Selected Letters, 1940–1977

Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov, Matthew J. Bruccoli, Dmitri Nabokov, Matthew J. Bruccoli

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780544106550
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

"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

Letters, 1940–1977

TO: ELIZABETH MARINEL ALLAN AND MARUSSYA MARINEL¹

ALS, 4 pp. M. Juliar.
West Wardsboro, Vt.

25 August 1940

Dear friends,

We received both your letters, and avidly but sadly absorbed every word. I value highly your lines about Invitation²; your fate worries us deeply; the incident of the harp is symbolic and appalling.

I wrote a letter to Pyatigorsky³ about you, detailed and insistent. We fervently hope that you may move to this country. We too have a feeling of some kind of interplanetary remoteness, some ungodly distance separating us from the dearest and most precious of friends. Our normal everyday existence, in contrast, seems the height of luxury, like some millionaire’s coarse dream. That dreamlike, complex day of our departure, the panic-stricken, gaping suitcases and the whirlwind of old newspapers, Mitya’s⁴ forty-degree fever, and you amid our bedlam—how shamefully distant it all is. And one begins to feel as if he had silently slipped away without sharing his foresight with others. So that, on the whole, it is embarrassing to repose—as I do now—on a blanket in a meadow amid tall grass and flowers, hearing from afar the peaceful sounds of a solitary country house, children’s exclamations, the thud of a ball. We are staying amid marvelous green wilds with the wonderfully kind Karpoviches,⁵ where one can go around half-naked, write an English novel, and catch American butterflies (soon I’ll have to start using your sweater: fall is on the way). My position is maddeningly undecided, so far nothing has worked out, and the thought of winter is rather frightening, but, by comparison, it is a genuine paradise here. It was a torment to imagine your feelings, your poor mother’s situation; one would like to know many more details. I feel so sad, so distressed for you. We recall all your gentle kindness, the delightful hours we spent together, and we talk so very often about you.

My literary (or, rather, anti-literary) agent⁶—a short, fearsome, bandy-legged woman, her hair dyed an indecent red—demands from me a genteel book, with agreeable protagonists and moral landscapes. What I am composing now will hardly satisfy her. She also forbade me to write in Russian: that part of my life, she says, is definitely over; I don’t believe I shall obey her for long.

Write to us again, please. In a few days we shall return to New York. Our address remains unchanged—the Tolstoy Foundation. I kiss your hands. Keep well.

Yours,
V. Nabokov⁷

TO: JAMES LAUGHLIN¹

TLS, 2 pp.

V. Nabokov
35 W 87th St
New York
January 24th, 1941

Dear Mr. Laughlin,

I thank you for your letter and shall be delighted to show you some of my work; but first of all I want to be quite frank about my very singular predicament. In modern Russian literature I occupy the particular position of a novator, of a writer whose work seems to stand totally apart from that of his contemporaries. At the same time, owing to my books being banned in the Soviet Union, they can circulate only among the limited group of emigre intellectuals (chiefly in Paris). Out of a dozen novels I have written (under the penname of Vladimir Sirin) during the last fifteen years my best are “The Lujin Defense” (of which there exists a miserable French translation and an—unintelligible to me—Swedish one), “Invitation to Beheading” and the 120,000 word “Gift” (neither of the two translated). One of my worst novels “Camera Obscura”, translated into half-a-dozen languages, has been published here by Bobbs-Merrill under the title of “Laughter in the Dark” in my own translation. I also translated into English a better novel of mine, “Despair” which was published in England. Moreover, I have in manuscript form a novel, “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”.² I wrote it in English and rather like it.

Would you like me to send you the typescript of “Sebastian Knight”, the English “Despair” or the French “Lujin Defense”?

Yours sincerely
V. Nabokov

TO: ELIZABETH MARINEL ALLAN AND MARUSSYA MARINEL

ALS, 2pp. M. Juliar.

26 January, 1941
35 West 87th Street
NYC

My dear and unforgettable friends,

Now we have also received your preceding letter and the newspapers; I answered immediately. Perhaps by now my letter, too, has limped to its destination; medieval landscapes remain undisturbed by the passing of airplanes. In mind and spirit we are constantly with you, and it is most distressing to realize that we cannot manage to give your fate the proper nudge. I wrote twice to Pyatigorsky. Besides that I asked an influential person to write him, and that was done too. I shall still try to act through my cousin, whom I shall visit in a few days. The silence of this man who could, of course, have helped you, is completely repellent. Another great friend of mine is faced with a similar situation. It is terrible to think that, not getting any help from here, people who are dear to me might think my concern for them is scattered by the wind of my own worries. For some time now it has been amazingly difficult to obtain results in matters of this kind here. But please believe me—I am trying and shall continue trying. Everything you write about your existence, about its Neanderthal hardships, about your poor mother, is so frightening that I am ashamed to write you about our life here. I shall only say that never before have I had to work so much as this winter over here—translations, preparation of lectures, magazine articles—and all of it in English, nothing but English, so that the demon of my own language sits, enveloped in his wings, and only yawns from time to time, with its dear black gullet gaping. Véra and Dmitri have both been ill these past months. As I wrote you, he has acquired some English and is happy at the excellent school he is attending.

I don’t lose hope that we shall soon see you here.

Love,
V. Nabokov¹

TO: JAMES LAUGHLIN

ALS, 2 pp.

10-II-41
35 W 87

Dear Mr. Laughlin,

I am sending you in a few days “Despair” and “Sebastian Knight.” I think the second is more amusing.

I liked your list. Kafka and Rimbaud—that’s the stuff. Yes, Pasternak is a real permanent poet; his verse is hard to translate so as to retain both music and suggestion (and association of images), but it can be done. There are not many other poets or poems in Russia now worth the trouble: I recall only one poem by Maiakovsky which is really good (i.e. transcending propaganda), only one by Bagritsky, several by Zabolotsky and Mandelshtam. There’s also Essenin and Selvinsky. By far the best poets of recent times are Pasternak and Khodasse...