Stalking Nabokov (9 page)

the old pitfall of that dualism which separates the ego from the non-ego, a split which, strangely enough, is intensified the stronger the reality of the world is stressed…. [W]hile the brain still pulses one cannot escape the paradox that man is intimately conscious of Nature because he is walled in himself and separated from her. The human mind is a box with no tangible lid, sides, or bottom, and still it is a box, and there is no earthly method of getting out of it and remaining in it at the same time.
¹

The excitement of discovering passages like this kept me searching for far-flung Nabokoviana all through my dissertation years. When I came to write the biography, an uncollected interview offered the ideal epigraph for the book, in this succinct and luminous metaphor: “ ‘What surprises you most in life?’… ‘the miracle of consciousness: that sudden window opening onto a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.’ ”
²
Nabokov’s reflections on literature and life and on his own work and thought in his collected interviews have proved fascinating for readers, memorable for dictionaries of quotations, and invaluable for critics. Now, more than thirty years after I started amassing stray Nabokoviana, I am delighted to be preparing an edition of his uncollected prose and interviews, which should be published in the next few years as
Think, Write, Speak
—after the opening sentence of his foreword to his own collection,
Strong Opinions
: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

Excitement remained a constant in my Ph.D. studies. As work advanced, I also built a modest collection of Nabokov first editions. At an antiquarian book fair in Toronto I was astonished to find that a stall representing Serendipity Books, Berkeley, offered a stack of Nabokov first editions, especially of the early Russian works. Most bore Nabokov’s inscriptions to Anna Feigin, Véra’s cousin and the family’s closest friend, with whom they lived in Berlin from 1931 to 1937. With beating pulse and bated breath, I held for the first time a page inscribed in Nabokov’s neat Russian hand, a title page dedication to “Anyuta,” in a copy of his first novel,
Mashen’ka
(
Mary
). After fingering each of the precious tomes—far beyond what I could afford as a student—I continued to loiter around the Serendipity counter for hours, transcribing the inscriptions and taking all the data I could for a bibliographical analysis of these books.

I would have been astonished then to look ahead to the access I would soon have to material in Nabokov’s hand—and delighted to know that I would eventually help to make much of this material available. When I finished the Ph.D. at the end of 1978, I joined my girlfriend for a weekend unwinding in New York. As soon as we met there, she mentioned she’d chanced on
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters
in a bookstore. I made her take me straight there, opened up Simon Karlinsky’s elegant edition, saw that the original letters were at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and immediately knew where I’d be heading the next week. Nabokov had happily cultivated an air of Olympian remoteness as a shield to his privacy during his post-
Lolita
years of fame, and he had long expressed his disdain for writers who preserved their manuscripts. Along with everybody else I had assumed that there would be no chance of finding Nabokov papers. At Yale, I found hundreds of letters from Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, his closest literary friend in the 1940s, and twenty-five letters—including the most vivid of all—omitted (by mistake, I soon found out) from the book. Electrified by these discoveries, I spent the next two months flitting back and forth among libraries at Wellesley College, Harvard, and Cornell, where Nabokov had taught, the Bakhmeteff archive of Russian émigré papers at Columbia, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere.

The Nabokov-Wilson Letters
offered the first real insight into Nabokov’s casual human side. Its trove of literary detail confirmed me in my decision to compile a bibliography that would record the circumstances and processes of composition and publication of Nabokov’s books and that could serve as a kind of surrogate biography and as compensation for the dearth of fact and the glut of error in Andrew Field’s 1973 bibliography and 1977 biography.

After finishing my dissertation, I had sent a copy to Véra Nabokov. Just before I was due to return to New Zealand, as the terms of my scholarship required, she invited me to Montreux. I spent four days there, grilling her for the bibliography. Two months after I returned to New Zealand, she asked if I would sort out her husband’s archive. Naturally I said yes, and for two consecutive Southern Hemisphere summers came to work through the ton of papers and Nabokov books in room 69, the
chambre de débarras
, across the corridor from room 64, the Nabokovs’ sitting room—from where, in their suite in the Cygne wing of the Montreux Palace Hotel, they had overlooked Lake Geneva for decades.

The papers in Montreux did not cover Nabokov’s whole legacy. In 1959, suddenly facing a massive tax bill on his
Lolita
income, Nabokov took advantage of the tax relief awarded for donating papers to the Library of Congress. Although he had always thought manuscripts should not distract attention from finished works, the concrete financial incentive conquered his abstract antipathy. Over the next few years he sent the Library of Congress the manuscripts of his Russian novels and stories and his English works up to
Pale Fire
in 1962. To allay his misgivings, he placed a fifty-year ban on access to the materials, despite the Library of Congress’s attempts to persuade him otherwise—a ban that expired only in 2009. During my first winter in Montreux, I extracted from Véra a promise to allow me access to the papers he had deposited in Washington. With Dmitri’s help, I held her to her promise and had my first foray into the Nabokov papers at the Library of Congress—badly catalogued, as I found—in January 1980.

In Montreux, Véra allowed me to come and go as I liked into room 69 and the unheated former laundry storeroom at the end of the corridor, which we made into the new manuscript room. There I arranged and catalogued everything Nabokov had kept after settling in Montreux—all the manuscripts on index cards, the typescripts, galleys, page proofs, editorial correspondence, and material from his early years, especially the albums his mother had lovingly compiled of his first fifteen years’ work as a writer. These had arrived in the 1960s from Prague, where his mother had died in 1939, by way of his sisters, one still in Prague, one now near him in Geneva.

