Stalking Nabokov (10 page)

While I worked in the archives, Véra told me many times how keenly she wanted to assemble a volume of Nabokov’s verse translations. I promised to keep track of all I discovered as I sorted and sifted. But Véra had neither the health nor the time to edit the translations. She was already seventy-seven when I met her, frail after the shock of Nabokov’s death, and always busy as agent for the Nabokov estate and as translator or indefatigable checker of translations into Russian, English, French, and German.

When Stanislav Shvabrin, in the course of his doctoral research on Nabokov’s verse translations, discovered in 2003 some unpublished Nabokov verse translations in Harvard’s libraries, he asked Dmitri Nabokov whether he could publish them. Dmitri asked my advice. I pointed out all the other uncollected verse translations and suggested to Stas that we edit together a volume of Nabokov’s collected verse translations. He and Dmitri readily agreed. At 441 pages, the resulting volume,
Verses and Versions
(2008), is not skimpy, but even so it could not include a large fraction of Nabokov’s verse translations: those before 1923, those into Russian (including Ronsard, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, Rimbaud), and those into French (especially Pushkin). That reflects one constraint on all Nabokov’s posthumous publications. Since the volumes can sell well, trade publishers naturally prefer selectiveness to the exhaustiveness that eager scholars would like and that some university presses might permit.

Another constraint is manpower. Véra Nabokov had a hands-on approach to all the Nabokov material published in her lifetime. She was even a meticulous first editor for me on the half-million words of the Nabokov biography. After a high-speed crash in one of his Ferraris in 1982, leading to severe burns, a broken neck, and ten months in hospital, Dmitri Nabokov—already his father’s main translator into English during his lifetime—decided to set aside his career as an opera basso profundo and to dedicate the remainder of his life to serving the Nabokov literary legacy.

In the 1970s Matthew Bruccoli, a former student of Nabokov’s at Cornell and already the leading Fitzgerald scholar, set up a publishing company that, in partnership with an established New York publisher, published four volumes of Nabokov’s Cornell and Harvard lectures in swift succession:
Lectures on Literature
and a facsimile edition of one part,
Lectures on
Ulysses (1980);
Lectures on Russian Literature
(1981); and
Lectures on
Don Quixote (1983). Two important lectures on drama did not fit into these volumes. Recovered from his accident, Dmitri Nabokov took it upon himself as his first major task to translate four of Nabokov’s one-act plays and one three-act play into English and publish them with the essays and his own introduction (
The Man from the USSR and Other Plays
, 1985).

His next task was to translate the manuscript of
Volshebnik
(
The Enchanter
, 1986) that I had rediscovered while sorting out the archive for Véra. While he was translating, I was beginning to write the biography, very conscious that other Nabokov scholars would benefit enormously from the archival material that only I had access to in Montreux and Washington. I was determined to make available in the biography as much as I could that was relevant to Nabokov scholars, while not overloading other readers—not that
they
would object to more unpublished Nabokov.

During my research on the biography I had come to know and love Nabokov’s favorite sibling, Elena Sikorski, who was living in Geneva and published her fascinating correspondence with her brother in 1986 (in Russian, of course). A much larger but much more selective
Selected Letters, 1940–1977
, chosen rather hastily by Matthew Bruccoli and Dmitri Nabokov, appeared three years later.

Véra Nabokov’s decline and her death in 1991 slowed the flow of Dmitri’s work as translator and editor. He had translated in 1985 one story Nabokov had chosen not to republish, and he now translated another eleven in his edition of
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
(1995). The sale of his father’s remaining manuscripts to the New York Public Library and of his father’s books inscribed to his mother, usually with wonderful drawings of invented butterflies, and his dealing with the duties of the estate, the persistent problem of Russian piracies, and a ten-volume collected works in Russian took up much of his time. Nabokov scholarship was also powering ahead elsewhere, in the Pléiade edition of Nabokov in France (begun in 1986, with the second of the projected three volumes published only in 2010), and Dieter E. Zimmer’s annotated twenty-five-volume German edition.

