Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  «The handling of French is peculiar», grimly observes Mr. Wilson, and adduces three instances:

  «The name of Rousseau's heroine is», he affirms, «given on one page as Julie and on the next as Julia». This is an absurd cavil since she is named Julie all the thirteen times she is mentioned in the course of the four-page note referring to her (the note to Three: ix: 7), as well as numerous times elsewhere (see Index); but maybe Mr.

  Wilson has confused her with Augustus' or Byron's girl (see Index again).

  The second «peculiar» example refers to the word monde in the world-of-fashion sense copiously described in my note to One: v: 8 (le monde, le beau monde, le grand monde). According to Mr. Wilson it should always appear with its «le» in the translation of the poem. This is an inept practice, of course (advocated mainly by those who, like Mr. Wilson, are insecure and self-conscious in their use of le and la), and would have resulted in saying «le noisy monde» instead of «the noisy monde» (Eight: xxxiv: 12). English writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote «the monde», not «le monde». I am sure that if Mr. Wilson consults the OED, which I do not have here, he will find examples from Walpole, Byron, Thackeray, and others. What was good enough for them is good enough for Pushkin and me.

  Finally, in this peculiar group of peculiar French there is the word sauvage, which according to Mr. Wilson should not have appeared in my rendering of Two: xxv: 5, dika, pechal'na, molchaliva, «sauvage, sad, silent»; but apart from the fact that it has no exact English equivalent, I chose this signal word to warn readers that Pushkin was using dika not simply in the sense of wild or «unsociable but in a Gallic sense as a translation of «sauvage». Incidentally, it often occurs in English novels of the time along with monde and ennui.

  «As for the classics», says Mr. Wilson, «Zoilus should be Zu'ilus and Eol, Aeolus». But the diacritical sign is quite superfluous in the first case (see, for instance, Webster) and «Eol» is a poetical abbreviation constantly cropping up in English poetry. Moreover, Mr, Wilson can find the full form in my Index. I am unable to prevent my own Zoilus from imitating a bright and saucy schoolboy, but really he should not tell me how to spell the plural of «automaton» which has two endings, both correct. And what business does he have to rebuke me for preferring Theocritus to Virgil and to insinuate that I have read neither?

  There is also the strange case of «stuss». «What does N. mean», queries Mr. Wilson, «when he speaks of Pushkin's addiction to stuss? This is not an English word and if he means the Hebrew word for nonsense which has been absorbed into German, it ought to be italicized and capitalized. But even on this assumption it hardly makes sense». This is Mr. Wilson's nonsense, not mine. «Stuss» is the Knglish name of a card game which I discuss at length in my notes on Pushkin's addiction to gambling. Mr. Wilson should really consult some of my notes (and Webster's dictionary).

  Then there is Mr. Nabokov's style. My style may be all Mr. Wilson says, clumsy, banal, etc. But in regard to the examples he gives it is not unnecessarily clumsy, banal, etc. If in translating toska lyubvi Tat'yanu-gonit (Three: xvi: 1), «the ache of love chases Tatiana» (not «the ache of loss», as Mr. Wilson nonsensically misquotes), I put «chases» instead of the «pursues» that Mr. Wilson has the temerity to propose, I do so not only because «pursues» is in Russian not gonit but presleduet, but also because, as Mr. Wilson has not noticed, it would be a misleading repetition of the «pursue» used in the preceding stanza (tebya presleduyut mechty, «daydreams pursue you»), and my method is to repeat a term at close range only when Pushkin repeats it.

  When the nurse says to Tatiana nu delo, delo, ne gnevaysya, dusha moya, and I render it by «this now makes sense, do not be cross with me, my soul», Mr. Wilson in a tone of voice remindful of some seventeenth-century French — pedant discoursing on high and low style, declares that «make sense» and «my soul» do not go together, as if he knows which terms in the nurse's Russian go together or do not!