I soon found in the Montreux archives first one, then two manuscripts of
Volshebnik
(
The Enchanter
), the novella that we might now call “The Original of Lolita,” which Nabokov had written in Russian in 1939 but been advised not to publish. After writing
Lolita
itself, he thought he had destroyed its Russian precursor but then rediscovered it and considered translating and publishing it in the wake of
Lolita’
s international success. But the manuscript had again been misplaced for decades when I
re-
rediscovered what would be published in 1985, in Dmitri’s translation, as
The Enchanter
.

Despite my free access to everything in the Montreux archive room and controlled access to the Library of Congress Nabokoviana, I could not see other materials that Véra guarded in her bedroom: Nabokov’s letters to his parents and to her, his diaries, and
The Original of Laura
. Véra knew that as well as sorting the archive for her I was gathering information for a bibliography. She did not know that old photostats—negatives, on paper now turned brown—of some of the letters from Nabokov to his parents were among the material I was sorting. I transcribed them painstakingly by holding their reversed script up to a mirror, but Nabokov had crossed out personal details on the photostats, made for Field’s inspection in 1970, and many letters were missing altogether. I kept pressing Véra for access to what I had not yet been able to see.

In 1981 Véra formally agreed to condone a
bio
graphy project. In November I returned to Montreux to begin. Several months later, I discovered, at the bottom of a pile of otherwise empty boxes behind a cupboard in room 69, a cardboard box full of manuscripts of Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature from its origins to the twentieth century, all the material
other
than the authors (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov) taught in his Masterpieces of European Fiction course and featured in the 1981
Lectures on Russian Literature
. Véra had always been perturbed that her husband’s lectures on Russian poetry could not be found. “
Eureka!
” I wrote in headline-size capitals on a note I left for her to find the next morning.

The material found in that box almost thirty years ago has still not been published. Part of the problem of dealing with Nabokov’s legacy is that it is so vast that it can be hard to know where to turn next. I have worked on subjects other than Nabokov for most of this millennium, but in preparing a paper for a Nabokov conference three years ago, I was sent back to my notes on the unpublished Russian lectures and immediately stumbled on a paragraph I could not resist transcribing and sending to Dmitri Nabokov:

When examining a writer and his work, three points of view interest me above all. Individual genius, the position his work holds in the historical evolution of artistic vision and the artist’s struggle
against
public opinion and the current ideas of his time. Such things as Realism and Romanticism and the rest of the lot mean nothing to me. Absolute objective reality cannot exist or rather cannot be apprehended by the human mind. It is the approximation to it that only matters; and the reality with which human genius deals, be it the buffalo which the caveman painted on a rock or the lullaby sung by an Indian squaw, is but a series of illusions becoming more and more vivid according to the artist’s power and his position in time. What must always be remembered is that the reality of the world as imagined and conveyed by a writer is but the individual reality of his individual world. When people find this or that writer’s world to be true to nature, as the saying goes, it means that either 1) the writer has adopted a popular point of view—and that is the way of all second-rate writers from [Virgil,] the minor poet of Rome[,] to Mr Hemingway of Spain, —or 2) that the writer has made the general public see the world in his own terms—and this is the way of all great writers from William Shakespeare to James Joyce.
³

As I wrote to Dmitri, the passage, although crossed out by Nabokov, seems invaluable for anyone with an interest in him—or in literature—and deserves publication, along with the rest of these lectures. Dmitri agreed. (This and similar passages in these lectures in fact led me to formulate a new appreciation of the role that a belief in cultural evolution plays in Nabokov’s thought and artistic judgments; see
chapter 14
, “Nabokov’s Transition from Russian to English: Repudiation or Evolution?”) The subjects covered by these “new” Russian lectures run all the way from saints’ lives to Vladislav Khodasevich, whom Nabokov considered the greatest twentieth-century Russian poet. They cover the literary material that Nabokov knew best, that he devoured as a boy, that he studied at Cambridge, and that he was brought to Cornell to teach. In these lectures he opens up the whole range of Russian literature and injects all his passion and imagination into discussions of Pushkin or digressions on literature, art, and life like the one above.

By the time I unearthed this treasure, Véra had already let me see Nabokov’s diaries and his letters to his parents. But it was not until I returned to Montreux in the winter of 1984–85, after she had seen the first chapters of my biography and realized she would not regret trusting me, that she allowed me oblique access to Nabokov’s letters to her. She would not let me read or hold them, but sat at the small round dining table in her sitting room—the one where she and Vladimir were photographed playing chess—while I sat opposite. In her eighties, still coughing and husky from a recent cold, she read aloud from the letters into my tape recorder, session after session, skipping endearments and anything else she thought too personal, announcing “
propusk
” (“omission”) at each cut. Now these splendid letters are being produced in their own volume, transcribed and translated from the Russian by Olga Voronina, former deputy director of the Nabokov Museum, and by me, with Dmitri Nabokov adding the final polish and familial tone. They will also be released in the original Russian.

Late in 1984 Véra had told me she would “of course” eventually let me see
The Original of Laura
, but she offered such concessions mainly to buy time. But in February 1987, as I was writing on Nabokov’s American years, she at last handed me the little box of index cards. My awe at holding Nabokov’s manuscripts had long passed. For seven years I had been cataloguing and rearranging them for Véra and transcribing and indexing them for my own purposes, letting myself into the archive room and the “library” in the Nabokov rooms of the Montreux Palace Hotel’s Cygne wing, often working there from morning till after midnight.

I explain in this book’s last chapter the unpropitious circumstances of my reading
The Original of Laura
at last, and my negative reaction. Not long after I read it, Véra and Dmitri asked me what I thought they should do with it. Though I had religiously preserved every relic of paper, envelope, or cardboard in the archives that bore his handwriting, I now said, to my own surprise, “Destroy it.” A whole
novel!
I will explain in that chapter why I changed my evaluation of
Laura
so radically and how glad I am now that my original advice went unheeded.