The Feud

by Alex Beam

  Maria recalled that Pushkin wrote “some charming verses” about the seaside idyll. Nabokov distrusts her memory because she gets her own age wrong. He proceeds to investigate Maria’s older sister Ekaterina (“splendid-looking, goddess-like and proud”) as the Lady of the Sea. In 1820 Pushkin spent three weeks in the Crimean village of Gurzuf, where Ekaterina and her mother were living in a rented seaside palazzo. Nabokov thinks Pushkin alluded to his infatuation with Ekaterina in some lines from “Onegin’s Journey,” the abandoned chapter 7 of an early draft. “The glass shoe does not fit [Maria Rayevski’s] foot,” Nabokov concluded after several pages of textual scholarship. “It may fit Ekaterina’s, but that is a mere guess based on our knowledge of Pushkin’s infatuation with her.”

  Nabokov dismisses with a hand wave a Soviet-era seminar (“heroically meeting amidst the gloom and famine of Lenin’s reign”) that suggests that Pushkin may have dallied in the surf with the Rayevsky girls’ chaperone, or dame de compagnie. Then he advances his strongest candidate, Countess Elizaveta Vorontsova, the wife of the man overseeing Pushkin’s exile in Odessa. Vorontsova was the lover of Alexander Rayevsky, one of Pushkin’s closest friends and the brother of the gorgeous sisters. This Alexander didn’t mind Alexander Pushkin spending time with his mistress, because their relationship threw her husband, the governor-general of the southern province Novorossiya, off the scent. There is an 1834 letter from Pushkin’s friend and confidante, Princess Vera Vyazemskaya, to her husband describing some tripartite Odessa wave dodging with Pushkin and Elizaveta Vorontsova. Later that year Pushkin sent Vera “the stanza I owe you,” which Nabokov strongly suspects to be the famous and beloved verse 33 of chapter 1.

  Whose feet are these?/He thinks he knows: “If the pair of feet chanted in XXXIII does belong to any particular person, one foot should be assigned to Ekaterina Raevski and the other to Elizaveta Vorontsov,” Nabokov solomonically concludes. Then, after fifteen dense pages of occasionally lyrical scholarship, he says he hates “prototyping,” or matching up real people and real events to characters and events in fiction. “I object to the prototypical quest as blurring the authentic, always atypical methods of genius,”7 he wrote, adding later that “I am very much against stressing the human-interest angle in the discussion of literary works.”

  The entire “Pedal Digression,” he concluded, is “of no interest whatsoever.”

  * * *

  *1 Brockway is referring to the exchange between Comatas and Lacon in Idyll V, lines 41ff.: “Comatas: ‘When I was buggering you and you were feeling the pain, these she-goats were bleating as they were being penetrated by the he-goat.’ Lacon: ‘When the time comes for your death and burial, you hunched-over thing, may you not get buried any deeper than the depth of that penetration of yours.’ ”

  *2 Russian hardens English h’s to g’s, with occasionally comical results, for example, Gumbert Gumbert and Gubert Gumphrey.

  *3 Judge not lest ye be judged: Hofstadter developed an Onegin fixation, and devoted two years to creating his 1999 translation, unburdened by a deep knowledge of Russian. The translator Richard Lourie had a bit too much fun fricasseeing Hofstadter in The New York Times: “Hofstadter is much given to theories of translation, which to my mind resemble culinary theories of pudding—we all know where the real proof lies. He is constantly dodging the shadow of Nabokov.” Lourie exposed a few of Hofstadter’s ghastly boners, for example, “In matters of the heart still virgin/With hope the lad began to burgeon,” and tossed the “tortured syntax, groan-inducing rhymes and a language unlike that ever spoken by anyone on earth” onto the rubbish heap of literature. “It is flat, your translation,” Lourie concluded, paraphrasing Flaubert to Turgenev on the subject of Pushkin.

  Beware the cyberneticist-turned-translator! Here is part of Hofstadter’s reply to Lourie, published a few weeks later in the Times:

  I write to counter Richard Lourie,

  Who tried to trash my Pushkin verse,

  ‘Eugene Onegin.’ In his fury,

  He called it ‘flat,’ and even worse,

  He claimed my English was deficient,

  My Russian weak and insufficient—

  I have to question why a critic

  Would crudely crow, ‘There’s not a line

  That sings or zings,’ yet quote but nine

  From o’er five thousand. Such acidic

  But feckless words to flout my rhymes

  Did not well serve The New York Times.

