Selected Letters, 1940-1977

by Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov (Editor), Matthew J. Bruccoli (Editor)

Overview

“Wonderful, compulsively readable, delicious” personal correspondences, spanning decades in the life and literary career of the author of Lolita (The Washington Post Book World).
 
An icon of twentieth-century literature, Vladimir Nabokov was a novelist, poet, and playwright, whose personal life was a fascinating story in itself. This collection of more than four hundred letters chronicles the author’s career, recording his struggles in the publishing world, the battles over Lolita, and his relationship with his wife, among other subjects, and gives a surprising look at the personality behind the creator of such classics as Pale Fire and Pnin.
 
“Dip in anywhere, and delight follows.” —John Updike

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544106550
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	32,650
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Russian-born poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and essayist was awarded the National Medal for Literature for his life's work in 1973. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. He is the author of many works including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and Speak, Memory.

Date of Birth:

April 23, 1899

Date of Death:

July 2, 1977

Place of Birth:

St. Petersburg, Russia

Place of Death:

Montreux, Switzerland

Education:

Trinity College, Cambridge, 1922

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

LETTERS WRITTEN IN GERMANY AND FRANCE, 1923–1939

These fifteen letters provide background on Vladimir Nabokov's family and the preparation for his emigration to the United States.

TO: Elena Rukavishnikov Nabokov

ALS, 2 pp.

19.vi.23 Soliès-Pont, Alpes Maritimes

My dearest,

Today I received your dear card in which you say you only got two poems ("Cherries" and another one), while, before them, I had sent you a long letter with the two poems "Vecher" and "Krestî." No problem if the poems get lost (I know them by heart anyway) but I'm sorry about the letter. ... Now I send you two short poems (to be followed tomorrow by much better ones) and a longer one (about an actual occurrence; the song en quéstion was the romance "Within your eyes, within your wild caress-es ...").

It is evening now, with touching cloudlets in the sky. I took a walk around the plantation, behind the grove of cork oaks, ate peaches and apricots, admired the sunset, listened to a nightingale's twees and whistles, and both its song and the sunset tasted of apricot and peach.

In a large cage near the house, live, all together (and rather messily), chickens, roosters, ducks, peahens, and white rabbits. One of the rabbits was lying with its front paws extended, like a lop-eared sphynx. Then a chick climbed on its back, and both of them had a scare....

All during these days I have felt drawn to the inkwell, but there's no time for writing. For that reason — and because, without you, the sun is not the same, am coming back no later than July 20. I have gained weight and gotten all dark, since I now wear nothing but shorts when I work. I must say I am infinitely glad I came here, and infinitely grateful to Sol. Sam....

V.

Evening

I heaved from my shoulder my pick and my shovel into a corner of the barn, I dried off the sweat, ambled out to greet sunset a bonfire cool and rosy-hued.

It peacefully blazed beyond towering beeches, in between funereal boughs, where fleetingly shimmered ineffable echoes of a vibrant nightingale.

And a guttural din, choirs of toads, gutta-perchalike, sang resilient on the pond. It broke off. My forehead was trustingly, doumily brushed by the flight of a passing moth.

The hills grew more somber: there, flashed reassuringly a twinkle of nocturnal lights. In the distance, a train chugged and vanished. A lingering whistle lingeringly died....

The fragrance was grassy. Entranced I stood, thoughtless. And, when the nebulous hoot was stilled, I saw night had fallen, stars hung close above me, and tears were streaming down my face.

TO: Kirill Nabokov c. 1930

ALS, 2 pp. Berlin

Dear Kirill,

The poems you sent me are significantly better. The poem "To you, a stranger" ends well; the last two lines are good. The dragonfly etc. image is not bad in the poem about the window, and, thanks to the repetition of the letter P, there is a pleasant sound to the first line "one's soul, suffused with poems and passion." But there are also things that are not good: a flame cannot "flare up gradually" (flaring is an instantaneous phenomenon). Leave to Blok the act of "committing [those] shoulders to memory"; okonnaya dvertsa ["the window's doorlet"] is incomprehensible, and is there to rhyme with serdtse ["heart"], just as, incidentally, further on, okonise ["windowlet"] exists solely for the benefit of solntse ["sun"].

