Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Letter of 22 June 1926

  Two pages from VN, two from EN to VéN, and on a separate page a fair copy of VN’s poem ‘Komnata’ (‘The Room’), which has mutated from a story project (letter of 13 June 1926).

  to take a lot off: Pun on two meanings of the Russian verb snimat’: 1) ‘to take pictures’; 2) ‘to take off clothes’.

  floridithy: From vit’evatiy, ‘florid’ or ‘ornate’.

  owlthy: The provenance of VN’s nonce-endearment syshch is not very clear. It could be from sych (‘owl’), sytiy (‘full’, ‘sated’), or even sushchiy (‘existent, real’).

  This poem: ‘Komnata’ (‘The Room’): see below.

  The Room: ‘Komnata’, Rul’, 11 July 1926, p. 2, and Stikhi, pp. 184–5.

  18–VI–26 / Dear Véra: EN’s letter, enclosed in VN’s letter to VéN.

  Ev. K.: Evgenia Konstantinovna Hofeld (1884–1957). From 1914, governess to Olga and Elena Nabokov, she remained for the rest of her life very close to the Nabokov family, especially VN’s mother, and was buried next to her. She stayed in Prague for the rest of her life, supporting Olga’s son Rostislav Petkevich and was herself supported financially by VN and Elena Sikorski. VN had tried to get his sister Elena and her family, as well as Evgenia Hofeld and Rostislav Petkevich, to America after the war.

  K.: Kirill Nabokov.

  Letter of 23 June 1926

  Mme K.: Kaplan.

  Lena: Elena Slonim.

  F.: Unidentified.

  Letter of 24 June 1926

  Martin du Gard: Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958), French writer, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937.

  pales or aphirape: Sub-species of the fritillary butterfly Brenthis ino (borealis).

  Letter of 25 June 1926

  S. B.’s: Slava Borisovna (Slonim)’s.

  Uncle Kostya: Konstantin Nabokov.

  Letter of 26 June 1926

  proofs: Of ‘Skazka’ (‘A Nursery Tale’).

  Ludwiga: Unidentified Rul’ staff member.

  Uncle K: Kostya (Konstantin Nabokov).

  Shakhovskoy: Dmitry Alekseevich Shakhovskoy (1902–89), translator and poet; from August 1926 he would be a Russian Orthodox priest (Father Ioann), rising to Archbishop; brother of Natalia Shakhovskoy, who in 1927 would marry VN’s cousin Nicolas Nabokov.

  ‘Blagonamerenny’: The Loyalist, shortlived Russian émigré journal, published in Brussels in 1926, edited by Shakhovskoy.

  Pirandello: Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), Italian dramatist.

  at least like Anyuta: Anna Feigin was chubby.

  Letter of 27 June 1926

  Hercules bridge: Schillstrasse ends at the Herkulesbrücke, which crosses the Landwehrkanal, which in turn flanks the Berlin park, the Tiergarten.

  ‘Real’: Yav’, a title that rhymes with the well-known Russian periodical Nov’ (Virgin Soil) and outdoes in its brevity (in Russian, three letters rather than four) this and titles like Rech’ (Speech) and Rul’ (The Rudder). VN invents a Soviet journal, Red Reality (Krasnaya yav’), in ‘The Christmas Story’ (‘Rozhdestvenskiy rasskaz,’ Rul’, 25 December 1928).

  Letter of 28 June 1926

  really is a Hoffmann Street: As in ‘A Nursery Tale’. Named in VN’s fictionalized Berlin, as in the real city, after E.T.A. (Ernst Theodor Wilhelm) Hoffmann (1776–1822), German writer of fantasy and horror fiction.

  books have been sent: Copies of Mary for Bunin and for Konstantin Nabokov.

  to Zoo: The Zoo train station.

  an absolutely charming poem: A clipping from Slovo No. 189 is enclosed, containing a poem by I. Perts, ‘Teterevinyi tok’ (‘The Lek of a Black Grouse’), under the heading ‘Young Poets’.

  Adamovich: Georgy Victorovich Adamovich (1892–1972), poet, and the most influential literary critic in the emigration.

  thorough scolding: Adamovich regularly published, under the pseudonym ‘Sizif’ (Sisyphus), a column in Zveno called ‘Otkliki’ (‘Comments’), usually caustic responses to contemporary, especially Soviet, literature. Nabokov refers here to the column of 27 June 1926, pp. 4–6.

  /22’/9’7’3’31’…: VN sends VéN his solution to this riddle in his letter of 3 July below.

  Letter of 29 June 1926

  Prof. Gogel: Sergey Konstantinovich Gogel (1860–1930), lawyer and law professor at the Russian Academic Institute in Berlin.

  Pozdnyshev: The main character in the novella ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ (1889), by Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910). See below.

