Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Oda

  Satira

  Rosa

  Turman

  Answers in English:

  Shenshin – Fet

  Apukhtin (more likely, as a joke, Opukhtin)

  Romanov (possibly, also as a joke, Nikrasov)

  Nikitin

  Lomonosov

  Ode

  Satire

  Rose

  Tumbler pigeon

  LETTER OF 15 JULY 1926

  Riddle in Russian:

  Волшебные словечки

  Толпа, стойка, чехарда, овчина, гора, щеголь, подагра, бирюза, заноза, Каин, гончая, государь, рама, маяк, сила, Минск.

  Их етих сесьнацати слоф тлебуйця зделять цецирнацать длюгих, снаценье католих: 1) люский писятиль 2) тозе 3) тозе 4) цасть Сфинкся 5) тозе 6) делево 7) пцица 8) цасть дямской одезды 9) двизенье 10) неподзвизность 11) плязник 12) утёс, воз петый Пускиным 13) гелоиня Никлясова 14) маянькое отвельстие. С потьценьем МИЛЕЙШИЙ

  Riddle in English / transliteration:

  Magic Words

  Tolpa, stoyka, chekharda, ovchina, gora, shchogol’, podagra, biryuza, zanoza, Кain, gonchaya, gosudar’, rama, mayak, sila, Minsk.

  (Crowd, counter, leapfrog, sheepskin, mountain, dandy, gout, turquoise, splinter, Cain, whippet, sovereign, frame, lighthouse, force, Minsk.)

  You musht täk zees zekshtain Wödz und tön zem into fortain azers, ze Meanink off witch ees: 1) russisch Rayter 2) ze saym 3) ze saym 4) a Paat off ze Sfinks 5) ze saym 6) a Trea 7) a Böd 8) a Paat off Veemin’s Kloseez 9) Moofemint 10) Immobeelitee 11) Holeedai 12) a Kliff gloreefaid bai Puschkeen 13) Nekrazoff’s Heeroeen 14) a schmoll Houl. Rezpektfulee, DARLINK

  Answers in Russian:

  1. Толстой 2. Чехов 3. Мамин – Сибиряк 4. щека 5. лапа 6. чинара 7. гоголь/сойка 8. подол 9. гонка 10. cтоп/заминка/стойка/поза 11. Пасха 12. Ая – даг 13. Дарья 14. щель

  Answers in Transliteration:

  1. Tolstoy 2. Chekhov 3. Mamin-Sibiryak 4. shcheka 5. lapa 6. chinara 7. gogol’ / soyka 8. podol 9. gonka 10. stop / zaminka / stoyka / poza 11. Paskha 12. Aya-dag 13. Dar’ya 14. shchel’

  Answers in English:

  1. Tolstoy 2. Chekhov 3. Mamin-Sibiryak 4. cheek 5. paw 6. plane tree 7. goldeneye / jay 8. [skirt] hem 9. chase 10. stop / hesitation / hitch / pose 11. Easter 12. Aya-dag 13. Dar’ya 14. chink

  LETTER OF 18 JULY 1926

  Riddle in Russian:

  Волшебные словечки

  Из семи дней недели и из слов: лоно, евреи, Cинай, пародия, требуется составить 13 слов значенье коих:

  1) не делится пополам 2) кустарник 3) мотор 4) властвование 5) что религия берет у энтомологии 6) низложи! 7) Бывает на солнце 8) борец 9) занятие 10) помощь 11) центр 12) часть света 13) части корабля

  Riddle in English / transliteration:

  Magic Words

  Out of the seven days of the week and the words: lono, evrei, Sinay, parodiya, make 13 words with the meanings:

  1) can’t be divided in half 2) shrub 3) engine 4) rule over 5) what religion takes from entomology 6) dethrone! 7) the sun has them 8) fighter 9) undertaking 10) assistance 11) centre 12) part of the world 13) parts of a boat

  Answers in Russian:

  1. нечет 2. тальник 3. ротор 4. царенье 5. воспарение 6. свергни 7. пятна 8. поборник 9. дело 10. субсидия 11. средина 12. Европа 13. реи

  Answers in transliteration:

  1. nechet 2. tal’nik 3. rotor 4. tsarenie 5. vosparenie 6. svergni 7. pyatna 8. pobornik 9. delo 10. subsidiya 11. sredina 12. Evropa 13. rei

  Answers in English:

  1. uneven 2. purple willow 3. rotor 4. reign 5. soaring 6. overthrow 7. spots 8. champion 9. enterprise 10. subsidy 11. middle 12. Europe 13. yard(-arm)s

