of the translation, the Introduction in vol.i, and the first hundred pages of the Chapter One Commentary have been edited (by a very able person at the Cornell University Press, before I withdrew the thing from them).
The bibliographical descriptions at the end of the Introduction will be carefully rechecked at the Houghton Library where all three first editions are represented. I also see that I shall have to repeat in vol.3, p. 160, the text of all Pushkin's own notes to E.O., which are distributed throughout my Commentary, at the lines to which they refer.
In vol. 4, disregard the red and green underscorings (my Index-maker's checks, now transferred to my second copy).
A few remarks: I use square brackets [] for my own additions within texts, and broken brackets <> to frame Pushkin's deletions in his drafts.
In the course of his work, he indiscriminately uses the terms Canto and Chapter but settles for Chapter in the published form; I have followed him. My notes are referred to by the Chapter, Stanza and Line (e.g., One, I, 1) to which they apply. When quoting verses in the original (transcription), I use accent marks; but this is done solely to help foreign readers in the matter of stress and scanning; no such accents are used by Russians in Russian script or print, and I generally omit them if the word is not part of a poem. I use capitals at the beginning of lines when giving a transcription of the original poem, or when retaining its rhythm and rhyme in translation; otherwise—no (my translation of E. O. does not render its rhymes).
I would like, if possible, to have my copious commentaries appear as footnotes (even if they do rise above sea level; the text can swim).
The Partisan Review is bringing out Chapter One (with a minimum of notes—about one page or so).2
I hope that the random observations in this letter will be of assistance to your editor, and I will readily comply with any special preferences your Press may have in the matter of punctuation, capitalization, italization and so forth.
I am absolutely delighted that you have decided to publish my book. I shall be in dithers until you tell me that the MS has safely arrived. May I ask you to acknowledge its receipt? I understand that your decision is final and am looking forward to the signing of an agreement.
It was so pleasant to talk to you on the phone.
With best wishes,
Very truly yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: WALTER J. MINTON
CC, 1 p.
Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, NY.
February 6, 1959
Dear Walter,
I have just thought of an interesting little scheme.
As I explained in my essay appended to your edition of LOLITA, I had written a kind of pre-LOLITA novella in the autumn of 1939 in Paris. I was sure I had destroyed it long ago but today, as Véra and I were collecting some additional material to give to the Library of Congress, a single copy of the story turned up. My first movement was to deposit it (and a batch of index cards with unused American LOLITA material) at the L. of C., but then something else occurred to me.
The thing is a story of 55 typewritten pages in Russian, entitled Volshebnik ("The Enchanter"). Now that my creative connection with LOLITA is broken, I have re-read Volshebnik with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead scrap during my work on LOLITA. It is a beautiful piece of Russian prose, precise and lucid, and with a little care could be done into English by the Nabokovs. Therefore I wonder if you would be interested in publishing THE ENCHANTER somewhen, at a favorable moment—perhaps in a limited numbered edition at a rather steep price (but that would be for you to decide).1
Tell me how does this idea strikes you.
Sincerely,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: F. J. PLOTROW1
CC, 1 p.
c/o Putnam's Sons
210 Madison Ave.
New York 16, NY.
March 5, 1959
Dear Mr. Piotrow,
Your letter of February 24 has been forwarded to me in New York where I am spending a fortnight before leaving for the west. In reply to your inquiry I would like to suggest the following sources:
Russian newspapers and reviews of the period immediately following March 28, 1922 - such as Rul, Posledniya Novosti, Russkaya Mïsl', Sovremennïya Zapiski etc.
The new (unfinished) Brokhaus-Efron Encyclopedia of 1914, which has a short biography of my father.
His own articles in Rech' (especially those on the pogrom of Kishinev (1909), the Beilis case) and in Pravo.
His own description (published as a pamphlet) of his confinement in the Krestî prison (1908).
His description of a mission to England in which he took part in 1914.
My memoir Speak, Memory (Victor Gollancz, 1953, I believe).
I hope this may be of help to you.
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: PYKE JOHNSON, JR.
CC, 1 p.
Hotel Windermere
666 West End Ave.
New York 25, NY.
March 15, 1959
Dear Mr. Johnson,
Many thanks for sending me the designs for jacket and title page of the Collected Poems.1
I like the two colored butterflies on the jacket but they have the bodies of ants, and no stylization can excuse a simple mistake. To stylize adequately one must have complete knowledge of the thing. I would be the laughing stock of my entomological colleagues if they happened to see these impossible hybrids. I also want to draw your attention to the fact that nowadays butterflies are being displayed on birthday cards, lampshades, frocks, curtains, candy boxes, wrapping paper and all kinds of ads.
Anyway, the body should look as in the sketch I am enclosing, and not the way they look in your artist's drawing, and the wings should be attached not to the abdomen but to the thorax. I like the texture and tints of these two insects, and the lettering is admirable.
