The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father

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Note on Transliteration A somewhat simplified version of the Library of Congress system for transliterating the Russian alphabet is employed throughout. The only exceptions are Nabokov's own transliteration of names used in his works (e.g., Fyodor, Chernyshevski) as well as Russian names whose spellings have become standard in English (e.g., Yuri, Tolstoy, Bely).

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Abbreviations Ada AnL

Ada; or, Ardor: A Family Chronicle. 1969. New York: Vintage, 1990. The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. 1970. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1991.

BS Carr

Bend Sinister. 1947. New York: Vintage, 1990. Carrousel. 1923. Aartswoud: Spectatorpers, 1987.

CE

Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 1951. The Defense. Trans. Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. 1964. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Def Des EO Gift Glory IB KQK LATH Laugh LDQ LL LRL LoR LoScreen Mary NG NWL Perepiska PF Pnin PP RLSK SL SM SO

Despair. 1966. New York: Vintage, 1989. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Trans. with commentary by Vladimir Nabokov. 4 vols. 1964. Rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. The Gift. Trans. Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author. 1963. New York: Vintage, 1991. Glory. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 1971. New York: Vintage, 1991. Invitation to a Beheading. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 1959. New York: Vintage, 1989. King, Queen, Knave. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 1968. New York: Vintage, 1989. Look at the Harlequins! 1974. New York: Vintage, 1990. Laughter in the Dark. 1938. New York: Vintage, 1989. Lectures on Don Quixote. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich /Bruccoli Clark, 1983. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich /Bruccoli Clark, 1980. Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1981. Lolita. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Phaedra, 1967. Lolita: A Screenplay. 1974. New York: Vintage, 1997. Mary. Trans. Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author. 1970. New York: Vintage, 1989.Page xii → Nikolai Gogol. 1944. New York: New Directions, 1961. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971. Revised and expanded edition. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Perepiska s sestroi. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985. Pale Fire. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1989. Pnin. 1957. New York: Vintage, 1989. Poems and Problems. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. 1941. New York: Vintage, 1992. Selected Letters, 1940–1977. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1989. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1967. New York: Vintage, 1989. Strong Opinions. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1990.

SP Ssoch Stikhotvoreniia Stories TOOL TT USSR VNA VV

Selected Poems. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Ed. Thomas Karshan. New York: Knopf, 2012. Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh. 5 vols. St. Petersburg: Simpozium, 1999–2000. Stikhotvoreniia. Ed. M. E. Malikova. St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2002. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. 1995. New York: Vintage, 1997. The Original of Laura. New York: Knopf, 2009. Transparent Things. 1972. New York: Vintage, 1989. The Man from the U.S.S.R. and Other Plays. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1984. The Vladimir Nabokov Archive, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York. Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry. Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin. New York: Harcourt, 2008.

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Illustrations Fig. 1. V. D. Nabokov among the signatories to the Vyborg Manifesto. July 1906. Fig. 2. V. D. Nabokov on his way to the Kresty prison. May 1908. Fig. 3. V. D. Nabokov as part of the delegation of Russian journalists visiting the United Kingdom. 1916. Fig. 4. A ten-ruble banknote of the Second Crimean Regional Government with V. D. Nabokov's signature. 1918. Fig. 5. Bob, “On the Scales of Themis.” 1913. Fig. 6. The ex libris stamp of V. D. Nabokov. Fig. 7. V. D. Nabokov at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Literary Fund, St. Petersburg City Duma. November 8, 1909. Fig. 8. Vladimir Nabokov at the Alexander Pushkin 125th anniversary celebration in Berlin. June, 1924. Fig. 9. V. D. Nabokov and E. I. Rukavishnikov with bicycles. 1897. Fig. 10. Vladimir Nabokov's drawing of a tennis costume such as Anna wore in her game with Vronski. Fig. 11. Vladimir Nabokov on tennis court, Berlin. ca. 1922. Fig. 12. Vladimir Nabokov as goalkeeper of the Russian émigré soccer team Unitas, Berlin. 1932.

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Acknowledgments I am thankful to Cornell University, specifically the Department of Comparative Literature, for generously supporting this project during my summer and sabbatical forays into various libraries, both near and far away. In addition, I wish to thank my Cornell colleagues Robert E. Dirig, Franklin W. Robinson, and Kora Bättig von Wittelsbach for their helpful comments. My thanks also go to various individuals and institutions that greatly assisted me in my research: Anne Carson, Elaine D. Engst, Caitlin Finlay, Rhea Garen, Laura Linke, Liz Muller, Eisha Neely, Katherine Reagan, Suzanne Schwartz, Linda A. Sczepanski, Nancy Skipper, Patrick J. Stevens, and the courteous and most accommodating personnel of the Olin Circulation Desk, all of Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY; Robert H. Davis, Jr., Columbia and Cornell Librarian for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, who generously and most efficiently acquired books and periodicals needed for my research; Alice L. Birney and the staff of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Alice M. Hummer of the Wellesley Magazine, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Rebecca A. Filner, Anne Garner, and Isaac Gewirtz of the New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York City; Tanya Chebotarev and the staff of the Columbia University Library's Bakhmeteff Archive, New York City; Jessica Calagione of the Wylie Agency LLC, New York City; Ronald Hussey and Claire Posner of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York City; Ayse Toker of Penguin Group (UK), London; Christian Algar of British Library Newspapers, London; Tatiana Ponomareva of the Vladimir Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg, the Russian Federation; Marjo Kuusela, Ritva Leppänen, Irina Lukka, Tapio Luukko, Pentti Niemimaa, Olli Oinas, Petro Paasirova, Irma Reijonen, Marjaana Saillio, and Elli Salo of the National Library of Finland, Helsinki. Page xvi → I am most grateful to Richard M. Buxbaum, Luba Freedman, Vladimir Khazan, Gennady Obatnin, Donna T. Orwin, and Richard E. Pipes for their constructive advice and positive feedback at various stages of my work on the manuscript. I am greatly indebted to my partner, Tatiela Laake, for her invaluable assistance with this project. I also thank my editor, Steven Moore, for his thoughtful and effective suggestions. I wish to express my deep appreciation to all those at the University of Michigan Press who were involved in this project, and in particular Thomas E. Dwyer, Christopher Dreyer, Aaron McCollough, and Andrea Olson, for their professional expertise, angelic patience, and skillful handling of the manuscript during the laborious process of turning it into a book. Above all, I am immensely grateful to Dmitri Nabokov, blessed be his memory, for many felicitous years of boundless generosity, most beneficial help, and sagacious counsel. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations for permission to use material from the collection. Penguin Books for permission to quote from Nikolai Gogol, by Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin Books, 2011). Copyright © Article 3C under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov, 1944; and for permission to quote from The Original of Laura, by Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin Classics, 2009); Copyright © Dmitri Nabokov 2009. Random House, LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, for permission to use the following copyrighted material. Excerpt from Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1953, 1955, 1957, copyright renewed 1981, 1983, 1985, by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1967, copyright renewed 1994 by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday

Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1995 by Dmitri Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. Annotated edition copyright © 1970, Page xvii → 1991 by Alfred Appel, Jr. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1963, copyright renewed 1991 by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1990 by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1959 by Vladimir Nabokov and copyright renewed 1987 by Véra Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Glory by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1971 by Article 3C Trust under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “Last Supper,” “Revolution,” “The University Poem,” “To Prince S.M. Kachurin,” and “Tolstoy” from Selected Poems by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1973 by The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission. Wellesley Magazine for permission to reproduce Vladimir Nabokov's contribution to the panel discussion “What Faith Means to a Resisting People,” held at Wellesley College, February 6, 1942, and published in Wellesley Magazine, April 26, 1942, p. 212. The Wylie Agency, LLC, for permission to use copyrighted materials. Page xviii →

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Introduction From conversations with my father, from daydreams in his absence, from the neighborhood of thousands of books full of drawings of animals, from the precious shimmer of the collections, from the maps, from all the heraldry of nature and the cabbalism of Latin names, life took on a kind of bewitching lightness that made me feel as if my own travels were about to begin. Thence, I borrow my wings today. —Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift My father was, indeed, a very active man, but as often happens with the children of famous fathers, I viewed his activities through a prism of my own, which split into many enchanting colors the rather austere light my teachers glimpsed. In connection with his varied interests—criminological, legislative, political, editorial, philanthropic—he had to attend many committee meetings, and these were often held at our house. ——Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory My father […] not only taught me a great deal but also trained my very thoughts, as a voice or hand is trained, according to the rules of his school. ——Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift The family milieu habitually exerts an important, often decisive, influence on a human being. It has been long observed and established that parents, specifically fathers, “are in a unique position to be the most powerful single source of influence on a child, and the only consistent influence the child is exposed to throughout childhood.”1 Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), one Page 2 → of the most celebrated writers of our time, is no exception. He grew up in a refined family of diverse interests. The liberal values and wide-ranging cultural activities of the writer's parents had a crucial impact on his worldview, personality, predilections, and tastes. Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich (1870–1922), was a prominent jurist and statesman at the turn of the twentieth century, a great connoisseur of literature, painting, and theater as well as a butterfly enthusiast, passionate chess player, and keen athlete. V. D. Nabokov left a considerable literary legacy that enables one to discern his legal and political stance and aesthetic inclinations. To be sure, Nabokov's mother, Elena Ivanovna (née Rukavishnikov, 1876–1939), an amateur pianist, entomologist, and painter, played a significant role in her son's development, especially his artistic pursuits, such as poetry, painting, theater, and music. Like so many women in imperial Russia, however, Elena Ivanovna lived in the shadow of her husband, and there is hardly any material evidence that allows for a comprehensive evaluation of her influence on Nabokov. While Elena Ivanovna's effect on Nabokov's personal advancement may be ascertained primarily from the writer's own reminiscences and those by close relatives such as his paternal uncle Konstantin and cousin Nicolas, the pivotal impact of V. D. Nabokov on his son may be corroborated in many different ways. In addition to a great variety of recollections about him, Vladimir Dmitrievich's versatile and vibrant personality finds its expression in his library (via its extant catalogue) and, to a degree, in the family art collection. Most importantly, the senior Nabokov's heritage may be gleaned from his own writings—his numerous books, speeches, and articles. It is worth noting that the interest in V. D. Nabokov's legacy has been steadily growing not only in Russia but also in the West. Students in my Nabokov seminar at Cornell University frequently inquire about the availability of Nabokov senior's works. Regrettably, most of them, originally published in imperial and émigré periodicals, have been neither reprinted nor translated. One can only hope that this deplorable situation will be rectified in the near future. In the meantime, this book partially remedies this problem by including Nabokov senior's two seminal articles and by providing plentiful references to and citations from his otherwise hard-to-find writings. As a Nabokov scholar, however, I view their primary and indispensable significance in the powerful light they cast on the writer's system of beliefs and aesthetic values. What makes the examination of the senior Nabokov's impact on his firstborn so important is the relationship of mutual admiration and respect between the father and

the son. While V. D. Nabokov adored Page 3 → his eldest son, recognized his great many gifts, and did his utmost to nurture them, Nabokov revered and admired his father and adopted many aspects of his perception of the world. In addition, Vladimir Dmitrievich served as a great role model for Nabokov in every facet of his life. The unique nature of their bond, which Nabokov characterizes as that of “the tender friendship” marked by “the charm of our perfect accord” (SM 191)—the writer's formulations that I employ as the book's title—stands out as truly exceptional when compared to numerous father-son relationships in Russian and Western European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Russian letters, by and large, these are examples of either estrangement bordering on animosity (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Blok, Mandelstam), an almost nonexistent paternal role (Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov), or both. One such compound case is the relationship between Nabokov's exact coeval, Yuri Olesha, and his father. In his essay, “I Am Looking into the Past” (1928), Olesha expresses vast disillusionment with his father's habitual absence. The writer laments that the senior Olesha spent most of the time playing cards in a club and never served as his mentor in literary or other intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. Olesha astutely remarks that “the course of a man's fate and the development of the male character are, to a large extent, predetermined by whether or not he was attached to his father.”2 In Western European letters, a contemplation on the father-son connection brings to mind, first and foremost, the acrimonious relationship between Alexandre Dumas père and fils and Franz Kafka's fear of and contempt for his despotic and mercantile father. Alongside these notorious examples, there are cases of positive role-modeling and beneficial influence of fathers on their sons who became prominent writers, such as Robert Browning, John Ruskin, Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Updike. Even though in all these latter cases, the fathers served as positive role models and had a beneficial effect on their sons’ creative development, to the best of my knowledge, none of these authors experienced such a fundamental and long-lasting paternal influence as did Nabokov, in spite of Vladimir Dmitrievich's passing at the time when the budding writer was only about twentythree years old. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov's impact on his son's life and worldview has interested Nabokov scholars for nearly four decades. Andrew Field, Nabokov's first biographer, should be credited with positing the question of Page 4 → the senior Nabokov's importance in the life of the writer and with delineating some of its pertinent aspects.3 It was Brian Boyd, however, who wrote a monumental biography of the writer, that addressed the issue and established the extent and significance of Vladimir Dmitrievich's impact on his eldest son. As Boyd has aptly pointed out, “Nabokov felt very strongly that much of what was best in himself came from his father,” including “the moral ‘principles passed down from father to son, from generation to generation.’”4 Boyd convincingly argues for the senior Nabokov's pivotal role in the development of his son's personality and worldview and returns to this subject time and again. Thus, more recently, Boyd has perceptively remarked that “Vladimir Nabokov learned much from his father, most importantly, perhaps, this sense of cultural development as the effortful striving for a maximal evolution beyond the brutish.” Boyd goes on to point out that “from his father Nabokov imbibed a strong sense of cultural meliorism, a sense that culture had evolved to make humans more humane […], and that art had played and could continue to play a key role” in this process.5 “Nabokov's cultural meliorism,” Boyd underscores, “begins with the free individual. Unfettered individual efforts can open up new possibilities that expand the freedom and scope of culture, offering us better access to the values Nabokov sees in art: creativity and complexity, and ‘curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy’ (Lolita 315). Individuals should preserve and extend the gains of culture to the degree that they can.”6 Boyd's emphatic attention to the great magnitude of V. D. Nabokov's influence on the life of his son has been echoed by a number of Nabokov scholars. For example, John Burt Foster Jr. has noted “Nabokov's overwhelming need to commemorate his own father,” and Georges Nivat has maintained in his essay on Speak, Memory that its “central chapter, as in The Gift, is probably the one about his father,” in Galya Diment's astute assertion, “because of the crucial role V. D. Nabokov played in his son's life.”7 In the aftermath of Nabokov's centenary in 1999, which understandably heightened interest in the writer, there appeared several articles in which scholars such as Maria Malikova, Zoran Kuzmanovich, and Alexey Sklyarenko touched upon the Page 5 → subject in passing or addressed it on a limited scale.8 In her recent book, Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (2011), Dana Dragunoiu has looked at some juridical and political aspects of V. D. Nabokov's legacy as the sources upon which

Nabokov drew for his writings. This valid scholarship notwithstanding, the fundamental and multifaceted role of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov in the life and works of his illustrious son still remains largely overlooked and clearly merits a separate study. This study is an attempt—by no means exhaustive—to fill the gap. The main purpose of this interdisciplinary book, then, is to examine the worldview, literary legacy, and multitudinous pursuits of Vladimir Nabokov as impacted by his father, a leading legal expert and political figure of his time and a man of diverse intellectual, aesthetic, and athletic interests. In so doing, I take into consideration Nabokov's creative legacy in all its diversity—poetry, short prose, novels, plays, memoirs, lectures, essays, interviews, and correspondence—vis-à-vis his father's sizable written legacy as well as reminiscences of various individuals who knew the senior Nabokov and left their testimony about this remarkable man. In chapter 1, I examine Nabokov's oeuvre for its treatment of some judicial matters that were of special concern to his jurist father. In particular, I center on such issues as penitentiary system, capital punishment, dueling, and child abuse. In chapter 2, I focus on Nabokov's political outlook. I concentrate on his views regarding democracy and totalitarianism, his attitude toward freedom of the press and censorship, and his stance on anti-Semitism, all the while examining them against the backdrop of his father's strong positions on these subjects. In chapter 3, I address Nabokov's preferences in English, French, Italian, and Russian letters and compare them to his father's literary tastes, his likes and dislikes. In chapter 4, using my recent book The Sublime Artist's Studio: Nabokov and Painting (2009) as a stepping-stone, I examine Nabokov's attitude toward painting, from Renaissance to contemporary. Once again, I explore it in relation to that of his father, a great connoisseur and aficionado of the fine arts. While Nabokov matched his father's interest in painting he was somewhat less enthusiastic about theater and even less so about music. Although not as zealous a theatergoer as his father, Nabokov nonetheless was fascinated by the genre, wrote a sizable number of plays, and expressed well-informed Page 6 → opinions on theater and the laws of dramaturgy. In spite of his relatively modest interest in music, Nabokov demonstrates an enviable knowledge of both its classical and contemporary repertoire, especially vocal and operatic. Nabokov's parents, particularly his father, should be credited for exposing their firstborn to the best theatrical and musical productions St. Petersburg could offer. In chapter 5, I turn my attention to Nabokov's passion for butterflies (second only to creative writing), his fondness for chess (playing, problem-solving, and above all problem-composing), as well as his lifelong fascination with many sports (boxing, bicycling, tennis, and soccer), all of which were developed under the strong influence, encouragement, and guidance of his father, himself an ardent lepidopterist, enthusiastic chess player and problem solver, and avid sportsman. Overall, I intend to demonstrate that it was Nabokov's father who exerted the most fundamental influence on the outlook, interests, and tastes of his celebrated son, and the examination of Nabokov's weltanschauung as affected by his distinguished father will greatly enhance our understanding of this incomparable verbal artist and of his fictional universe. In addition, the book offers a selective survey of Russian civilization at the turn of the twentieth century by providing a partial view of imperial Russia during its twilight years. The book illumines the historical background, sociopolitical struggles, juridical battles, literary and artistic life, as well as athletic activities of the epoch rich in cultural events and fraught with geopolitical upheavals and worldwide cataclysms. 1. Hamilton, Father's Influence on Children, 170. 2. For a discussion of the father-son relationship in Olesha's fiction, see Borenstein, “The Family Men of Yuri Olesha,” in Borenstein, Men without Women, 125–61. Here I cite, in Borenstein's translation, the phrase by Olesha that the American scholar employed as the epigraph to his chapter. 3. Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part, 84–85.

4. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 398, 12. 5. Boyd, “Nabokov's Transition,” 178, 176; for a reprint of the article, see Boyd, Stalking Nabokov, 176–200. 6. Boyd, “Nabokov's Transition,” 178. 7. See Foster, “Nabokov and Tolstoy,” 522; Nivat, “Speak, Memory,” 677; Diment, “Nabokov's Biographical Impulse,” 176. 8. See Malikova, “Zhertva total´nogo vospominaniia”; Malikova, “V. V. Nabokov and V. D. Nabokov”; Kuzmanovich, “Strong Opinions and Nerve Points”; Sklyarenko, “Fathers and Children in Ada.”

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ONE Jurisprudence [V. D.] Nabokov [was] my department deputy at the School of Jurisprudence and a person dear to my family, my Herzenskind, so to speak, in whom I took great interest and whom I valued very highly as an educated human being, talented to the highest degree. —N. S. Tagantsev1 V. D. Nabokov's stature as a public figure and a politician overshadows somewhat his significance as a scholar. But his participation in the struggle for liberation of the motherland, for the foundations of the state of law, did not prevent him from leaving a bright trace in the science of criminal law that was his direct specialty. The name of Nabokov will go down in the history of science of criminal law because he was and remains a living link in the glorious pleiad of Russian criminologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. —A. V. Makletsov2 An ideal of the legal order was dear to him because it corresponded to the inner structure of his soul, because this ideal embodied the respect for the human personality that constituted Nabokov's Page 8 → involuntary psychic need. It, therefore, colored his worldview, his personal behavior, and his entire demeanor. —A. A. Kizevetter3 My father Vladimir Nabokov was a liberal statesman, member of the first Russian parliament, champion of justice and law in a difficult empire. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was a jurist by occupation. In his choice of profession, he followed in the footsteps of his father, Dmitri Nikolaevich (1826–1904), who served as the minister of justice (1878–85) under two tsars and who oversaw the implementation of the legal reforms introduced in the reign of Alexander II. Among D. N. Nabokov's most important accomplishments was the preservation of the jury system that the reactionary forces led by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the chief procurator of the Holy Synod, sought to abolish. Although Pobedonostsev eventually succeeded in dismissing D. N. Nabokov from his ministerial post, the jury system remained in place and continued to function for more than thirty years, until the Bolsheviks eradicated it upon their usurpation of power.4 Vladimir Dmitrievich received his legal education at St. Petersburg University School of Law (1887–91), from which he graduated with a first-class degree diploma.5 He penned his earliest scholarly article in 1894, at the age of twenty-four.6 In the spring of 1896, he continued his juridical training at Page 9 → the Universities of Halle and Leipzig; at the University of Halle, Nabokov senior studied under Franz von Liszt, and at the University of Leipzig he attended the classes of Karl Binding. Although V. D. Nabokov held both von Liszt and Binding in high esteem, it appears that his legal philosophy was more akin to that of von Liszt, but V. D. Nabokov did not share his onetime teacher's belief in the rehabilitative function of the penitentiary system.7 Curiously, von Liszt opposed capital punishment but, by his own admission, lacked the resolve to speak his mind, whereas the senior Nabokov most courageously did so.8 Von Liszt's legal works were widely translated into Russian: the collection of articles on criminology, The Tasks of Criminal Politics by Franz von Liszt (Zadachi ugolovnoi politiki Frantsa fon Lista, 1895), as well as his monograph International Law in Systematic Presentation (Mezhdunarodnoe pravo v sistematicheskom izlozhenii, 1898), which ran through six editions. Incidentally, Leo Tolstoy mentions von Liszt in Resurrection (1899) among the criminologists whose writings Prince Dmitri Nekhliudov, the novel's protagonist, consulted.9

Like his onetime Russian student, von Liszt was the son of a prominent jurist with a distinguished civil service, Eduard von Liszt, who was eventually appointed head of the newly created Austrian General Prosecutor's Office. And like V. D. Nabokov, von Liszt was engaged in both jurisprudence and politics. Alongside his illustrious legal career—after the University of Halle (1889–98), he taught at Humboldt University in Berlin (1898–1917)—von Liszt was a delegate to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies (Preussisches Abgeordnetenhaus, 1908–12). As a member of the liberal German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei), somewhat analogous to the Constitutional Democratic Party in Russia, von Liszt represented it in the Parliament (Reichstag) from 1912 to 1917.10 After the bloody events of 1905 in Russia, von Liszt took part in the protest meeting held in Berlin, at which he “spoke in very energetic and bold terms of those political conditions that Page 10 → create the possibility of such horrors. […] In giving an overall picture of the state order reigning in Russia, von Lizst called upon Germans to express their sympathy and moral support to the Russian people fighting for their freedom. […] In conclusion, von Liszt said that he had confidence in the Duma, the elections to which were in the process of preparation.”11 V. D. Nabokov eventually became a delegate to the First Duma, in which he played a prominent role (see chapter 2). Binding, a distinguished German criminologist, was a proponent of retributive justice.12 Long after V. D. Nabokov attended the classes of von Liszt and of Binding and wrote his article about their legal systems, Binding became notorious for coauthoring (with Alfred Hoche) the book Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens, 1920), in which he advocated euthanasia for “the terminally ill, ‘incurable idiots,’ and the congenitally mentally defective.”13 The Nazis subsequently exploited the ideas expressed in this book. While in Germany, V. D. Nabokov received a letter from his former professor Nikolai Stepanovich Tagantsev, the most eminent Russian criminologist of the time, who had seen a great potential in the young scholar (see the first epigraph) and who had invited him to teach criminal law at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence.14 Vladimir Dmitrievich gladly accepted the offer and taught criminal law at the school for eight years (1896–1904), until he was forced to resign for political reasons. According to the “Certificate,” V. D. Nabokov tendered his resignation on November 14, 1904, and was dismissed Page 11 → from the school by order of the Ministry of Justice on January 17, 1905.15 A number of V. D. Nabokov's actions led to this forced resignation: among them, the article “The Kishinev Bloodbath” published on May 10 (April 27 O.S.), 1903, in condemnation of the Kishinev pogrom, his joining the Union of Liberation, as well as active participation in the zemstvo congress that took place a week prior to the resignation (see chapter 2, n. 3). The zemstvo congress “demanded a representative assembly and civil liberties” that the tsarist government understandably viewed as a challenge to its authority.16 Nabokov links his father's forced resignation to his participation in the zemstvo congress; the writer notes that V. D. Nabokov “left the school in 1904 soon after the November zemstvo congress in which he took an active part.”17 V. D. Nabokov made a name for himself at the turn of the twentieth century as a distinguished expert in criminal law. He wrote extensively on a wide variety of juridical subjects. Of special note are his two volumes, An Elementary Textbook on the Specific Part of the Russian Criminal Law (Elementarnyi uchebnik osobennoi chasti russkogo ugolovnogo prava, 1903) and A Collection of Articles on Criminal Law (Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 1904). He was a coeditor of and a frequent contributor to various reputable legal periodicals, such as the weekly Law (Pravo, 1898–1917), the monthly (ten times a year) Herald of Law (Vestnik Prava, 1898–1917), and the quarterly Journal of Criminal Law and Procedure (Zhurnal ugolovnogo prava i protsessa, 1912–17).18 As a member of the legal profession, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was highly respected both at home and abroad. From 1904 to 1915, he served as president of the Criminology Division of the St. Petersburg Judicial Society. Between 1905 and 1915, he also served as president of the Russian Group of Page 12 → the International Union of Penal Law, which he joined upon its foundation in 1897 and which he represented at numerous international symposia. “At the last prewar International Congress in Copenhagen,” Makletsov notes, “[V. D.] Nabokov, without exaggeration, played the major role. His report was the focal point of the congress activities: the major part of the resolutions he offered were passed wholeheartedly by the vast majority of votes.”19 Vladimir Dmitrievich commanded so much professional respect worldwide that at that congress—which took place August 27–31, 1913—he was considered for the presidency of the International Union of Penal Law, since its current

president, the distinguished Belgian criminologist Adolphe Prins, was expected to step down from this post.20 The outbreak of World War I shattered these plans: the Union was dissolved, only to be succeeded a decade later by the International Association of Penal Law.21 V. D. Nabokov was also considered twice for the post of minister of justice, once by the tsarist government in 1906 and again by the Provisional Government in 1917.22 While serving as head of the Provisional Government's secretariat, Vladimir Dmitrievich “was a leading figure in the Juridical Council and the commission entrusted with revision of the criminal code.”23 Eventually, Nabokov senior served as minister of justice in the Second Regional Crimean Government in 1918–19. For over a quarter of a century, V. D. Nabokov addressed and championed various legal causes, from refuting the “corrective” role of penitentiary system to denouncing capital punishment to criticizing dueling to condemning child abuse. As we shall see, his stand on each of these issues exerted a great influence on his son's worldview, which, in turn, found expression in the younger Nabokov's fiction.

Criminality It seems entirely fitting to start the discussion by comparing the father's and son's attitudes toward criminality in general. As a criminologist well familiar Page 13 → with the many factors leading to a felony, Vladimir Dmitrievich was nevertheless appalled when observing lawbreakers at close range during his stay at St. Petersburg Kresty prison. This solitary confinement prison, designed by architect Anton Tomishko, received its name because of its two five-story cross-shaped buildings (kresty means “crosses” in Russian). The shape of the buildings allowed observation of all the corridors from one vantage point; it was also designed to have religious significance, encouraging penitence among the inmates. The prison, at the time the largest and most advanced in Europe, was completed in 1892 and was populated by both criminal and political convicts.24 The senior Nabokov described the inmates thus: Those “criminal” prisoners whom one happens to encounter daily leave an extremely heavy impression, first of all by their physical appearance. One evening I went to the church, for the attendance of which, as a political prisoner, I needed a special permission from the authorities. It was the eve of the Ascension, and about two hundred prisoners, while kissing the icon, marched past me. In the vast majority—what faces! The stamp of degeneracy is visible with unmerciful clarity in every feature of their exterior. […] But worst of all are the facial expressions, either gloomily embittered or insolent and coarse.25 V. D. Nabokov exemplifies his observations by mentioning a prison barber, a minor, who was sentenced to six years for murder. This barber shaved very carefully and very well. Nabokov senior muses “whether a razor blade served the barber as the instrument of his crime” and further observes that “in appearance he was a rather dullwitted fellow with a repulsive physiognomy.”26 Nabokov drew on his father's observations about degeneracy in criminals and took them a step further in his fiction. In King, Queen, Knave, Kurt Dreyer voices an opinion, apparently close to that of his creator, that crime exposes banality and a lack of imagination on the part of its perpetrator. Page 14 → Upon walking through the Berlin Crime Museum, which Nabokov most likely visited together with his criminologist father, Dreyer wonders what a talentless person one must be, what a poor thinker or hysterical fool, to murder one's neighbor. The deathly gray of the exhibits, the banality of crime, pieces of bourgeois furniture, a frightened little console on which a bloody imprint had been found, hazel nuts injected with strychnine, buttons, a tin basin, again photographs—all this trash expressed the very essence of crime. How much those simpletons were missing! Missing not only the wonders of everyday life, the simple pleasure of existence, but even such instants as this, the ability to look with curiosity upon what was essentially boring. (207)27 The supposition that Dreyer voices here the author's opinion on crime is validated by Nabokov's Cornell lectures,

in which the writer expresses sentiments similar to those of his fictional character: “Criminals are usually people lacking imagination. […] Lacking real imagination, they content themselves with such half-witted banalities as seeing themselves gloriously driving into Los Angeles in that swell stolen car with that swell golden girl who had helped to butcher its owner. […] Crime is the very triumph of triteness, and the more successful it is, the more idiotic it looks” (LL 376). In Despair, Nabokov presents criminality in an altogether different light. There Hermann Karlovich, the novel's deranged protagonist and narrator, equates crime with art, compares the “breaker of the law which makes such a fuss over a little spilled blood, with a poet or a stage performer,” and speaks of “the genius of a perfect crime” (3, 123). Although not an ordinary criminal, Hermann—a man of letters who thinks of himself as an accomplished artist—obviously lacks imagination and an eye for detail when erroneously believing that he and Felix, a vagrant he happens to meet, are twins and when failing to notice that his wife, Lydia, conducts a love affair under his very nose. Elsewhere I have shown that Hermann's attraction to crime and its “creativity” finds an intriguing parallel in the precepts of German expressionist artists, specifically George Grosz. Incidentally, like Grosz and some other Page 15 → expressionists, Nabokov's Russian-born German character dreams of uniting people “in the classless society of the future” and maintains that a work of art—in this case “his” novel—should contain “the social message” (158, 159). It is very likely, then, that by way of the novel's protagonist, Nabokov derides this bizarre, twofold fascination with crime and leftist sociopolitical ideas on the part of some German expressionists.28 Nabokov demonstrates that law, politics, and art may form a link and even intertwine. He further demonstrates in the example of Hermann how questionable ethics may have a detrimental effect on the aesthetic values of an artist and consequently on the quality of his art.

Penitentiary System V. D. Nabokov was, of course, well aware that society must protect itself against law offenders, above all against felons who pose a serious threat to its orderly function, particularly those who commit repeated offenses.29 Although recognizing the necessity for the incarceration of criminals, especially dangerous ones, he nonetheless had strong misgivings about the penitentiary system per se, which he expressed in his book Prison Pastimes (Tiuremnye dosugi, 1908). A few words must be said about the circumstances that led to the creation of that book. V. D. Nabokov took active part in the political life of imperial Russia as one of the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and of its faction in the First Duma. Upon dissolution of the First Duma by the tsarist government in July 1906, Vladimir Dmitrievich, together with other delegates, protested this act in the Vyborg Manifesto. As one of the manifesto's signatories, the senior Nabokov was sentenced to three months of solitary confinement at Kresty prison, which he served from May 27 (May 14 O.S.) to August 25 (August 12 O.S.), 1908.30 Prison Pastimes is V. D. Nabokov's firsthand account and as such is especially valuable because it contains the observations of a legal expert, a distinguished criminologist. In particular, it includes his reflections on the penitentiary system as a whole. Vladimir Dmitrievich was of the opinion that prison does not create a beneficial environment and therefore could not have a desirable remedial effect on a convict. He thus characterizes contemporary prisons: Page 16 → Based on religious mysticism, the “penitentiary” idea, as it is known, originated in America, at once assuming that awful and ugly expression that bears the name of the cell system. Here for the first time an attempt was made to utilize imprisonment for the purpose of correction, which was understood in the strictest sense as an internal, spiritual transformation. It had to be achieved by way of introspection, contemplation, hard work at self-improvement, and with complete withdrawal from the outside world. This totally unique, narrowly pietistic view of the role of prison, coupled with the

colossally ignorant disregard for basic needs of the human spirit, bore monstrous fruit! The first prisons built and maintained by this system became the places of such refined mental tortures to which the cruelties of the olden days pale in comparison.31

As can be seen, Nabokov senior denies prison its corrective function and believes that it has rather become a place of deep suffering for an inmate. He goes on to argue, “In theory, it is easy and convenient to speak about the ‘corrective’ meaning of punishment by imprisonment.” “In practice […] prison c a n n o t ‘correct,’” for its subjects “a human being to absolutely unnatural conditions” (letter-spacing emphasis in original).32 Nabokov, of course, was fully familiar with his father's juridical career and his legal writings, including Prison Pastimes. While valuing and cherishing greatly everything related to his father's memory, Nabokov considered this particular episode from Vladimir Dmitrievich's biography of utmost importance. In his reply to an inquiry about the sources for Vladimir Dmitrievich's life and career, Nabokov recommended, among other things, Prison Pastimes— Page 17 → “His own description (published as a pamphlet) of his confinement in the Krestï prison (1908)” (SL 283). And it is very telling that nearly sixty years after the pamphlet's publication, Nabokov deemed it important to issue fragments from his father's prison letters to his mother, Elena Ivanovna.33 Nabokov alludes to Prison Pastimes in The Gift. As is often the case with the writer, he employs the method of dividedness for such purpose.34 In Chapter Four, Nabokov speaks of Chernyshevski writing novels during his “prison leisure” (tiuremnyi dosug in the original Russian), thereby invoking the title of his father's book (236; Ssoch 4:414). Later in the same chapter, Nabokov mentions his grandfather, “the Minister of Justice [D. N.] Nabokov,” who played a benevolent role in Chernyshevski's destiny: he “made the appropriate report and ‘His Majesty deigned to permit the transfer of Chernyshevski to Astrakhan’” (292), whose climate and conditions were much more temperate than those of Siberia, to which the radical social critic was initially exiled. By mentioning his family name via his liberal grandfather, the writer not only pays tribute to his even more liberal father, the author of Prison Pastimes, but also encodes the authorial presence in his last Russian novel.35 While expressing his views on the penitentiary system, V. D. Nabokov stipulated that “all kinds of ideological crimes must be excluded from our field of vision.”36 By contrast, apparently under the influence of his father's imprisonment for “ideological crimes” in tsarist Russia, the subsequent Red Terror in his native Bolshevikusurped country, and the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, in the capital of which he resided at the time, Nabokov not only does not exclude “all kinds of ideological crimes” from his “field of vision” but makes the protagonist of the novel Invitation to a Beheading an “ideological” prisoner. The writer further shows the absurdity of a system under which a human being may be incarcerated merely for a “certain peculiarity,” which, in Cincinnatus's case, is being “impervious to the rays of others” “in this world of souls transparent to one another” (24)—that is, when one guards one's own individuality and tries to protect it from an unwelcome outside intrusion. In this Nabokov takes a cue from his father, who warned a quarter of a century earlier that “a manipulation of the term ‘dangerous state’ of an individual is especially dangerous and undesirable wherein it is necessary to think not Page 18 → about broadening the rights of an administrative authority but, on the contrary, about containing them within appropriate limits.” The senior Nabokov cautioned that “to enable it [the administrative authority] at its own discretion to declare a human being dangerous and without the guaranties that lie in the precise and concrete formulation of corpus delicti and of felony by the criminal code, to employ most serious measures of social prevention against such a ‘dangerous’ individual by means of incarceration, exile, and the like is tantamount to elevating into a principle what in fact is an ugly deviation from the functions of the state of law.”37 (With this statement, V. D. Nabokov, sadly, foreshadowed the Soviet and Nazi crimes against humanity.) Vladimir Dmitrievich also remarks in Prison Pastimes that “prison as such, inescapably and fatally m u s t have only a pernicious effect and a depressing influence on human psyche” (letter-spacing emphasis in original) and avers that “the nervous system and the entire psychic makeup of a human being play here a decisive role.”38 Following the professional firsthand observations of his father, Nabokov dramatizes the detrimental impact of prison, especially solitary confinement, on his protagonist, whose suffering intensifies because of his sensitivity and impressionability. The writer shows how Cincinnatus feels claustrophobic in the cell that has already become

so painfully recognizable to him: He lamented for a while, groaned, cracked all his joints, then he got up from the cot, put on the abhorred dressing gown, and began to wander around. Once again he examined all the inscriptions on the walls in the hope of somewhere discovering a new one. Like a fledgling crow on a stump, he stood for a long while on the chair, motionlessly gazing up at the beggarly ration of sky. He walked some more. Once more he Page 19 → read the eight rules for inmates, which he already knew by heart. […] Anguish, anguish, Cincinnatus. Pace some more, Cincinnatus, brushing with your robe first the walls, then the chair. Anguish! The books heaped on the table have all been read. And, even though he knew that they had all been read, Cincinnatus searched, rummaged, peeked into a thick volume…. Without sitting down, he leafed through the already familiar pages. (IB 48–50) The reader is privy to the gamut of the character's emotions. As a result of his narrow seclusion in the cell, in which the sky is provided through the barred and elevated window in “the beggarly ration,” Cincinnatus experiences acute anxiety. The anxiety turns into deep anguish when he desperately tries to find a shred of novelty in his environs, even in such repulsive objects as the rules for inmates, “which he already knew by heart,” and realizes therefore full well that his attempts are doomed from the very start. When describing the day-to-day existence in prison, Vladimir Dmitrievich remarks on the arbitrariness of its regulations and further notes that they are characterized by “cavils, petty and based on no logic whatsoever, that are so perceptible in the prison's entire regimen.”39 As if not merely illustrating but rather amplifying his father's point, Nabokov shows that prison is not only a source of suffering in and of itself by virtue of its being a place of captivity and isolation but also frequently the place where jailers and fellow convicts inflict vicious torments upon an inmate. For instance, in their attempts to control Cincinnatus and make him more pliable to their authority, the jailers tell cruel jokes designed to remind the protagonist of his impending execution. Thus, when offering a cigarette to Cincinnatus, whom Rodrig Ivanovich later dubs, with his characteristic prison sense of humor, “our doomed friend,” the prison director adds “wittily,” “Have no fear, at most this is only the one before last” (38, 16). Then there is M'sieur Pierre, masquerading for a while as Cincinnatus's “friend” (110) but turning out instead to be his executioner, who masterminds numerous sadistic ploys against the protagonist. Upon learning that Cincinnatus is dreaming of escaping from the prison, M'sieur Pierre, with the assistance of Rodrig, tauntingly digs the tunnel to his cell. And during his first meeting with Cincinnatus, long before the protagonist learns his true identity, M'sieur Pierre sinisterly quips, “I make bold to hope that we may get to know each other more closely,” and further ominously intimates, “One way or another, but I ended up here because of you. And I'll tell you Page 20 → more: we shall mount the scaffold together too” (82, 111). In addition, M'sieur Pierre twice tells the “old woman” joke in which the key phrases are “my head shakes” and “I've an awful fright I'll die of it” or “I'm afraid it'll be the death of me” (84, 184). While this distasteful joke ostensibly scoffs at a doddering woman unaware of her old age, it is aimed at Cincinnatus and is intended to remind him of his impending death by beheading.40 Nabokov also drew upon Vladimir Dmitrievich's prison notes when describing Cincinnatus's daily routine and his cell and when endowing the protagonist's speech with his father's distinctive locutions and intonation. The writer borrows, with modifications, some of the prison accessories from Prison Pastimes for Invitation to a Beheading. For example, “the earthenware pot” and “the copper pitcher” from V. D. Nabokov's Kresty cell blend into “the earthenware pitcher” (32).41 “The rubber tub” in which Nabokov senior took baths while in prison transforms into “the washing tub” (64) in which Cincinnatus bathes before the anticipated tryst with his wife, Marthe, that turns instead into the first meeting with M'sieur Pierre.42 The right to use his own linen, towels, and toiletries, which V. D. Nabokov mentions in both his prison notes and his letters to Elena Ivanovna, turns into Cincinnatus's similar privilege (see 64–65). The senior Nabokov describes his cell furnishings as comprising “an iron bed with a mattress and a pillow filled with straw” and “a smallish wooden movable table and round light bentwood stool, also movable”; “the cell floor is concrete, painted black, always soiling,” and “the wall and ceiling are painted bluish-gray, with a thin blue separating stripe.”43 Although furniture in Cincinnatus's cell is represented in a similar trivial fashion, “a table, a chair and the cot,” only the chair “was movable” (14, 119).44 The floor in his cell is characterized as “dusky

stone” (119), and the walls are described as possessing Page 21 → “the implacable yellowness” (126). “The dusky stone floor,” with its “creeping, heel-clutching chill” (119), brings to mind the caliginous dungeons of the notorious Shlisselburg and the Peter and Paul Fortresses, while the “implacable yellowness” of the walls whose “cold ochre smelled of the grave” (124) invokes infernal associations. These differences, and specifically the cot and the table fastened to the cell floor, suggest that by contrast to the relative comfort and light regimen that characterized V. D. Nabokov's stay at Kresty prison, Cincinnatus's daily grind in the fortress betrays the atmosphere of utmost control that surrounds the novel's protagonist.45 One of the basic and most conventional methods of exercising control over an inmate is close surveillance. When describing the jailers’ functions, Vladimir Dmitrievich writes that “the supervisor walks back and forth, watches, listens, enters the prisoners’ cells on their call. […] He oversees the silence and order, tidiness, that the floors are shining, he ‘checks’ on the prisoner by removing the porthole cover and peeping through the round glass ‘eye’ located in the middle of the door.”46 In Nabokov's novel, Cincinnatus constantly feels that he is being carefully watched and observed. His turnkey, Rodion, is described as standing on the other side of the door of his cell, “peering with a skipper's stern attention through the peephole” and gazing “through the blue porthole at the horizon, now rising, now falling” (13). At first, Cincinnatus reacts agonizingly to this close watch: “He broke out in a sweat, everything grew dark, and he could feel the rootlet of every hair” as well as “a chill on the back of his head” (13). Later, willy-nilly, he becomes accustomed and even resigns himself to this incessant violation of his privacy and accepts its inevitability. These acceptance and resignation are expressed when Cincinnatus is sitting naked on the cot, with “his entire skinny back, from coccyx to cervical vertebrae, exposed, to the observers on the other side of the door (he could hear whispers, rustling movements, a discussion of something or other—but never mind, let them look)” (65). And when Marthe is wondering how she will be able to exit the cell, Cincinnatus, mindful of this endless scrutiny, accurately predicts that the jailers will let her out at once because they were not only watching but also listening to “every word we say” (201). Page 22 → Also indicative of this strict control is the examination of inmates’ correspondence. V. D. Nabokov notes that incoming letters are checked: “All closed letters come unsealed, a stamp of inspection is placed on each letter prior to its being handed over to a prisoner.”47 Although outgoing correspondence was forbidden, Nabokov senior managed, time and again, to have letters smuggled out. In the foreword to Vladimir Dmitrievich's letters to Elena Ivanovna, Nabokov notes that “they were written on toilet paper. Rolled sheets were passed on with the help of Avgust Isakovich Kaminka.”48 Vladimir Dmitrievich comments that in reality, however, “it would be hardly possible, even if the administration would have tripled its present personnel, to familiarize itself with the contents of all letters.”49 In the bizarre world of the novel in which Cincinnatus is the only true prisoner, his letters are read even before being dispatched to their addressees. While Rodion takes Cincinnatus's letter to Marthe, M'sieur Pierre enters the cell: “‘I see,’ he said, seating himself, ‘that the dear fellow took a letter with him. Must have been the one that was lying here on the table yesterday, eh? To your spouse? No, no, a simple deduction, I don't read other people's letters, although it's true it was lying right in plain sight, while we were going at our game of anchors’” (143). That M'sieur Pierre is lying becomes evident from his later matter-of-fact remark, “You were writing to your spouse there about her pretty eyes and lips” (144). Some parallels between the father's pamphlet and the son's novel transpire from the description of the prison libraries. Vladimir Dmitrievich remarks that the Kresty prison library contains “almost all Russian classics as well as a considerable number of the new and newest authors.”50 In Invitation to a Beheading, to judge from numerous allusions, Russian literature of the “mythical Nineteenth Century” (27) is widely represented in the fortress library, “the second in the city for its size and the rarity of its volumes” (50). V. D. Nabokov also notes that the Kresty prison library, “which was compiled, as far as I know, mainly from donations, is notable for its totally fortuitous Page 23 → book assortment.” The senior Nabokov reached this conclusion upon “perusing the prison library catalogue and while writing out the books’ call numbers.”51 This “totally fortuitous book assortment” of the Kresty prison library undergoes grotesque refraction in Invitation to a Beheading: “It was difficult for someone who was not a specialist to make sense of the catalogue, since the titles were arranged not in alphabetical order, but according to the number of pages in each, with notations as to how many extra sheets (in order to avoid

duplication) had been pasted into this or that book” (54–55). When speaking about his solitary confinement in Kresty prison, V. D. Nabokov astutely remarks that “strange as it may seem, but while in prison, it is most difficult to study it. One learns its customs, the daily round, and to some degree its mores. But complete lack of personal contacts, the impossibility of comparing and checking one's impressions, and, most importantly, a limited field of vision—all this presents almost insurmountable obstacles, especially considering a comparatively short-term sentence.”52 Although Cincinnatus, like every prisoner, has merely a partial view of the surroundings, Nabokov's narrator—and this is one of the essential differences between the father's account and the son's novel—provides an additional, omniscient and omnivoyant, perspective on the protagonist's world. Nabokov senior's remark about the limited field of vision available to a prisoner is aptly exemplified by the position of his cell window, of which he writes: “The windowsill is elevated to the approximate height of 2¼ arshin [about 5'3”]. Being above the average height, I could, by getting on tiptoe, see a rather large portion of the courtyard. For people of average height it is impossible. It is forbidden to stand on a stool, and since there were cases of random shooting at the transgressors of this ban, it is presumably observed now. There are, of course, hours of the day when there is no danger of shooting. But it is unpleasant to feel like a schoolboy who can be caught and exposed at any moment.”53 This elevated window from Prison Pastimes found its way Page 24 → into Invitation to a Beheading, where its height and inaccessibility are emphasized: “Way, way up high, there was the inclined cavity of the window” (28). Taking a cue from his father's prison memoir, Nabokov deliberately makes Cincinnatus “very small for a full-grown man” so that he “could barely stretch as far as the bars beyond which rose the window tunnel with more bars at the end” (13, 28).54 One of the reasons for this, it seems, is the creation of an atmosphere in which Cincinnatus would be even more despondent by seeing merely bars—the ultimate symbol of captivity. To look out the window like the imaginary schoolboy in Prison Pastimes, “Cincinnatus lifted the bucking chair onto the table” and even then “was standing on tiptoe, holding the iron bars with his small hands” (28, 29). In the bizarre world of the novel, unlike in Kresty prison, looking out the window was not forbidden because Cincinnatus “could see nothing” (28), even from an elevated position. Furthermore, when catching Cincinnatus in this act, “Rodion, embracing him like a baby, carefully took him down” (29). Later in the novel, the jailer portrays himself as full of pity, clearly contrived, for the imprisoned Cincinnatus: “‘I've got to feeling very sorry for the poor gentleman—I come in, I look, he's up on the table-and-chair, trying to reach the bars with his little hands and feet, like a sick monkey. And with the sky real blue, and the swallows a-flying, and cloudlets a-high—such bliss, such blessings! I take the gentleman down from the table like a baby, and meself I bawl—yes, just as I'm standing here—I bawl and bawl…. I really went all to pieces, I was so sorry for him’” (39–40). The “compassionate Rodion's” (69) sentiments do not preclude him, however, from acting cruelly toward a horse and from participating in Cincinnatus's execution (see 214, 218–23).55 We recall that the narrator of “Tyrants Destroyed” (1938) calls attention to “the sentimentality of executioners” (Stories 446). Some twenty years later, in his lectures on Dostoevsky, Nabokov Page 25 → elucidates the idea that lies behind the abovequoted passage: “We must distinguish between ‘sentimental’ and ‘sensitive.’ A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. […] The sentimental politician may remember Mother's Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata” (LRL 103).56 Worth noting in the earlier-quoted passage from Prison Pastimes is V. D. Nabokov's comparison of the prisoner to a schoolboy. Nabokov utilizes his father's simile when Rodrig treats Cincinnatus as a principal would a student: “Are your shoe buckles in order? Why is it wrinkled, or something, over here? Shame on you—Let's see your paws. Bon. Now try not to get all dirty” (80). This explains why, in the very beginning of the novel, Rodrig selects “a sheet of ruled paper, obviously torn from a school notebook” (17) to write his directive to the convict. While in V. D. Nabokov's prison memoirs, the simile is used merely with regard to a singular ban against standing on a stool to look out the window, it receives an altogether different—comprehensive and ominous—meaning in the novel. The jailers are aiming at bending Cincinnatus to their will and at suppressing his dissenting individuality. They act as if they are taking him to school in order to straighten him out. Later Cincinnatus comprehends the meaning of his persecutors’ scheme when he maintains that eventually “they will get me trained” (61).57

Nabokov employs other distinctive locutions of his father that may be found not only in Prison Pastimes but also in the aforementioned prison letters of V. D. Nabokov to his wife. In his letter written shortly before the end of his prison term, Nabokov senior informs Elena Ivanovna, “I cheerfully await the end of this foolish, shameful and base comedy,” whereas Cincinnatus asks M'sieur Pierre and his minions shortly before the trip to the execution block for “a three-minute intermission—after that, so be it, I'll act to the end my role in your idiotic production” (209).58 These analogous phrases are uttered, however, under entirely different circumstances: while V. D. Nabokov writes about his imminent liberation from prison, Cincinnatus refers to his looming execution. The word mythical that Vladimir Dmitrievich employs in another letter with regard to a house being built opposite the prison migrates Page 26 → to the novel. There it describes “this mythical Nineteenth Century” for which Cincinnatus “artificially developed a fondness” (27) that leads him astray as he erroneously applies some romantic clichés to his own situation.59 When referring to prison in olden times, Vladimir Dmitrievich calls it “temnitsa, a place of torments and horror.”60 As a place of “torments and horror,” but moral rather than physical, one should perceive Nabokov's numerous uses of this archaic locution in his timeless dystopia. Rodrig employs the phrase “in gaol” [v temnitse] when addressing Cincinnatus for the first time (see 17; Ssoch 4:51). It also appears twice in the “eight rules for inmates” (rules 2 and 7) to remind the protagonist of its meaning and thereby to affect his psyche (see 49; Ssoch 4:72). It is telling that M'sieur Pierre makes use of the epithet when explaining to Cincinnatus that “only in fairy tales do people escape from prison [iz temnitsy]” (114; Ssoch 4:115). The executioner utilizes it once again, invoking its definition by V. D. Nabokov as the place of “torments and horror,” immediately prior to the disclosure of his true occupation when he mendaciously and sinisterly infers that his “friendship” with Cincinnatus “has flowered in the hothouse-like atmosphere of a prison [temnitsy], where it was nourished by the same alarms and by the same hopes” (161; Ssoch 4:146). Curiously, Cincinnatus, who behaves “obediently” (72) toward his tormentors throughout most of the novel, himself employs this appellation. In one of his inner monologues, he muses, “I am here through an error—not in this prison [v temnitsu], specifically—but in the whole terrible, striped world” (91; Ssoch 4:99). Even the Tamara Gardens and all other gardens in the novel are part of this “whole terrible, striped world.” They are not intrinsically evil but become so because they are fashioned and controlled by malevolent creatures, those “specters, werewolves, parodies,” those “adult dummies” (40, 95) who make them function as an integral part of the dystopian world surrounding Cincinnatus. Until nearly the end of the novel, all these phenomena arouse no suspicion in the protagonist, who feels mesmerized by the Tamara Gardens: “Cincinnatus, his palm pressed to his cheek, in motionless, ineffably vague and perhaps even blissful despair, gazed at the glimmer and haze of the Tamara Page 27 → Gardens and at the dove-blue melting hills beyond them—oh, it was a long time before he could take his eyes away” (42–43), finding them “bewitching” (43). Cincinnatus's unheeded perception of the Tamara Gardens as “bewitching” may convey an alarming impression in the English translation and was perhaps intended by Nabokov as an early warning to his protagonist. In Russian, however, the word's meaning is more conducive to Cincinnatus's initial, erroneously blissful perception of the Tamara Gardens: “charmingly.”61 It is illuminating what Véra Nabokov wrote on behalf of her husband about the Tamara Gardens: “These gardens are described […], they are then seen from the tower, and finally they appear again in the scene of the banquet when their humid, mysterious depths and recesses suddenly lose all their mystery and become exposed in the tawdry illumination (colored bulbs) provided by the city fathers. This is the final and perhaps the most important ‘betrayal’: for this represents not the exposure of a tawdry individual, or of the state, but of the very essence of the world in which C. is living and dying.”62 As I contend elsewhere, the above-quoted passage in which Cincinnatus muses about the Tamara Gardens is reminiscent in its tone of the one in Prison Pastimes. This is how Nabokov senior recalls the sentiments that the sight of the Tauride Palace from his cell aroused in him: The [prison] courtyard is separated from the Arsenal Quay by a tall brick wall. Behind it, there are a street and the Neva River that I can see only when standing on a stool. But her opposite bank is as if spread out on the palm of one's hand, and to the left, solidly towers an old acquaintance—the cupola over the rotunda of the Tauride Palace.