  Appendix Two: Afterlife

  BRIAN BOYD

  The first person other than Véra herself to be allowed to see any of Nabokov’s letters to her was Andrew Field, who had begun to work on a biography of Nabokov at the end of the 1960s. In January 1971 Nabokov showed Field his letters to his parents and a few of his letters to his wife, with an occasional marginal identification. After her husband’s death in 1977 (coincidentally the year Field published Nabokov: His Life in Part), Véra began to think about selling off his manuscripts. In 1979, after reading my Ph.D. thesis, she invited me to catalogue the archive for her, both as an inventory for a potential sale and simply to help her find materials for publication or to answer journalists’ and researchers’ queries. In 1981 she acquiesced in my starting another biography of her husband. After my repeated requests for access to his letters to her, she eventually agreed to read them into my tape recorder. On my trip during the New Zealand university summer vacation, in December 1984 and January 1985, she did read them out (she was now in her eighties), although she had developed a bad cold and had to croak and cough into my cassette recorder as I sat across from her at the small dining table in the living room of the suite at the Montreux Palace Hotel that she had shared with Nabokov since 1961. She had numbered the letters, but often not quite in the right sequence, and she picked up bundles haphazardly, so that the order was baffling. She had warned me she would not read everything – and indeed there were some she did not read at all – but, knowing her intense need for privacy, I was surprised that she read as much as she did between each announcement of a new ‘propusk’ (‘cut’). Occasionally, she would add a gloss. Later, when I was able to see the originals, I could see where she had marked ‘ne chitat’ (‘do not read’) or ‘NO’ or ‘chitat’ ostorozhno’ (‘read with care’).

  In December 1986, Field, who had heard I was working on a biography, published VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, largely a combination of his 1967 Nabokov: His Life in Art and his 1977 Nabokov: His Life in Part. The 1986 volume broke the story of Nabokov’s affair with Irina Guadanini, of whom he heard from Zinaida Shakhovskoy (married name Malevsky-Malevich). Shakhovskoy, a staunch friend and supporter of Nabokov in the late 1930s and very warmly mentioned in the letters here, had turned against him and especially Véra by the end of the 1950s, perhaps partly because she resented that it was now Véra who handled almost all her husband’s correspondence. That led to an article on Nabokov that he understandably disliked, and to his snubbing her when she approached him at the Gallimard party for the launch of the French Lolita in 1959. She blamed Véra for the snub (which had taken Véra herself by surprise) and was determined to get back at her. She did this in the first instance through her 1979 memoir V poiskakh Nabokova (In Search of Nabokov) – which she told me she had written ‘against Véra. And if you say so, I will deny it’. Among her other ploys, she sent a transcription of Nabokov’s last letter to Svetlana Siewert to the Library of Congress, where he had deposited many of his early manuscripts, and for good measure included another transcript in her own archive. She also took pains to ensure that the affair with Guadanini would be known. Immediately after reading Field’s account of the Guadanini affair, Véra and Dmitri selected three letters to Véra from the time of the affair that make plain Nabokov’s anxiety for Véra and Dmitri to rejoin him as soon as possible. The first of these, misdated by Véra ‘Feb 19 20 1937’ (it was actually written on 20 March 1937), now bears Dmitri’s note: ‘translated on Dec. 20, 1986’. Despite their preceding Nabokov’s arrival in New York in 1940, and the switch from Russian to English as his main language of correspondence, these thr
ee 1937 letters to Véra appeared in Selected Letters, 1940–1977, co-edited by Dmitri, in 1989.

  In 1990 Véra had to move out of the Montreux Palace Hotel while it was renovated, and on Dmitri’s advice bought two adjacent apartments on the slopes above Montreux and the hotel. She lived in the larger apartment and turned the smaller into an office, a guest room and the archive. On Véra’s death in 1991, Dmitri took over the apartments. He sold the Nabokov archive to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 1992, but arranged to hold back some materials he wished to control, like his father’s diaries, the manuscript of The Original of Laura and the letters to his mother. Dmitri had a New World openness that contrasted with his mother’s Old World reserve, and later in the 1990s allowed Stacy Schiff and her Russian-speaking research assistant access to the letters to Véra for her biography of his mother, as he also permitted access to other researchers, journalists and documentary-makers. The Berg Collection administrators were anxious to receive whatever materials they had been promised, and in 2002 the letters to Véra were photocopied by Dmitri’s assistants, with copies made for Olga Voronina and myself, and the originals sent to New York. We discovered the 1932 letters had not been photocopied, and then, with increasing alarm, that the originals had not been received in New York and could not be found in Dmitri’s apartment or his basement, where photocopies of the rest of the archive were now stored. We translated the 1932 material from the tape recordings, which after more than twenty years had deteriorated in quality. In February 2011, on what turned out to be my last visit to Dmitri, a year before he died, he allowed me to rummage through every shelf, drawer and cupboard in the apartment and the basement, but the 1932 letters were nowhere to be found.

