Despair

The Russian text of
Despair (Otchayanie—
a far more sonorous howl) was written in 1932, in Berlin. The émigré review
Sovremennye Zapiski
, in Paris, serialized it in the course of 1934, and the émigré publishing house Petropolis, in Berlin, published the book in 1936. As has happened in the case of all my other works,
Otchayanie
(despite Hermann’s conjecture) is banned in the prototypical police state.

At the end of 1936, while I was still living in Berlin—where another beastliness had started to megaphone—I translated
Otchayanie
for a London publisher. Although I had been scribbling in English all my literary life in the margin, so to say, of my Russian writings, this was my first serious attempt (not counting a wretched poem in a Cambridge University review, circa 1920) to use English for what may be loosely termed an artistic purpose. The result seemed to me stylistically clumsy, so I asked a rather grumpy Englishman, whose services I obtained through an agency in Berlin, to read the stuff; he found a few solecisms in the first chapter, but then refused to continue, saying he disapproved of the book; I suspect he wondered if it might not have been a true confession.

In 1937 John Long Limited, of London, brought out
Despair
in a convenient edition with a
catalogue raisonné
of their publications at the back. Despite that bonus, the book sold badly, and a few years later a German bomb destroyed the entire stock. The only copy extant is, as far as I know, the one I own—but two or three may still be lurking amidst abandoned reading matter on the dark shelves of seaside boarding houses from Bournemouth to Tweedmouth.

For the present edition I have done more than revamp my thirty-year-old translation: I have revised
Otchayanie
itself. Lucky students who may be able to compare the three texts will also note the addition of an important passage which had been stupidly omitted in more timid times. Is this fair, is this wise from a scholar’s point of view? I can readily imagine what Pushkin might have said to his trembling paraphrasts; but I also know how pleased and excited I would have been in 1935 had I been able to foreread this 1965 version. The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its most laudable form. This love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth.

Despair
, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth. It does not uplift the spiritual organ of man, nor does it show humanity the right exit. It contains far fewer “ideas” than do those rich vulgar novels that are acclaimed so hysterically in the short echo-walk between the ballyhoo and the hoot. The attractively shaped object or Wiener-schnitzel dream that the eager Freudian may think he distinguishes in the remoteness of my wastes will turn out to be on closer inspection a derisive mirage organized by my agents. Let me add, just in case, that experts on literary “schools” should wisely refrain this time from casually dragging in “the influence of German Impressionists”: I do not know German and have never read the Impressionists—whoever they are. On the other hand, I do know French and shall be interested to see if anyone calls my Hermann “the father of existentialism.”

The book has less White-Russian appeal than have my other émigré novels;
^*
hence it will be less puzzling and irritating to those readers who have been brought up on the leftist propaganda of the thirties. Plain readers, on the other hand, will welcome its plain structure and pleasing plot—which, however, is not quite as familiar as the writer of the rude letter in Chapter Eleven assumes it to be.

There are many entertaining conversations throughout the book, and the final scene with Felix in the wintry woods is of course great fun.

I am unable to foresee and to fend inevitable attempts to find in the alembics of
Despair
something of the rhetorical venom that I injected into the narrator’s tone in a much later novel. Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann.

The line and fragments of lines Hermann mutters in Chapter Four come from Pushkin’s short poem addressed to his wife in the eighteen-thirties. I give it here in full, in my own translation, with the retention of measure and rhyme, a course that is seldom advisable—nay, admissible—except at a very special conjunction of stars in the firmament of the poem, as obtains here.

The “remote abode” to which mad Hermann finally scurries is economically located in the Roussillon where three years earlier I had begun writing my chess novel,
The Defense
. We leave Hermann there at the ludicrous height of his discomfiture. I do not remember what happened to him eventually. After all, fifteen other books and twice as many years have intervened. I cannot even recall if that film he proposed to direct was ever made by him.

—V
LADIMIR
N
ABOKOV

March 1, 1965

Montreux

If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness … So, more or less, I had thought of beginning my tale. Further, I should have drawn the reader’s attention to the fact that had I lacked that power, that ability, et cetera, not only should I have refrained from describing certain recent events, but there would have been nothing to describe, for, gentle reader, nothing at all would have happened. Silly perhaps, but at least clear. The gift of penetrating life’s devices, an innate disposition toward the constant exercise of the creative faculty could alone have enabled me … At this point I should have compared the breaker of the law which makes such a fuss over a little spilled blood, with a poet or a stage performer. But as my poor left-handed friend used to put it: philosophic speculation is the invention of the rich. Down with it.

It may look as though I do not know how to start. Funny sight, the elderly gentleman who comes lumbering by, jowl flesh flopping, in a valiant dash for the last bus, which he eventually overtakes but is afraid to board in motion and so, with a sheepish smile, drops back, still going at a trot. Is it that I dare not make the leap? It roars, gathers speed, will presently vanish irrevocably around the corner, the bus, the
motorbus, the mighty montibus of my tale. Rather bulky imagery, this. I am still running.

My father was a Russian-speaking German from Reval, where he went to a famous agricultural college. My mother, a pure Russian, came from an old princely stock. On hot summer days, a languid lady in lilac silks, she would recline in her rocking chair, fanning herself, munching chocolate, all the blinds down, and the wind from some new-mown field making them billow like purple sails.