Now, turning to the title-page butterfly, its head is that of a small tortoise, and its pattern is that of a common Cabbage White butterfly (whereas the insect in my poem is clearly described as belonging to a group of small blue butterflies with dotted undersides), which is as meaningless in the present case as would be a picture of a tuna fish on the jacket of Moby Dick. I want to be quite clear and frank: I have nothing against stylization but I do object to stylized ignorance.
I suggest therefore either of two courses: i) Not to have any butterflies, or any pictures, at all or 2) To provide the insects depicted with butterfly bodies and butterfly heads and (in the case of the title-page butterfly) with a different pattern.
If you look up my correspondence with Jason regarding the Pnin jacket, you will note into what hideous trouble the otherwise excellent artist got in his first sketch. I think there were some fourteen mistakes.
Sincerely,
PS. I am enclosing your two sketches and my explanations of structures and patterns.
TO: ENCOUNTER
PRINTED LETTER1
New York
Vladimir Nabokov (who congratulates ENCOUNTER'S first five codecrackers, listed below) writes:
"The first letters of the last paragraph of The Vane Sisters (ENCOUNTER, March, p. 10) form a phrase if read consecutively. Here is how it works:
I Could Isolate, Consciously, Li
ttle. Everything Seemed Blurred, Yellow-Clouded, Yielding Nothing Tangible. Her Inept Acrostics, Maudlin Evasions, Theopathies—Every Recollection Formed Ripples Of Mysterious Meaning. Everything Seemed Yellowly Blurred, Illusive, Lost.
The coded message is:
ICICLES BY CYNTHIA. METER FROM ME, SYBIL.
"The implication is that the ghost of Cynthia, who had been such a good painter of frost and thaw, (see p. 6, end of section 3) supplied the brilliant icicles which the narrator saw on the first page of the story, just before he learned that Cynthia was dead. On the same Sunday, a little later, he noticed the strange ruddy umbra cast upon the snow by a parking meter; this came from dead Sybil.
"Unless the acrostic is as accidental as ATOM in Shakespeare's sonnet (p. 9), Cynthia has proved the correctness of her theory (described on p. 6). My difficulty was to smuggle in the acrostic without the narrator's being aware that it was there, inspired to him by the phantoms. Nothing of this kind has ever been attempted by any author...."
A prize of one guinea each is being sent to Philip Gabriel (Tadworth), Alan R. Smith (London), L. F. T. Smith (Cambridge), Mrs. T. M. Schmoller (West Drayton), and The Rev. M. B. Sewell (Llandeilo).
TO: LIFE INTERNATIONAL
CC, 1 p.
New York
April 2, 1959
Dear Sir,
May I ask you to print this letter in the next issue of Life International?
There are two little errors in your fascinating account of me and Lolita.1 In the photograph (p.64) showing my brother and me in boyhood he is on the left and I am on the right, and not vice versa as the caption says. And on p.68 I am described as being "startled ... and indignant" when my Parisian agent informed me that the Olympia Press wanted "to add Lolita to its list": I certainly was neither "startled" nor "indignant" since I was only interested in having the book published—no matter by whom.2
Yours faithfully,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: PYKE JOHNSON, JR.
CC, 1 p.
Hotel Windermere
666 West End Avenue
New York 25
April 15, 1959
Dear Mr. Johnson,
Thanks for sending me the designs. The title-page butterfly is now charming—a very natural and stylish little lep in comfortable surroundings. The binding-design swallowtail lacks antennae but otherwise is presentable. The jacket is well drawn but the choice of models (two popular European insects, the Galatea Marbled White and the Machaon Swallowtail) is not apt, and the whole arrangement looks like the jacket of some popular insect book for young collectors. I beg you to give up the idea of a lepidopterological jacket. Let us have it quite plain, with no drawings at all, or perhaps just a duplicate of the title-page lep.
I also thank you for your letters received this morning. I am glad the unfortunate W. &W. business is about to be settled.1
As to the division of foreign-rights royalties I must confess that I was under the impression that our agreements reserved 25% to Doubleday for acting as my agents or representatives. I am very much surprised that additional agents and agent fees are involved.
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
PS. Now is the time to run a big ad of PNIN and the DOZEN together.
TO: PROF. GLEB STRUVE1
TL, I p. Hoover Institution.