  As I have already said, many of the recurring words I use (ache, pal, mollitude, and so on) are what I call «signal words», i.e., terms meant, among other things, to indicate the recurrence of the corresponding Russian word. Style, indeed! It is correct information I wish to give and not samples of «correct style». I translate ochen'milo-postupil-nash-priyatel, in the beginning of Four: xviii (which is also the beginning of the least artistic section in Four: xviiixxn), by «very nicely did our pal act», and this Mr. Wilson finds «vulgarly phrased»; but Mr. Wilson stomps in where I barely dare to tread because he is quite unaware that the corresponding Russian phrase is also trite and trivial. There simply exists no other way of rendering that genteel ochen' milo (Pushkin is imitating here a simpering reader), and if I chose here and elsewhere the signal word «pal» to render the colloquial turn of priyateV, it is because there exists no other way of expressing it. «Pal» retains the unpleasant flippancy of priyateV as used here, besides reproducing its first and last letters. PriyateV ViVson would be, for instance, a flippant and nasty phrase, out of place in a serious polemical text. Or does Mr. Wilson really think that the passage in question is better rendered by Professor Arndt? («My reader, can you help bestowing praise on Eugene for the fine part he played with stricken Tanya?»)

  Mr. Wilson's last example in the series pertaining to «bad style» has to do with the end of Seven: xxxn. When rendering the elegiac terms in which Tatiana takes leave of her country home, I had to take into account their resemblance to the diction of Pushkin's youthful elegy addressed to a beloved country place («Farewell, ye faithful coppices», etc.), and also to that of Lenski's last poem. It was a question of adjustment and alignment. This is why I have Tatiana say in a stilted and old-fashioned idiom, «Farewell, pacific sites, farewell, secluded [note the old-fashioned pronunciation of the correspondent uedinennyy] refuge! Shall I see you?» «Such passages», says Mr. Wilson, «sound like the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English». But since those computers are fed only the basic Russian Mr. Wilson has mastered, and are directed by anthropologists and progressive linguists, the results would be his comic versions, and not my clumsy but literal translation.

  Probably the most rollicking part of Mr. Wilson's animadversions is the one in which he offers his own mistranslation as the perfection I should have tried to emulate.

  My rendering of gusey kriklivyh karavan tyanulsya k yugu (Four: xli: 11 and beginning of 12) is «the caravan of clamorous geese was tending southward» but, as I note in my commentary, kriklivyh is lexically «screamy»* and the idiomatic tyanulsya conveys a very special blend of meaning, with the sense of «progressing in a given direction» predominating over the simple «stretching» obtainable from pocket dictionaries (see also note to Seven: iv: 14). Mr. Wilson thinks that in his own version of the coming of winter in Four, part of which I quote in my Commentary with charitably italicized errors, he is «almost literally accurate and a good deal more poetically vivid than Nabokov». The «almost» is very lenient since «loudtongued geese» is much too lyrical, and «stretching» fails to bring out the main element of the contextual tyanulsya.

  [* In revising my translation for a new edition I have changed «clamorous» to the absolutely exact «cronking». ]

  A still funnier sight is Mr. Wilson trying to show me how to translate properly ego loshadka, sneg pochuya, pletyotsya rys'yu kak nibud' (Five: n: 34), which in my literal rendering is «his naggy, having sensed the snow, shambles at something like a trot». Mr. Wilson's own effort, which goes «his poor (?) horse sniffing (?) the snow, attempting (?) a trot, plods (?) through it (?)», besides being a medley of gross mistranslations, is an example of careless English. If, however, we resist the unfair temptation of imagining Mr. Wilson's horse plodding through my trot and, instead, have it plod through Mr. Wilson's snow, we obtain the inept picture of an unfortunate beast of burden laboriously working its way through that snow, whereas in reality Pushkin celebrates relief, not exertions. The peasant is not «rejoicing» or «feelin
g festive», as paraphrasts have it (not knowing Pushkin's use of torzhestvovat''here and elsewhere), but «celebrating» (the coming of winter), since the snow under the sleigh facilitates the little nag's progress and is especially welcome after a long snowless autumn of muddy ruts and reluctant cart wheels.

  Although Mr. Wilson finds my Commentary overdone, he cannot help suggesting three additions. In a ludicrous display of pseudo-scholarship he insinuates that I «seem to think» (I do not, and never did) that the application by the French of the word «goddams» to the English (which 1 do not even discuss) begins in the eighteenth century. He would like me to say that it goes back to the fifteenth century. Why should I? Because he looked it up?