And, above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times like "love's flame," "the Muses' creation" "to sing the beloved," "riotous agitation" and "tempestuous storm" (a pleonasm to boot), "jubilant sea," etc. There is a hackneyed sound as well in the rhythm itself of the poem "When in one's soul": first a stanza on "when," followed by one on "then" — this is mere rhetoric. As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them). Do not use epithets that no longer have any meaning ("noisy street"); do not fill in gaps, for a poem must be born whole and tightly packed, and if you must invent some adjective to plug a hole, that means the whole line is bad.

If you designate stressed syllables "/" and unstressed ones here are all the schemes of Russian poetry (when written with regular meter):

The iamb: "- / - / - / - /"("within my soul, those eyes of yours"). Every "- /" pair is called a foot, so here you have four-foot iambic meter, iambic tetrameter.

The trochee is the inverse of the iamb. Its foot is "/ -" ("trochees merit your attention").

There are, in addition, three types of meter whose feet consist not of two but of three syllables: The amphibrach: - / - ("this too is a meter in which you should write").

The anapaest: - - / ("and this too is a meter in which you should write").

The dactyl: / - - ("also a meter toward which don't be squeamish").

Six-foot dactylic meter = hexameter.

As you see, this is all simple and can be assimilated in five minutes, with no need for any textbooks.

Answer two questions for me:

1. Why, in the examples given, does the last foot not correspond to the scheme ("should write" and "squeamish")?

2. Why is an iambic line (or trochaic one, if you drop the first syllable) like "when imperturbably at work," in spite of its odd scheme of stressed and unstressed syllables ("---/---/"), nevertheless iambic (or, minus the first word, trochaic)? Try and answer.

Your V.

TO: Kirill Nabokov c. 1930

ALS, 2 pp.
Dear Kirill,

Here is what it boils down to: are you writing poetry as a sideline, because everyone does it, or are you really drawn to it irresistibly, does it surge from your soul, do images and sensations naturally don the dress of poetry, crowding to emerge? If the former is the case, and a poem is only a carefree game to you, a pleasant fashionable entertainment, the desire to hand it with a grim expression to some girl, then forget it, for you are wasting your time.

If, on the other hand, it is the latter (and I would very much like it to be so), then one must first of all realize what a difficult, responsible job it is, a job one must train for with a passion, with a certain reverence and chastity, disdaining the seeming facility with which quatrains fall together (just tack on a rhyme and it's done).

Beware of stereotypes. Thus, for instance, the first verse of your poem (although it does contain errors, but more about that later) is far from being a stereotype, even though it contains discourse about a rose (but an original kind of discourse). What is a stereotype, and a bad one, is your way of rhyming. On more than one occasion I have written in Rul' about ugly rhymes that irk the ear and create a comical impression through aural association. Thus, for example, you rhyme mozg ["brain"] and roz [a plural case of "rose"]; where the ear expects a rhyme, the aural sense involuntarily transforms roz into rozg [a plural case of "birch rod"], and these birch rods are comical. Zhadny ["greedy"] and sada [a case of "garden"] or pozharishch [a plural case of "site of a conflagration"] and lapishch [a plural case of "huge paw"] cannot rhyme at all, while raztsvet ["flowering" (n.)] and tsvet ["color"] or kogti ["daws"] and nogti ["nails"] rhyme too obviously, since they are almost identical words, which is bad. A rhyme must evoke astonishment and satisfaction in the reader — astonishment at how unexpected it is, and satisfaction with its precision or musicality.

