Speak, Memory

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Mr. Burness was a large Scotsman with a florid face, light-blue eyes and lank, straw-colored hair. He spent his mornings teaching at a language school and then crammed into the afternoon more private lessons than the day could well hold. Traveling, as he did, from one part of the town to another and having to depend on the torpid trot of dejected izvozchik (cab) horses to get him to his pupils, he would be, with luck, only a quarter of an hour late for his two o'clock lesson (wherever that was), but would arrive after five for his four o'clock one. The tension of waiting for him and hoping that, for once, his superhuman doggedness might balk before the gray wall of some special snowstorm was the kind of feeling that one trusts never to meet with in mature life (but that I did experience again when circumstances forced me, in my turn, to give lessons and when, in my furnished rooms in Berlin, I awaited a certain stone-faced pupil, who would always turn up despite the obstacles I mentally piled in his way).

  The very darkness that was gathering outside seemed a waste product of Mr. Burness' efforts to reach our house. Presently the valet would come to drop the blue voluminous blinds and draw the flowered window draperies. The tick-tock of the grandfather's clock in the schoolroom gradually assumed a dreary, nagging intonation. The tightness of my shorts in the groin and the rough touch of ribbed black stockings rubbing against the tender inside of my bent legs would mingle with the dull pressure of a humble need, the satisfaction of which I kept postponing. Nearly an hour would pass and there would be no sign of Mr. Burness. My brother would go to his room and play some practice piece on the piano and then plunge and replunge into some of the melodies that I loathed--the instruction to the artificial flowers in Faust (... dites-lui qu'elle est belle ...) or Vladimir Lenski's wail (... Koo-dah, koo-dah, koo-dah vi udalilis'). I would leave the upper floor, where we children dwelt, and slowly slide along the balustrade down to the second story, where my parents' rooms were situated. As often as not, they used to be out at that time, and in the gathering dusk the place acted upon my young senses in a curiously teleological way, as if this accumulation of familiar things in the dark were doing its utmost to form the definite and permanent image that repeated exposure did finally leave in my mind.

  The sepia gloom of an arctic afternoon in midwinter invaded the rooms and was deepening to an oppressive black. A bronze angle, a surface of glass or polished mahogany here and there in the darkness, reflected the odds and ends of light from the street, where the globes of tall street lamps along its middle line were already diffusing their lunar glow. Gauzy shadows moved on the ceiling. In the stillness, the dry sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling upon the marble of a table made one's nerves twang.

  My mother's boudoir had a convenient oriel for looking out on the Morskaya in the direction of the Maria Square. With lips pressed against the thin fabric that veiled the windowpane I would gradually taste the cold of the glass through the gauze. From that oriel, some years later, at the outbreak of the Revolution, I watched various engagements and saw my first dead man: he was being carried away on a stretcher, and from one dangling leg an ill-shod comrade kept trying to pull off the boot despite pushes and punches from the stretchermen--all this at a goodish trot. But in the days of Mr. Burness' lessons there was nothing to watch save the dark, muffled street and its receding line of loftily suspended lamps, around which the snowflakes passed and repassed with a graceful, almost deliberately slackened motion, as if to show how the trick was done and how simple it was. From another angle, one might see a more generous stream of snow in a brighter, violet-tinged nimbus of gaslight, and then the jutting enclosure where I stood would seem to drift slowly up and up, like a balloon. At last one of the phantom sleighs gliding along the street would come to a stop, and with gawky haste Mr. Burness in his fox-furred shapka would make for our door.

  From the schoolroom, whither I had preceded him, I would hear his vigorous footsteps crashing nearer and nearer, and, no matter how cold the day was, his good, ruddy face would be sweating abundantly as he strode in. I remember the terrific energy with which he pressed on the spluttering pen as he wrote down, in the roundest of round hands, the tasks to be prepared for the next day. Usually at the end of the lesson a certain limerick was asked for and granted, the point of the performance being that the word "screamed" in it was to be involuntarily enacted by oneself every time Mr. Burness gave a formidable squeeze to the hand he held in his beefy paw as he recited the lines:

  There was a young lady from Russia

  Who (squeeze) whenever you'd crush her

  She (squeeze) and she (squeeze) ...

  by which time the pain would have become so excruciating that we never got any farther.

  5

  The quiet, bearded gentleman with a stoop, old-fashioned Mr. Cummings, who taught me, in 1907 or 1908, to draw, had been my mother's drawing master also. He had come to Russia in the early nineties as foreign correspondent and illustrator for the London Graphic. Marital misfortunes were rumored to obscure his life. A melancholy sweetness of manner made up for the meagerness of his talent. He wore an ulster unless the weather was very mild, when he would switch to the kind of greenish-brown woolen cloak called a loden.