To this day, I cannot overcome my excitement at the sight of the Tauride Palace. And of course to have it before my eyes in the current situation means to see before me, as if incarnate, that brief and recent but seemingly so distant past that will be forgotten neither by us, nor by history.63 Page 28 → The apparent resemblance in tone also reverberates semantically: both locations epitomize the lost hopes—political for Nabokov senior since the Tauride Palace was the seat of Russia's short-lived Duma, where Vladimir Dmitrievich was, from May 10 to July 21, 1906, one of the leaders of the Kadet parliamentary faction, and personal for Cincinnatus.64 The palace was originally built for Prince Grigory Potemkin (1739–91), the all-powerful favorite of Catherine the Great. Potemkin's name is forever associated with the so-called Potemkin Villages, those rows of sham façades of nonexistent houses that he built before the empress's visit to display her subjects’ ostensible prosperity—the ploy that since then has become a proverbial symbol of fraud and deception. The irony that the Tauride Palace, associated with the corrupt magnate, became the site of the nascent and short-lived Russian democracy was not lost on Nabokov, who employs a similar mansion with the Gardens as an epitome of the novel's deceitful dystopia. And Nabokov also evidently remembered that the Tauride Palace was the seat of the Constituent Assembly—the futile hope, as it turned out, for Russian post-imperial democracy. The Tauride Garden is mentioned in The Defense: “To pass time” before returning home at an opportune hour, the school-skipping Luzhin “wandered into Tavricheski Park” (51–52).65 Here in the work of fiction, as in real history, the Tauride Garden as part of the palace is associated with the motif of deceit.66

Capital Punishment Although it has unequivocally political ramifications, capital punishment is, first and foremost, a legal issue since the decision is ordinarily reached through a judicial process. At the turn of the twentieth century, the death penalty became the subject of passionate debate in imperial Russia.67 As a jurist, statesman, and highly ethical individual, Vladimir Dmitrievich Page 29 → was a resolute opponent of the death penalty, which he calls “an abhorrent improbable relic of barbaric times” and a “cold-blooded, conscious, according to all the rules of art, complete destruction of a defenseless victim who, being fully aware, is going under the blade or into the noose.”68 In the First Duma, Nabokov senior was the principal initiator of the bill for the abolition of capital punishment.69 V. D. Nabokov introduced the draft and was elected to the so-called Commission of the Fifteen to draw up the bill and to present it back to the Duma. The Duma approved the bill and sent it for ratification to a specially appointed committee of the State Council that had served between 1906 and 1917 as the upper house of the parliament (the Duma being its lower house). The State Council soon adjourned for a recess, and when it reconvened, the committee deemed it unlawful to deliberate upon the bill received from the Duma, which by then had been dissolved. The bill as prepared by the Commission of the Fifteen was reintroduced in the Second Duma.70 It was never signed into law by the tsarist government. Throughout his legal and political career, V. D. Nabokov maintained that the “death penalty could not be recognized as a means of justice: it is but a remnant of old barbarity, a stain on humanity, inflicting ‘shame and reproach’ upon it.”71 With “shame and reproach,” the senior Nabokov invokes the phrase from the Alexander I's decree of September 27, 1801, in which the tsar so characterized the abolished tortures.72 He unwaveringly held this view, “link[ing] his name to the struggle against capital punishment.”73 Vladimir Dmitrievich asserted that aside from judicial errors (when innocents are executed) and in addition to physical and mental sufferings inflicted upon a convict, it is, first and foremost, a crime against ethics, against the human Page 30 → soul: “Only incomprehensible shortsightedness, some kind of moral atrophy, can forget about the soul of a ‘death convict’ over which an impossible, unbearable, criminal outrage is committed.”74 The decree for the abolition of capital punishment, in the drafting of which V. D. Nabokov played a key role, was among the earlier ones issued by the Provisional Government.75 The only temporary change in the senior Nabokov's attitude toward the death penalty occurred in the early fall of 1917, when he realized that this principle had to be sacrificed for the good of the

country and “had the courage to speak out in support of the Kerensky government, which attempted to reinstate the death penalty in the armed forces poisoned by revolutionary agitation.”76 As if to illustrate his father's point about the crime committed against the soul of a death row prisoner, Nabokov, by way of Cincinnatus's internal monologues, displays the suffering of the protagonist who awaits the imminent execution, all the while experiencing numerous horrifying emotions before the impending violent death: How I fear that second, or rather split second, already cut short then, when, with a lumberjack's grunt—But what is there to fear? Will it not be for me simply the shadow of an ax, and shall I not hear the downward vigorous grunt with the ear of a different world? Still I am afraid! One cannot write it off so easily. […] Soon, I think, I shall evolve a third eye on the back of my neck, between my brittle vertebrae: a mad eye, wide open, with a dilating pupil and pink venation on the glossy ball. Keep away! Even stronger, more hoarsely: hands off! I can foresee it all! And how often do my ears ring with the sob I am destined to emit and the terrible gurgling cough, uttered by the beheaded tyro. (92–93) Incidentally, it is quite possible that Nabokov's choice of an ax as the instrument of execution in the novel was influenced by the information he obtained from one of his father's published speeches in which Nabokov senior intimated that “in Germany, death sentences are carried out by one of the most despicable methods, namely with an ax.”77 On the other hand, Nabokov, Page 31 → who resided in Berlin throughout most of the interwar years (1922–37), could also have learned about this method of execution from the German press. Like Josef K., the protagonist of Kafka's Trial, Cincinnatus does not comprehend the reason for his being condemned to death, naively assuming that there is some “misunderstanding” (32). Furthermore—what he finds deeply distressing and aggravating—even the date of his execution is kept secret from him: “Oh, my anguish—what shall I do with you, with myself? How dare they conceal from me…I, who must pass through an ordeal of supreme pain, I, who, in order to preserve a semblance of dignity (anyway I shall not go beyond silent pallor—I am no hero anyway…), must during that ordeal keep control of all my faculties, I, I…am gradually weakening…the uncertainty is horrible—well, why don't you tell me, do tell me—but no, you have me die anew every morning” (51). As terrifying as Cincinnatus's inner thoughts are, it is the ellipses that are most shocking, graphically registering his paralyzing anguish, his bitter anger at the tormentors, his uncontrollable fear before the unknown, his horror of sudden and violent death, and altogether demonstrating the protagonist's inhuman suffering to which he is subjected by the world around him. V. D. Nabokov calls attention to the abnormality ingrained in the very act of execution. He maintains that “to carry out death sentences the authorities have to resort to the services of outcasts who have lost the last residue of moral sensibility. And even these people are often capable of carrying out their deed to the end only by driving themselves with wine to almost complete insanity.”78 The senior Nabokov's opinion about the abnormality of execution is reflected in that of the protagonist's father in The Gift: “Innate in every man is the feeling of something insuperably abnormal about the death penalty” (203). Nabokov takes his father's comment one step further in his play The Grand-Dad, set in early nineteenth-century France, some twenty-five years after the French Revolution, to which the play contains references and flashbacks. The writer shows that this occupation is so deviant that it becomes detrimental to the psyche of the executioner himself, who eventually Page 32 → loses his mind. Similarly, in Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov perhaps also implies that M'sieur Pierre is insane when the novel's protagonist dubs the executioner's “crib” speech “obtrusive nonsense” (152, 154).79 In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov, who shared his father's resolute convictions, expresses his disgust with and denunciation of capital punishment in the strongest possible terms. The writer, of course, was well aware that the condemnation of the death penalty constitutes one of the novel's most important semantic strands. Writing on April 28, 1960, on behalf of her husband to Frank Harper of the Committee against Capital Punishment, Véra Nabokov points out only months after the appearance of the novel's English translation in September 1959, “My husband asks me to answer your letter of April 20. He is entirely and unequivocally opposed to capital punishment. He wishes you success in your fight against it. He regrets that he cannot write an article for you or

sign a petition […] because he thinks he has done his bit by writing a whole book on the subject (‘Invitation to a Beheading’).”80

Dueling A duel, the procedure of challenging and combating an opponent with matched weapons as a way of settling “an affair of honor,” had been practiced, particularly in the West, for centuries. In modern times, as late as early twentieth century, the most common choice among duelists was either cold weapons (swords, sabers) or firearms—as a rule, specially designed dueling pistols. Duels resulted in the premature deaths of such famous individuals as the American statesman Alexander Hamilton (1804), the French mathematician Évariste Galois (1832), and the Russian writers Alexander Pushkin (1837) and Mikhail Lermontov (1841). V. D. Nabokov addressed this subject from the juridical standpoint in his pamphlet Dueling and Criminal Law (Duel´ i ugolovnyi zakon, 1910). There he argues that a duel is “an evil” and “glorification of violence because the winner is the one who turns out to be stronger, more dexterous, more accustomed to deal with firearms.” He maintains that “a duel, of course, is not a restoration of honor” and avers that it has little in common with the courage needed during war—“a duel at best is a proof of personal courage”—but in Page 33 → essence merely demonstrates that a duelist “possesses strong nerves.”81 Vladimir Dmitrievich illustrates his point by way of Guy de Maupassant's story “A Coward” (“Un Lâche,” 1884): Many are familiar with a superb story by Guy de Maupassant in which one man who insulted another challenges him to a duel. He then spends a sleepless night, suffers miserably because he foresees that his nerves will not endure it, that he is unable to face his opponent's pistol. Although his entire being rises up against this “pusillanimity,” he cannot get the better of his physiology, his nerves; he foresees the shame that awaits him if he faints, and finally he can stand it no longer and shoots himself. Readiness to sacrifice his life did not desert him, but he lacked the sufficient readiness to go to the duel.82 When discussing the meaninglessness of dueling, V. D. Nabokov also quotes Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862). In this novel, Evgeny Bazarov, while perfectly understanding the ridiculousness of dueling, nonetheless combats Pavel Kirsanov, his friend's uncle. Discussing the novel's dueling episode years later in his Cornell lectures—after Pavel Kirsanov fires and misses, Bazarov wounds his opponent in the thigh and then as a physician attends to his wound—Nabokov remarks, “Actually Bazarov would have behaved still more nobly if he had coolly discharged his pistol in the air after enduring Uncle Pavel's fire” (LRL 90). As we remember, this is precisely how Nabokov makes the protagonist's father act in his story “Orache”: “G. D. Shishkov and Count A. S. Tumanski fought a duel. […] Count Tumanski, who fired first, missed, whereupon his opponent discharged his pistol into the air” (Stories 331). Curiously, only a year after the publication of Dueling and Criminal Law, Page 34 → the senior Nabokov, despite arguing in his pamphlet for the absurdity of dueling, felt compelled to defend his honor by challenging Mikhail Suvorin, the editor of the newspaper New Times (Novoe Vremia). Suvorin had printed a defamatory article by a certain “non-duelable” (SM 188) hack journalist named Nikolai Snessarev, who slanderously insinuated that Vladimir Dmitrievich's motives for marrying Elena Ivanovna were mercenary. The confrontation did not take place because Suvorin “held himself not responsible for Snessarev's article and declined a duel.”83 Nabokov's oeuvre abounds with references to duels. Alongside those in the verse play The Tragedy of Mr. Morn (1924) and the story “An Affair of Honor” (“Podlets,” ca. 1927), such references are especially noticeable in the works that are autobiographical to various degrees—from the story “Orache” (1932) to the novels Glory (1932) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), to the memoirs Conclusive Evidence (1951) and Speak, Memory (1967) and Other Shores (1954), to Pale Fire (1962), to Ada (1969), to Look at the Harlequins! (1974).84 This motif assumed its significance to Nabokov and subsequently was dramatized in his writings due to the two aforementioned events: the publication of V. D. Nabokov's Dueling and Criminal Law and his challenging Mikhail Suvorin to a duel.

Among the considerable number of Nabokov's works in which dueling takes place, “An Affair of Honor” occupies a special position since it was composed under the direct influence of his father's pamphlet. It is very telling that the legal aspect of dueling is emphasized in the story. Thus Gnushke, one of the seconds of Anton Petrovich, the protagonist of the story, addresses the dueling laws of contemporary Germany, in the capital of which the action takes place: “As far as the German laws are concerned,” “if you kill him, they'll put you in jail for several years; if, on the other hand, you are killed, they won't bother you” (Stories 204).85 By employing the comical alogism “if, on the other hand, you are killed, they won't bother you,” Nabokov highlights the absurd nature of dueling.86 Page 35 → It is very likely that Nabokov originally titled his story “The Scoundrel” (“Podlets”) under the influence of his father's pamphlet. Polemicizing with a prominent jurist, Alexander Lokhvitsky—father of poet Mirra Lokhvitskaia and of prose writer Nadezhda Buchinskaia, who wrote under the pen name Teffi—V. D. Nabokov asserts, “in essence, he only demands: commit scoundrelly acts, if you like, but fight a duel with the one who calls you a scoundrel.”87 In this story, written not only under the influence of Nabokov senior's pamphlet but also the Maupassant story with which Vladimir Dmitrievich drives home his point about the senselessness of dueling, Nabokov shifts the narrative from the tragic to the burlesque (as I shall show in greater detail in chapter 3). As if illustrating his father's point that a duel is “glorification of violence because the winner is the one who turns out to be stronger, more dexterous, more accustomed to deal with firearms,” Nabokov shows the absurd injustice of dueling: Berg, who commits a dishonorable act but who appears to be an excellent marksman, will unavoidably prevail over Anton Petrovich, who is destined to become his victim only because he is totally inexperienced with a pistol. Echoing his father's pamphlet, Nabokov shows that dueling is not “an affair of honor” at all but a remnant of a barbaric custom that does not lead to any resolution except the death of one of the participants.88 In his other works, Nabokov approaches dueling from an altogether different angle, which his father understandably does not tackle in his legal pamphlet—namely, the reaction of the duelist's dear ones: their tantalizing feelings, their sufferings before the unknown outcome, their terror of losing the loved one. Nabokov de facto condemns dueling by conveying this range of emotions in his autobiographical story “Orache” and later in his English and Russian memoirs from the viewpoint of a boy fearing the loss of his adored father. For example, in Speak, Memory, the writer describes his returning home from school all the while dreading the fatal outcome of his father's duel: What would his adversary choose, I kept asking myself—the blade or the bullet? Or had the choice already been made? Carefully, I took the beloved, the familiar, the richly alive image of my father at fencing Page 36 → and tried to transfer that image, minus the mask and the padding, to the dueling ground, in some barn or riding school. I visualized him and his adversary, both bare-chested, blacktrousered, in furious battle, their energetic movements marked by that strange awkwardness which even the most elegant swordsmen cannot avoid in a real encounter. The picture was so repulsive, so vividly did I feel the ripeness and nakedness of a madly pulsating heart about to be pierced, that I found myself hoping for what seemed momentarily a more abstract weapon. But soon I was in even deeper distress. As the sleigh crept along Nevski Avenue, where blurry lights swam in the gathering dusk, I thought of the heavy black Browning my father kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. […] In the almost hallucinatory state that our snow-muffled ride engendered, I refought all the famous duels a Russian boy knew so well. […] And behind it all there was yet a very special emotional abyss that I was desperately trying to skirt, lest I burst into a tempest of tears. (SM 190–91) By describing the wide range of his own boyhood feelings, Nabokov shows the absurdity of dueling that is prone to bring disaster upon the child—to make him lose his father for no justifiable reason whatsoever. Nabokov also expresses his opinion on dueling through the perspective of a tormented family member in his first

English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Here, the father of both the narrator, V, and the title character loses his life in a duel with Palchin, who claims to have had an affair ten years earlier with the father's first wife and Sebastian's mother, Virginia. The narrator ponders this tragic event and questions the worthiness of the duel in light of the terrible effect it has had on the lives of the family members and on himself: Palchin was a fool and a cad, this much at least I gathered from the story my mother told me. […] But just because Palchin was a fool and a cad, it is hard for me to understand why a man of my father's worth should have risked his life to satisfy—what? Virginia's honour? His own desire of revenge? But just as Virginia's honour had been irredeemably forfeited by the very fact of her flight, so all ideas of vengeance ought to have long lost their bitter lust in the happy years of my father's second marriage. Or was it merely the naming of a name, the seeing of a face, the sudden grotesque sight of an individual stamp upon what had been a tame faceless ghost? And taken all in all was it, Page 37 → this echo of a distant past (and echoes are seldom more than a bark, no matter how pure-voiced the caller), was it worth the ruin of our home and the grief of my mother? (10–11) It is noteworthy that Nabokov emulated Vladimir Dmitrievich's modus operandi: like his father, Nabokov condemned duels in principle yet, precisely like his father more than a decade before him, found it necessary to confront his verbal assailant when his honor and reputation were at stake. Thus, in winter of 1923, Nabokov challenged to a duel Alexander Drozdov, who collaborated with the pro-Bolshevik, Berlin-based, Russian émigré periodical On the Eve (Nakanune), for writing a libelous article about him. Luckily, the duel did not take place because Drozdov did not respond to Nabokov's challenge.89 By the end of 1923, Drozdov left Berlin for Moscow. He worked on the editorial staffs of various Soviet periodicals and managed to survive the Stalinist purges.90 There is a significant temporal difference, however, between the father and the son in their opting for a duel: while V. D. Nabokov's challenge came shortly after writing the condemnatory pamphlet, Nabokov's call came long before expressing strong misgivings about dueling. Although Nabokov was acquainted with his father's pamphlet all along, he apparently did not give the issue sufficient thought in his earlier, bachelor years. He presumably formed this altogether negative critical opinion of dueling in his later and more mature years, after he got married (1925) and became a father (1934)—that is, from the mid-1920s and throughout the 1930s, when he was composing “An Affair of Honor,” “Orache,” and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

Child Abuse V. D. Nabokov made his views on child abuse known in the article “Carnal Crimes According to the Draft of the Penal Code” (“Plotskie prestupleniia po proektu ugolovnogo ulozheniia”). By Nabokov's own admission, he learned about it when Andrew Field presented him with a copy of his father's Collection of Articles on Criminal Law, which he had bought “in a secondhand bookshop, on his visit to Russia in 1961” (SM 178). Nabokov accurately describes the book as “a volume of 316 pages containing nineteen papers” and “published in 1904 in St. Petersburg” (178). Nabokov further intimates that “in one of these (‘Carnal Crimes,’ written in 1902), my father discusses, rather Page 38 → prophetically in a certain odd sense, cases (in London) ‘of little girls à l'âge le plus tendre (v nezhneyshem vozraste), i.e. from eight to twelve years, being sacrificed to lechers (slastolyubtsam)’” (178). It is possible that Nabokov's memory failed him in this case and he had read “Carnal Crimes” while still in his teens, as both the article itself and the book collection that contains it were available to him in his father's library.91 But even if Nabokov was indeed unfamiliar with “Carnal Crimes” until after writing Lolita, in which child abuse is the focal subject matter, it is nevertheless pertinent to discuss some salient parallels and juxtapositions between Nabokov's novel and his father's article. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the two authors understandably pursued different goals: while the senior Nabokov's piece is a legal essay, offering, as its title indicates, emendations to the draft of the Penal Code, Nabokov's composition is a novel, written approximately fifty years later and narrated in first person by the offender, thereby allowing us to discern, to the extent it is at all possible, his and his victim's innermost feelings, albeit filtered through his altogether unreliable presentation.92 In his article, Vladimir Dmitrievich writes that little girls, specifically between the ages of eight and twelve, are not uncommonly forced into copulation with an adult. He refers to a German study that maintains, “The most

despicable crimes of this kind are committed by mentally healthy people whom sexual satiety, sensuality, and coarseness, not infrequently intoxication, force to lose human dignity to such a degree.”93 In Lolita, Nabokov makes Humbert Humbert pursue little girls whose age range slightly differs from that in his father's article—“between the age limits of nine and fourteen” (AnL 16). In spite of the results of the German study presented in V. D. Nabokov's article, suggesting that child sex offenders are usually thrill seekers not satisfied by ordinary sexual encounters with Page 39 → adult women and who therefore look for sensual indulgence with juveniles, Nabokov prefers to focus instead on a pervert, a pedophile. Humbert tries to account for his abnormal sexual predilection, at least in part, with his traumatic adolescent experience, when he and his sweetheart were startled by strangers on the verge of consummating their relationship: “I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu” (13). Humbert muses whether this “excessive desire” for Annabel Leigh, a girl of his own age, that he experienced as a youngster and her subsequent death were responsible for his “inherent singularity” (13). Humbert is convinced, nevertheless, “that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel” (14), or as he puts it differently, “that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (15). That is why, as Humbert claims, he shies away from sexual encounters with adult women and deliberately and exclusively seeks erotic satisfaction with pubescent girls, whom he dubs “nymphets” (16). In an attempt to exonerate himself, Humbert asserts that such girls are uniquely sexually attractive, with “the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child,” and that a man feels helpless against their irresistible “demoniac” charms (124–25, 16). V. D. Nabokov points out that “when a libidinous act with a child under the age of fourteen is committed, neither a question of the child's consent nor whether or not there was an abuse of [the child's] innocence can be raised.”94 Vladimir Dmitrievich clearly perceives coitus of an adult with a juvenile, even a consensual one, as “[to be] placed side by side with rape.”95 In light of the senior Nabokov's criminological expertise and considering that the American justice system terms a consensual copulation of an adult with a minor statutory rape, Humbert's attempt to vindicate himself by claiming that it was the twelve-year-old Lolita who seduced him (see 132) is totally preposterous. Lolita, however, accurately defines the intercourse with her guardian stepfather as “incest” (119) and correctly asserts that Humbert “raped” her (141). Humbert Page 40 → eventually accepts Lolita's latter charge, admitting, “Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape” (308). V. D. Nabokov believes that the helplessness of a child who has no place to go provides a thrill to molesters and rapists. He exemplifies this point by a quotation from Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan Karamazov offers the following psychological explanation: “It is precisely the defenselessness of these creatures that tempts the torturers, the angelic trustfulness of the child, who has nowhere to turn and no one to turn to—that is what enflames the vile blood of the torturer.”96 We are mindful that in The Gift, Shchyogolev tells a story about some older man lusting after “quite a little girl” (a thinly disguised confession of his own pining for his stepdaughter, Zina), calling it “a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy” (186). The “Dostoevskian tragedy” alludes, inter alia, to Crime and Punishment (1866), in which a fifty-year-old Svidrigailov is not only rumored to have raped “a deaf-and-dumb girl of about fifteen, or perhaps even fourteen, years old” but also longs for and contemplates marrying a girl who “is not yet sixteen.”97 In addition, Nabokov undoubtedly remembered, especially after working at his monograph on Gogol, that Chichikov, the protagonist of Dead Souls, recalls how his father “seduced an orphan girl whose guardian he was.”98 Nabokov clearly shows that Humbert, if not stimulated by Lolita's helplessness, nevertheless takes advantage of her having “absolutely nowhere else to go” (142) after her mother's death and time and again tries to keep her on a tight rein. He temporarily “succeeded in terrorizing Lo” by threatening her with “the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home” (151). V. D. Nabokov underscores that coercive premature sexual experience causes profound, ineradicable harm to a

child, both physical and psychological. He further calls attention to the pernicious effect that such premature sexual experience has on little girls: “Needless to say, of course, there is the deep, indelible harm connected with premature arousal of the sexual instinct Page 41 → under the influence of depraved manipulations. Aside from purely physical harm, most terrible of all is the moral corruption that may result and for the most part indeed results in the complete spiritual ruin of a child. Out of such individuals, defiled in their childhood, is recruited, in its turn, the army of defilers, prostitutes, debauchees, pederasts; they are trusted and safe prey to traders in live human flesh.”99 The physical harm to Lolita from this premature sexual experience is evident when she endures great discomfort after intercourse with Humbert: she “started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her” (141). Most telling and most poignant is Lolita's death after giving birth to a stillborn child. This double death most fittingly highlights the destructive nature of Humbert's lustful perversion and its inevitable devastating effect not only on the life of Lolita but also on the lives of her dear ones—her lost child and her widowed husband. Nabokov demonstrates that Humbert inflicts on Lolita not only physical but also psychological harm. After Charlotte's tragic death (for which he was at least partially responsible), Humbert has a duty as Lolita's stepfather and only remaining relative to provide her with a stable home and happy childhood. However, he is totally unconcerned with Lolita's well-being. Instead, he treats her merely as a sex object, as his “car pet” (256), the tool for his aberrant sexual gratification. Knowing full well that his behavior is both immoral and criminal and fearful of getting caught, Humbert moves the little girl around the country, thereby depriving her of a decent, uninterrupted education and a consistent social environment. Using various threats, the acutely jealous and allsuspecting Humbert forces Lolita into lying at all times to her peers, teachers, and everyone else with whom she comes into contact. Furthermore, to save a sufficient amount of money to be able to run away from the torture chamber into which her world has been turned by her “dream dad” and “guardian” (149), Lolita has no choice but to prostitute herself with Humbert, extorting more and more cash from him for her “services.” Nabokov shows that in pursuit of his desire, Humbert does not hesitate to ruin the life of Page 42 → the human being entrusted into his care.100 This deleterious situation affects Lolita's mental state and partially breaks her will, resulting in frequently passive and resigned behavior. For example, after observing Lolita's tennis game, Humbert realizes in retrospect that “something within her [had] been broken by me” so that she lacks “the will to win” (232). Humbert's matter-of-fact remark that he hears “her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep” (176) indicates that he has inflicted unbearable suffering and pain upon the little girl. Toward the end of the novel, Humbert seems to comprehend the terrible harm he has caused to Lolita: Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. (282–83) Even though Humbert's Confession of a White Widowed Male, with its recurrent pleas to “(ladies and) gentlemen of the jury” (see, e.g., 9, 69, 123), was ostensibly designed, if not to exonerate the narrator from his crimes at least to provide some mitigating circumstances with regard to his treatment of Lolita, Nabokov's novel, of course, issues a stern reproach and passes a guilty verdict on Humbert, a pervert, child molester, and rapist. Expanding on his father's point that prostitution is a habitual path for sexually abused children, Nabokov demonstrates that with the development of photography and especially with the advent of cinematography—which was still in the cradle at the turn of the twentieth century when Nabokov senior wrote his article—there emerged another dreadful avenue for child exploitation: the pornography industry. Lolita tells Humbert that after she ran away with Quilty, of whom she was enamored at the time, he wanted her to take part in “weird, filthy, fancy things […] he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures”; when Lolita “refused to take part […] he threw her out” (276). Page 43 →

All through her formative years, Lolita knew “much sadness and hardship” (266): first, the inexpressible suffering while living with Humbert, then traumatic experience caused by Quilty, and finally privation when “doing some restaurant work in small places” “for almost two years” (277). It is, however, a testament to Lolita's resilience and tenacity that she garnered enough strength not to follow those horrific paths referred to in both V. D. Nabokov's article and Nabokov's novel. She eventually meets and marries Richard F. Schiller, a war veteran, and intends to start a family with him. Nabokov demonstrates, however, that she cannot escape the fatal effect of her imposed premature sexual experience, which results in her death when giving birth to a stillborn child. While V. D. Nabokov speaks of child abuse merely with regard to little girls, Nabokov broadens the presentation by his description of Gaston Godin, Humbert's Beardsley College colleague. Humbert imparts that Godin “knew by name all the small boys in our vicinity […] and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn leaves in his back yard, and bring wood from his shed, and even perform simple chores about the house, and he would feed them fancy chocolates, with real liqueurs inside—in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement” (181). Humbert's disdainful hinting at Godin's perversion—attraction to underage boys—is highly ironic because both he and Godin, who is nothing but a travestied variant of Humbert, are pedophiles. In The Original of Laura, Nabokov's last, unfinished novel, the author addresses the subject of child abuse once again. There the molester is a lachrymose Hubert H. Hubert, an aged, unattractive, pathetic Englishman, a lover of the twelve-year-old Flora's mother, and a caricature of “unhappy, mild, dog-eyed” Humbert Humbert (88). It is as if Humbert's wish “let them play around me forever. Never grow up” (21) came true, and Flora is the thirdgeneration Lo, that “supremely lovely Lolita the Third” whom the “salivating Dr. Humbert” tried “to distinguish in the remoteness of time” (174). Here is how Nabokov describes Hubert's child abuse: “She [Flora] was often alone in the house with Mr. Hubert, who constantly ‘prowled’ (rôdait) around her, humming a monotonous tune and sort of mesmerizing her, enveloping her, so to speak, in some sticky invisible substance and coming closer and closer no matter what way she turned. For instance she did not dare to let her arms hang aimlessly lest her knuckles came into contact with some horrible part of that kindly but smelly and ‘pushing’ old male” (56–57). In this passage, Hubert is portrayed as a spider—the image reminiscent of Humbert's self-description (cf. AnL 49)—trying to enmesh his child-victim in the invisible sticky web of his perverted lust. When Flora is bedridden Page 44 → with fever, Hubert makes his move, feigning “a father's sudden concern”: “‘I'm afraid you are chilly, my love,’ and plunging a hand under the bedclothes from his vantage point at the footboard, he felt her shins” (71). The little girl who perfectly sees through Hubert's machinations and learns from her schoolmate beforehand “where to kick an enterprising gentleman” (63) responds instantaneously to his fondling attempt: “Flora uttered a yelp and then a few screams. Freeing themselves from the tumbled sheets her pedalling legs hit him in the crotch” (71). This kick in the crotch is a stroke of poetic justice, the well-deserved and long overdue retribution that all child molesters by way of Mr. Hubert receive from Flora, Nabokov's last underage character, for committing indescribable acts of rape and sexual abuse. In “Carnal Crimes,” V. D. Nabokov made substantive comments on and constructive criticism of the penal code draft regarding sex crimes, specifically those against juveniles. While criticizing the draft of the criminal law on a variety of points, he remarks nonetheless that “the most characteristic and uniquely valuable features of the draft resolutions concerning indecent conduct are aspirations for the children's protection” and concludes the article by saying that “the draft resolutions, especially those directed toward the protection of minors, in themselves constitute the most significant progress.”101 About fifty years later, Nabokov courageously exposed this taboo subject in his fiction. Martin Amis is perfectly on target when he astutely comments on Nabokov's momentous role in bringing out into the open the subject matter that, until then, had been completely swept under the rug: “No human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime.”102 Well in line with his father's pioneering legal work, Nabokov indeed demonstrates most graphically the severity of the problem and calls for the long-overdue worldwide public attention to the prevalent phenomenon of child abuse, thereby showing the urgent need for juvenile protection. •

•

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Nabokov adopted the legal precepts of his father regarding the penitentiary system, capital punishment, dueling,

and child abuse. At the same time, the Page 45 → writer conducted with him a creative dialogue of sorts. Whereas in his Prison Pastimes, Vladimir Dmitrievich excluded political prisoners from consideration, Nabokov, in light of the emerging Great Terror in Russia and the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s, centers in Invitation to a Beheading on the lot of the Other under a totalitarian regime. While Nabokov senior earnestly exposes the moral bankruptcy and senselessness of dueling in his legal pamphlet on the subject, Nabokov junior does so in “An Affair of Honor” by way of ridicule and explores new dimensions in such works as “Orache,” The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Speak, Memory: he conveys the gamut of feelings experienced by the duelist's dear ones, above all children, to underscore the tragic aspect of this outmoded ritual. Insomuch as the senior Nabokov assumes that a pedophile is merely a thrill-seeker, not sated with conventional sexual experience, the author of Lolita demonstrates that his protagonist seeks a youngster from the outset; moreover, Nabokov foreshadows the rapid development of the pornography industry and, in the example of Gaston Gaudin, shows that pedophilia can also be homosexual. In the final analysis, whether Nabokov embraces his father's legal stance on these crucial matters unconditionally or conducts a creative dialogue with him, the writer's world perception and fictional universe cannot be fully understood without taking into account the impact of Vladimir Dmitrievich's juridical legacy. 1. «Набоков заместитель мой по кафедре в училище Правоведения и близкий человек в моей семье; мой так сказать Herzenskind, которым я чрезвычайно интересовался и которого ценил очень высоко, как образованного и в высшей степени талантливого человека»; Tagantsev, Perezhitoe, 106–7. Here and henceforth, all translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. 2. «Фигура В. Д. Набокова, как общественного деятеля и политика, несколько затеняет его значение, как ученого. Но участие в борьбе за освобождение родины, за основные начала правового государства, не помешало ему оставить яркий след в науке уголовного права, которая была прямой его специальностью. Имя Набокова войдет в историю науки уголовного права, ибо он был и остается живой связью в славной плеяде русских криминалистов конца 19-го и начала 20-го века»; Makletsov, “V. D. Nabokov,” 2. 3. «Идеал правового порядка был ему дорог потому, что он отвечал внутреннему строю его души, потому, что в этом идеале воплощалось то уважение к человеческой личности, которое составляло непроизвольную душевную потребность Набокова и которое, поэтому, окрашивало собою и его мировоззрение и его личное поведение и всю его внешнюю повадку»; Kizevetter, “V. D. Nabokov,” 1. 4. For detailed information on D. N. Nabokov’s career, see Korneva, “D. N. Nabokov”; Shilov, Gosudarstvennye deiateli Rossiiskoi imperii, 501–4. In fact, Vladimir Dmitrievich’s male siblings, two older and one younger, all received legal education: Dmitri (1867–1949) and Sergei (1868–1940) at their father’s alma mater, the Imperial School of Jurisprudence; Konstantin (1872–1927), like Vladimir Dmitrievich, at St. Petersburg University Law School. 5. The degree was conferred upon V. D. Nabokov on November 15 (27), 1891; the diploma was issued on December 23, 1891 (January 4, 1892). See “The Diploma” («Диплом»); V. D. Nabokov, Scrapbook, VNA. 6. V. D. Nabokov, “Nishchenstvo i brodiazhestvo,” 39–73. He initially presented this essay at the session of the Criminology Division of the St. Petersburg University Judicial Society on November 25, 1894 (39 n. 1). 7. For V. D. Nabokov’s analysis of von Liszt’s and Binding’s legal precepts, see his “List i Binding.” On von Liszt as a legal scholar of world renown, see Jescheck, Franz von Liszt zum Gedächtnis. 8. For von Liszt’s attitude toward capital punishment, see Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 447. 9. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 32:313; Tolstoy, Resurrection, 340. The annotator of this Englishlanguage edition erroneously refers to “Friedrich Liszt […], a German economist” (489–90). 10. For a brief overview of von Liszt’s political career, see his essay, “Rationale for the Nullum Crimen Principle,” 1009. 11. «в весьма энергических и смелых выражениях говорил о тех политических условиях, которые создают возможность подобных ужасов. […] Дав общую картину государственных порядков, царящих в России, Лист обратился к немцам с призывом выразить свое сочувствие и нравственную поддержку борющемуся за свою свободу русскому народу. […] В заключение Лист сказал, что он верит в думу, выборы в которую тогда подготовлялись»; Zaitsev, “Frants List,” 1076. 12. See Radzinowicz, Adventures in Criminology, 292 n. 19.

13. Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 529. 14. “This letter, written in our scholar’s [N. S. Tagantsev’s] hieroglyphs, well known to everyone in St. Petersburg, remained throughout his life one of [V. D.] Nabokov’s most precious and carefully preserved documents. Many years later he would show it with pride, recounting with humor what incredible efforts it cost him to decipher this letter, into each word of which he invested special content.” («Письмо это, написанное хорошо известными всему Петербургу иероглифами нашего ученого, осталось для Набокова на всю жизнь одним из ценнейших, бережно хранимых документов. Много лет спустя он с гордостью его показывал, с комизмом рассказывая, каких неимоверных трудов стоило ему расшифрование этого письма, в каждое слово которого он вкладывал особое содержание»); Kaminka, “Pamiati V. D. Nabokova,” 3. 15. The Certificate («Аттестат») reads in the original: «Приказом по Министерству Юстиции от 17го Января 1905 г. за № 2 уволен, согласно прошению, от должности Преподавателя Императорского Училища Правоведения с 1904 г. Ноября 14го»; V. D. Nabokov, Scrapbook, VNA. 16. See Riasanovsky, History of Russia, 406; Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 369. 17. «Оставил училище в 1904 вскоре после ноябрьского земского съезда, в котором приним деят участие»; notes on family background, holograph unsigned and undated, 9 index cards, card titled “V. D.,” VNA. 18. While V. D. Nabokov’s political career has been addressed to some degree in recent years, his important role in the advancement of jurisprudence in Russia has been, by and large, neglected. For brief surveys of his juridical accomplishments, see Kaminka, “Pamiati V. D. Nabokova”; Kulisher, “Pamiati V. D. Nabokova”; Makletsov, “V. D. Nabokov.” In the post-Soviet era, V. D. Nabokov’s legal career has been outlined by Chernobel´, “Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov.” For the most recent discussion of V. D. Nabokov’s legal tenets, see Dragunoiu, “Rechtsstaat and Natural Law,” in Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism, 98–110. 19. «На последнем перед войной международном конгрессе в Копенгагене Набоков играл без преувеличения главную роль. Его доклад явился центром работ конгресса; большая часть предложенных им резолюций была принята единодушно подавляющим большинством голосов»; Makletsov, “V. D. Nabokov,” 3. 20. See Kulisher, “Pamiati V. D. Nabokova.” For a detailed report on the work of the Copenhagen Congress, see V. D. Nabokov, “Kopengagenskii s´´ezd mezhdunarodnogo soiuza kriminalistov.” 21. See http://www.penal.org/new/generale.php. 22. See Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1:197; Vinaver, Nashe pravitel´stvo, 71. 23. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 126. 24. For detailed information about the prison and its most famous inmates, see Porokhov, Kresty. 25. «Те «уголовные» арестанты, с которыми приходится ежедневно встречаться, производят крайне тяжелое впечатление. Прежде всего своею внешностью. Однажды вечером я отправился в церковь, для чего мне, как политическому, потребовалось особое разрешение начальства. Был канун Вознесенья, и мимо меня продефилировало, прикладываясь к образу, сотни две арестантов. В огромном большинстве—что за лица! Печать вырожденья с неумолимой ясностью видна в каждой черте их облика. […] Но хуже всего—выражения лиц, либо мрачно озлобленных, либо наглых и грубых»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 17–18. 26. «послужила ли ему именно бритва орудием убийства», «На вид он был довольно тупым парнем с отталкивающей физиономией»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 51–52. 27. Although the records of the Berlin Crime Museum (Das Berliner Kriminalmuseum), founded in 1890, did not survive World War II, the museum, in all likelihood, did function and was open to public in the 1920s—that is, at the time when Nabokov could visit it together with his father in 1920–22 and later again alone while working on King, Queen, Knave. I am indebted to Barbara Fest of Polizeihistorische Sammlung as well as to Susanne Regener of Universität Siegen for the information about the museum and its history. 28. See Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 172–73. 29. See V. D. Nabokov, “Mery sotsial´noi zashchity protiv retsidivistov.” 30. See S., “Puteshestvie Vl. Dm. Nabokova v tiur´mu”; anon., under the rubric “Khronika.” 31. ««Пенитенциарная» идея, как известно, впервые зародилась в Америке, на почве религиозного мистицизма, и получила сразу то ужасное и уродливое выражение, которое носит звание келейной

системы. Здесь впервые попытались утилизировать лишение свободы в целях исправления, понимаемого, притом, в самом строгом смысле внутреннего, духовного перерождения. Оно должно было быть достигнуто самоуглублением, размышлениями, работой над самим собою, при полном отчуждении от всего мира. Это совершенно своеобразное, узкое пиетистское воззрение на задачи тюрьмы, соединенное с колоссальным по своему невежеству игнорированием основных потребностей человеческого духа, дало чудовищные плоды! Первые тюрьмы, построенные и содержимые по этой системе, оказались местами таких изощренных душевных мук, перед которыми бледнеют жестокости старого времени»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 23. 32. «В теории легко и удобно говорить об «исправляющем» значении наказания лишением свободы»; «На практике […] тюрьма н е м о ж е т «исправить»»; «[ставит] человека в совершенно противоестественные условия»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 20, 26. 33. See V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene.” 34. On Nabokov’s use of dividedness, in this case bifurcation, see Shapiro, “Nabokov’s Allusions.” 35. For a discussion of various ways in which Nabokov encodes his authorial presence, see Shapiro, “Setting His Myriad Faces in His Text.” 36. «все виды идейных преступлений должны быть исключены из нашего поля зрения»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 21 n. 1. 37. «орудование понятием «опасного состояния» личности особенно опасно и нежелательно там, где приходится думать не о расширении прав административной власти, а, наоборот, о введении ее в надлежащие рамки»; «Предоставление ей возможности по своему усмотрению объявлять человека опасным, и без тех гарантий, которые заключаются в точной и конкретной формулировке состава преступного деяния уголовным кодексом,—принимать по отношению к этому «опасному» лицу весьма серьезные меры «социальной защиты», в виде лишения свободы, высылки и т. п.,—это равносильно возведению в принцип того, что фактически является уродливым уклонением от функций правового государства»; V. D. Nabokov, “Ob ‘opasnom sostoianii’ prestupnika kak kriterii mer sotsial´noi zashchity,” 1180. 38. «тюрьма сама по себе, неизбежно и фатально д о л ж н а иметь только пагубное значение и подавляющее влияние на человеческую психику»; «Решительную роль играет здесь нервная система и весь психический склад человека»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 24, 31. 39. «мелочных и ни на чем рациональном не основанных придирок, которые так ощутительны во всем тюремном режиме»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 6. 40. For a detailed discussion of psychological abuse, to which the protagonist is subjected by his jailers, see Shapiro, “Methods of Control and Power.” 41. «глиняным горшком», «медным кувшином»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 9. 42. «резиновой ванночки», V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 7. Nabokov also used “the English collapsible [rubber] tub” (SM 79) throughout his émigré life in interwar Europe; see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 182; Ssoch 5:188. The writer occasionally “loaned” this rubber tub to his characters; see, for example, Glory 182, Ada 189. 43. «железная койка, с тюфяком и подушкой, набитой соломой», «небольшой деревянный подвижной стол и круглый легкий «венский» табурет, также подвижной», «Пол в келье бетонный, выкрашенный в черную краску, вечно пачкающую», «Стена и потолок выкрашены в голубоватосерый цвет, с тонкой синей полоской, разделяющей их»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 9, 10. 44. In the beginning of the novel, however, the table appears as movable; see 28, 29. Perhaps it was fastened after Cincinnatus’s attempt to use it as a platform to look outside. 45. See Shapiro, “Methods of Control and Power.” 46. «надзиратель ходит взад и вперед, смотрит, слушает, входит к заключенным по их звонку. […] Он наблюдает за тишиной и порядком, за чистотой, за тем, чтобы блестели полы, он «проверяет» заключенного, отодвигая заслонку и заглядывая в круглый стеклянный «глаз», помещенный в средине двери»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 54–55. 47. «Все закрытые письма распечатываются, на каждом письме, ранее вручения его арестанту, ставится клеймо о просмотре»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 36. 48. «Написаны они на туалетной бумаге. Свернутые листки передавались при помощи Августа Исаковича Каминки»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene,” 265–66.

49. «едва ли возможно бы было хотя бы тройному против нынешнего комплекту администрации ознакомиться с содержанием всех писем»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 36. 50. «тут почти все русские классики, а также изрядное количество новых и новейших авторов», V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 6. 51. «составленная, сколько мне известно, главным образом из пожертвований, отличается совершенно случайным подбором книг», «занимаясь изучением каталога тюремной библиотеки [и] выписыванием номеров книг»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 6, 8. 52. «Как это ни покажется странно, но, находясь в тюрьме, всего труднее изучать ее. Знакомишься с порядками, с распределением дня, до некоторой степени с нравами. Но полное отсутствие общения, отсутствие возможности сравнивать и проверять впечатления, а главное—ограниченность поля зрения—все это ставит почти непреодолимые препятствия, в особенности при условии сравнительно краткосрочного наказания»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 51. 53. «Подоконник находится на высоте приблизительно—2 ¼ аршин. Будучи роста выше среднего, я мог, приподнимаясь на цыпочки, видеть довольно большую часть двора. Для людей среднего роста это невозможно. На табурет становиться запрещено, и так как бывали случаи шальной стрельбы в нарушителей этого запрета, то он теперь, повидимому, соблюдается. Конечно, бывают часы дня, когда опасности стрельбы нет. Но неприятно сознавать себя школьником, который ежеминутно может быть пойман и уличен»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 10. 54. An elevated window, of course, is not unique to V. D. Nabokov’s and Cincinnatus’s cells. Thus, a nineteenth-century Russian painter, Nikolai Iaroshenko, depicts such a window in his Prisoner (1878; State Tret´iakov Gallery, Moscow). Although Nabokov “never once visited Moscow” (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 40), he could have seen the painting either exhibited in St. Petersburg or reproduced in periodicals, as, for example, in Niva (1917): 437. 55. All three—the jailer, Rodion; prison director, Rodrig; and the lawyer, Roman—repeatedly turn into one another throughout the novel and at the very end metamorphose into one and the same creature (see 39, 44, 207, 222–23). 56. For a more detailed discussion on this subject matter, see Shapiro, Delicate Markers, 165–66. 57. In the original Russian, Nabokov employs the verb «вышколят» (Ssoch 4:79)—that is, “they will get [me] schooled.” 58. «бодро ожидаю конца этой дурацкой, позорной и низкой комедии»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene,” 275. 59. «мифический»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene,” 268. For a discussion of Cincinnatus’s application of romantic notions to his own situation, specifically with regard to Lermontov’s poem “The Neighbor Girl” (“Sosedka,” 1840), see Shapiro, Delicate Markers, 140–41. 60. «Тюрьма была «темницей», местом мучений и ужаса», V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 22. “Tiur´ma,” the modern Russian locution for prison, which Nabokov employs, for example, in the first prison rule (IB 49; Ssoch 4:72), derives from the German Turm (tower); the archaic temnitsa stems from the Slavic root temn (dark). 61. «обаятельно» (Ssoch 4:68); translated by Dmitri Nabokov. 62. See Boyd, “‘Welcome to the Block,’” 167. 63. Translated by Gavriel Shapiro with Dmitri Nabokov. The original reads: «От Арсенальной набережной сад отделен высокой кирпичной стеной. За нею—улица и Нева, которую я могу видеть только, стоя на табурете. Но противоположный берег—как на ладони, а слева солидно возвышается старый знакомый—купол над ротондой Таврического дворца. До сих пор, я не могу побороть волнения при взгляде на Таврический дворец. И конечно, в данной обстановке иметь его перед глазами—значит видеть перед собою как бы воплощенным то короткое и недавнее, но кажущееся так бесконечно далеким прошлое, которое ни нами, ни историей забыто не будет»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 11–12. 64. For a more detailed discussion of the passages, see Shapiro, “Otgoloski Tiuremnykh dosugov V. D. Nabokova v Priglashenii na kazn´,” 71–72. 65. «Таврический сад»; Ssoch 2:332. 66. On a more felicitous note, Nabokov was presumably aware that in 1899, his birth year, the Tauride Palace was the center of the Pushkin centennial celebrations. And in 1905, only a year before his father

participated there in the work of the First Duma, the palace housed a grandiose exhibit of Russian portraiture organized by Sergei Diaghilev. For information about the history of the Tauride Palace, see Zherikhina and Shepelev, Stolichnyi Peterburg, 516–23. 67. See, for example, Gernet et al., Protiv smertnoi kazni; Tagantsev, Smertnaia kazn´. For a survey of attitudes toward death penalty in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, see Nethercott, Russian Legal Culture, 110–32. 68. «отвратительный, неправдоподобный пережиток варварских времен», «хладнокровное, сознательное, по всем правилам искусства, совершенное умерщвление беззащитной жертвы, заведомо идущей под нож или в петлю»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 19. 69. See V. D. Nabokov, “Zakonoproekt ob otmene smertnoi kazni.” 70. For a detailed discussion of the procedural legislative measures concerning this bill, see Healy, Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 206–11. 71. «Смертная казнь не может более признаваться мерой правосудия: она лишь остаток старого варварства, пятно на человечестве, «стыд и укоризну» ему наносящее»; V. D. Nabokov, untitled article, 72. For an English translation of this article rendered from the copy made by E. I. Nabokov, see Barabtarlo, “V. D. Nabokov and Capital Punishment,” 56–60. 72. See Anisimov, Russkaia pytka, 231. V. D. Nabokov directly refers to the tsar’s decree in his “Proekt ugolovnogo ulozheniia i smertnaia kazn´,” 263. 73. «связал свое имя с борьбой против смертной казни»; Tyrkova-Williams, “V. D. Nabokov i pervaia duma,” 279. 74. «Только непостижимая близорукость, какая-то нравственная атрофия может забывать о душе «смертника», над которой совершается невозможное, невыносимое, преступное надругательство»; V. D. Nabokov, “‘Ceterum censeo…,’” 1854. 75. Anon., “Postanovlenie Vremennogo Pravitel´stva ob otmene smertnoi kazni.” 76. «имел мужество выступить на поддержку правительства Керенского, пытавшегося восстановить смертную казнь в войсках, отравленных революционной агитацией »; Tyrkova-Williams, “V. D. Nabokov i pervaia duma,” 282. 77. «при исполнении смертных приговоров, которые в Германии приводятся в исполнение одним из самых отвратительных способов, а именно топором»; V. D. Nabokov, “Rech´ v zashchitu zakonoproekta ob otmene smertnoi kazni,” in V. D. Nabokov, Rechi, 31. Indeed, Germany had a long tradition of decapitation by an ax, and the ax beheading continued there, particularly in Berlin, until 1936. See, for example, Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 386–87, 669–78. 78. «Для выполнения смертных приговоров власть должна прибегать к услугам отвергнутых людей, потерявших последний остаток нравственного чувства. Да и эти люди часто лишь доведя себя вином до почти полной невменяемости оказываются способными выполнить до конца свое дело.»; V. D. Nabokov, untitled article, 71. 79. This implication is more distinct in the original Russian phrase, «навязчивый вздор» (Ssoch 4:141), since «навязчивый» may be rendered as obsessive; cf. «навязчивая идея», meaning “idée fixe.” 80. Boyd, “‘Welcome to the Block,’” 164, 178. 81. «зло», «Дуэль есть глорификация насилия, потому что побеждает тот, кто оказывается сильнее, ловчее, привычнее к огнестрельному оружию», «дуэль, конечно, не является восстановлением чести. Дуэль есть в лучшем случае доказательство личного мужества», «обладает крепкими нервами»; V. D. Nabokov, Duel´ i ugolovnyi zakon, 5, 22, 17. 82. «Известен превосходный рассказ Гюи-де-Мопассана, когда человек, оскорбивший другого, вызвал его на дуэль и затем проводит бессонную ночь, страдает ужасно, потому что предчувствует, что его нервы не выдержат, что он не в состоянии выступить перед пистолетом противника, и хотя все его существо восстает против этого «малодушия», он не может справиться с своей физиологией, своими нервами, он предвидит позор, который его ждет, если он упадет в обморок, и, наконец, он не выдерживает и застреливается. Готовность пожертвовать жизнью его не покинула, но готовности выйти на дуэль ему не хватило»; V. D. Nabokov, Duel´ i ugolovnyi zakon, 17–18. 83. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 98. For a detailed discussion of this incident, see Leving, “Antipatiia s predystoriei.” For a history of dueling in Russia, see Reyfman, Ritualized Violence Russian Style.

84. For a survey of this motif in Nabokov’s works, see Rusanov, “Motiv dueli v tvorchestve V. V. Nabokova.” 85. Nabokov is precise here: the Weimar Republic (1919–33) made dueling a criminal offense; see Frevert, “The Demise of Duelling,” in Men of Honour, 192–219. 86. Alexander Slonimsky defines comical alogism as the device that “consists of the comic destruction of logical and causal connections” («состоит в комическом разрушении логических и причинных связей»). See Slonimsky, “Technique of the Comic in Gogol,” 346; Slonimsky, Tekhnika komicheskogo u Gogolia, 35. 87. «Он требует в сущности только: пожалуй, делай подлости, но стреляйся с тем, кто назовет тебя подлецом»; V. D. Nabokov, Duel´ i ugolovnyi zakon, 15. 88. I have therefore to take issue with Rusanov, who, being presumably unfamiliar with both V. D. Nabokov’s pamphlet and Maupassant’s story, claims that “Nabokov is striving to show not the senselessness and archaic nature of dueling […] but the personal moral bankruptcy of his hero” («Набоков стремится показать не бессмысленность и архаичность дуэли […], а личную несостоятельность своего героя»). 89. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 203. 90. For a brief biographical note, see Drozdov, “Intelligentsiia na Donu,” 166. 91. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 73 (nos. 1548 and 1551). For the separate article and its inclusion in the book, see V. D. Nabokov, “Plotskie prestupleniia po proektu ugolovnogo ulozheniia”; V. D. Nabokov, Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 86–146. 92. Nabokov addressed child abuse long before Lolita. Suffice it to mention The Enchanter (written 1939), a novella in which this subject matter is central, as well as The Gift (1937–38, 1952) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), in which it is alluded to in passing. But nowhere before Lolita does Nabokov deal with child abuse in such depth and with such painstaking detail. 93. «наиболее омерзительные преступления этого рода совершаются людьми душевно здоровыми, которых половое пресыщение, чувственность и грубость, нередко опьянение—заставляют до такой степени утратить человеческое достоинство»; V. D. Nabokov, Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 93. 94. «При любострастном действии с ребенком, не достигшем 14-ти лет, ни вопрос о согласии его, ни вопрос о том, было ли, или нет, злоупотребление его невинностью,—поставлены быть не могут»; V. D. Nabokov, Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 96. 95. «поставлено на-ряду с изнасилованием»; V. D. Nabokov, Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 100. 96. V. D. Nabokov, Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 93. Vladimir Dmitrievich quotes here the following original passage from the novel: «Тут именно незащищенность-то этих созданий и соблазняет мучителей, ангельская доверчивость дитяти, которому некуда деться и не к кому идти, —вот это-то и распаляет гадкую кровь истязателя»; see Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 241; for the original, see Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 14:220. 97. «глухонемая, девочка лет пятнадцати и даже четырнадцати»; «и шестнадцати нет». See Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 252, 405; Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 6:228, 369. 98. See Gogol, Dead Souls, 393. The original reads: «развратил сиротку, которой сам был опекуном»; Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7:114. 99. «Нет надобности, конечно, говорить о том глубоком, неизгладимом вреде, с которым соединено слишком раннее пробуждение полового инстинкта под влиянием развратных манипуляций. Помимо чисто физического вреда, ужаснее всего нравственное растление, могущее иметь и большей частью действительно имеющее последствием полную духовную гибель дитяти. Из таких, в детстве оскверненных, лиц вербуется армия, в свою очередь, осквернителей, проституток, кинедов, педерастов; они являются верной и надежной добычей торговцев живым человеческим мясом»; V. D. Nabokov, Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 93–94. For V. D. Nabokov’s stance on child abuse and long-term ramifications of premature sexual experience in modern scholarly literature, see Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 81 n. 85. 100. For a perceptive discussion of how Humbert ruins Lolita’s life by depriving the little girl of innocence and childhood, see Pifer, “Nabokov’s Novel Offspring.” 101. «Характернейшими и ценными особенностями постановлений проекта о непотребстве являются

стремления к охране детей»; «Постановления проекта, в особенности, те, которые направлены к охране малолетних, представляют сами по себе крупнейший прогресс»; V. D. Nabokov, Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu, 91, 146. 102. Amis, “Problem with Nabokov,” 2.

