Stalking Nabokov (75 page)

16
.   Unpublished lecture for Russian Survey course, VNA.

17
.   Unpublished letter, Véra Nabokov to Heinrich-Maria Ledwig Rowohlt, January 30, 1966, VNA: “The translator should follow faithfully the English text [of
The Gift
], and the English text only. Whenever there is a discrepancy between the English and the Russian texts, it was done by my husband himself quite deliberately.”

18
.   Daniil Pasmanik, cited in
VNRY
156.

19
.   
Daily Dispatch and Manchester Morning Chronicle
, March 31, 1922, 6;
VNRY
34.

20
.   Among other ideas Nabokov may have found congenial were Spencer’s stress on benevolent design and Haeckel’s stress on monism and on evolution’s achieving artistic perfection.

21
.   Nabokov, “The Lermontov Mirage,”
Russian Review
1, no. 1 (1941): 32.

22
.   Nabokov, “The Lermontov Mirage,” 32.

23
.   Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.

24
.   Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.

25
.   Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.

26
.   Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.

27
.   Unclear in original; perhaps “considerations.”

28
.   Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.

29
.   In original, “stops to be.”

30
.   Unpublished lectures for Russian Survey course, VNA.

31
.   Also known as “Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers” (
LRL
).

32
.   Nabokov,
The Eye
, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Phaedra, 1965), 8;
Gift
9,
Glory
, xii.

33
.   Boyd,
Russkie gody
, 284, 328.

34
.   Among the challenges to Joyce: a portrait of an artist as a young man, providing ample rather than insufficient evidence of the artist’s artistic growth, even to the point where he writes the work in question; close confinement in a closely observed city and a natural motivation for fabulous voyages beyond; and a subtle Odyssean parallel, a son brooding on his father’s apparent failure to return from distant voyages, and his search for him, incorporated within the story rather than imposed from without. Among the challenges to Proust: lost time regained both in small witty ways throughout the course of the story and unexpectedly at a higher level and to a deeper degree at the end of the work, and assertion of the significance of voluntary over involuntary memory.

15. NABOKOV, PUSHKIN, SHAKESPEARE: GENIUS, GENEROSITY, AND GRATITUDE IN
THE GIFT
AND
PALE FIRE

1
.   For excellent discussions of the presence of Pushkin in
The Gift
, which, however, come short of identifying Pushkin as part of the fate Fyodor senses surrounding him, see Simon Karlinsky, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel
Dar
as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis,”
Slavonic and East European Journal
7 (1963): 284–96; Sergei Davydov, “Weighing Nabokov’s
Gift
on Push-kin’s Scales,” in
Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age
, ed. Boris Gasparov et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 419–30; Davydov, “Nabokov and Pushkin,” in
The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov
, ed. Vladimir Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 482–96.; and Alexander Dolinin, “
The Gift
,” in
The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov
, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 135–69; and the first of his “Tri zametki o romane Vladimira Nabokova ‘Dar,’ ” in
V. V. Nabokov: Pro et Contra
, ed. B. Averin, Maria Malikova, and T. Smirnova (St. Petersburg: Russkiy Khristianskiy Gumanitarniy Institut, 1997), 697–740.

2
.   Pushkin (1828),
Sobranie sochineniy v desyati tomakh
, vol.2:
Stikhotvoreniya 1824–1836
(Moscow: Pravda, 1981), 125 (translation by BB). Dolinin, “
The Gift
,” 166n. 29. Dolinin follows “
dar”
as a theme throughout the novel, in its relation to Pushkin and Lermontov and to Dovid Knut and Adamovich in “Tri zametki,” and shows that Nabokov all but explicitly had “Dar naprasnyy, dar sluchaynyy” in mind at the end of the “Vtoroe dopolnenie k ‘Daru’ ” (698n).

3
.   See Davydov, “Weighing Nabokov’s
Gift
,” 420.

4
.   Cf. Clarence Brown, “Nabokov’s Pushkin and Nabokov’s Nabokov,” in
Nabokov: The Man and His Work
, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison: University of Wiscon-sin Press, 1967), 207: “Fate and Pushkin are identical. Pushkin is Nabokov’s fate.” Brown means this, though, in a different sense from mine.

5
.   Unpublished lecture notes, VNA.

16. NABOKOV AS VERSE TRANSLATOR: INTRODUCTION TO
VERSES AND VERSIONS

1
.   To follow the lead of Nabokov (see below) and the lilt of his friend Dr. Seuss. Nabokov met Theodore Seuss Geisel at a writers conference in Utah in the summer of 1949. During the conference, “Dr. Seuss” wrote a butterfly poem for Nabokov; years later, in
Horton Hears a Who!
(1954), he introduced an incidental “black-bottomed eagle named Vlad Vlad-i-koff,” after Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokoff (as Nabokov once spelled his name).

2
.   Page a Day Diary, November 11, 1958, VNA.

3
.   Jason Epstein to VN, December 2, 1958, VNA.

4
.   VéN to Jason Esptein, January 18, 1959, VNA.

5
.   VN to Jason Epstein, June 6, 1959, VNA.