  I was captivated by his use of the special eraser he kept in his waistcoat pocket, by the manner in which he held the page taut, and afterwards flicked off, with the back of his fingers, the "gutticles of the percha" (as he said). Silently, sadly, he illustrated for me the marble laws of perspective: long, straight strokes of his elegantly held, incredibly sharp pencil caused the lines of the room he created out of nothing (abstract walls, receding ceiling and floor) to come together in one remote hypothetical point with tantalizing and sterile accuracy. Tantalizing, because it made me think of railway tracks, symmetrically and trickily converging before the bloodshot eyes of my favorite mask, a grimy engine driver; sterile, because that room remained unfurnished and quite empty, being devoid even of the neutral statues one finds in the uninteresting first hall of a museum.

  The rest of the picture gallery made up for its gaunt vestibule. Mr. Cummings was a master of the sunset. His little watercolors, purchased at different times for five or ten roubles apiece by members of our household, led a somewhat precarious existence, shifting, as they did, to more and more obscure nooks and finally getting completely eclipsed by some sleek porcelain beast or a newly framed photograph. After I had learned not only to draw cubes and cones but to shade properly with smooth, merging slants such parts of them as had to be made to turn away forever, the kind old gentleman contented himself with painting under my enchanted gaze his own wet little paradises, variations of one landscape: a summer evening with an orange sky, a pasture ending in the black fringe of a distant forest, and a luminous river, repeating the sky and winding away and away.

  Later on, from around 1910 to 1912, the well-known "impressionist" (a term of the period) Yaremich took over; a humorless and formless person, he advocated a "bold" style, blotches of dull color, smears of sepia and olive-brown, by means of which I had to reproduce on huge sheets of gray paper, humanoid shapes that we modeled of plasticine and placed in "dramatic" positions against a backcloth of velvet with all kinds of folds and shadow effects. It was a depressing combination of at least three different arts, all approximative, and finally I rebelled.

  He was replaced by the celebrated Dobuzhinski who liked to give me his lessons on the piano nobile of our house, in one of its pretty reception rooms downstairs, which he entered in a particularly noiseless way as if afraid to startle me from my verse-making stupor. He made me depict from memory, in the greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen thousands of times without visualizing them properly: a street lamp, a postbox, the tulip design on the stained glass of our own front door. He tried to teach me to find the geometrical coordinations between the slender twigs of a leafless boulevard tree, a system of visual give-and-takes, requiring a precision of linear expression, which I failed to achieve in my youth, but applied gratefully, in my adult instar, not on
ly to the drawing of butterfly genitalia during my seven years at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, when immersing myself in the bright wellhole of a microscope to record in India ink this or that new structure; but also, perhaps, to certain camera-lucida needs of literary composition. Emotionally, however, I am still more indebted to the earlier color treats given me by my mother and her former teacher. How readily Mr. Cummings would sit down on a stool, part behind with both hands his--what? was he wearing a frock coat? I see only the gesture--and proceed to open the black tin paintbox. I loved the nimble way he had of soaking his paintbrush in multiple color to the accompaniment of a rapid clatter produced by the enamel containers wherein the rich reds and yellows that the brush dimpled were appetizingly cupped; and having thus collected its honey, it would cease to hover and poke, and, by two or three sweeps of its lush tip, would drench the "Vatmanski" paper with an even spread of orange sky, across which, while that sky was still dampish, a long purple-black cloud would be laid. "And that's all, dearie," he would say. "That's all there is to it."

  On one occasion, I had him draw an express train for me. I watched his pencil ably evolve the cowcatcher and elaborate headlights of a locomotive that looked as if it had been acquired secondhand for the Trans-Siberian line after it had done duty at Promontory Point, Utah, in the sixties. Then came five disappointingly plain carriages. When he had quite finished them, he carefully shaded the ample smoke coming from the huge funnel, cocked his head, and, after a moment of pleased contemplation, handed me the drawing. I tried to look pleased, too. He had forgotten the tender.

  A quarter of a century later, I learned two things: that Burness, by then dead, had been well known in Edinburgh as a scholarly translator of the Russian romantic poems that had been the altar and frenzy of my boyhood; and that my humble drawing master, whose age I used to synchronize with that of granduncles and old family servants, had married a young Estonian girl about the time I myself married. When I learned these later developments, I experienced a queer shock; it was as if life had impinged upon my creative rights by wriggling on beyond the subjective limits so elegantly and economically set by childhood memories that I thought I had signed and sealed.

  "And what about Yaremich?" I asked M. V. Dobuzhinski, one summer afternoon in the nineteen forties, as we strolled through a beech forest in Vermont. "Is he remembered?"

  "Indeed, he is," replied Mstislav Valerianovich. "He was exceptionally gifted. I don't know what kind of teacher he was, but I do know that you were the most hopeless pupil I ever had."

  5

  1

  I HAVE often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.

  A large woman, a very stout woman, Mademoiselle rolled into our existence in December 1905 when I was six and my brother five. There she is. I see so plainly her abundant dark hair, brushed up high and covertly graying; the three wrinkles on her austere forehead; her beetling brows; the steely eyes behind the black-rimmed pince-nez; that vestigial mustache; that blotchy complexion, which in moments of wrath develops an additional flush in the region of the third, and amplest, chin so regally spread over the frilled mountain of her blouse. And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowering itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling.