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TWO Politics I regarded him [V. D. Nabokov] as one of the most promising figures in Russian political life. —Sir Bernard Pares, My Russian Memoirs All his intellect and all his will, all his self-restrained and cultured but deep, inner enthusiasm—everything was devoted to affairs of state in this tragic period of Russian historical development. —Baron Boris Nol´de1 My father was an old-fashioned liberal, and I do not mind being labeled an old-fashioned liberal too. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions Democracy is humanity at its best […] because it is the natural condition of every man ever since the human mind became conscious not only of the world but of itself. —Vladimir Nabokov, “What Faith Means to a Resisting People” Since my youth—I was nineteen when I left Russia—my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions After being forced to resign from teaching for his opposition to and outspokenness against the regime policies, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov continued to be active as a jurist by addressing various legal matters in his books Page 47 → and articles, by taking active part in Russian judicial organizations, and by attending domestic and international professional symposia. At the same time, while still teaching criminal law at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, he became involved in the political life of Russia. His judicial and political activities went hand in hand and complemented each other. Not only as a lawyer and a highly moral individual but also as a statesman, the senior Nabokov was extremely sensitive to any fault in the legal and political systems of the country and to poor implementation of the existing laws and statutes, not to mention lawlessness and authoritarianism. This intolerance toward injustice prompted him, above all, to enter the struggle for the liberalization of Russia, for the cardinal makeover of law and order. V. D. Nabokov's political career spanned over a quarter of a century. Throughout this extensive period of time, in accordance with the platform of the Kadet Party, also known as the Party of People's Freedom (Partiia narodnoi svobody), Vladimir Dmitrievich steadfastly advocated a parliamentary system that would include a democratic government, the rule of law, civil liberties, and equal rights for all individuals, regardless of their nationality, creed, or gender.2 V. D. Nabokov began his active involvement in the country's political life by participating in the conventions of district councils (zemstva) and by contributing to the periodical Liberation (Osvobozhdenie).3 In 1903, he was elected to the St. Petersburg City Council and a year later joined the Union of Liberation (Soiuz osvobozhdeniia). In 1905, he became one of the founding fathers of the Kadet Party, was elected deputy chair of its Central Committee, and a year later served as one of the leaders of its First Duma faction. Alexander Izvol´sky, the Russian foreign minister at that time, rated V. D. Nabokov as one of the Kadet Party's three best speakers in the First Duma.4 Nabokov senior made a name for himself among his fellow parliamentarians as well as in the national arena for his relentless efforts to abolish capital punishment and to free the press from the shackles of censorship and for his numerous inquiries into the government's attitude toward pogroms. He was also long remembered for his pithy pronouncements, such as, “Let Page 48 → the executive authority submit to the

legislative authority,” that exemplify his striving for legality and accountability in Russia's political system.5 Sir Bernard Pares, the renowned British historian who observed V. D. Nabokov's conduct in the Duma, portrays him as a man “of marked ability and great parliamentary promise,” a man “who carried with him all the atmosphere of an English Parliament.”6 Pares further elaborates on V. D. Nabokov's parliamentary skills by showing how he understood the importance of reaching a compromise by patiently working with parties at both ends of the political spectrum: In a voice under whose soft inflection lay the suggestion of a great reserve of strength, he over and over again gave matter-of-fact and convincing answers to the objections of individual members. When he was not speaking, it was often more interesting to watch him than to follow the debates: he would rise in a casual way from his seat, move through the assembly much as an English gentleman might pass through the smoking room of his club, seat himself beside the terrible Aládin of the Labour Group, and work out with him some formula which could be accepted by that party. This, after very outspoken discussion, would at last be achieved, and Nabókoff, with his little slip of paper in his hands, would walk straight across to Count Heyden, the Conservative leader, with whom the same process would be repeated. It was to be noticed that almost anything proposed by Nabókoff was passed unanimously.7 Alexander Benois reached a similar conclusion: while watching V. D. Nabokov at a public function in March 1917, he remarks that “among Kadets there are talents and superb masters of parliamentary art.”8 And Richard Pipes, the preeminent American historian, most fittingly sums up V. D. Nabokov's political activities in imperial Russia: When I reflect why Nabokov and men of his kind seem so attractive to me, I conclude that it is because of the quiet, natural dignity with which they carried out public responsibilities. They had no personal interests in what they did, and sought to derive from it no personal Page 49 → publicity. They acted out of a sense of patriotic responsibility, pure and simple. […] They were admirable men, the Russian liberals, combining Western individualism with the intelligentsia's tradition of public service. Their liberal ethos was remarkably free of that element of calculation so prominent in the liberal tradition of the West. Russia owes them a great deal. Some day it will recognize this debt and perhaps acknowledge it with a plaque long overdue at Bol´shaya Morskaya 47.9 Nabokov was very proud of his father's oratorical talents and parliamentary skills. The writer notes that he was “an admirable speaker, an ‘English style’ cool orator” who made “several splendid speeches with nationwide repercussions” in the Duma (SM 178, 175). At the same time, Nabokov lamented Page 50 → that he did not inherit his father's rhetorical aptitude, calling himself “the ridiculous cacologist […] when not having a typed sheet before me” (SM 178). Even if one allows for a certain degree of self-deprecation on the part of the novelist, it is obvious that Nabokov did inherit his father's verbal brilliance, mutated from the oral to the written. The dissolution of the First Duma prompted its delegates to issue the Vyborg Manifesto, which called upon the populace to reject taxation and military conscription until the Duma reconvened. The dissolution of the First Duma was particularly traumatic for V. D. Nabokov as it occurred on July 8 (O.S.)—his birthday. In his article commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the advent of the Duma, Vladimir Dmitrievich marks July 8, 1906, as the day when “the first Russian revolution found itself before the broken washtub, and the second revolution became inevitable.”10 Although the senior “Nabokov had […] opposed this action,” he “signed the Appeal [Manifesto] only out of loyalty to the rest.”11 As a result, his electoral rights—the right to elect and to be elected to subsequent Dumas—were permanently revoked, and he was sentenced, as we saw in the previous chapter, to a three-month solitary confinement at Kresty prison. During World War I, specifically in February–March of 1916, V. D. Nabokov, statesman, publisher, and publicist, visited England as a member of a Russian delegation of writers and journalists “to take a look at England's war

effort” (SM 254). He published his impressions, initially as dispatches in the newspaper Speech, and subsequently collected them in a book, From England at War (Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 1916). While there, the senior Nabokov met with numerous British political and military leaders. Owing to his outstanding personality, great political and diplomatic abilities, excellent command of the English language, and close familiarity with everything British, V. D. Nabokov played the leading role in the delegation. Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, also a member of the delegation, recalls him as “possessing, aside from great personal authority, an outstanding gift of speech” and that “Nabokov spoke English as may the Lord grant it to the best Oxford student.”12 V. D. Nabokov's brother Konstantin, who at the time served as first secretary of the Russian embassy in Page 51 → London, recalls that Vladimir Dmitrievich “was the only member of the delegation who could speak fluent English, and was therefore in a position to derive the greatest benefit from the hospitality and courtesy of his English hosts. As a rule, he also was the spokesman of the delegation at various functions, and acquitted himself tactfully and at times eloquently of his duties.”13 These amicable contacts with the British leadership sympathetic to V. D. Nabokov's liberal strains promised to become of utmost importance for nascent Russian democracy. Had it not been for the Bolshevik takeover, these contacts would have served the country in good stead and would have propelled Nabokov senior to the top echelon of a Russian democratic government. Among the British leaders with whom V. D. Nabokov established a good personal rapport was Admiral Sir John Jellicoe. At dinner, Vladimir Dmitrievich asked Admiral Jellicoe to autograph his menu card, for which purpose he offered his Swan pen. “Jellicoe inscribed it with my Swan pen and Page 52 → highly praised its nib, indeed writing very smoothly and easily…. Before bidding him farewell, I told the admiral that it would afford me great joy if he would agree to accept this pen from me as a memento. When I happen to read about the exploits of the British Grand Fleet, I shall be imagining that Admiral Jellicoe's orders and reports were signed with my pen.”14 Three years later, these contacts proved most useful: “When English Admiral Kelton [sic] arrived in Sebastopol, Nabokov [senior] and [Maxim] Vinaver as ministers in the Crimean government paid him a visit. The admiral declared: ‘I had no authority to recognize the Crimean autonomy,’ and only Nabokov's reference to Admiral Jellicoe softened Kelton's stance.”15 Page 53 → Nabokov later wrote that “this unfortunate disclosure of the pen's make was promptly echoed in the London papers by a Mabie, Todd and Co., Ltd., advertisement, which quoted a translation of the passage and depicted my father handing the firm's product to the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, under the chaotic sky of a sea battle” (SM 255). It appears that the writer conflates two separate advertisements. The one, under the rubric “Admiral Jellicoe praises the ‘Swan’ pen which he finds writes very easily and smoothly,” portrays V. D. Nabokov wearing a Russian military overcoat and a service cap and holding a cane while standing in front of a pier against the background of battleships at sea. (At the outbreak of World War I, Vladimir Dmitrievich was mobilized to the army “as an officer of the Reserve” and at the time of the trip held a “position of an officer serving with the General Staff.”)16 Under these graphic images, there is a jagged-shaped quotation from the senior Nabokov's description of the incident in question as well as the images of two “‘Swan’ fountpens” and their prices, followed by the name of their manufacturer and the locations of the company and its branches throughout the world. The other, under the title “Admiral Jellicoe's ‘Swan’ Pen,” depicts the admiral at the top and the Swan pen below, piercing through that same jagged albeit slightly longer passage from V. D. Nabokov's dispatch about the incident.17 When assessing From England at War as a whole, Nabokov junior expresses some disappointment that, as he puts it, “I find few examples of his habitual humor: he was not a writer, and I do not hear his own voice.” Nabokov considers it especially regrettable because his father “was remarkably telling” “at the dinner table” about many “amusing misapprehensions.”18 One can understand Nabokov's disillusionment, but his pronouncement seems too categorical and not altogether fair: his father was a skillful writer, with his own voice, albeit couched in a journalistic manner, with overtones of a jurist and a statesman who thought perhaps that it would Page 54 → be

inappropriate to relate anecdotes on paper and therefore saved them for the dinner table. Nabokov recalls one such amusing story, Kornei Chukovsky's “funny interview with George V,” whom the Russian man of letters “insisted on asking if he liked the works of Oscar Wilde—‘dze ooarks of OOald.’ The king, who was baffled by his interrogator's accent and who, anyway, had never been a voracious reader, neatly countered by inquiring how his guests liked the London fog.” According to Nabokov, “later Chukovski used to cite this triumphantly as an example of British cant—tabooing a writer because of his morals” (SM 254–55). Chukovsky vehemently denies that the whole incident ever took place.19 On March 15, 1917, following the February Revolution, Nicholas II abdicated the throne and relinquished the right of succession for his son, Alexis, in favor of Grand Duke Michael, the tsar's only living brother.20 Michael subsequently deferred ascending the throne until the ratification of his reign by the Constituent Assembly, empowering the Provisional Government to rule the country in the interim. It fell on V. D. Nabokov to codraft (together with Baron Boris Nol´de) the text of Michael's manifesto of conditional acceptance, the final version of which is written in the senior Nabokov's handwriting. According to Nabokov, his father “wrote, with phenomenal ease and rapidity (sitting uncomfortably at a child's desk in the classroom of a mournful palace) the text of the abdication of Grand Duke Mihail” (SM 178).21 In the newly formed Provisional Government, Vladimir Dmitrievich served as head of the secretariat until his resignation on May 18 (May 5 O.S.), 1917. The date of his resignation may be inferred from the following correction: “In yesterday's issue of Speech, after the signatures of the ministers of the Provisional Government, the signature of its Head of the Secretariat, V. D. Nabokov, was erroneously included. V. D. Nabokov, as reported yesterday, left his post and was already not present at the session of the reorganized Provisional Government.”22 In spite of his resignation, V. D. Nabokov continued Page 55 → “working in the Juridical Conference and in the Commissions and Plenum of the Conference to draw up the laws for the Constituent Assembly elections” and remained “a member of a commission to review and implement the Criminal Code.”23 After the Bolsheviks seized power on November 7, the senior Nabokov continued acting as deputy chair of the All-Russian Electoral Commission, which was entrusted with the preparation of elections for the Constituent Assembly. Together with other members of the commission, he was briefly detained by the Bolshevik regime. (The Constituent Assembly finally convened on January 18, 1918, but was unceremoniously disbanded by the Bolsheviks the next day.) When the Kadet Party was outlawed on December 11, 1917, and the arrest of its leaders became imminent, Vladimir Dmitrievich left the capital for the Crimea. Whilst there, he served as minister of justice in the second Crimean Regional Government, headed by Solomon Krym (November 15, 1918–April 15, 1919). Page 56 → After the defeat of the White armies in the Crimea, V. D. Nabokov emigrated with his family, eventually arriving in London and subsequently moving to Berlin. In exile, Nabokov senior persisted in his struggle against Bolsheviks by exposing their oppression and by calling upon the Allies to support the anti-Bolshevik campaign. While in London, V. D. Nabokov cofounded, with Pavel Miliukov, the Russian Liberation Committee and coedited its house organ, The New Russia. Upon moving from London to Berlin in August 1920, Vladimir Dmitrievich cofounded and coedited, with Iosif Gessen and Avgust Kaminka, the Russian daily The Rudder (Rul´), in which he continued to lay bare the true character of the Bolshevik dictatorship and to call for an uncompromising struggle against its tyranny. After being outlawed by the Bolsheviks and forced into exile, the Kadet Party underwent a serious crisis, exacerbated by Miliukov's refusal to support the White movement and to remain loyal to the Allies. After the collapse of the White movement, following the evacuation of the remains of General Wrangel's army to Constantinople at the end of 1920, Miliukov urged his fellow Kadets to form a liaison with other more leftoriented parties, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries, to abandon the struggle against the Bolshevik rule, and to

count instead on Russia's gradual transformation toward liberalization from within. The main point of contention between the two factions, however, was the attitude toward the Bolshevik coup d'état: although Miliukov did not recognize the legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime, he nevertheless maintained that the October Revolution was the logical continuation and completion of the revolutionary process. The senior Nabokov, conversely, totally rejected both Bolshevik rule and the legitimacy of its power takeover and advocated the continuation of the armed struggle against Bolshevik despotism.24 When discussing the Kadet Party schism, V. D. Nabokov pointed out that “the divergence is obvious and undeniable. Miliukov's proponents and we look differently at every issue of practical politics. It is impossible for us to welcome the [October] revolution because it destroyed Russia, corrupted the people's soul, and turned us into exiles. We remain opponents of the autocracy and of the curtailed constitution, which existed before 1917, but we rejected and continue to reject the revolutionary ways, as we clearly see Page 57 → now where they are leading. This is the core of our disagreement.”25 Miliukov's faction remained in the minority, while the majority backed the position of the anti-Bolshevik struggle taken by V. D. Nabokov. Furthermore, since the senior Nabokov's faction “was a solid majority,” he, “as its leader, became in effect the head of the Constitutional Democratic Party.”26 In late March 1922, Miliukov came to Berlin from Paris, where he took up residence and where he was editing a Russian daily Latest News (Poslednie Novosti), to give a talk on “America and the Restoration of Russia.” (Miliukov's talk came on the heels of his series of lectures in the United States on various aspects of “the Russian catastrophe,” which he delivered in the fall of 1921 under the auspices of the Lowell Institute.)27 At that time, V. D. Nabokov took pains to seek reconciliation between the two Kadet factions, an effort that Miliukov flatly rejected. The senior Nabokov addressed Miliukov and his Paris faction and welcomed a discussion of their differences of opinion within the norms of civility in his unsigned op-ed article, characteristically titled “To the Friend-Opponent”; he offered conciliation once again on the eve of Miliukov's lecture.28 On March 28, 1922, during Miliukov's talk at the Berlin Philharmonics, two ultra-monarchist thugs, Sergei Taboritsky and Petr Shabel´sky-Bork, made an attempt on the speaker's life. Vladimir Dmitrievich died while shielding his former old friend and current political opponent from the assassins’ bullets. In his commemorative article, Miliukov writes that before that fatal shooting, upon seeing V. D. Nabokov, he “recognized in him an old loyal friend under the unaccustomed guise of a political opponent.”29 Page 58 →

Political Precepts V. D. Nabokov fought all his life for the liberalization of Russia, hoping that it would become a state of constitution, law, individual rights, and civil liberties. His hopes for a democratic Russia, however, were dashed when the Bolsheviks took over the country. Witnessing the Bolshevik usurpation of power in Petrograd, the senior Nabokov recalls, among other things, “armed soldiers and sailors” with “the usual inane, stupid, and malevolent faces,” very reminiscent of the criminal faces he saw in Kresty prison.30 The younger Nabokov likewise witnessed ochlocracy—mob rule—in action at that very same time, and although clad in poetic form, his observations parallel those of his father. In “Revolution,” the young poet depicts “the sinuous streets, the evil-auguring constructions, / a man, incarnadine, prostrate upon his back, / the bestial motions of somebody's avid hands” (SP 4).31 And in the poem “Pegasus” he presents a similar picture: “All is sad, / Blood reddens on the pavements. / Gray homunculi insolently / crawled out of their little holes. / They are shouting at crossways, / and grisly is their vile drivel. / Blackens on their harsh palms / the indelible mark of slavery…/ They wish to destroy / passions, reveries, beauty.”32 Curiously, Nabokov's imagery—“gray homunculi insolently / crawled out of their little holes”—echoes a passage from one of his father's articles. In the essay “Revolution and Culturedness,” published more than seven months prior to the composition of “Pegasus,” Nabokov senior employs analogous imagery albeit by way of a simile. When speaking of manifestations of “that anti-cultural and anti-ethical which crawls out of various cracks,” Vladimir Dmitrievich likens it to “street dregs that do not waste time and are always ready to run the show at a time of anarchy and of convulsive upheavals.”33 It is no exaggeration to say that Nabokov's political views were shaped Page 59 → by those of his father, which in turn, by and large, are reflected in the original Kadet Party platform.34 Like his father, Nabokov also maintained

that had it not been for the Bolshevik seizure of power, Russia would have been democratic, with its own constitution, parliamentary system, guaranteed civil rights, and individual liberties. And like his father, he averred that Russians in exile ought to continue their struggle against the Soviet regime. In his letter to the London Sunday Times, which appeared on January 1, 1967, Nabokov made the following assessment of his father's political stance, which he wholeheartedly shared: My father had been one of the leaders of the Constitutional-Democratic Party in Russia long before the revolution, and his articles in the émigré Rul—the only influential Russian-language daily in Berlin—merely continued the strain of West European liberalism, in the large sense, that had marked his life since at least 1904. […] It was that liberal cultural core, and certainly not the crude and ambiguous activities of extreme rightists, that formed a genuine anti-Bolshevist opposition (still working today), and it was people like my father who pronounced the first and final verdict on the Soviet police state. (SL 396–97) Although Nabokov shared his father's political precepts, his modus vivendi was considerably different: whereas the elder Nabokov was a statesman who engaged in political affairs, the younger Nabokov for the most part steered clear of politics. As Simon Karlinsky astutely observed, “Nabokov's later distaste for organized politics in any form and his distrust of mass movements must have been enhanced by the spectacle of the defeat of the major socialist and democratic parties, with their membership in the millions, by the small band of Bolsheviks led by Lenin. The aversion to politics must have been further reinforced by the assassination of Nabokov's father by right-wing, pro-monarchist fanatics in Berlin a few years after the family's Page 60 → emigration” (NWL 9). While ordinarily avoiding any involvement in organized politics, Nabokov nonetheless frequently expressed strong political opinions in his writings: scholarly studies (such as the monograph on Gogol, his Cornell lectures, the commentary to Eugene Onegin), essays, book reviews, interviews, correspondence, and even public appearances, such as the round-table discussion on the nature of democracy at Wellesley College, but first and foremost in his fiction.35 Therefore nothing is further from the truth than the perception that Nabokov was uninterested in politics. A few heretofore-unpublished examples will illustrate this. In January 1919, Nabokov commemorated the anniversary of the murder of Andrei Shingarev and Fedor Kokoshkin by the Bolsheviks with a poem. Over half a century later, he spoke highly of them: “Shingarev and Kokoshkin, members of my father's party, his close friends (I well remember both), heroic idealists and pure souls, who were murdered in their hospital beds by Lenin's police.”36 In a letter dated October 24, 1921, Nabokov writes to his parents: “Dear daddy, dear mommy, I daily buy the Morning Post and Daily Herald which smells thicker and thicker—well, I rather shall not say with what.”37 (Nabokov's sharply negative opinion of the Daily Herald was triggered by the paper's opposition to armed intervention against the Bolshevik rule.)38 And in 1941, at the outbreak of Nazi Germany's war against Soviet Russia, Nabokov, although geographically distant from the events, was deeply affected by the calamities that had befallen his native land: What is to be done? To believe that, transfigured by the right of battle, Page 61 → in this battle against the bloody barbarian, the sinful country has suddenly become akin to righteous powers? .............................. Or to cry out: rise, O Russia, and crush the two tyrants! Oh, my poor ones, mute, unthinking reeds… How it bends, burns, and breaks you there, in what smoke, in what hell…

Quiet is the ocean and quiet is the house, and I hear nothing, save the murmur of the night outside.39

As noted earlier, while in London, the senior Nabokov played a leading role in the Russian Liberation Committee and coedited the short-lived periodical, The New Russia (1920), that he used as the platform for communicating his political views—specifically, for persuading Russia's European allies to continue their intervention and sanctions against the new dictatorial regime. At this crucial juncture, Nabokov senior delivered a lecture at King's College on January 16, 1920. A week later, this lecture was published in the supplement to the weekly New Commonwealth. (For the complete text, see appendix 2.) While the entire corpus of Vladimir Dmitrievich's political writings is essential for understanding Nabokov's political views, this London lecture-essay is especially important because, by Nabokov's own admission, he “learned by heart most of it when preparing to speak against Bolshevism at a Union debate in Cambridge” (SM 179).40 It is instructive, therefore, to take a close look at the younger Nabokov's argument as recorded in the minutes of the Magpie and Stump Debating Page 62 → Society as well as at his political precepts at large as reflected in his writings and to trace them back to the political outlook that his father conveyed in the lecture-essay and around that same time in The New Russia and shortly afterwards in The Rudder. The minutes of the Magpie and Stump Debating Society provide the gist of Nabokov's speech, which lasted eighteen minutes and fifty seconds: “Mr. Nabokoff spoke with personal knowledge of Bolshevism, and described it as a loathsome disease. Lenin was mad, the rest scoundrels. He referred to the distribution of a piano among several claimants—a reminiscence of Solomon. He advised immediate help from England, support of Denikin and Koltchak, and refusal to deal with Bolsheviks.”41 In its essence, Nabokov's speech echoes his father's lecture-essay and articles written around that time. Thus V. D. Nabokov maintains that “Bolshevism is a dangerous disease” and dubs the Bolshevik government “a crazy gang of fanatics who have seized power by violence and crime and who retain it by terrorism and bribery.”42 Like his son after him, Vladimir Dmitrievich appealed to England for immediate assistance and support of General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak. Nabokov senior characterized these two military leaders as those who “did not lose faith or courage” after the Bolshevik coup d'état.43 He calls Denikin “a worthy successor of the valiant Generals Alexeieff and Korniloff” and notes that while “General Denikin became the leader and organiser of such units of Russian Army as remained loyal to the Alliance[,] Koltchak succeeded in organising and leading these forces in distant Siberia.”44 The senior Nabokov tried to reason with the West and specifically with the British that “any attempt to conciliate them [Bolsheviks] or to collaborate with them is futile and self-destructive.”45 V. D. Nabokov names the Manchester Guardian among “the detractors of Page 63 → the anti-Bolshevist movement.”46 Vladimir Dmitrievich was especially disappointed by the paper's contemporary stance and understandably so. Ironically, only a few years earlier, Manchester Guardian correspondent Harold Williams, a confidant of Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador to Russia, exerted his influence on the imperial government—specifically, Alexei Polivanov, minister of war—to secure the inclusion of Nabokov senior in the 1916 Russian delegation.47 The husband of Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, one of the leading figures of the Kadet Party and the only woman elected to its Central Committee, Williams was sympathetic to the liberal Kadet platform and after the Bolshevik seizure of power was a strong proponent of Allied intervention.48 The younger Nabokov, too, mentions “a man from The Manchester Guardian” whom he calls “the (victorious) apologist” (SM 179). At that time, the Guardian was indeed setting the tone for the policy of nonintervention and, furthermore, as the hotbed of the pro-Bolshevik stance, was championing the campaign of support for the Bolshevik rule. In addition to comparing the father's and the son's views on the burning issues of the day, it is important to place side by side their more general political positions and specifically their perspectives on the nature of the new

regime in Russia. In his lecture-essay, Vladimir Dmitrievich implies a kinship between Bolshevism and Jacobinism by making use of Thomas Carlyle's catchword rascality, with which the illustrious Scottish historian succinctly conveyed the quintessence of the French Revolution.49 Nabokov senior thought highly of Carlyle and was very familiar with his work. For his inscription in Chukokkala, Kornei Chukovsky's handwritten almanac, dated September 29, 1917 (O.S.), less than a month before the Bolshevik takeover, he chose three citations, all of them from Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841): “It is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions”; “While man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a sansculottism”; and “There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience,” to which he added sarcastically in Russian, “For the information of ‘comrades,’ if they happen to chance upon this book.”50 Page 64 → Like his father, Nabokov held Carlyle's writings in high esteem, calling his History of the French Revolution “that admirable work” (EO 3:343). In his Cornell lectures on Dickens, in addition to calling Carlyle's History “that magnificent work,” Nabokov observes that the “apostrophic, booming accent in Dickens” is reminiscent of Carlyle, in whose writings one finds “that apostrophic accent, rolling and tolling around the idea of destiny, futility, and nemesis” (LL 81). In his memoir, Nabokov employs Carlyle's locution “rascality,” which was doubly precious to him because of its use by his father. In describing the episode in which his father challenged Mikhail Suvorin rather than Snessarev, the author of the slanderous article, to a duel (see chapter 1), Nabokov deems the latter “non-duelable” because of his “well-known rascality” (SM 188). Nabokov's comparison of the bloody Bolshevik coup d'état to the French Revolution harks back to his father's references to the works of Carlyle. (Though as I have shown elsewhere, such comparisons were common in the political vocabulary of the day.)51 For example, in his 1926 lecture “A Few Words about the Poverty of Soviet Belles Lettres and an Attempt to Establish Its Reasons,” Nabokov underscores the affinity between these two regimes by referring to their representative newspapers: “There is hardly anyone in France now who cherishes as relics an issue of Mercure de France for 1789. Our descendants, too, will hardly cherish Izvestiia and Pravda—all these organs of Communist Philistines.”52 Nabokov suggests this analogy in his fiction as well. He hints at the bloody terror of the French Revolution in Invitation to a Beheading, which, by his own admission, “deals with the incarceration of a rebel […] by the buffoons and bullies of the Communazist state” (CE 217). Cincinnatus's arrest, imprisonment, and condemnation to death by beheading were preceded by the episode that describes how “at some open meeting in the city park there Page 65 → was a sudden wave of alarm and someone said in a loud voice: ‘Citizens, there is among us a—’ Here followed a strange, almost forgotten word” (31–32). This omitted “strange, almost forgotten word” is evidently traitor, and the phrase in the single quotation marks is reminiscent of the accusatory formula commonly used at the Convention: “Citizens, there is a traitor among us,” which habitually resulted in a death sentence by guillotine.53 Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the protagonist of The Gift, who frequently conveys Nabokov's own point of view, clearly perceives the analogy between the Jacobin and the Bolshevik regimes when invoking the distinctive calendar used during the French Revolution and projecting it on his own times. (The Convention introduced a radical calendar reform, with a new clock, new names for the months, and the years numbered from the establishment of the First French Republic.) Fyodor emphatically dates the time of his émigré existence from the Bolshevik usurpation of power, calling the year in which the novel action begins, “The Year Seven” (17) rather than 1924. At the same time, he ponders the whimsical workings of memory with regard to his native Russia and to Germany, his current country of residence: “It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age—strange, strange are the mishaps of memory. I emigrated seven years ago; this foreign land has by now lost its aura of abroadness just as my own ceased to be a geographic habit. The Year Seven. The wandering ghost of an empire immediately adopted this system of reckoning, akin to the one formerly introduced by the ardent French citizen in honor of newborn liberty” (17). Even though Nabokov's protagonist sarcastically employs the locution “newborn liberty” with regard to lateeighteenth-century France, it is obvious that he has contemporary Russia in mind.

In late 1920, V. D. Nabokov still hoped that a collapse of Bolshevism and the revival of the short-lived democratic Russia were possible in the foreseeable future. Thus he wrote, “‘Some day, and soon, perhaps,’ we shall return there.” (As time progressed, however, his hopes gradually vanished.) While calling upon his fellow émigrés to prepare for that eventuality, the senior Nabokov scathingly characterized the ruling Bolshevik regime as “fierce, triumphant boorishness, savagery and brutality, incessant danger of rude and merciless violence. In the past, Prince E. N. Trubetskoy used to compare Russia at the end of the last century to a dormitory at the police station. But even such an institution is a paradise compared to that befouled and plague-infected Page 66 → torture chamber into which the Bolsheviks turned Russia within the three years of their sway.”54 Nabokov upheld his father's stance on the Bolshevik regime and expressed his own political views, permeated with utmost contempt for the Soviet rule, in the 1927 essay “The Jubilee,” which was written on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik usurpation of power: I feel disdain […] for that ugly, dull little idea that turns Russian simpletons into Communist nitwits, people into ants, the new genus, formica marxi var. lenini. […] I feel disdain for the Communist faith, as an idea of base egalitarianism, a dreary page in the festive history of humanity, a negation of earthly and unearthly things of beauty, as something that stupidly infringes upon my unfettered “I,” as the promoter of ignorance, obtuseness, and complacency. […] And not only ten years of disdain…. We celebrate ten years of fidelity. We are faithful to Russia not only as one is faithful to memory, we love her not only as one loves one's runaway childhood, one's fleeted-away youth. No, we are faithful to that Russia of which we could be proud, the Russia that was formed slowly and measuredly, that was a great power among other great powers. […] And we celebrate ten years of freedom. […] These days, when the gray SSS(g)Ray jubilee is being celebrated, we celebrate ten years of disdain, fidelity, and freedom.55 Page 67 → As can be seen, Nabokov pours scorn and derision upon the totalitarian regime that befooled his compatriots, proclaims his loyalty to democratic Russia, and sings a hymn to the liberty he enjoys in exile and of which his fellow countrymen who remained in his Leninized native land were totally deprived.56 As an expert entomologist, Nabokov most perceptively discerned the formation of the new human species. Nabokov later described this new species as “those ruthless, paste-faced automatons in opulent John Held trousers and high-shouldered jackets, those Sitzriesen looming at all our conference tables, whom—or shall I say which?—the Soviet State began to export around 1945 after more than two decades of selective breeding and tailoring” (SM 264–65). More than twenty years after the Cambridge debate, in the spirit of his father's writings and of his own speech there, Nabokov once again admonishes the world, mainly Western Europe and the United States, for abandoning Russia in its quest for democracy. In his 1940 review of Grigory Maximoff's book on the political situation in contemporary Soviet Russia, Nabokov calls it “an intelligent historical survey, a careful classification of the varieties of physical pain so thoroughly inflicted since 1917 upon the very enduring bodies of millions of men and women in silent Russia while the rest of the world was having on the whole rather a good time.”57 The review was not published because, according to Edmund Wilson, the New Republic “seem[ed] to be scared of [it] for political reasons” (NWL 46). Thus, ironically, while in the early 1920s the West had forsaken Russia, its World War I ally, in its struggle for democracy against the yoke of Bolshevism, in the early 1940s the West now supported Soviet Russia, its World War II ally, and was turning a blind eye to the regime's totalitarianism. That same year, in his December 15, 1940, letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov captures the essence of Bolshevism: “Another horrible paradox about Leninism is that these materialists found it possible to squander the lives of millions of real people for the sake of the hypothetical millions that would be happy some day” (NWL 38). Nabokov's pronouncement poignantly invokes his father's sardonic remark of twenty years earlier about Lenin's “pleasant and useful experiment.”58 In his novels Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Page 68 → Sinister and in the story “Tyrants Destroyed,” Nabokov shows that all human rights and liberties are trampled when a country turns into dictatorship. He demonstrates that such a regime, as the elder Nabokov warned, spells “death to civilization, to progress—as it has been proven by Russia's [and later by Germany's] terrible experience.”59

In his lecture-essay, V. D. Nabokov detects some warning signs of the nascent Bolshevik totalitarianism. In particular, he was appalled by the Bolsheviks’ sinister methods of forcing people to collaborate with the regime by subjecting their family members to torture. He writes, The martyrology of the officers, which had belonged to the old army, is already known. They were mobilised and a direct alternative was given them either to submit to the Soviet or to die. Many of them perished. Others have submitted, and against their will went under the Bolshevik yoke. And let those who can vouch for their own heroism in equal circumstances be the first to cast a stone at them. A few only succeeded, after passing through heavy hardships and at the risk of their lives, to escape from the Bolshevik tyranny and to join the anti-Bolshevik armies. But still less is the number of those who have of their own accord joined the ranks of the Bolshevik army and offered the Soviet power whole-hearted support. The Soviet Government on perceiving how small the number of these proselytes was, had to resort to the most extraordinary measures. Commissars with unlimited powers were attached to every different military unit. But even more, by far surpassing everything known in history, the Bolsheviks declared the wives and children of officers hostages, who were to be put to death if their husbands and fathers should pass to the other side. And what is worse, this menace has been carried out.60 Although there exist later accounts of Soviet Russia and other totalitarian states using the lives of family members to make their opponents cooperate with the regime, this is possibly one of the earliest testimonies of this kind ever given in modern history. What is more, it comes from Nabokov senior's 1920 lecture-essay that Nabokov learned by heart. There are reasons to believe, therefore, that Nabokov drew upon this piece in Bend Sinister when Page 69 → describing how Adam Krug's son, David, was taken away, tortured, and murdered to force the philosopher to cooperate with the Paduk regime. Both Nabokov senior and his son more than quarter of a century later show that ruling dictatorships will stop at nothing and will use the most reprehensible methods at their disposal to achieve their goals. Nabokov sheds light on the origins of this despicable method in his introduction to the novel: While the system of holding people in hostage is as old as the oldest war, a fresher note is introduced when a tyrannic state is at war with its own subjects and may hold any citizen in hostage with no law to restrain it. An even more recent improvement is the subtle use of what I shall term “the lever of love”—the diabolical method (applied so successfully by the Soviets) of tying a rebel to his wretched country by his own twisted heartstrings. It is noteworthy, however, that in Bend Sinister Paduk's still young police state—where a certain dull-wittedness is a national trait of the people […]—lags behind actual regimes in successfully working this lever of love, for which at first it rather haphazardly gropes, losing time on the needless persecution of Krug's friends, and only by chance realizing (in Chapter Fifteen) that by grabbing his little child one would force him to do whatever one wished. (xiii)61 As can be seen from this passage, Nabokov, presumably mindful of his father's discussion of this “lever of love” in his lecture-essay, bestows the dubious distinction on the Soviet regime of reinventing this method of “persuasion” in modern times. In his article “British Liberalism and Russia,” while admonishing British Liberals for “giving their moral support to the enemies of civilization, of liberty, of justice and of the Russian people,” V. D. Nabokov describes the Bolshevik dictatorship in the following terms: “Political freedom—that corner-stone of Liberalism—is cynically discarded in all its manifestations. There is no equality before the law. The rights of the individual are subjected Page 70 → to an unspeakable tyranny.”62 Here the senior Nabokov expresses, by way of an argumentum e contrario, his vision of democracy, which is, first and foremost, the celebration of individual rights and liberties. Taking a cue from his father, Nabokov makes the following important pronouncement about the essence of democracy:

The splendid paradox of democracy is, that while stress is laid on the rule of all and equality of common rights, it is the individual that derives from it his special and uncommon benefit. Ethically, the members of a democracy are equals; spiritually, each has the right to be as different from his neighbors as he pleases; and taken all in all, it is not perhaps an organization or a government or a community that we really have in mind when we say “democracy” but the subtle balance between the boundless privileges of every individual and the strictly equal rights of all men. Life is a state of harmony—and that is why I think that the spirit of democracy is the most natural human condition.63 This and similar public pronouncements, along with his fiction, accurately reflect Nabokov's political credo. They compellingly demonstrate that Nabokov senior's civic philosophy is deeply ingrained in his son's worldview. It is particularly manifest in the writer's scathing criticism of totalitarianism and in his praise of democracy as the most beneficial societal structure, one that plays a pivotal role in the life of every individual.

Freedom of the Press, Censorship Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russia's men of letters and publishers were subjected to various degrees of censorship and did not enjoy the freedom of expression accorded to their counterparts in Western Europe and the United States. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was well aware of this sorry state of affairs in his native country regarding freedom of the press, which he called “one of the most burning issues of public life.”64 When surveying the conditions in the nineteenth-century Russia, he lamented, “Hard and cheerless was the picture of the situation in which the Page 71 → Russian press found itself throughout the entire last century.”65 The situation did not change for the better with the advent of the new century. In reviewing the tempestuous events of 1905, V. D. Nabokov, inter alia, takes note of the tsarist government's attack on freedom of the press and rhetorically queries, “The sword of justice rather than an administrative fist is already raised over the press. But is it an advantage when new punitive rules regarding the press put the deliberately false scales into the hand of an overly keen-sighted Russian Themis?”66 He further indicates that the press “found itself in a position far more cheerless than before. Over the period between December 25 [1905] and January 25 [1906], seventy-eight periodical publications were closed down and fifty-eight editors were arrested.”67 Nabokov senior delineates “those external forms within which freedom of the press could only emerge: the complete and unconditional abolition of anticipatory censorship, […] the complete abolition of the system of administrative penalties.”68 V. D. Nabokov steadfastly spoke out in support of freedom of expression. As a statesman, publicist, editor, publisher, and writer, he experienced firsthand the tsarist restrictions and retributions concerning freedom of the press and freedom of speech. As we recall, one of the main reasons for the loss of his position at the Imperial Court and his tenure at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence was the publication of the article “The Kishinev Bloodbath” in response to the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903 (see SM 174–75). We learn that “as the editorpublisher of the Herald [the Kadet Party periodical, The Herald of the Party of People's Freedom (Vestnik partii narodnoi svobody)], V. D. Nabokov has been prosecuted […] for reprinting a note of informative nature; then the [St. Petersburg] city governor demanded V. D. Nabokov's removal from the editorship-in-chief on the occasion of his involvement in the Vyborg Manifesto case. Finally, this year [1907] for the articles printed in Page 72 → issues 23–24 and 25–26 […] the city governor imposed on the Herald's editor a fine in the amount of one thousand rubles.”69 In 1913, for his dispatches from the Beilis trial, Vladimir Dmitrievich “was fined by the government the token sum of one hundred rubles” (SM 176). Nabokov senior evidently was aware of the wide scope of governmental retributions and of his relatively lenient punishment for reporting from the Beilis trial: “The Beiliss [sic] case occasioned more governmental action against newspapers than any other public issue. There were six arrests of editors, eight indictments, three cases of complete repression, thirty-six cases of confiscation of entire editions, and forty-three fines.”70 Vladimir Dmitrievich found this state of affairs in imperial Russia totally unacceptable and, together with Fedor Kokoshkin, drafted a resolution concerning freedom of the press, which was submitted for consideration to the second congress of the Kadet Party in January 1906, on the eve of the elections to the First Duma.71 He also took an active part in formulating and reading out the Duma address in response to the tsar's throne speech at the Duma commencement, which, among other things, included a demand for freedom of the press.72 The senior Nabokov further participated in drafting the freedom of the press bill that was presented to the Duma on July 4 (17), 1906;

the bill, however, was not deliberated upon prior to the Duma's dissolution four days later.73 V. D. Nabokov was, of course, well aware that freedom of the press could exist only with the abolition of censorship. He perfectly understood that the issue was part of the larger subject of the freedom of expression. He insisted that what was needed was “to reject the government guardianship over word and thought, to establish the legal status of the press, to implement one of the most important forms of political freedom.”74 Between 1912 and 1914, as Page 73 → a member of the All-Russian Literary Society, V. D. Nabokov served on the committee entrusted with drafting the press legislation.75 In 1917, the First Provisional Government, in which Vladimir Dmitrievich served as head of the secretariat and played an important role in formulating and issuing its laws, proclaimed freedom of the press among its earlier decrees.76 The day after the takeover, the Bolshevik regime issued the so-called “Decree about the Press.” A little over a week later, on November 4 (17), 1917, the decree was approved at the session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK). Lenin declared at that session, “We stated even earlier that we shall close bourgeois newspapers if we take power into our own hands. To tolerate the existence of these papers means to cease being a Socialist.”77 (The actual shutdown of all periodicals that did not conform to the Bolshevik ideology occurred in July 1918.)78 A little over a month later, on December 9, 1917, only two days before his permanent departure from Petrograd, V. D. Nabokov was listed among the speakers at the meeting in defense of the freedom of the press, which was timed to mark one month since the Bolsheviks had issued their draconian decree.79 In exile, the senior Nabokov continued to expose the complete absence of any freedom of the press in Soviet Russia: The Soviet authorities robbed all newspaper proprietors as well as the owners of printing offices, confiscated all the materials (printing-presses, types, paper), and handed them over to their own party instruments. This was the summary way in which they actually destroyed every possibility of voicing an independent opinion in print. The Socialist press, which expresses the views of workers who happened to disagree with them, had to endure the same treatment. Thus they attained a fallacious unison of the press which was never dreamt of, even in the darkest times of unchecked autocracy. In Soviet Russia Page 74 → there does not only not exist, but there cannot exist any liberty in the expression of an opinion in print which would be in dissent with the official creed. Practically the whole of the Bolshevist press belongs to the category appropriately denominated reptile press.80 As early as 1926, Nabokov echoed his father's sentiment when he sarcastically spoke of “that dissolved in the air, heavy, mysterious censorship, which is, I would say, a wonderful, perhaps the only talented achievement of the Soviet authority” and named it, along with “belief in historical cataclysms, a class-based world perception, narrowness of the field of vision, lack of culture,” among “the indubitable and main reasons for the temporary decline of Russian literature” under the Bolsheviks.81 A quarter of a century later, in one of his Cornell lectures, Nabokov sums up the situation concerning the freedom of the press in Russia prior to the Bolshevik coup d'état and in its aftermath: Throughout the last [nineteenth] century the government remained aware that anything outstanding and original in the way of creative thought was a jarring note and a stride toward Revolution. The government's vigilance in its purest form was perfectly expressed by Tsar Nicholas I in the thirties and forties. […] The system of censorship that he evolved lasted till the 1860s, was eased by the great reforms of the sixties, stiffened again in the last decades of the century, broke down for a short spell in the first decade of this century, and then had a most sensational and formidable comeback after the Revolution under the Soviets. (LRL 3) Nabokov was quite knowledgeable about the history of Russian censorship. He accurately quotes the relevant paragraph of “the censorship code for 1826” issued by Admiral Alexander Shishkov, then minister of education, “in which authors were enjoined to ‘uphold chaste morals and not to replace them solely by beauty of the imagination’” (Gift 202).82 He also astutely observes that alongside the governmental censorship there existed its radical Page 75 → variant in Russia: “one had only to replace ‘chaste’ by ‘civic’ or some such word to get the private censorship code of the radical critics” (202). Several years later, in his correspondence with Edmund

Wilson, Nabokov repeats this notion about the two types of censorship in Russia: “Long before the Russian revolution, radical thought was so powerful in the Russian publishing business that the works of Lenôtre [a conservative historian of the French Revolution] could not appear in Russian: we had really two censorships!” (NWL 37). He most certainly knew about the radical censorship both historically and from his father, who must have encountered considerable difficulties in publishing his articles on judicial and political matters. Nabokov seconds his father in condemnation of the severe Soviet suppression of the freedom of the press, which surpassed by far the restrictions of the tsarist regime: “For an artist one consolation is that in a free country he is not actually forced to produce guidebooks. Now, from this limited point of view, nineteenth-century Russia was oddly enough a free country: books and writers might be banned and banished, censors might be rogues and fools, be-whiskered Tsars might stamp and storm; but that wonderful discovery of Soviet times, the method of making the entire literary corporation write what the state deems fit—this method was unknown in old Russia” (LRL 2). A lawyer, liberal statesman, and man of letters, V. D. Nabokov championed the cause all his life both in Russia and in exile. Having been raised in a family with a high regard for freedom of expression, of which freedom of the press is an integral part, Nabokov, too, was its staunch advocate. Like his father, he was particularly sensitive to the issue as a writer and was understandably outraged when the editors of the Parisian Russian émigré journal Contemporary Annals (Sovremennye Zapiski) subjected him to severe censorship: while serializing The Gift, they refused to include the chapter that contained the protagonist's Life of Chernyshevski. They claimed, as does Vasiliev in the novel (see Gift 207), that The Life of Chernyshevski is a mockery of the revered radical social critic.83 The novel appeared in full, in book form, only fifteen years later (1952) in the United States. After coming to the United States, Nabokov fought any display of censorship in his newly adopted country. In late 1953, “he was involved in a censorship row” at Cornell when the university wished to expel student Ronald Sukenick “for having published his story, ‘Indian Love Call,’ in a new campus literary magazine, The Cornell Writer, of which Sukenick was fiction editor.” The incident arose because the story contained as its most offending locution Page 76 → the word birdshit. Although Nabokov “disapproved of the kind of expression his upbringing taught him to consider improper,” “he disliked censorship far more.”84 Nabokov himself soon encountered censorial constraints with regard to Lolita, albeit not political, as in the case of The Gift, but rather pertaining to “morals.” In his July 30, 1954, letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov describes the bleak prospects for the novel's publication: The novel I had been working at for almost five years has been promptly turned down by the two publishers (Viking and S. & S. [Simon and Schuster]) I showed it to. They say it will strike readers as pornographic. I have now sent it to New Directions but it is unlikely they will take it. I consider this novel to be my best thing in English, and though the theme and situation are decidedly sensuous, its art is pure and its fun riotous. I would love you to glance at it some time. [Viking Press editor] Pat Covici said we would all go to jail if the thing were published. I feel rather depressed about this fiasco. (NWL 317) Nabokov experienced a great deal of difficulty finding a home for the novel that nowadays is considered a great masterpiece—fourth on the Modern Library List of Hundred Best Novels of the Twentieth Century. At the time, however, American publishers, although recognizing the novel's literary merits, refused to print it out of concern that such a publication would subject them to litigation on obscenity charges. Nabokov surveys the censorial hardships he experienced with publication of Lolita in the postscript to his own Russian translation of the novel.85 Lolita was first released by the rather dubious Olympia Press in Paris in 1955. This publication set off numerous virulent attacks on the novel and its author in the Western media and a temporary ban in Europe. Only after Graham Greene declared the novel among the three best works of the year did Putnam's publish it in America in 1958 and Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the United Kingdom in 1959.86 Page 77 →

While Lolita's problems with censorship were relatively brief (they lasted approximately three years) and ended successfully in the West, this was not at all the fate of Nabokov's oeuvre in Soviet Russia. Nabokov, of course, was fully aware that he was “some kind of scaly devil to the Bolshevik authorities” (SL 528) and that his writings were banned in his native land. In his February 14, 1974, letter to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov was, in all likelihood, right when he doubts “if even you have read my poems, articles, stories and such novels of mine as Dar, Podvig, Priglashenie na kazn´, and especially Bend Sinister,” in which, as Nabokov puts it, “ever since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia” (528). I would like to share here my own experience of becoming acquainted with Nabokov's writings in Soviet Russia. In 1971, a fellow refusenik (an unofficial term for individuals, typically Soviet Jews, who were denied permission to emigrate to Israel) gave me a copy of a book that bore neither the author's name nor the title. It was The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov—whose name I heard for the first time. Since Nabokov's works were on the Soviet Index Librorum Prohibitorum and reading or disseminating them was punishable by law, the absence of his name and the book's title were deliberate for safety reasons: if arrested, I could claim in my defense (pun unintended) that I found the book on a subway train and had no idea of its authorship or contents. Reading the novel left me with two conflicting feelings: elation at becoming familiar with the remarkable writer and his masterpiece, and fury at the Soviet regime for keeping it and other works by Nabokov away from me all that time. Only upon my immigration to Israel in 1972 was I able to read Nabokov's works freely. His books started appearing in Soviet Russia only posthumously, in the late 1980s, shortly before the collapse of the totalitarian empire.

Anti-Semitism As a discriminatory policy against a specific ethnic group, anti-Semitism is first and foremost a political matter, even though it may also present itself as a legal issue. This occurred, for example, when Jews were subjected, in violation of elementary laws, to collective persecutions, known as pogroms, or when they were individually prosecuted on trumped-up charges, as in the case of the Mendel Beilis blood-libel trial. The Kadet Party platform championed the rights of all Russian citizens, regardless of nationality or creed. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov in particular resolutely condemned discrimination of any kind, above all its ethnic and Page 78 → religious manifestations. Knowing of his special interest in this issue, the Kadet Party Central Committee entrusted him, together with Fedor Kokoshkin and Fedor Rodichev, to prepare a bill on the rights of ethnic groups.87 Since Jews endured the most severe discrimination among all the minorities in Russia, Vladimir Dmitrievich focused on their plight and voiced his firm and unwavering condemnation of anti-Semitism. Already in 1903, following the Kishinev pogrom, Nabokov senior had penned the article “The Kishinev Bloodbath” that thrust him into opposition to the tsarist regime. In this article, he wrote, From this regime's point of view, a Jew is a pariah, a creature of the lowest order, something malevolent in and of itself. He can be merely tolerated, but he ought to be limited and bound by confinement within the narrow limits of the artificial pale. In the strata of the populace, alien to true culture, the historically formed outlook on a Jew that passes from generation to generation is that of a “Yid” who is to blame for merely being born a “Yid.” Such a cruel and coarse attitude toward the entire nationality finds, as it were, an implicit affirmation and recognition in the ruling regime, and as a result, makes possible the sincere belief of a peasant lad who murdered a Jew that “for them, there is no judgment.”88 What was so intolerable to the tsarist establishment was that Vladimir Dmitrievich not only denounced this particular horrific incident, but also exposed the tsarist administration by offering the true explanation for the Kishinev pogrom. In his opinion, it was rooted, first and foremost, in the existing abnormal status of Russian Jewry. V. D. Nabokov specifically condemns the regime for maintaining the pale of settlement policy. He further blames it for creating the discriminatory climate in the country that deprives Jews of equal political, legal, and individual rights, thereby tacitly sanctioning lawless acts against them. The publication of this article was a very courageous act on the part of the senior Nabokov, not only because it put

him at odds with the government but also because defending Jews at that time was frowned upon even in liberal circles. As Osip Buzhansky recalls, “The fear of being accused of servility to Jews was so strong that an article on the Jewish question made editors of some democratic newspapers cringe. At this very time, he, a chamberlain of Page 79 → the court and a son of the former minister, came out with his well-known article in Pravo concerning the Kishinev pogrom.”89 As Iosif Gessen reminisces forty years later, “The article made an indelible impression and was talked about in ‘all of Petersburg.’”90 Russian Jewry recognized and much appreciated V. D. Nabokov's personal and political courage: almost twenty years after the publication of the article, the Union of Russian Jews in Germany laid a wreath at his grave with the inscription, “To the noble author of the article ‘The Kishinev Bloodbath,’ the unforgettable V. D. Nabokov.”91 In 1906, while in the Duma, Vladimir Dmitrievich insisted upon a government investigation into the conduct of the police and of the army that reportedly took part in the Belostok and Vologda pogroms—reports that were subsequently confirmed.92 In his Duma speech concerning the Vologda pogrom, V. D. Nabokov singled out for scorn Rotmistr (cavalry captain) Pyshkin for his malevolent role in the incident. The elder Nabokov makes it clear that Pyshkin symbolizes dark forces in Russia. When informing the Duma delegates that the Vologda governor submitted his resignation after this shameful affair, Nabokov senior urges, “Rotmistr Pyshkin ought to be removed first of all.” He further insists that “Rotmistrs Pyshkins should be forever uprooted from Russian life.”93 It is noteworthy that Nabokov employs this surname in The Gift when portraying an odious character, a member of “the Committee of the Society of Russian Writers in Germany” (316). It is “the repulsively small, almost portable lawyer, Poshkin [in Russian “Pyshkin”; see Ssoch 4:497], who when talking to people said ‘I pot’ for ‘I put’ and ‘coshion’ for ‘cushion’ as if establishing Page 80 → an alibi for his name” (322). By calling him “Poshkin” in translation, Nabokov, among other things, wishes to allude to the character's poshlost´, or as he wittily Anglicized this Russian word, “poshlust” (see NG 63–74). Poshkin's poshlust finds its expression in his callousness toward fellow humans and his lust for posh, as he had “a whole store of metal in his mouth” (319). By referring to “an alibi,” Nabokov, of course, derides the character's pretentious and vulgar attempts to link himself to Russia's greatest poet in order to justify his otherwise untenable connection to literature. Poshkin, of course, is a world apart not only from Pushkin, his near-namesake, but also from Nabokov's father, his fellow jurist: while Nabokov's father employed his knowledge of the law to serve humanity, Poshkin, “something of a swashbuckler in his own way,” used his legal expertise for harassment by “challenging people to arbitration, and he would talk of this (I called him out, he refused) with the precise severity of a hardened duelist” (319–20). Although not a duelist in a strict sense, Poshkin exploited his legal marksmanship, so to speak, to challenge people to judicial battles, thereby evoking Nabokov senior's pamphlet on dueling (see chapter 1), in which he denounced this “glorification of violence.” In his last Russian novel, Nabokov pays tribute to his beloved father and alludes to his genuine affinity to Pushkin (see chapter 3): like Russia's national poet, who “called for mercy toward the downfallen” (EO 2:311),94 Nabokov senior indefatigably worked all his life to help and protect the vulnerable and the underprivileged. In 1913, during the Beilis trial, in spite of his family responsibilities and amid a very busy schedule, Vladimir Dmitrievich felt compelled to go to Kiev to be present in the courtroom. This is how Oscar Gruzenberg, the chief defense counsel, describes V. D. Nabokov's sense of duty: “A few days before my departure for Kiev to defend Beilis, Vladimir Dmitrievich dropped in at my place. Pensively, as if testing himself, he began talking about his doubts: should he go to this trial? The editorial board of Speech will send its best staffers. He is needed here for editorial, party, public, and personal affairs; it is hard for him to part with his entire family for a long time and yet something tells him that he ought to go. We exchanged thoughts and Vladimir Dmitrievich went to Kiev.”95 Page 81 → According to Daniil Pasmanik, “It was not love for Beilis, but disgust with the uncultured methods of the Shcheglovitovs and Zamyslovskys that motivated his inspired communications from Kiev detailing the blood-libel trial.”96 The senior Nabokov was sending his accounts of the hearing to the newspapers Speech and Law, in which he questioned the legal basis of the entire procedure and exposed its glaring inconsistencies. Gruzenberg recalled V. D. Nabokov's reaction to the trial:

From the first days of the hearing, when one immediately sensed a tight tension of unmerciful struggle, Nabokov had transformed. […] His face grew thin, his dilated eyes looked at me with such anguish, distress, and injury that I was seized by painful joy: I am not alone; with me, there is a codefendant, codefender, commiserator. From that day on, it became a necessity for me, like inhaling strong tobacco, to seek his eyes during especially difficult moments of the trial. I detected in them horror, pain. […] Every minute before and after the sessions, at every intermission, Nabokov would try to support me with endless patience and cordial warmth, to share with me his valuable observations and thoughts, to calm me down. In the meantime, he himself would grow more pale and sorrowful.97 Page 82 → It is clear from Gruzenberg's testimony that Vladimir Dmitrievich, who customarily did not show his emotions in public, was greatly affected by the trial, feeling ashamed and saddened at the government's legal farce.98 This is how he summarized the entire case: “In the final analysis, there emerges the following picture: a fantastic, improbable, absurd story of a child's abduction in daylight before the eyes of a group of other children, recounted in various versions by devious and unreliable individuals; the unverified, totally uncorroborated testimony against Beilis; the multitude of facts showing where the true perpetrators ought to be sought; and in the foreground—the menacing ‘blood libel’ and the entire anti-Semitic fireworks.”99 Nabokov senior further articulates these sentiments in his survey of criminal justice in Russia in 1913: “And when one happens to read about the necessity of separating law from politics, about judicial independence, about all virtues of a true justice system—and echoes of the Beilis trial are still ringing in one's ears—one feels shame and pain.”100 As I noted earlier, for his reports from the courtroom, in which Vladimir Dmitrievich exposed the government's sinister role in the trial, he was fined one hundred rubles (see SM 176). Page 83 → In addition to the state's punitive measures, the reactionary press, of which the senior Nabokov was a constant target, accused him of “selling out to the Jews.” In Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls a cartoon in which his father and Miliukov were portrayed “handing over Saint Russia on a plate to World Jewry” (188); in Other Shores, the Russian version of his autobiography, Nabokov describes this cartoon in greater detail: “I recall one caricature in which grateful World Jewry (nose and diamonds) receives the bread-and-salt platter—Mother Russia—from him and the multitoothed cat-whiskered Miliukov.”101 I was unable to find the cartoon described by Nabokov but came across another one, “On the Scales of Themis,” that appeared in the blatantly anti-Semitic daily New Times during the Beilis trial. V. D. Nabokov is portrayed seated on the scales of justice and holding a stack of the trial materials on his lap bearing the heading “A Questionnaire on the Beilis Case.” Atop these materials sits Iosif Gessen, the senior Nabokov's fellow Kadet Party leader and coeditor (with Miliukov) of the newspaper Speech, while Miliukov is swaying the scales and greeting the approaching Rothschild, who is carrying handfuls of diamonds and money bags under his arms. The caption for this cartoon, not unlike the one described by Nabokov, which insinuated that his father and Miliukov sold themselves out to World Jewry, reads, “That's not all yet! Here comes Baron Rothschild carrying a brilliant piece of evidence!”102 Many years later, in exile, the reactionary circles and the press demanded that Orthodox funerary ceremonies be denied to [V. D.] “Nabokov the Yid.”103 They also attacked the younger Nabokov for being “completely Jewified” and “half a Jew,” not only because he was married to a Jewish woman but also because he was a staunch opponent of anti-Semitism.104 Vladimir Dmitrievich numbered many Jews among his friends and close associates—Iosif Gessen, Oscar Gruzenberg, Avgust Kaminka, Maxim Vinaver, and later Grigory Landau. A fair-minded, ethical human being, Nabokov senior as a rule judged people individually, without resorting to stereotyping or pigeonholing. For that reason, his extremely rare references to the Jewish origin of his political opponents are completely out of character. Thus, when describing Moisei Uritsky, a Bolshevik functionary, V. D. Nabokov reminisces, “After a while Uritsky arrived. I remember, as though it were to-day, Page 84 → the repulsive figure of that seedy individual [uncomely pint-sized puny man] with his hat on his head and his impudent Jewish face [physiognomy]…. He also ordered us to disperse and threatened the use of arms.” And when referring to another

Bolshevik functionary, Yuri Steklov (pseudonym of Ovsei Nakhamkes), Vladimir Dmitrievich writes: “The leading figure at these meetings was Steklov. I first met him then, and I did not suspect that he was a Jew or that his euphonic pseudonym covered up his far from euphonic Page 85 → real name. Even less known, of course,—it was later revealed to me by L. L´vov—was that Nakhamkes had made the most humble and servile applications to ‘legalize’ his pseudonym and officially substitute it for his real name.” V. D. Nabokov then wittily comments that Steklov's real surname, Nakhamkes, “organically combined the words ‘impudent lout’ [nakhal] and ‘boor’ [kham], and perfectly suited his manner, which I found repulsive from the very first [meeting].”105 Naturally, not knowing Hebrew, Vladimir Dmitrievich was unaware that the surname Nakhamkes stems from the Hebrew word and female name Nechama (consolation), a far cry from and a striking contrast to the personality of this hardhearted and insolent Bolshevik.