Even more important, though, are images. You compare jealousy with an octopus, but the image you give of an octopus is incorrect: you endow it with "coils" and "huge paws" and "claws" and "nails," while actually an octopus is a gray bag with two goggled eyes and elongated feelers. In other words, this octopus of yours turned up quite by chance, and on top of it there is an admixture, from God knows where, of some "quagmire" and some "chastening hand," even though we had just been talking of "huge paws." Let us go through the poem again from beginning to end and see what other flaws it contains. Here — you have "the first color will ... ripen." A fruit ripens, not a color. "A bird flies in on the wing." On what else would you expect it to fly? ... "In the abandonment of the garden" is a horrid Balmontism. It should be "in the abandoned garden" (an expression, incidentally, that is often found in romances). "The fire of pozharishchi": You are mistaken if you think pozharishche means "huge conflagration." It means "a place where a conflagration has occurred." "Ring ... paws" are too far apart. "With [one's?] mouth ... to sate one's thirst": with what else are you going to drink? In the fifth stanza for some reason you have a transposition of feminine and masculine rhymes. Prevozmoch ["to overcome "] — noch ["night"] is a very shabby rhyme.

Take all this into consideration and, if you have the urge to write, do so as conscientiously as you can and try to avoid the absurdities I have noted above.

Keep well.

V.

TO: Altagracia de Jannelli

CC, 1 p.

V. Nabokoff Nestorstrasse 22
Dear Mr. de Jannelli,

I am afraid I cannot very well send you a synopsis of the EXPLOITits composition entails too much labour: the quality of this novel is in the way the plot is treated and not in the plot itself. Besides I am very much against my books being judged by mere descriptions of their contents. As the EXPLOIT has not yet been translated into any language I offer you instead an option on another novel of mine KING QUEEN KNAVE, a German copy of which I am sending you by the same mail. As the option I gave you expires on the 1.V., I replace it herewith by a fresh one for KING QUEEN KNAVE to last until the 3.VII, 1935.

I trust that this is the best we can do under the present circumstances and await your consent to my present offer.

Yours very truly

P.S. Schuster & Simon tell me that the book (Luzhin's Defence) has indeed been offered to them, but that they have not yet quite made up their minds about it. I shall keep you informed of further developments.

TO: Hutchinson & co.

CC, 1 p.

Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirin Nestorstrasse 22
Dear Sirs,

Thanks for your letter of the 15th. I have noted that you are having the translation set up by your Printers and that I shall receive a set of proofs. I certainly don't intend to make any superfluous corrections and generally I should not like to cause any delay. My demands are very modest. From the very beginning I have been trying to obtain an exact, complete and correct translation. I wonder whether Mr. Klement informed you of the defects I found in the translation he sent me. It was loose, shapeless, sloppy, full of blunders and gaps, lacking vigour and spring, and plumped down in such dull, flat English that I could not read it to the end; all of which is rather hard on an author who aims in his work at absolute precision, takes the utmost trouble to attain it, and then finds the translator calmly undoing every blessed phrase. Please believe me that had the translation been in the least acceptable I would have passed it. And I am sure you will agree, in your quality of publishers, that a good translation is most important for the success of a book. So I hope that it has now been thoroughly improved and that it will not give rise to any objections of the above kind.

There is another bit of information for which I should be most grateful to you. Did you acquire from Mr. Klement together with "Camera Obscura" another novel of mine? And if so, was it "Despair" or "Luzhin's Defence" (entitled "La Course du Fou" in the French edition)? Please excuse me for bothering you with questions, but you will surely understand in what a ridiculous position I am. Mr. Klement has for months left all my letters without any reply. Possibly the man is dead. Now my point is that, as I hear, the American publishing firm Doubleday, Doran & Co. are desirous of publishing the latter book in collaboration with the British publishers, so that I should like to know who holds the English rights of this book Yours very truly

P.S. Please do not omit "Berlin" when writing to me.

TO: Altagracia De Jannelli

CC, 1 p.

V. Nabokoff Nestorstrasse 22
Dear Mr. de Jannelli,

I see from what you tell me that the American publishers all prefer to deal in a book where they can find an English partner. I therefore suggest your temporarily abandoning your attempts at finding a publisher for Podvig and La Course du Fou and trying your hand at Camera Obscura and Despair, those two books having already an English publisher in the firm of Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.