In the early 1990s I teamed up with lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle to edit Nabokov’s butterfly writings. The thick tome that resulted included not only the scientific papers but also many unpublished notes from the 1940s, when Nabokov was working at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology; an abandoned
Butterflies of Europe
from 1963–65; all the lepidopterological references in his creative works; an abandoned story, his last, “The Admirable Anglewing”; and his longest story still unpublished at the time, “Father’s Butterflies,” an appendix to his longest and greatest Russian novel,
The Gift
. The incompletely revised and sometimes barely legible manuscript of this complex appendix proved Dmitri’s most difficult translating task, occupying him on and off through the late 1990s.
Nabokov’s Butterflies
(2000) was preceded, in 1999, the centenary of Nabokov’s birth, by my Knopf edition of Nabokov’s
Speak, Memory
with, for the first time, chapter 16, a key to the rest that Nabokov had written immediately after the other chapters but then decided not to publish.

For much of the last decade Dmitri’s health has been under serious assault. At seventy-six he has slowed from five Ferraris and a Dodge Viper to a wheelchair. Nevertheless, alongside his editing and translating his father’s fiction, he has continued to enjoying translating and publishing his father’s Russian poems, a diversion that began in the 1980s. Nabokov had published his own translations of thirty-nine Russian poems, along with fourteen English poems and some of his chess problems, in
Poems and Problems
(1970). In 1975 and 1976, often bedridden, he had selected the Russian poems he thought worth collecting, and these were published, two years after his death, as
Stikhi
(
Poems
, 1979). Dmitri has translated for the first time many other poems in
Stikhi
and “A University Poem,” his father’s longest Russian poem, for an imminent
Collected Poems
, along with the last, previously unrecovered or unpublished, Russian stories, including “Natasha,” for an expanded and final version of
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
.

I had more than enough projects of my own and was pleased to see Dmitri preparing for publication whatever he could. But now Dmitri has recognized that he cannot deal with all the business of the estate, all the scores of countries interested in publishing, translating, or adapting Nabokov works,
and
translate the primary literary texts—there still remain other poems and Nabokov’s longest and most exuberant play,
Tragediya Gospodina Morna
(
The Tragedy of Mister Morn
, not published even in Russian until 1997)—
and
edit the remaining texts, the uncollected prose and interviews, the remaining lectures, and the remaining letters. I did not initiate
Nabokov’s Butterflies
, or
Verses and Versions
, but I have been interested for many years in editing Nabokov’s uncollected prose and am happy also to edit his remaining Russian lectures and his Russian letters, and eventually the still-unpublished English letters.

What difference can Nabokov’s posthumous literary legacy make? What has changed in our understanding of Nabokov since his death, and what chances for further change do we have?

Perhaps the first was our growth in knowledge of Nabokov the man. Field’s
Nabokov: His Life in Part
was published in 1977, in the month Nabokov died, but what one reviewer called its “incompetence and malice” meant that despite Nabokov’s hundreds of pages of corrections to Field’s typescripts, it still offered very little knowledge of or insight into the man.
⁴
The editing of
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters
(1979) had begun while Nabokov was still alive. This rich correspondence showed the back story to the fierce public rift in the mid-1960s between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, the leading American critic from the 1930s to the 1960s, and Nabokov’s close involvement in American literary life from 1940, despite to many seeming to arrive like a bolt from the blue in the late 1950s.
Selected Letters, 1940–1977
offered more glimpses of Nabokov while leaving many gaps, but as John Updike wrote in response: “What a writer! And, really, what a basically reasonable and decent man.” My
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
(1990) and
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
(1991) benefitted from years in Nabokov’s and other archives from Moscow to Stanford and from interview leads the archives suggested. The two volumes allowed a full treatment of Nabokov’s Russian context; his Russian writing; his other American careers as a lepidopterist and a teacher, translator, and scholar; and the protective withdrawal of his final European years from 1959 to 1977. Stacey Schiff’s
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
offered another perspective. When
Letters to Véra
appears in 2011 it will finally correct the image some still have, despite all the evidence in his literary work and outside, of Nabokov as somehow cold and aloof. When his letters to his family—to his parents, sister, and brother—appear a little later, they will show a loving and playful son, a supportive and sometimes critically corrective brother. When his letters to his other Russian friends, especially other writers, artists, and musicians, appear—usually much more intense and intimate than the equivalent letters in English—they will illuminate his intense engagement in, as well as his self-protective creative detachment from, Russian émigré cultural life.