When asked about these statements by his father, Nabokov replied to Andrew Field, My father felt so infinitely superior to any accusation of antisemitism (its official brand, or the even more disgusting household variety) that out of a kind of self-confidence and contempt for showcase philo-semitism he used to make it a point—and go out of his way to make it—of being as plainspoken about Jew and Gentile as were his Jewish colleagues (such as Joseph Hessen and Grigory Landau) or the Christian but impeccably unprejudiced Milyukov. In the case of Nakhamkes, a well-known figure of fun and an impudent boor, the stress of the passage is obviously not on his race but on his portmanteau name so aptly blending kham (blackguard) and nakhal (jackanapes). I wish to point out that my father's publicistic style is marked by a certain bluntness and banality which he deplored himself when marvelling with me at say Aleksandr Hertsen's epithetic felicities; but the rugged phrasing in what you call the “Jewish references” proceeds less from a hasty pen Page 86 → than from that familiarity with which some professional divine might permit himself to speak of a martyr's quirks. (SL 471)106 Nabokov's explanation is not entirely satisfying: although there are no reasons whatsoever to suspect the senior Nabokov of any anti-Semitic inclinations, his mention of Uritsky's and Steklov's ethnicity bears no relevance to their despicable behavior. How, then, to account for his remarks? Perhaps as a highly cultured and superbly educated Russian liberal who fought for the foundation of democracy and the rule of law in Russia, V. D. Nabokov found it irksome, to say the least, that these two uncouth, insufficiently educated (although both Uritsky and Steklov studied law, these studies, judging by their actions, left no trace in their conscience) “semiintellectuals,” members of the loathsome Bolshevik Party that committed the lawless act of usurping power, subjected him and other political opponents to severe persecution.107 Nabokov senior undoubtedly found it all the more vexing since both Uritsky and Steklov happened to belong to the formerly persecuted minority for whose equality he determinedly worked all his life. But as members of the Bolshevik Party, they abused these accomplishments for undemocratic, totalitarian ends.108 Finally, when he was writing this portion of his memoirs (the Page 87 → summer of 1918), V. D. Nabokov knew that Uritsky was serving as the head of the Petrograd CheKa, the Bolshevik secret police, and in that capacity was responsible for mass executions of opponents of the new regime. Uritsky's cruelty and bloodthirstiness were well known: for example, he reportedly bragged about signing twenty-three death sentences in a single day.109 The younger Nabokov was, of course, familiar with Uritsky's ominous role as the chief of the Petrograd secret police. Thus, when admonishing “Nesbit,” whom he also anagrammatically calls “Ibsen,” his friend of Cambridge years, Nabokov remarks that “with horror he pronounced the names of Ezhov and Yagoda—but quite forgot their predecessors, Uritski and Dzerzhinski” (SM 272).110 To the best of my understanding, the senior Nabokov's rejection of and disgust with anti-Semitism had several reasons. As an ethical, fair-minded person, he could tolerate neither discrimination of any kind, in this case ethnic and religious, nor the suffering of any fellow human being. As a jurist, Vladimir Dmitrievich vehemently protested the injustice ingrained in anti-Semitism, the lawlessness and mayhem of pogroms, and the mockery of the Russian judicial system as demonstrated by the Beilis trial. And finally, like so many decent, liberal-minded, and patriotic members of the Russian intelligentsia, Page 88 → V. D. Nabokov felt that anti-Semitism brings—to

employ the earlier-cited locution—“shame and reproach” upon Russia, tarnishes its image, and inflicts irreparable damage on its international reputation. Such was the attitude within liberal circles and specifically within the Kadet Party. Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams remarks that “the Jewish question was one of the constant reminders about the sins of autocracy, one of the obstacles to a more conciliatory attitude toward the authorities. The policy of the authorities on the Jewish question went against our notions of justice and humanity.”111 Like his father, Nabokov was a resolute opponent of anti-Semitism. As a boy, when he would overhear his aunts criticizing his father's “fierce writings against pogroms” and “discussing with horror Lenski's origins”—Nabokov's tutor, whose real surname was Zelensky and who was ethnically Jewish—the younger Nabokov “would be dreadfully rude to them” (SM 160). Unlike his father, however, Nabokov voiced his disgust with anti-Semitism not by writing legal articles and political essays but, by and large, through his fiction. Thus, the narrator of Nabokov's short story “The Admiralty Spire,” no doubt expressing his creator's point of view, depicts the anti-Semitic upper-class milieu of imperial St. Petersburg as having “backward tastes, to put it mildly” and sarcastically remarks that in this “exquisitely cultured beau monde” Alexander Blok was considered “a wicked Jew who wrote futuristic sonnets about dying swans and lilac liqueurs” (Stories 351). The latter pronouncement is especially ironic since Blok was a virulent anti-Semite: for example, in his December 18, 1911, diary entry, Blok calls Speech “a Yid newspaper.”112 In The Defense, Nabokov describes Luzhin's in-laws and their anti-Semitic émigré circle of friends and depicts this ugly phenomenon as a manifestation of poshlost´—philistine vulgarity.113 Luzhin's future father-in-law “used to say to his friends that it was particularly pleasant after business meetings and conversations with people of dubious origin to immerse himself in genuine Russian comfort and eat genuine Russian food” (104), and his future Page 89 → mother-in-law suspects that Luzhin is a pseudonym and believes that “his real name is Rubinstein or Abramson” (107). In The Gift, Nabokov portrays Boris Shchyogolev, an abhorrent anti-Semite, “one of those cocky and corny Russians who, when occasion presents itself, savor the word ‘Yid’ as if it were a fat fig” (185). Predictably, one of Shchyogolev's favorite books which, as Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev sarcastically remarks, “he had studied” “in the realm of philosophy” (186)—was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery claiming the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to conquer and rule the world. This pamphlet is later characterized in Nabokov's story “Conversation Piece, 1945” as “this book, which in the old days had been wistfully appreciated by the Tsar, was a fake memorandum the secret police had paid a semiliterate crook to compile; its sole object was the promotion of pogroms” (Stories 587). The most courageous expression of Nabokov's personal opposition to anti-Semitism occurred in the spring of 1933 in Berlin. When “the official Nazi boycott of Jewish shops began, with uniformed soldiers stationed at shop doors to daunt prospective purchasers,” “Nabokov and another non-Jewish acquaintance walked the streets, deliberately entering all the Jewish shops that still remained open.”114 After immigrating to the United States, Nabokov protested even the slightest, most genteel forms of antiSemitism. Alfred Appel reports that in one of their conversations, Nabokov recalled going into a New England inn years ago, accompanied by his son and his son's friend. Opening the menu, Nabokov noticed therein the succinct stipulation “Gentiles Only.” He called over the waitress and asked her what the management would do if there appeared at the door that very moment a bearded and berobed man, leading a mule bearing his pregnant wife, all of them dusty and tired from a long journey. “What…what are you talking about?” the waitress stammered. “I am talking about Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Nabokov, as he pointed to the phrase in question, rose from the table, and led his party from the restaurant. “My son was very proud of me,” said Nabokov. (AnL 436) “Shocked by the casual anti-Semitism he found among his academic colleagues,” Boyd tells us, “Nabokov remained hypersensitive to any hint of Page 90 → a slur” and had not the slightest intention of tolerating it.115 For example, Meyer “Mike” H. Abrams, his Cornell University colleague, recalls that Nabokov wanted to throw out of his house a guest whom he suspected of anti-Semitic remarks.116

In his fiction of the “American years,” Nabokov continued to expose anti-Semitism in its various guises. In “Conversation Piece, 1945,” perhaps the most explicitly political of his postwar works, Nabokov shows that antiSemitism is alive and well in America when depicting a group of people who blamed the world upheavals on Jews, minimized Nazi crimes, and denied the Holocaust. In 1946, soon after the composition of this short story, upon learning more about the Nazi atrocities, Nabokov writes to his sister Elena: “My darling, no matter how much I would like to hide in my little ivory tower, there are things that injure too deeply, for example the German abominations, burning children in ovens, the children who were as delightfully funny and beloved as our own children. I withdraw into myself but find there such hatred for Germans, concentration camps, all sorts of tyranny, that as a refuge ce n'est pas grand'chose.”117 Nabokov exposes the signs of anti-Semitism in postwar everyday American life in Lolita. Humbert, who was often taken for a Jewish refugee and whose name was frequently misspelled, feels “sorry” for Irving Flashman. Appel recalls Nabokov's explanation of this “sorry” remark: “‘Poor Irving,’ said Nabokov, ‘he is the only Jew among all those Gentiles. Humbert identifies with the persecuted’” (AnL 53, 363).118 Being addressed as “Professor Hamburg,” Humbert “got a prompt expression of regret in reply” (261) for his room inquiry from the Enchanted Hunters, the hotel that advertised its proximity to churches, thereby euphemistically conveying its “Gentiles Only” preference. Prior to marrying Humbert, Charlotte quizzes him about having “a certain strange strain” (74–75) in his family background. Lolita's Beardsley School headmistress, Miss Pratt, inquires about Humbert's religious denomination (194). And Claire Quilty, Humbert's nemesis, remarks indignantly Page 91 → during their last confrontation at the playwright's residence, “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile's house, you know. Maybe, you'd better run along” (297).119 In the aftermath of World War II, when the information about the Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust became widely known, Nabokov learned that his younger brother Sergei had died in 1945 in the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he was interned for speaking out against the Nazi regime and for being a homosexual. Nabokov also learned that his close friend Il´ya Fondaminsky, a Jew, had perished in 1942 in Auschwitz. The writer, of course, was mindful that had it not been for the stroke of lucky fate, his Jewish wife, his son, and perhaps he himself would have perished in the Holocaust.120 To no small degree in recognition of his father's steadfast opposition to and tireless struggle against anti-Semitism in Russia, the Jewish rescue organization HIAS assisted Nabokov and his family in leaving France for the United States.121 In Lolita, Nabokov addresses the Holocaust only in passing, through Humbert's mention of Lolita's classmate, Eva Rosen, “a displaced little person from France” (190), and by way of Humbert's “dream disorder,” in which the novel's narrator envisioned “the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed” (254).122 The writer, however, treats the subject matter most explicitly in Pnin. He describes Pnin's futile attempts to deal with his personal tragedy, the horrifying death of Mira Belochkin, the protagonist's sweetheart, in the Buchenwald concentration camp: What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Page 92 → Mira Belochkin—not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind […], but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget—because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood. According to the investigator Pnin had happened to talk to in Washington, the only

certain thing was that being too weak to work (though still smiling, still able to help other Jewish women), she was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald. (134–35)

Immediately following Pnin's ponderings, Nabokov provides an explanation, as it were, of the reasons that the Holocaust was allowed to take place. The writer shows that aside from propaganda and the coercion of the Nazi regime, it was the tacit approval and at times banal insensitivity of the German populace and of the international community at large that made it all possible. Nabokov demonstrates this phenomenon in the example of Dr. Herman Hagen, who left Germany long before the Nazi rise to power: Hagen claims in 1954 that he has been “giving my all for twenty-nine years to this university” (168).123 Hagen, head of the German department, under whose auspices Pnin teaches Russian language and literature at Waindell College (139), is described as “a pleasant, rectangular old man” and Pnin's “staunch protector” (36, 11)—ostensibly a fairly likable figure. And yet, when speaking about the Buchenwald concentration camp, Hagen, whom Nabokov's narrator sarcastically characterized as “kindhearted” (170) and “the gentlest of souls alive,” “would wail” about the close proximity of “that horrid camp” Page 93 → to Weimar, “where walked Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Wieland, the inimitable Kotzebue and others” (135)—not its actual existence. Pnin's recollections of Mira Belochkin and his contemplation of her most tragic fate are among the earliest and most moving passages written about the Holocaust. According to Andrew Field, Nabokov said that “he had wanted to make a statement about the Nazi camps in Pnin but […] only touched upon them and that subject.” Field quotes Nabokov as saying, “There is a sense of responsibility about this theme which I think I will tackle one day. I will go to those German camps and look at those places and write a terrible indictment.”124 Both the father and the son, who combated anti-Semitism all their lives, made a significant contribution to the ultimate defeat of this heinous crime against humanity. Dmitri Nabokov summed up the family tradition as follows: “I might mention here that I was born into a family utterly devoid of racial or religious prejudice. This was the continuation, on my father's side, of the liberal aristocratic tradition of his own father, who consistently condemned injustice toward the weak and the poor. He, like his son, had not an ounce of Jewish blood, but was a ferocious opponent of anti-Semitism in general, and pogroms in particular.”125 Dmitri Nabokov is absolutely correct in his assessment of the Nabokov family tradition, except for one thing: his father did have more than an ounce of Jewish blood. According to a relatively recent archival discovery, the writer's maternal ancestor, registered as Illarion Kozlov, a second-guild merchant from Buzuluk, a town in the Orenburg province, was born to Jewish parents and converted to Russian Orthodoxy.126 One of his sons, Nikolai (1814–89), Nabokov's great-grandfather, pursued a medical career and attained the position of the “first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine” (SM 65). Nabokov did not know about his Jewish heritage, which became public only in 1997. Judging by his attitude toward Jewry, however, one would think that Nabokov would have been delighted to learn about it. Nabokov's sister Elena Vladimirovna (1906–2000), with whom the writer shared an outlook on great many things, spoke proudly of her newly discovered Jewish roots during our meeting at her Geneva residence on May 3, 1999. While Nabokov's support and sympathy for the plight of Jews never wavered, Page 94 → his attitude toward Zionism evolved over the years. Samuil Rozov, Nabokov's Tenishev School classmate and a close friend who grew up in a Zionist family and was himself a Zionist, reminded the writer that at the time, “You always laughed at my Zionism.”127 Many years later, Nabokov recognized the validity of aspirations of Jews for their own homeland and became a strong supporter of the State of Israel. Thus, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War (June 1967), Nabokov wrote to Rozov, by then residing in Haifa, “I have been with you with all my soul, deeply and anxiously, in the course of the latest events, and I triumph now, saluting the marvelous victory of Israel.”128 In an unpublished typescript of his January 5, 1970, interview with Nurit Beretzky, a reporter for the leading Israeli newspaper Maariv, who asked Nabokov's opinion of the current situation in the Middle East, the writer responded: “I fervently favor total friendship between America and Israel and am emotionally inclined to take Israel's side in all political matters.”129 During the Yom Kippur War (October 1973), Nabokov, who lived in

Montreux, Switzerland, sent a monetary contribution to Arye Levavi, the Israeli ambassador to that country (see SL 522). Earlier that year, Nabokov wrote to Izhak Livni, the editor of the Israeli weekly Bamahaneh, “I don't have to tell you what ardent sympathy marks my feelings toward Israel and her 25th anniversary. […] I can only extend my heartfelt congratulations to your young ancient great little country” (SL 509). Nabokov's reference to Israel as a “young ancient great little country” suggests that he was familiar with Theodor Herzl's novel The Old New Land (Altneuland, 1902), in which this father of modern political Zionism envisioned the future of the Jewish state. In the 1970s, Nabokov, at the invitation of the Israeli government, planned in earnest to visit Israel, but the trip never came to fruition, first because of the writer's extremely busy schedule and then due to his deteriorating health and death in 1977 (see SL 476, 480).130 •

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Nabokov's worldview was greatly affected by that of his father. Like him, the writer believed in the supremacy of democracy, individual liberties, and human Page 95 → rights, condemned totalitarianism, especially in his native land, all his adult life, and made his strong opinions known no matter the degree of their popularity. Like his father, he voiced his vehement opposition to censorship and fought for the freedom of expression on both sides of the Atlantic. Following in his father's footsteps, Nabokov unequivocally and determinedly denounced antiSemitism and its various manifestations in both his daily existence and in his writings throughout his entire life. 1. «Весь его разум и вся его воля, весь его сдержанный и культурный, но глубокий внутренний энтузиазм, все отдано было государственному делу в эту трагическую полосу русского исторического развития»; Nol´de, “V. D. Nabokov v 1917 g.,” 13. 2. See “Programma konstitutsionno-demokraticheskoi partii. [1905 g.],” in Programmy politicheskikh partii Rossii, ed. Shelokhaev et al., 326–36; V. D. Nabokov mentions the party platform in his “Deiatel´nost´ partii narodnoi svobody v gosudarstvennoi dume,” 1530–31. 3. Here is Nabokov’s own definition of the zemstvo: “The zemstvos (created by a government act of January 1, 1864) were district and provincial assemblies with councils elected by three groups: landowners, peasants, and townspeople” (LRL 216). 4. As cited in Healy, Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 181. 5. «Власть исполнительная, да подчинится власти законодательной»; see Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 326. The phrase is cited in English in Healy, Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 192. 6. Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 106, 108. 7. Pares, Russia and Reform, 548. 8. «у кадетов имеются таланты и превосходные мастера парламентского искусства »; Benois, Moi dnevnik, 175. 9. Pipes, Introduction, xiv. 10. «первая русская революция оказалась перед разбитым корытом, и вторая стала неизбежностью»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pervaia duma,” 1. 11. Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 124. 12. «обладающий, помимо личного крупного авторитета, недюжинным даром слова », «Набоков говорил по-английски, как дай Бог лучшему Оксфордскому студенту»; Nemirovich-Danchenko, “U soiuznikov,” 113, 114. 13. K. D. Nabokov, Ordeal of a Diplomat, 44. 14. «Джеллико подписался моей ручкой Swan и с большой похвалой отозвался о пере, в самом деле, пишущем очень плавно и легко…Перед тем, как проститься, я сказал адмиралу, что он доставил бы мне большую радость, если-бы согласился принять от меня на память эту ручку. Когда мне придется читать о подвигах британского Grand Fleet, я буду представлять себе, что приказы и отчеты адмирала Джеллико подписаны моей ручкой»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 39. 15. «когда приехал в Севастополь английский адмирал Кельтон, к нему отпра-вились с визитом Набоков и Винавер, как крымские министры. Кельтон заявил: «не имею полномочий признать крымскую самостийность» и только ссылка Набокова на адмирала Джелико смягчила Кельтона»; Margulies, God interventsii, 1:285. The “English Admiral Kelton” of Margulies’s memoirs was in fact

Vice-Admiral Sir Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe, commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet (1917–19); see Vinaver, Nashe pravitel´stvo, 95–102, appendix 10. 16. V. D. Nabokov, Provisional Government, 6, 7. 17. Times, May 3, 1916, 6; Graphic, May 13, 1916, 653. 18. «я нахожу мало примеров его обычного юмора: он не был писателем, и я не слышу его голоса», «замечательно рассказывал», «за обеденным столом», «забавных недоразумениях»; Ssoch 5:300. 19. See Chukovsky, Dnevnik (1930–1969), 298. 20. Nicholas II’s two other brothers had died by that time, Alexander in his infancy and George at the age of twenty-eight as a result of tuberculosis. 21. For more on this episode in Russian history, see Khrustalev, Velikii kniaz´ Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 391, 398–402. 22. «Во вчерашнем номере «Речи» под декларацией Временного Правительства после подписей министров ошибочно поставлена подпись управляющего делами В. Д. Набокова, который, как было вчера же сообщено, покинул свой пост и в заседании преобразованного Временного Правительства уже не присутствовал»; Rech´, May 7 (20), 1917, 3 (under the rubric “Poslednie novosti”). May 5 (18) as the date of V. D. Nabokov’s resignation from the Provisional Government is corroborated by Kanishcheva, “Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich,” 390. 23. V. D. Nabokov, Provisional Government, 95–96. 24. For a discussion of these differences and eventual schism within the Kadet Party in exile, see Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 455–61; Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 331–35; S. A. Aleksandrov, Lider rossiiskikh kadetov P. N. Miliukov v emigratsii, 22–59; Suomela, Zarubezhnaia Rossiia, esp. 113–17. 25. «расхождение налицо и отрицать его невозможно. По любому вопросу практической политики сторонники Милюкова и мы смотрим различно. Нам нельзя приветствовать революцию, так как она разрушила Россию, растлила народную душу, сделала из нас изгнанников. Мы остаемся противниками самодержавия и той куцой конституции, которая была до 1917 г., но мы отрицали и отрицаем революционные пути, и теперь мы ясно увидели, к чему они приводят. В этом основа нашего разногласия »; Shelokhaev et al., Protokoly Tsentral´nogo Komiteta, 5:236. 26. Pipes, Introduction, xiii. 27. See Anon., “Dr. Paul Miliukov to Lecture,” 1; Anon., “Last Lowell Lecture Today,” 6. 28. V. D. Nabokov, “Drugu-protivniku,” 2; V. D. Nabokov, “K priezdu P. N. Miliukova,” 2. For V. D. Nabokov’s authorship of the first article and for Miliukov’s rejection of the reconciliation, see Gessen, Gody izgnaniia, 122–23, 134. 29. «узнал в нем старого, верного друга под непривычной маской политического противника»; Miliukov, “Pamiati starogo druga.” In addition to the sources already cited, I also consulted the following for my brief outline of V. D. Nabokov’s political career: Pasmanik, Revoliutsionnye gody v Krymu; Gessen, V dvukh vekakh; Kovalenko, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov; Protasov, “Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich.” For succinct and most informative accounts in English of V. D. Nabokov’s statesmanship, see, in addition to Pipes, Introduction, Browder’s introduction in Medlin and Parson’s V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1–11. 30. V. D. Nabokov, Provisional Government, 108. 31. «кривые улицы, зловещие строенья, / кровавый человек, лежащий на земле, / и чьих-то жадных рук звериные движенья» (Ssoch 1:570). 32. «Все печально, / алеет кровь на мостовых. / Людишки серые нахально / из норок выползли своих. / Они кричат на перекрестках, / и страшен их блудливый бред. / Чернеет на ладонях жестких / неизгладимый рабства след…/ Они хотят уничтоженья—/ страстей, мечтаний, красоты»; Stikhotvoreniia, 510–11. 33. «то антикультурное и антиэтическое, что вылезает из разных щелей, подобно уличным подонкам, не теряющим времени и всегда готовым похозяйничать в минуты безвластия и судорожных потрясений»; V. D. Nabokov, “Revoliutsiia i kul´turnost´.” 34. I therefore disagree with Leona Toker, who maintains that Nabokov’s “political views were not identifiable with those of any party; they were liberal—in the classical sense of believing in individual freedom short of encroaching on the freedom and property of others, as well as in the more modern sense of

being opposed to all forms of cruelty and terror”; Toker, “Nabokov’s Worldview,” 243. Curiously, in an April 1923 internal memo characterizing Nabokov’s political stance, which was meant to be condemnatory, the Soviet Censorship Department (Glavlit) nevertheless defined it quite accurately: “[He] is hostile to the Soviet regime. Politically, [he] shares the platform of the right-wing Kadets”—that is, his father’s faction. («К Соввласти относится враждебно. Политически разделяет платформу правых к.-д. »); cited in Blium, “‘Poetik belyi, Sirin…,’” 200. 35. It is noteworthy that in his summer 1938 letter to Georgy Vernadsky, a renowned historian who held a professorship at Yale University, Nabokov informs his correspondent: “As I already wrote to you a long while ago, it seems to me that I would be able to handle well a lectureship in Russian literature. I studied its history a great deal, and I have a recently completed scholarly work which illumines anew the 1860s and the incipience of Russian Marxism” («Как я вам уже писал как-то давно, мне кажется, что я хорошо-бы справился с должностью лектора по русской литературе,—я много занимался ее историей, и у меня есть недавно законченный ученый труд, освещающий по-новому 60-е годы и зарождение русского марксизма»); Bongard-Levin, “Vladimir Nabokov i akademik M. I. Rostovtsev,” 127. 36. See Vladimir Nabokov, “Na smert´ Sh. i K. [added in his hand—Shingareva i Kokoshkina],” 115, VNA; Nabokov’s answers to Field’s questions, June 12, 1970, 3, manuscript box 2, VNA. 37. «Дорогой папочка, дорогая мамочка, я ежедневно покупаю «Morning Post» и «Daily Herald», который все гуще и гуще пахнет—ну, уж не скажу чем.»; Vladimir Nabokov, 99 A.L.S., 33 postcards to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, VNA. 38. See Richards, Bloody Circus, 41–42. 39. «Как быть? Поверить ли, что правом / на битву преображена, / в сей битве с варваром кровавым / подобной праведным державам / вдруг стала грешная страна? […] // Иль возопить: восстань, Россия, / и двух тиранов сокруши! / О бедные мои, немые, / немыслящие камыши…// Как вас там гнет, и жжет, и ломит, / в каком дыму, в аду каком…/ тих океан и тихо в доме, / я ничего не слышу кроме / журчанья ночи за окном»; Vladimir Nabokov, untitled, VNA. 40. There appears to be some confusion about the exact date and even number of Cambridge debates in which Nabokov participated: while Nabokov speaks of “a Union debate in Cambridge” “in the spring of the same year [1920]” (SM 179), Boyd correctly reports that Nabokov took part in a November 28, 1919, debate at Trinity College’s Magpie and Stump Debating Society on the motion “That this House approves of the Allied Policy in Russia”; Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 168. 41. Minutes of Magpie and Stump Debating Society, Visitors’ Debate (November 28, 1919), 46. I am indebted for a transcription of the minutes to John Marais, assistant librarian of Trinity College Library, Cambridge. 42. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 7; V. D. Nabokov, “British Liberalism and Russia,” 9. 43. V. D. Nabokov, “British Liberalism and Russia,” 8. 44. V. D. Nabokov, “British Liberalism and Russia,” 8. The situation, however, was quite fluid and tragic for the Russian anti-Bolshevik forces: on February 7, 1920, two days after the publication of Vladimir Dmitrievich’s article in the February 5 issue of The New Russia, Admiral Kolchak was executed by Bolsheviks in Irkutsk; on April 4, General Denikin resigned from the army command, passing it on to General Wrangel, whose final campaign against the Red Army resulted in his forces’ defeat and their evacuation from Russia in November of that year. 45. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 8. 46. V. D. Nabokov, “British Liberalism and Russia,” 9. 47. Alekseeva, Poslednee desiatiletie Rossiiskoi Imperii, 404. 48. Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver, 59, 254–59. 49. See V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 7; Carlyle, French Revolution, 218–19. 50. «К сведению «товарищей»—если им попадется эта книга»; Chukovsky, Chukokkala, 129. 51. Thus, I. V. Shklovsky (better known by his pen name, Dioneo), when commenting on the Bolshevik Red Terror, quotes Hippolyte Taine’s Les Origines de la France Contemporaine: “Jacobin Government collected its staff and its cadres” from “ignorant and vicious scum.” Shklovsky then remarks: “What was true in 1793 is still more true in 1917–18”; Shklovsky, Russia under the Bolsheviks, 35. V. D. Nabokov echoes Taine’s pronouncement when asserting that “this central dictatorship is tempered by the tyranny of

hundreds of thousands of little local dictators mostly recruited from the scum of society”; V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 6. For more on the subject, see Shapiro, “‘Homeland Stuck to the Skin of My Soles.’” 52. «Вряд ли есть кто-нибудь сейчас во Франции, кто лелеет, как мощи, номер «Mercure de France» от 1789 года. Вряд ли и наши потомки станут лелеять «Известия» и «Правду»—все эти органы комунистических мещан»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Neskol´ko slov ob ubozhestve sovetskoi belletristiki i popytka ustanovit´ prichiny onogo,” 19. 53. Shapiro, Delicate Markers, 106. 54. ««Когда нибудь—и скоро, может быть» мы туда вернемся» [the internal quotation is from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov]; «свирепое торжествующее хамство, одичание и озверение, ежеминутная опасность грубого и беспощадного насилия. Когда-то кн. Е. Н. Трубецкой сравнивал Россию конца прошлого века с дортуаром в участке. Но и такое учреждение—рай, по сравнению с тем загаженным и зачумленным застенком, в который за три года своего владычества большевики превратили Россию»; V. D. Nabokov, “My i Oni.” 55. «Я презираю […] ту уродливую, тупую идейку, которая превращает русских простаков в коммунистических простофиль, которая из людей делает муравьев, новую разновидность, formica marxi var. lenini. […] Я презираю коммунистическую веру, как идею низкого равенства, как скучную страницу в праздничной истории человечества, как отрицание земных и неземных красот, как нечто, глупо посягающее на мое свободное «я», как поощрительницу невежества, тупости и самодовольства. […] И не только десять лет презрения…. Десять лет верности празднуем мы. Мы верны России не только так, как бываешь верен воспоминанию, не только любим ее, как любишь убежавшее детство, улетевшую юность,—нет, мы верны той России, которой могли гордиться, России, создавшейся медленно и мерно и бывшей огромной державой среди других огромных держав. […] И заодно мы празднуем десять лет свободы. […] В эти дни, когда празднуется серый, эсэсэсерный [sic] юбилей, мы празднуем десять лет презрения, верности и свободы» (Ssoch 2:645–47). In the original, the abbreviation is spelled out «эсэсэсерый»; see Rul´, November 18, 1927, 2. In translation, I added the “g” in “SSS(g)Ray” to preserve Nabokov’s wordplay, which underscores the drab nature of the USSR (SSSR). 56. For a detailed analysis of this essay and for references to Nabokov’s other political writings, see Heller, “Nabokov i politika.” 57. See Vladimir Nabokov, review of Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, 3. 58. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 4. 59. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 7. For a discussion of Nabokov’s exposure of the ills of the Soviet totalitarianism, primarily in Invitation to a Beheading, see Toker, “‘Who Was Becoming Seasick?’” 60. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 7. 61. I have to disagree with Zoran Kuzmanovich, who, in his otherwise most perceptive article, compares David’s death to that of children who perished in the Holocaust; see Kuzmanovich, “Suffer the Little Children,” 57. There is an essential difference: the Paduk regime tortures and kills David to coerce his father into collaborating, whereas the Nazis murdered Jewish children for merely being Jewish. For more on the subject, see Sommers, “The ‘Right’ versus the ‘Wrong’ Child.” 62. V. D. Nabokov, “British Liberalism and Russia,” 8. 63. Nabokov, “What Faith Means to a Resisting People.” For the complete text, see appendix 3. 64. «одним из самых жгучих вопросов общественной жизни»; V. D. Nabokov, “K istorii obnovlennogo zakonodatel´stva o pechati,” 42. 65. «Тяжела и безотрадна картина положения, в котором находилась русская печать в течение всего прошлого века»; V. D. Nabokov, “K istorii obnovlennogo zakonodatel´stva o pechati,” 25. 66. «Над печатью поднят уже не административный кулак, а меч правосудия, но есть ли это преимущество, когда новые карательные правила о печати вложили в руку слишком зрячей русской Фемиды заведомо фальшивые весы?»; V. D. Nabokov, “Krovavyi god,” 316. 67. «она оказалась в положении гораздо более безотрадном, чем прежде. За период с 25-го декабря по 25-е января закрыто семьдесят восемь периодических изданий и арестовано пятьдесят восемь редакторов»; V. D. Nabokov, “Vnutrenniaia voina,” 518.

68. «те внешние формы, в которых только и может проявиться свобода печати: полная и безусловная отмена предварительной цензуры, […] полная отмена системы административных взысканий»; V. D. Nabokov, “K istorii obnovlennogo zakonodatel´stva o pechati,” 4. 69. «редактор-издатель «Вестника» В. Д. Набоков привлечен к судебной ответственности […] за перепечатку заметки информативного характера; затем градоначальник потребовал устранения В. Д. Набокова от ответственного редактирования журнала по случаю привлечения его по делу о Выборгском воззвании. Наконец, в нынешнем году за статьи, напечатанные в № 23–24 и 25–26 […], градоначальник наложил на редактора «Вестника» штраф в размере 1000 рублей»; Shelokhaev et al., S´´ezdy i konferentsii, 1:549. 70. Samuel, Blood Accusation, 244. 71. See Itenberg and Shelokhaev, Rossiiskie liberaly, 329. 72. See Kanishcheva, “Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich,” 390; Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 240. 73. See Pozhigailo, Zakonotvorchestvo dumskikh fraktsii, 481. 74. «отказаться от опеки правительства над словом и мыслью, создать правовое положение печати, осуществить одну из важнейших форм политической свободы»; V. D. Nabokov, “K istorii obnovlennogo zakonodatel´stva o pechati,” 7. 75. See S[c]hruba, Literaturnye ob´´edineniia Moskvy i Peterburga 1890–1917 godov, 40. 76. The decree “About the Press” («О печати»), dated April 27, appeared under the rubric “The Government’s Actions. Decrees of the Provisional Government” («Действия Правительства. Постановления Временного Правительства»). The first paragraph of the decree states, “The press and trade of its printed works are free. Subjecting them to administrative penalties is not allowed” («Печать и торговля произведениями печати свободны. Применение к ним административных взысканий не допускается»); Pravo, May 30 (June 12), 1917, 932. 77. «Мы и раньше заявляли, что закроем буржуазные газеты, если возьмем власть в руки. Терпеть существование этих газет—значит перестать быть социалистом»; cited in Blium, Russkie pisateli o tsenzure i tsenzorakh, 317–18. 78. See Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 294. 79. See Blium, Russkie pisateli o tsenzure i tsenzorakh, 324. 80. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 5–6. 81. «та растворенная в воздухе, тяжелая, таинственная цензура, которая является, я бы сказал, удивительным, пожалуй, единственным талантливым достижением советской власти», «вера в исторические катаклизмы, классовое мировосприятие, узость поля зрения, некультурность, цензура—суть несомненные и главные причины временного упадка российской литературы»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Neskol´ko slov ob ubozhestve sovetskoi belletristiki,” 20. 82. See Blium, “‘Poetik belyi, Sirin…,’” 199. 83. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 441–43. 84. For a detailed description of this incident, see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 255–56. 85. For this postscript in English translation, see Vladimir Nabokov, “Postscript,” esp. 191–92. 86. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 293. On the history of Lolita’s publication, see Feeney, “Lolita and Censorship,” 67–74, 90; Sova, Banned Books, 107–11; Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake, 187–220. See also Vladimir and Véra Nabokov Publishing Correspondence, Collection no. 4627, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY, http://rmc.library.cornell.edu /ead/htmldocs/RMM04627.html. 87. Itenberg and Shelokhaev, Rossiiskie liberaly, 330. 88. V. D. Nabokov, “Kishinevskaia krovavaia bania,” 1285. For the complete text of the article in both the original Russian and in an English translation, see appendix 1. 89. «Боязнь быть обвиненным в еврейском прислужничестве была так сильна, что статья по еврейскому вопросу заставляла морщиться редакторов и некоторых демократических газет. В такое именно время, он, камер-юнкер и сын бывшего министра, выступил с известной статьей в «Праве» по поводу Кишиневского погрома»; Buzhansky, “V. D. Nabokov.” 90. «Статья произвела неизгладимое впечатление и о ней говорил «весь Петербург »»; Gessen, “Let sorok nazad,” 5. 91. «Благородному автору статьи «Кишиневская кровавая баня», незабвенному В. Д. Набокову»;

Anon., “Pogrebenie V. D. Nabokova,” 2. The first portion of the article is signed Bor. Or., presumably Boris Orechkin. The asterisked second portion that contains the wreath description is anonymous. Only two years before his death, V. D. Nabokov strongly condemned pogroms in the civil war torn Russia; see V. D. Nabokov, “A Distressing Problem.” 92. See V. D. Nabokov, “Rech´ pri vnesenii zaprosa o Belostokskom pogrome” and “Otvet Ministru Vnutrennikh Del Stolypinu po povodu zaprosa ob uchastii administratsii v ustroistve pogromov,” in V. D. Nabokov, Rechi, 17–18, 19–26. 93. «надо убрать прежде всего ротмистра Пышкина»; «чтобы были на всегда из русской жизни вырваны господа ротмистры Пышкины»; V. D. Nabokov, Rechi, 26. 94. In the original Russian, this line, taken from Pushkin’s poem “Exegi monumentum” (1836), reads, «И милость к падшим призывал»; Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3:424. 95. «За несколько дней до отъезда моего в Киев на защиту Бейлиса, зашел ко мне Владимир Дмитриевич. Раздумчиво, как бы проверяя себя, он заговорил о своих сомнениях: ехать ли ему на этот процесс?—Редакция «Речи» пошлет своих лучших сотрудников; здесь он нужен по редакционным, партийным, общественным и личным делам; ему тяжело расстаться на долгий срок со всей семьею—и, все же, что-то говорит ему, что должен ехать. Мы обменялись мыслями—и Владимир Дмитриевич поехал в Киев»; Gruzenberg, “Moia pamiatka o V. D. Nabokove,” 162. 96. «Не любовь к Бейлису, а отвращение к некультурным приемам Щегловитовых и Замысловских внушило ему его вдохновенные корреспонденции из Киева при разборе ритуального процесса»; Pasmanik, Revoliutsionnye gody v Krymu, 93–94. Ivan Shcheglovitov was minister of justice and the main instigator of the Beilis case; Georgy Zamyslovsky was the chief prosecutor at the trial. 97. «С первых же дней судебного заседания, когда сразу почувствовалось тугое напряжение беспощадной борьбы, Набоков преобразился. […] Лицо его осунулось, расширенные глаза глянули на меня с такой тоской, болью и обидою, что меня охватила болезненная радость: я—не один, со мною—соподсудимый, созащитник, сострадалец. С того дня стало для меня потребностью, затяжкою крепкого табаку отыскивать, в особенно тяжелые минуты процесса, его глаза. Я ловил в них ужас, боль. […] Все минуты до и после заседания, во все перерывы, Набоков с бесконечным терпением, сердечной теплотой старался меня поддержать, поделиться ценными наблюдениями и мыслями, успокоить. А сам, меж тем, он становился все бледнее и печальнее»; Gruzenberg, “Moia pamiatka o V. D. Nabokove,” 162–63. V. D. Nabokov’s and O. O. Gruzenberg’s professional collaboration and amicable relations go back a long way. In his article on Gruzenberg, Nabokov senior mentions their coediting the crime section of Law back in 1898–1901; see V. D. Nabokov, “Gruzenberg, Oskar Osipovich.” I am indebted to Vladimir Khazan (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for drawing my attention to this source. 98. Here is another occasion, this time a happy one—his election to the First Duma—on which Vladimir Dmitrievich did not maintain his cool demeanor. Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams reports that “S. M. Rostovtseva, the wife of the famous historian, who most diligently conducted the Kadet election campaign in her Admiralty district, described with her habitual humor how the worldly, elegant V. D. Nabokov burst into her living room with an exclamation: ‘Elected!’ He was in such rapture that not only did he not wait for a chambermaid to announce him but even forgot to take off his muddy galoshes and sullied the Rostovtsevs’ expensive light-colored carpet” («С. М. Ростовцева, жена знаменитого историка, которая очень усердно вела в своем Адмиралтейском районе кадетскую предвыборную кампанию, с обычным своим юмором описывала, как светский, изящный В. Д. Набоков ворвался в ее гостиную с восклицанием:—Выбрали! Он был в таком восторге, что не только не дождался, чтобы горничная о нем доложила, но даже забыл снять грязные калоши и перепачкал дорогой, светлый ковер Ростовцевых»); Tyrkova-Williams, To, chego bol´she ne budet, 393. 99. «В итоге получается такая картина: фантастическая, невероятная, нелепая история похищения ребенка среди бела дня, на глазах у кучи других детей,—история, переданная в различных редакциях, исходящих от темных и недостоверных лиц; непроверенное, ничем не подкрепленное указание на Бейлиса; множество данных, указывающих, где следует искать истинных виновников; а на первом плане—грозный «кровавый навет» и весь антисемитский фейерверк.»; V. D. Nabokov, “Dva obvinitel´nykh akta (Delo Beilisa),” 2702. 100. «И когда приходится читать слова о необходимости отделения суда от политики, о

независимости судебной, о всех качествах истинного правосудия,—а в ушах еще звучат отголоски дела Бейлиса,—становится и стыдно, и больно»; V. D. Nabokov, “Ugolovnoe pravosudie,” 88. 101. «Помню одну карикатуру, на которой от него и от многозубого котоусого Милюкова благодарное Мировое Еврейство (нос и бриллианты) принимает блюдо с хлеб-солью—матушку Россию»; Ssoch 5:267–68. 102. «Еще не все! Еще барон Ротшильд несет блестящее доказательство!» 103. Gessen, Gody izgnaniia, 69. 104. See Shrayer, “Jewish Questions,” 75, 90; Gessen, Gody izgnaniia, 70. 105. See V. D. Nabokov, Provisional Government, 121, 80. I offer in square brackets more literal renditions of certain locutions. The passages in the original read: «Через некоторое время пришел Урицкий. Как сейчас помню эту отвратительную фигуру плюгавого человечка со шляпой на голове, с наглой еврейской физиономией…. Он также потребовал, чтобы мы разошлись, и пригрозил пустить в ход оружие»; «Главным действующим лицом в этих заседаниях был Стеклов. Я впервые тогда с ним познакомился, не подозревал ни того, что он еврей, ни того, что за его благозвучным псевдонимом скрывается отнюдь не благозвучная подлинная фамилия. Тем не менее, конечно, могла быть известна история,—впоследствии раскрытая Л. Львовым,—о том, к каким униженным всеподданнейшим ходатайствам прибегал Нахамкис для того, чтобы «легализовать» свой псевдоним и официально заменить им свою подлинную фамилию. Но как бы то ни было, с первой же встречи на меня произвела отвратительное впечатление его манера, вполне подходящая к фамилии, в которой как-то органически сочетаются «нахал» и «хам»»; V. D. Nabokov, Vremennoe pravitel´stvo i bol´shevistskii perevorot, 174, 116. 106. Nabokov recurrently mentions Steklov-Nakhamkes, the author of the two-volume centenary biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1928), in Chapter Four of The Gift (see 228–30, 264). 107. For the majority of Jews “active in the ranks of Bolshevism” being dubbed “semi-intellectuals,” see Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 102. 108. I must therefore take Dana Dragunoiu to task for her assertion that “some scattered comments in The Provisional Government give credence to Pearson’s observation that V. D. Nabokov’s ‘covert antiSemitism’ was an open secret among his acquaintances” (Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism, 179–80). Dragunoiu bases her assertion on Raymond Pearson’s contention in his “Nashe Pravitel´stvo?” In this article, Pearson relates the following anecdote: when Alexander Kerensky considered Maxim Vinaver for the post of minister of justice in September 1917, V. D. Nabokov allegedly “made his oft-repeated remark about the cabinet of the Provisional Government starting to resemble the Sanhedrin (a factor in Vinaver’s deciding to decline the post)” (17–18). Pearson completely misconstrues the facts. It was Mark Vishniak, not V. D. Nabokov, who used the term Sanhedrin with regard to the Council of Elders, not the Provisional Government. Vishniak asserts that V. D. Nabokov misunderstood his remark in which he had referred to beards and gray hair of some of the council’s members, not to their ethnicity. But it is not too hard to see why V. D. Nabokov took Vishniak’s remark as ethnically related: Sanhedrin, an assembly of judges in biblical Israel, has obvious Jewish connotations, not to mention that “the overwhelming majority [of the council] were Jews”; see Vishniak, Dan´ proshlomu, 18; V. D. Nabokov, Provisional Government, 100. This anecdote by no means evinces V. D. Nabokov’s “covert anti-Semitism.” In addition to misconstruing the Sanhedrin episode, Pearson further bases his claim on the personal communication of Valentina Cremer, Vinaver’s eldest daughter, which cannot be verified, and on G. B. Sliozberg’s memoir. The latter, however, makes no mention of V. D. Nabokov at all, and the page referenced by Pearson has no relevance whatsoever to the incident in question; see Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei, 3:158. Toward the end of his memoir, Sliozberg speaks of Vinaver’s appointment as senator but says nothing about his being considered for the minister of justice portfolio (3:358–59). So much for Pearson’s insinuation that V. D. Nabokov’s “covert anti-Semitism was well-known” and for Dragunoiu’s pronouncement that it “was an open secret.” It is regrettable that Dragunoiu chose to repeat Pearson’s defamatory remark rather than to check the facts herself. Pearson’s bias against V. D. Nabokov and ignorance of his life are manifest in his describing the Russian statesman’s tragic death as “getting in the way—altruistically or accidentally—of a bullet intended for Miliukov”; Pearson, “Nashe Pravitel´stvo?,” 18. Pearson should have known that V. D. Nabokov died while shielding Miliukov from the assassins and not from a stray bullet. 109. See Margulies, God interventsii, 2:77. Although the book was published after V. D. Nabokov’s death,

this information—it appears under the entry for June 6, 1918—was, in all likelihood, widely known in the Kadet Party circles to which both Nabokov senior and Margulies belonged. Margulies was V. D. Nabokov’s longtime acquaintance: while in Kresty prison, Nabokov senior secretly passed letters to his wife via various people, including Margulies. In his May 21, 1908, letter to her, V. D. Nabokov writes, “I understood (but also knew) that you received my first letter; probably also the second one sent through Margulies” («Я понял (да и знал, впрочем), что ты мое первое письмо получила; вероятно и второе, посланное через Маргулиеса»); V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene,” 268. Contacts between the two continued: Margulies met with Vladimir Dmitrievich in London in December 1919; see Margulies, God interventsii, 3:146–47, 153–54. 110. Boyd points out that Nabokov identified Richard Austen Butler “as the man behind the Nesbit mask”; see Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 168. 111. «Еврейский вопрос был одним их постоянных напоминаний о грехах самодержавия, одной из помех для более примирительного отношения к власти. Политика власти в еврейском вопросе шла вразрез с нашими понятиями о справедливости, о человечности»; Tyrkova-Williams, To, chego bol´she ne budet, 428. 112. «жидовская газета»; Blok, Dnevnik, 91, 379 n. 128. Although the anti-Semitic portions of Blok’s diary had not become public in the 1930s, when Nabokov composed the story, he could have known about them at the time. Roman Gul´ recalls that Il´ya Gruzdev, who was preparing Blok’s diaries for publication in the 1920s, told him that they teemed with “out-and-out anti-Semitism” («густопсовый антисемитизм»); Gul´, Ia unes Rossiiu, 1:278. 113. For Nabokov’s detailed discussion of poshlost´, see NG 63–74. John Shade, evidently expressing his creator’s opinion, “said that more than anything on earth he loathed Vulgarity and Brutality, and that one found these two ideally united in racial prejudice” (PF 217). 114. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 400. 115. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 311–12. 116. See Appel, “Remembering Nabokov,” 23. 117. «Душка моя, как ни хочется спрятаться в свою башенку из слоновой кости, есть вещи, которые язвят слишком глубоко, напр немецкие мерзости, сжигание детей в печах,—детей, столь же упоительно забавных и любимых, как наши дети. Я ухожу в себя, но там нахожу такую ненависть к немцу, к конц. лагерю, ко всякому тиранству, что как убежище ce n’est pas grand’chose» (Perepiska 41). 118. In the novel’s Russian version, Nabokov further underscores the boy’s Jewishness by altering his name to “Fleishman, Moisei” (LoR 41). 119. For a discussion of anti-Semitism in Lolita, see Mizruchi, “Lolita in History”; Belletto, “Of Pickaninnies and Nymphets.” Most recently, it has been suggested that “if Humbert is Jewish, he is a Wandering Jew of the post-Holocaust era.” See Pitzer, Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, 256. 120. The Nabokovs left France for the United States around May 19, 1940, less than a month before Paris—their last residence in the war-torn Europe—fell to the Nazis on June 14. For the approximate date of the Nabokovs’ departure, see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 522. 121. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 521. 122. For a perceptive analysis of Lolita in its relation to the Holocaust, see Anderson, “Nabokov’s Genocidal and Nuclear Holocausts”; Brodsky, “Nabokov’s Lolita”; Mizruchi, “Lolita in History.” 123. Since Pnin’s party takes place in September 1954 (see Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact, 298), Hagen must have arrived in America in 1925. 124. Field, VN, 104. For a detailed discussion of the Holocaust in Pnin, see Shrayer, “Jewish Questions,” esp. 83–87; Sommers, “The ‘Right’ versus the ‘Wrong’ Child,” esp. 45–50. 125. Dmitri Nabokov, “Laura Is Not Even the Original’s Name,” 68 (The Goalkeeper, 190–91). 126. See Malysheva, “Praded Nabokova,” 132. 127. For Nabokov’s friendship and correspondence with Samuil Rozov, see Leving, “Palestinskoe pis´mo V. Nabokova”; Leving, “Samuel Izrailevich.” «Помните, Вы всегда над моим сионизмом смеялись!»; see Leving and Shrayer, “‘V svoikh knigakh Vy prodolzhaete okunat´sia v ledianuiu glubinu,’” 203. 128. Cited in Leving, “Samuel Izrailevich,” 16. 129. As cited in Leving, “Nabokov’s Jewish Family.”

130. See Leving, “Phantom in Jerusalem”; Goldman, “Nabokov’s Minyan,” 267–68.

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THREE Literature Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian, French—than in any other five-year period of my life. […] I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with large library. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions Pushkin and Tolstoy, Tiutchev and Gogol rose up in the four corners of my world. —Vladimir Nabokov, Other Shores1 I am also aware that my father was responsible for my appreciating very early in life the thrill of a great poem. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was a great aficionado and connoisseur of literature. His diverse literary interests are manifest in his voluminous library at the St. Petersburg family residence, which contained, alongside professional books, belles lettres in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and other languages.2 A passionate bibliophile, Vladimir Dmitrievich possessed broad literary erudition. This is confirmed by even such an unfavorably inclined memoirist as Kornei Chukovsky. Chukovsky, who collaborated with V. D. Nabokov in the daily Speech, reports that Nabokov senior “knew [works of] literature by heart, especially foreign ones; in the newspaper Speech they were so certain of Page 97 → his know-it-all nature that they would turn to him for references […]: where is this citation from? In what century did such-and-such a German poet live? And Nabokov would answer.”3 In Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls that his father “knew à fond the prose and poetry of several countries, knew by heart hundreds of verses (his favorite Russian poets were Pushkin, Tyutchev, and Fet—he published a fine essay on the latter), was an authority on Dickens” (177). Page 98 → Nabokov senior's love for and knowledge of literature and his organizational talents earned him great respect among Russian literati: he served as secretary, deputy president (1909–12), and president (1912–14) of the Literary Fund.4 In addition, between 1912 and 1914, V. D. Nabokov was a member of the All-Russian Literary Society.5 V. D. Nabokov's great love for literature and his enormous literary erudition set an inspiring example for his son. Nabokov's interest in literature took shape, to a great extent, under the influence and through the encouragement of his father. As the writer recalls, “in my boyhood I was an extraordinarily avid reader. By the age of 14 or 15 I had read or re-read all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English, and all Flaubert in French—besides hundreds of other books” (SO 46). These hundreds of others included “the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, […] Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, […] and Alexander Blok” (42–43). Page 99 → It should be noted, however, that the father and the son had some differences in their literary tastes. For example, Nabokov senior “prized highly Stendhal, Balzac, and Zola,” whereas Nabokov considered them “three detestable mediocrities” (SM 177). He went on to describe Balzac and Stendhal as “mediocre and overrated” and derided “Balzac's absurdities and Stendhal's clichés” (SO 266). While it is difficult to ascertain whether the father's and son's views on any given writer differed from the very start or whether the differences of opinion evolved over the years, Nabokov's attitude toward Dostoevsky seems to belong to the latter case. Over time, his perception of the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers

Karamazov underwent a considerable change. Vladimir Dmitrievich thought highly of Dostoevsky, calling him a “great artist.”6 As a youngster, most probably under the influence of his father, Nabokov, too, held the writer in high esteem. Nabokov recalls that when he “must have been twelve,” he “read Crime and Punishment for the first time and thought it a wonderfully powerful and exciting book,” but when he “read it again at nineteen,” he “thought it long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written” (LRL 110). While denying Dostoevsky's works any literary merit, Nabokov nevertheless perceived them at that time as prophetic and spoke of Dostoevsky in his 1919 poem so titled as the one who “in his prophetic delirium / […] outlined our calamitous age.”7 In another poem, with the opening line “Through the garden walked Christ with his disciples…” (“Sadom shel Khristos s uchenikami…,” 1921), Nabokov seems to polemicize with Dostoevsky by juxtaposing Christ—the paragon of a genuine artist, who not only pays close attention to the minutiae of details but sees beauty where ordinary people do not—with his disciples: while looking at the carcass of a dog, the apostles assert that “Evil was the dog” and find its death “bare and abominable,” whereas Jesus simply remarks that “its teeth are like pearls.”8 Here Nabokov drives home the point that unlike Dostoevsky, whose Page 100 → dialogues “are generally free from any intercalations used by other writers—the mention of a gesture, a look, or any detail referring to the background” (LRL 129), a true artist cannot rely on platitudes and generalities and ought to pay close attention to so-called trifles and to see attractive features in unprepossessing, commonly perceived things. In a November 6, 1921, letter to his mother, Nabokov writes, “Today my Muse broke her fast with a poem whose message is: it is possible to detect beauty even in unsightliness.”9 In his lecture draft, “Dostoevsky without Dostoevskianism,” Nabokov focuses on The Brothers Karamazov. He calls the fictional universe of the novel “a bright world, illumined by oblique light, a dubious world; […] a dangerous world where dim paths lead away from a not very wide high road of fantasy into rationality.” At the same time, he concludes the lecture on a note of approval: “And yet a captivating [crossed out], alluring [crossed out], extraordinary and curious world.”10 Later, presumably under the influence of Grigory Landau's seminal article “Theses against Dostoevsky” (“Tezisy protiv Dostoevskogo,” 1932), Nabokov sharpened his negative attitude toward the writer.11 For example, after rereading Dostoevsky's works in 1946, Nabokov found him to be “a third-rate writer and his fame incomprehensible” (NWL 197). Nabokov also calls him “a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian” (SO 42) and dubs his oeuvre “melodramatic muddle and phony mysticism,” singling out for scorn his “worst novels”—“The Karamazov Brothers and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole” (SO 266, 148). Nabokov explained his attitude toward Dostoevsky in his Cornell lectures: “My position in regard to Dostoevski is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me—namely the point of view of Page 101 → enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between” (LRL 98). Although denying Dostoevsky's works literary merit, Nabokov, as can be seen, praises his “flashes of excellent humor” and singles out The Possessed for its “delightful skit on Turgenev” (LRL 129). He also admits that had Dostoevsky written plays, he would have been “Russia's greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels” (104). Nabokov exemplifies his point with The Brothers Karamazov, which he describes as “a straggling play, with just that amount of furniture and other implements needed for the various actors: a round table with the wet, round trace of a glass, a window painted yellow to make it look as if there were sunlight outside, or a shrub hastily brought in and plumped down by a stagehand” (104). We are mindful that Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev considers as “worth saving” the first example of The Brothers Karamazov's stage props, although he describes it somewhat differently: “a circular mark left by a wet wine glass on an outdoor table” (Gift 72–73).12 When mentioning contemporary Russian writers he admired, Nabokov senior named Maxim Gorky as one of “the greatest among them.”13 Nabokov, conversely, maintained that “as a creative artist, Gorki is of little importance” (LRL 304). Apparently that is why he gave Gorky's name and patronymic—“Alexéy Maximovich”—to one of the chief personages of his play, The Event, Troshchéykin, a mediocre artist (USSR 126). When referring to Gorky's story, “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl,” Nabokov calls it “utterly false and sentimental” (LRL 305). He goes on to

say, “A closer examination reveals that the story is as traditional and flat as the worst examples of the old school of sentimental and melodramatic writing. There is not a single live word in it, not a single sentence that is not ready-made; it is all pink candy with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive” (306). It is noteworthy that in his correspondence with Edmund Wilson, Nabokov acknowledges that his views on Gorky, albeit less drastically than on Dostoevsky, changed somewhat over time. On July 23, 1948, Nabokov writes that “Gorky is C+ in his fiction, but attains almost A− in his memoirs about Tolstoy, etc.” (NWL 231), but shortly afterward, he hastens to correct his juvenile impression of Gorky the memoirist: Page 102 → “Have reread Gorki's non-fiction stuff (on Tolsto, etc. […]) and, yebi (alas), find it as poor as the rest of his output—though I remember liking the Tolsto bits in my youth” (232). Even though their literary tastes differed somewhat, there is no doubt that V. D. Nabokov instilled in his son a lifelong love for literature and was responsible for his many literary predilections, especially for Shakespeare, Dickens, Wells, and Flaubert as well as Pushkin, Tiutchev, Fet, and Blok. In assessing the role of his father in his aesthetic education, Nabokov avers, “I am also aware that my father was responsible for my appreciating very early in life the thrill of a great poem” (SO 46). Vladimir Dmitrievich offered encouragement and advice to his son at the beginning of his literary career. Nabokov senior prompted him to continue working on the translation of Romain Rolland's Colas Breugnon—Nikolka Persik in Nabokov's Russian rendition. Thus, Vladimir Dmitrievich writes on October 16, 1920, “Still try not to give up ‘Persik’ to the extent possible. Fiacre Bolacre [the chapter that contains this character] is translated well in the second redaction.” He also offers some criticism concerning the young Nabokov's poetry: “Mommy has received today your letter with the verses (where there is ‘balmoch´’). She has already copied them. We found that they were good in places, but in general somehow lack unity of mood and thought. But that's all right, keep your spirits up.”14 In spite of some differences in taste, Nabokov greatly valued his father's literary counsel. Writing to Véra on January 3, 1924, Nabokov notes regarding The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, “For some reason, I am very touchy concerning this piece. But with what delight did I read it to two people—to you and the other day to mother. The third person who understood each comma and appreciated the trifles dear to me was my father.”15 As an Anglophile, Vladimir Dmitrievich was understandably well versed in English literature. The senior Nabokov loved Shakespeare and cites from the English bard's works in his writings. Thus, he quotes from Hamlet in his lecture-essay on the future of Russia.16 His library contained the J. M. Dent Page 103 → multivolume edition of Shakespeare's works, perhaps the best of its time. Nabokov seconded his father's enthusiasm for England's greatest man of letters (see Ssoch 5:270), with whom the Russian-born writer proudly shared a birthday (April 23) and whose works he knew remarkably well. The reflection of this superb knowledge of Shakespeare's life and works can be found throughout his literary legacy, from an early poem “Shakespeare” (“Shekspir,” 1924) to The Enchanter (Volshebnik, written 1939), from Bend Sinister (1947) to Lolita (1955) to Pale Fire (1962).17 Nabokov also translated into Russian two of Shakespeare's sonnets and three scenes from Hamlet (see Stikhotvoreniia 370–75). Among the nineteenth-century English classic authors, Vladimir Dmitrievich especially favored Charles Dickens, becoming an expert, or as Nabokov calls him, “an authority” (SM 177), on his works. Nabokov senior's library contained thirty-seven entries under the writer's name, including the forty-volume centennial commemorative National Library Edition—the largest number of works by any writer in the collection.18 In his May 15, 1950, letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov informs his friend, “I think I told you once that my father had read every word Dickens wrote” (NWL 273). V. D. Nabokov penned articles on the occasion of Dickens's centenary and later contributed a chapter on the English writer to the multivolume History of Western Literature (Istoriia zapadnoi literatury).19 Chukovsky confirms V. D. Nabokov's expert knowledge of Dickens, recalling that the senior Nabokov “had a special game: to enumerate all the names of Dickens's characters—nearly three hundred of them. He competed with me. I was exhausted after the first hundred.”20 While recognizing V. D. Nabokov's supreme knowledge of Dickens, Chukovsky nonetheless made some unflattering remarks about the acumen of his literary insights. Presumably upset that F. D. Batiushkov approached the senior Nabokov to write the Dickens chapter, and not him, Chukovsky calls his rival's articles, specifically those on Dickens, “sentimental and soulless

compilations.”21 This fallacious and mean-spirited assertion, Page 104 → which Chukovsky made in his diary upon learning of V. D. Nabokov's tragic death, unmasks his true nature—envious, callous, and petty-minded. There is good reason to call Chukovsky's pronouncement into question. As Alexander Kizevetter, a distinguished historian, recalls, Petr Boborykin, a notable novelist, playwright, and literary critic, gives an altogether different account of V. D. Nabokov's aptitude for literary analysis. According to Kizevetter, Boborykin remembered meeting Vladimir Dmitrievich, a recent graduate of St. Petersburg University, at a literary gathering where Nabokov senior had given a lecture on the works of Dickens. “This lecture made such an impression on Boborykin by the originality of thoughts expressed in it that the eminent belletrist recalled this evening many years later with the liveliest pleasure.”22 Boborykin's opinion carries considerable weight since he was well versed in the history of Western European literature and later wrote a monograph on its nineteenth-century fiction in which he called Dickens “the coryphaeus of the nineteenth-century English novel” and a writer of “enormous talents.”23 Vladimir Dmitrievich did his utmost to share his enthusiasm for Dickens with his children. Nabokov recalls that his father, “an expert on Dickens, at one time read to us, children, aloud, chunks of Dickens, in English, of course” (NWL 268). These readings instilled in Nabokov a lasting admiration for the English novelist. In his Cornell lectures on Bleak House, Nabokov says, “With Dickens we expand. […] In the case of Dickens the values are new. Modern authors still get drunk on his vintage. […] We just surrender ourselves to Dickens's voice—that is all. If it were possible I would like to devote the fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens” (LL 63–64). Nabokov's great familiarity with and fondness for the works of Dickens, inculcated by his father, served him well in his teaching. Thus when commenting on the phrase “That gentleman in Dickens” from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Nabokov writes with specificity, “The reference is to the pompous and smug Mr. John Podsnap in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, which had first appeared in London in twenty monthly parts from May 1864 to November 1865” (LRL 223). Page 105 → Nabokov senior was very fond of Dickens but nonetheless was well aware of the shortcomings of his prose. He calls the English writer “a magician” and “a gripping storyteller” but at the same time notes “the improbability of the plot, and artificiality of many situations, and affectedness of senses, and frequent excesses of style.”24 Echoing his father, Nabokov also praises Dickens with some reservations, pointing out the English writer's shortcomings: “Dickens is a good moralist, a good storyteller, and a superb enchanter, but as a storyteller he lags somewhat behind his other virtues. In other words, he is supremely good at picturing his characters and their habitats in any given situation, but there are flaws in his work when he tries to establish various links between these characters in a pattern of action” (LL 123). V. D. Nabokov's love for and great knowledge of Dickens enabled him to incorporate the English writer's precepts into his discussions of legal matters. Thus, when commenting on the penitentiary system in Prison Pastimes, Vladimir Dmitrievich writes, “During his American trip in the 1830s, Charles Dickens saw such prisons. A deep reader of the human heart and a truly humane thinker, he was horrified by them and painted them in striking and stark colors in his American sketches.”25 As I demonstrated in chapter 1, Invitation to a Beheading, which in itself constitutes, among other things, a strong condemnation of the existing penitentiary system with its full endorsement of capital punishment, was written under the influence of Nabokov senior's strong stance on the subject. This stance, reflected in his numerous articles and specifically in Prison Pastimes, was shaped to a certain degree by Dickens's position on this issue. This novel contains a curious example of an allusion to Dickens that, in all likelihood, came about by way of V. D. Nabokov's Prison Pastimes. In his American Notes, Dickens provides a detailed description of the Philadelphia city prison, which he visited in 1842. It is very possible that Nabokov borrowed the following detail, ominous in its symbolism, from Dickens's description of the Page 106 → Philadelphia penitentiary to which his father refers in his prison memoir: “Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house a black

hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until the whole term of imprisonment has expired.”26 This hood emerges in Nabokov's dystopia in the chapter describing the traditional pre-execution supper. When walking to this final meal, accompanied by M'sieur Pierre, Cincinnatus removes the hood from his head but pulls it back up at the executioner's insistence: “(on the bridge Cincinnatus had turned, freeing his head from the hood of his cloak: the blue, elaborate, many-towered, huge bulk of the fortress rose into the dull sky, where a cloud had barred an apricot moon. The dark air above the bridge blinked and twitched because of the bats. ‘You promised…, ’ whispered M'sieur Pierre, giving him a slight squeeze on the elbow, and Cincinnatus again pulled on his cowl)” (181). Although the color of the hood is not indicated, it is apparently black, as are the rest of the clothes worn by the death-sentenced Cincinnatus: “the black skullcap,” “the black dressing gown,” and “the black slippers with pompons” (25) as well as the traditionally black “Elsinore jackets” (or with a more pronounced Shakespearean allusion in the original Russian, gamletovki) (182; Ssoch 4:159), in which both Cincinnatus and his antipode, M'sieur Pierre, are clad. The hood episode demonstrates once again that the protagonist is not yet strong enough to defy his executioner. Cincinnatus gathers the resolve only toward the final scene of the novel, in which he refuses to obey M'sieur Pierre and his minions. Overall, it appears that the Dickensian imagery found its way into Nabokov's novel by means of his father's prison memoirs. Another nineteenth-century English writer who deserves our attention is the Irish-born Oscar Wilde. V. D. Nabokov's library contained Wilde's numerous works, among them the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray; the plays An Ideal Husband and Salomé (in German translation); the fairy tale and the story collections The Happy Prince, A House of Pomegranates, and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime; the essays The Soul of Man under Socialism (in French translation) and De profundis; as well as Epigrams and Aphorisms.27 Page 107 → We recall that Nabokov recounted his father's funny anecdote about Chukovsky's inquiry to King George V regarding “the works of Oscar Wilde—‘dze ooarks of OOald.’” Not realizing that the king perhaps did not respond to his query simply because he “was baffled by his interrogator's accent and […], anyway, was not a voracious reader,” “Chukovsky used to cite this triumphantly as an example of British cant—tabooing a writer because of his morals” (SM 254–55). Although Chukovsky categorically denied that the incident ever took place, the veracity of his denial may be called into question.28 As we shall see in chapter 4, Vladimir Dmitrievich was quite critical of Wilde's dramaturgy for its negative effect on the mind-set of English theatergoers. Although the senior Nabokov did not mention Wilde's prose and poetry, it is probably safe to say that he thought of them along similar lines. It appears that Nabokov on the whole shared his father's negative attitude toward Wilde, as he makes several rather scornful remarks concerning the Irish author's life and work. Already in Despair he sarcastically praises, by way of the novel's protagonist-narrator, a “neurotic scoundrel” “mad Hermann” (xiii, xiv), “that little story in the Oscar Wilde style,” one of “just such tiny tales of the pretty-pretty and slightly licentious sort, forty lines in all, with an elegant point and a sprinkling of what the ignoramus calls paradoxes” (108). Nabokov also speaks of Wilde's “flaunting a flamboyant perversion and getting caught” (SO 119), thereby alluding to the writer's sodomy trials, which led to his hard-labor imprisonment and death. Nabokov reproves George Steiner for “absurdly overestimat[ing] Oscar Wilde's mastery of French” (SO 288) when referring to Wilde's play Salomé. What no doubt irked Nabokov, who was equally at home in Russian and English letters, was that as Steiner argues in his essay, “Oscar Wilde's bi-lingualism may be an expressive enactment of sexual duality, a speech-symbol for the new rights of experiment and instability he claimed for the life of the artist.”29 Nabokov asserts that Wilde, along with “Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton” “are essentially writers for very young people” and views “Wilde and various dainty poets” who promoted “the slogan ‘art for art's sake’” as “rank moralists and didacticists” (SO 57, 33).30 Wilde's aesthetic precepts nevertheless had a certain impact on Nabokov. In his essay “The Decay of Lying,” initially published in 1889 and considerably Page 108 → reworked before being included in his collection,