Camera Obscura, for one, is to appear this autumn under the firm of Long & Co. Its translation has already been completed, but there only exists till now one revised copy thereof.

Perhaps you could try to work on a Russian copy which I am addressing you together with this. I am also giving you an MS copy of Despair. The latter will probably appear in England next spring.

Yours very truly

TO: Hutchinson & Co.

CC, 2 pp.

Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirin Nestorstrasse 22
Dear Sirs,

After the publication of my book "Camera Obscura", the translation of which did not satisfy me — it was inexact and full of hackneyed expressions meant to tone down all the tricky passages — Messrs. John Long suggested that I should translate myself that other novel of mine they were supposed to publish, — "Despair". Though I am pretty well acquainted with the English language I did not care to take the entire responsibility and offered to make a translation which the publishers would have revised by some expert of their own. While they accepted this condition, Messrs. J. Long declared that they did not think they could "pay more than a fee of say 10/6d per 1000 words, as we should have to pay an additional fee to the person selected to edit it." Subsequently the fee was extended to 15/- per 1000 words, and I agreed.

They acknowledged the translation I sent them in the beginning of April 1936, but then left me for almost 2 months without any news. At length they informed me that they had not made any plans for the publication of the book as "some of our Readers' reports have not been at all enthusiastic, especially in regard to your translation". I did not point out to Messrs. J. Long the strangeness of their conduct, but simply replied by a letter part of which please allow me to quote:

"... after careful consideration I think that perhaps your readers' perplexity was not so much caused by an imperfect translation, as by the peculiar character of the work itself and by a certain angularity of style which was part of the author's deliberate intention. As a matter of fact among the Russian reviewers of the less sophisticated type there occurred one or two who failed to penetrate beyond the "story" and were frankly puzzled, — in spite of which the book very soon won a reputation which my modesty forbids me to qualify. I quite understand that the book's "originality"— as the critics chose to put it — may cause some perplexity after a superficial perusal, — the more so as I have taken special pains to render exactly into English all that I had taken similar trouble to convey to the Russian reader, a couple of years before."

I also suggested that your firm might get in touch with McBride of New York whose manager Mr. Mangione wrote to my agent that he was "enthusiastic about Despair preferring it, of course, to Camera Obscura" and asked to consider its publication in case it should be published in England.

To this letter of June 29th I have not yet had any answer.

While I do not think the whole attitude of Messrs. J. Long in this matter to be beyond reproach, since they had engaged themselves to have the translation edited and declared this to be the reason why they offered me but a very moderate fee for my work, I, nevertheless, have now asked an English friend of mine (who is a professional translator) to revise my translation, so as to set things into motion again; I hope to have the revised Ms. ready within a couple of weeks.

I should like to add that some time ago I got acquainted with the average production of Messrs. J. Long — and I feel somehow that "Despair" would be far more in its place if you could publish it under the imprint of Hutchinson instead of John Long. I am afraid that the public for which Messrs. J. Long are working might fail to appreciate "Despair" on account of its rather peculiar character as described in my letter quoted above.

Yours faithfully

TO: Hutchinson & Co.

CC, 1 p.

Vladimir Nabokoff Nestorstrasse 22
Dear Sirs,

While leaving the final decision entirely with you, I think it my duty to repeat my attempt of persuading you that it is your interest as well as mine to publish "Despair" under your own imprint instead of John Long's.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Vladimir Nabokov"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Dmitri Nabokov.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Editorial Note,
Chronology,
Letters Written in Germany and France, 1923–1939,
Photographs,
Letters, 1940–1977,
Index,
Endpapers,
About the Author,
Connect with HMH,
Footnotes,

What People are Saying About This

Howard Nemerov

"It's ever go good to hear the master's voice again, that shewd, sometimes downright nasty voice asserting the absolute value of the literary in its own right against the crude forgeries of translators, editors, publishers, and even fellow-aurlerians."