Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977
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1. Department of Slavic Languages, the University of California, Berkeley.
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2. Marina Tsvetaeva, émigré poet who returned to Russia in 1939 and subsequently committed suicide.
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3. Antonin Ladinsky.
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4. Vladimir Korvin-Piotrovksi.
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1. Slavic scholar who delivered a message to VN from young Russians in Leningrad.
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1. Keys to Lolita.
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2. tesselist: from "tesselate," to form into or adorn with mosaic. DN.
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3. On the acknowledgment page of Keys to Lolita, Proffer used the jocular partial anagram of Nabokov's name "Mark V. Boldino." A penciled note of VN's, presumably a correction for a later edition, reads: "The incompletely anagrammatized name of the person thanked for his 'expert suggestions' (Mark V. Boldino) should have been yours truly Vivian Bloodmark." DN.
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1. Of Viking Press.
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2. PUBDATE CONGERIES CONGENERICALLY COMMANDS CONGRATULATIONS CONJUBILANT CONSENSUS CONJURES CONDIGN COURUSCATIONS BESTNOUSKEM.
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1. The revised edition was published by Bollingen in 1975.
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1. Of Penguin Books, London.
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1. Excerpt from Ada.
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2. The third paragraph of this letter was published with VN's rabbit-butterfly drawing ir the January 1972 issue of Playboy, p. 18.
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1. Puns on titles of works by Henry Miller.
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1. A volume of prose sketches published in 1927.
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1. Of Esquire. VN's message to Esquire about the first words to be spoken on the moon. When published in "Le Mot Juste for the Moon" (July 1969), "I" was emended to "you."
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1. A Medieval Storybook (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), drawings by Alison Mason Kingsbury.
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1. American critic, living in Australia, for whose Nabokpv: His Life in Art (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967) the Nabokovs had supplied much information and numerous corrections. At the beginning of 1968 Field began a bibliography of VN's works, commissioned by VN's new publisher, McGraw-Hill. Later that year Field asked the Nabokovs if they would countenance his writing a biography of VN. Since Field promised that VN would have "the final word" (Field to VN, 25 August 1968), VN agreed.
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2. Photos of places VN knew in Russia.
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1. Vienna newspaper. Letter written in German (translated by Prof. James Hardin).
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1. Department of English, Cornell University. His review of Ada appeared in the 22 May 1969 New York Review of Books-
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2. New York Review of Books (10 July 1969), with Hodgart's reply. Hodgart also sent VN a personal letter on 19 May, explaining that his comment on the Nabokovs "was an extrapolation from Speak, Memory."
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1. Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman."
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1. VN sent progress reports to McGraw-Hill in order to comply with contractual requirements.
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2. Mary, trans. VN and Michael Glenny (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).
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1. A novel. London: Hodder-Fawcett, 1969.
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1. Of Writer's Digest. Polking had offered VN $200 for 2,000 words.
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1. "Philip Oakes Talks to Vladimir Nabokov: Author as Joker," London Sunday Times (22 June 1969). Oakes had requested permission to delete VN's description of Ezra Pound as "a venerable fraud."
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1. Of Wells College Library, Aurora, N.Y.
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1. English drama critic.
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2. On 23 June Tynan invited VN to contribute to a collection of pieces of erotica, "all written for the express purpose of arousing the author's own sexual impulses." This volume did not appear.
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1. "Reactions to Man's Landing on the Moon Show Broad Variations in Opinions" (21 July 1969).
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1. London: Deutsch, 1969.
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1. "Notes to 'Ada' by Vivian Darkbloom" was first published in the 1970 Penguin edition of the novel.
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2. Mary.
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1. Of St. Edward High School, Cleveland, Ohio.
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1. Oscar de Liso of Phaedra, publishers of Nabokov's Quartet and The Waltz Invention.
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2. Transparent Things (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972). VN was referring to the typescript; the printed book had 104 pages of text.