Intentions (1891), Wilde promulgated several artistic principles that Nabokov later reaffirmed. Wilde stated that “Art never expresses anything but itself. […] All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. […] Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. […] Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”31 Echoing Wilde, Nabokov declares “that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art” (SO 33). Like Wilde, Nabokov thinks little of “general ideas” in works of literature and envisions the “admirable reader [who] is not concerned with general ideas: he is interested in the particular vision” (LRL 11). Nabokov also asserts “literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic” (LRL 166) and that what should be of interest is “not general ideas, but the individual contribution” (SO 33). In the foreword to The Gift, Nabokov envisions its Chapter Four being “rejected for the same reasons that the biography it contains was rejected by Vasiliev”: “a pretty example of life finding itself obliged to imitate the very art it condemns” (Gift i [unpaginated]). Sounding like the author of “The Decay of Lying,” Nabokov insists in one of his interviews that “art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex” (SO 33) and states in his Cornell lectures that, “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. […] Every great writer is a great deceiver” (LL 5). Nabokov intricately alludes to Wilde in Lolita. Humbert drives a car dubbed “Dream Blue Melmoth,” and near the end of the novel, he addresses it, “Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow” (227, 307). Alfred Appel explains that the name of the vehicle, in which Humbert and Lolita wander across America, besides humorously referring to Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, alludes to Wilde's “post-prison pseudonym of ‘Sebastian Melmoth’” (416). (As it happens, Maturin was Wilde's great-uncle by marriage.) In addition to the name of his vehicle, Humbert (as well as his literary kin, Hermann of Despair) may be linked to Wilde by way of their aestheticization of crime, sin, and suffering, a view that Nabokov no doubt found abhorrent.32 Further, Sybil Vane, a character in Nabokov's last English story, “The Vane Sisters,” evokes her namesake in The Picture of Dorian Gray, who also commits suicide. And the name Oscar Nattochdag, a character in Pale Fire, alludes to Oscar Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol: the phrase “night and Page 109 → day,” the English equivalent of the Swedish Natt och Dag, occurs three times in the ballad.33 Yet another English man of letters for whom V. D. Nabokov showed great fondness was Herbert George Wells, fewer than four years his senior. Vladimir Dmitrievich was personally acquainted with Wells: he met the writer during his visit to Russia in 1914 and invited the Englishman to dine at the familial St. Petersburg residence. Nabokov recalls how Zinaida Vengerova, who at the time was translating Wells's works into Russian and who attended the dinner held in his honor, made an embarrassing gaffe when declaring that her favorite novel by the writer was The Lost World, a novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Vladimir Dmitrievich rushed to her rescue: “‘She means the war the Martians lost,’ said my father quickly” (SO 104), referring of course to The War of the Worlds. Two years later, on his trip to England, Nabokov senior returned the visit, vividly describing the sojourn in his travel book.34 V. D. Nabokov's library catalogue contains sixteen entries of H. G. Wells's works.35 Vladimir Dmitrievich spoke highly of Wells as “the author of such remarkable books, now sparkling with fantasy, now astounding with depth of thought, bright, instantaneous outbursts of passion, alternating sarcasm and lyricism.”36 He notes, however, the English writer's “striking prolificacy (which at times is harmful to the completeness and thoughtfulness of his Page 110 → works, especially the later ones).”37 Nabokov senior also points out the utopian nature of Wells's projections for postwar Europe: “Wells thinks that a revolution is possible in Germany in the near future, in conjunction with an overthrow of the Prussian yoke and all its present manifestations. He holds that this would be the best, the most just, and most lasting outcome of the war, and that there is a possibility to promote this. I am afraid he becomes a utopist here…”38 Although Wells guessed right that collapse of the German Empire in the aftermath of World War I would be followed by a revolution, he erred in perceiving this sequence of events as the best option for that country and for the rest of the world. Like his father, Nabokov held Wells the writer in high esteem but dismissed Wells the sociopolitical commentator. By Nabokov's own admission, “A writer for whom I have the deepest admiration is H. G. Wells, especially his romances: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Country of the Blind, The War of the Worlds, and the moon fantasia The First Men on the Moon” (SO 175). Nabokov also admits that “H. G. Wells, a great artist, was my

favorite writer when I was a boy. The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, The Country of the Blind, all these stories are far better than anything Bennett, or Conrad, or, in fact, any of Wells’ contemporaries would produce. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasias are superb” (SO 103–4). This assessment is later echoed in Vadim Vadimovich's comment in Look at the Harlequins! that Wells “was the greatest romancer and magician of our time, but I could not stand his sociological stuff” (22). In one of his last pronouncements, Nabokov praised highly and spoke lovingly, perhaps even nostalgically, about The Passionate Friends, calling it “my most prized example of the unjustly ignored masterpiece. I must have been fourteen or fifteen when I went through its author's fiction after some five winters of tacit access to my father's library. Today at seventy-seven I clearly remember how affected I was by the style, the charm, the cream of the book, while not bothering about its ‘message’ or ‘symbols’ if any. (I have never reread it and now I see it as a coloured haze leaving only some final details—growing a little closer to me in time—still coming through).”39 Page 111 → Nabokov's oeuvre abounds with references and allusions to Wells's fiction. For example, Sebastian Knight's bookshelf contains The Invisible Man (see RLSK 39), which Nabokov had already read in his youth, as the novel was available to him in his father's library,40 and Van Veen calls it a “delightful tale” and “one of the greatest novels of English literature” (Ada 133, 203). In his monograph on Gogol, Nabokov calls attention to “the author's way of stressing this or that circumstance or condition by illustrating it with some striking detail” so that “the picture starts living a life of its own” and exemplifies this observation with Wells's “The Temptation of Harringay” (1895), which he mistakenly calls “The Portrait” after the title of Gogol's eponymous tale (NG 82). When queried whether in chapter 3 of Ada he had in mind “the final pages of Wells's fantasia,” The War of the Worlds, in which “the silence of devastated and darkened London is disturbed by the terrible last lamentations of those mammoth invaders from Mars, toppled by lowly bacteria,” Nabokov confirmed this and admitted that he “can still hear those creatures.”41 Most recently, it has been suggested with regard to Ada that Nabokov possibly “derived his Antiterra concept from H. G. Wells’ Men Like Gods (1923)” and that the English writer's short story, “The Door in the Wall” (1911), with its green door imagery, had an impact on Nabokov's vision of the hereafter.42 Although English literature had a special appeal for the Anglophile V. D. Nabokov, he was quite knowledgeable about French literature as well, favoring Gustave Flaubert above all. Vladimir Dmitrievich held Flaubert, especially Madame Bovary, in such high esteem—or as Nabokov puts it, “prized [him] highly” (SM 177)—that he wrote in French in his personal copy of the novel, “A book of genius—the pearl of French literature” (“livre génial—la perle de la littérature française”). When Nabokov made a similar inscription in Russian in his own copy of Ada (1969), (“A book of genius—the pearl of American literature” [“genial´naia kniga—perl amerikanskoi literatury”]), he meant it not merely as “a joke,” with “a grain of seriousness,”43 but also as a tribute to the approaching centenary of his beloved father, who would have been extremely proud of his son's remarkable literary accomplishments.44 Page 112 → Nabokov senior wrote an article on Flaubert's centenary in which he maintained that Flaubert, Balzac, and Maupassant constitute three summits of the nineteenth-century French novel but that Flaubert is its apogee.45 Nabokov would have hardly agreed with his father's appraisal of the other two “summits,” especially with regard to Balzac, but would most certainly have shared his estimation of Flaubert. The highest praise from the younger Nabokov, as in the case of Chateaubriand's René, is to say that its “rhythm and richness of phrasing are admirable; Flaubert could not have done better” (EO 3:99). Apparently under the influence of his father, the precocious Nabokov admits that already in his boyhood he “relished especially the works of […] Flaubert” (SO 42–43) and at that time he “had read or re-read […] all Flaubert in French” (SO 46). Nabokov's works contain numerous references and allusions to Flaubert, most of all to Madame Bovary, both Nabokov's and his father's favorite book. They may be found as early as in Nabokov's second novel King, Queen, Knave, where he admits “my amiable little imitations of Madame Bovary, which good readers will not fail to distinguish, represent a deliberate tribute to Flaubert” (x), and they are quite prominent in

Lolita (see, for example, 47, 145, 202, 265 and 359, 385, 406, 438). In his monograph on Gogol, Nabokov exemplified his perception of poshlost´—philistine vulgarity—with Madame Bovary's characters Rodolphe and Homais (70) and lectured extensively on the novel at Cornell (see LL 125–77).46 V. D. Nabokov's essay and Nabokov's lectures understandably differ in their purposes: Nabokov senior wrote a relatively short essay on the occasion of Flaubert's centenary, whereas Nabokov delivered rather elaborate university lectures on Flaubert's masterpiece. While in his newspaper essay, Nabokov senior briefly surveys Flaubert's literary legacy, with an emphasis on the biographical aspect, Nabokov analyzes Madame Bovary in painstaking detail. Nevertheless, like his father, Nabokov draws on Flaubert's correspondence with Louise Colet, a poet and Flaubert's mistress (believed to have served as the prototype for Emma Bovary); singles out for praise Flaubert's style, whose completeness Nabokov senior compares to that of a sonnet; and refers to the atmosphere of scandal surrounding the novel's publication.47 Curiously but not surprisingly, when discussing Madame Bovary's publication history Page 113 → and the treatment it received in the media as well as in the courts of law and of public opinion, Nabokov alludes to the similar fate of his newly written novel, Lolita: “Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene. I am glad to say that Flaubert won his case. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times…. But let me keep to my subject” (LL 125). Vladimir Dmitrievich also highly praised Guy de Maupassant, whose works comprise twenty-six entries in his library.48 In addition to considering Maupassant to be one of “the three summits of nineteenth-century French novel,” he also dubbed him “Flaubert's disciple and successor.”49 In his pamphlet, V. D. Nabokov illustrates the senselessness of dueling with Maupassant's story “A Coward.” The younger Nabokov, who occasionally mentioned the French writer's works (see, for example, Glory 48; Gift 104, 277) and regarded him as an “important storyteller” (SO 147), exemplifies, as it were, his father's focal points in his own story, “An Affair of Honor.” While drawing upon “A Coward,” Nabokov shifts the narrative register from the melancholy to the burlesque. His lampooned protagonist, Anton Petrovich, is the complete opposite of the aristocratic Viscount Signoles, an experienced pistol shooter: unlike Signoles, Anton Petrovich has a plebeian appearance—he is “short-legged, rather plump,” with a “fat Russian nose” (Stories 200)—and he had never held a pistol in his hands.50 His opponent, Berg, a former military officer whom Anton Petrovich catches with his unfaithful wife, is repulsive in his unabashed complacency and self-assurance. Unlike Signoles's worthy, imposing seconds, Anton Petrovich's seconds, Mityushin and Gnushke, are detestably vulgar: Mityushin is “a brawler and a drunkard,” and Gnushke reportedly “to spite the post office, used to throw lighted matches into mailboxes” (Stories 206). Gnushke is a meaningful surname that combines the Russian gnusnyi (“vile”) and a typical German surname ending, -schke; in the original Russian, his last name is characterized as “most vile.”51 The protagonist's greedy devouring of a ham sandwich in a shabby hotel after he absconds from the duel arouses both pity and laughter. Overall, in “An Affair of Honor,” Nabokov by and large conveys his father's negative opinion of dueling. He does so by switching from the tragic tenor Page 114 → of Maupassant's story and the serious timbre of his father's legal pamphlet to the farcical mode.52 Like many refined Europeans throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, V. D. Nabokov showed a strong interest in Italian culture. In chapter 4, I discuss Nabokov senior's expertise in Italian Renaissance art and close familiarity with Italian music, especially opera. It is not generally known that Vladimir Dmitrievich studied the Italian language, which was not too hard for him to master. After all, he had possessed an excellent command of Latin since his gymnasium days and legal training at St. Petersburg University.53 Also most helpful in this regard was his superb knowledge of French. While in the Kresty prison, V. D. Nabokov describes his two-hour daily studies of Italian as follows: “I take a book of Italian grammar with exercises and […] begin to ‘cram’ conjugations, irregular verbs, pronouns, locutions, to do translations in my head.”54 A nineteenth-century Italian writer with whose works V. D. Nabokov was evidently familiar was Silvio Pellico. In his earlier years, Pellico was best known for historical dramas. Francesca da Rimini (staged in 1815), his most celebrated play at the time, brought him considerable renown. The strong interest in Pellico's dramatic writings, however, was ultimately eclipsed by the tragic events in his own life. Arrested in 1820 as a member of the Carbonari, a secret political organization that aspired to liberate Italy from Austrian domination and fought for

Italian unification, freedom, and independence, Pellico narrowly escaped execution. His death sentence was commuted to fifteen years of hard labor; he was eventually pardoned after ten years. Upon serving the first eighteen months of his sentence in Italian prisons, including the notorious Venetian Piombi, Pellico was transferred for the rest of his term to “the ill-fated fortress of the Spielberg,” where he remained until his release in 1830.55 Based on these experiences, Pellico wrote a candid and moving account that created widespread sympathy for the Risorgimento (the Italian liberation and unification movement). The book, My Prisons (Le mie prigioni), originally published in 1832, was translated a year later into English and French and in 1836 into Russian as Moi temnitsy. Page 115 → It is conceivable that V. D. Nabokov modeled his Prison Pastimes to some extent on Pellico's prison memoir: Mes prisons, a French translation of the book, is listed in the catalogue of his voluminous library.56 And it is highly likely that while working on Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov drew upon not only the prison memoir of his father but also upon that of Pellico. The cruel, threatening meaning of the turnkey Rodion's ostensibly innocuous and otherwise puzzling suggestion, “You'd do better to learn to knit me a cache-knee” (IB 143) becomes evident in the context of Piero Maroncelli's “Additions” to Pellico's memoir: according to Maroncelli, the yarn from which the stockings had to be made was so “saturated with bad oil or grease” that “the cell was soon infected with it, and an intolerable headache was the first consequence of that foul exhalation, from which our cells were never afterwards free.” Maroncelli reports that “those who did not fulfill their task, were threatened with the deprivation of food and exercise, with blows, and with a report to Vienna.”57 Nabokov could have easily familiarized himself with Maroncelli's “Additions,” which were frequently published with Pellico's memoir.58 A contemporary Italian writer of whom the senior Nabokov was especially fond was Gabriele d'Annunzio. V. D. Nabokov's library catalogue lists sixteen entries for d'Annunzio's works in Italian as well as in French and Russian translations.59 While in prison, Vladimir Dmitrievich read d'Annunzio's novels in the original—The Child of Pleasure (Il piacere), The Triumph of Death (Il trionfo della morte), and The Flame of Life (Il fuoco)—the latter containing a most ardent glorification of Venice. In his letters to Elena Ivanovna, V. D. Nabokov writes that he read The Child of Pleasure “with great enjoyment” and recommends that she read The Flame of Life, which contains “passages amazing by their brilliance, beauty, and depth of psychological analysis.”60 Nabokov was familiar with the life and works of his father's favorite Italian contemporary writer. He mentions “d'Annunzio's marble footprints” in Ada (152), alluding to the Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone di Sopra, where Page 116 → his villa is now part of the garden and memorial complex.61 It is very likely that Nabokov's reference to d'Annunzio is another surreptitious tribute to his father on the occasion of his approaching centenary, along the same lines as his private tribute by emulating his father's inscription in his personal copy of Madame Bovary. Incidentally, the Venice of which d'Annunzio wrote with such veneration in The Flame of Life played an important role in the relations between the Nabokovs, father and son. Their life was forever linked to St. Petersburg, the “northern Venice” that they both were forced to leave. It is not surprising, therefore, that in The Gift, Nabokov places in the study of Fyodor's father “a copy of the picture: Marco Polo leaving Venice” (115).62 (The writer projects the relationship with his own father on that of the novel's protagonist and his father.) The Venice–St. Petersburg connection also appears in Nabokov's earlier play, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn. Commenting on Act 1, Scene 2, Nabokov remarks that the atmosphere of the state's capital in which the action takes place contains something from “the Venetian XVII century of the Casanova times [sic] and from the thirties [presumably 1830s] of the Petersburg epoch.”63 The link between Venice and St. Petersburg may also be discerned in Nabokov's last completed novel, Look at the Harlequins! After visiting St. Petersburg turned Leningrad, Vadim Vadimovich notes, “That sunset, with a triumph of bronze clouds and flamingo-pink meltings in the far-end archway of the Winter Canalet, might have been first seen in Venice” (210–11).64 Venice also binds the father and the son by way of Alexander Blok's poetry (discussed later in this chapter). Like his father, Nabokov possessed an “innate love for the country and its language.” Italy, particularly its Renaissance art, meant a great deal to Nabokov. His interest in Italian language and culture intensified in the early

1960s after his son, Dmitri, a professional opera singer, settled in Italy, where Vladimir and Véra would visit him from Montreux. They also “did love and frequent Italy, especially for her art.” At the time, Nabokov visited Italy, and Page 117 → specifically its museums, for his work on the Butterflies in Art project as well as because of his contacts with “Mondadori and other Italian publishers.” Even though Nabokov “did not really know the language, ” Dmitri later said, “the refinement of his understanding was nonetheless amazing.”65 As in his father's case, Nabokov found it much easier to comprehend Italian as a result of his outstanding proficiency in French. Before leaving the subject of Western European literature, it is important to add that Nabokov highly esteemed Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce. One wonders whether Nabokov senior had an opportunity to read them—to the best of my knowledge, he does not mention them or their works in his writings. Vladimir Dmitrievich could have read at least the first three parts of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which were published between 1913 and 1921; Kafka's In the Penal Colony (written 1914, published 1919) and “The Metamorphosis” (1915); Joyce's Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses, which was first serialized from March 1918 to December 1920 and then published in its entirety on February 2, 1922. V. D. Nabokov was also no doubt fairly familiar with American literature. It is not surprising that his library contained the works of Edgar Allan Poe, who was very popular with Russians throughout most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.66 Nabokov began reading Poe in his boyhood; he names “the works of […] Poe” (SO 42) among the books he read at that time. The writer says that when he resided in Western Europe, “between the ages of 20 and 40,” Poe was among his “top favorites” but admits that Poe's works eventually “lost the glamour and thrill they held for me” (SO 43). An accomplished lepidopterist, Nabokov scorns Poe for his incorrect description of a moth and its habitat in his story “The Sphinx” (1846). In his April 28, 1958, letter to Harry Levin, a Harvard professor of comparative literature and close friend, Nabokov writes, “I enjoyed your treatment of Poe. Not only did he not visualize the death's-head moth, but he was also under the completely erroneous impression that it occurs in America” (SL 257). Nabokov was fascinated by Poe's life. During one interview, “in answer to the question: what scenes one would like to have filmed,” Nabokov names, among others, “Poe's wedding” (SO 61). Curiously, Nabokov contributed to Poe's creative legacy by setting a reverse Russian-to-English translation of Page 118 → one of his poems to music. In his April 29, 1941, letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov writes that “Rakhmaninov has asked me to translate the words of his ‘Bells’ into English. These words are Balmont's reckless translation of Edgar Poe's ‘Bells.’ But as the Edgar Poem does not fit the music I am supposed to re-shuffle the thing according to Balmont's drivel” (NWL 50).67 Nabokov further writes that in reversing “Balmont's drivel” into English, he “was solely concerned”—and so apparently was Rakhmaninov when he commissioned the work—“with finding English words that would sound like the Russian ones” (VV 7). Nabokov warns future scholars, “Now, if somebody one day comes across my English version of that Russian version, he may foolishly retranslate it into Russian so that the Poe-less poem will go on being balmontized until, perhaps, ‘The Bells’ become ‘The Silence’” (VV 7). Here Nabokov not only wittily contrasts the thundering sound of bells with the placidity into which that sound eventually dissipates by way of infinite retranslation but also alludes to Poe's sonnet or eponymous fairy tale so titled. By this allusion, Nabokov perhaps meant to offer a tribute to his wife: the fairy tale's translation into Russian (“Bezmolvie”), signed V. S., for her maiden name, Véra Slonim—curiously identical to the initials of Nabokov's given and pen names, Vladimir Sirin—appeared in The Rudder side by side with Nabokov's poem, “A Song” (“Pesnia”).68 Nabokov was well versed in the works of Poe: multitudinous references and allusions to them can be found in both the Russian-born author's poetry and prose. Omry Ronen, for example, asserted that in describing the afterlife in the form of the all-seeing eye in his poem “Oculus” (“Oko,” 1939) Nabokov was inspired by an image from Poe's story, “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841).69 In addition to his poetry, Nabokov's prose from “The Word” (“Slovo,” 1923) and “The Return of Chorb” (“Vozvrashchenie Chorba,” 1925) to Transparent Things (1972) contains fascinating parallels with Poe's well-known stories, among them “Ligeia” and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (or polemics as in the case of “The Word” and “Silence”). And of course, Lolita teems with explicit references to Poe's persona and works.70

In his boyhood, Vladimir Dmitrievich was undoubtedly fond of Thomas Mayne Reid, an Irish-born American novelist. Anton Chekhov's story “The Page 119 → Boys” (“Mal´chiki,” 1887) points to the popularity of Mayne Reid among Russian youngsters in the second half of the nineteenth century, and specifically in the 1880s, when V. D. Nabokov was growing up.71 In his essay, “Fragments of Moscow Life” (“Oskolki moskovskoi zhizni”), published in the January 19, 1885, issue of the magazine Fragments (Oskolki), Chekhov remarks on the wide popularity of Mayne Reid's and James Fenimore Cooper's novels: “Our Syzran´ and Chukhloma [provincial towns in Central Russia] cubs, having read their fill of Mayne Reid and Cooper, would run away from their parental homes and would reenact escaping to America.”72 V. D. Nabokov's library contained two entries under “Mayne Reid-captain”: The Scalp Hunters (1851) and The White Chief (1855).73 The younger Nabokov read these novels as well as The Headless Horseman (1865). By Nabokov's admission, Mayne Reid's fiction “was tremendously popular with Russian children at the beginning of this [twentieth] century” (SM 195). Nabokov recalls that at the age of eleven he translated The Headless Horseman into French alexandrine verse.74 The writer also recalls that as a youngster he enjoyed reenacting scenes from The Headless Horseman with his cousin, Baron Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg (see SM 197–203).75 It is very telling that Nabokov selects the year 1880, when his ten-year-old father might have been fascinated with Mayne Reid's novel, while speaking about the ability of Van—his father's exact coeval—to “learn by heart Pushkin's ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes” (Ada 171). The Pushkin attribution facetiously conflates Mayne Reid's novel with the Russian poet's narrative, The Bronze Horseman. This childhood fascination with Mayne Reid also finds its expression in Nabokov's poem, “To Prince S. M. Kachurin” (“K kn. S. M. Kachurinu,” 1947). Its lyrical hero, disguised as “an American clergyman,” pays a clandestine visit Page 120 → to the city of his birth, St. Petersburg turned Leningrad, in contemporary Soviet Russia.76 The poem's protagonist experiences great excitement as he beholds his native cityscape and imagines himself on the way to the intimately familiar countryside. But then he realizes how conspicuous he would look on a “local train” in his clerical outfit, “wearing this coat, wearing these glasses,” and “with a novel of Sirin in my hands”77 It suddenly dawns on him how “completely translucent” he is in the totalitarian land of “the new, the broad shouldered provincial and slave,” and he has a panic attack.78 As a result, he wants “to go home”—back to the United States of America. In the concluding stanzas of the poem, this Nabokov “representative” exclaims, I want to go home. I've had enough. Kachurin, may I go home? To the pampas of my free youth, To the Texas I once discovered. I'm asking you: Isn't it time to return to the theme of the bowstring, or to what is enchantingly called “chaparral” in The Headless Horseman, so as to fall asleep in Matagordo Gorge, on the fiery-hot boulders there with the skin of one's face parched by aquarelle paint, and a crow's feather stuck in one's hair? (SP 122)79 Nabokov's lyrical persona experiences a wide range of nostalgic sentiments, very familiar from his previous works, both in poetry and prose. The poem contains an important novelty, however: in a brilliant tour de force, Nabokov connects his hero's desire to return to America with his longing for the Russia of his childhood. This connection becomes even more relevant for the writer because the American Wild West as depicted in Mayne Reid's fiction Page 121 → and specifically in The Headless Horseman was an integral part of his Russian boyhood fascination—or, as Nabokov puts it in his annotated translation of the poem for Edmund Wilson, “(in other words, let me take the direct road to America straight from my boyhood and the Wild West novels I used to love).”80 Thus the circle is complete as the contemporary America and the bygone Russia finally converge.

Yet another American writer well known to V. D. Nabokov was Mark Twain. The elder Nabokov's library catalogue lists a number of the great American humorist's works, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer, Detective; The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories; and the essay Is Shakespeare Dead?81 In an October 16, 1920, letter to his eldest son, Vladimir Dmitrievich encloses, “a charming excerpt from Mark Twain,” though he does not specify what that excerpt is.82 Nabokov was no doubt well familiar with the life and works of Mark Twain, even though his oeuvre contains no overt references to Twain's writings. Most recently it has been suggested, however, that his “confessions of a synesthete” (SM 35), in which when describing “the blue group” (34) he calls the letter k “huckleberry” (35), may contain a Mark Twain reference: aside from the literal meaning of huckleberry as “blue-black,” the color of the berry, Nabokov could be alluding here to the character in Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.83 Nabokov was evidently aware that Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon in 1870 (the year of the senior Nabokov's birth) and moved to the Northeast, regularly summering on Quarry Farm near Elmira, New York, where he wrote these two widely read novels. Nabokov composed his widely read novels, Lolita and Pnin, as well as Conclusive Evidence, the earlier version of his memoir, only thirty miles from Elmira, in Ithaca, home of Cornell University, where the writer taught for over ten years (1948–59). Nabokov's sole mention of Mark Twain appears in a rather unusual context: writing to Edmund Wilson on March 24, 1951, Nabokov reports that after receiving the news that “the American Academy […] is giving me a ceremonious award,” he “at first confused it with a Mark Twain horror that almost obtained my name in the past” (NWL 289). It seems that Nabokov mistook the National Institute of Page 122 → Arts and Letters, whose award he received in May 1951, for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which Mark Twain became one of the first seven inductees in 1904 and whose Merit Medal Nabokov received in 1969.84 Upon his arrival in the United States, Nabokov, of course, expanded on his knowledge of American literature and thoroughly familiarized himself with its contemporary fiction. Many years later, when asked about “American writing since 1945,” Nabokov maintained “that Salinger and Updike are by far the finest writers in recent years” (SO 57). When queried further, Nabokov singled out for praise Salinger's “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and Hemingway's “The Killers,” which he called “delightful, highly artistic,” and “admirable” (SO 42, 80). Nabokov also praised Hemingway's “wonderful fish story”—the novella The Old Man and the Sea—in which “the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination” “is superb” and which he “was asked to translate into Russian but could not for some reason or other” (SO 80). Nabokov admits that he read Hemingway “for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, and bulls [For Whom the Bell Tolls], and loathed it” (80). Although of the opinion that Hemingway is one of the “writers of books for boys,” Nabokov nevertheless recognized that “he has at least a voice of his own” (42).85 Nabokov also praised John Cheever's “The Country Husband,” calling it “a miniature novel beautifully traced”; John Updike's “The Happiest I've Been,” confessing that he likes “so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one”; Herbert Gold's “Death in Miami Beach,” calling it “an admirable piece”; John Barth's “Lost in the Funhouse,” recognizing in it “the lovely swift speckled imagery”; and Delmore Schwartz's “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” finding “divine vibrations in this story that so miraculously blends an old cinema film with a personal past” (312–13). Thoroughly knowledgeable of Western literature, V. D. Nabokov was, of course, exceptionally well versed in his native Russian letters. Nabokov quite expectedly places Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet and a national icon, among his father's “favorite Russian poets” (SM 177). It was customary in Russia among cultured individuals well into the twentieth century to recite the works of their favorite poets by heart, and Nabokov recalls “the Pushkin iambics that rolled off his [father's] tongue so triumphantly whenever I mentioned some minor poet of the day” (191). Predictably, the senior Nabokov frequently cites Pushkin in his writings. Thus, he quotes the Kochubei Page 123 → execution passage from Poltava in his legal article on capital punishment and another passage from that poem about Russia's destiny in his political essay, quotes from Boris Godunov in yet another political essay (see chapter 2, n. 54), and paraphrases a line from Eugene Onegin in his entry for Chukokkala.86 In his tear-off calendar for 1918 in the Crimea, which served him as a diary of sorts, Vladimir Dmitrievich writes on January 7 (20), “I am reading Pushkin's prose,” and on January 22 (February 4), he was reading “Pushkin's letters.”87

Nabokov undoubtedly inherited his love for Pushkin from his father. Among V. D. Nabokov's many enthusiasms that the writer bestowed on the father of The Gift's protagonist, Konstantin Kirillovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, was reverence for Pushkin. Furthermore, in Fyodor's mind, Pushkin and his father, like Pushkin and V. D. Nabokov in the author's mind, become closely associated: “With Pushkin's voice merged the voice of his father. He kissed Pushkin's hot little hand, taking it for another, large hand. […] He heard his father on a fresh summer morning […] repeating with classic fervor what he considered to be the most beautiful not only of Pushkin's lines but of all the verses ever written in the world: ‘Tut Apollon-ideal, tam Niobeya-pechal´’ (Here is Apollo-ideal, there is Niobe-grief)” (98). It is noteworthy that in his obituary for V. D. Nabokov, Landau likens him to Pushkin, maintaining that “the Pushkinian light grows feeble, and perhaps the simplicity of Nabokov, personal and public, political and spiritual, belongs to its final, gradually fading glints.”88

It is not surprising that Fyodor, who shares many tastes with his creator, “fed on Pushkin, inhaled Pushkin,” “Pushkin entered his blood” (Gift 97, 98). Not unlike his character, Nabokov, a devoted and devout disciple of Pushkin and the translator and annotator of Eugene Onegin, maintains that “Pushkin's blood runs through the veins of modern Russian literature” and speaks about “the pride and purity of Pushkin's art” (SO 63, 103). In his French lecture, delivered on the occasion of the centenary of Pushkin's death, Nabokov professes, Page 124 → Those of us who really know him revere him with unparalleled fervor and purity, and experience a radiant feeling when the richness of his life overflows into the present to flood our spirit. Everything about it is a source of joy: every one of his enjambments, as natural as the bend of a river; each nuance of his rhythm; as well as the most minute details of his existence, even the names of those who passed close to him, for an instant blending their shadows with his. As we pore over the splendor of his drafts, we seek to unravel in them all the intermediate phases through which his imagination hurtled to arrive at the finished masterpiece. To read his works, without a single exception—his poems, stories, elegies, letters, plays, reviews—and to reread them endlessly is one of the glories of earthly life.89 When referring to “those of us,” the select group of the poet's great admirers, Nabokov undoubtedly included his late father. Nabokov was mindful of his father as he composed his essay commemorating the centenary of Pushkin's Page 125 → death. Nabokov penned the essay only weeks before the fifteenth anniversary of his father's death (March 28, 1922)—tragic, violent, and untimely, like Pushkin's. He presented his Pushkin essay on February 11 and published it in La Nouvelle Revue Française on March 1, 1937.90 Nabokov translated Pushkin's innumerable poems; some of his dramatic works, such as “A Feast during the Plague” (“Pir vo vremia chumy”); “Mozart and Salieri”; and a scene from “The Covetous Knight” (“Skupoi rytsar´”) (see VV 72–216) as well as the poet's magnum opus, Eugene Onegin, to which he appended a comprehensive commentary that to this day remains unsurpassed in its scope and erudition.91 Another of V. D. Nabokov's “favorite poets” was Fedor Tiutchev (SM 177). Vladimir Dmitrievich passed this fondness on to his son. Nabokov acknowledges in his Russian memoir that “Pushkin and Tolstoy, Tiutchev and Gogol rose up in the four corners of my world.”92 Nabokov's great appreciation of the poet's work led him to translate many of Tiutchev's poems into English (see VV 232–65). Nabokov avers that Tiutchev's poetry “has quite exceptional qualities and reveals (in the [eighteen] thirties!) elements which characterize the fin de siècle renaissance of Russian poetry”; Nabokov also maintains that “his short lyrics belong to the greatest ever written in Russian” (VV 230, 231). While appreciating the unique nature of Tiutchev's poetic legacy, Nabokov, no doubt under the influence of his father's political beliefs, expresses disapproval of Tiutchev's die-hard stance: “Politically he was a rather smug conservative with Slavophile leanings and a sentimental fondness for permanently anointed Tsardom. The batch of poems inspired by his political views makes rather painful reading” (VV 231).

Tiutchev spent many years of his adult life in Western Europe, where he was stationed as a diplomat, and his poetry is permeated with the atmosphere of a spiritualized Central European landscape. Nabokov's “Cloud, Castle, Lake” takes place in Central Europe, evidently in Marienbad (presently known as the Czech town of Mariánské Lázně), where Nabokov composed the story. Its protagonist, Vasiliy Ivanovich, while on his “pleasure trip,” “opens a little volume of Tyutchev, whom he long intended to reread” (Stories 430, 431). The Russian original of the story suggests that he wished to reread “Silentium!” (written ca. 1830, published 1833) and “Yesterday, in the Page 126 → enchanted dreams…” (“Vchera, v mechtakh obvorozhennykh…,” written ca. 1836, published posthumously in 1879) (see Ssoch 4:583, 777). Vasiliy Ivanovich mistakenly recites the essential line of “Silentium!” (“A thought pronounced is a lie”) as “We are slime. Spoken is a lie.”93 Vasiliy Ivanovich's garbling of the phrase is telling because his fellow travelers are indeed slimy. More important, Vasiliy Ivanovich's misreading of Tiutchev's maxim proves fatal when he fails to keep his discovery of the “cloud, castle, lake” to himself. Instead of remaining in this idyllic location, Vasiliy Ivanovich, contrary to the poem's dictum, returns to his traveling companions to tell them of his intention to abandon their joint trip and to stay in the chosen locality. As a result, his fellow “excursionists” force him to continue the trip and, while on the train back to Berlin, beat him with such a “great deal of inventiveness” that Vasiliy Ivanovich begs his creator “to let him go” because “he had not the strength to belong to mankind any longer” (Stories 437). Glory may be also linked to “Silentium!”94 The following passage from the novel corroborates this assertion: “From early childhood his [Martin's] mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience—which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor—was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment” (12). The poem is no less important for the understanding of Invitation to a Beheading. The inner world of the novel's protagonist conveys the atmosphere of concealment that dominates Tiutchev's piece. Whenever Cincinnatus does share his feelings with the characters around him, they mock and torment him, like the Schramms and the Schultzes who mock and torment Vasiliy Ivanovich. Thus, when Cincinnatus shares with M'sieur Pierre his dream of escaping to freedom, the executioner and Rodrig mock the prisoner with a “rescue” operation, tauntingly digging a tunnel to his cell. Nevertheless, Cincinnatus eventually triumphs in his struggle with the surrounding world Page 127 → because he learns to keep his innermost feelings to himself, thereby following the dictum of Tiutchev's verse.95 In addition to “Silentium!,” Invitation to a Beheading contains numerous allusions to Tiutchev's other poems, such as “Urania,” “Cache-Cache,” “The Last Love,” and “Lonesomeness” (a rendition of Alphonse de Lamartine's “L'isolement”).96 Along with every well-read Russian, V. D. Nabokov was versed in the works of Nikolai Gogol. His library contained Gogol's works, specifically Dead Souls.97 His son thought very highly of Gogol and was fascinated by his literary genius. At Cambridge University's final exams, Nabokov, who in his childhood and early youth entertained the idea of becoming a landscape painter (see AnL 414; SO 17, 166–67), especially enjoyed the Dead Souls question—namely, “to describe Pliushkin's garden.”98 In his earlier Russian lecture, Nabokov notes Gogol's innovative “rare picturesqueness, skillful colorfulness”;99 in his monograph, Nabokov points out Gogol's outstanding visuality in depicting “the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves” (NG 87). Further, in his Cornell lectures, Nabokov dubs Gogol's prose “four-dimensional at least” (LRL 58).100 Nabokov's oeuvre contains a plethora of references to Gogol and his works. For example, Invitation to a Beheading includes numerous allusions to “A May Night, or the Drowned Maiden,” “Viy,” “An Overcoat,” and especially Dead Souls.101 The novel contains a curious polemic with Gogol's presentation of translucency and opaqueness in “A May Night.” In Gogol's tale, translucency of a character is a positive trait, whereas opaqueness expresses its malevolent nature. Thus, when the witch assumes the appearance of a drowned maiden, Levko identifies her by noticing “that her body was not so translucent as the others; something black could be seen in the inside.”102 In Page 128 → Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov employs the same device but to opposite ends: opaqueness is a salient trait of Cincinnatus, who “was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another” (24)—the only genuine human being among the permeable specters in the dystopian world of the novel.

With the inverted use of the device, Nabokov seems to disagree with Gogol by suggesting that opaqueness may indicate the uniqueness of an individual who aspires to guard the inner self from the surrounding world. We are mindful of the assertion, which Nabokov later expressed in Pnin, that “one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings” (20). Nabokov senior was familiar as well with the works of Gogol's younger contemporary, Ivan Turgenev. His library contained the writer's complete works and a collection of his letters.103 In his article on capital punishment, V. D. Nabokov exemplifies its abhorrent nature by referring to Turgenev's essay, “Tropman's Execution” (“Kazn´ Tropmana,” 1870).104 And when discussing the meaninglessness of dueling in his pamphlet, Vladimir Dmitrievich quotes from Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Like his father, Nabokov, too, was well versed in the works of Turgenev, whom he calls one of his “deeply beloved authors” (SO 146) but whom he considers “not a great writer, but a pleasant one” (LRL 68). One of his Cambridge examination questions was on Turgenev's novel, Smoke (Dym, 1867).105 In his Cornell lectures, before focusing on Fathers and Sons, Nabokov surveys Turgenev's works and sums up his observations as follows: But generally speaking his style produces a queer effect of patchiness, just because certain passages, the artist's favorites, have been pampered much more than the others and, in consequence, stand out, supple and strong, magnified, as it were, by the author's predilection among the general flow of good, clear, but undistinguished prose. Honey and oil—this comparison may be well applied to those perfectly rounded graceful sentences of his, when he settles down to the task of writing beautifully. As a story-teller, he is artificial and even lame. […] His literary genius falls short on the score of literary imagination, that is, of naturally discovering ways of telling the story which would equal the originality of his descriptive art. (LRL 69–70) Page 129 → These observations say a great deal about the standards inculcated into Nabokov by his father, whose “desire to excel,” as his son recalls, “was overwhelming” (SM 173). Nabokov rigorously applied this benchmark to others but, first and foremost, to himself. Nabokov's oeuvre contains numerous references and allusions to Turgenev's works. In The Defense, there are allusions to On the Eve (Nakanune, 1860), which Nabokov calls “artistically the least successful of Turgenev's novels” while acknowledging that “it was the most popular one” (LRL 66). In The Gift, Turgenev is included in the survey of Russian literature during the first imaginary dialogue of Fyodor with Koncheev (73). Both “The Visit to the Museum” and Lolita contain references to Turgenev's lesser-known tale, “Specters” (“Prizraki,” 1864), and there are several allusions to his works in Ada, to give but a few examples.106 V. D. Nabokov was obviously very knowledgeable about Leo Tolstoy's works. His library catalogue lists twelve entries for the writer's works.107 In his travel sketches from wartime England, he mentions the subjunctive dialogues between Lyovin and Koznyshev in Anna Karenina.108 Vladimir Dmitrievich was personally acquainted with Tolstoy: Nabokov recalls that as a child he “faintly remember[ed]” his father “shaking hands with someone at a street corner”; as they continued their walk, he was told that “that was Tolstoy” (LRL 142 n. 2). For Nabokov's parents, as for so many Russians, Tolstoy was not merely a renowned writer but a moral authority, and they regarded his death as both a great personal loss and a national tragedy. Nabokov reminisces that while the family was visiting Berlin, one day his “father ruffled the German newspaper” and, upon learning of Tolstoy's death, announced in French, “‘Tolstoy vient de mourir’ [Tolstoy has just died] […] in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother,” and the parents decided that it was time to return home right away (SM 207–8).109 Yet at the same time, V. D. Nabokov was critical of Tolstoy's views, particularly those expressed in the treatise What Is Art? (1896). In reviewing N. S. Trubetskoy's Europe and Mankind, after denouncing the author's attempt to reject the beneficial role of Western European high culture for the entire world, Nabokov senior scornfully

recalls a similar claim by Tolstoy, who “argued that a Beethoven symphony is inferior to the choral singing of Page 130 → peasant women returning from haymaking.”110 On another occasion, when reviewing V. A. Maklakov's Tolstoy and Bolshevism, Vladimir Dmitrievich criticizes Tolstoy's unconvincing didacticism, maintaining that “the concluding moral conversion of the characters in both Anna Karenina and Resurrection leaves us absolutely cold, indifferent, and not in the least persuaded.”111 Although Nabokov reports his parents’ reaction to Tolstoy's death, he did not record his own sentiments. At the time, Nabokov was too young (eleven years old) to comprehend Tolstoy's significance and the array of ramifications resulting from his passing. In many ways, however, Nabokov's attitude toward Tolstoy resembles that of his father: he thought highly of Tolstoy the stylist and craftsman but had some misgivings about his precepts. Nabokov calls him a genius alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Pushkin; “the incomparable prose artist” (see SO 146, 112); and “the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction” (LRL 137). Nabokov also views Tolstoy as a paragon of a writer whose creative process is modeled on that of the Almighty—the notion he expressed in the poem “Tolstoy” (1928), written on the occasion of the writer's centenary: The mystery is almost superhuman! I mean the nights on which Tolstoy composed; I mean the miracle, the hurricane of images flying across the inky expanse of sky in that hour of creation, that hour of incarnation…For, the people born on those nights were real…That's how the Lord transmits to his elected his primeval, his beatific license to create his worlds, and instantly to breathe into the new-made flesh a one-and-only spirit. (SP 59)112 Page 131 → When commenting on Tolstoy's specific works, however, Nabokov is not altogether flattering. He considers “Anna Karenin the supreme masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature […] closely followed by The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (SO 147). (Nabokov lectured on both works at Cornell.) At the same time, he admits, “I detest Resurrection and The Kreuzer Sonata, also finding Tolstoy's publicistic forays […] unreadable” (147–48). Nabokov subjects War and Peace to severe criticism: he disdainfully dubs it “a rollicking historical novel written for that amorphic and limp creature known as ‘the general reader,’ and more specifically for the young” (148). Nabokov is especially critical of the novel's “artistic structure” and, like his father with regard to Anna Karenina and Resurrection, does not appreciate its clumsy moralizing: “I derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes, from the artificial coincidences, with cool Prince Andrey turning up to witness this or that historical moment, this or that footnote in the sources used often uncritically by the author” (148). Nabokov's works from Laughter in the Dark to Pnin to Ada nevertheless contain numerous references to Tolstoy. In Laughter in the Dark, there is an actress with a Tolstoyan-sounding name, Dorianna Karenina. When asked whether she had read Tolstoy, the actress, who had obviously never heard of the writer, garbles his surname as “Doll's Toy” (191). In Pnin, Nabokov bestows his own prized observations concerning Tolstoy's relativity of time in Anna Karenina on the title character (122; cf. LRL 190–94).113 And in Ada, the narrator maintains in reference to Tolstoy's memoir trilogy, Childhood. Boyhood. Youth, that “nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy's reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the book” (588).114 One of Tolstoy's favorite poets and a longtime friend was Afanasy Fet, yet another nineteenth-century Russian man of letters who was among Nabokov senior's “favorite poets” (SM 177) alongside Pushkin and Tiutchev and of whose poetry the elder Nabokov “had an amazing knowledge.”115 V. D. Nabokov's appreciation and knowledge of Fet's poetry are manifest in his essay on the centenary of the poet's birth, which Nabokov mentions in his

memoirs.116 In this essay, Vladimir Dmitrievich praises Fet as “a most wonderful, intimate, pure Russian lyricist whose soul and poetry are so saturated, Page 132 → so permeated throughout with the mysterious delight of life, whose creation from early poems to the inspired Eventide Lights touched only the tenderly or passionately sounding strings of the soul, who lived his poetic life as if in some kind of turris eburnea.”117 Elena Sikorski, Nabokov's youngest sister, recalls that V. D. Nabokov's favorite poem, from which he recited a few days before his death, was Fet's “In quiet and murk of mysterious night” (“V tishi i mrake tainstvennoi nochi,” ca. 1864) (see Perepiska 48). And Nabokov reminisces that as a youngster (ca. 1914), he had a bet with his father: while the boy erroneously claimed that the poem “The night was shining” (“Siiala noch´,” 1877) was written by Alexei Apukhtin, V. D. Nabokov correctly attributed it to Fet (Perepiska 58). In spite of this juvenile miscue, Nabokov also became a true aficionado and connoisseur of Fet's poetry. In his poem “Mists were floating after mists” (“Za tumanami plyli tumany,” 1921), written on the occasion of Alexander Blok's death, the young poet describes how the soul of Fet, alongside those of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev, greets Blok's soul in Paradise. Nabokov calls Fet “a carmine ray in the temple,” describes his shadow as clad “in the fine raiment, red roses,” and imagines how he will sing “about roses in the eternal temple.”118 He also dubs the poet “the spirit of the air, a wispy cloud, a butterfly fanning its wings” (VV 300). Nabokov greatly appreciated Fet's poetry. In his opinion, Fet's lyrics are a tuning fork: “A good way to test whether a Russian understands poetry or not [is] by finding out whether he appreciates Fet” (VV 301). The writer elaborates on the essence of Fet's poetry: The matter-of-fact critics who cursed Fet because he did not describe the sufferings of the Russian peasant in blunt manly measures, those critics were particularly maddened by Fet's verse slipping as it were between their fingers, verse which became intangible when placed in a coarse medium of their own world for in their world mental curves were as illegal as the roundness of the world was in the days of the flat-footed logicians who were firmly planted on a flat beach, where every grain of sand voiced, unheeded, the claim of its circular shape. A poem Page 133 → by Fet seemed to them meaningless, because for them the meaning of things was limited by the square angles of their immediate use—city squares where crowds gather with square flags, square shoes, square prison cells, square tombstones. But Fet looped his loop and was suddenly somewhere in the milky way just when he was expected to come home with some reasonable explanation of his behavior. (VV 301) As did his father, Nabokov perceived Fet as “a pure Russian lyricist.” To Nabokov's mind, Fet's oeuvre is the quintessence of poetry and a litmus test of poetic sensibility. The lyricism of his poems is unappreciated by people who look for “usefulness” in literature, to quote Pushkin's “The Poet and the Crowd” (“Poet i tolpa,” 1828). Ironically, the poem was written in the birth year of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a radical critic who argued that art should be useful and should have a social purpose. In The Gift, Fyodor asserts that whatever Fet's drawbacks, he “can forgive him everything for ‘rang out in the darkening meadow,’ for ‘dew-tears of rapture shed the night,’ for the wing-fanning, ‘breathing’ butterfly” (73).119 And it is very telling that more than fifty years after the bet with his father, Nabokov, in yet another furtive homage in Ada (cf. earlier tributes by way of the Madame Bovary–related inscription and the reference to d'Annunzio), calls the poem “The night was shining” “glorious” (411) and provides an English translation of its first stanza (412). Nabokov's fondness for and deep knowledge of Fet's poetry are evidenced by recurring references to it not only in his verse and prose but also in his lectures and correspondence and of course by his translation of Fet's poetry into English.120 Nabokov's clandestine tribute to his father by way of Fet manifests itself in Ganin's recollection of his romance with Mary.121 In particular, Nabokov recounts how the novel's protagonist, sitting “on the window ledge of that lugubrious lavatory,” was longing for Mary while waiting “for a nightingale to start trilling in the poplars as in a poem by Fet” (Mary 46). Curiously, “that moment Ganin now rightly regarded as the highest and most important Page 134 → point in his whole life” (46–47). Here Nabokov alludes to Fet's most famous poems—“Whispers, timid respiration, trills of nightingale” (“Shepot, robkoe dykhan´e, treli solov´ia,” 1850), which the writer later

cites in The Gift (240) and “The Nightingale and the Rose” (“Solovei i roza,” 1847). The former became one of the most popular romances and was set to music by a number of composers, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1897), Mily Balakirev (1904), and Nikolai Medtner (1911); the latter was considered the hallmark of Fet's lyrics, so much so that the poet was habitually referred to by his contemporaries as “‘the singer of the nightingale and of the rose’ (the usual title of Fet at the time).”122 As Nora Buhks has astutely noted, the reference to “The Nightingale and the Rose” suggests the unlikelihood of a Berlin encounter between Ganin and Mary.123 In addition, it could be argued that while Mary's image may be connected to the obliterated Russia (see 69), Ganin's persona appears to bifurcate into associations with the author and his father. The former association is manifest by way of the protagonist's physical characteristics (handsome looks and athletic attributes), his artistic sensibilities and equally young age, as well as the description of his romance with Mary, modeled on the writer's romance with Valentina Shul´gin. The latter association may be perceived by way of Ganin's pre-exile actions and through his name: like Nabokov senior, Ganin actively participated in the struggle against the Bolsheviks, albeit militarily rather than politically. The protagonist's name and patronymic, Lev Glebovich, “a name like that's enough to twist your tongue off” (1), correspond to Nabokov senior's no less tongue-twisting Vladimir Dmitrievich. The surname Ganin evidently stems from the verb gónit´ or gάnit´. According to Dal´, the compiler of Nabokov's primary Russian-language dictionary, it means “to set or to offer a riddle” (zagadyvat´).124 On the one hand, this surname, then, adds to the mysteriousness of the character; on the other, it deftly alludes to Nabokov's enigmatic tribute to his father. Nabokov subtly pays tribute by means of an allusion to Fet's poetry that his father surveyed in his centenary essay. In this essay, the very first two Page 135 → quotations, fittingly but not surprisingly, come from the two aforementioned poems—“Whispers, timid respiration, trills of nightingale” and “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Most important, V. D. Nabokov's essay may be perceived, to a great extent, as a guide to life for both Mary's protagonist and its author. Ganin makes the shift very much in accordance with the suggestion offered by Nabokov senior: he leaves behind the bloody violence of the Civil War, the boredom and dreariness of his Berlin émigré existence, and through the ennobling remembrances of his romance with Mary, of which Fet's poetry is an essential part, aspires to open a new chapter in his life. In his centenary essay, Vladimir Dmitrievich queries, “Who had the strength for this transition, from the daily unfolding pictures of reality—now bloody, now vulgar and filthy—to these lofty summits?”125 For an answer, Nabokov senior offers his readers a refuge and brief respite from cruel existence by advising them to plunge into the depths of Fet's poetry: “But try to make this transition, and if you still have the volumes of Eventide Lights, or if Fet resounds in your memory, submit yourself to his magic power and you will be momentarily happy.”126 Ganin, as though following V. D. Nabokov's advice, submits himself to the power of his recollections, permeated with Fet's poetry, and experiences momentary happiness (cf. 43, 93). (The working title of Mary was Happiness.)127 In Mary, Nabokov shows the beneficence of his father's advice: this momentary happiness, greatly induced by Fet's poetry, not only refreshes Ganin but also fosters hope and perseverance, allowing him to start over, to strive for a new beginning. Thus, while in the poem, “Mother,” Nabokov surreptitiously expresses his inconsolable grief over the tragic death of his father, in his first novel, written about the same time, he employs his father's recipe for overcoming grief and despondency: to find comfort in the poetry of Fet, and broader still, to find comfort in the magic of verbal creation.128 In this way, Nabokov pays an everlasting tribute to his father's memory by taking his advice as the guiding principle for his own life. Finally, Nabokov, especially in his youth, shared with his father a high regard for the poetry of Alexander Blok. The father and the son commemorated Blok's passing with contributions that were published side by side in Page 136 → The Rudder: Nabokov senior with an article, Nabokov, under his newly adopted pen name, Sirin, with the poem “Mists were floating after mists.”129 Both appeared at the poet's memorial: Nabokov senior read aloud Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams's personal recollections of Blok, and Nabokov junior recited his second commemorative poem, “Pushkin—rainbow over all the Earth” (“Pushkin—raduga po vsei zemle”).130 Italy, specifically Venice, and Blok were associated in Nabokov's mind with his father's tragic death. It is known that Nabokov “was reading aloud those tender poems about Italy, about damp, resonant Venice” by Blok when “the phone rang in the hall” with the fatal message.131 In all likelihood, Nabokov was reading to his mother the

third, concluding poem of Blok's Venice cycle. In this poem, “dampness” is expressed in the line “The recurring tidal wave” and “resonance” is conveyed with the preliminary draft line, “Ringing a string before the maiden.”132 The lines in Nabokov's commemorative poem, “Too gloomy, too insidious / the land has gone wild,” are reminiscent of the “gloomy country” in Blok's aforementioned Venice poem, whereas the phrase “his own wizardly fatherland” evokes lines from Blok's poem “Russia” (“Rossiia,” 1908), with its “you may abandon your brigandish beauty / to any wizard you choose.”133 In addition to the cycle on Venice, Nabokov read to his mother the one on Florence—specifically, the second poem, in which Florence is called “a delicate iris” and “a smoky iris” (SM 49).134 Vladimir Dmitrievich thought very highly of Blok's poetry in general. In his article, “On Al[exander] Blok's Passing” (“K konchine Al. Bloka”), he writes, “There is no doubt that Blok's name will remain in the history of Russian poetry as the name of one of the finest masters, most heartfelt, most sincere lyricists, genuine, inspired priests of Apollo.”135 But in the same article, Page 137 → he expresses his misgivings about Blok's longer poem, The Twelve (Dvenadtsat´, 1918). Despite calling it “this strange and in any case strikingly bright and talented work,” he finds it unfortunate that Blok ever wrote it.136 It is difficult to compare Nabokov's attitude toward Blok to that of his father based solely on this one pronouncement made within the constraints of the commemorative article. It could be said, however, that Nabokov also held Blok's poetry in exceptionally high regard. In the draft of his lecture about the poet, Nabokov remarks, “The musicality of Blokian verse is legendary, incomparable. His iambic tetrameter is so light, so rapid that it captivates the soul.”137 Nabokov recalls that he read Blok's poetry, as he put it, “in my boyhood, more than a half-century ago. Ever since that time I have remained passionately fond of Blok's lyrics” (SO 97). For Nabokov, the admiration for Blok's poetry is, therefore, also pervaded with nostalgia: “Besides, his poetry is associated for us with the memory of Russia, childly and grandfatherly, with love for her, with the unrestorable Petersburgian epoch.”138 He calls Blok “by far the greatest poet of the first two decades of this [twentieth] century” and places him “among major Russian poets, the greatest masters in the [iambic tetrameter] form” (EO 3:495, 525). Nabokov imparts that Russia had experienced a great cultural revival between 1905 and 1917. He points out that Blok, along with “Bely, Bunin and others[,] wrote their best stuff in those days,” going on to admit, “I am a product of that period. I was bred in that atmosphere” (NWL 246). However, he did not think highly of Blok's entire literary legacy, particularly his “long pieces” (SO 97). Unlike his father, who perceived The Twelve as a “strange” but “strikingly bright and talented work,” Nabokov subjected the poem to very harsh criticism, calling it “dreadful, self-consciously couched in a phony ‘primitive’ tone, with a pink cardboard Jesus Christ glued on at the end” (97). In his unpublished poem, “The Two” (“Dvoe,” 1918), written as a response to The Twelve, Nabokov portrays Andrei Karsavin, “a chemist and zoologist” who “spends the evening in drawing a new butterfly he has caught and writing its description in Latin,” and his wife, Irina, an amateur painter and pianist.139 Polemicizing with Blok, Page 138 → Nabokov shows how “twelve armed peasants,” whom Blok depicts at the end of his poem as Christ's apostles, “burst into the house and attack its owners,” destroying the lives of the two, Andrei and Irina. “A rabble's hatred, Nabokov implies, can usher no new millennium.”140 It is curious that Nabokov's character, who shares a passion for entomology with his creator, bears the surname of the renowned Russian medieval historian and philosopher Lev Karsavin.141 Nabokov warns that Blok “is one of those poets that get into one's system—and everything seems unblokish and flat” (NWL 103) but names him among those “who revolutionized the old ideas about Russian versification and introduced into Russian verse breaks and substitutions and mongrel meters that are far more syncopic than anything even Tyutchev had dreamed of” (NWL 80). At the same time, when characterizing Russia's most outstanding poets, Nabokov employs the following formulas, reserving the most elaborate and poetic metaphor for Blok: “Pushkin is a sea, but Tyutchev is a well. Slick but true. Blok is the winged boat that the child in Rimbaud's ‘Bateau Ivre’ lets float in the gutter-stream” (NWL 106). The latter pronouncement suggests that Nabokov reevaluated Blok's artistic legacy, finding his poetry somewhat infantile, flimsy, and fleeting. Nabokov knew Blok's poetry exceptionally well and translated several of his poems into English (see VV 322–35). Nabokov's own works abound with allusions and references to Blok, from early poetry that teems with borrowings from and imitations of the poet to a later, much more balanced and even critical attitude that is reflected in his

fiction from The Gift to Lolita and is expressed in the writer's memoirs, correspondence, and interviews.142 •