  Notes

  ENVELOPES FOR THE LETTERS TO VÉRA BY BRIAN BOYD

  ‘The years are passing …’: Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951); revised as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam, 1967), p. 295. VN would later explain the autobiography’s original title, Conclusive Evidence, in terms of the interlinked v’s at the centre, for Vladimir and Véra (interview with Pierre Dommergues, Les Langues modernes, 62 (January–February 1968), pp. 92–102, p. 99).

  ‘you and I are so special …’: Letter of 13 August 1924.

  ‘cloudless’: SO p. 145: ‘a cloudless family life’.

  even in a letter to Irina Guadanini: VN to Irina Guadanini, June 14, 1937: fourteen years of ‘cloudless happiness’ (‘yasnoe schast’e’, Tatyana Morozov Collection).

  ‘despite having lived … among former officers’: BB interview with VéN, 20 December 1981.

  samples of his verse she had clipped: As recorded in an album of Sirin’s verse that VéN seems to have begun assembling later, along with other albums of his prose and of reviews of his work, when she became his archivist (VNA).

  scooped the productivity stakes: The fact that this twenty-three-year-old could publish four books in four months shortly before meeting Véra gives the lie to claims such as these: ‘Lawyers, publishers, relatives, colleagues, friends, agreed on one point: “He would have been nowhere without her” ’ (Schiff, p. xii).

  ‘Zhemchug’ (‘The Pearl’) in March: Written 14 January 1923, published in Almanakh ‘Medniy vsadnik’ (Berlin, n. d., but advertised in Rul’ on 18 and 25 March 1923), p. 267; reprinted in Stikhi, p. 76. Nabokov’s sister Elena Sikorski, always very attentive to her brother’s literary work and his love-life, identified it to BB as a poem written for Svetlana.

  ‘V kakom rayu’ (‘In what heaven’), also in March: Written 16 January 1923, also published in Almanakh ‘Medniy vsadnik’, as ‘Cherez veka’ (‘Across the Ages’), p. 268. Also identified by Elena Sikorski as a poem written for Svetlana.

  ‘Berezhno nyos’ (‘I carefully carried’): Written 7 March 1923 (VNA, Album 8, p. 36), published as ‘Serdtse’ (‘Heart’) under the group title ‘Gekzametry’ (‘Hexameters’) in Rul’, 6 May1923, p. 2; reprinted in Stikhi, p. 94.

  ‘Ya Indiey nevidimoy vladeyu’ (‘The Ruler’: ‘An India invisible I rule’): Written 7 March 1923 (VNA, Album 8, p. 37), published as ‘Vlastelin’ (‘The Ruler’), Segodnya, 8 April 1923, p. 5; reprinted in Stikhi, 125; translated by DN in SP, p. 8. In Stikhi the poem is misdated ‘7.12.23’ (7 December 1923); in VN’s 1923 fair-copy verse album (VNA, Album 8) the ‘III’ of the month has a correction that makes it possible to read as ‘XII’, but the poem follows another of ‘7-III-23’ and precedes one of ‘19-III-23’.

  charity ball: SO, p. 127; VNRY, p. 558n.37.

  Véra wore that mask so that … : BB interview with Elena Sikorski, 24 December 1981.

  A day or two later: VN’s fair-copy verse album (VNA, Album 8) records new poems often several times a week, often on consecutive days, but breaks off after 7 May until 19 August 1923.

  one last forbidden farewell letter: There are transcripts of the letter to Svetlana in the Zinaida Shakhovskoy Papers, Library of Congress, and in the Zinaida Shakhovskoy Papers at Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College.

  ‘as if licensed …’: VNRY, p. 209.

  A week later he wrote a poem … The Encounter: ‘Vstrecha’, Rul’, 24 June 1923, p. 2; reprinted in Stikhi, pp. 106–107; trans. BB. The epigraph comes from Aleksandr Blok’s poem ‘Neznakomka’ (‘Incognita’, 1906). The 1 June 1923 date of composition derives from VN’s manuscript, pasted by Nabokov’s mother into one of the albums where she pasted or copied his verse: VNA, Album 9, pp. 48–9.