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1. "Backgrounds of Lolita" Triquarterly (Winter 1970). This issue was also published as Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes, ed. Appel and Charles Newman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970)
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2. Lucie Léon Noel, "Playback."
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1. Russian poet Joseph Brodsky who subsequently emigrated to America and won the Nobel Prize in 1987.
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2. Proffer had delivered jeans to Brodsky in VN's name.
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1. Published 12 December 1969.
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1. Editor, Book, World. VN's choices were published in the 7 December 1969 issue.
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1. Of Penguin Books, London.
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1. The Russian poems were printed with facing English translations
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2. Signed with a V and a drawing of an eye.
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1. Véra Nabokov's P.p.s. is in holograph.
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1. Signed with a V and a drawing of an eye.
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1. TriQuarterly (Winter 1970).
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2. A parody of Pnin's style with which the TriQuarterly number concludes; it was written by Prof. W. B. Scott of Northwestern University.
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3. Anniversary Notes by VN (sixteen-page supplement to TriQuarterly, Winter 1970).
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1. This play on author Gore Vidal's name can be translated: "I've seen woes and suffered blows." DN.
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2. Part of a Russian saying, "No down, no feathers"—roughly equivalent to the American expression "break a leg" for good luck before a performance. DN was performing in Colombia. DN.
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3. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Quarry, prey, booty, or spoils.
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3. The noun "hide."
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4. Anniversary Notes. Sergey Rachmaninov had given VN an obsolete cutaway in 1940 to wear at his first summer-school lecture at Stanford University; VN returned it. At roughly the same time Rachmaninov also gave Dmitri Nabokov his first radio, a streamlined Philco portable; that present was lovingly used for many years. DN.
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5. Translated from Russian by Véra Nabokov and DN.
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1. William Gerhardie, British novelist born in St. Petersburg.
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1. Of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
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2. Of a 1971 paperback edition of The Defence.
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1. On picture postcard of Nymphalis antiopa L.
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2. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Of Collins, London.
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2. "Rebel Blue, Byrony White," VN's review (Times Educational Supplement, 23 October 1970) of A Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe, ed. L. G. Higgins.
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1. Acting Chief, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress.
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1. Israeli Ambassador to Switzerland.
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1. Published in the 18 January 1971 issue.
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1. Samuel Rosoff and VN had attended the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg together, and were good friends in boyhood. Rosoff eventually settled in Haifa. Even though circumstances made meetings rare later in their lives, and Rosoff was able to visit the Nabokovs only once in Switzerland, their warm reciprocal affection never diminished. DN.
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2. Diminutive of the Russian form of "Samuel."
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3. Poems and Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).
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4. Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Editor, Times Literary Supplement.
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1. University of Illinois.
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"... Lolita est une petite fille; Lola est en âge de se marier; Dolores a trente ans; Doña Dolores a soixante ans."
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1. By Malcolm Barcant (London: Collins, 1971).
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1. Deemed by Playboy to be beyond the capacities of its readers. Collected in A Russian Beauty.
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2. George Axelrod, "Where Am I Now When I Need Me?"
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1. News of the project reached Soviet scholars before publication, and the translation began to circulate in Russia long before glasnost'. DN.
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2. A jocular reference to VN's explicit intention to make his translation an uncompromisingly literal "crib." DN.
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3. "Small dog."
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4. Joujou and Bijou.
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5. Baron Friedrich La Motte Fouqué (1777–1843), author of Undine and of a Pique-Dame, which, according to VN, might well have been "known to Pushkin (in a French or Russian version) when he wrote his 'Queen of Spades.'" See VN's Commentary on his translation of Eugene Onegin (New York: Bollingen, 1964), Vol. 3, p. 97. DN.
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6. "Alexander Turgenev, Ambassador of Russian Culture in Partibus Infidelium," Slavic Review, 29 (1970), 444–459.
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7. Translated from Russian by Véra Nabokov and DN.
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1. Department of History, Harvard University.