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V. D. Nabokov instilled in his son from an early age a great fondness for literature, so much so that creative writing became his life's principal calling. Page 139 → Nabokov senior's encouragement and counsel were vital at the very beginning of Nabokov's literary path when he was writing poetry and translating Rolland's Colas Breugnon into Russian. In spite of some differences in taste—Balzac and Zola, Dostoevsky and Gorky—V. D. Nabokov exerted an essential influence on his son's literary likes and dislikes. Although the father's and the son's literary styles differed considerably, one can trace a certain affinity between them by observing Vladimir Dmitrievich's favorite locutions and mode of expression in Nabokov's writings when comparing, for example, Prison Pastimes with Invitation to a Beheading. Nabokov's adoration of his father is manifest throughout his oeuvre, from Mary to Ada and beyond, in numerous filial tributes by means of references and allusions to his father's favorite writers and their works. And the senior Nabokov's comments on Western European and Russian literature—Dickens, Wells, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Fet—reverberate in Nabokov's literary pronouncements as reflected in his lectures and interviews. Growing up in a Westernized Anglophile family and being equally at home in Russian and English as well as French letters served Nabokov in good stead. The writer played an important role as a cultural ambassador between the Russian and Western civilizations. To this end, his entire literary legacy, in addition to the immeasurable merit of his own fiction, constitutes an everlasting monument. 1. «Пушкин и Толстой, Тютчев и Гоголь встали по четырем углам моего мира»; Ssoch 5:305–6. 2. They are catalogued in Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova; Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie. See also Klimenko, “Biblioteka doma Nabokovykh.” 3. «Литературу он знал назубок, особенно иностранную; в газете «Речь» так были уверены в его всезнайстве, что обращались к нему за справками […]: откуда эта цитата? В каком веке жил такой-то германский поэт? И Набоков отвечал»; Chukovsky, Dnevnik (1901–1929), 206. 4. As secretary of the Literary Fund, V. D. Nabokov took part in its 1909 jubilee celebrations, at which he delivered a speech, “Piatidesiatiletie Literaturnogo Fonda.” See Vengerov, Iubileinyi sbornik Literaturnogo Fonda, 1859–1909, 80, 474–87. V. D. Nabokov was elected president of the Literary Fund on December 10, 1912, and served in that capacity until August 4, 1914, when, at the outbreak of World War I, he was called to arms. I am greatly indebted to Gennady Obatnin (University of Helsinki) for this information. 5. See S[c]hruba, Literaturnye ob´´edineniia Moskvy i Peterburga 1890–1917 godov, 40. 6. «великий художник»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 60. 7. «в своем пророческом бреду / он век наш бедственный наметил»; Ssoch 1:511. 8. «Говорил апостолу апостол: / «Злой был пес; и смерть его нага, / мерзостна»…Христос же молвил просто: / «Зубы у него как жемчуга…»»; Ssoch 1:448. The poem’s original publication in The Rudder does not contain the inscription “On the Anniversary of Dostoevsky’s Death,” as Malikova erroneously asserts in both the Simpozium edition of Nabokov’s works and the collection of his poetry (see Ssoch 1:447, 781; Stikhotvoreniia, 65, 543). In fact, the poem was published precisely at the centenary of Dostoevsky’s birth—November 11, 1921; the fortieth anniversary of Dostoevsky’s death fell on February 9 of that year. Nabokov knew about Dostoevsky’s upcoming centenary, for the preceding issue of the newspaper included an anonymous article, “Data rozhdeniia F. M. Dostoevskogo,” that discusses the date of Dostoevsky’s birth by the Julian and Gregorian calendars. 9. «Сегодня же, муза моя разговелась стишком, символ которого: и в уродстве можно приметить красоту»; Stikhotvoreniia 543. The original title of this poem, which Nabokov penned on the verso of that same letter, was “A Legend” («Сказанье»); Vladimir Nabokov, 99 A.L.S., 33 postcards to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, VNA. 10. Nabokov delivered the lecture on March 20, 1931 (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 363). «Яркий мир, освещенный косым светом, сомнительный мир; […] опасный мир, где с не очень широкого большака фантазии уводят тусклые тропы в рассудочность. И все же пленитель [зачеркнуто], заманчивый [зачеркнуто], необычайный и любопытный мир»; Vladimir Nabokov,

“Dostoevsky bez dostoevshchiny,” VNA. 11. G. A. Landau, who was “V. D. Nabokov’s successor as editorial writer” at The Rudder, was “a philosopher before he emigrated and a man whose mind Nabokov greatly respected” (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 255). For a detailed discussion of Nabokov’s evolving attitude toward Dostoevsky and specifically of Landau’s impact on Nabokov’s perception of the writer, see Dolinin, Istinnaia zhizn´ pisatelia Sirina, 199–213, esp. 203. 12. For a recent survey of Nabokov’s attitude toward Dostoevsky, including the most pertinent Englishlanguage scholarship on the subject, see Cornwell, “Orhan Pamuk and Vladimir Nabokov on Dostoevsky.” Also worth reading is Deroy’s monograph, Hommages satiriques à Dostoïevski. 13. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 4. 14. «Все-таки старайся не бросать «Персика», насколько возможно. Fiacre Bolacre хорошо переведен во второй редакции», «Мамочка получила сегодня Твое письмо со стихами (где «балмочь»). Она уже их переписала. Мы нашли, что в них есть хорошие места, но общее не имеет как-то единства настроения и мысли. Но это ничего, не падай духом…»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma k synu,” 169. 15. «Я почему-то очень touchy относительно этой вещи. Зато с каким наслаждением я читал ее двум людям—тебе и вот на днях маме. Третий человек, который понимал каждую запятую, оценивал мне дорогие мелочи—был мой отец»; Babikov, “Primechaniia,” 565. 16. V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 7. 17. On Shakespeare in V. D. Nabokov’s library, see Verizhnikova, “Vladimir Nabokov i iskusstvo knigi Anglii rubezha vekov”; on Shakespeare’s presence in Nabokov’s works, see Schuman, “Nabokov and Shakespeare”; Grabes, “Nabokov and Shakespeare.” 18. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 24–25; Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 13. 19. See V. D. Nabokov, “Charl´z Dikkens (K 100-letiiu so dnia ego rozhdeniia)”; V. D. Nabokov, “Charl´z Dikkens, kak kriminalist”; V. D. Nabokov, “Charl´z Dikkens.” 20. «У него была особая игра: перечислять все имена героев Диккенса—чуть не триста имен. Он соревновался со мной. Я изнемогал после первой сотни»; cited in Klimenko, “Biblioteka doma Nabokovykh,” 198. 21. «сантиментальные и бездушные компиляции»; Chukovsky, Dnevnik (1901–1929), 205. 22. «Этот доклад произвел на Боборыкина такое впечатление оригинальностью высказанных в нем мыслей, что маститый беллетрист через много лет вспоминал об этом вечере с живейшим удовольствием»; Kizevetter, “V. D. Nabokov.” In Glory, Nabokov describes “the writer Boborykin” as “an old gentleman in a black scullcap” (136). 23. «корифей английского романа XIX столетия», «огромных дарований»; Boborykin, Evropeiskii roman v XIX stoletii, 520, 563–64. The book is listed in V. D. Nabokov’s library catalogue; see Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 37 (no. 854). 24. «кудесник», «захватывающий рассказчик», «неправдоподобность фабулы, и деланность многих положений, и вычурность чувств, и частые излишества стиля»; V. D. Nabokov, “Charl´z Dikkens (K 100-letiiu so dnia ego rozhdeniia).” 25. «Чарльз Диккенс, в свою американскую поездку, в 30-х годах прошлого столетия, видел эти тюрьмы. Глубокий сердцевед и истинно-гуманный мыслитель, он пришел от них в ужас и описал их в ярких и сильных красках в своих американских очерках»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 23. V. D. Nabokov slightly errs here: Dickens undertook this trip in the 1840s, not the 1830s. Several years later, Vladimir Dmitrievich corrected this mistake in his essay on Dickens as criminologist, mentioning that “he visited America in the early 1840s” («Он посетил Америку в начале сороковых годов»); V. D. Nabokov, “Charl´z Dikkens, kak kriminalist,” 193. 26. Dickens, Works, 18:98–99. Scholars have found numerous Dickensian allusions in Nabokov’s works. For allusions to A Tale of Two Cities in Invitation to a Beheading, see Senderovich, “Dickens in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading”; for allusions to Bleak House in Bend Sinister, see Toker, “Between Allusion and Coincidence.” More recently, Mitch Frye found further Dickensian allusions via Nabokov’s Cornell lectures on Bleak House; see Frye, “Enchanter’s Education.” 27. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 15 (nos. 2692–700).

28. For a detailed discussion of this incident, see Shapiro, “Nabokov-Chukovsky Controversy.” 29. Steiner, “Extraterritorial,” 121. In his Real Presences, Steiner makes a pronouncement on Freudism that would have made Nabokov cringe: “Freudian paradigm of the articulate psyche is poetic, is potentially selfand world-serving” (108). 30. For a discussion of possible reasons for Nabokov’s scornful attitude toward Wilde, see de la Durantaye, Style Is Matter, 35–37. 31. Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 4:102–3. 32. See Dolinin, Istinnaia zhizn´ pisatelia Sirina, 326–27 nn. 33, 35. 33. See Sklyarenko, “Oscar Nattochdag.” 34. See V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 41–51. Nabokov senior most likely met Conan Doyle, who was a member of the reception committee, during the visit of the Russian delegation to wartime England; see V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 16. Both V. D. Nabokov and his son knew Conan Doyle’s writings very well. V. D. Nabokov’s library catalogue lists Conan Doyle’s collection of short stories, The Green Flag and Other Stories [of War and Sport]; two collections of Sherlock Holmes stories, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and The Return of Sherlock Holmes; along with A Study in Scarlet, the mystery novel that introduces his principal character; and another novel about the afterlife of three vengeful Buddhist monks, The Mystery of Cloomber. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 23 (nos. 550, 551); Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 13 (nos. 2646–48). The works of Nabokov, for whom “Sherlock Holmes […] stories” were his “boyhood passion” (SO 174), contain numerous references and allusions to adventures of the famous detective, “a hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likeable character in various stories by Conan Doyle” (PF 78). 35. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 15–16. 36. «об авторе стольких замечательных книг, то блещущих фантазией, то изумляющих глубиной мысли, яркими мгновенными вспышками страсти, чередованием сарказма и лиризма»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 43. 37. «Поразительная его плодовитость (порою вредящая законченности и продуманности его произведений, особенно последних)»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 44. 38. «Уэлльз думает, что в Германии возможна в близком будущем революция, соединенная с свержением прусского ига и всех его нынешних проявлений. Он считает, что это было бы лучшим, исторически наиболее справедливым и наиболее прочным исходом войны,—и что есть возможность этому содействовать. Я боюсь, что здесь он становится утопистом…»; see V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 51. 39. Nabokov, under the rubric “Reputations Revisited.” 40. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 15 (no. 2709). 41. Appel, “Nabokov,” 19. 42. For a more detailed discussion of Nabokov’s attitude toward Wells and his references and allusions to his works, see Sisson, “Nabokov and Some Turn-of-the-Century English Writers”; Blackwell, Quill and the Scalpel, 163; Mello, “The Green Door.” 43. Boyd, “Ada,” 3. Nabokov translates his father’s inscription as “The unsurpassed pearl of French literature” (SM 174). 44. For the supposition that Nabokov dedicated Ada to his father, see Sklyarenko, “Fathers and Children in Ada,” 40. 45. «Бальзак,—Флобер,—Мопассан: в этих трех именах содержится вся история развития французского романа XIX века. Это три его вершины. И среди них Флобер—наивысшая »; V. D. Nabokov, “O Flobere.” 46. For further discussion of the subject, see Couturier, “Nabokov and Flaubert.” 47. See V. D. Nabokov, “O Flobere”; LL 152, 125. 48. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 17–18. 49. «своего ученика и преемника—Mопассана »; V. D. Nabokov, “O Flobere.” 50. The protagonist’s first name and the patronymic initial allude to Chekhov. By Nabokov’s own admission, “the story renders in a drab expatriate setting a belated variation on the romantic theme whose

decline started with Chekhov’s magnificent novella Single Combat (1891)” (Stories 649). 51. «прегнусная»; Ssoch 2:509. 52. For a more elaborate discussion of Nabokov’s story in relation to Maupassant’s story and V. D. Nabokov’s pamphlet, see Shapiro, “‘Podlets’ Nabokova i ‘Trus’ Mopassana.” 53. For V. D. Nabokov’s gymnasium study of Latin, see his “Peterburgskaia gimnaziia sorok let tomu nazad.” 54. «беру итальянскую грамматику с упражнениями и […] начинаю «зубрить» спряжения, неправильные глаголы, местоимения, слова, делать переводы в уме»; V. D. Nabokov, Tiuremnye dosugi, 16. 55. Pellico, My Prisons (trans. Capaldi), 114. 56. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 101 (no. 2151). 57. Pellico, My Prisons (trans. Norton), 2:111–12. 58. For a detailed discussion of Pellico’s influence on Nabokov’s dystopia, see Shapiro, “Nabokov and Pellico.” 59. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 30; Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 18. 60. «d’Annunzio Piacere (читаю с огромным наслаждением)», «Я теперь читаю […] d’Annunzio Trionfo della morte», «Я кончил «Fuoco», есть удивительные места по яркости, красоте и глубине психологического анализа. […] Тебе стоит прочесть»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene,” 267, 269, 275. 61. See Boyd, ADAonline, 152.32–33. 62. For a detailed discussion of the important role of this miniature in the novel, including the relationship between Fyodor and his father, see Shapiro, “Smysloobrazovatel´naia rol´ miniatiury v romane Nabokova Dar.” 63. «что-то от венецианского XVII столетия—времен Казановы—и от тридцатых годов петербургской эпохи»; Vladimir Nabokov, Tragediia gospodina Morna, 283. 64. With the locution “the Winter Canalet,” Nabokov wittily portmanteaued the St. Petersburg [Zimniaia] Kanavka (lit. a “winter groove” or a “winter small canal”) with the name of the eighteenth-century painter Giovanni Antonio Canal, nicknamed Canaletto, who made a name for himself with his landscapes of Venice. 65. Dmitri Nabokov, electronic communications, February 13, November 28, 2005. 66. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 14 (no. 2684). For Poe’s popularity in Russia, see Grossman, Edgar Allan Poe in Russia. 67. For the history of Nabokov’s collaboration with Rakhmaninov on “The Bells,” see Leving, “Singing The Bells and The Covetous Night.” 68. Rul´, July 29, 1923, 2–3. For the attribution of Poe’s fairy tale translation to Véra Slonim, see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 210. 69. See Ronen, “Véra,” 234. 70. For a detailed discussion of Poe’s role in Nabokov’s oeuvre, see Peterson, “Nabokov and Poe.” 71. On the popularity of an “escape to America” at the turn of the twentieth century and its reflection in Russian literature of the period, see Arustamova, “Amerika v detskoi literature kontsa XIX veka v Rossii.” 72. «наши сызранские и чухломские детеныши, начитавшись Майн-Рида и Купера, удирали из родительских домов и изображали бегство в Америку»; Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, 6:699. 73. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 20 (nos. 2772, 2773); the catalogue does not list these novels’ publishers or years of publication, only the place (London). 74. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 81. 75. For a detailed discussion of the important role that Mayne Reid’s novels, especially The Headless Horseman, played in Nabokov’s boyhood and for allusions to Reid’s works in Nabokov’s oeuvre, see D. Barton Johnson, “Vladimir Nabokov and Captain Mayne Reid.” Regrettably, Johnson does not mention “To Prince S. M. Kachurin” in his article. 76. «священником американским» (PP 134).

77. «поезд дачный», «в таком пальто, в таких очках», «с романом Сирина в руках» (PP 138). 78. «совсем прозрачный»; «о новом, о широкоплечем / провинциале и рабе» (PP 138). 79. «Мне хочется домой. Довольно. / Качурин, можно мне домой? / В пампасы молодости вольной, / в тексасы, найденные мной. // Я спрашиваю, не пора ли / вернуться к теме тетивы, / к чарующему «чапаралю» / из Всадника без Головы, // чтоб в Матагордовом Ущелье / заснуть на огненных камнях, / с лицом сухим от акварели, / с пером вороньим в волосах?» (PP 138, 140). 80. See Barabtarlo, “‘To Prince Kachurin,’” 34. 81. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 27 (nos. 660, 661); Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 15 (no. 2691), 27 (no. 2871). 82. «очаровательный отрывок из Марк Twain»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma k synu,” 169. 83. See Mello, “[An] Unexpected Link between Nabokov and Clemens in ‘huckleberry K’?” 84. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 198, 566. 85. For more on Nabokov’s attitude toward Hemingway, see Leving, “Nabokov and Hemingway.” 86. See V. D. Nabokov, “‘Ceterum censeo…’,” 1850; V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” 8; Chukovsky, Chukokkala, 269. 87. «Читаю прозу Пушкина», «письма Пушкина»; V. D. Nabokov, Scrapbook, VNA. 88. «гаснет пушкинский свет; и быть может к последним все редеющим отблескам его относится простота—личная и общественная, политическая и духовная—Набокова »; see Landau, “Pokhoronnoe,” 3. Cf. “And the entire life of Vladimir Dmitrievich was also perceived by Nabokov as identical to the life of Pushkin” («Да и вся жизнь Владимира Дмитриевича воспринималась Набоковым идентичной жизни Пушкина»); Stark, “V. V. Nabokov,” 10. 89. Vladimir Nabokov, “Pushkin,” 39. 90. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 434; Juliar, Vladimir Nabokov, 505. 91. For more on the inexhaustible links between Nabokov and Pushkin, see, for example, Davydov, “Nabokov and Pushkin”; Stark, A. S. Pushkin i V. V. Nabokov. 92. «Пушкин и Толстой, Тютчев и Гоголь встали по четырем углам моего мира»; Ssoch 5:305–6. 93. «Мысль изреченная есть ложь», «Мы слизь. Реченная есть ложь» (Ssoch 4:583). Nabokov himself translated “Silentium!” into English. In his translation of the poem, this line is rendered as “A thought once uttered is untrue” (VV 237). On the essential role of Tiutchev’s poetry in Nabokov’s oeuvre, see Rydel, “Nabokov and Tiutchev.” Rydel makes a valid point that the “Tiutchevian landscape” is especially pertinent to the story because the “most beautiful nature lyrics” of the Russian poet, who spent a great deal of his adult life in Germany, “describe not Russian scenes—which he found barren and hostile—but German scenes, many of which feature clouds, castles, lakes, and even towers.” Rydel observes that “in Tiutchev’s poetry, towers appear twice, castles seven times, clouds twenty-one times, and lakes eleven times” (133). 94. See Buhks, Eshafot v khrustal´nom dvortse, 58. 95. See Shapiro, Delicate Markers, 139. 96. Shapiro, Delicate Markers, 135–39. 97. Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 4 (nos. 37–39); Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 4 (no. 2407). 98. «описать сад Плюшкина»; Ssoch 5:309. 99. «редкая картинность, искусная красочность»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Gogol´,” 16. 100. For a discussion of Nabokov’s attitude toward Gogol, see Fanger, “Nabokov and Gogol.” 101. Shapiro, Delicate Markers, 141–54; Shapiro, “Reministsentsii iz Mertvykh dush v Priglashenii na kazn´ Nabokova.” 102. «Тут Левко стал замечать, что тело ее не так светилось, как у прочих: внутри его виделось чтото черное»; see Gogol, Complete Tales, 1:73; Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1:176. 103. Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 9 (nos. 163–65). 104. V. D. Nabokov, Untitled article, 71. 105. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 182. 106. See Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely, 188–89; Dolinin, Istinnaia zhizn´ pisatelia Sirina, 356, 365 n. 29; Boyd, ADAonline. 107. Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 8–9.

108. V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 21. 109. On the opinions of Tolstoy’s life and death held by the Nabokov parents’ contemporaries, among them Chekhov, Blok, and Briusov, see Lakshin, “Lev Tolstoy glazami sovremennikov,” 15–16. 110. «Толстой доказывал, что бетховенская симфония уступает хоровой песне баб, идущих с покоса»; V. D. Nabokov, “Razvenchanie evropeiskoi kul´tury.” Here Vladimir Dmitrievich paraphrases a passage from chapter 14 of Tolstoy’s What Is Art?, in which the writer finds Beethoven’s celebrated piano sonata no. 28 in A major, opus 101, inferior to the peasant women’s celebratory choral home welcoming of his daughter after her wedding. See Tolstoy, What Is Art?, 116; Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30:144–45. 111. «и в «Анне Карениной», и в «Воскресенье» заключительный нравственный переворот героев оставляет нас абсолютно холодными, равнодушными, ни капельки не убежденными»; V. D. Nabokov, “My, Tolstoy, bol´sheviki.” 112. «Почти нечеловеческая тайна! / Я говорю о тех ночах, когда / Толстой творил, я говорю о чуде, / об урагане образов, летящих / по черным небесам в час созиданья, / в час воплощенья…Ведь живые люди / родились в эти ночи…Так Господь / избраннику передает свое / старинное и благостное право / творить миры и в созданную плоть / вдыхать мгновенно дух неповторимый»; Ssoch 2:593–94. 113. For a further discussion on the subject, see Alexandrov, “Relative Time in Anna Karenina.” 114. For a detailed discussion of Nabokov’s attitude toward Tolstoy and allusions to his works, see Foster, “Nabokov and Tolstoy”; Buhks, “Tolstoï dans l’atelier de Nabokov.” 115. «изумительно знал Фета»; Perepiska 58. 116. See SM 177; V. D. Nabokov, “Fet.” 117. «чудеснейшим, интимным, чистым русским лириком, чья душа и поэзия так насыщена, насквозь проникнута таинственной прелестью жизни, чье творчество, от ранних стихов, до вдохновенных «Вечерних Огней», касалось только нежно или страстно звучащих струн души, кто жил своей поэтической жизнью словно в какой-то turris eburnea»; V. D. Nabokov, “Fet.” 118. «румяный луч во храме», «в ризе тонкой, в розах красных», «о розах в вечном храме»; Ssoch 1:449–50. 119. The last quotation refers to Fet’s poem “The Butterfly” (“Babochka,” 1884), to which Nabokov alludes earlier in Mary (58) and King, Queen, Knave (44). Cf. Ssoch 2:87, 695; 159, 700. 120. See Green, “Mister Nabokov,” 39–40; NWL 103–4; Nabokov’s translation, “Three Poems by Fet.” 121. At the time of composing the novel, “in the spring of 1925,” on the eve of the third anniversary of Vladimir Dmitrievich’s death, Nabokov writes to his mother: “Three years have gone—and every trifle relating to father is still alive as ever inside me”; Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 241, 239. 122. ««певец соловья и розы» (обычный тогдашний титул Фета)»; Pertsov, Literaturnye vospominaniia, 97. 123. Buhks, Eshafot v khrustal´nom dvortse, 7–15. 124. Dal´, Tolkovyi slovar´ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, 1:373–74. Buhks maintains that the surname “phonetically emerges from the name of Pushkin’s famous African ancestor—[Abram] Gannibal” («фонетически возникает из имени пушкинского знаменитого африканского предка—Ганнибал ») (Eshafot v khrustal´nom dvortse, 37), while Dolinin believes that it is anagrammatized from the Russian “izgnanie” (“exile”) (Istinnaia zhizn´ pisatelia Sirina, 41 n. 35). 125. «Кому был под силу переход от ежедневно развертывающихся картин действительности—то кровавых, то пошлых и грязных—к этим высочайшим вершинам?»; V. D. Nabokov, “Fet.” 126. «Но попробуйте сделать этот переход, и если у вас сохранились книжки «Вечерних огней», или если в памяти вашей звучит Фет,—отдайтесь его волшебной власти—и вы на миг будете счастливы»; V. D. Nabokov, “Fet.” 127. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 241. 128. See Shapiro, “Pictorial Origins,” 53. 129. See Rul´, August 14, 1921, 4. 130. See Ofrosimov, “Vecher soiuza zhurnalistov.” The same issue also contained Tyrkova-Williams’s recollections about Blok, “Pamiati Al. Bloka: Beglye vstrechi,” which the senior Nabokov had read out loud (4–5), and Nabokov’s second poem on Blok’s death (4). 131. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 191.

132. «Волнa возврaтного приливa», «Струной пред девою звеня»; see Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos´mi tomakh, 3:103, 531. 133. «Слишком сумрачна, слишком коварна / одичалая стала земля», «сумрачной стране»; «чародейной отчизны своей», «Какому хочешь чародею / Отдай разбойную красу». See Ssoch 1:449, 448; Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos´mi tomakh, 3:103, 254; VV 327 (Nabokov’s translation of Blok’s “Russia”). 134. Cf. «ирис нежный», «дымный ирис»; Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos´mi tomakh, 3:107. For a more detailed discussion of Blok’s imagery relating to Florence and its subtexts in Nabokov’s works, see Fateeva, “Tri tsveta,” 383–85. 135. «Нет сомнения, что в истории русской поэзии имя Блока останется как имя одного из тончайших мастеров, проникновеннейших, искреннейших лириков,—под-линных, вдохновенных жрецов Аполлона»; V. D. Nabokov, “K konchine Al. Bloka.” 136. «Это странное и во всяком случае поразительно яркое и талантливое произведение »; V. D. Nabokov, “K konchine Al. Bloka.” 137. «Музыкальность блоковского стиха легендарна, несравненна. Его четырехстопный ямб так легок, так скор, что захватывает душу»; Vladimir Nabokov, “O Bloke,” 6, VNA. 138. «Его стихи, кроме того, связаны для нас с памятью о России детской и дедовской, с любовью к ней, с невосстановимой петербургской эпохой»; Vladimir Nabokov, “O Bloke,” 7, VNA. 139. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 157. Lepidoptery, of course, was Nabokov’s passion and he, like his character, described butterflies “in taxonomic Latin” (PP 155). For more on Nabokov and butterflies, see chapter 5. 140. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 157. 141. Karsavin’s later treatise, On Personality (O lichnosti, 1929), apparently had a certain impact on Nabokov’s perception of time and memory; see Averin, Dar Mnemoziny, 44, 94, 333. 142. For a detailed discussion of Nabokov’s evolving attitude toward Blok and his works, see, for example, Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld, 215–17; Bethea, “Nabokov and Blok”; Dolinin, “Nabokov i Blok,” in Istinnaia zhizn´ pisatelia Sirina, 331–37. On the role of Blok’s poetry in Nabokov’s oeuvre, see Shadursky, “A. Blok v khudozhestvennom mire V. Nabokova.”

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FOUR Painting, Theater, and Music We were drinking tea in the beautiful castle of a local magnate, and here, totally unexpectedly, a portrait of striking delight and fortitude gazed at me from the wall of one of the drawing rooms: a fortuitous Van Dyck, a genuine pearl. It was cold and gloomy in the drawing-room, but to me it seemed as if someone warmed and illumined it at once. —V. D. Nabokov1 Since then, Moscow Art Theatre has occupied a lasting place not only in the annals of Russian stage but also in the history of Russian literature. —V. D. Nabokov2 A couple of months before my father's death, the émigré review Teatr i zhizn´ (“Theater and Life”) started to serialize his boyhood recollections. […] I find therein […] my father's very early, and lifelong, passion for the opera: he must have heard practically every first-rate European singer between 1880 and 1922. —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory In chapter 3, I have shown V. D. Nabokov's great appreciation for and outstanding erudition in belles lettres and his impact on his son's literary edification and tastes. No less passionately did the senior Nabokov love painting, Page 141 → theater, and music. In this chapter, I demonstrate Vladimir Dmitrievich's deep and sophisticated knowledge in these three spheres of culture and discuss its bearing on his eldest son.

Painting V. D. Nabokov's enthusiasm for painting, theater, and music may be discerned in his own books and articles, in the memoir literature about him, and by way of his personal library and art collections. In particular, Nabokov senior's artistic tastes are reflected in his travel sketches. Even during his most demanding professional trips as a lawyer, publicist, and statesman, Vladimir Dmitrievich would always take the time to view works of art, to watch stage productions, and to attend music performances. For example, Konstantin Nabokov reports that when he accompanied his brother and sister-in-law on a visit to Brussels in August 1906, they “went about a great deal visiting museums, churches, parks, and also the environs of the town.”3 And while staying in Copenhagen in August 1913 as a delegate to the Congress of the International Union of Penal Law (see chapter 1), Nabokov senior acquainted himself with the art treasures of the Danish capital. He characterizes the city as having “numerous monuments, palaces-museums, superb art collections.”4 In spite of this generalized statement, it is possible to determine what concretely attracted his attention. When speaking of Copenhagen's “numerous monuments,” Nabokov senior evidently meant its splendid royal statues as well as the city's magnificent Caritas Fountain, first and foremost. When mentioning “palaces-museums, superb art collections,” he presumably referred to the Rosenborg Castle, which houses the Royal Danish Collection, open to the public since 1838; the Frederiksborg Castle, which houses the National Historical Museum, open since 1878; the National Museum, open since 1892 and located in the mansion known as the Prince's Palace, with its large collection of classical and Near Eastern antiquities, as well as the Royal Collection of Coins and Medals; the Danish National Gallery, open since 1896, which contains paintings by Titian and Mantegna, Rubens and Rembrandt; the Glyptotek (inaugurated in 1897) that since 1906 has been the repository of the largest collection of ancient sculpture in Northern Europe, to name only a few. Page 142 → While V. D. Nabokov understandably wrote only briefly about sightseeing in his report on the juridical

convention, he was much more elaborate in his account of the reconnaissance trip to wartime England. He found time amid a very busy schedule to visit London's National Gallery, where he singled out for praise works of Renaissance Italian, seventeenth-century Dutch, and eighteenth-century English painters. Specifically, he viewed “a number of chefs d'oeuvre by Italian masters (for example, a large altar painting by a Bolognese Francesco Francia, with a marvelous Pietà, several canvases by Correggio, a new recently acquired Masaccio, superb works by Crivelli and Boltraffio).”5 It is noteworthy that Vladimir Dmitrievich seems to have looked at the National Gallery paintings, at least in part, through the lens of his professional and extracurricular interests as well as through the prism of his native St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum collection. When speaking of Francia's “large altar painting,” he had in mind The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Other Saints that includes the lunette, Pietà. As a connoisseur of art, he was aware of Francia's rediscovery at the turn of the twentieth century and therefore paid special attention to his artwork.6 Without mentioning it, he caught sight of Francia's Virgin and Child with Two Saints, reminiscent of the artist's eponymous painting in the Hermitage, which Alexander Benois called “our marvelous large Madonna on the Throne.”7 In spite of iconographic similarities, the National Gallery and the Hermitage canvases belong to two different categories of religious painting: while the former is an intimately devotional object, the latter is an altarpiece. The major distinction between the two paintings is the absence of two angels playing musical instruments in the National Gallery painting—an absence that Nabokov senior, a passionate music lover, undoubtedly noticed. It is not at all surprising that V. D. Nabokov mentioned the “recently acquired Masaccio.” The artist died at the age of twenty-seven but became a harbinger of Italian Renaissance art. Masaccio's works are extremely scarce, especially outside Italy, and every composition of his on display stirs a sensation. Vladimir Dmitrievich refers here to Masaccio's Virgin and Child, which originally served as the central part of an altarpiece in the Carmelite Church in Pisa. Page 143 → Since the Hermitage had no works by Correggio at the time (Portrait of a Lady was added to the collection in 1925 and in any case was long misattributed to Lorenzo Lotto), the senior Nabokov naturally enjoyed finding “several canvases” by him at the National Gallery.8 He apparently meant Correggio's Madonna of the Basket, Ecce Homo, Saint Mary Magdalene, and Venus with Mercury and Cupid (also known as The School of Love). These paintings attracted his special attention for their unique iconography. The Madonna of the Basket distinguishes itself by its most intimate portrayal of the Holy Family, with close attention to a rather uncommon detail: the baby Jesus is sitting on the lap of the Virgin Mary, who is dressing him lovingly and tenderly by putting one of his arms into a coat. Ecce Homo is also characterized by the rather extraordinary iconography of its subject: the presentation of Jesus by the turbaned Pilate to the people following the interrogation—a subject that might be of professional interest to Nabokov the jurist—with the Virgin Mary swooning at the sight of her tormented son. This detail is quite unconventional since the Gospels do not mention the Madonna being present at the scene. The painter portrays Mary Magdalene not only customarily holding a pot of ointment, with which she reportedly anointed the body of Christ, but also gazing pensively at the spectator while leaning on an open volume—the Holy Scripture—and presumably reflecting upon its contents. Finally, in his Venus with Mercury and Cupid, Correggio most unusually depicts the goddess of love and beauty with wings and the god of trade and rhetoric holding a scroll from which Cupid, standing between them, is reading.9 Nabokov senior was probably less familiar with Crivelli, as the Hermitage Museum possessed none of his paintings, and was delighted to discover so many of the painter's “superb works.” In all likelihood, he first took notice of the Demidoff Altarpiece, named after Prince Anatole Demidoff, a scion of the famous Russian industrialist who was elevated to nobility by Peter the Great, because the altarpiece was in his possession prior to becoming part of the National Gallery collection in 1868. In addition, Vladimir Dmitrievich feasted his eyes on Crivelli's Annunciation with Saint Emidius, The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, The Madonna of the Swallow, and The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian (acquired between 1861 and 1870), all of which no doubt Page 144 → impressed him by their ornate costumes and elaborate settings. Prior to this trip, he most likely

became acquainted with Crivelli's Annunciation through its most detailed description in Alexander Benois's book. Benois remarks on the iconography of this biblical motif that “Crivelli perfected this traditional formula to the utmost splendor.”10 In naming Boltraffio, da Vinci's principal pupil, V. D. Nabokov refers to The Virgin and Child that was acquired by the National Gallery in 1863 and is somewhat reminiscent of Leonardo's Madonna with a Flower (The Benois Madonna). The latter was added to the Hermitage collection in 1914 and certainly made a great impression on Nabokov senior. Boltraffio's painting also evoked in the senior Nabokov's mind The Madonna and Child (The Litta Madonna), whose attribution to Leonardo has been in doubt since the second half of the nineteenth century and whose execution has been ascribed to various artists, including Boltraffio.11 Once again, it is no surprise that Masaccio's newly acquired piece thrilled V. D. Nabokov, as it would any connoisseur of art. The rest of the painters’ artwork that Nabokov senior enumerates in his account in all likelihood appealed to him because of its heightened emotionality and close attention to detail. V. D. Nabokov's love for Italian Renaissance painting is demonstrated by the “mellowly illumined Perugino” (SM 190) in his study. Lazar´ Rozental´, the younger Nabokov's mathematics tutor, reports that the painting bears the clear signature of Raphael, but Benois attributed this work to Perugino.12 Vladimir Nabokov's reference to Perugino in his memoir suggests that the family accepted Benois's verdict. Nabokov senior's erudite knowledge of and sophisticated taste in painting, specifically the Italian Renaissance, undeniably exerted considerable influence on his son. Nabokov repeatedly refers or alludes to well-known Italian masters such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Sebastiano del Piombo.13 However, Vladimir Dmitrievich did not mention these painters, even Page 145 → though the National Gallery contains many of their works, especially those by Botticelli. One wonders whether this omission resulted from Nabokov senior's artistic predilections and therefore points to differences in taste between him and his son. There is another curious difference: while Vladimir Dmitrievich looked at Old Masters, particularly Italian Renaissance painters, through the prism of the Hermitage Museum collection, Nabokov did so primarily through the prism of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum collection in Berlin, where he resided for fifteen years (1922–37). Many specific paintings referred or alluded to in Nabokov's works—among them Botticelli's Virgin and Child with Eight Angels and Virgin and Child Enthroned between Saint John the Baptist and Saint John Evangelist as well as del Piombo's Portrait of a Young Roman Woman—were located in that museum. Nabokov's oeuvre abounds with references to Botticelli in The Defense, Laughter in the Dark, The Enchanter, Bend Sinister, Lolita, and Look at the Harlequins! In his last completed novel, Nabokov directly refers to Botticelli's Primavera. In his letter to Annette Blagovo, Vadim Vadimovich implores his addressee: “Do not write, do not phone, do not mention this letter, if and when you come Friday afternoon; but, please, if you do, wear, in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild flowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my allegory” (LATH 107). This letter may be viewed on at least two semantic planes: contextually, this is Vadim's love letter and marriage proposal to Annette; metatextually, however, it may be perceived as Nabokov's profession of love for his wife, Véra.14 Nabokov's fascination with Italian Renaissance art spans more than half a century, throughout his entire literary legacy. While Botticelli's masterpiece figures prominently in Look at the Harlequins! (1974), Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper was the main visual stimulus for Nabokov's eponymous poem (1920): The hour is pensive, the supper severe, the predictions are treason and parting. The nocturnal pearl bathes with its light the petals of the oleander. Apostle inclines toward apostle. The Christ has silvery hands. Page 146 →

The candles pray lucidly, and on the table creep the winged insects of night. (SP 6)15

Gerard de Vries links Nabokov's poem to Leonardo's masterpiece through the line “Apostle inclines toward Apostle.” He rightly points out that other well-known paintings on the same subject by such distinguished artists as Fra Angelico, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Perugino “show the disciples invariably in an erect and separate position.”16 In employing oleander, Nabokov once again alludes to the illustrious Florentine, as the appellation of the plant contains an anagram of the painter's name.17 In his later years Nabokov continued to display his fascination with Leonardo's art and personality. While teaching at Wellesley College (1941–48), Nabokov gave a talk on the celebrated Italian. It appears that the text of this talk, “Leonardo the Great,” has not survived. Delivered on February 23, 1942, and sponsored by the Italian Department and the Circolo Italiano, it was announced and summarized in the Wellesley College newspaper.18 Nabokov found Leonardo extremely appealing on account of both his magnificent art and his breathtaking scientific explorations, and this appeal is also manifest in the writer's later fiction—for example, by way of the apostrophe to Leonardo at the beginning of Victor Wind's poem (Pnin 98).19 Sebastiano del Piombo, the younger contemporary of the Carlo Crivelli whom Nabokov senior mentions in his travel sketches, also belonged to the Venetian School of painting but spent most of his artistic career in Rome. Other than the story “La Veneziana,” in which del Piombo's masterpiece plays such a pivotal role, Nabokov mentions the painter in Laughter in the Dark: Albinus, the protagonist and a professional art critic, is the author of a “biography of Sebastiano del Piombo” (Laugh 129).20 With these and numerous Page 147 → other appearances of Italian masterpieces in his oeuvre, Nabokov, like his father, demonstrates his astonishingly broad and thorough knowledge of Italian painters. In addition to his deep admiration for Italian Renaissance art, V. D. Nabokov was greatly fond of Dutch painters. These masters evidently appealed to him primarily for their attention to minutiae—from meticulous observation of human figures to that of their surroundings. Nabokov recalls that his “father had an exceptional power of observation.”21 He also testifies to his father's predilection for Dutch art: he recollects that Vladimir Dmitrievich had in his study “the small, honey-bright Dutch oils” (SM 190) that he especially favored. While visiting the London National Gallery, Nabokov senior described its newly opened room of the Dutch School of Painting. He wrote that there “one may feast one's eyes upon four first-rate Rembrandts, excellent pictures by [Gabriel] Metsu, [van] Ostade [Nabokov senior does not specify whether he means Adriaen or his brother, Isack], two Hobbemas [works by Meindert Hobbema], and the recently acquired Concert (another title La Collation— supper) by Pieter de Hooch—this admirable, unique master in his own way (my favorite).”22 While V. D. Nabokov did not elaborate what “four first-rate Rembrandts” he had in mind, it is possible to deduce the paintings to which he refers: first, the artist's two self-portraits, one at the age of thirty-four, the other at the age of sixty-three, in the final year of his life. Second, Ecce Homo would appeal to Vladimir Dmitrievich the jurist. While looking at that painting, in which the bust at the right alludes to the transience of the Roman Empire, he probably could not help but think in 1916 about the impending demise of the Russian Empire, especially because already “prior to the great war” Nabokov senior “was one of the few who portended the possibility of catastrophe for Russia.”23 Finally, yet another painting, now listed as A Bearded Man in a Cap Page 148 → and known then as A Jewish Rabbi, could have attracted his special attention because Rembrandt used the same sitter in his Bearded Man that Vladimir Dmitrievich saw in the Hermitage Museum.24 Whereas V. D. Nabokov was not specific about “first-rate Rembrandts,” his son frequently alludes to or describes Rembrandt's artwork alongside some generic references. For example, King, Queen, Knave contains references to “the air of Rembrandt” and “the brightest Rembrandtseque gleam” (91, 154), and “The Visit to the Museum” similarly refers to “a copper helmet with a Rembrandtseque gleam” (Stories 282). The latter two phrases bring to mind such paintings by or attributed to Rembrandt as The Man with the Golden Helmet (ca. 1650;

Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), which Nabokov saw at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum prior to World War II, and Mars (1655; Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow), and its assumed pendant, Pallas Athena (1663; until 1930 in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; presently in the Museu Calouste Gullbenkian, Lisbon), which Nabokov saw at the Hermitage before departing from his native city. In Ada, Nabokov metaphorically and most succinctly conveys the essence of Rembrandt's art: “Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive” (103). Nabokov's use of wordplay—remembrance/Rembrandt—may be traced to his father, who, as discussed in chapter 2, engaged in wordplay with the surname of his political opponent, Nakhamkes. In addition to these rather generic references to Rembrandt's predilection for the interplay of light and shadow, the typically somber tones of his palette and at the same time the gladsome nature of his art, Nabokov points to specific works by the Dutch master. In Pnin, he alludes to the detail of Rembrandt's Christ at Emmaus when speaking about a “reproduction of the head of Christ,” “with the same, though slightly less celestial expression of eyes and mouth” (95), that hangs in the studio of Lake, Victor's art teacher. Twenty years earlier, Nabokov implies this countenance in the description of Cincinnatus's face, with a similar emphasis on the eyes and the mouth, when speaking of “the dispersing and again gathering rays in his animated eyes” and of “the light outline of his lips, seemingly not quite fully drawn but touched by a master of masters” (IB 121). Finally, in his Life of Chernyshevski, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev sarcastically notes that biographers viewed the author of What Is to Be Done as “Christ the Second” and relates that “when Page 149 → he was completely dead and they were washing his body, that thinness, that steepness of the ribs, that dark pallor of the skin and those long toes vaguely reminded one of his intimates of ‘The Removal from the Cross’—by Rembrandt, is it?” (Gift 215; cf. Ssoch 4:394). As I contend elsewhere, the unique description of this work of art suggests the 1633 etching The Descent from the Cross.25 Rembrandt's magnificent art and the poverty-stricken lonesomeness of his genius may have had a special appeal to “a lone lamb” (SO 156) like Nabokov, who apparently projected the great artist's life and work on his own, especially during the destitute interwar years in Europe. When speaking about other Dutch painters, V. D. Nabokov most likely refers to the artwork that was acquired by the National Gallery collection by way of the 1910 George Salting Bequest: Metsu's Interior of a Smithy and An Old Woman with a Book; Adriaen van Ostade's Peasant Courting an Elderly Woman and The Interior of an Inn with Nine Peasants and a Hurdy-Gurdy Player; as well as Hobbema's Cottages in a Wood and A Road Winding Past Cottages. All of these paintings, whether they depict genre scenes or landscapes, appealed to Nabokov senior through their intricate use of light and great concern with interior detail. He no doubt was especially pleased to recognize paintings by his favorite artists from his family collection.26 Although Vladimir Dmitrievich did not give his reasons, he evidently admired Pieter de Hooch for his exceptional attention to the minutiae of both interior and exterior details and for his fondness of through-views from one space to another. Curiously, V. D. Nabokov's penchant for de Hooch corresponded to the heightened appreciation of the painter's work in the early twentieth century.27 Marcel Proust, only a year younger than the senior Nabokov, mentions “these interiors by Pieter de Hooch which are deepened by the narrow frame of a half-opened door, in the far distance, of a different colour, velvety with the radiance of some intervening light” in Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann, 1913), which Vladimir Dmitrievich may have read.28 This specific painting, Musical Party in a Courtyard, could have sparked the admiration of V. D. Nabokov the music lover because de Hooch depicts a musical party in the foreground, while in the background, through the doorway, the artist characteristically presents an additional plane of Dutch urban scenery, and Page 150 → does so in exquisite detail. In his description of the Dutch Room, Nabokov senior slightly mistitles de Hooch's painting, calling it The Concert (the second title, La Collation, is correct) after the analogous painting of music making in the Hermitage Museum.29 This mistake is very telling: even when the senior Nabokov speaks about his favorite artist, his perception of the painter's artwork in the London setting is obfuscated by the much stronger impression of the similar work from the intimately familiar St. Petersburg collection. Nabokov inherited a fondness for Dutch painting from his father. In his compositions, he frequently refers or alludes to works of the Dutch School. He often speaks of Rembrandt, points out “the rich butterflies that enliven the flowers and fruit of the old Dutch Masters” (SO 330), metaphorically refers to the white horses of Philips Wouwerman in “Spring in Fialta” (Stories 428), and bestows his love for “Flemish and Dutch oils” on Lucette

(Ada 464).30 Earlier I suggested that V. D. Nabokov singled out for praise the Italian and Dutch artists whose works he saw in the London National Gallery due in no small degree to their attentiveness to detail. This attentiveness may be traced to Early Netherlandish artists (also known as Flemish Primitives) such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and others who exerted considerable influence on contemporary and subsequent artwork. Nabokov was fond of Early Netherlandish art, with its focus on detail.31 This fondness is manifest in Pnin and originated in his attention to and fascination with optical effects. This fascination may be traced to his love of entomology, which he imbibed from his father (see chapter 5). In addition to the renowned Italian, Dutch, and presumably Flemish painters, Vladimir Dmitrievich also held in high regard the “marvelous landscapes of Claude Lorrain.”32 Nabokov senior was well acquainted with Lorrain's art from the French painter's multitudinous works at the Hermitage Museum and particularly with those depicting various times of day, such as Morning in the Harbor and Landscape with Dancing Figures, showing nature at dawn and dusk. At the National Gallery, Vladimir Dmitrievich enjoyed looking at Lorrain's numerous landscapes, among them A Seaport, earlier Page 151 → known as A Seaport at Sunset, which may be imagined as a pendant to the two aforementioned Hermitage paintings.33 Like his father, Nabokov greatly admired the art of Claude Lorrain. In “Painted Wood” (1923), Nabokov pays enthusiastic tribute to the French landscape painter when singling him out as an example of how “art and nature mingle together—in such a wonderful way that it is difficult to say for instance whether sunsets made Claude Lorrain, or Claude Lorrain made sunsets” (Carr 21). Elsewhere I credited Nabokov's first drawing master, Henry Cumming, with encouraging his charge's interest in landscape and specifically in the art of Lorrain.34 But Nabokov's father, who so admired the “marvelous landscapes of Claude Lorrain,” also deserves credit for inspiring his son's fascination with landscape painting in general and with that of the celebrated French artist in particular. Lorrain was known for his landscapes “suffused with the light of the rising and setting sun.”35 Nabokov's particular fondness for sunsets is evident in his early poem, “Clouds” (1921), which contains the following admission of his lyrical I: “I love the sunset clouds.”36 It seems that by associating Lorrain with sunsets, Nabokov had in mind the French painter's numerous depictions of that time of the day, among them the National Gallery painting that his father had enjoyed visiting only a few years earlier. Nabokov could see the paintings during his numerous forays into London while studying at Cambridge University. In his poem, “Olympicum,” written in Cambridge the same year as “Clouds,” the poet describes his imaginary aeroplane flight through the evening skies: “I was floating amid the large and small / pale-lemony, pale-vermilion, / pale-lilac clouds. / At the evening hour of delight, / they like God's ships, / like tender fragrances, / like paradise songs were flowing.”37 When visiting the London National Gallery, Nabokov's Anglophile father pays special attention to English masterpieces: “wonderful portraits by Reynolds and Raeburn, landscapes by Constable and Turner,” dubbing the Page 152 → works of the latter “fantastic luminous symphonies.”38 He also mentions the “lovely Musidora and amazing portraits by Gainsborough,” referring in particular to “such marvels as The Parish Clerk, or [Dr.] Ralph Schomberg, A Lady in Blue also by him, with dreamy dark eyes, as if illumining her sickly pallid face.”39 Nabokov senior described English art, for which he felt a unique kinship, quite elaborately and lovingly. He especially admired and devoted substantial space to describing the works of Thomas Gainsborough. V. D. Nabokov thought highly of Gainsborough's Musidora (presently at the Tate Gallery), which was particularly fascinating because at the time it was widely believed to be a portrait of Amy Lyon, who became known as Lady Hamilton.40 The picture's title, which was added later, refers to the nymph who represented “Summer” in The Seasons by James Thomson. The elder Nabokov no doubt noticed the figure's pose, based on a well-known classical marble statue, Nymph “alla Spina,” which became part of the Uffizi collection in 1704.41 Nabokov senior was attentive most of all to Gainsborough's portraiture. A passionate butterfly enthusiast, V. D. Nabokov enjoyed The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly. Intriguingly, his most detailed description of Gainsborough's art is reserved for A Lady in Blue, the only painting by the artist in the Hermitage. Once again, this aberration indicates that the senior Nabokov had his native city collection so strongly imprinted in his memory that it supplants the impressions of all other collections, including that of the National Page 153 → Gallery.

Vladimir Dmitrievich also singled out for praise Gainsborough's “magnificent Mrs. [Sarah] Siddons.”42 One wonders whether he did so in part because this portrait, in its composition and palette of colors, reminded him of the works by The World of Art, specifically those by Konstantin Somov. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky recalls that “English painters [literally Englishmen] enjoyed Somov's unlimited sympathies, above all Gainsborough, and mainly in his early period.”43 Furthermore, some of Somov's contemporaries, such as art critic Sergei Makovsky and art collector Mikhail Braikevich, found kinship between his artwork and that of Gainsborough.44 As Gainsborough did in Mrs. Siddons over a century earlier, Somov depicts in his Lady in Blue (1897–1900) a creative woman, in this case a fellow artist, Elizaveta Martynova, whose portrait's title is the same as Gainsborough's celebrated Hermitage painting.45 Nabokov, too, refers to the art of English masters and specifically to that by Gainsborough, though not to the works enumerated and described by his father but to The Blue Boy (BS 150). Perhaps the artist's best-known work, the painting has been in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, since 1922. Before its departure for the United States on January 25, the painting was exhibited for three weeks at the National Gallery, during which time it was viewed by ninety thousand visitors; Nabokov could have seen it there during his London visits from Cambridge.46 In other novels, he mentions The Age of Innocence by Sir Joshua Reynolds (AnL 198, 402) and “a portrait of Lady Hamilton,” most likely by George Romney (Glory 34).47 In addition, the writer names Turner among the painters who meant a great deal to him in his youth when he entertained the idea of becoming a landscape painter (see SO 167). Nabokov's fascination with Turner may be linked to his father's characterization of the English painter's artwork as “fantastic luminous symphonies.” Although Vladimir Dmitrievich did not mention the Pre-Raphaelites or Aubrey Beardsley in his writings, he in all probability was familiar with their works. His library contained Otto Schleinitz's monographs (in the Künstler Page 154 → Monographien series) on William Holman Hunt, one of the group's chief representatives, and on Edward Burne-Jones, who was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as well as a Russian book on Beardsley published by St. Petersburg “Shipovnik.” (Curiously, a note indicates that the volume's sixty reproductions of Beardsley's artwork were selected at the recommendation of Konstantin Somov.)48 The World of Art journal, which is also listed in the library catalogue, frequently featured artwork by and articles about the PreRaphaelites and Beardsley.49 Nabokov was well acquainted with the art of the Pre-Raphaelites even though he never mentions the name of the group or any of its representatives. He alludes, for example, to the artwork of John Everett Millais. Nabokov's early poem, “The Glasses of St. Joseph” (1923), echoes the imagery of Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1850, the Tate Gallery), whereas Pnin, with its reference to “Ophelia's death […] also a willow and also wreaths” (79) and Look at the Harlequins!, with its reference to “Ophelia with all her flowers” (162), allude to Millais's Ophelia (1851, the Tate Gallery).50 In his last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, Nabokov portrays Flora along the lines of the Pre-Raphaelites, who not uncommonly depicted the goddess as a young girl or with a maidenly figure. John William Waterhouse in particular shows Flora as a dreamy, dark-haired young girl in a white dress (1891, private collection). This painting, which Nabokov could have seen reproduced, tallies well with the writer's depiction of the character.51 Beardsley figures prominently in Lolita. The artist's first and last names Page 155 → are bifurcated between Lolita's classmate Aubrey McFate and the name of the town, “the site of Beardsley College for Women,” in which Humbert briefly taught, and of the “school for girls” (56, 173, 174) that Lolita briefly attended. The artist's full name appears in Claire Quilty's tantalizing entry in “the hotel recorder” (250)—“Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island” (251, 427). And as Alfred Appel perceptively noted, Humbert's caricatured portrayal of Gaston Godin, his Beardsley College colleague, brings to mind the artist's depiction of Ali Baba for the unrealized project of illustrating the book Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (AnL 398). Beardsley is best known as an illustrator, specifically of Oscar Wilde's Salomé, which is quite relevant to Lolita: according to the gospel of Mark (6:22), Salome danced before King Herod and asked for the head of John the Baptist as a reward (cf. Lolita's interest in dancing [202]). In Wilde's drama, Salome is obsessed with the prophet and demands his severed head so that she can kiss it without hindrance. This intricate allusion may be seen as

Humbert's attempt at self-vindication, as he makes an effort to imply that Lolita is obsessed with him. Conversely, and more fittingly, Humbert, who assumes various regal epithets, seems to liken himself to King Herod. His recollection that “on certain adventurous evenings, in Beardsley, I also had her [Lolita] dance for me with the promise of some treat or gift” (AnL 230) directly evokes the biblical story. In addition, Humbert seems to allude to Beardsley's illustration, The Eyes of Herod, when he “could not help perceiving” that to Lolita he was “not even a person at all, but just two eyes” (283).52 V. D. Nabokov's voluminous library reflected his wide artistic tastes. The library contained a sizable number of illustrated art books, such as the earlier mentioned Künstler Monographien series that spanned several centuries from Old Masters to contemporary European artists, Adolf Philippi's Monographs in Art History (Kunstgeschichtliche Einzeldarstellungen), Richard Muther's History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert), as well as Alexander Benois's History of the Russian School of Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Istoriia russkoi shkoly zhivopisi v XIX veke.53 Nabokov had unlimited access to his father's library and could easily peruse these art book treasures. Page 156 → The future writer's fascination with the works of Old Masters and his artistic preferences were also shaped to a great extent by the family art collection, which contained an extensive number of works by Italian, Spanish, and especially Flemish and Dutch painters. Although the Nabokov family art collection originated, by and large, with that of his maternal ancestor, Nikolai Illarionovich Kozlov, its display corresponded to the tastes of Nabokov's parents. The most prominent among the extant works by Old Masters from the Nabokov family art collection, which was seized by the Soviet regime—the fate of the “mellowly illumined Perugino” is unknown—are The Madonna and Child by Jacopo Palma the Elder; The Entry into Jerusalem by Pedro Orrente; a study, Head of an Old Man, for the painting The Crown of Thorns (Ecce Homo) by Peter Paul Rubens; and Portrait of a Notary by Adriaen de Vois, all of which are now at the Hermitage.54 In Ada, Nabokov mentions Palma the Elder (aka Palma Vecchio) by name (“A drunken Palma Vecchio”) (141) and alludes to his Flora, otherwise known as A Blonde Woman (1520, the National Gallery, London), with “a Venetian blonde” (141). The Hermitage Museum also holds other “nationalized” paintings from the Nabokov family art collection, such as Portrait of an Officer by Pieter Symonsz Potter, and Landscape amidst the Rocks by Allaert van Everdingen, who made a name for himself by depicting Scandinavian scenery.55 In addition to Old Masters, the Nabokov family collection included a large number of Russian paintings, specifically from the World of Art group, which became active years after N. I. Kozlov's passing and no doubt reflected the tastes of Nabokov's parents, especially his father. Vladimir Dmitrievich asked Alexander Benois to become the art critic for the daily Speech, a capacity in which Benois served from November 1908 to April 1917.56 In 1910, Vladimir Dmitrievich commissioned Léon Bakst, another distinguished World of Art representative, to draw Elena Ivanovna's “rose-and-haze pastel portrait,” which he kept over the desk in his study (see SM 190). Nabokov lovingly describes the portrait as follows: “The artist had drawn her face in three-quarter view, wonderfully bringing out its delicate features—the upward sweep of the ash-colored hair (it had grayed when she was in her twenties), the pure curve of the forehead, the dove-blue eyes, the graceful line of the neck” (SM 190). The senior Nabokov also invited, most likely in consultation with Elena Ivanovna, two members of the World of Art group, first Stepan Iaremich (1910–12) Page 157 → and then Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1912–14), to provide instruction for his eldest son. In Other Shores, Nabokov also describes works of the World of Art painters in his mother's study. There, Alexander Benois's “truly delightful rainswollen Bretagne and russet-green Versailles neighbored by ‘delectable’ (in the parlance of those times) Bakst's Turks and Somov's aquarelle Rainbow amid wet birches.”57 The art collection also included a score of costume designs by the Bakst-influenced Boris Anisfeld for the ballet, Islamei, which was choreographed to Mily Balakirev's music by Mikhail Fokine and premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in the spring of 1912.58 Rozental´ confirms not only Vladimir Dmitrievich's ownership of the Islamei costume designs but their display in the mansion, with one “in the large old-fashioned living room” and others in the “spacious bathroom.”59

With daily exposure to all these remarkable masterpieces, Nabokov imbibed from his father the penchant for the World of Art that prompted him to say in one of his interviews, “I prefer the experimental decade that coincided with my boyhood—Somov, Benois […], Vrubel, Dobuzhinski, etc.” (SO 170).60 While in exile, V. D. Nabokov closely followed and even critiqued the artwork of Russian painters, especially those who had been formerly associated with the World of Art such as Benois and Somov.61 Nabokov likewise enjoyed every opportunity to see the artists and the artwork of this “experimental decade.” He maintained particularly amicable relations with Somov, Benois, and of course Dobuzhinsky, his erstwhile drawing master (all three of whom belonged to his father's generation). He attended Dobuzhinsky's personal exhibit in 1926 in Berlin, fostering a long-lasting friendship with his former teacher, to whom he dedicated the poem, “Ut pictura poesis,” written shortly after the exhibit.62 On January 3, 1931, he sent Elena Ivanovna a postcard with Page 158 → a reproduction of Dobuzhinsky's watercolor Bank Bridge (1902), remarking, “I think this postcard will be to your taste.”63 While visiting Paris in the spring of 1937, Nabokov reports to Véra, “Yesterday, I sat with Benois and Somov at the most charming Dobuzhinsky's.”64 And on April 5, 1939, he wrote to her from London, “I dined at the most charming old Braikevichs'; they have a remarkable collection of paintings, especially a whole trove of Somov's, of which I could not get my fill.”65 Nabokov frequently refers or alludes to works of the World of Art painters in his fiction. A case in point is a very specific description of large-size snowflakes that recurs often in Nabokov's works, such as the poem “The Skater,” the story “Orache,” and the novels Mary and The Defense. This description is also suggested in the original of The Gift by way of “the snow of the World of Art” (“sneg ‘Mira Iskusstva’”) (Ssoch 4:376). In the English translation, however, out of concern for the reader's unfamiliarity with Russian culture, the phrase is rendered merely as “stylized snow” (196). The source of this persistent imagery is elucidated in Speak, Memory, in which the writer associates “the stylized snowscape of the ‘Art World,’ Mir Iskusstva,” with “Dobuzhinski, Alexandre Benois,” who were “so dear to me in those days” (SM 236).66 Obviously, Nabokov owed a great deal to his parents, particularly to his father, for exposing him daily to the magnificent works of the World of Art and for inviting Dobuzhinsky, who made such a great impact on this budding artist turned poet, to become his art teacher.