Many have read
Lolita
but little else of Nabokov. Even many much better acquainted with his work knew little, for a long time, beyond his prose fiction and his memoirs. In his own late years Nabokov wanted to make less-prominent sides of his achievement visible when he translated his Russian poems, collected his English poems, republished his chess problems in
Poems and Problems
, and, with Dmitri’s help, translated three volumes of Russian stories in the 1970s. When he was too unwell to write more, in his last years, he selected his Russian poems, published as
Stikhi
two years after his death. Nabokov’s poetry has always divided readers. Some see it as light, brittle, old-fashioned. Georgiy Adamovich, the most influential émigré critic, regularly dismissed it, only to fall into Nabokov’s trap and hail as works of a new genius two poems Nabokov published not under his regular Russian pseudonym, Vladimir Sirin, but under the pseudonym Vasily Shishkov. Some keen readers of Nabokov think the poetry he writes for John Shade intentionally poor. Other excellent readers of poetry, such as the critic Helen Vendler and the poet R. S. Gwynn, consider his poetry first-rate, hiding depths of concealed design under its glittering surface patterns. A forthcoming publication of Shade’s “Pale Fire” unencumbered by Kinbote (see
chapter 24
, “ ‘Pale Fire’: Poem and Pattern”); a pseudo-facsimile edition of the poem, on index cards, as if Shade’s own manuscript; and the translations Dmitri continues to produce, including his excellent version of his father’s longest Russian poem, “A University Poem,” should help in the reappraisal of Nabokov’s lifelong commitment to poetry launched in Paul Morris’s hefty
Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice
(2010).

Nabokov translated one of his plays,
The Waltz Invention
, at a publisher’s invitation in the mid-1960s. Dmitri translated four more for
The Man from the USSR and Other Plays
. Once Tommy Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy complete their translation of the longest and most colorful of the Russian plays,
The Tragedy of Mr. Morn
, and it is published with the long and short versions of his
Lolita
screenplays, readers will have about 800 pages of Nabokov’s dramatic writing to factor into their sense of his work.

Nabokov also wished to collect his verse translations but, like Véra, did not find the time. Now
Verses and Versions
, although it omits his translations into Russian and French verse, allows the Anglophone reader to appreciate easily the hundreds of pages of verse he translated from Russian into English
outside
those already published in separate books, the anonymous medieval
Song of Igor’s Campaign
(1959) and Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
(1964, revised 1975). The thousand pages of notes to his translation into English of
Eugene Onegin
have been translated into Russian as the best commentary available in any language.

Nabokov as a reader of other writers was known in his lifetime from his highly personal and penetrating study
Nikolay Gogol
. Thanks to the enthusiasm of former students like Alfred Appel Jr., Hannah Green, and the New York journalist Ross Wetzsteon, his lectures were already renowned before the publication of the four volumes in the early 1980s. Those have now become talismans for writers and readers, if not for academic critics. The impression created by the existing volumes of lectures, that Nabokov focused only on the peak of his homeland’s output, will be corrected in the new volumes of Russian literature. His
Eugene Onegin
displays his scholarly precision but little of the warm personal passion for Pushkin visible in his Russian fiction, especially
The Gift
. This warmth saturates the new lectures, where his interest in Pushkin as writer and man and icon of artistic freedom radiates from page after page. Nabokov’s own artistic credo, often tantalizingly oblique in his fiction, poetry, and drama, here receives its most direct expression in his comments on other writers. With the forthcoming lectures, we will have three volumes of Nabokov’s translations of Russian verse, the two volumes of
Eugene Onegin
annotations, and soon two or three volumes of his Cornell lectures on Russian literature: seven or eight volumes from the man who forms a natural bridge between Russian and English literature.