The Enchanter

by Vladimir Nabokov

  So. A priceless original: sleeping girl, oil. Her face in its soft nest of curls, scattered here, wadded together there, with those little fissures on her parched lips, and that special crease in the eyelids over the barely joined lashes, had a russet, roseate tint where the lighted cheek—whose Florentine outline was a smile in itself—showed through. Sleep, my precious, don’t listen to me.

  Already his gaze (the self-aware gaze of one who is observing an execution or a point at the bottom of an abyss) was creeping downward along her form and his left hand was in motion—but here he gave a start as if someone had moved in the room, at the edge of his field of vision, for he had not immediately recognized the reflection in the wardrobe mirror (his pajama stripes, receding into the shadow, and an indistinct glint on the lacquered wood, and something black under her pink ankle).

  Finally making up his mind, he gently stroked her long, just slightly parted, faintly sticky legs, which grew cooler and a little coarser on the way down, and progressively warmer farther up. He recalled, with a furious sense of triumph, the roller skates, the sun, the chestnut trees, everything—while he kept stroking with his fingertips, trembling and casting sidelong looks at the plump promontory, with its brand-new downiness, which, independently but with a familial parallel, embodied a concentrated echo of something about her lips and cheeks. A little higher, at the translucent bifurcation of a vein, the mosquito was hard at work. He jealously shooed it away, inadvertently contributing to the fall of a flap that had long been in the way, and there they were, those strange, sightless little breasts, swollen with what seemed two tender abscesses, and now a thin, still childlike muscle was bared, and next to it the stretched, milk-white hollow of her armpit with five or six diverging, silky-dark streaks, and down there, too, obliquely flowed the golden little stream of chain (with a cross, probably, or a charm at its end), and then once again there was cotton—the sleeve of her sharply thrown-back arm.

  Yet another truck hurtled past, howling and filling the room with a tremor. He paused in his perlustration, leaning awkwardly over her, involuntarily pressing into her with his gaze, feeling the adolescent scent of her skin mingle with that of the russet hair and penetrate his blood like a gnawing itch. What am I to do with you, what am I to—

  The girl heaved a sigh in her sleep, opening her tightly shut navel like an eye, then slowly, with a cooing moan, breathed out, and that was all she needed to glide on in her previous torpor. He carefully pulled the crushed black cap out from under her heel and froze again, his temples throbbing, the ache of his tension pounding. He dared not kiss those angular nipples, those long toes with their yellowish nails. His eyes returned from everywhere else to converge on the same suedelike fissure, which somehow seemed to come alive under his prismatic stare. He still did not know what to undertake, afraid of missing something, of not taking full advantage of the fairy-tale firmness of her sleep.

  The stuffy air and his excitement were growing unbearable. He slightly loosened his pajama drawstring, which had been cutting into his belly, and a tendon emitted a squeak as his lips almost incorporeally brushed the spot where a birthmark was visible beneath her rib…. But he was uncomfortable and hot, and the congestion of his blood demanded the impossible. Then, starting little by little to cast his spell, he began passing his magic wand above her body, almost touching the skin, torturing himself with her attraction, her visible proximity, the fantastic confrontation permitted by the slumber of this naked girl, whom he was measuring, as it were, with an enchanted yardstick—until she made a faint motion, and turned her face away with a barely audible, somnolent smack of her lips. Everything again froze still, and now, amid her brown locks, he could make out the crimson border of her ear and the palm of her liberated hand, forgotten in its previous position. Onward, onward. In parenthetical flashes of consciousness, as though on the verge of oblivion, he had fleeting glimpses of incidental ephemera—some bridge over speeding railway cars, an air bubble in the glass of some window, the dented fender of a car, some other object, a waffle-patterned towel seen somewhere not long ago—and meanwhile, slowly, with baited breath, he was inching closer and then, coordinating all his movements, he began molding himself to her, testing the fit…. A spring apprehensively yielded under his side; his right elbow, cautiously cracking, sought a support; his sight was clouded by a secret concentration…. He felt the flame of her shapely thigh, felt that he could restrain himself no longer, that nothing mattered now, and, as the sweetness came to a boil between his woolly tufts and her hip, how joyously his life was emancipated and reduced to the simplicity of paradise—and having barely had time still to think, “No, I beg you, don’t take it away!” he saw that she was fully awake and looking wild-eyed at his rearing nudity.