  Comment tu regardes sur ça? Rien à soi? (‘Good grief!’): VN appears here to offer comically lexical (not even literal) and unidiomatic French translations of Russian idioms, Kak ty na eto smotrish’? (‘How do you look on that?’) and Nichego sebe! (lexically in English ‘Nothing to self’, but idiomatically expressing surprise: ‘Good grief!’).

  Maykapar: ‘Maykapar’ was the name of a tobacco factory, founded by a Karaim family in Riga in 1887.

  Dubnyak: Aykhenvald. Dubnyak means ‘oak wood’; its German translation is Eichenwald, of which ‘Aykhenvald’ is the Russian transliteration. VN plays with the name’s origin in the epigram on Aykhenvald at the start of the second letter of 5 June 1926.

  Letter of 30 June 1926

  pages you marked: See note to letter of 2 June 1926.

  send you the clipping: VN forgot to enclose the clipping; see next letter.

  Pushkin used to say: From Pushkin’s ‘Oproverzheniya na kritiki i zamechaniya na sobstvennye sochineniya’ (‘Refutation of the Criticism and Comments on My Own Works’, 1830, partly published for the first time in 1841). ‘What does grammar say? That the acting verb ruled by a negative particle demands not Accusative, but Genitive case now. […] Is it possible that the electric power of a negative particle must go through this entire chain of verbs and resonate in the noun? I don’t think so.’

  S. B.: Slava Borisovna (Slonim).

  E. L.: Evsey Lazarevich (Slonim).

  Peltenburg: Leo Peltenburg (?–1955), Dutch business partner of E. L. Slonim and a good friend of the family.

  Lyusya: Ilya Feigin.

  ‘Fairy-Tale’: The story later translated as ‘A Nursery Tale’.

  Letter of 1 July 1926

  Crossword: See Appendix One: Riddles, p. 525.

  Give me oblivion … enchant: Perhaps a paraphrastic extract from the romance ‘Pod charuyushchey laskoy tvoeyu …’ (‘Under Your Enchanting Caress’) which included the line ‘Akh, potseluem day zabven’e’ (‘Oh, give me oblivion with a kiss’), attributed to composer Nikolay Zubov and poet A. Mattisen.

  The spoil of the Russian Revolution: ‘Blin revolyutsii russkoy’; a distorted echo of the Russian proverb Pervyi blin komon (literally ‘The first pancake will turn out just a lump’; a rough English equivalent would be: ‘You must spoil before you spin’).

  clipping: A review of an art exhibition in which Tatyana Siewert, the sister of VN’s ex-fiancée Svetlana, took part.

  Regina Claudias: A kind of plum.

  Orlov: Unidentified.

  Bertman: Unidentified.

  Rosny jeune: J. H. Rosny jeune (Séraphin Justin François Boex, 1859–1948), French science fiction author.

  krestoslovitsa … two years old: In 1924 VN coined a Russian equivalent for ‘crossword’, krestoslovitsa, which, however, would lose out before long to the straightforward transliteration krossvord. See below, note to letter of 6 July 1926.

  half a pood: A pood is 16.8 kg or about 37 pounds.

  Letter of 2 July 1926

  Across and down: VN’s crossword puzzle for VéN: see Appendix One: Riddles.

  word puzzle: Unsolved.

  Morskaya: The Nabokovs’ St Petersburg house was at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street. His dream may have been influenced by the name of the street: morskaya means ‘of the sea’. In the description that follows he refers to Pushkin’s poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’ (1833), which not only famously describes the disastrous flood of 1824 but also presents Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725
) as a supernatural being capable of overcoming, if not controlling, the elements. The landmark bronze statue of Peter the Great on horseback – commissioned by Catherine the Great and sculpted from 1770 to 1782 in a team led by Étienne Maurice Falconet, and a central character in the poem – stands on Senate Square, about a quarter mile from the former Nabokov home.

  Akhmatova: Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreevna Gorenko, 1889–1966), poet, translator, literary critic, memoirist.

  ‘I remember just your coldness …’: The story did not materialize (but see letter of 10 July 1926), but a version of Lyudmila N. turns up much later in Pnin (1957) as Liza Bogolepov, Pnin’s manipulative ex-wife, formerly the narrator’s ex-mistress: ‘A few days later she sent me those poems; a fair sample of her production is the kind of stuff that émigré rhymsterettes wrote after Akhmatova: lackadaisical little lyrics that tiptoed in more or less anapaestic tetrameter and sat down rather heavily with a wistful sigh … A prose translation would go: “No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: ‘There is nothing softer than your heart.’ And I lowered my gaze …” ’ (Pnin, pp. 180–81).

  MY GREETINKS … : Written in a mixture of capital and small letters: VN imitates an unsteady hand, like that of a child who has not yet mastered writing but is trying to write neatly.