  This is an Onegin stanza…of course.

  *4 In his “Commentary,” Nabokov writes that “I am ennuied” was his second choice.

  *5 Whomping on other translators, as we have seen, was a favorite Nabokov pastime. When he and his son, Dmitri, translated Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time for Doubleday in 1958, Nabokov insisted that “this is the first English translation of Lermontov’s novel.” In a footnote he listed five English versions “known to me—all bad.”

  *6 Nabokov’s copyeditor Winer confided to McGuire that “the Arndt condemnation seems mere pique, at someone who beat him to the gun, especially when others award Arndt a prize.” (Inconveniently for Nabokov, Arndt’s Onegin won the Bollingen Prize for Translation.) Literally days before the massive Onegin project went to press, Nabokov tried to shoehorn some anti-Arndt bile into the text. In an antitranslators screed embedded in a note to canto 8.17–18, Nabokov intended to describe Arndt’s work as “this singularly unnecessary production in doggerel verse, full of omissions, additions, distortions and hilarious blunders.” This squib did not make the cut.

  *7 The translator/cyberneticist Hofstadter correctly notes that the Russian word noga and its diminutive nozhky “is a notorious Russian word that means both ‘foot’ and ‘leg,’…therefore, in his sensual paean to sleek pairs of feminine appendages, Pushkin is referring just as plausibly to legs as to feet….I present Pushkin as a ‘leg man’ rather than a foot fetishist.” Hofstadter says a friend has labeled this obsession an “iambic diversion,” a clever play on—never mind.

  Hofstadter is probably wrong about Pushkin being a “leg man.” Witness the testimony of the nineteen-year-old beauty Anna Kern, one of the poet’s great loves: “Among the poet’s singularities was that of having a passion for small feet, which in one of his poems he confessed to preferring to beauty itself.”

  But he is right that one Russian word means both “foot” and “leg.” In a lengthy 2014 essay on translating Anna Karenina (surely ‘Karenin’?), Masha Gessen makes this same point about ruka, the Russian word for “arm” or “hand.” She parts company with translators Constance Garnett, Rosamund Bartlett, and others, when rendering the famous scene in which Anna’s lover, Vronsky, finds her hand repellent. “I happen to think Tolstoy is writing about the arm,” Gessen writes, “one of those two full arms that were so beguilingly set off by the black gown Anna wore to the ball in Part 1, Chapter 22, when she and Vronsky fell in love.”

  *8 Another well-known man of letters shared Goethe and Pushkin’s appreciation of the well-turned ankle: Edmund Wilson. “Like Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet whom he so admired, he was susceptible to the charms of women’s feet,” Wilson’s son, Reuel, recalled in his 1972 memoir. Reuel’s half-sister, Rosalind, noted in her memoir that their father himself had small feet, and that upon meeting his soon-to-be-fourth wife Elena Mumm Thornton, he noticed that “she had prettier hands and feet than Mary McCarthy.” “Kissing Elena’s feet,” Wilson wrote in his journal, “was erotically stimulating to me, and I would put my hand around her foot under the instep and squeeze it with an erotic pulsation.”

  Reviewing Wilson’s journal collection The Thirties for The New York Review of Books, Gore Vidal counted twenty-four references to women’s feet. Alluding to Wilson’s “podophilia,” Vidal wrote, “he could have made a fortune in woman’s footwear.”

  *9 Why not digress? Nabokov’s not-very-appealing habit of rubbishing his competitors and fellow writers also extended to his butterfly writing, to wit thes
e examples from Nabokov’s Butterflies, a beautiful collection of lepidoptery, edited by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle: Ben Leighton’s “incredibly naïve paper”; William Holland’s “Blunderfly Book”; Embrik Strand’s “farcical nomenclatorial methods,” and so on.

  *10 There is a famous passage in Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin in which the pusillanimous professor, whom it is hard not to equate with Mr. N. himself, explains that there never was a glass slipper, “that Cendrillon’s shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur—vair, in French.” A verre-y understandable and amusing confusion, to be sure.