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2. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1971.
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1. Manager, University of Queensland Press.
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1. Fyodor Sologub, pseudonym of Fyodor Teternikov (1863–1927), Russian poet and novelist.
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2. Mikhail Kuz'min (1872–1936), Russian poet.
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1. DN had expressed the intention of using his share of the income from publication of five VN stories he had translated for the acquisition of the first of what was to be a series of racing motorboats. Notwithstanding his (unheeded) warnings, VN followed DN's automobile and boat racing with keen interest, and reproached DN in 1975 for having lost an offshore powerboat race in southern Italy because of a fuel miscalculation. DN.
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Translated from Russian by DN.
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1. Published in the 5 July 1971 issue.
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2. Skow's Time review of Poems and Problems challenged VN's use of "caprifole."
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1. Photographs of the Nabokov home, 47 Morskaya Street, St. Petersburg.
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1. "Rowe's Symbols," New York Review of Books (7 October 1971). Review of William Woodin Rowe's Nabokov's Deceptive World (New York: New York University Press, 1971).
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1. Editor, New York Times Book. Review.
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2. See following letter.
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3. "The Old Magician at Home," New York Times Book Review (9 January 1972).
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1. Published in New York Times Book Review (7 November 1971) with a reply by Wilson.
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1. Of America, a magazine "Published by Jesuits of the United States and Canada."
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1. Of Penguin Books, London.
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1. An attorney in Washington, D.C.
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2. Alan Levy, "Understanding Nabokov—A Red Autumn Leaf Is a Red Autumn Leaf, Not a Deflowered Nymphet" (31 October 1971).
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3. VN did not respond.
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1. Bell was writing a book on Hitler.
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1. Smith, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, was writing his dissertation on VN.
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2. A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (1973).
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1. Associate Editor, Features, Vogue.
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2. Simona Morini, "Vladimir Nabokov Talks About his Travels" (15 April 1972); photographs by Oliviero Toscani.
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1. Published 5 May 1972.
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1. Supervisor and Associate Curator, Division of Lepidoptera and Diptera, Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.
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2. After VN's death in 1977, his unspread and unmounted Montreux collection was given, in
accordance with his wishes, to the Musée Cantonal de Zoologie, Place Riponne 6, Lausanne. More than half of it is now mounted; the remainder is still in preparation. DN.
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1. 1972.
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Esquire editor.
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Esquire (October 1973).
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Esquire (December 1972).
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4. The cover featured "The Impotence Boom" with the photograph of a man studying his lower torso.
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1. Published 22 December 1972.
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1. Of The Saturday Review of the Arts.
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2. The January 1973 issue, which included VN's essay "Inspiration," Lord Snowdon's photos of VN, and critical assessments.
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3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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4. Jorge Luis Borges.
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5. The negative was reversed for the photo of VN in front of the MONTREUX sign.
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6. Reproduction of a painting of Pygmalion embracing his statue of Galatea.
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7. Articles about VN by White, Joseph McElroy, William H. Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, and Simon Karlinsky.
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1. Of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
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2. The excerpt was not published.
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1. President, Brandeis University.
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1. Senior Vice President, McGraw-Hill.
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2. No butterfly book was published. VN had written much of the book on European butterflies in the early 1960s, but for the butterflies-in-art project still had many galleries to visit before beginning to write. DN.
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3. VN did not write this autobiographical work.
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4. Details of a Sunset (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
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5. The Man from the USSR and Other Plays (New York and San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1984).
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6. Lectures on Literature; Lectures on Russian Literature; Lectures on Don Quixote.
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7. Look at the Harlequins! (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
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1. Editor in chief, Bamahaneh magazine, Yaffo, Israel
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1. Of the New York Times Book Review.
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2. Photographer.
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3. Shenker replied on 5 March that VN had not asked him to copyright the interview. Shenker reprinted the interview in Words and Their Masters (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974). VN's first three corrections were made in the book text.