Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977
Page 42
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: ARYE LEVAVI1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux
December 31, 1970
Dear Sir,
I wish to thank you and your Government very warmly for inviting my wife and me to visit Israel. We shall be delighted to do so. Would April 1972 be an acceptable time? The reason we must wait till 1972 is that we have to go this spring on a business trip to New York for the opening of a musical made of one of my novels.
I would be happy to give one or two readings of my works, I would enjoy visiting museums, libraries and universities, and I would like to take advantage of this wonderful occasion to do some butterfly hunting.
I would be very pleased to discuss matters at your convenience, particularly if you and Mrs. Levavi happened to be again in Montreux.
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: TIME
PRINTED LETTER1
Sir: I find highly objectionable the title of your piece "Profit Without Honor," [Dec. 21] on the musical adaptation of Lolita, as well as your sermonet on scruples that I once happened to voice concerning its filming. When cast in the title role of Kubrick's neither very sinful nor very immoral picture, Miss Lyon was a well-chaperoned young lady, and I suspect that her Broadway successor will be as old as she was at the time. Fourteen is not twelve, 1970 is not 1958, and the sum of $150,000 is not correct.
Vladimir Nabokov
Montreux, Switzerland
TO: SAMUEL ROSOFF1
ALS (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux
28 January 1971
Dear Mulya,2
Thanks for your nice, slightly melancholy letter and for the copy of my thirty-four-year-old missive to you. Rereading it, I noticed that two or three details had already vacated the cells of memory where they had been aging, but, on the other hand, remembered with a fresh, unexpected sensation the last name of our pleasant, curly schoolmate, who had remained nameless in my 1937 letter: Fridman! Thus work our strange, wondrous internal beehives.
I was saddened to hear of your wife's illness. Also by the news that you do not plan to come to Europe again. I have, however, gotten an official invitation to visit Israel from your ambassador, who called on us, so perhaps next year or so we shall see both you as a venerable old man, and your country's spring butterflies. Last year we did our hunting in Sicily.
Things are unchanged here since our Zermatt meeting nine years ago. Mityusha is singing in America. I am writing a new book. A collection of my poems (Russian and English) and chess problems is being published3—I'll send it. I have transmitted a copy of the letter you sent to the diligent and indefatigable Field.
I embrace you and Véra sends greetings.
Vladimir Nabokov4
TO: ARTHUR CROOK1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
February 1, 1971
Dear Mr. Crook,
I thank you for your letter of January 21.
A deluge of work prevents me from undertaking to write the article about comparative immortality which you ask me for. Moreover I would not care to refer to living authors and even less, to list only my own books. Finally, when I think that such utter trash as Galsworthy's is being enthusiastically resurrected, the entire matter loses even the faint flush of illusion it might have had.
Yours faithfully,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: PROF. JOHN KENNETH SIMON1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
February 15, 1971
Dear Mr. Simon,
Many thanks for your reprint from Modern Language Notes, Vol. 83, No. 4, May, 1968, with the interesting item at the foot of page 546.
I do not remember having ever read anything by Valéry Larbaud—even in my youth when I absorbed a lot of contemporaneous French stuff. The possibility of the lines you quote having somehow stuck in my brain since the late Twenties is, of course, out of the question: from my Pushkin studies I know that the most spectacular parallel readings do not always meet at the points where we find them; but Larbaud's list of Dolores diminutives ("Des prénoms féminins," Oeuvres complètes, 1950, pp. 189–201) certainly does resemble rather eerily the very rhythm of the passage (written in 1949) in the beginning of my Lolita.2 But who, au fond, is your "aficionado"? Humbert? My reader?
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: ARYE LEVAVI
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
1820 Montreux, Palace Hotel
February 28, 1971
Dear Mr. Levavi,
I find it embarrassing to write this letter, especially after all the kindness and attention you showed me. I can only explain the making, remaking, and unmaking of my mind in relation to your Government's invitation by the highly complicated life I am leading. Such matters as the redeepening shadow of a business trip to America, where the LOLITA musical is undergoing awful difficulties, or the nightmare prospect of having to check the French translation of my huge ADA right at the time when I would have liked to be in your country, and various other worries, may prevent me from visiting Israel this year. I believe that my first reaction to your invitation was the correct one. This is a muddled year for me, and it is wiser that I apologize now than cancel our visit at the very last moment.
We certainly hope to come to Israel, unofficially, before I am too decrepit to chase butterflies!
Cordially yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: MICHAEL WALTER
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
April 14, 1971
Dear Mr. Walter,
I thank you for Barcant's Butterflies of Trinidad and Tobago1 which I found here on my return from a trip to S. Portugal.