Theater In addition to painting, Vladimir Dmitrievich also possessed great enthusiasm for and a deep knowledge of the theater. These qualities are manifest in Page 159 → his recollections published in the Berlin-based periodical Theater and Life. Nabokov senior opens these memoirs with the following revealing acknowledgment: “I became a passionate theatergoer at the age of fourteen. As a sixth-grade schoolboy, I was mad about Russian opera, became keen on Russian drama and French theater. I have carried this passion through my entire life.”67 In spite of his rather compact schedule while touring the wartime England, Vladimir Dmitrievich found time to examine the current state of English drama. He noted a considerable decline of interest in serious theater among the English spectators, save for the works of Shakespeare. This decline, as he astutely remarked, could not be explained by the war conditions alone. He wrote that Hippolyte Taine in his Notes on England had already “observed an indifference to theater on the part of ‘good society’” and cited the famed French critic and historian's view that “in England, […] there is national comedy no more; authors either translate or adapt French plays.”68 V. D. Nabokov also quoted from a more recent book by another French critic, Augustin Filon, who seconded Taine's opinion. Filon “published an entire book about the English theater in which he noted the decline of the English drama, which reached an especially low level in the 1860s and since then has been trying in vain to shake off the French influence, mainly that of Scribe and Sardou, and to grasp new ideas, new methods of stage creation.”69 When surveying the field and providing his own explanation, Vladimir Dmitrievich singles out Oscar Wilde for scorn: “As far as Wilde is concerned, his role in the history of English theater is undeniable, but namely this role, it seems Page 160 → to me, was inauspicious in the highest degree.”70 Nabokov senior asserts that “life's truth, power of emotions, beauty and depth of thought, distinctness of characters, their significance and interest common to all mankind—all that is absent in Wilde and is replaced by fireworks of wittiness, unexpected paradoxes, by some iridescent and deceptive play of the disillusioned mind.”71 As discussed in chapter 3, the younger Nabokov also had serious misgivings about Wilde and his oeuvre.

As this passage indicates, Vladimir Dmitrievich applied very high standards to dramaturgy. And so did Nabokov, judging by his essays on theater. In particular, like his father, Nabokov admonished playwrights when their tragedies were “untrue to life” and maintained that “what seems to me to be the higher form of tragedy is the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which the sorrows and passing of a particular man will follow the rules of his own individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them” (USSR 340, 341). In other words, echoing his father, Nabokov wished to see plays that exhibit “power of emotions, beauty and depth of thought, distinctness of characters.” V. D. Nabokov dubbed George Bernard Shaw the “current molder of opinion” and praised his literary merit but believed that “for him, one would think, the dramatic form is simply the most convenient but by no means the necessary one.”72 Nabokov agreed with his father, considering Shaw a skillful writer whose plays, although having a “complicated setting […] (with very minute details and at great length),” do not suffer from “superfluous ornamentation” (USSR 320, 321). Further, when speaking about “modern drama,” Nabokov listed “Shaw's brilliant farces (especially Candida)” among the examples of “existing plays” containing “magnificent bits, artistically rendered emotions and, most important, that special atmosphere which is the sign that the author has freely created a world of his own” (USSR 340). Kurt Dreyer reads Candida in King, Queen, Knave (263), and the play is alluded to in Lolita (251, 427). Page 161 → As a theater buff, Vladimir Dmitrievich frequented stage performances and personally knew many actors and directors. In particular, he was well acquainted with the Moscow Art Theatre troupe and its founders, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. The elder Nabokov recalls that in 1901, when the Moscow Art Theatre came to St. Petersburg for the first time, “we, seasoned spectators, were gripped by a new, some kind of extraordinarily strong and joyful emotion. We sensed at once that before us there was a certain renovation of theater, a deep novel conception and novel approach, and that this conception motivates a group of extraordinarily gifted people, passionately believing, passionately committed, soldered together by a strong bond.”73 Twenty years later, when the Moscow Art Theatre troupe, led by Stanislavsky, came to perform in Berlin as part of a Western European tour, Nabokov senior warmly welcomed the actors as old friends. Vladimir Dmitrievich's nephew Nicolas Nabokov (1903–78), a composer, wrote that “Stanislavsky and Olga Leonardovna KnipperChekhova (Chekhov's widow) were close friends of Uncle Vladimir and Aunt Lyolya [Elena Ivanovna's family nickname]. Other actors and actresses of the Moscow Art Theatre also visited the Nabokovs quite often, and once, I remember, Aunt Lyolya gave a party for the whole company.”74 This party is reminiscent of the one the editorial board of the St. Petersburg daily Speech (Rech´, copublished by Vladimir Dmitrievich) had given in honor of the Moscow Art Theatre a decade earlier, in May 1910, in the imperial capital, when the troupe performed Turgenev's A Month in the Country with Dobuzhinsky's stage and costume designs.75 Sergei Bertenson, a theater historian and later a member of the Moscow Art Theatre company, recalls that “the banquet was extremely fascinating: among the speakers there were Miliukov, Nabokov, Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko; Kachalov recited poetry.”76 Nicolas Nabokov also recalls that, while in Berlin, Stanislavsky was invited for tea to the Nabokov residence, where the famed Russian theater director had an argument with the renowned German actor Alexander Moissi about Page 162 → “the interpretation of Tolstoy's hero in The Living Corpse.”77 As copublisher of a Berlin Russian émigré daily, The Rudder, Vladimir Dmitrievich went out of his way to publicize the Moscow Art Theatre troupe's activities. Bertenson recalls, “We were anticipated here [in Berlin] with great eagerness and excitement. In the local Russian newspaper The Rudder that belonged to [I. V.] Gessen and [V. D.] Nabokov, […] much was being written about our group, and the Russian colony had an opportunity to stay abreast of all our travels and further plans.”78 Affable relations between Stanislavsky and Nabokov's parents are reflected in Nabokov's play The Event, in which “the Stanislavskis” are mentioned as acquaintances of the protagonist's sisterin-law (USSR 187). Nabokov shared his father's admiration for Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre. In his essays on theater, Nabokov calls Stanislavsky “that genius of the stage” (USSR 316) and praises the Moscow Art Theatre in his Cornell lectures along the same lines as his father:

When Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded their little Moscow Theatre, everything soon began to change. From the rather hackneyed affair that the theatre had become, it began to pick its way again to what it should be: a temple of careful and genuine art. […] The basic idea that it embodied was to serve the Art, not for the purpose of gain or fame, but for the high purpose of artistic achievement. […] The enthusiastic spirit of this high service animated every single member of the troupe; and if any other consideration became to him or her of greater importance than the search for artistic perfection, then he or she had no place in this theatrical community. Carried away by the profound artistic enthusiasm of its founders, living like one big family, the actors worked away at every one of the productions as if this were to be the one and only production in their lives. There was religious awe in their approach; there was moving self-sacrifice. And there also was amazing teamwork. For no actor was supposed to care more for his personal performance or success than for the general performance of the troupe, for the general success of the performance. (LRL 301–2) Page 163 → Nabokov concludes that “whenever talented people approach art with the sole idea of serving it sincerely to the utmost measure of their ability, the result is always gratifying” (LRL 302). He also credits the Moscow Art Theatre with “the wonders of staging and acting that have been preserved in Russia since the nineties of the last [nineteenth] century” (USSR 339). While Vladimir Dmitrievich merely notes that the Moscow Art Theatre brought about “a certain renovation of theater, deep novel conception and novel approach,” Nabokov elaborates on these accomplishments and presents them in a nutshell: the actor should dread above all the rigid techniques, the accepted methods, and should instead give all his attention and effort to an attempt at penetrating the soul of the theatrical type he was going to represent. In this attempt to give a convincing picture of dramatic type, the actor entrusted with the part would try for the period of training to live an imagined life which would be likely to suit the character in question; he would develop in real life mannerisms and intonations suitable for the occasion, so that when he was called upon to speak the words on the stage, these words would come to him as naturally as if he were the man himself and was speaking for himself by an entirely natural impulse. (LRL 302) Nabokov underscores the company's pioneering role and its major contribution to the development of theater. When praising “the Art Theatre” for “the wonders of staging and acting,” he concludes by remarking that this high technique of acting and of stage directing “can certainly make entertainment even out of the lowest trash” (USSR 339). Interestingly, Nabokov applied this latter method to his own work. He would use inferior material, such as a second-rate work of fiction or a newspaper account, as the basis for his superb prose. For example, Nabokov possibly utilized the plotline of Valentin Samsonov's substandard story, “A Fairy-Tale Princess,” for The Enchanter and Lolita and used tabloid crime reports as a source for Despair.79 The protagonist of The Gift undoubtedly reflects the musings of his creator when he feels a piercing pity “for all trash of life which by means of a momentary alchemic distillation, the ‘royal experiment’—is turned into something valuable and eternal” (164).80 And many years later, in Page 164 → his Cornell lectures on Dostoevsky, whom Nabokov calls “a thirdrate writer,” he remarks, “If you hate a book, you still may derive artistic delight from imagining other and better ways of looking at things, or, what is the same, expressing things, than the author you hate does” (LRL 105). “Although the theater always meant less to Nabokov than literature or painting,” as Boyd points out, Nabokov derived a considerable fascination with it from the influence of his theater-loving parents, particularly his father.81 By Nabokov's own later admission, he “love[d] ardently” “the art of staging and acting” (USSR 323). The young Nabokov attended theatrical productions of various innovative directors, among them Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Evreinov. Thus, Nabokov asserted that “the Russian producer Meyerhold, in spite of all his distortions and

additions, offered a stage version of The Government Inspector which conveyed something of the real Gogol” (NG 38). Nabokov also “recalled with particular pleasure” Evreinov's staging of fragments of Gogol's Government Inspector at the Crooked Mirror theater “as it might appear in five different versions: in a provincial theater, in the silent movies, or as directed by Edward Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt, or Konstantin Stanislavsky.”82 While in the Crimea, Nabokov took part in a performance of Arthur Schnizler's Liebelei. Later, in Berlin, he played the role of Pozdnyshev in the mock trial of the protagonist of Leo Tolstoy's “The Kreutzer Sonata” and the role of Nikolai Evreinov, Nabokov's distant kin, in the two-act comic review Quatsch.83 Although Nabokov asserted that “by nature I am no dramatist” (LoScreen ix), this statement should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, Nabokov's own creative legacy contains a sizable corpus of theatrical works spanning twenty years (more than forty years, if we take the Lolita screenplay into account), such as the one-act verse play “In Spring” (“Vesnoi,” 1918), the four-act tragedy in verse The Wanderers (Skital´tsy, 1923), the prologue Ahasuerus (Agasfer, 1923), the two-act drama Death (Smert´, 1923), and the one-act drama The Grand-Dad (Dedushka, 1923), the five-act verse play The Tragedy of Mr. Morn (Tragediia gospodina Morna, 1924), The Pole (Polius, 1924), The Man from the USSR (Chelovek iz SSSR, 1926); The Event (Sobytie, 1938), The Waltz Invention Page 165 → (Izobretenie Val´sa, 1938). (See USSR for The Grand-Dad and the last three plays listed.) Nabokov demonstrates a profound understanding of stage laws and playwriting principles in his two seminal essays, “Playwriting” and “The Tragedy of Tragedy” (USSR 315–42). The writer evidently consulted them when preparing his lectures on Chekhov's dramaturgy, specifically The Seagull.84 In his Cornell lectures on the play, Nabokov remarks, But notwithstanding the fact that Chekhov was still tied up by the very traditions he was flaunting (the rather flat expositions, for instance), what seemed nonsense and faults to the average critic are really the grain from which some day a really great drama will grow, for with all my fondness for Chekhov I cannot hide the fact that in spite of his authentic genius he did not create the perfect masterpiece. His achievement was that he showed the right way to escape the dungeon of deterministic causation, of cause and effect, and burst the bars holding the art of drama captive. What I hope of future playwrights is not that they will merely repeat the actual methods of Chekhov, for these belong to him, to his type of genius, and cannot be imitated, but that other methods tending with even more power to the same freedom of drama will be found and applied. (LRL 285) Like his father, Nabokov applied very high standards to playwriting: he discerned flaws, such as “flat expositions, ” even in Chekhov's works, and unreservedly called “masterpieces” only Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear and Gogol's Government Inspector, those “dream-tragedies resplendent with genius” (USSR 326). Alongside his father's highly selective attitude toward theater, Nabokov's approach was evidently influenced by the works of some of his contemporaries, such as Andrei Bely's “Theater and Contemporary Drama” (“Teatr i sovremennaia drama,” 1908), Nikolai Evreinov's Theater as Such (Teatr kak takovoi, 1912), Maximilian Voloshin's “Theater and Dream” (“Teatr i snovidenie,” 1912–13), and Yuri Aikhenval´d's “The Rejection of Theater” (“Otritsanie teatra,” 1913).85 Page 166 → How can we account for the fact that Nabokov eventually abandoned this form of art altogether? It appears that he stopped writing plays not primarily because of his “notorious aversion to any form of collaborative work,”86 even though Nabokov indeed had misgivings about the compromises collaboration frequently entails: “Thus, a play will be created by the management, the actors, the stagehands—and a couple of meek scriptwriters whom nobody heeds; it will be based on collaboration, and collaboration will certainly never produce anything as permanent as can be the work of one man because however much talent the collaborators may individually possess the final result will unavoidably be a compromise between talents, a certain average, a trimming and clipping, a rational number distilled out of the fusion of irrational ones” (USSR 323–24). Although he expressed his misgivings about stage collaboration by the early 1940s, Nabokov had not yet ruled it out for himself. He underscored his loathing this “group activity” (LoScreen x) decades later, after writing a screenplay for the movie Lolita—his last-ditch

effort and the “most ambitious venture in the domain of drama” (SO 90). The screenplay's implementation—or, rather, the lack thereof—by Stanley Kubrick was a disappointment to the writer. Nabokov called the film “only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene” (SO 105), even though he found the movie “otherwise excellent” and “first-rate” (SO 90, 21). It was, then, not writing plays but staging them that Nabokov found particularly troublesome; book publishing (as opposed to book writing) is also a collaborative effort that can involve vexatious experiences (typographical errors, unsatisfactory layout, poor aesthetic appeal, and so forth), but those issues did not stop Nabokov from composing novels and short stories. When it came to writing, Nabokov by and large exercised full control over his material, with rare exceptions. These include, for example, the notorious excision of Chapter Four from The Gift by the Contemporary Annals editors and the New Yorker's attempts to “edit” his stories (see SO 65; SL 76–77). A play for stage or screen, on the contrary, is subject to interpretations by theater and movie directors and actors that in the end may have very little to do with the playwright's intent. Finally, Nabokov ceased writing plays after realizing over time that he had exhausted the possibilities that dramaturgy could offer him and, furthermore, that prose fiction—novel and short story—was the medium most congenial to his creative genius. Even after arriving at this realization and abandoning playwriting altogether, Nabokov nonetheless continued Page 167 → to draw on thespian art and to channel his fascination with it into his prose by exploring such characteristic aspects of theatricality as impermanence, unpredictability, illusoriness, and ostentatiousness.87

Music Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was a fervent lover of music, both instrumental and operatic.88 This love finds its expression in his correspondence, particularly with Platon Vaksel´, in which he discusses his impressions of operatic and concert events with this music critic and fellow jurist.89 As Nabokov recalls, his parents “had many acquaintances who painted and danced and made music” (SO 171). At their St. Petersburg residence, the Nabokovs frequently held cultural soirées, and their house “was one of the first where young Shaliapin sang” (171) and where Sergei Koussevitzky, a celebrated musician and the future legendary conductor and music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, gave private concerts.90 Contacts between the Nabokovs and Koussevitzky continued in exile. In 1939, the conductor provided an affidavit for Nabokov's American visa application.91 In the winter of 1948, Nabokov reported to his sister Elena, “I just translated for him [Nicolas Nabokov] ‘I've revisited that little corner of the earth…’ [Pushkin's poem]. He set it to music and the Koussevitzky orchestra [the Boston Symphony] will perform it.”92 Vladimir Dmitrievich took part in arranging musical events. For example, in his letters to Sergei Liapunov, a composer and pianist, V. D. Nabokov discusses the program of his piano concert.93 Nabokov senior was also in the habit of attending various music recitals. Alexander Benois records in his diary that on December 6, 1916, he and V. D. Nabokov were present at “the concert of [Alexander] Borovsky […]; the program was comprised exclusively of the works by Liszt.”94 Borovsky, a renowned concert pianist, taught Page 168 → at the Moscow Conservatory (1915–20). He left Russia in 1921 and performed all over Europe and the United States, where he took up permanent residence in 1941. Borovsky continued giving concerts and making recordings and later accepted a teaching position at Boston University.95 In spring of 1922, less than three weeks before his death, V. D. Nabokov wrote an enthusiastic review about one of Borovsky's Berlin recitals.96 From his boyhood on, Nabokov senior “was mad about Russian opera.” Nabokov testifies that Vladimir Dmitrievich “liked to sing”97 and corroborates his “very early, and lifelong passion for opera” (SM 179). Nabokov writes that his father “must have heard practically every first-rate European singer between 1880 and 1922, and although unable to play anything (except very majestically the first chords of the ‘Ruslan’ overture) remembered every note of his favorite operas” (179). In spite of being extremely busy with matters of politics, V. D. Nabokov tried to keep up with the productions of contemporary operas. In his diary for 1917, Alexander Benois records that “Nabokov [Sr.] at last got to see a production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or over which he went into raptures (he never heard this opera before).”98 Nabokov senior's penchant for opera was so strong that he went to Mariinsky Theater to attend Mikhail Glinka's

Ruslan and Liudmila even after being detained for four days by the Bolsheviks. His courage and presence of mind are astonishing, as he was perfectly aware of the dangers of being seen in public. Benois records in his diary entry for December 10 (November 27 O.S.), 1917, “Tonight in Suvchinsky's box at Ruslan. […] V. D. Nabokov dropped by the box, looking like some sort of victor after his four-day detention at Smolny.”99 The following day, the Bolsheviks outlawed the Kadet Party and arrested many of its leaders. Vladimir Dmitrievich avoided the arrest by a sheer miracle and left for the Crimea. In his memoirs about music scene in imperial St. Petersburg, Vladimir Dmitrievich describes in detail the best Russian and foreign singers and Page 169 → conductors, especially lauding the bass Fedor Stravinsky (the father of the renowned composer), whom he calls “one of the most gifted and strong artists I have ever seen.”100 The senior Nabokov also singled out for praise the conductor Eduard Napravnik, to whom he devoted a special essay, calling the maestro “no doubt one of the most prominent figures in the music life of St. Petersburg since the 1870s” and pointing out that Napravnik “played an especially outstanding role in the history of our opera.”101 In 1917, V. D. Nabokov paid tribute to Napravnik in a memorial address commemorating the first anniversary of the maestro's passing.102 In his obituary for Enrico Caruso, Vladimir Dmitrievich recalls the legendary tenor's appearances on the St. Petersburg stage at the turn of the twentieth century “in the Italian opera performances arranged by the Gretti enterprise in the Conservatory Theater.” Nabokov senior demonstrates his excellent familiarity with contemporary Italian opera when he intimates that “those who heard him [Caruso] in La bohème, with Sigrid Arnoldson in the part of Mimi, will hardly forget him” and when he points out that “as a singer, and in particular as a performer of contemporary operas by Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Puccini, he [Caruso] was an absolutely exceptional phenomenon.”103 Vladimir Dmitrievich commanded high respect not only among musicians but also among music critics. For example, when S. Sviridenko [Sofia Aleksandrovna Sviridova], a music critic and the first Russian translator of the Scandinavian epic Edda, sent him a copy of her book, Schumann and His Songs, she inscribed it, “To the much-respected Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov with the hope for like-mindedness and in regard to Schumann—from the author. 1911. St. Petersburg.”104 Page 170 → While on his trip to wartime England, V. D. Nabokov found time not only to visit art museums and to attend theatrical productions but also to evaluate the music life of the English capital. In his scathing and at times even sarcastic survey, Vladimir Dmitrievich notes that “there is little music nowadays, there is no opera, concert soloists are scarce, only symphonic concerts remained.”105 Nabokov senior remarks that “the lion's share of the programs, as before, belongs to Wagner. Entire concerts happen to be devoted to fragments from his musical dramas.” He also sardonically notes that Russian music, too, is a big favorite, with Tchaikovsky and Glazunov still being the [public's] darlings, and, ever since Diaghilev's performances, also Mussorgsky. While I was there, T. Beecham included an entire act from Boris Godunov in the program of one of the concerts. They say, however, that it was poorly performed. But Englishmen have firmly grasped that Mussorgsky is a great Russian composer who o u g h t to be admired and are conscientiously carrying out this duty. Whether this music of genius reaches their hearts is another question. (letter-spacing emphasis in original)106 V. D. Nabokov's observations indicate that the poor quality of musical performance, specifically of Russian music, was virtually on par with the low receptiveness of the English audience. Several years later, Nicolas Nabokov recalled that while in Berlin, he attended open rehearsals of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra together with V. D. Nabokov: “On Sunday mornings we would take the Berlin subway to the general rehearsals of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. They were open to the public at that time. We stood in the back of the hall (seats were much too expensive and standing room cost the equivalent of fifty cents) under a light so as to be able to follow the music in pocket scores that Uncle Vladimir Page 171 → brought to the rehearsals.”107 Nicolas Nabokov goes on to recall, “Every Sunday as Uncle Vladimir and I shuttled homeward

after a concert rehearsal, he gave me a post-mortem résumé of what he had liked or disliked in that day's concert.”108 By his own admission, “it was at those Sunday-morning concerts (and the discussions with Uncle Vladimir that followed) that I received the first truly useful and lasting part of my musical education.”109 The conditions much improved and attending concerts became more enjoyable when Nicolas Nabokov was assigned as The Rudder's staff music critic. As he remembers, “From then on Uncle Vladimir and I had comfortable seats at the Philharmonic concerts on Monday evenings, and we went together to some of the best recitals and chamber-music concerts I have heard in my life.”110 In his estimation, “during those years Berlin was the world's biggest showplace for conductors, instrumentalists, singers, and, to a lesser extent, composers.”111 Together with his uncle, Nicolas Nabokov attended concerts led by many world-class conductors: “Besides [Arthur] Nikisch and [Wilhelm] Furtwängler, there were Bruno Walter at the Charlottenburg Opera House, Erich Kleiber at the Staatsoper, and Otto Klemperer at the Kroll Opera and Sing Akademie (to name but the five most famous).”112 Furtwängler became the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic after the death of Nikisch on January 23, 1922. V. D. Nabokov wrote an obituary in which he calls Nikisch's artistic career “the enterprise of a great master,” praises his “extraordinary talent,” and remarks that when he got older, “age, of course, already was taking its toll and cooled off Nikisch's temperament, but his performance of the great works of classical music […] became even more profound and heartfelt and his amazing power over the orchestra did not abate.”113 Nicolas Nabokov also remembers that V. D. Nabokov “liked best ‘the classics’—in particular, Beethoven. He did not care for Tchaikovsky, whom I, like most Russians, adored. We used to argue about Tchaikovsky and he Page 172 → would usually close the argument by saying: ‘I grant you that he is a brilliant orchestrator. But I cannot accept his sentimental melodies. They sound like gypsy stuff! It is all très mauvais goût.’”114 Vladimir Dmitrievich made an exception for Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony: after hearing the “Berlin Philharmonic's splendid performance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony,” “conducted by Nikisch, who knew how to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of Tchaikovsky's bombast and sentimentality and how to model those suave melodic lines so dangerously close to Kitsch” by bringing out “their genuine lyricism,” he “admitted to having been completely persuaded by its musical qualities and by its great ‘lyric’ beauty.”115 While Nabokov was “perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure” (SO 35), he, unlike his father, was far less enthusiastic about music than about literature, painting, and theater, as he acknowledged in his memoir: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones” (SM 35–36). The writer also admits, “When I attend a concert—which happens about once in five years—I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, these take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians” (SO 35). Nabokov's extraordinary visual acuity apparently stood in the way of his enjoyment of music and was to a great extent responsible for his discomfort at recitals. The writer's visual propensity while listening to music can be discerned in the poem “The Two”: as Irina is playing Mozart, Andrei is more fascinated by “the tremble of her little hand, / and slightly golden curls at the back of her head” than by “the splash of dancing accords.”116 This visual propensity finds further expression in the short story, “Music” (1932), in the sensations of its protagonist: “To Victor any music he did not know—and all he knew was a dozen conventional tunes—could be likened to the patter of a conversation in a strange tongue: in vain you strive to define at least the Page 173 → limits of the words, but everything slips and merges, so that the laggard ear begins to feel boredom” (Stories 332–33). Like Nabokov's, Victor's boredom is the result of the character's exceptional visuality. He cannot focus on the sounds because his eyes are busy making various observations: “Victor tried to concentrate on listening, but soon caught himself watching Wolf's hands and their spectral reflections. When the sounds grew into insistent thunder, the performer's neck would swell, his widespread fingers tensed, and he emitted a faint grunt. […] Victor made a detailed study of the man: sharp-tipped nose, jutting eyelids, scar left by a boil on his neck, hair resembling blond fluff, broad-shouldered cut of black jacket” (333).117

With the exception of the “faint grunt,” all Victor's perceptions are visual, pertaining to shapes and colors, and given in exquisite detail (hands, nose, eyelids, hair, neck scar), as if by way of cinematic close-ups. Nevertheless, in the end, music makes an unexpectedly strong impression on the protagonist, causing him to feel elation by virtue of sharing this magic experience with his former wife, whom he still loves dearly: “Victor realized that the music, which before had seemed a narrow dungeon where, shackled together by the resonant sounds, they had been compelled to sit face-to-face some twenty feet apart, had actually been incredible bliss, a magic glass dome that had embraced and imprisoned him and her, had made it possible for him to breathe the same air as she” (Stories 336). Thus, Nabokov shows that music, not as a succession of sounds but as an overall sensation, may have an indelible beneficial effect on a human being. Some eight years earlier, Nabokov composed a story, “Bachmann” (1924), in which concert music figures prominently. The title character descends from a world-renowned concert pianist and composer to a degraded drunkard weeping beside a broken jukebox. In many ways, the story anticipates The Defense, specifically in the portrayal of a genius artist, childlike and driven toward madness because of his inability to control his gift.118 The character's last name may be perceived as a combination of Bach, the illustrious music Page 174 → dynasty, and of the composer Robert Schumann. In addition, the surname brings to mind the firm that manufactured grand pianos and was named after its founder, Wilhelm Bachmann, who made his first concert grand piano in Vienna around 1850. The narrator alludes to this connection: “You can still find his name in the advertisements of playerpiano firms” (Stories 124).119 Nabokov eloquently and insightfully describes Bachmann's virtuoso performance: “With incomparable artistry, Bachmann would summon and resolve the voices of counterpoint, cause dissonant chords to evoke an impression of marvelous harmonies, and, in his Triple Fugue, pursue the theme, gracefully, passionately toying with it, as a cat with a mouse: he would pretend he had let it escape, then, suddenly, in a flash of sly glee, bending over the keys, he would overtake it with a triumphant swoop” (Stories 119). In its expressiveness and grasp, Nabokov's description of Bachmann's playing is reminiscent of his father's review of Borovsky's recital. There, Vladimir Dmitrievich wrote that in performing Balakirev's Islamey, “Borovsky demonstrated absolutely extraordinary might and some sort of choking on his own passion” and that Beethoven's “Thirty-Two Variations were conveyed with an amazing integrity, unity, all the while carrying the main thread, without getting entangled in the brilliant variety of details.”120 Of course, Nabokov could allow himself more dazzling metaphors in a story than Vladimir Dmitrievich could in a brief newspaper review, but the writer's tendency to resort to such expressive and figurative language when describing a music performance may be traced back to his father's predilections. Concert music also figures prominently in Invitation to a Beheading. It is ingrained in its title, which invokes Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Dance (Aufforderung zum Tanz, 1819), an allusion Nabokov acknowledged.121 The novel may be linked to Weber's piano work, the first concert piece to be shaped as a waltz, when the fainting Cincinnatus bizarrely imagines being invited to a waltz by his jailer, Rodion (13). Furthermore, Weber's composition Page 175 → contains a surprise at its close: just when one expects the piece to end, one is startled by its continuation toward the unforeseen finale. In 1841, Hector Berlioz arranged the piece for orchestra; Berlioz accentuates Weber's startling finale with a cello sound after the piece appears to be finished. The surprise at the close of Invitation to a Beheading is not unlike that of Weber's piece: Cincinnatus suddenly abandons the platform where he is supposed to be executed. This music-related element of surprise is foreshadowed when “a large case containing possibly some musical instrument” (161) in M'sieur Pierre's cell, perhaps “a trombone” (59), turns out to be an ax. As it happens, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1832), the first programmatic Romantic symphony, culminates with “The Procession to the Scene of the Execution” and contains the vision of a beheading by guillotine.122 Nabokov could have familiarized himself with Weber's opus—specifically, its original piano version—in his boyhood. After its first performance in Russia in 1883 by Anton Rubinstein, the piece became very popular there both on stage and as an exercise for advanced piano students. In all likelihood, Nabokov heard it performed at the family residence, where his parents hosted private concerts. It is also possible that Nabokov heard it played by either Elena Ivanovna, an accomplished amateur pianist, or by his brother Sergei, a passionate music lover and a piano student.

Being music aficionados, both his parents and specifically Vladimir Dmitrievich were determined to expose their eldest son to classical music, especially to opera. For example, Nabokov recounts that he “must have attended Ruslan [and Liudmila] and Pikovaya Dama [Queen of Spades] at least a dozen times in the course of half as many years” (SM 36). Owing to this exposure by his parents, the soirées at the family home in St. Petersburg, talks at dinner table in Berlin, which most likely were the continuation of such discussions in the Russian imperial capital, as well as private conversations with his father, Nabokov absorbed and stored a great deal of information about music.123 He displays an impressive command and grasp of classical music, above all opera, despite his assertion, with excessive modesty, that his “knowledge of music is very slight” (SO 35). His oeuvre demonstrates an enviable knowledge of both classical opera—C. W. Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, Richard Wagner's Page 176 → Parsifal, Hector Berlioz's Damnation of Faust, and Peter Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades—as well as contemporary operatic repertoire, such as Paul Hindemith's There and Back and News of the Day, to name only a few.124 Furthermore, in 1928, Nabokov penned an essay in which he maintains that opera is “a natural art,” by which he means that “it either has its likeness or correspondence in nature—such as, for example, a Doric column or Beethoven's sonata—or directly imitates nature and human life, such as, for example, painting or theater.”125 In exemplifying natural art with Beethoven's sonata, Nabokov follows his father's criticism of Tolstoy, who argued that the composer's sonata is inferior to choral singing of peasant women (see chapter 3). He singles out for praise Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, and in part Georges Bizet's Carmen. Nabokov even goes so far as to envision humanity employing a different mode of communication—singing instead of speaking: “A frisky imagination will find some pleasure in the following picture—a country in which all books are written in music and salesmen in stores respond with an aria to a customer's aria.”126 How can we account for Nabokov's fascination with and noticeable erudition regarding opera? The answer may lie in the genre being a syncretic art form, or as Nabokov puts it, “a mixture of several arts”: alongside music, opera is comprised of verbal elements (librettos rendered in arias and recitatives) and visual components (costume and stage designs and lighting).127 It is telling, nevertheless, that whenever Nabokov followed the action on stage, he suffered from being unable to study the minutiae of visual details, real or imaginary, finding himself “completely overrun by the visual torment of not being able to read over Pimen's shoulder or of trying in vain to imagine the hawkmoths in the dim bloom of Juliet's garden” (SM 36). Nabokov evidently refers here to Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Gonoud's Roméo et Juliette. Page 177 → Interestingly, Nabokov's opinion about Tchaikovsky resembles his father's view, not only because the younger Nabokov found Tchaikovsky's melodies sentimental and in poor taste but also because the composer and the librettists—his brother Modest and Konstantin Shilovsky, “a poetaster” (EO 2:333)—for Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades vulgarized them by turning Pushkin's writings into “cloying banalities,” with particularly “hideous and insulting” librettos (SO 266). As Nabokov wrote in his lecture “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” “It is fruitless to reiterate that the perpetrators of the librettos, sinister individuals who sacrificed Eugene Onegin or The Queen of Spades to Tchaikovsky's mediocre music, criminally mutilated Pushkin's texts” (39).128 In his fiction, as, for example, in Despair, Nabokov derides Tchaikovsky's vulgar distortions of Pushkin's works, particularly The Queen of Spades.129 Nabokov's somewhat contradictory statements about his attitude toward music notwithstanding, it would be completely wrong to say, as some critics do, that Nabokov had no ear for it, even though he self-deprecatingly and quite unfairly made that claim (SO 35). After all, his earliest extant and highly melodious poem (composed in the summer of 1914) is “Music” (“Muzyka”), as is the later story.130 If indeed he had no ear, Nabokov would not have been able to find “Russian words to suit some of the Schubert and Schumann lieder based on Heine texts”—the task of which he “acquitted himself so well that at the concert both the singer [Anna Ian-Ruban] and the translator received ovations, and the next day in Yalta people were ringing up to obtain the words.”131 And if he had no ear, the writer certainly would not have been approached by Rakhmaninov to set Poe's “Bells” to the composer's music.132 One would have a tin ear not to detect melodiousness and sonority in Nabokov's own works,

whether poetry or prose. The author of one recent critique, Alexander Nemser, contends that “Nabokov's poetic translations” are “drained of melody,” and “in his prose, Nabokov often engineers a dazzling construction that produces the effect of a strange harmony.” Basing his argument on a single quotation from Pale Fire permeated with Page 178 → alliteration, the critic concludes, “But alliteration is percussion, and there are other instruments. Readers in search of poetry will have to go back to rooting around in the junkyard, or waiting by the payphone for a spectral call, as before.”133 It is unfathomable that Nemser, himself an accomplished poet, fails to discern melodiousness in Nabokov's oeuvre. It suffices to mention the opening and closing lines of Lolita, or (my personal favorite) the passage from Pnin that describes the title character's departure from Waindell, in which Nabokov's enormous aptitude for melody and rhythm is manifest in full force.134 At the same time, Nabokov was most proud, as no doubt would have been his father, of Dmitri's operatic accomplishments: “There is a wonderful singer in my family—my own son. His great gifts, the rare beauty of his bass, and the promise of a splendid career—all this affects me deeply” (SO 35). And in his last letter to Dmitri, written on May 9, 1977, the eve of his son's birthday, Nabokov writes, “I hug you, I'm proud of you, be well, my beloved” (SL 565). As Dmitri Nabokov astutely remarked, “Nabokov's predilection for butterflies is a central theme of ‘The Aurelian’ and flickers through many other stories. But what is stranger, music, for which he never professed a special love, often figures prominently in his writing (‘Sounds,’ ‘Bachmann,’ ‘Music,’ ‘The Assistant Producer’)” (Stories xvi). For example, when relating the phrase by Koncheev's look-alike “Da kommen die Wolken schon” and referring to his “philosophical or musical vein” (Gift 343), Nabokov subtly alludes to Joseph von Eichendorff's poem, “In a Foreign Land” (“In der Fremde”), with its almost precisely quoted phrase “Here come the clouds” (“Da kommen die Wolken her”), which was widely known in Schumann's musical rendition.135 Thus even though Nabokov did not possess the passion for music evidenced by his parents and his brother Sergei, he demonstrates an excellent knowledge of the instrumental, operatic, and vocal repertoire in his writings and a great sense of rhythm and melody in his poetry and prose. •

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Nabokov's childhood and adolescence in St. Petersburg, Russia's imperial capital, with its magnificent architecture and sculpture, art museums and Page 179 → galleries, especially during such a culturally splendid period as the so-called Silver Age that produced a plethora of superb works in painting, theater, and music, played a truly important role in his cultural development.136 But it was Vladimir Dmitrievich's enthusiasm for the fine arts, alongside Elena Ivanovna's hobby of painting, that prompted Nabokov to entertain boyhood thoughts of becoming a landscape painter and eventually led to his enviable knowledge of painting as reflected in his writings. The senior Nabokov's passion for theater metamorphosed into his son's predilection for dramaturgy and manifestations of theatricality in both his poetry and prose. Although Nabokov did not inherit his father's keen enthusiasm for music, his outstanding command of the classic repertoire served him in good stead, and his works abound with references to music, especially to opera, and resonate with their own melodies. 1. «мы пили чай в красивом замке местного магната, и здесь, совершенно неожиданно, со стены одной из гостиных, на меня глянул портрет поразительной прелести и силы: случайный Ван-Дейк, подлинная жемчужина. В гостиной этой было холодно и сумрачно—но мне показалось, будто кто-то ее сразу согрел и осветил»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 106. 2. «С тех пор Московский Художественный театр занял прочное место не только в летописях русской сцены, но и в истории русской литературы»; V. D. Nabokov, “Moskovskie khudozhniki,” 4. 3. K. D. Nabokov, Letters of a Russian Diplomat, 24. 4. «многочисленными памятниками, дворцами-музеями, превосходными художественными собраниями»; V. D. Nabokov, “Kopengagenskii s´´ezd mezhdunarodnogo soiuza kriminalistov,” 2151. 5. «ряд шедевров итальянских мастеров (например, большая алтарная картина болонца Франческо Франчия, с дивной Pieta, несколько полотен Корреджио, новый, недавно приобретенный Мазаччио, превосходные Кривелли и Болтраффио)»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 118–19. 6. See, for example, Williamson, Francesco Raibolini Called Francia; Benois, Istoriia zhivopisi vsekh vremen i narodov, 2:90–95. 7. Benois, «чудесной большой нашей «Мадонне на троне»», Istoriia zhivopisi vsekh vremen i narodov,

2:94. 8. Alexander Benois attributed the painting to Lorenzo Lotto in 1909, “and this attribution endured for a long time”; see Vsevolozhskaya, Hermitage, 274; Gould, Paintings of Correggio, 211. 9. Nabokov senior could not see Correggio’s Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, another subject rarely treated in Italian Renaissance art, as it did not become part of the National Gallery collection until 1927. See Gould, Paintings by Correggio, 222–23. 10. «Кривелли довел эту традиционную формулу до предельного великолепия»; Benois, Istoriia zhivopisi vsekh vremen i narodov, 1:474. 11. See Baker and Henry, National Gallery Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 146–47, 417, 159–63, 45; Vsevolozhskaya, Hermitage, plates 48–49, 65, 37–38, pp. 271–72, 274–75, 268–69. On The Madonna Litta’s various attributions, including Boltraffio, see Kustodieva, Ital´ianskaia zhivopis´ XIII–XVI veka, 220–22; Zöllner and Nathan, Leonardo da Vinci, 227. Cf. Benois’s characteristic assertion that “Such masterpiece as the Hermitage ‘Madonna Litta’ could be well attributed to him [Boltraffio]” («Ему вполне можно приписать такие шедевры, как эрмитажную «Мадонну Литту»»); see Benois, Istoriia zhivopisi vsekh vremen i narodov, 2:152. 12. Rozental´, Neprimechatel´nye dostovernosti, 239. 13. For pertinent references, see the index of artists in de Vries and Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting; Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, esp. 46–50, 54–61. 14. For a detailed discussion of the significance of Botticelli’s Primavera in Look at the Harlequins!, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 47–50. 15. «Час задумчивый строгого ужина, / Предсказанья измен и разлуки. / Озаряет ночная жемчужина / олеандровые лепестки. // Наклонился апостол к апостолу / У Христа—серебристые руки. / Ясно молятся свечи, и по столу / ночные ползут мотыльки» (Ssoch 1:535). 16. de Vries and Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting, 87. 17. I am indebted to Becky Bowman for this suggestion. In Russian, the adjective oleandrovye contains the painter’s given name in its entirety. For a detailed discussion of the poem in its relation to Leonardo’s Last Supper and to other works of art, see Shapiro, “Pictorial Origins,” 43–47. 18. For the announcement and a concise account of the talk, see Wellesley College News, February 19, 1942, 3; February 26, 1942, 5. 19. For more on Nabokov and Leonardo, see Ciancio, “Nabokov’s Painted Parchments,” 247–49; de Vries and Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting, 87–97. 20. For a detailed discussion of the presence of del Piombo’s art in Nabokov’s oeuvre and especially its pivotal role in “La Veneziana,” see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 54–61. 21. «наблюдательность у моего отца была исключительная»; Iangirov, “Druz´ia, babochki i monstry,” 551. 22. «в отдельной, недавно открытой, зале голландской школы можно любоваться четырьмя Рембрандтами первоклассного достоинства, отличными картинами Метсю, Остаде, двумя Гоббема и недавно приобретенным “Концертом” [другое название “La Collation”—ужин] Питера деГооха—этого восхитительного, единственного в своем роде мастера (моего любимого)»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 119. V. D. Nabokov refers here to de Hooch’s Musical Party in a Courtyard (1677; National Gallery, London). De Hooch’s painting, Concert (1680), is at the St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum. 23. «перед началом великой войны […] он был одним из немногих, которые предчувствовали возможность катастрофы для России»; Ganfman, “V. D. Nabokov.” Kornei Chukovsky also recorded V. D. Nabokov’s prophetic words in 1916 about the state of affairs in Russia in his diary: “The army is in the state of collapse; the catastrophe is imminent” («в армии развал; катастрофа неминуема»); Chukovsky, Dnevnik (1901–1929), 206. 24. For the present and past titles of the painting, see Baker and Henry, National Gallery Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 563; National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, 248. 25. For a detailed discussion of the meaning of this reference in the novel, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 40–45. 26. For the works by Hobbema, Metsu, and Adriaen van Ostade in the Nabokovs’ St. Petersburg residence, see Klimov, “Khudozhestvennoe sobranie sem´i Nabokovykh.”

27. See Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, 1629–1684, 80. 28. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 1:238. 29. For a black-and-white reproduction and brief description of the Hermitage painting, see Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, plate 150, p. 116. 30. For numerous references to and a detailed discussion of Dutch art, see de Vries and Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting; Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio. 31. On Early Netherlandish art and its presence in Nabokov’s works, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 31–40. 32. «чудесные пейзажи Клода Лоррена»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 119. 33. For the various titles of the painting, see Baker and Henry, National Gallery Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 124; National Gallery, Trafalgar Square: Catalogue of the Pictures, 57. 34. For a discussion of Cumming’s role in Nabokov’s artistic development and specifically in his fascination with landscape, see Shapiro, “Henry Cumming.” 35. Russell, Claude Lorrain, 47. 36. «Закатные люблю я облака» (Ssoch 1:551). For a brief discussion of sunsets in Nabokov’s works, see Berdjis, Imagery in Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Russian Novel, 311–12. 37. «я плавал средь больших и малых / бледно-лимонных, бледно-алых, / бледно-лиловых облаков. / В вечерний час очарованья, / они, как Божьи корабли, / как нежные благоуханья, / как песни райские текли»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Olympicum,” 77, VNA. 38. «дивные портреты Рейнольдса и Реберна, пейзажи Констэбля и Тэрнера», «фантастические световые симфонии Тэрнера»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 118, 119. In 1917—that is, a year after V. D. Nabokov’s visit to the National Gallery—the vast majority of English paintings were transferred to the Tate Gallery. 39. «прелестная Musidora и изумительные портреты Гэнсборо», «таких чудес, как «Приходский писарь» или «Ральф Шомберг» кисти Гэнсборо, «Дама в голубом» его же, с мечтательными темными глазами, словно освещающими болезненное бледное личико»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 118, 119. The senior Nabokov errs here: A Lady in Blue is not in the London National Gallery but in the St. Petersburg State Hermitage Museum, where it is the only Gainsborough painting in the collection. It had come into the Hermitage’s possession only a few years earlier, in 1912, as a gift of A. Z. Khitrovo, and was undoubtedly still fresh and strong in V. D. Nabokov’s memory. On Khitrovo and his collection of English paintings, see Veiner, “Sobranie Alekseia Zakharovicha Khitrovo.” 40. It was Walter Armstrong who made this supposition in his Gainsborough and His Place in English Art, 140. The supposition was repeated in numerous subsequent studies on Gainsborough; see, for example, Lord Gower, Thomas Gainsborough, 74; Boulton, Thomas Gainsborough, 196. 41. See http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=4892&searchid=20021; for a discussion of the statue, see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 97–98, cat. no. 61. 42. «великолепная «Мистрисс Сиддонс»»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 119. 43. «Англичане пользовались неограниченными симпатиями Сомова и прежде всего Гэнсборо и главным образом в его раннем периоде»; Dobuzhinsky, “Zapozdalyi venok na mogilu druga,” 6. 44. See Podkopaeva and Sveshnikova, Konstantin Andreevich Somov, 428. 45. Another eponymous painting created about the same time (1902) as Somov’s is by Viktor BorisovMusatov. 46. Anon., “‘Blue Boy’’s Transfer Begins in Secrecy.” 47. Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 100. 48. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 48 (no. 1078); Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 29 (no. 2893), 22 (no. 2788). 49. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 38 (no. 882). The periodical contains articles on the then recently deceased Burne-Jones and Beardsley that both Nabokov and his father apparently read; see Minsky, “Ser Edvard Bern-Dzhons” and Nurok, “Obri Berdslei.” For numerous reproductions of Beardsley’s artwork in the periodical, see, for example, Mir iskusstva 1 (1899): 54; 7 (1902): 109, 111, 112, 115, 117, 118, 123, 125, 129. Mir iskusstva also published an extensive article on Beardsley, by Dugald Sutherland MacColl that included numerous reproductions of Beardsley’s artwork;

see Mek Koll, “Obri Berdslei.” The University of Glasgow Library possesses “an autograph letter signed by Diaghilev to D. S. MacColl” dated September 20, 1898; the Diaghilev letter was prompted by Charles Conder, who “has written to him suggesting that MacColl write an article on Aubrey Beardsley”; see http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/manuSCRIPTs/search/detaild.cfm?DID=14998. 50. For a more detailed discussion of these paintings with regard to Nabokov’s oeuvre, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 139–41, 46. 51. See Shapiro, “Painterly Connotations,” 26–27. 52. For more on Beardsley in Lolita, see Shapiro, “Lolita Class List,” 326–27; de Vries, “Lolita and Aubrey Beardsley,” in de Vries and Johnson, Nabokov and the Art of Painting, 59–66; de la Durantaye, Style Is Matter, 36. 53. See Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 45–49; Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova: Pervoe prodolzhenie, 28–29, 22 (no. 2789). On the importance of Muther’s study for Nabokov, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, esp. 136–57. 54. For further information, see the Hermitage’s website, http://www.hermitagemuseum.org. 55. Miagkov, “Zapadnoevropeiskaia zhivopis´ v sobranii sem´i Nabokovykh,” 211–12. 56. Benois, Moi dnevnik, 584–85. 57. «действительно прелестные, дождем набухшая «Бретань» и рыже-зеленый «Версаль » соседствовали с «вкусными», как тогда говорилось, «Турками» Бакста и сомовской акварельной «Радугой» среди мокрых берез» (Ssoch 5:172). Rozental´ confirms that Somov’s Rainbow was displayed at the Nabokov mansion; see Neprimechatel´nye dostovernosti, 239. 58. See Petrova, World of Art, 253–54; Klimov, “Khudozhestvennoe sobranie sem´i Nabokovykh”; also see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 228 n. 24. 59. «в большой старомодной гостиной», «в обширной ванной»; Rozental´, Neprimechatel ´nye dostovernosti, 237, 239. 60. Rozental´ mentions “his [V. D. Nabokov’s] sympathies toward The World of Art” («его симпатии к «Миру искусства»»); Neprimechatel´nye dostovernosti, 238. 61. See V. D. Nabokov, “Mir iskusstva.” 62. For a discussion of this poem, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 118–21. 63. «Думаю, что тебе придется по вкусу эта открыточка»; Vladimir Nabokov, 99 A.L.S., 33 postcards to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, VNA. 64. «Вчера с Бенуа и Сомовым сидел у милейшего Добужинского». Translated by Gavriel Shapiro with Dmitri Nabokov. Quoted by permission of the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. All rights reserved. 65. «обедал у милейших стариков Брайкевич; у них замечательная коллекция картин,—особенно целая россыпь сомовских, которыми я не мог насосаться». Translated by Gavriel Shapiro with Dmitri Nabokov. Quoted by permission of the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. All rights reserved. For more information about Nabokov’s relations with and attitude toward the World of Art painters and for an important role which they and specifically Dobuzhinsky played in the development of Nabokov’s world perception and his artistic tastes, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 96–135. 66. For a detailed discussion of snow imagery in Nabokov’s oeuvre, see Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 102–5. 67. «Я сделался страстным театралом с четырнадцатилетнего возраста. Гимназистом 6-го класса я бредил русской оперой, увлекался русской драмой, французским театром. Эту страсть я пронес через всю свою жизнь»; V. D. Nabokov, “Iz vospominanii o teatre (za 35 let),” 4. 68. «Тэн в своих «Заметках об Англии» констатировал равнодушие к театру со стороны «хорошего общества»»; «В Англии,—писал Тэн,—больше нет национальной комедии; авторы переводят или приспособляют французские пьесы»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 120. V. D. Nabokov quotes here from Taine’s Notes sur l’Angleterre (Paris: Hachette, 1872). The 1885 edition is listed in his library catalogue; see Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 42 (no. 982). 69. «напечатал целую книгу об английском театре, где констатировал упадок английской драмы, достигшей особенно низкого уровня в 60-х годах прошлого века и с тех пор тщетно старавшейся отрешиться от французского влияния—главным образом, влияния Скриба и Сарду—и воспринять новые идеи, новые приемы сценического творчества»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 120–21. V. D. Nabokov refers here to Filon’s Le théatre anglais: hier, aujourd’hui, demain (Paris: Calmann Lévy,

1896), which is listed in his library catalogue; see Sistematicheskii katalog biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova, 40 (no. 928). 70. «Что касается Уайльда, то его роль в истории английского театра нельзя отрицать, но именно эта роль, как мне кажется, была в высшей степени неблагоприятной»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 121–22. 71. «Жизненная правда, сила переживаний, красота и глубина мысли, выпуклость характеров, их общечеловеческое значение и интерес—все это у Уайльда отсутствует и заменено фейерверком остроумия, неожиданных парадоксов, какой-то радужной и обманчивой игрой разочарованного ума»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 122. 72. «теперешний властитель дум», «Для него, надо думать, драматическая форма просто наиболее удобная, а отнюдь не необходимая»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 122. 73. «нас, искушенных зрителей, охватило новое, какое-то, необычайно сильное и радостное чувство. Мы сразу ощутили, что перед нами некое обновление театра, глубокий новый замысел и новый подход. И что замыслом этим одушевлена группа необычайно даровитых людей, страстно верующих, страстно убежденных, спаянных крепкой связью»; V. D. Nabokov, “Moskovskie khudozhniki,” 4. 74. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 109. 75. See Dobuzhinsky, Vospominaniia, 244–45. 76. «Банкет был крайне интересный: говорили речи Милюков, Набоков, Станиславский, НемировичДанченко, читал стихи Качалов»; Bertenson, Vokrug iskusstva, 125. 77. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 109. The role of Protasov, the protagonist of The Living Corpse, was one of Moissi’s crowning roles. See Böhm, Moissi, 10–12, including two photographs of Moissi as Protasov. 78. «Тут нас ждали с нетерпением и волнением. В местной русской газете «Руль», принадлежавшей Гессену и Набокову, […] много писалось о нашей группе, и русская колония имела возможность быть в курсе всех наших странствий и дальнейших планов»; Bertenson, Vokrug iskusstva, 314. 79. See Dolinin, “Nabokov and ‘Third-Rate Literature’”; D. Barton Johnson, “Sources of Nabokov’s Despair.” 80. Cf. Anna Akhmatova’s line “If only you knew from what rubbish / Poetry grows, knowing no shame” («Когда б вы знали, из какого сора / Растут стихи, не ведая стыда»); Akhmatova, Complete Poems, 413–14; Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:461. 81. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 103. 82. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 103. 83. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 148, 261, 273. For a discussion of Nabokov’s speech at the mock trial as well as for its fragments, see Babikov, “Primechaniia,” 544–46. For Nabokov’s and Evreinov’s kinship, see Ferrand, Les Nabokov, 13. For more on Nabokov and Evreinov, see Alexandrov,” “Nabokov and Evreinov”; Senderovich and Shvarts, “Starichok iz evreev.” 84. Nabokov senior called Chekhov’s Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard “his two immortal creations” («двух своих бессмертных творений»); V. D. Nabokov, “Moskovskie khudozhniki,” 4. 85. For a detailed discussion of Nabokov’s dramaturgy and the influence that these and other works exerted on his theatrical views, see Babikov, “‘Sobytie’ i samoe glavnoe v dramaticheskoi kontseptsii V. V. Nabokova”; for the English translation of the article, see Babikov, “The Event and the Main Thing in Nabokov’s Theory of Drama”; and most recently on the same subject, Babikov, “Izobretenie teatra.” 86. For this claim, see Frank, “‘By Nature I Am No Dramatist,’” 169. 87. On various manifestations of theatricality in Nabokov’s prose, see Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination. 88. Elena Ivanovna also passionately loved music and in Nabokov’s opinion “was an excellent pianist.” See Diment, Pniniad, 132. 89. See Uchitel´, “Muzykal´nyi uzor sud´by Vladimira Nabokova,” 95. 90. Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part, 86. 91. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 514. 92. «Только что для него перевел «Вновь я посетил тот уголок земли…»—он написал на это музыку, которую будет исполнять оркестр Кусевицкого» (Perepiska 52). 93. See Uchitel´, “Muzykal´nyi uzor sud´by Vladimira Nabokova,” 95.

94. «Вечером с В. Д. Набоковым на концерте Боровского […]; программа состояла исключительно из произведений Листа»; Benois, Moi dnevnik, 48. 95. See Slonimsky et al., Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians, 148. 96. See V. D. Nabokov, “Teatr i muzyka.” 97. See Diment, Pniniad, 131. 98. ««Золотого петушка», на который, наконец, Набоков попал и от которого пришел в восторг (он этой оперы раньше не слыхал)»; Benois, Moi dnevnik, 46. The opera’s premiere took place at the Moscow Zimin Opera House in 1909. 99. «Вечером в ложе Сувчинского на «Руслане». […] Заходил в ложу В. Д. Набоков, выглядящий каким-то триумфатором после своего четырехдневного сидения в Смольном»); Benois, Moi dnevnik, 289–90. Petr Suvchinsky, a music critic, was the coeditor (with Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer’s son) of the journal Music Contemporary (Muzykal´nyi sovremennik). 100. «одним из самых даровитых и сильных артистов, которого я когда либо видел»; V. D. Nabokov, “Teatral´nyi Peterburg,” 7. 101. «Э. Ф. Направник был, несомненно, одной из наиболее крупных фигур в музыкальной жизни Петербурга начиная с 70-х годов прошлого века и сыграл особенно выдающуюся роль в истории нашей оперы»; V. D. Nabokov, “Iz vospominanii o teatre: Napravnik.” 10. 102. See Benois, Moi dnevnik, 240. 103. «он выступал в спектаклях итальянской оперы, устраиваемых антрепризой Гретти в театре консерватории»; «Те, кто его […] слышал в «Богеме», с Зигрид Арнольдсон в роли Мими, едва ли его забудут», «как певец—и в частности, как исполнитель современных опер Масканьи, Леонкавалло и Пуччини, он был совершенно исключительным явлением»; V. D. Nabokov, “Enriko Karuzo.” 104. On Sviridova, see Ganzburg, “S. Sviridenko”; Smirnitskaia, “Sof´ia Sviridenko i ee ‘Edda.’” The original reads: «Многоуважаемому Владимиру Дмитриевичу Набокову, с надеждою на единомыслие и по отношению к Шуману—от автора. 1911. СПБ»; see Nabokovskii vestnik 1 (1998): between 192 and 193. 105. «Музыки сейчас довольно мало. Оперы нет, концертанты редки, остались только симфонические концерты»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 124. 106. «В программах львиная доля по-прежнему принадлежит Вагнеру. Целые концерты бывают посвящены отрывкам из его музыкальных драм», «Также в большом фаворе русская музыка, причем любимцами по-прежнему являются Чайковский и Глазунов, а со времени дягилевских спектаклей—и Мусоргский. При мне Т. Бичем включил в программу одного из концертов целый акт «Бориса». Говорят, впрочем, что исполняли его очень слабо. Но англичане твердо усвоили, что Мусоргский—великий русский композитор, что им с л е д у е т восхищаться, и добросовестно исполняют эту обязанность. Доходит ли до их сердца эта гениальная музыка—другой вопрос»; V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 124. Sir Thomas Beecham was a British conductor and impresario. 107. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 102. 108. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 104. 109. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 102. 110. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 107–8. 111. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 102. 112. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 102. Although Walter, Kleiber, and Klemperer performed in Berlin in the early 1920s, they assumed their duties as the principal conductors of the respective opera houses after V. D. Nabokov’s death on March 28, 1922. 113. «деятельность большого мастера», «исключительного таланта», «Годы, конечно, уже сказывались и охладили темперамент Никиша, но зато его исполнение великих произведений классической музыки […] стало еще глубже и проникновеннее, а изумительная власть над оркестром не ослабела»; V. D. Nabokov, “Artur Nikish.” 114. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 103. 115. See, respectively, Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 104, 103, 104. 116. «И трепет маленькой руки, / и у затылка завитки / чуть золотые—занимали / Андрея более чем плеск / созвучий пляшущих»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Dvoe,”133a, VNA.