General Delivery
Sedona, Arizona
3 June 1959
Dear Gleb Petrovich,
My unconditional thanks for sending your interesting and very clearly constructed article. "First of all and before anything else" (as Lenin used to put it) I would like to clear away some obstructions and snow-covered potholes between my world and yours. I cannot understand how you, with your taste and experience, could have been carried away by the turbid Sovietophile torrent bearing the corpselike, mediocre, false, and completely anti-liberal Doctor Zhivago. Ceci dit, let me say that I valued very highly your remarks about the Russian language of our dear Edmund.2 At present my wife and I are in a charming canyon near Flagstaff, where I am collecting butterflies. I have also completed my translation of The Song of Igor's Campaign, with comments, to be published by Random House (without the collaboration of the unacceptable Roman Jakobson), and have edited Invitation to a Beheading in my son's English translation. (This splendid book has, of course, nothing in common with Kafka.)3
There is something else I wanted to tell you some time ago, but somehow never got around to. I read somewhere once your account of Ivanov's4 attack on me in Chisla. In your capacity of literary historian you may be interested in knowing that the only grounds for this attack were the following: Madame Odoevtsev5 had sent me her book (I don't recollect its title—Winged Love? Wing of Love? Love of a Wing?), with the inscription "Thank you for King, Queen, Knave" (i.e., thank you for having written KQK, since, of course, I had not sent her anything). I panned that novel of hers in Rul'. That demolition provoked Ivanov's revenge. Voilà tout. Apart from this, I assume he had gotten wind of an epigram I had written for Khodasevich's album:
"You could not find in all of Grub Street
a rogue to match him vile enough!"
"Whom do you mean—Petrov? Ivanov?
No matter ... Wait, though—who's Petrov?"
I was really flabbergasted by Shmelyov's6 letter (either in Mostt or Opïtï), demanding mention in print of the fact that he had been visited by Foma Mann.7
Gleb Petrovich, why don't you write a scholarly analysis of the incredibly rubbishy Pasternak "translations" of Shakespeare (my hands are itching, but we still hang together on the golden trapeze of the bestseller list)?8
While we were in New York we had a visit from Feltrinelli bearing a bunch of roses.
From here we shall go on to California. I hope to see you there.
With cordial greetings to you and yours,
V. Nabokov9
TO: PETER MROSOVSKY1
CC, 1 p.
Sedona, Ariz.
June 6, 1959
Dear Peter,
It was good to hear from you again. Your letter was forwarded to this canyon in Arizona where my wife and I are collecting butterflies. We spent some time in the Big Bend National Park, Texas which I think is not far from a former stamping ground of yours. It was interesting to read about your large family. We have only one son who is 25 now and just under 6'5". He finished Harvard with honors in 1955 and has been since then preparing for a singing career: he has an admirable bass voice. He is also a successful mountaineer, skier and translator. Some years ago he and I published a translation of Lermontov's A Hero of our Time, and this year he translated one of my Russian novels (Priglashenie na Kazn'), which Putnam will bring out as Invitation to a Beheading in September. It is very amusing that you mentioned poems because I do have a little volume of verse which Doubleday is publishing this month. By another pleasant coincidence, we intend to go to Italy, Véra, Dmitri and I, sometime in the fall. We shall also visit Paris and London. Dmitri plans a year of studies in Milan.
For the last ten years I have been lecturing every spring on Joyce's Ulysses which you were the first to bring to my attention forty years ago.
Best regards. Let's meet soon.
Yours,
TO: JASON EPSTEIN
CC, 1 p.
General Delivery
Sedona, Arizona
June 6, 1959
Dear Jason,
My Song of Igor's Campaign is now finished—neatly typed out and ready to be mailed. However, before sending it to you I would like to say this:
The work consists of a foreword (18 pp. typescript) explaining the discovery of the Slovo and describing its structure. This is followed by an Index of the princes, a genealogical chart and a map. Next comes The Song itself (the pagination of The Song in print should correspond exactly to the pages of the typescript, 44 pp.). This is followed by a Commentary including notes to the Foreword and notes to The Song, in all 74 pp.
The further the work advanced the clea
rer it became that it is a book in itself which cannot be combined with that kind of second half that we had planned. That second half, the translation of the short poems of Pushkin, Tyutchev and others, would throw the book completely out of balance because it would necessarily lack the copious notes the first half has.
Seeing that the second half was supposed to cover the entire cen tury of Russia's renaissance in poetry the commentary should have taken at least twice as many pages as that on The Song.
Since I cannot think of doing it now, and since the now completed book has turned out to be different from the "anthology" you and I envisaged, you are free, of course, to say you do not want it, and in that case I shall immediately return the advance.1
I hope all is well with you and Barbara. We shall stay here for another fortnight (see address given above). This is a beautiful green and cool canyon where we have a comfortable little chalet.
Véra joins her greetings to mine.
Sincerely,
PS. I hope Jackie liked the Smokies bear.
TO: SATURDAY REVIEW
TLS, 1 p.
Sedona, Ariz.
June 19, 1959
Re: Belles-Lettres, S.R. of June 20th, 1959, p.20.
Sir,
If Mr. Robert Payne could compare Mr. Boris Paternak's "translations" from Shakespeare with the original text, he would discover for himself (what Sovietophile propaganda has obscured) that these are as vulgar, inept, and full of howlers, as any of the versions from Tolstoevski concocted by Victorian hacks. One cannot help doubting, however, that Mr. Payne is qualified to discuss these matters since he still does not know the difference between mir (MHpT>