  7

  “He Is a Very Old Friend of Mine”

  The Vladimir Nabokov vs. Walter Arndt contretemps was a bit like the shelling of Fort Sumter, a seemingly faraway and isolated incident that, when viewed in hindsight, signaled the beginning of a protracted war.

  In March 1957, Arndt, a forty-year-old professor of Russian literature at the University of North Carolina, sent a letter to Nabokov in Montreux. The German-born Arndt had much in common with Nabokov. He attended Oxford and, like the Russian émigré, had weathered the midcentury Central European storms. Arndt abandoned his graduate studies in Slavic languages and literature in Warsaw and renounced his German citizenship to fight with the Polish army against the invading Germans in 1939. He was captured, escaped, and made his way to Istanbul, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. In the 1950s he changed careers and earned his doctorate in comparative linguistics and classics from the University of North Carolina, where he taught classics until moving to Dartmouth in 1966.

  Arndt was spending a sabbatical year at Harvard, and had started work on a translation of Eugene Onegin. He didn’t know that Nabokov was close to finishing his mammoth translation-and-annotation project. He remembered noticing, in The Russian Review, the three Onegin stanzas translated by Nabokov, and sent along twelve sample stanzas of his own translation, soliciting “outside judgment, encouragement, or authoritative condemnation.”

  There is no record of a reply.

  Two years later Arndt posted a second letter, this time on UNC stationery. He was planning to publish his Onegin translation, which he enclosed for the master’s perusal. Arndt now understood that Nabokov was working on his own translation, and he asked about specific publication plans. For obvious reasons Arndt’s publisher, Dutton, hoped to avoid direct competition between the two books.

  Less than a week later Vera Nabokova, who handled much of her husband’s correspondence, responded. “You need not be concerned about my husband’s Eugene Onegin book,” she wrote. “It will have actually nothing* in common with yours….He finds your translation full of blunders, the reason for this being your insufficient knowledge of the Russian language as well as of the literary and historic background of the novel.” More scorn followed. (Her asterisk pointed to this footnote: “Except the word “lingenberry”[sic] which you borrowed from him.”1)

  In 1963, amid a blizzard of correspondence passing between New York City and Switzerland, the Bollingen Foundation sent Nabokov a clipping of an ad for Arndt’s Onegin, asking if he would like to see it. “Yes, I would like to see the ‘brilliant’ translation of Walter Arndt—whoever that is,” Nabokov answered, and this time he paid very close attention indeed. A few months later he published a devastating takedown of Arndt’s Onegin in The New York Review of Books.

  At the beginning Nabokov needed to say why he was attacking a rival translation so close to his own publication date, just a few months in the future. He had resolved to “master my embarrassment” and perform a public service, he explained: “Something must be done, some lone, hoarse voice must be raised, to defend both the helpless dead poet and the credulous college student from the kind of pitiless and irresponsible paraphrast whose product I am about to discuss.”

  There follow several thousand words of vintage Nabokovia: the airy dismissal of Arndt’s years of work (“twisting some five thousand Russian iambic tetrameters [into] similarly rhymed English…is a monstrous undertaking”); the vitriol (“sustained stretches of lulling poetastry and specious sense”); the condescension (“anything too far removed from [Hi-how-are-you-I’m-fine] becomes a pitfall”); the inevitable dyageddit? pun (“the meager fare…becomes a Gargarndtuan feast”); the unintended malapropism (“which, as boners go, is a kind of multiple fracture”); and, of course, boyish one-upmanship, the homage that pedantry pays to erudition. Nabokov scores Arndt for misidentifying “racemose bird cherry” as “alder,” but notes that “the harmful drudges who compile Russian-English dictionaries have at least, under cheryomuha, ‘black alder,’ i.e. ‘alder buckthorn,’ which is wrong, but not as wrong as Arndt’s tree.”*1

  Nabokov conveniently ignored Arndt’s gracious acknowledgment of his aid in the preface (“Several emendations were suggested by Vladimir Nabokov’s criticism,” apparently referring to Vera’s scathing letter), but he could not ignore the fact that Arndt’s smooth, rhyming translation had won the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize. Bollingen as in the same foundation that was underwriting his Onegin. A richly undeserved reward, Nabokov assured his New York Review readers. He named the selection committee of Harvard and Yale professors, then added: “One cannot help wondering if any of the professors really read this readable work”—“readable” being a Nabokovian insult, akin to “workmanlike”—“or the infinitely great poem of their laureate’s victim.”*2

  The Fort Sumter–ish rule governing these low-stakes literary skirmishes is: Always return fire. Thus ensued one of those prissy, overdetermined exchanges that seem the special province of the New York Review.