  For an instant, in the hiatus of a syncope, he also saw how it appeared to her: some monstrosity, some ghastly disease—or else she already knew, or it was all of that together. She was looking and screaming, but the enchanter did not yet hear her screams; he was deafened by his own horror, kneeling, catching at the folds, snatching at the drawstring, trying to stop it, hide it, snapping with his oblique spasm, as senseless as pounding in place of music, senselessly discharging molten wax, too late to stop it or conceal it. How she rolled from the bed, how she was shrieking now, how the lamp scampered off in its red cowl, what a thundering came from outside the window, shattering, destroying the night, demolishing everything, everything…. “Be quiet, it’s nothing bad, it’s just a kind of game, it happens sometimes, just be quiet,” he implored, middle-aged and sweaty, covering himself with a raincoat he had glimpsed in passing, shuddering, donning it, missing the armhole. Like a child in a screen drama, she shielded herself with her sharp little elbow, tearing from his grasp and still yelling senselessly, and somebody was pounding on the wall, demanding inconceivable silence. She tried to run out of the room, could not unlock the door, he could not catch hold of anything or anyone, she was growing lighter, becoming slippery as a purple-buttocked foundling, with a distorted infant’s face, scuttling from the threshold to the crib and crawling backward from the crib into the womb of a tempestuously resurrected mother. “I’ll make you quiet down!” he was shouting (to a spasm, to the dotlike final drop, to nothingness). “All right, I’ll leave, I’ll make you—” He overcame the door, rushed out, deafeningly locked it behind him, and, still listening, gripping the key in his palm, barefoot and with a cold smear beneath his raincoat, stood where he was, gradually sinking.

  But from a nearby room there had already appeared two robed old women; one of them—thickset, resembling a white-haired negro, wearing azure pajama bottoms, with the breathless, jerky cadence of a distant continent, suggesting animal defense leagues and women’s clubs—was giving orders (at-once, eröffnen, et-tout-de-suite!) and, clawing at the palm of his hand, nimbly knocked the key to the floor. For several elastic seconds he and she had a hip-shoving match, but in any event it was all over; heads emerged from every direction, a bell was clanging somewhere, behind a door a melodious voice seemed to be finishing a nursery tale (Mr. White-Tooth in the bed, the hoodlum brothers with their little red rifles), the old woman conquered the key, he gave her a quick swat on the cheek, and, with his whole body ringing, went running down the sticky steps. Toward him briskly clambered a dark-haired fellow with a goatee, clad only in underpants; after him wriggled a puny harlot. He rushed past them. Farther down came a specter in tan shoes, farther still the old man climbed bow-legged, followed by the avid gendarme. Past them. Leaving behind a multitude of synchronized arms extended over the banister in a splashlike gesture of invitation, he pirouetted into the street, for all was over, and it was imperative, by any stratagem, by any spasm, to get rid of the no-longer-needed, already-looked-at, idiotic world, on whose final page stood a lonely streetlamp with a shaded-out cat at its base. Already interpreting his sensation of barefootedness as a plunge into another element, he rushed off along the ashen sidewalk, pursued by the pounding footfalls of his already outdistanced hear
t. His desperate need for a torrent, a precipice, a railroad track—no matter what, but instantly—made him appeal for the very last time to the topography of his past. And when, in front of him, a grinding whine came from behind the hump of the side street, swelling to full growth when it had overcome the grade, distending the night, already illuminating the descent with two ovals of yellowish light, about to hurtle downward—then, as if it were a dance, as if the ripple of that dance had carried him to stage center, under this growing, grinning, megathundering mass, his partner in a crashing cracovienne, this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment—that’s it, drag me under, tear at my frailty—I’m traveling flattened, on my smacked-down face—hey, you’re spinning me, don’t rip me to pieces—you’re shredding me, I’ve had enough…. Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt’s split seconds—and the film of life had burst.