The photographs are good and, generally speaking, the book should be of considerable help to the butterfly hunter in those parts. Too much stress, however, is laid on "habitat" and "rarity" (and even "semi-rarity") of numerous strays, or chance colonies founded by strays of species that come from the mainland where those species are common. In itself Barcant's work is very amateurish, the style is trivial and redundant, and the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of the material, in the text and on the plates, is an absolute nightmare. Among obvious blunders I note : on p. 210, P barcanti should be P. barcanti Tite, not "P barcanti sp. nov.", and on p. 229, N. maravalica should be N. maravalica Seitz, not "N. maravalica sp. nov."
I continue to be distressed by the illiterate vogue of omitting the names of genus-describers—and this not because my own name is omitted (in the case of Echinargus Nabokov to which I assigned huntingtoni, p. 84, which I was the first to dissect and figure) but because no taxonomic term is clear and correct unless its author's name is affixed to it. One wonders what the beginner will make of the last paragraph on p. 21, implying, as it does, that Linnaeus is the author not only of the species iphicla but also of the genus Adelpha, which is wrong.
Anyway I read the book with interest and remain gratefully yours.
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: A. C. SPECTORSKY
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
April 14, 1971
Dear Mr. Spectorsky,
I am inflicting upon you some more of my stuff which I have asked Bill Maxwell to forward to you.
Though rotund and self-containing, Solus Rex, first published in Russian in spring 1940, in the last issue (LXX) of the émigré review Sovremennīya Zapiski, Paris, is, or rather was, a chapter in a novel I never finished. 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 somewhat gamey scene that had been marked in the Sovr. Zap. by suspension points (and has pu
t off a later, non-Russian, magazine). Send it back to me if you find it unsuitable, without one quaver of hesitation.1
Axelrod's story in your March issue is superb—up to the silly, and careless, final pages.2
Cordially yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: PROF. GLEB STRUVE
TL, 1 p. Hoover Institution.
Montreux, Switzerland
April 15, 1971
Dear Gleb Petrovich,
I read with great interest your information about my Eugene Onegin in Soviet Russia,1 and shall be very grateful to you for photocopies unless it is too much trouble. I hope the translation, once again reworked (and by now ideally interlinear and unreadable),2 will come out before the end of this year. I also hope the Soviet commentators will not scoop my new conjecture that the word zhuchka,3 was born below stairs of Zhuzhu and Bizhu,4 i.e., the names of the masters' lapdogs. As to the "Queen of Spades," in the early fifties my wife obtained from Germany a microfilm copy of Lamotte's tale5 and identified some amusing coincidences (as well as enormous discrepancies, of course) between it and Pushkin's short story.
You have either received, or will receive before the end of the month, my Poems and Problems, and, upon publication in the fall, my Glory, alias The Exploit, in a superb translation by Dmitri.
Oh yes, in regard to your excellent article about A. Turgenev,6 I take the liberty of offering a tiny criticism: the nickname "Aeolian Harp" referred not to a burp but to a borborygmus in the Turgenev bowels.
I hope you are feeling better, and wish you a pleasant trip to Toronto.
Greetings to you and to your wife from me and from V.E.
I shake your hand.
Yours,
V. Nabokov7
TO: MICHAEL WALTER
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
April 16, 1971
Dear Mr. Walter,
Your very charming note of March 25, with a copy of Dr. Higgins' response to my correction, reached me only to-day in a batch of correspondence that had gone to look for me in Algarve and has now wandered back to Montreux.
Entomologists are the most gentle people on earth—until a taxonomic problem crops up : it then transforms them into tigers. In the present case I can only repeat that the type locality of the butterfly described as aurelia by Nickerl in 1850 is "Böhmen". The fact that the type locality of the same butterfly under another, much earlier but invalid name (parthenie Borkhausen 1788) is Erlangen, a hundred kilometers W. from the Bohemian border seems to me irrelevant. It is not a question of library but of logic. A "first reviser" may and should assign a definite locality to a species that has been given none, or only a very vague general region, in the original description; but "Böhmen" is definite enough, and if the reviser wants to pin down the locus, he stakes off his moor or mountainside in W. Czechoslovakia and not in Bavaria.
I feel that all this exciting lepidopterological correspondence passing through your kind hands will finally infect you with the aurelian madness! The best stuff for a butterfly net is marquisette.