6
.   VéN to Ray Mantle, October 22, 1968, VNA.

7
.   Cited in Ljuba Tarvi,
Comparative Translation Assessment: Quantifying Quality
(Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2004), 230.

8
.   I kicked myself when, after the publication of
Verses and Versions
, while writing obituaries for both Alfred Appel Jr., and Simon Karlinsky, I came across Nabokov’s translation of a four-line poem by Marina Tsvetaeva that I should have noted or recalled in time. Appel and Karlinsky coedited a special issue of
Triquarterly
(27–28 [1973]), published in book form as
The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922–1972
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Nabokov knew both editors and, recalling Karlinsky’s book on Tsvetaeva, translated for him, on November 12, 1972, this verse, the last quatrain of an untitled poem (first line, “Moim stiham, napisannym tak rano,” “To my poems composed so early”), which Tsvetaeva composed in 1913 (
Bitter Air
, 93):

Amidst the dust of bookshops, wide dispersed

And never purchased there by anyone,

Yet similar to precious wines, my verse

Can wait: its turn shall come.

9
.   Tarvi,
Comparative Translation
, 228.

10
.   In Tarvi,
Comparative Translation
, 234.

11
.   Douglas Hofstadter,
Le Ton beau de Marot
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 548,268, 270, 269.

12
.   Unpublished. From TS note, VNA, which may have been the beginning of a talk that Nabokov was invited to delivered to the English Institute on September 14, 1954, as he wrote Edmund Wilson on July 30, “on the Art of Translation” (
DBDV
317).

13
.   Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: ‘Onegin’ in English,”
Partisan Review
22 (1955): 498.

14
.   Elaine Feinstein, ed.,
After Pushkin
(London: Folio Society, 1999), 18.

15
.   Alexander Zholkovsky, “ ‘Ya vas lyubil… ’ Pushkina: invarianty i struktura” (Pushikin’s “I loved you”: variants and structure), http://college.usc.edu/alik/rus/ess/bib21.html.

17. TOLSTOY AND NABOKOV

1
.   
LRL
manuscript, VNA.

2
.   Gary Saul Morson,
Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in
War and Peace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987).

3
.   Unpublished letter, Nabokov to Mark Aldanov, May 6, 1942, Bakhmeteff Collection, Columbia University.

4
.   
LRL
manuscript, VNA.

5
.   Unpublished Russian survey course lecture, VNA.

6
.   I have placed this word in square brackets, because the Russian “
ekonomka”
can be translated only as “housekeeper,” but does not belong to the
dom
(house, home)—
domochadtsy
(household) pattern I have translated via the English “house.”

7
.   Cited in Richard F. Gustafson,
Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3:53, 94.

8
.   National Educational Television interview with Robert Hughes, 1965.

9
.   John Bayley,
Tolstoy and the Novel
(1966; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 242.

10
.   Stephen Jay Gould,
Bully for Brontosaurus: Further Reflections in Natural History
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 476.

11
.   Leona Toker,
Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 198–227.

12
.   Bayley,
Tolstoy and the Novel
, 207.

13
.   Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle
, Fundamentals of Language
(The Hague: Mouton, 1956).

14
.   Quoted in Gary Adelman,
Anna Karenina: The Bitterness of Ecstasy
(Boston: Twayne, 1990), 109.

15
.   Craig Raine, “Craig Raine Fondles Vladimir Nabokov,”
London Review of Books
, May 14, 1992, 6.

16
.   Isaiah Berlin,
The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History
(1953; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).

18. NABOKOV AND MACHADO DE ASSIS

1
.   Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis,
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
(1881), trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; hereafter,
BC
.

2
.   Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis,
Dom Casmurro
(1899), trans. John Gledson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 186; hereafter
DC
.

3
.   Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis,
Quincas Borba
(1891), trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 102; hereafter
QB
.

4
.   Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis,
The Devil’s Church and Other Stories
, trans. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsua (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 102–3; hereafter
DCh
.

5
.   Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis,
Obras Completa
, 3 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora José Aguilar, 1962), 3:398, cited in Maria Manuel Lisboa, “Machado de Assis and the Beloved Reader: Squatters in the Text,” in
Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s
, ed. Nicholas White and Naomi Segal (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 160.

6
.   Unpublished lecture on Soviet drama, VNA.

7
.   Not “passing,” as
MUSSR
incorrectly transcribes.

8
.   “Actually, of course, any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror” (
Gift
239).

9
.   For this at the cultural level, see
chapter 14
.

10
.   Cited by Helen Caldwell,
The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1960, 150.

11
.   Nabokov wrote “between the author and the world,” but corrected this in memory in
SO
183 to “between the author and the reader.”

19.
SPEAK, MEMORY:
THE LIFE AND THE ART

1
.   See my “In Memory of Simon Karlinsky,”
The Nabokovian
63 (Fall 2009): 7–14.

22. EVEN HOMAIS NODS: NABOKOV’S FALLIBILITY; OR, HOW TO REVISE
LOLITA

1
.   From Nabokov’s pseudo-review of
Conclusive Evidence
, intended at the time of writing to form a sixteenth chapter in the book version, but then omitted; published in
SM
1999.