  ‘Znoy’ (‘Swelter’) … on 7 July … heat of a southern summer: The poem (see p. 6) could be rendered ‘Torridity’ or ‘Ardency’, were the antique ring not wrong, and were not its point how subtly the speaker’s sexual fire starts to infiltrate the literal seasonal heat. Never previously published, this poem was for a specific reader he already knew could read and understand his verse: could she also read and understand his desire?

  another poem … (‘Zovyosh’ …’: ‘You call …’): Not published until Stikhi, p. 112.

  this first letter: Letter of c. 26 July 1923, or later. In her biography Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), Stacy Schiff begins with these first months but seriously confuses the evidence. She reports correctly the letter Vladimir wrote to Svetlana on 25 May, but then continues, referring to the first letter to Véra: ‘Two days later he wrote to Véra Slonim … Was he still too preoccupied with Svetlana? … Forty-eight hours after telling Svetlana he will be changing continents the young poet felt compelled to return to Berlin, in part for his mother’s sake, in part because of a secret, one “I desperately want to let out” ’ (p. 6). In fact Vladimir’s first letter to Véra bears no date. Schiff has confused the date of the poem ‘The Encounter’ (May 1923 in Nabokov’s posthumous selected Russian verse (Stikhi, p. 107), but correctly 1 June 1923 in his manuscript, in Album 9, pp. 48–9, VNA) with the date of the first letter to Véra, while ignoring that that letter encloses a poem (‘You call …’) not written until 26 July. Other elements of the first letter to Véra also indicate it could not have been written on 27 May 1923: the enclosed poem ‘Swelter’, written on 7 June (Elena Nabokov’s transcript, in VNA Album 9, p. 54), and the letter’s references to the plays Dedushka (The Grandad) and Polyus (The Pole), written on 20 June and 6 and 8 July 1923, respectively (see Rul’, 14 October 1923, p. 6, and 4 August 1924, p. 3).

   Schiff suggests that Nabokov expresses unforgettable love to Svetlana in one letter, then writes with assured passion to Véra two days later. The record instead shows that he wrote a last farewell to Svetlana on 25 May, then a week later penned ‘The Encounter’, his response to that meeting with Véra three weeks earlier, which, as soon as it was published, constituted a direct appeal to her. Véra then responded to the appeal in several letters, as he then responded to them in two poems and his first letter enclosing the poems. Not two days for a swift switch of affections, as Schiff presents it, but two months of appeal and response.

  Tragediya gospodina Morna
(The Tragedy of Mr Morn): Published only in 1997 (Zvezda, 1997: 4), and in book form not until 2008 (VN, Tragediya gospodina Morna, P’esy, Lektsii o drame, ed. Andrey Babikov (St Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2008)), and translated into English only in 2012 (The Tragedy of Mister Morn, trans. Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan (London: Penguin, 2012)).

  impressions of Prague … ‘along that whiteness …’: Letter of 8 January 1924.

  first letter back to Véra … ‘My delightful …’: Letter of 13 August 1924.

  sample letter, complete: ‘I love you … ’: Letter of 19 January 1925.

  a list of what made him suffer: Letter of 19 June 1926.

  Nina Berberova could respond: Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 318.

  Bunin … commented: Quoted by Lev Lyubimov, Novyi Mir, 3 (March 1957); VNRY, p. 343.

  the ‘very sweet and saintly’ Fondaminsky: Letter of 3 November 1932.

  Stacy Schiff’s apt phrase: Schiff, p. 81.

  ‘forty-five springs!’: Note of 15 April 1970.

  rendered illegible … crossing out every word: Except for one postcard of newlywed playfulness, which Véra may have preserved because Vladimir’s words intermingle inextricably with hers. In their first winter of marriage, they skied at Krummhübel (then in Germany; now Karpacz, Poland). Several days after they returned, on 7 January 1926, Véra began a postcard to Nabokov’s mother, but she reports (his words are italicized): ‘Volodya’s stopping me writing so much, that I’d better write another time, when he’s not home. I’m not stopping you. That’s not true. It is true. That it’s not true.’ Transcript, BB Archive.

  Weather ‘The trip went well …’: BB transcript from original then in Montreux, current location unknown.

  an anthology: Kovcheg: Sbornik russkoy zarubezhnoy literatury (The Ark: Anthology of Russian Emigré Literature) (New York: Association of Russian Writers in New York, 1942).