Yours sincerely,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: BUD MACLENNAN
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux, April 27, 1971
Palace Hotel
Dear Miss MacLennan,
I received today five copies of the Penguin Books Great Britain edition of ADA. Upon examining them I discovered that in only one the miserable misprint on page 257 (the "she was pregnant" of the Penguin Open Market edition) had been properly changed to the correct
he was pregnant.
In the four other copies the last line on p. 257 still remains the meaningless "she was pregnant" instead of the correct
he was pregnant.
You will remember that Penguin Books undertook to eliminate this printer's blunder. I am greatly distressed by its still being there and am returning the four defective copies. Could you please insist that Penguin fulfill their obligation and destroy these and all other existing domestic edition copies which still harbor on p. 257 the wretched "she was pregnant" instead of the correct
he was pregnant.
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: PROF. RICHARD PIPES1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux, Palace Hotel
May 11, 1971
Dear Professor Pipes,
Your splendid Introduction to my father's "The Provisional Government"2 touched me greatly. I wish to tell you how infinitely gratifying it is to me to find in it this particular approach to Russian history at the revolutionary period. Few, indeed, are the foreign scholars who understand so penetratingly the terrible betrayal of the cause of liberty in the deepest sense of the word engendered on principle by the earliest Bolshevists.
I am really most happy to have your wise and sympathetic Introduction head the English translation of my father's memoir.
Yours very cordially,
Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's replies on a list of questions submitted by Alden Whitman in 1971.
DENNIS DONAGUE1
CC, 1 p.
Montreux, Palace Hotel
May 11, 1971
Dear Mr. Donague,
I would like you to know what satisfaction and delight your English edition of my father's The Provisional Government gave me. Besides obvious filial feelings I also experienced deep gratification at seeing historical truth so authoritatively presented at a time when totalitarian politics are allowed to invade a great part of the globe. The worth of the publication is enhanced by its being brought out by the press of a great university.
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: ANDREW FIELD
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux, Palace Hotel
11-V-71
I was acutely aware, dear Andrew, upon re-reading the Sologub1 poems you kindly sent me how much I always admired parts of that Curate's Egg. A number of lines in the Palach are indeed first-rate—little musical storms blowing through this or that strophe; but there are also unacceptable neuklyuzhesti in many lines, and a quite hideous error of pronunciation in line 29: "scaffold" is pomóst, not the impossibly provincial—or simply wrong—pómost. It is really remarkable how many poets of our day, including Blok, Annenski, Mandelshtam, Hodasevich, Gumilyov, Shishkov, Bunin, and of course Pasternak, allowed vulgarisms and downright blunders to disfigure their best verse. One day I'll list and discuss examples.
I am leaving tomorrow for the south of France so that your suggestion about Struve cannot possibly be followed up at this moment.
I have just written Pipes and Donague.
Your appalling Kuz'min1 has been mailed to you today by registered mail.
Cordially yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: DMITRI NABOKOV
HOLOGRAPH PS TO VÉRA NABOKOV LETTER
Tourtour, Var, France
31 May 1971
I, too, embrace my dear and also unique one. I walk a great deal here and write a great deal. The afternoons are always gloomy. Five stories have already been placed in magazines but the royalties will not go for boats of any kind!1 The Tourtour food is very rich.
I send you a kiss
P2
TO: GEORGE WEIDENFELD
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
June 30, 1971
Dear George,
I was sorry to have been absent when you telephoned. There is something important I have been nursing. Here it is: I am not very happy, as you may have guessed, about the sales of my books in England. And the more I think of it the more convinced I become that this is in a large measure due to a lack of publicity. ADA, for instance, was practically hushed down by your advertising department. MARY, which sold sweetly in the US and is now a bestseller in Italy, was never given a fair start in England. I have asked McG-H. to show you the correcte
d proof of GLORY, but I must insist that it be given some glorious advertising. I want you to give some thought to this. Whether you include a publicity budget in the contract or simply list in a letter what you undertake to do for GLORY is not essential but I must know exactly where I stand. I am royally indifferent to nincompoop reviews in the British papers but am commercially sensitive to publicity supplied by my publishers.
Yours ever,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: TIME
PRINTED LETTER1
Sir: People writing about words should never use dictionaries that "come to hand" ("an old Webster's," or the practically useless Random House compilation), as does Mr. John Skow [June 14] in checking my "caprifole" (not "caprifoli," as absurdly quoted). Oldish (1957) unabridged Webster does list "caprifole" and this happens to be the only exact translation of Russian zhimolost' (the Lonicera of science), since the usual term honeysuckle is also applied to a number of sweetsmelling plants belonging to other genera (Banksia, Azalea, etc.).2