  Letter of 3 July 1926

  Lomota … : Aching, abbot, aunt, Kolya, Maro, versifier, Lethe, cast iron, little path, lily of the valley, Hippocrene. For solution, see Appendix One: Riddles.

  grand ciel rose: Fr. ‘great pink sky’.

  A t’il eu vent … : Fr. ‘Did he get wind of something?’

  et je me regalai … : Fr. ‘and I treated myself to a cold bath’.

  ‘My dearest member …’‘: Line 6 of ‘Epistle To James Tennant of Glenconner’ (1789) (‘My dearest member nearly dozen’d’) by Robert Burns (1759–96).

  ‘I know coldly and wisely …’: VN’s poem, commenting on VéN’s habit of carrying a gun in her purse, written on 1 September 1923: ‘Ya znayu kholodno i mudro, / chto v sumke lakovoy tvoey – / v sosedstve zerkal’tsa i pudry / spit chornyi kamen’: sem’ smertey’ (‘I know, coldly and wisely, / that in that lacquered purse of yours, / next to a mirror and a powder-case / sleeps a black stone – seven deaths’: VN manuscript album, January–October 1923, VNA). VéN’s handgun, a Browning, held seven bullets. These lines were published in a different translation in Schiff, p. 56, and with an incorrect date, p. 388.

  Hanna: Unidentified.

  ‘Russkoe slovo’: The Russian Word, a Russian émigré periodical published in Harbin, Manchuria, from 1926 to 1935.

  Aykhenvald’s article: Yuly Aykhenvald, ‘Literaturnye zametki’ (review of V. Sirin, Mashen’ka and P. P. Veimarg, ‘Kornet Korsakov’), Rul’, 31 March 1926, pp. 2–3.

  Count Witte’s little nickname: VN’s pun on ‘curriculum vitae’. Count Sergey Yulievich Witte (1849–1915), Russia’s Minister of Finances (1892–1903) and first Prime Minister (1903–1906).

  couldn’t dance without limbs: Pun: beskonechnost’ (‘limitlessness, eternity’) is nearly homophonic with bez konechnostey (‘without limbs’): the letter transliterated ‘z’ is here unvoiced, so sounds like ‘s’.

  Letter of 4 July 1926

  pellonela or carpetiella: pellonella is Tinea pellionella, the case-bearing clothes-moth (from Latin pellis, ‘hide’ or ‘skin’, which VéN would recognize via French pelisse, a long fur coat); carpietella is VN’s joke name for the carpet moth, Trichophaga tapetzella.

  Postcard 1 of 5 July 1926

  Jaspidea Celsia: Staurophora (Phalaena, Calotaenia, Jaspidea) celsia L. 1758, a Noctuid moth found in central Europe. After catching a specimen of this species on a Berlin street, VN wrote to his mother on 28 September 1925 that he had found ‘a wonderfully rare moth – the dream of German collectors (it’s rather large, with soft-emerald forewings marked with brown)’ (N’sBs, p. 119).

  Aeroplane: ‘Aeroplan’, published, with some changes, Rul’, 25 July 1926, p. 2.

  Letter 2 of 5 July 1926

  A kind of epigram … oak grove: Ger. Eiche,‘oak’, Wald, ‘forest’; Eichenwald, ‘oak grove’. ‘Shirokoshumnaya dubrova’ (‘wide-noised oak grove’) echoes, in the last line of this epigram, the last line of Pushkin’s ‘Poet’ (‘The Poet’, 1827).

  new poem: See Letter 1 of this date, above.

  ‘Kalina’: ‘Kalinka’ (1860), by writer and folklorist Ivan Petrovich Larionov (1830–89).

  ruined the first line of my poem: ‘A Trifle’: see letter of 18 June 1926: nazvan’e, machty (‘a name, masts’) should have been nazvan’e machty (‘a mast’s denomination’).

  Pointlets: VN’s wordplay: funtiki (‘poundlets’); punktiki (‘pointlets’).

  ‘Sovremennye zapiski’: Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), the Russian emigration’s major literary and political journal, published in Paris, 1920–40. VN had published three poems in the journal in 1921 and 1922 but nothing since; his days of being the major fiction-writer in the journal, from 1929, still lay ahead.

  Arbatov : Zinovy Yurievich Arbatov (1893–1962), writer, journalist.

  Osorgin: Mikhail Osorgin, ‘Rets[enziya]: Mashen’ka. Berlin. Slovo, 1926’, Sovremennye zapiski, 28 ([early June], 1926), pp. 474–6.

  Za svobodu: For Freedom, Russian émigré daily, Warsaw, 1921–32.

  Letter of 6 July 1926

  story by Wells: ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes’ (1895).

  grosch: Groschen, a small coin worth 10 pfennigs.

  ‘Illustrated Newspaper’: Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, weekly, founded in 1891.