  On a Book Entitled

  The Enchanter

  by Dmitri Nabokov

  THE TITLE FOR THE FOLLOWING brief notes, which may interest the reader and perhaps answer a few questions, was chosen with the half-serious thought that a small echo of Father’s postface to Lolita may amuse his shade wherever it may be.

  In both translation and commentary I have tried hard to stick to the Nabokov rules: precision, artistic fidelity, no padding, no ascribing. Any conjecture beyond what I have ventured would violate those rules.

  The translation itself reflects my intent to be faithful to VN in both the general and the specific, textual, senses. Many years of translating for and with Father instilled in me those categorical requirements of his. The only cases where he considered departures admissable were untranslatable expressions and revisions of the text itself, in the translated version, by the original author. It is possible that VN, were he alive, might have exercised his authorial license to change certain details of The Enchanter; I believe, though, that he would have chosen to leave intact this model of conciseness and multilevel meaning. The rare instances where I have taken the liberty of making minor adjustments occur precisely where the technique—as in the telescoped Little Red Riding Hood wordplays (this page; this page) or the high-speed imagery of the finale—would have made a totally literal rendering meaningless in English. Elsewhere, on occasion, the English may seem simply a bit unorthodox. But so, in such cases, is the Russian.

  Other possible translations of the Russian word volshebnik are “magician” or “conjuror,” but I have respected Nabokov’s express intention that, in this case, it be rendered as “enchanter.” Volshebnik was written during October and November of 1939. It was signed “V. Sirin,” a pseudonym that VN used for his Russian writings from his early youth on so that they would not be confused with those of his father, who had the same given name. Sirin in Russian is both a species of owl and a bird of ancient fable, but most probably has no connection, as some have suggested, with the word siren.

  The original text was dictated to and typed by Father’s first reader, Vera Nabokov. According to Nabokov’s letters, he showed it shortly thereafter to four other people, literary friends of his (see Author’s Note One).

  At some point, apparently, a typescript was also shown to the émigré critic Vladimir Weidle, in Paris. It could not have been later than May 1940, when we sailed for New York. Andrew Field, who, it seems, read an article written nearly forty years after the fact by a very old Weidle not long before his death, claims[11] the piece shown to Weidle differed in several respects from The Enchanter (of which Field has a very sketchy idea at best, having seen only two pages and one or perhaps both of Nabokov’s references presented at the beginning of this volume).

  Presumably that version was called “The Satyr,” the girl “was no more than ten,” and the concluding scene was set not on the French Riviera but “in a remote little hotel in Switzerland.” Field also attributes the name Arthur to the protagonist. It is unclear whether he got that from Weidle too, but more likely he simply gleaned it from Father’s recollection in his postface to Lolita. I have suggested that Nabokov had thought of his protagonist as “Arthur,” or perhaps even used that name in a preliminary draft. It is highly unlikely, however, that the name appeared in a manuscript “already marked with instructions for the printer,” as Field has Weidle affirm.

  As for the three differences Field cites, if his paraphrase of the Weidle article is accurate, then Weidle’s memory of that distant event must have been a bit hazy (Field does admit, in fact, that Weidle “could not remember whether the girl is named in the story”). The fact is that there never was a version called “The Satyr”; indeed, such a title would seem most implausible to anyone with a sensitive ear for Nabokov’s use of language. And I would attribute the same degree of credibility to the rest of Weidle’s assertions.