  We had been abroad for about a year. After spending the summer of 1904 in Beaulieu and Abbazia, and several months in Wiesbaden, we left for Russia in the beginning of 1905. I fail to remember the month. One clue is that in Wiesbaden I had been taken to its Russian church--the first time I had been to church anywhere--and that might have been in the Lenten season (during the service I asked my mother what were the priest and deacon talking about; she whispered back in English that they were saying we should all love one another but I understood she meant that those two gorgeous personages in cone-shaped shining robes were telling each other they would always remain good friends). From Frankfurt we arrived in Berlin in a snowstorm, and next morning caught the Nord-Express, which thundered in from Paris. Twelve hours later it reached the Russian frontier. Against the background of winter, the ceremonial change of cars and engines acquired a strange new meaning. An exciting sense of rodina, "motherland," was for the first time organically mingled with the comfortably creaking snow, the deep footprints across it, the red gloss of the engine stack, the birch logs piled high, under their private layer of transportable snow, on the red tender. I was not quite six, but that year abroad, a year of difficult decisions and liberal hopes, had exposed a small Russian boy to grown-up conversations. He could not help being affected in some way of his own by a mother's nostalgia and a father's patriotism. In result, that particular return to Russia, my first conscious return, seems to me now, sixty years later, a rehearsal--not of the grand homecoming that will never take place, but of its constant dream in my long years of exile.

  The author's maternal grandmother, Olga Nikolaevna Rukavishnikov, born Kozlov (1845-1901), St. Petersburg, around 1885.

  The author's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870-1922), as a schoolboy around 1885 with his three brothers (from left to right Dmitri, Konstantin, and Sergey). My father was about to graduate from the Third Gymnasium and enter the university at an astonishingly early age. Uncle Konstantin, at eleven or twelve, was still being educated at home. Uncle Dmitri and Uncle Sergey were pravoveds, i.e. scholars of the fashionable Imperial School of Jurisprudence.

  The summer of 1905 in Vyra had not yet evolved lepidoptera. The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks ("What you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened"; "That field there will be given a rest next season"; "Oh, just a small bird--no special name"; "If that peasant is drunk, it is because he is poor"). Autumn carpeted the park with varicolored leaves, and Miss Robinson showed us the beautiful device--which the Ambassador's Boy, a familiar character in her small world, had enjoyed so much the preceding autumn--of choosing on the ground and arranging on a big sheet of paper such maple leaves as would form an almost complete spectrum (minus the blue--a big disappointment!), green shading into lemon, lemon into orange and so on through the reds to purples, purplish browns, reddish again and back through lemon to green (which was getting quite hard to find except as a part, a last brave edge). The first frosts hit the asters and still we did not move to town.

  That winter of 1905-1906, when Mademoiselle arrived from Switzerland, was the only one of my childhood that I spent in the country. It was a year of strikes, riots and police-inspired massacres, and I suppose my father wished to keep his family away from the city, in our quiet country place, where his popularity with the peasants might mitigate, as he correctly surmised, the risks of unrest. It was also a particularly severe winter, producing as much snow as Mademoiselle might have expected to find in the hyperborean gloom of remote Muscovy. When she alighted at the little Siverski station, from which she still had to travel half-a-dozen miles by sleigh to Vyra, I was not there to greet her; but I do so now as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous and ill-timed journey. Her Russian vocabulary consisted, I know, of one short word, the same solitary word that years later she was to take
back to Switzerland. This word, which in her pronunciation may be phonetically rendered as "giddy-eh" (actually it is gde with e as in "yet"), meant "Where?" And that was a good deal. Uttered by her like the raucous cry of some lost bird, it accumulated such interrogatory force that it sufficed for all her needs. "Giddy-eh? Giddy-eh?" she would wail, not only to find out her whereabouts but also to express supreme misery: the fact that she was a stranger, shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, in search of the blessed land where at last she would be understood.

  I can visualize her, by proxy, as she stands in the middle of the station platform, where she has just alighted, and vainly my ghostly envoy offers her an arm that she cannot see. ("There I was, abandoned by all, comme la Comtesse Karenine," she later complained, eloquently, if not quite correctly.) The door of the waiting room opens with a shuddering whine peculiar to nights of intense frost; a cloud of hot air rushes out, almost as profuse as the steam from the panting engine; and now our coachman Zahar takes over--a burly man in sheepskin with the leather outside, his huge gloves protruding from his scarlet sash into which he has stuffed them. I hear the snow crunching under his felt boots while he busies himself with the luggage, the jingling harness, and then his own nose, which he eases by means of a dexterous tweak-and-shake of finger and thumb as he trudges back around the sleigh. Slowly, with grim misgivings, "Madmazelya," as her helper calls her, climbs in, clutching at him in mortal fear lest the sleigh move off before her vast form is securely encased. Finally, she settles down with a grunt and thrusts her fists into her skimpy plush muff. At the juicy smack of their driver's lips the two black horses, Zoyka and Zinka, strain their quarters, shift hooves, strain again; and then Mademoiselle gives a backward jerk of her torso as the heavy sleigh is wrenched out of its world of steel, fur, flesh, to enter a frictionless medium where it skims along a spectral road that it seems barely to touch.