  Anna Karenin … tennis: See ‘A special note on the game of tennis’ in VN’s essay on Anna Karenin (LRL, p. 234). The note is accompanied by VN’s drawing of ‘a tennis costume such as Anna wore in her game with Vronski’. In the drawing, the racket is lowered and the hat is small.

  Mme Usoltsev’s: Unidentified.

  butterfly: See Appendix One: Riddles.

  Acr. 1 part of a rose: The lower part of the left wing.

  can be seen in a sack: A reference to a Russian proverb, ‘One cannot hide an awl in a sack’ (‘Shila v meshke ne utaish’’).

  In capital cities …: From the poem ‘V stolitsakh shum, gremyat vitii, / Кipit slovesnaya voina’ (‘There is a din in the capitals, orators thunder, / A war of words is seething’, 1857) by Nikolay Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821–78).

  Acr. 1 A supernatural … : The lower part of the right wing.

  All sings … thunderclaps!: A line from Tyutchev’s poem ‘Vesennyaya groza’ (‘Spring Thunderstorm’): ‘S gory bezhit potok provornyi, / V lesu ne molknet ptichiy gam, / I gam lesnoy, i shum nagornyi – / Vsyo vtorit veselo gromam’ (‘A swift stream runs from the hill, / The din of birds in the forest does not still, / And the forest din and the noise on the hill – / All sings in cheerful tune with thunderclaps’).

  Crestos lovitza Sirin: Krestoslovitsa is the Russian word VN invented to render the English word ‘crossword’. (Crosswords, developed in their modern form in 1913, became a craze only in the 1920s.) In this letter, while inscribing the crossword puzzle in a shape of a butterfly, VN spells it as ‘Crestos lovitza Sirin’ – like a Latin binomial, as if it were a butterfly he had named, with ‘Sirin’ in the place of the first describer’s name. The spacing also draws attention to the Russian lovitsa (‘can be caught’), hidden in the inscription.

  A ditty: Kit’s … : Written vertically to the left of the butterfly drawing. The original reads: ‘Kosh khoroshiy, Koshi, Koshi, / Koshi, koshi, moy roskoshi’ (literally: ‘Good kitty, Kitty, Kitty, / Kitty, kitty, my luxurious’).

  A ditty: Folk … : Written vertically to the right of the butterfly drawing. The original reads: ‘Lezet lyud na bashnyu ratushi, / Udivlyayutsya lyudi: / Akh vy milye, mokhnatyshi, / Akh, lokhmatyshi moi!’ (literally: ‘People are scrambling to the city hall tower, / People are surprised: / Ah, my sweet shaggies, / Ah, my d
ishevelled ones’).

  Letter of 7 July 1926

  On Wednesdays: Written at the top of the page, near and a little below the date.

  Mr Darling: His identity is explained in the letter of 10 July 1926.

  ‘rai mne’ … ‘sukhar’: VN is correcting VéN’s answers to the crossword puzzle of 1 July. Rai mne: ‘heaven to me’; op’yani: ‘intoxicate’ (imperative); sukhari: dry bread, rusks; sukhar’: a rusk.

  ‘and the cares …’: From ‘The Day is Done’ (1845), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), final stanza (ll. 41–4): ‘And the night shall be filled with music, / And the cares, that infest the day, / Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, / And as silently steal away.’

  healed from the sun: VN suffered from psoriasis, which would become acute in early 1937 (see below). He would write amusingly about the condition in Ada, Pt. 1 Ch. 21.

  Letter of 8 July 1926

  puzzle: VN drew two vertical arrows pointing down along the column of words/letters: from 1 to 5 and from ‘r’ to ‘sh’. Across: 1 Cairo; 2 union; 3 grandfather; 4: adieu; 5: hashish. Down: Kuda gryadesh (Lat. Quo vadis, ‘Whither goest thou?’, the question St Peter asks of Jesus, John 13: 36).

  a puzzle like this: VN provides a solution to this puzzle in his 15 July letter.

  S. B.: Slava Borisovna (Slonim).

  Lazarus: See letter of 3 July 1926.

  Letter of 9 July 1926

  Romans … : Love song, sateen, buffet, frame, burdock, swindler, bar lock, slime, silence, a lonely [man], rook. See Appendix One: Riddles.

  new post office on Geisberg str.: 7–9 Geisbergstrasse, Berlin-Schöneberg.

  Letter of 10 July 1926

  55×5=305: Miscalculation. VN probably multiplied 50 by 5 and added 55.

  27 my Life: Presumably income sent on from VéN from language lessons she has been giving.

  puddle: The image of a spectacular puddle that seems a window on to another world recurs in Bend Sinister (1947), which begins: ‘An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky’ (p. 1).

  wrote my ‘review’: See letter of 2 July 1926 and n.