  He also would have liked me to mention in connection with the «pensive vampire» (Three: xii: 8) of Polidori's novelette (1819) another variety of vampire which Pushkin alluded to in a poem of 1834 suggested by Merimee's well-known pastiche. But that vampire is the much coarser vurdalak, a lowly graveyard ghoul having nothing to do with the romantic allusion in Canto Three (1824); besides he appeared ten years later (and three years after Pushkin had finished Eugene Onegin) — quite outside the period limiting my interest in vampires.

  The most sophisticated suggestion, however, volunteered by Mr. Wilson, concerns the evolution of the adjective krasnyy which «means both red and beautiful». May this not be influenced «by the custom in Old Russia, described in Hakluyt's Voyages, of the peasant women's painting large red spots on their cheeks in order to beautify themselves?» This is a preposterous gloss, somehow reminding one of Freud's explaining a patient's passion for young women by the fact that the poor fellow in his self-abusing boyhood used to admire Mt. Jungfrau from the window of a water closet.

  I shall not say much about the paragraph that Mr. Wilson devotes to my notes on prosody. It is simply not worth while. He has skimmed my «tedious and interminable appendix» and has not understood what he managed to glean. From our conversations and correspondence in former years I well know that, like Onegin, he is incapable of comprehending the mechanism of verse — either Russian or English. This being so, he should have refrained from «criticizing» my essay on the subject. With one poke of his stubby pencil he reintroduces the wretched old muddle I take such pains to clear up and fussily puts back the «secondary accents» and «spondees» where I show they do not belong. He makes no attempt to assimilate my terminology, he obstinately ignores the similarities and distinctions I discuss, and indeed I cannot believe he has read more than a few lines of the thing.

  My «most serious failure», according to Mr. Wilson, «is one of interpretation». Had he read my commentary with more attention he would have seen that I do not believe in any kind of «interpretation» so that his or my «interpretation» can be neither a failure nor a success. In other words, I do not believe in the old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism championed by Mr. Wilson that consists of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were «real people». In my commentary I have given examples and made some innocent fun of such criticism (steering clear, however, of any allusion to Mr. Wilson's extraordinary misconceptions in The Triple Thinkers).

  I have also demonstrated the factual effect of Pushkin's characterizations as related to the structure of the poem. There are certain inconsistencies in his treatment of his hero which are especially evident, and in a way especially attractive, in the beginning of Canto Six. In a note to Six: xxviii: 7, I stress the uncanny, dreamlike quality of Onegin's behavior just before and during the duel. It is purely a question of architectonics — not of personal interpretation. My facts are objective and irrefutable. I remain with Pushkin in Pushkin's world. I am not concerned with Onegin's being gentle or cruel, energetic or indolent, kind or unkind («you are simply very kindhearted», says a woman to him quoted in his diary; he is «zloy, unkind», says Mr. Wilson); I am concerned only with Pushkin's overlooking, in the interest of the plot, that Onegin, who according to Pushkin is a punctilious home du monde and an experienced duelist, would hardly choose a servant for second or shoot to kill in the kind of humdrum affair where vanity is amply satisfied by sustaining one's adversary's fire without returning it.

  The actual cause of the encounter is however quite plausible in Pushkin: upon finding himself at a huge vulgar feast (Five: xxxi) so unlike the informal party promised him by Lenski (Four: xlix), Onegin is quite right to be furious with his deceitful or scatterbrained young friend, just as Lenski is quite justified in calling him out for flirting with Olga. Onegin accepts the challenge instead of laughing it off as he would have done if Lenski had chosen a less pedantic second. Pushkin stresses the fact that Onegin sincerely loves the youth but that amour propre is sometimes stronger than friendship. That is all. One should stick to that and not try to think up «deep» variations which are not even new; for what Mr. Wilson inflicts upon me, in teaching me how to understand Onegin, is the old solemn nonsense of Onegin's hating and envying Lenski for being capable of idealism, devoted love, ecstatic German romanticism and the like «when he himself is so sterile and empty». Actually, it is just as easy, and just as irrelevant (yet more fashionable — Mr. Wilson is behind the times), to argue that Onegin, not Lenski, is the true idealist, that he loathes Lenski because he perceives in him the tuture tat swinish squire Lenski is doomed to become, and so he raises slowly his pistol and . . , but Lenski in malignant cold blood is also raising his pistol, and God knows who would have killed whom had not the author followed wisely the old rule of sparing one's more interesting character while the novel is still developing. If anybody takes «a mean advantage», as Mr. Wilson absurdly puts it (none of the principals can derive any special «advantage» in a duel a volonte), it is not Onegin, but Pushkin.