  Arndt professed to be unsurprised by Nabokov’s outburst: “All prior invaders of the precinct of Onegin translation have found him coiled at the exit (see his article in Partisan Review, Fall, 1955) and have been dosed, jointly and severally, alive or posthumously, with much the same mixture of arrogance, cuteness, and occasional distortion.”

  One would wish to say that Arndt, a facile writer, a top-drawer scholar, and a clever fellow, gave as good as he got, but that was not the case. Still, if he didn’t show up at this knife fight with a LePage pistol, he hadn’t come unarmed either. Arndt pointed out that Nabokov cut plenty of corners when he tried to Anglicize the Onegin stanza in The Russian Review; it comes with the territory. Arndt displayed the kind of haut-en-bas didacticism so favored by New York Review polemicists when he suggested that Nabokov, “while not perhaps trained in linguistics or phonometrics,” should know that English words like “power” and “fire” can scan as one, two, or one-and-a-half syllable words, depending on usage, especially in poetry.

  Arndt argued that Nabokov, “with the brand of fairness peculiar to him,” was having entirely too much fun at his expense. He was right. He countered the master’s nastiness with a tempered promise: “The therapeutic portions of Mr. N.’s fervid physic will also be gratefully embodied, with acknowledgment, in any second edition.”

  They were. In subsequent editions Arndt graciously acknowledged Nabokov’s “prodigious two-volume commentary—probably his most enduring, certainly his most endearing, opus.” Arndt wrote that his own work “was superabundantly complemented by the boundless learning of Mr. Nabokov—who did not compliment it, however.”

  Nabokov had his own second bite at the apple when he included his savaging of Arndt in his 1973 collection, Strong Opinions. Of Arndt’s later editions, Nabokov sneered: “This ‘revised’ version still remains as abominable as before.”2

  —

  WHEN EDMUND WILSON and Vladimir Nabokov met for the last time in January 1964 at Montreux, the weather was grim and there was too much drinking, Wilson lamented. Yet “it was all very merry and sparkling.”

  We don’t know if the two men discussed Nabokov’s Onegin, which would appear just six months later. Wilson was very much on the case. He had been sniffing around Bollingen since 1962, according to a letter from a staffer to the editor Anne Warren, preserved in the Na
bokov archive:

  For what it’s worth, Edmund Wilson is dying to review Nabokov’s EO and asked me when it was to be published. It seems that he has already seen some of it in manuscript or something (I didn’t get whether he is a friend of Nabokov or not), and is simply delighted with it. Seems he and N. have similar positions about the philosophy of translating.3

  In May 1963, the Bollingen editor William McGuire informed Nabokov that “we have had an inquiry from the new ‘New York Review of Books’ asking about EO on behalf of Edmund Wilson. It seems that he intends writing a long review for them, and he would like to immerse himself in the matter over the summer.”4

  One can understand his excitement. Just as literature in New York seemed to have ground to a standstill due to a printers’ strike at the Times and the other dailies, the New York Review, edited by Robert Silvers and cofounded by Wilson’s friends Jason and Barbara Epstein, burst onto the scene with a welcome combination of enthusiasm, erudition, and élan.*3 Buoyed by talented writers sick of the hidebound Times Book Review and in some cases willing to write for free, the Review sold out the entire first print run of what The New Yorker called “surely the best first issue of any magazine ever.”

  Nabokov had scotched the idea of sending out prepublication galleys, but McGuire wanted to make an exception for Wilson: “We here feel strongly, however, that we should co-operate with Mr. Wilson. A review by him—in this new organ, which promises to be extremely influential—should have considerable impact. One of our advisers believes that it might increase sales by 500 or more.”

  Nabokov repeated his resolute nyet to sending out anything but completely finished Onegin copy: “I therefore suggest that we wait until we can supply Edmund Wilson with the final version of the complete text, and only in the case of an insuperable craving give him at least vol. 1 (complete and revised), vol. 2 (ditto) and the 1837 Russian text in page proof, all in one batch.”