  I was five when The Enchanter was being written and was, if anything, a disruptive influence in our Paris apartment and our Riviera pensions. I recall that, between generous periods of play with me, Father would sometimes withdraw into the bathroom of our meager quarters to work in peace, although not, as John Shade does for shaving purposes in Pale Fire, on a board placed across the tub. While I was already aware that my father was a “writer,” I had no idea of what was being written, and my parents certainly made no attempt to familiarize me with the story of Volshebnik (I think the only work of Father’s I knew at the time was his Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland and the little tales and ditties he would improvise for me). It is possible that, when Father was writing Volshebnik, I had already been bundled off to Deauville with a cousin of Mother’s, since it was feared that the rumble of Hitler’s bombs might reach Paris. (It did, but only after our departure for America, and I think one of the few bombs actually dropped on the city did hit our building as we were crossing on the Champlain. The vessel, too, was destined to be destroyed after having safely delivered us with no more than the spout of an occasional whale to alarm a couple of trigger-happy gunners; on its next voyage, for which we had originally held passage, it was sunk with all aboard by a German submarine.)

  Other than what already is or will now become publicly available, neither Mother nor I can reconstruct much about the birth of the idea in VN’s mind, but can only alert the reader to some of the inane hypotheses that have been propounded, especially of late. As for the link with Lolita, the theme had probably lain dormant (as Nabokov suggests in “On a Book Entitled Lolita”) until the new novel began germinating, somewhat as in the case of the interrupted Solus Rex and the later, very different, but nonetheless related Pale Fire.

  It is clear from Nabokov’s postface to Lolita, originally written in 1956, that, at the time, he believed whatever copies had existed of the Volshebnik typescript had been destroyed, and his recollection of the novella was somewhat blurred, partly by the passing of time, but mainly by his rejection of it as “a dead scrap,” superseded by Lolita. The surviving text probably turned up not long before he proposed it, with reborn enthusiasm, to G. P. Putnam’s Sons (see Author’s Note Two).

  I became aware of the work’s existence quite late and in rather a vague way, and had occasion to read it only in the early eighties, when our voluminous archives were finally organized by Brian Boyd (the author of a proper literary biography of VN, to be published in 1988). It was then that Volshebnik, which had been consulted by Father in the sixties before it submerged anew among the jumble of belongings that had been shipped to Switzerland from an Ithaca warehouse, resurfaced.

  I completed a more or less final draft of the translation in September of 1985.

  For the initial impetus to attack what was not an easy job I must give heartfelt thanks to Matthew Bruccoli, who had envisioned a very limited edition of the work, as Nabokov had originally suggested to Walter Minton, then president of Putnam.

  The timing of this public debut of The Enchanter is not without an amusing and instructive coincidental sidelight. In 1985, in Paris, there began an energetic one-man campaign to attribute to Vladimir Nabokov a
pseudonymous, quite un-Nabokovian book from the mid-thirties entitled Novel with Cocaine.

  Falling as it does within the very limited realm of rediscovered Nabokoviana, The Enchanter is a most appropriate example of the strikingly original prose Nabokov-Sirin produced in his most mature—and final—years as a novelist in his mother tongue (not long before writing The Enchanter in 1939, in fact, he had completed his first major English work, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and 1940 was to be the year of our transplantation to the United States).

  For anyone who may harbor lingering doubts about the authorship of the other book, a quick comparison of its substance and style with those of The Enchanter should suffice to put the final round of shot into this moribund canard.

  A brief account of the bizarre affair is, nevertheless, perhaps in order. Early in 1985, in the Paris-based Messenger of the Russian Christian Movement, Professor Nikita Struve of the Sorbonne affirmed with great conviction that Novel with Cocaine, by one “M. Agheyev,” written in the early thirties in Istanbul and published soon thereafter in the Paris émigré review Numbers, was in fact the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

  To support this thesis, Struve adduced sentences from Novel with Cocaine that, according to him, are “typical of Nabokov.” Struve’s assertions were taken up in a letter to the (London) Times Literary Supplement, 9 August 1985, from Julian Graffy of the University of London, who referred to Struve’s “detailed analysis of the secondary themes, structural devices, semantic fields [whatever those may be] and metaphors of N with C, all of which are found, on the basis of repeated quotation and comparison… to be quintessentially Nabokovian.”