  So much for my «most serious failure».

  All that now remains to be examined is Mr. Wilson's concern for reputations — Pushkin's reputation as a linguist and the reputations of SainteBeuve and others as writers.

  With an intensity of feeling that he shares with Russian monolinguists who have debated the subject, Mr. Wilson scolds me for underrating Pushkin's knowledge of English and «quite disregarding the evidence». I supply the evidence, not Mr. Wilson, not Sidorov, and not even Pushkin's own father (a cocky old party who maintained that his son used to speak fluent Spanish, let alone English). Had Mr. Wilson carefully consulted my notes to One: xxxvni: 9, he would have convinced himself that I prove with absolute certainty that neither in 1821, nor 1833, nor 1836, was Pushkin able to understand simple English phrases. My demonstration remains unassailable, and it is this evidence that Mr. Wilson disregards while referring me to stale generalities or to an idiotic anecdote about the Raevski girls' giving Pushkin lessons in English in a Crimean bower. Mr. Wilson knows nothing about the question. He is not even aware that Pushkin got the style of his «Byronic» tales from Pichot and Zhukovski, or that Pushkin's copying out extracts from foreign writers means nothing. Mr. Wilson, too, may have copied extracts, and we see the results. He complains I do not want to admit that Pushkin's competence in languages was considerable, but I can only reply that Mr. Wilson's notion ot such competence and my notion of it are completely dissimilar. I realize, of course, that my friend has a vested interest in the matter, but I can assure him that although Pushkin spoke excellent eighteenth-century French, he had only a gentleman's smattering of other foreign languages.

  Finally — Mr. Wilson is horrified by my «instinct to take digs at great reputations». Well, it cannot be helped; Mr. Wilson must accept my instinct, and wait for the next crash. I refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views and academic traditions, as he wants me to be. What right has he to prevent me from finding mediocre and overrated people like Balzac, Dostoevski, SainteBeuve, or Stendhal, that pet of all those who like their French plain? How much has Mr. Wilson enjoyed Mme. de StaeTs novels?
Has he ever studied Balzac's absurdities and Stendhal's cliches? Has he examined the melodramatic muddle and phony mysticism of Dostoevski? Can he really venerate that archvulgarian, SainteBeuve? And why should I be forbidden to consider that Chaykovski's hideous and insulting libretto is not saved by a music whose cloying banalities have pursued me ever since I was a curlyhaired boy in a velvet box? If 1 am allowed to display my very special and very subjective admiration for Pushkin, Browning, Krylov, Chateaubriand, Griboedov, Senancour, Kuchelbccker, Keats, Hodascvich, to name only a few of those I praise in my notes, I should be also allowed to bolster and circumscribe that praise by pointing out to the reader my favorite bogeys and shams in the hall of false fame.

  In his rejoinder to my letter of August 26, 1965, in The New York Review, Mr. Wilson says that on rereading his article he felt it sounded «more damaging» than he had meant it to he. His article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation — and that is the last look I shall ever take at the dismal scene.

  Completed on January 20, 1966, and published in February of that year in Encounter. One or two forced peeps did come after that «last look». The essay was reprinted in Nabokov's Congeries, Viking, New York, 1968.

  LOLITA AND MR. GIRODIAS

  From time to time, in the course of the 1960s, there have appeared, over the signature of Mr. Girodias or that of some friend of his, retrospective notes pertaining to the publication of Lolita by The Olympia Press and to various phases of our «strained relations». Those frivolous reminiscences invariably contained factual errors, which I generally took the trouble to point out in brief rejoinders; whereupon, as I detected with satisfaction, certain undulatory motions of retreat were performed by our flexible memoirist. An especially ambitious article, with especially serious misstatements, has now been published by him twice — in Barney Rosset's Evergreen Review (No. 37, September 1965) under the title «Lolita, Nabokov, and I», and in his own anthology (The Olympia Reader, Grove Press, New York, 1965) under the less elegant title of «A Sad, Ungraceful History of Lolita». Since I have religiously preserved all my correspondence with Mr. Girodias, I am able,I trust, to induce a final retraction on his part.