117. As it happens, Victor was the name by which the infant Nabokov nearly missed being christened when his mother, just in time, “managed to correct the bungling archpresbyter” (SM 21). 118. In The Defense, chess is likened to music, specifically through the bond between Luzhin, who is compared to a musician (85), and his grandfather, the composer; see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 333. Nabokov commented on the chess-music connection in one of his interviews: “I have found a queer substitute for music in chess—more exactly, in the composition of chess problems” (SO 35). The writer also remarks that “in certain other respects he [Bachmann] is related to Luzhin” (Stories 647). 119. For a discussion of musical allusions in Nabokov’s works, and especially the role of music in “Bachmann,” see Bugaeva, “Muzykal´nyi eksperiment Nabokova.” Bugaeva asserts that “in the story ‘Bachmann’ Nabokov conducts a unique musical experiment that is striking in its boldness even against the background of the artistic strivings of the beginning of the twentieth century” («В рассказе «Бахман» Набоков проводит уникальный музыкальный эксперимент, поражающий смелостью даже на фоне художественных исканий начала ХХ в.»); Bugaeva, “Muzykal´nyi eksperiment Nabokova,” 332. 120. «Боровский проявил совершенно исключительную мощь и какую-то захлебывающуюся страстность», ««32 вариации» были переданы с изумительной целостностью, слитностью, все время ведущей одну основную нить, не запутавшуюся в блестящем разнообразии деталей»; V. D. Nabokov, “Teatr i muzyka.” 121. See Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 176. 122. For more information with regard to Weber and Berlioz in relation to Invitation to a Beheading, see Shapiro, Delicate Markers, 185–86 n. 11. 123. “The table talk at the Nabokovs’ was always gay and lively,” Nicolas Nabokov remembered. “We spoke about politics, cultural events, literature, and the arts”; Bagazh, 108. Vladimir Nabokov recalls that during the last evening with his father, they “were talking,” among other things, “about the opera Boris Godunov”; Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 192. 124. For an informative discussion on Nabokov and his attitude to music, including opera, see Connolly, “Quest for a Natural Melody”; Nicol, “Music in the Theater of the Mind”; Buhks, “Fantômes de l’opéra”; and most recently Bugaeva, “Muzykal´nyi eksperiment Nabokova.” 125. «Под естественным искусством я подразумеваю такое искусство, которое либо имеет свое подобие или соответствие в природе, как например дорическая колонна и бетховенская соната, либо непосредственно подражает природе и человеческой жизни, как например живопись и театр»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Ob opere,” 1, VNA. For the complete text of Nabokov’s essay in both the original Russian and in an English translation, see appendix 4. 126. «Прекрасны в этом смысле Пельас и Мелизанд, Борис Годунов, и отчасти Кармен», «Резвое воображение найдет некоторое удовольствие в картине такого рода—страна, где все книги написаны нотами и прикащики в магазинах отвечают арией на арию покупателя»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Ob opere, ” 3, VNA. 127. «опера есть смесь нескольких искусств»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Ob opere,” 1, VNA. 128. Nabokov, “Pushkin,” 39. 129. See Buhks, “Fantômes de l’opéra,” 464. 130. For the facsimile of the original, see Rippl, Vladimir Nabokov, 48; for an English translation of the poem, see SP 3. 131. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 145. Nabokov recalls that Ian-Ruban was “a very sophisticated kamernaya pevitsa [chamber singer] for whom I translated a lot of Heine for her Schumann recitals in Yalta”; Vladimir Nabokov, Answers to Andrew Field questions, June 12, 1970, 10, VNA. On Ian-Ruban, see Rozanova-Sverdlovskaia, Yalta muzykal´naia, 96–116. 132. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 145; NWL 50; VV 7. 133. Nemser, “Vlad the Impaler,” 43. 134. Cf. Marc Szeftel’s observation about “the musicality of Nabokov’s writing” and Maurice Couturier’s reference to “the musicality of his prose”; see Diment, Pniniad, 132; Couturier, “French Nabokov,” 145. 135. See Kats, “Chetyre muzykal´nye podsvetki k literaturnym tekstam.” 136. For illuminating surveys of St. Petersburg’s cultural life during Nabokov’s boyhood and youth, see Ezhegodnik gazety “Rech´” for 1912–16; Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn´ Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu.

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FIVE Lepidoptera, Chess, and Sports I should not have attempted to take a short cut. We're lost. Ask that nut with the net over there. The Butterfly Hunter. His name is Vladimir Nabokov. A fritillary settles with outspread wings on a tall flower. Nabokov snaps it up with a sweep of his net. Humbert walks toward him. With a nip of finger and thumb through a fold of the marquisette Nabokov dispatches his capture and works the dead insect out of the netbag onto the palm of his hand. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: A Screenplay HUMBERT LOLITA

Problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions Bicycling and riding, boating and bathing, tennis and croquet […]—this is a general list of the themes that move our author. —Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift Alongside the devotion to creative writing that became Nabokov's lifetime vocation, his great fascination with the fine arts, interest in theater, and enviable knowledge of music, V. D. Nabokov inculcated in his firstborn a lasting passion for butterflies and an enduring enthusiasm for chess and sports. All of these pursuits, without which Nabokov's persona and his literary legacy cannot be fully comprehended, manifest themselves in his oeuvre. Page 181 →

Butterflies The Nabokovs’ butterfly fervor can be better understood in the broader context of lepidoptery in Russia. The initial interest in butterflies dates from the eighteenth century, when Russia's grandees, following the fashion in contemporary Western Europe, became enchanted with these splendorous insects, especially after the publication of lavishly illustrated monographs such as Maria Sybilla Merian's Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705), which, incidentally, Nabokov mentions in his memoir (SM 122). In 1728, at the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera, founded only a decade earlier by Peter the Great, a zoology division was established that contained and exhibited a sizable butterfly collection. Throughout the eighteenth century, a number of naturalists, among them Johann Georg Gmelin, Stepan Krasheninnikov, and Georg Wilhelm Steller, conducted expeditions to Siberia and enriched the Kunstkamera collection with a great number of local butterflies. Natural sciences, particularly lepidoptery, were greatly advanced by Carl Linnaeus's systematization, which was propagated in Russia by his disciples, Matvei Afonin and Alexander Karamyshev. Linnaeus's countryman Erik Gustaf Laxman, the German Peter Simon Pallas, and the Russian Ivan Lepekhin considerably promoted the study of butterflies and moths in Russia in the mid-to late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim founded the Imperial Society of Naturalists in Moscow and was very instrumental in furthering lepidopteral research. The research reached its peak with the publication of von Waldheim's five-volume Entomographia imperii Rossici, the last volume of which, Lepidoptera Rossica, written in collaboration with Eduard von Eversmann, came out in 1851. The formation of the Russian Entomological Society in 1859 and the publication of its journals, Horae Societatis Entomologicae Rossicae (Trudy Russkogo entomologicheskogo obshchestva, since 1861) and Russian Entomological Review (Russkoe entomologicheskoe obozrenie, since 1901), additionally advanced the national interest in lepidoptery at the turn of the twentieth century, when Vladimir Dmitrievich and later his eldest son developed an enthusiasm for butterflies.1

According to Nabokov, his father “caught” the lepidopteral passion from one of his German tutors (see SM 173). The senior Nabokov remembered “the rare butterfly that, on the seventeenth of August, 1883, his German tutor Page 182 → had netted for him” (SM 75)—so unforgettable was the event that its precise date was forever etched in his memory. “He and his brothers had stopped short in helpless excitement at the sight of the coveted insect poised on a log and moving up and down, as though in alert respiration, its four cherry-red wings with a pavonian eyespot on each,” the younger Nabokov later wrote. “In tense silence, not daring to strike himself, he had handed his net to Herr Rogge, who was groping for it, his eyes fixed on the splendid fly” (75). As a tribute to his father, Nabokov projects on the father of the protagonist of his last Russian novel “a love of lepidoptera” which “was inculcated into him by his German tutor,” as “he had caught his first peacock butterfly in ’71” (Gift 102, 109). There is also a fleeting reference to “indolent Peacocks” (524) in Ada, the novel that contains numerous marks of respect for Nabokov senior and that was written, to a great extent, as I have often mentioned, as a homage to his upcoming centenary. Over a hundred years after his character's father and almost ninety years after his own father, in the spring of 1972, Nabokov captured a Peacock butterfly in the gardens of the Montreux Palace Hotel during the television filming for the Bayerischer Rundfunk.2 “When Nabokov caught his first butterfly in 1906,” about a quarter of a century after his father's first lepidopteral trophy, “his mother showed him how to spread it.”3 Elena Ivanovna possessed considerable knowledge about butterflies, but it was Vladimir Dmitrievich, “a keen lepidopterist in his youth,”4 who not only passed this “passio et morbus aureliani” on to his eldest son (SM 173) but continued to encourage him, especially at the earlier stages of this fascination. Thus, in his June 7, 1908, letter to Elena Ivanovna from the Kresty prison, Vladimir Dmitrievich writes, “I have just received your precious letter, with a butterfly from Volodia. I was very touched. Tell him that here in the [prison] courtyard [literally garden], except for rhamni and P. brassicae, there are no butterflies at all. Did you find egeria?”5 As this letter indicates, Vladimir Dmitrievich, deeply moved by his son's present, was Page 183 → an expert lepidopterist, familiar with Latin names of various species. In his memoir, Nabokov also relates another incident of his father's lepidopteral ardor: “I remembered that summer afternoon (which already then seemed long ago although actually only four or five years had passed) when he had burst into my room, grabbed my net, shot down the veranda steps—and presently was strolling back holding between finger and thumb the rare and magnificent female of the Russian Poplar Admirable that he had seen basking on an aspen leaf from the balcony of his study” (SM 192). Prompted by this initial paternal influence and encouragement, Nabokov in due time became an outstanding lepidopterist. He conducted extensive research, specifically on butterflies known as Blues, wrote a score of valuable scientific papers whose significance was overlooked for several decades, and eventually attained deserved recognition after his taxonomic accomplishments were widely acknowledged.6 Nabokov's sixty-fiveyear-old hypothesis about the biogeographic movements of Polyommatus Blues was recently corroborated.7 I shall not dwell on the multitudinous manifestations of butterflies in Nabokov's oeuvre and shall merely refer the interested reader to numerous works on the subject, specifically to the catalogue by Dieter Zimmer and to the posthumous collection of Nabokov's lepidopteral writings edited by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle. Suffice it to say here that one of Nabokov's earliest and lesser known references to lepidoptera is in the poem “The Two.” Nabokov bestowed his butterfly fascination on Andrei Karsavin, who “defended a large dissertation on mimicry” and who gives “the Latin description of one shaggy butterfly.” The poet then sings a panegyric to lepidopteral pursuits: “I envy you, the scholar: / it is gratifying, with creative mind / to guess right the laws of worlds / by a vein on the translucent wing. / It is gratifying the customs and structure / of smallest creatures to study / and their age-old significance / to comprehend by way of comparison.”8 Page 184 →

Chess Chess has been played in Russia for nearly a thousand years. Scholars, however, do not agree on the origins of the game there: some believe that chess came to Russia from India, its land of origin, via Iran and Central Asia; others surmise that it entered the country from either the Khazarian kingdom that emerged at the end of the sixth century in the Pontic-Caspian steppes and northern Caucasus or with the Tartar invasion that controlled Russia from the

mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth century. Chess is mentioned in byliny, medieval oral epic narrative poems, as well as in Kormchaia kniga, the mid-thirteenth-century book of canonic rules in which chess is included in the list of prohibited games. In spite of the prohibition, the game spread widely across various strata of Russian society, from princes to merchants. It is known that Russian monarchs such as Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great all played chess.9 Alexander Petrov was the first Russian player to receive recognition both at home and abroad and to publish a Russian chess handbook (1824). Other notable Russian players, Petrov's contemporaries, were Carl Jaenisch, a chess theoretician who issued a two-volume study, Analyse nouvelle des ouvertures du jeu des échecs (1842–43); Il´ya Shumov; brothers Princes Sergei and Dmitri Urusov; Victor Mikhailov, the editor of Chess Newsletter (Shakhmatnyi listok, 1859–63), the first Russian magazine devoted to the game; and Mikhail Chigorin. Chigorin resumed the publication of Chess Newsletter in 1876 and organized the first Russian chess club in St. Petersburg in 1880. From 1876 on, chess tournaments were held in Russia on a regular basis, most commonly in St. Petersburg, culminating in the first all-Russian championship held in Moscow in 1899, the year Nabokov was born. Between 1896 and 1914, Russia also hosted several international conventions, and in 1914, the All-Russia Chess Society was formed in St. Petersburg.10 As can be gleaned from this brief survey, the chess life in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century was quite eventful, especially in St. Petersburg. So it should come as no surprise that, like many of his Russian contemporaries, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov enjoyed playing chess and solving chess problems. Once again, he passed on this interest to his eldest son: according to Dmitri Nabokov, it was a “Staunton championship chess set on Page 185 → which his father had taught him to play.”11 Nabokov and his father frequently played the game together. While in the Crimea, Vladimir Dmitrievich jotted down in his tear-off calendar for January 18 (31), 1918, “In the evening, as usual, chess with Volodia. He began to play not badly at all.”12 And it is very telling that after the family's departure from Russia on April 15, 1919, on board “a small and shoddy Greek ship Nadezhda (Hope) carrying a cargo of dried fruit,” they played “a game of chess” in which, as Nabokov recalls, “one of the knights had lost its head, and a poker chip replaced a missing rook” (SM 251).13 Chess playing and problem-solving were among father and son's many mutual interests throughout the years: addressing his father in Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls “the chess problems we solved” (191). The shared fascination with chess problem-solving is clear in Vladimir Dmitrievich's October 22, 1919, letter from London to Cambridge University, where Nabokov had just matriculated. The senior Nabokov included a problem that he believed to be unsound to such a degree that he intended to bring this matter to the attention of its composer. He then writes, “I am eagerly awaiting Sunday—there was a three-mover in the Morning Post which I solved. And you?”14 And in an October 16, 1920, letter to Cambridge from Berlin (to which the family had relocated the preceding August), Vladimir Dmitrievich informs his eldest son, “I am sending you a very nice problem. ‘Weiss zieht und macht Remis,’ which does not mean ‘the white pulls and remises,’ but rather ‘the whites begin and make a draw.’ Send me the answer. For the solution of this problem you should need no more than five minutes.”15 It is not known whether Nabokov senior ever composed chess problems, but his fascination with problem-solving, which he encouraged in his eldest son, is perhaps responsible for Nabokov's keen interest in their composition. By his own admission, Nabokov “started to devise chess problems in late 1917” (PP 15). He describes the process of composing and constructing them in his memoir: “The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time Page 186 → drops out of one's consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer” (SM 290). Nabokov believed that chess problems “demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity” (SO 160–61). The affinity between art—specifically the art of writing—and chess problem-composing is manifest in the title Poems and Problems (1970), in which, alongside his poetry, Nabokov included a selection of chess problems he composed over a period of fifty-odd years.16 After Vladimir Dmitrievich's death, Nabokov continued playing chess. While in Berlin, he played the game on a

regular basis with Evsei Slonim, his father-in-law, and took part in the simultaneous chess matches against the renowned grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch and against the future world champion Alexander Alekhine; in an April 23, 1926, letter to his mother, Nabokov writes, “And two days ago a well-known chess player Nimzowitsch simultaneously played in the café ‘Équitable’ against forty amateurs. […] I lost but held out for a long time, from 8 to 12:30. One of these days I shall play there against Alekhine.”17 While playing against Nimzowitsch on this or another occasion, Nabokov “was on the verge of beating Nimzowitsch when a spectator leaned over his shoulder and made a foolish move on the board, and Nimzowitsch pounced.”18 During his residence in the United States, Nabokov played chess with his friend, Roman Grinberg; his university colleague, Avgusta L. Jaryc, who taught Russian at Cornell (see Nabokov's approving reference to her teaching in SL 263); and in later years in Montreux with his wife, Véra.19 Page 187 → Nabokov's fascination with chess is discernible in his creative work, beginning with his early one-act verse play, “In Spring” (“Vesnoi,” 1918), and the poems “Three Chess Sonnets” (“Tri shakhmatnykh soneta,” 1924) and “The Chess Knight” (“Shakhmatnyi kon´,” 1927).20 In Nabokov's Russian prose, the game is featured in the story “An Affair of Honor” as well as in Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift. Of course the game figures most prominently in The Defense, whose protagonist, Alexander Ivanovich Luzhin, a famed grandmaster, does not differentiate between chess and the surrounding world, and this confusion eventually drives him to madness and suicide.21 In Nabokov's later works, chess appears in the novels Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Look at the Harlequins!, and The Original of Laura. In the latter, Hubert H. Hubert, a lover of Flora's mother, brought the febrile girl “a miniature chess set (‘she knew the moves’) with tickly-looking little holes bored in the squares to admit and grip the red and white pieces; the pin-sized pawns penetrated easily, but the slightly larger noblemen had to be forced in with an ennervating joggle” (65)—a description that, according to Michael Maar, “shows how Eros, in the shadow of Thanatos, creeps in the cells of the language.”22

Sports V. D. Nabokov grew up at a time when recreational and organized sports started becoming more and more popular in Russia. The early practitioners of sports in St. Petersburg were foreigners, mostly Britons, residing in the imperial capital.23 V. D. Nabokov's Anglophilism no doubt greatly contributed to his fascination with sports, especially those that originated or became popular in England, such as boxing, bicycling, tennis, croquet, and soccer. Nabokov reminisces that in his boyhood, “all sorts of snug, mellow things came in a Page 188 → steady procession from the English Shop” (SM 79), among them “marvelous squeaky leather soccer balls and tennis balls white as talc, with virgin fluff, in the wrapping worthy of rare exotic fruit.”24 As Vladimir Dmitrievich recalls, organized sports were not part of the Third Gymnasium's curriculum. He remembers that “the large schoolyard became animated only in spring, in April and May. Tag-bat and tag were played there. Of other sports (soccer, lawn tennis) there was even no mention at the time.”25 (In The Defense, Nabokov describes tag-bat as “Russian baseball” [26].) Nabokov senior's athletic predilection, however, led him to acquire the necessary skills and to learn many sports either on his own or with the assistance of personal trainers. The Imperial School of Jurisprudence, where Vladimir Dmitrievich lectured on criminal law, “had gymnastics in its curriculum from its very foundation [1835]; its first instructor was a Swede named Pauli. […] Since 1896–97 boxing has also been included in the school's curriculum; it has been taught by the Parisian boxing champion, gymnastics and fencing instructor, the Frenchman Loustalot.”26 Ernest Loustalot was born in Bordeaux, a son of the sailor who was the French navy boxing champion as well as an outstanding swimmer. Loustalot graduated with a gold medal from L'École Supérieure d'Éducation Physique in Joinville-le-Pont (near Paris) and for eight years taught boxing, swimming, fencing, and gymnastics there. As an athlete, Loustalot had some truly impressive achievements: he was the French gymnastics champion and the French- and English-style European boxing champion and was among the world's five best fencers. In 1896, he was invited to St. Petersburg to teach physical education at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. The senior Nabokov evidently met the Frenchman there and asked him to give private boxing Page 189 → and fencing

lessons to himself and later to his eldest son. Loustalot contributed a great deal to the popularization and development of boxing in Russia. He was among the first to introduce the English and French boxing styles there and trained several first-rate Russian boxers. Loustalot initiated the first public bout, which took place on March 25, 1898, in the Mikhailovsky Manège in St. Petersburg, where he boxed against one of his pupils. He also reportedly acquainted Russians with water polo.27 As an Anglophile, V. D. Nabokov clearly believed that sports enhance and complement one's intellectual pursuits. This conviction was perceptible even in his library, which his son remembered as “the place [that] combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves” (SM 181). A distinguished criminologist, prominent statesman, and passionate bibliophile, Vladimir Dmitrievich was also a keen and capable sportsman: boxer, fencer, bicyclist, and tennis player. Following in his father's footsteps, Nabokov, too, combined his intellectual pursuits—creative writing, literary scholarship, and entomology—with various athletic activities, most of which overlapped with those of his father: boxing, bicycling, tennis, and soccer.

Fencing and Boxing While pursuing his legal and political interests, the senior Nabokov regularly trained with Loustalot in fencing and boxing at his St. Petersburg residence. As Nabokov recalls, the Frenchman “came, almost daily, […] to spar or fence with my father. I would dash […] toward the library, from which came a medley of stamping and scraping sounds. There, I would find my father, a big, robust man, looking still bigger in his white training suit, thrusting and parrying, while his agile instructor added brisk exclamations (‘Battez!’ ‘Rompez!’) to the click-clink of the foils” (SM 181). Like his father, Nabokov also took lessons in fencing and boxing from the “wonderful rubbery Frenchman” (181). Nabokov's home training with Loustalot is dramatized in the autobiographical story “Orache,” in which Mascara, “a diminutive elderly Frenchman made of gutta-percha and black bristle,” gives “private lessons in boxing” to little Peter (Stories 325). The younger Nabokov's private lessons had to be discontinued, however, due to the rigors of the Tenishev School curriculum. But since Loustalot taught physical education at Tenishev School, there are good Page 190 → reasons to believe that Nabokov continued his training with the Frenchman there.28 In modern times, in addition to its athletic appeal, boxing could assist in defending an individual's honor and in protecting those in need, especially dear ones. In his final act of heroism, Vladimir Dmitrievich used his boxing skills when shielding Miliukov “from the bullets of two Russian Fascists and, while vigorously knocking down one of the assassins, was fatally shot by the other” (SM 193). In his boyhood, Nabokov also used his newly acquired boxing ability to protect himself and his classmates from the bullies at Tenishev School, specifically the “gorilla-like, malodorous” Popov.29 In “Orache,” Peter demonstrates his boxing skills to Shchukin, “his strongest, roughest, and most backward classmate.” When Shchukin “hit Peter in the underbelly” “with a straight left, as taught by Monsieur Mascara, he bloodied Shchukin's nose. A stunned pause, red spots on a handkerchief. Having recovered from his astonishment, Shchukin fell upon Peter and started to maul him. Though his whole body hurt, Peter felt satisfied. Blood from Shchukin's nose continued to flow throughout the lesson of Natural History, stopped during Sums, and retrickled at Sacred Studies. Peter watched with quiet interest” (Stories 325–26). As an adult, Nabokov was compelled to use his boxing skills to defend his wife's honor: in the summer of 1927, when no rooms were available at a Baltic Sea resort and “‘a flushed fellow in the bar, with full glass in his hand[,]’ offered to share a bed with Véra,” Nabokov responded to the scoundrel's proposition by “landing ‘a hook on the man's jaw.’” Earlier that same year, Nabokov had pummeled Constantin Spirescu, a Romanian violinist whose brutality drove his wife to suicide. After learning the name of the restaurant at which Spirescu was playing, Nabokov went there, “slapped him on the cheek and then, according to the newspaper report, ‘graphically demonstrated upon him the techniques of English boxing.’”30 While gaining his boxing expertise from Loustalot, Nabokov acquired a predilection for the sport from his father. Nabokov undoubtedly perceived the sparring sessions as an additional bonding opportunity with the man he so

adored and admired. As Alexander Benois reports in his diary, “[V. D.] Nabokov is himself a great aficionado as well as virtuoso of boxing; it is not Page 191 → for nothing that he is daily engaged in exercising this art together with his sons.”31 The night before the assassination, as Nabokov records in his diary, Vladimir Dmitrievich “laughed, he fought with me when I began to demonstrate a boxing clinch.”32 Nabokov became quite skillful in the art of pugilism. In February 1920, while at Cambridge, he took part in boxing matches, “reached the semifinals[,] and then was knocked out by someone from his zoology class, […] Paul Leiris, a Sinhalese” “who subsequently became a well-known painter and ichthyologist.”33 Nabokov carried on his fascination with boxing after his father's death. He felt so confident in his abilities as an instructor that in the fall of 1926, “in order to recruit pupils for boxing lessons, he staged an exhibition bout” with his close friend, Georgy Gessen.34 Nabokov's fondness for the sport continued into his forties, as he passed this interest along to his son. Nina Berberova reports that when she visited the Nabokovs in Paris at the beginning of 1940, the frail Nabokov, who was convalescing from the flu, “took a huge boxing glove” and gave it to the little boy, Dmitri, “telling him to show me his art, and Mitya, having put on the glove, began with all his child's strength to beat Nabokov about the face. I saw this was painful to Nabokov but he smiled and endured it. This was training, his and the boy's.”35 Several months later, Nabokov brought to the United States “the two pairs of boxing gloves” that he “used for coaching sessions with Dmitri.”36 Later, in keeping with the family tradition, just as V. D. Nabokov provided for his son's lessons with the illustrious Loustalot, Nabokov arranged to have Dmitri “taught to box by one of the finest instructors in New England.”37 Nabokov's fascination with boxing is manifest in his creative writings. In the poem “A Boxer's Girl” (“Podruga boksera,” 1924), he describes the match ostensibly through the eyes of the boxer's girlfriend, although the exactitude of the account betrays the authorial expert point of view (see Ssoch 1:622). Nabokov's interest in and vast knowledge of this sport are particularly discernible in his account of the 1925 fight between the German Hans Page 192 → Breitensträter (dubbed the Blond Hans) and the Basque Paolino Uzcudun (nicknamed the Basque Woodchopper).38 In this essay, Nabokov professes his great love for athletics in general, stressing first and foremost their game aspect and speaking in particular about the beauty of the art of boxing. He illustrates it with examples from literature, briefly discusses the history of the sport and its most notable representatives, and describes the bout itself, all with tremendous competence and gusto. Nabokov specifically mentions his Trinity College predecessor, Lord Byron, a competent boxer who “gladly made friends with boxers and liked to watch their combats.”39 Here Nabokov alludes to Byron's friendship with Gentleman John Jackson, or “Dear Jack,” as the poet called him, a retired champion pugilist. After learning to spar at Jackson's rooms in Bond Street, Byron described himself as “not a bad boxer when I could keep my temper, which was difficult, but which I strove to do ever since I knocked down Mr. Purling and put his knee-pan out (with the gloves on).”40 Nabokov believes that “Pushkin and Lermontov would have loved it too, had they lived in England,” and quotes from Lermontov's “Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov” (1837).41 More than thirty years later in Pnin, while lecturing Victor on the manifestations of sports in Russian literature, the novel's title character, referring to that same poem, points out in his quaint Pninian English that “the first description of box in Russian literature we find in a poem by Mihail Lermontov” (105). Of course, Lermontov's poem describes not boxing in the strict modern sense but rather a traditional fist combat (kulachnyi boi) that Eastern Slavs had been practicing as early as in Kievan Rus´.42 In “The Fight,” a story written about the same time as the Breitensträter-Paolino essay, Nabokov once again poetically describes a fistfight between Krause, an elderly tavern keeper, and Otto, his daughter's young lover. “Enthralled” by their quarrel, which was prompted by Otto's refusal to pay twenty pfennigs for a shot of brandy, the narrator recalls “a splendid scuffle” he himself once had “in a seaport dive” (Stories 145). He skillfully conveys the “muffled Page 193 → thumping of fists” in the ensuing “hand-to-hand combat” between Otto and Krause (145). He perceptively notes that each combatant possessed his own style: while Otto struck in silence, Krause, who ultimately prevailed in the brawl, “emitted a short grunt with every blow” (145). One wonders whether the twenty-pfennig shot of brandy was merely a pretext for the clash, which was in reality about jealousy, control, and domination.43 Nabokov describes a similar fight between Martin and his best friend, Darwin, in Glory: although the real reason

for the combat is not immediately obvious, the pretext, as in the earlier story, is insignificant. Martin had an affair with Rose, a waitress; after hearing from the girl about her supposed pregnancy, Martin impulsively writes her a note that contains a marriage proposal. Darwin, who rightly suspected Rose of faking the pregnancy, bought the note from her for five pounds, thereby saving his friend from the dire consequences of this mistake. When Martin sees Rose and says hello to her in spite of Darwin's forbidding him to do so, the Englishman challenges him to a boxing bout. Martin's defiance, however, is merely a pretext that allows Darwin to settle a score with his best friend in their rivalry over Sonia Zilanov. Neither of the suitors, however, had any success in his courtship: Martin was desperately and unrequitedly in love with Sonia, and Darwin dated her but to no avail. Nabokov describes the fistfight between Martin and Darwin in exquisite detail: Fists clenched, legs flexed, the two started dancing around one another. Martin still could not imagine himself hitting Darwin in the face, in that large, clean-shaven face with the soft wrinkles around the mouth; however, when Darwin's left shot out and caught Martin on the jaw, everything changed: all anxiety vanished, he felt relaxed and radiant inside, and the ringing in his head, from the jolt it had received, sang of Sonia, over whom, in a sense, they were fighting this duel. Dodging another lunge, he punched Darwin's gentle face, ducked under Darwin's retaliating right, attempted an uppercut, and received himself such a black, star-spangled blow in the eye that he staggered and only just managed to evade the most vicious of half-a-dozen swipes. He crouched, he feinted, and jabbed Darwin in the mouth so nicely that his knuckles felt the hardness of teeth through the wetness of lips, but at once was punished himself in the belly by running into what seemed the protruding end of an iron girder. They bounced away from each other and resumed circling. Darwin had a red trickle at the corner of his mouth. He spat twice and the fight went on. […] Martin's left Page 194 → eye was already closed and swollen, and both combatants were glossy with sweat and smeared with blood. […] Bang! on the ear. Martin lost his balance, and, as he was tumbling, Darwin managed to hit him a second time, whereupon Martin sat down heavily on a pebbly patch, hurting his coccyx, but instantly sprang up and returned to the fray. […] Martin miraculously withstood a series of resonant hooks and even managed to slam the other again on the mouth. He was panting now, and not thinking too clearly, and what he saw before him was no longer called Darwin, and in fact had no human name at all, but had become simply a pink, slippery, rapidly moving mass that must be punched with every last bit of strength. He succeeded in planting yet another very solid and satisfying blow somewhere—he did not see where—but immediately a multitude of fists pummeled him at length from all sides, wherever he turned; he stubbornly searched for a breach in this whirlwind, found one, hammered at a continuum of squelchy pulp, suddenly felt that his own head was flying off, slipped, and remained hanging on Darwin in a humid clinch. (123–25) Nabokov recounts the fight between Martin and Darwin with great expertise, reminiscent of an impartial sport commentary, even though it is presented through the eyes of Martin. It is telling that Nabokov calls this fight a “duel” and demonstrates that like every duel, it brings no resolution to the problem between the opponents. For the description of this fight, Nabokov felt compelled to refresh his boxing sensations and once again staged a bout with Georgy Gessen that was advertised in The Rudder: “The evening party, with the newspaper-farce ‘By Merry Feet,’ forthcoming [this] Friday, September 26th, has evoked a most vivid interest. […] Much is expected of the boxing which, in accordance with all the rules of the art, will be showcased by V. Sirin and G. Gessen, with the accompaniment of a populous entourage of arbiters and seconds.”44

Bicycling The bicycle originated in Germany and underwent many modifications and improvements throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Page 195 → mostly in Great Britain. The eventual “pedal-powered twowheeler” went through “three developmental phases”: “the boneshaker, the high wheeler, and the safety bicycle.”45 It assumed its more recognizable form in the 1880s and 1890s when pneumatic tires, the diamondshaped frame, and the safety brake were introduced. The bicycle “craze” spread all over Europe and across the Atlantic. It reached Russia in the 1860s and became quite common there as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In the early 1880s, when the St. Petersburg Society of Amateur Bicyclists was formed, the official statistics

registered nearly fifty bicyclists in the imperial capital. The initial fascination with bicycling in Russia owes a great deal to the efforts of Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich and other bicycling enthusiasts who in 1893 formed the Bicycling Society in St. Petersburg, alongside the St. Petersburg Society of Amateur Bicyclists, the Strel´na Society of Bicyclists, and others.46 An 1896 picture taken by the legendary photographer Carl Bulla shows the start of a bicycle race in Strel´na, a St. Petersburg suburb about twelve miles from the city on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland.47 Among the pioneers of competitive bicycle racing were Mikhail D´iakov, Alexander Dokuchaev, and Sergei Utochkin. Utochkin was also a trailblazer and popularizer of aviation in Russia. It has been recently suggested that Utochkin, whose surname stems from the Russian utochka (little duck), is alluded to in Pale Fire by way of “Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time)” (103). The surname Gusev stems from the Russian gus´ (goose).48 Like this fictional colonel, Utochkin passed away in 1916. Unlike the colonel, who died at the age of seventy when “a very special monoplane, Blenda IV” became “his bird of doom” (103), Utochkin died at the age of forty as a result of lung hemorrhage. The name of the plane on which Utochkin practiced piloting was Farman IV, named after its French constructor, Henri Farman.49 Although there were some heated debates in the Russian press of the early 1880s about the health benefits and hazards of bicycling as well as the propriety of public bicycling competitions,50 those debates soon sank into Page 196 → oblivion. We find the belated reflection of such opposition in Chekhov's story “The Man in a Case” (“Chelovek v futliare,” 1898). Chekhov demonstrates the utterly retrograde attitude of the protagonist, Belikov, who is outraged at the sight of the new teacher, Kovalenko, and his sister, Varen´ka, bicycling in public. In all likelihood, V. D. Nabokov learned to ride a bicycle in the late 1880s, Page 197 → during his student years at St. Petersburg University. It is certain, however, that he had become an experienced bicyclist by the mid-1890s, when, while continuing his law studies in Germany, “he had gone for a bicycle trip in the Black Forest” (SM 174). By the late 1890s, the senior Nabokov was “a dedicated cyclist” (SM 40), and although he first met his future wife “on a fishing party,” he proposed to her in 1897 “as they wheeled their bicycles up an incline” toward the village of Griazno, in the vicinity of their adjacent family estates, Batovo and Vyra.51 As “a dedicated cyclist,” Vladimir Dmitrievich passed this fondness on to his son, who learned “to ride a bicycle in 1909” (SO 133). Bicycling was one of the recreational activities that, like boxing, contributed to a closer bond between father and son: they often spent time together on “long bicycle rides along the smooth Luga highway” (SM 192). Nabokov remembers “the efficient way” in which his father, “mighty-calved, knickerbockered, tweed-coated, checker-capped, […] would accomplish the mounting of his high-saddled ‘Dux’” (SM 192). He recalls his father's scrupulous actions preceding these rides: “Surveying the state of its polish, my father would pull on his suede gloves and test under [valet] Osip's anxious eye whether the tires were sufficiently tight. Then he would grip the handlebars, place his left foot on a metallic peg jutting at the rear end of the frame, push off with his right foot on the other side of the hind wheel and after three or four such propelments (with the bicycle now set in motion), leisurely translate his right leg into pedal position, move up his left, and settle down on the saddle” (192–93). This description reveals not only Nabokov senior's supreme bicycling expertise but also Nabokov's great understanding of the activity. The writer's own bicycling experience finds its earliest expression in his juvenile poem “The Bicyclist” (“Velosipedist,” 1918) (Ssoch 1:543–44) and is also reflected retrospectively in The Gift in Fyodor's poem about his first bicycle (26). Nabokov's great proficiency, evident in the memoir description of his bicycle trips, in particular, when he visits Valentina Shul´gin (Tamara of the memoir) (SM 230, 233, 240), is refracted in Mary in Ganin's recollections of his summer trysts with the title heroine (44–48, 56, 71–73). Nabokov's fondness for bicycling is perceptible in the way Humbert depicts Lolita's graceful bike riding: “Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a Page 198

→ magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upperlip and push off with her foot, and again sprint through pale shade and sun” (188). Nabokov provides a detailed description of Lolita's bicycling as seen through the eyes of Humbert, who poeticizes her motions and anthropomorphizes the bicycle itself, calling it “beautiful” and “young.” This passage also indicates that Humbert wistfully sees Lolita and her bicycle, as he did earlier her coeval “chappies,” whom he names after their outer clothing—“Red Sweater” and “Windbreaker” (187)—as interacting youngsters and becomes tantalizingly aware that he has no place in their “beautiful young” world.

Tennis In “A special note to the game of tennis,” which Nabokov appended to his analysis of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina (1877), he remarks that with regard to “the modern game,” it was “a Major [Walter] Wingfield [who] introduced [it] in England in 1873.” He adds that “it was an immediate success in Russia and in this country [the United States] as early as 1875” (LRL 234).52 Commenting on the changes that took place in tennis over time, Nabokov, himself a great connoisseur and enthusiastic authority on the sport for decades, observes that “incidentally, the game was much tamer in the [eighteen] seventies than it is today [the 1940s–50s]. A man's service was a stiff pat, with the racquet held vertically at eye level; a lady's service was a feeble underhand stroke” (234–35). To this note Nabokov attached a drawing (235) that depicts a female player in the contemporary tennis costume, such as Anna supposedly wore, holding a racket in one hand and a ball in the other.53 According to Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Tolstoy, while writing Anna Karenina, learned about the existence of the game from some written sources and made the Anglophile Vronsky play it in the 1870s. Tolstoy himself, however, started playing tennis only in the 1890s.54 Page 199 → It appears that “lawn tennis,” as it was called at the time, had in fact been played in Russia since the late 1870s under the auspices of St. Petersburg Cricket and Lawn-Tennis Club. In the 1880s, more and more members of Russian nobility built tennis courts on their country estates near St. Petersburg. The 1890s witnessed a growth of club tennis, the best known and the most elite among them being the Krestovsky Lawn-Tennis Club, founded Page 200 → by Arthur MacPherson, a Russified Scotsman. Among the pioneers of competitive tennis in Russia were men's national singles champions Prince Lev Urusov (1908) and Count Mikhail Sumarokov-El´ston and women's national singles champions Ekaterina Hirschfeld (1909) and Nadezhda Martynova (1910–11).55 Vladimir Dmitrievich apparently learned to play tennis at a fairly young age. His sister Nadezhda (1882–1954) recalls that while at their Batovo estate, the “boys bathed in the river and played tennis.”56 Nabokov started playing tennis in his boyhood, when he was instructed by “the coach of the reigning French tennis champion.”57 Ronald Bush identifies this tennis player as André Henri Gobert, a two-time French Open champion (1911 and 1920).58 It is more likely, however, that this is the eight-time French Open champion Maxime “Max” Omer Décugis (1903–4, 1907–9, and 1912–14).59 Nabokov mentions both Gobert and Décugis in Lolita. As Humbert intimates, “My rather heavily cut serve […] I had been taught by my father who had learned it from Decugis or Borman, old friends of his and great champions” (233–34). Paul de Borman was a renowned Belgian tennis player. Although he undoubtedly played singles with his father, Nabokov recalls the family's habitual doubles matches: Our current tutor or my father, when he stayed with us in the country, invariably had my brother for partner in our temperamental family doubles. “Play!” my mother would cry in the old manner as she put her little foot forward and bent her white-hatted head to ladle out an assiduous but feeble serve. I got easily cross with her, and she, with the ballboys, two barefooted peasant lads. […] The northern summer became tropical around harvest time. Scarlet Sergey would stick his racket between his knees and laboriously wipe his glasses. I see my butterfly net propped against the enclosure—just in case. Wallis Myers’ book on lawn tennis lies open on a bench, and after every exchange my father (a firstrate player, with a cannonball service of the Frank Riseley type and a beautiful “lifting drive”)

pedantically inquires of my Page 201 → brother and me whether the “follow-through,” that state of grace, has descended upon us. (SM 41–42)60

It becomes clear from this description that Elena Ivanovna was a rather experienced player, having learned to play tennis as a girl in the 1880s, even though her “feeble serve” was no match for the “cannonball service” of her husband. (Nabokov's tennis note appended to his analysis of Anna Karenina seems to indicate that his father adopted the modern technique, especially with regard to serving, whereas his mother retained a traditional, “feeble,” presumably still “underhand stroke.”) According to Nabokov, there was an early tennis court at the Rukavishnikovs’ Vyra estate, “which had been the scene of gay rallies in the [eighteen] eighties and nineties” (SM 40). In his Russian memoir, Nabokov dates the old tennis court “from nearly the Kareninian times.”61 By the time Nabokov was ten, in 1909, that original Vyra court became “obsolete” (40) and “an excellent modern court had been built” (41) to host the family tennis matches. Nabokov's description of these doubles matches as “temperamental” is better understood from his Russian memoir: he “sees [his] mother serving into the net” and becomes “angry with her blunders.”62 This disparity between the game of the parents was probably counterbalanced somewhat by that of the brothers: Vladimir was very good at sports and already played tennis well in his boyhood, whereas Sergei was nearsighted and “not a sportsman.”63 Over time, however, Sergei learned to play tennis quite well: the two brothers played a great deal of tennis together during their Cambridge years (see SM 258). These college tennis games that originated in their childhood assumed a fictionalized and metaphoric transformation in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “Once I happened to see two brothers, tennis champions, matched against one another; their strokes were totally different, and one of the two was far, far better than the other; but the general rhythm of their motions as they swept all over the court was exactly the same, so that had it been possible to draft both systems two identical designs would have appeared” (32). Page 202 → The mutual interest in tennis between the father and the eldest son extended not only to playing the game but also to following the major tournaments. Thus Nabokov remembers “the Wimbledon matches we followed in the London papers” (SM 191). Later, while at Cambridge, Nabokov recalls attending matches and, in particular, witnessing Gobert being “beaten by Patterson in 1919 or 1920 at Wimbledon” (AnL 393).64 The Australian Gerald Leighton Patterson was a two-time Wimbledon champion (1919 and 1922). The match to which Nabokov refers here is the 1919 quarterfinal in which Patterson defeated Gobert in straight sets, 10–8, 6–3, 6–2.65 (Patterson did not play Gobert in 1920: as the preceding year's champion, he only played and lost the challenge round to William Tatem “Big Bill” Tilden.) As for Gobert, that year he lost the five-setter in the third round to the Japanese player Zenzo Shimizu.66 In Lolita, as Nabokov explained to Alfred Appel, the phrase “thirty years before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish the great Gobbert [sic]” (162) relates to Patterson (AnL 393–94). In speaking of Cannes, Humbert has in mind the Bristol Cup, one of the most prestigious tournaments of the 1920s, also known as the French Pro, which was held at this French Riviera resort in 1920–21 and 1924–25. (The other location was Menton.)67 There is evidence that on at least one occasion, Nabokov attended Wimbledon with his father. In a note addressed to Elena Ivanovna, written in Vladimir Dmitrievich's hand, notated by Nabokov as “London 1920” and initialed by both the father and the son, they inform her that they “decided to go early in order to get seats at Wimbledon.”68 Nabokov remained an ardent fan of the sport and was such an advanced player that, while residing in Berlin, he was permitted, entirely on the strength of his game, to play at one of the city's best tennis clubs “almost for free” and supplemented his income by working “as a tennis coach.”69 When his son, Dmitri, registered at school before Nabokov embarked on a teaching career, first at Wellesley College and then at Cornell, “he wrote ‘tennis Page 203 → coach’ in the blank space above ‘father's occupation.’”70 Nabokov continued to play tennis regularly

throughout his “American years”: at Wellesley with the distinguished Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, “a man of quick, light movements in a rather French manner,”71 and at Cornell with the linguist J Milton Cowan. (Incidentally, Nabokov immortalized his Cornell tennis partner in the Lolita class list by way of John and Marion Cowan.)72 As Cowan recalled, Our tennis was a bit unusual. He had good ground strokes and would wear me down if I stayed on the baseline. But I soon discovered that Page 204 → he wouldn't run after a sharp volley. Consequently, when I needed a point I would go in to the net. Our play settled down to long rallies and a deuce set which went on until we were ready to quit. Neither of us ever won a set as I recall. The tie-breaker hadn't been invented in those days and neither of us felt the need to win. I also remember that we played with a dozen new balls so we wouldn't waste time chasing them. It was really delightful play.73 It appears from Cowan's recollections that in his Cornell years, Nabokov, a true aficionado of tennis, enjoyed the game for itself and was not concerned with winning. Being overweight (after Nabokov quit smoking, his weight increased from 140 to as much as 200 pounds; see SO 27) made it difficult for him to dash to the net after Cowan's sharp volleys. Nonetheless, his serve as well as his forehand and backhand were better than ever. Nabokov reports to his sister Elena Sikorski in an August 3, 1950, letter, “I weigh 86 kilograms [about 190 pounds]. […] But I play tennis with complete ease,”74 and on September 29, 1953, he writes to her that although he was “fairly fat, just as before (190 pounds),” “I play tennis better than I did in my youth” (SL 139). Nabokov also remained an avid spectator of the game. Thus the writer reports to Roman Grinberg on October 15, 1949, that he and Véra attended a tennis match between John Albert “Jack” Kramer and Ricardo Alonso “Pancho” González. Nabokov's impression was that they played “very lively and well.”75 In his later years in Europe, Nabokov maintained his tennis form. For example, he writes to Grinberg on February 23, 1961, from Nice, “I play here with a professional [Joseph] Negro who once coached in Russian tennis clubs, for example in Odessa before World War I! A wonderful semi-lame swarthy old man who comes to life on court like cactus breaking into blossom.”76 Born in Badalucco, a tiny town in the Liguria region, Joseph Negro moved with his family to Nice in 1902. “As a child, the barefoot Negro would fetch tennis balls for the members of the club. Yet soon his natural talent helped him become first a [ball] tosser, and then an instructor.” So good was Negro Page 205 → that he became a lifelong coach of Nabokov's coeval, the great Suzanne Lenglen.77 Negro himself was a remarkably accomplished professional tennis player. “Negro's game was full of tricks and surprises, spins and slices. One amazed spectator concluded of Negro's abilities: ‘If you told me he could make the ball sit up and beg, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.’ Negro was nothing less than a sorcerer of tennis, and little Suzanne became his studious apprentice.”78 Although he sustained a leg injury in World War I, Negro became a Bristol Cup finalist in 1922 and 1923.79 In all likelihood, Joseph Negro served as a prototype, if not the prototype, in The Original of Laura for “the stodgy old Basque in uncreased white trousers who had coached players in Odessa before World War One and still retained his effortless exquisite style” (81). Later, while in Montreux, Nabokov played tennis with Véra.80 As both a proficient player and an experienced tennis instructor, he taught Véra how to play tennis in the summer of 1929. Thus, in an August 15, 1929, letter to his mother in Prague, Nabokov writes from Kolbsheim, “I am giving tennis lessons to Véra and she is already playing not badly at all.”81 Nabokov's works abound with tennis episodes. As early as his poem “Lawn Tennis” (1920), included in the collection The Empyrean Path (Gornii put´, 1923), he describes the game in detail (see Ssoch 1:542). In “La Veneziana” (“Venetsianka,” written 1924), Frank, Riseley's namesake, is presented as an excellent tennis player. Nabokov zestfully and expertly conveys the power of Frank's serve, reminiscent of the writer's father's (see SM 42): “Frank, who was serving, tossed the ball high with his left hand, leaned far back as if he were about to fall over, then immediately lunged forward with a broad arching motion, his glossy racquet giving a glancing blow to the ball, which shot across the net and bounced like white lightning past Simpson, who gave it a helpless sidewise look” (Stories 92).82 In “The University Poem” (“Universitetskaia poema,” 1927), the narrator mentions “the

tennis racket in its frame,” Page 206 → describes lawn tennis as “that white pastime,” and relates discussing “who was now tennis champ” with a fellow student, Johnson (SP 33, 41, 51).83 Calling himself “a fiery player,” the poem's lyrical I sings the most exhilarating panegyric to tennis, all the while graphically describing the game and skillfully conveying its dynamism: “To toss the ball, to arch my back, / unwind like lightning, / with the stringed surface, from the shoulder / to skim the ball's occiput, / and, lunging, the whistling return / to devastatingly cut short,—/ the world has not a sweeter pastime…/ in heaven we shall be playing ball” (SP 42).84 In Glory, Martin, who, like his creator, “was an excellent player,” earns a living in Berlin by giving tennis lessons (46, 136–37). Early in the novel, Nabokov depicts a tennis match between Martin and a professional player, Bob Kitson, that Martin ends up losing: One hot August day Bob Kitson, a professional from Nice, turned up at the court, and invited Martin to play. Martin felt that familiar, stupid tremor, the vengeance of too vivid an imagination. Nevertheless he started well, now volleying at the net, now driving powerfully from the baseline to the furthest corner. […] Serving, crashing down on the ball, and transforming at once the incline of his body into a dash netward, Martin was about to win the set. But the professional, a lanky, coolheaded youth with glasses, whose game until then had resembled a lazy stroll, suddenly came awake and with five lightning shots evened the score. Martin began to feel weary and worried. He had the sun in his eyes. His shirt kept coming out from under his belt. If his opponent took this point that was the end of it. Kitson hit a lob from an uncomfortable corner position, and Martin, retreating in a kind of cakewalk, got ready to smash the ball. As he brought down his racket he had a fleeting vision of defeat and the malicious rejoicing of his habitual partners. Alas, the ball plumped limply into the net. (47; italics in translation but not in original)85 Page 207 → Here Nabokov again demonstrates his expert understanding of the game: aside from physical challenges, tennis is a battle of wills, a battle of minds. The winner is usually not only the fittest but also the one who succeeds in keeping his emotions in check. That is why the “coolheaded” Kitson ultimately prevails over Martin, who, unlike his “professional” opponent, was not in top condition (“began to feel weary”) and could not control his emotions (“began to feel […] worried”). Just before this passage, Nabokov describes, no doubt autobiographically, Martin's knowledge and harmonious enjoyment of the game: “At an early age he had assimilated the concord essential for the enjoyment of all the properties of the sphere, a coordination of all the elements participating in the stroke dealt to the white ball, so that the momentum begun with an arching swing still continues after the loud twang of taut strings, passing as it does through the muscles of the arm all the way to the shoulder, as if closing the smooth circle out of which, just as smoothly, the next one is born” (Glory 46–47). In relating Martin's tennis sensations, Nabokov demonstrates the lessons he (and his protagonist) learned from Myers's Complete Lawn Tennis Player, even though neither the author nor the book is mentioned. This passage faithfully conveys the sensation of the “follow-through” that the Englishman expounds in his very innovative tennis instruction manual. We recall that during their tennis games, Vladimir Dmitrievich used to ask his sons “whether the ‘follow-through,’ that state of grace, has descended upon us” (SM 42).86 Curiously, Nabokov employed this tennis term for butterfly collecting. Thus, Pilgram, the protagonist of “The Aurelian,” craved to “feel the follow-through of the swishing net” (Stories 252).87 It is worth noting that the crucial conversation between Martin and Gruzinov regarding the protagonist's forthcoming surreptitious journey to Russia follows their meeting by a tennis court. While watching the game, Gruzinov speaks about it with contempt, recalls a local blacksmith back in Russia playing tag-bat (lapta), and believes that the blacksmith “would beat these lads hollow.” To Martin's remark that “tennis rules are different,” Gruzinov counters rather jingoistically and foolishly that the blacksmith “would have given it to them—rules or no rules” (Glory 175). This juxtaposition between tennis and tag-bat evokes a similar conversation in Tolstoy's novel, Resurrection, Page 208 → published, coincidentally, the year Nabokov was born. There a tennis versus tagbat debate takes place between Princess Maria “Missy” Korchagin, an Anglophile, judging by her nickname, who

finds tennis “awfully interesting,” and Ivan Ivanovich Kolosov, who has the most typical Russian name and patronymic and an agricultural surname that stems from the Russian kolos (an ear of grain) and who, not surprisingly, finds tennis “dull” and opines that tag-bat, the game of his childhood, is “much more amusing.”88 This dinner-table debate, in which the protagonist, Prince Dmitri Nekhliudov, takes no part, creates even more distance between him and his circle of friends and, most important, between him and his fiancée, Missy. The debate eventually leads Nekhliudov to a deep reevaluation of his entire life and to his subsequent spiritual awakening and transformation. The argument between Gruzinov, a fan of a traditional Russian game resembling cricket and baseball, and Martin, who defends tennis, the English invention, is designed to indicate that the protagonist is “pretty much removed from Russian political problems and more of a foreign cut” (Glory 204). This comment by Zilanov, an émigré statesman who to some extent resembles Nabokov senior, is intended to give credence to the ensuing estimation that Martin “could prove capable of—well, of a high deed, if you like” (204).89 The interjections “well” and “if you like,” which convey Zilanov's careful consideration and impartiality in uttering his pronouncement, make the “high deed” phrase carry special weight and tally well with the title of the book. Nabokov's fondness for and great knowledge of tennis are also obvious in Lolita. The writer includes “Lolita playing tennis” among “the nerves of the novel” (AnL 316). Although himself an experienced and skillful player, Humbert is incapable of teaching the title heroine how to play the game well and therefore hires Ned Litam, a famous erstwhile champion, to give her tennis lessons. Nabokov poetically describes how the coach “would put out as it were an exquisite spring blossom of a stroke and twang the ball back to his pupil, that divine delicacy of absolute power” (162). In speaking of “a famous coach” and later naming him “Ned Litam” (162, 232), Nabokov alludes to Tilden, a seven-time U.S. Open singles champion (1920–25, 1929) and a three-time singles champion (1920–21, 1930) at Wimbledon, where Nabokov, while studying at Cambridge (1919–22), most likely saw him play. Tilden was Page 209 → twice incarcerated in the late 1940s, shortly before Nabokov began writing Lolita, for sexual offenses against underage males. The coach's name, Ned Litam (232), anagrammatically contains the tennis champion's surname; according to Nabokov, Ned Litam was also the pen name under which Tilden wrote fiction (SL 409). Humbert evidently hires Litam not only for his superb tennis skills but also because he feels that Lolita is “safe” with a homosexual coach. The irony, as in the case of Gaston Godin (see 181–82), is that Humbert, while making a disparaging remark about Litam's “harem of ball boys” (162), does not perceive his own behavior toward the underage Lolita as similarly perverse and repugnant. It appears that Lolita's innate talent and Litam's excellent coaching converge most fruitfully as she learns the game to perfection. The description of Lolita's game, and particularly of her serve, is among the most expressive and enthusiastic descriptions of tennis in fiction: I remember at the very first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip. It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop. (231–32) The description demonstrates the game's visual appeal and the aesthetic bliss it bestows upon its practitioners and spectators alike. Tennis references appear in Nabokov's later English novels as well. In Transparent Things, Hugh Person not only plays tennis “tolerably well, with a certain easy stylishness” (56–57), but “had invented a shot” that “was executed with a rigid arm and blended a vigorous drive with a clinging cut that followed the ball from the moment of

impact to the end of the stroke” (57). Curiously, the novel's protagonist for the most part uses the stroke mentally as “a means of putting himself to sleep” (58).90 And in The Original of Laura, Page 210 → Flora takes “her tennis lessons with the stodgy old Basque [who] still retained his effortless exquisite style” (81). Nabokov's unfinished novel contains at least two additional tennis allusions. The first transpires in the mention of “the Carlton Courts in Cannes” (77), where Flora's first lover, Jules, serves as a ball boy. The Carlton Club in Cannes was the site of the so-called Match of the Century on February 16, 1926, in which Suzanne Lenglen defeated Helen Wills, herself a great champion and the first American-born woman athlete to attain international celebrity status.91 A passionate tennis player and fan, Nabokov undoubtedly followed this event. We are mindful that Humbert acquires for Lolita a coaching manual—Tennis by Helen Wills—and correctly identifies Wills as the winner of “the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of fifteen” (242). Humbert mentions the early accomplishment of Wills in the hope that, given her talent, Lolita will replicate the feat and will follow the example of the great champion. Furthermore, it is likely that by moving Flora, an active tennis player, to “Sutton, Mass.,” when she matriculates at “Sutton College” (89–90), Nabokov plants another tennis connotation.92 Although “Sutton, Mass.” does exist—a small township that numbered less than fifty-five hundred inhabitants in 1975—it has no college. It is likely that with Sutton College, Nabokov pays tribute to the Sutton sisters, all four of whom were very accomplished tennis players at the turn of the twentieth century. May Sutton, the most celebrated of the sisters, was the first American female tennis player (albeit English-born) to win Wimbledon (1905 and 1907). Perhaps in 1975, while working on his last novel, Nabokov came across May Sutton's obituary and decided to commemorate her passing by naming this fictional New England College after her. Tennis is so ingrained in Nabokov's mind that he employs its terminology even in his lectures on literature and even with regard to works where tennis references are least expected. In his Lectures on Don Quixote, Nabokov uses tennis terminology to describe Don Quixote's victories and defeats (see LDQ 93–110). He summarizes them as follows: “So the final score is 20–20, or in terms of tennis 6–3, 3–6, 6–4, 5–7. But the fifth set will never be played; Death cancels the match” (110). Tennis, then, Nabokov wishes to impart, is not merely a game that could be most revealing about an individual's personality, but may serve as an allegory for life itself. Page 211 →

Croquet The modern game of croquet originated in France and migrated across the English Channel in the mid-nineteenth century.93 We come upon a mention of croquet in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when the Cheshire Cat inquires of Alice, “Do you play croquet with the Queen today?”94 Nabokov, of course, translated Carroll's fairy tale into Russian as Ania v strane chudes (1923). The game spread rapidly throughout Europe, including Russia, where it became known as early as the 1860s. At first, it was predominantly played by those of high social position. Alexander II and other members of the Russian imperial family were among the first to play the game. Tolstoy refers to it in his fiction, specifically in Anna Karenina, where he writes of “the croquet match to which the Princess Tverskaya had invited Anna.”95 The writer himself played croquet in Iasnaia Poliana; for instance, there is an account of him playing the game at his country estate in May 1884.96 Nabokov's mother played croquet in her girlhood and early youth, as is evident from the “croquet hoops of her girlhood” and by “photographic albums, illustrating in detail her young years, amid picnics, croquets” at Vyra, her family's country estate.97 The Nabokovs no doubt played the game in the neighboring Batovo, and Vladimir Dmitrievich was presumably a superb player. In all likelihood, Nabokov himself also played croquet at family gatherings and must have excelled at it—his tennis prowess indicates that he possessed outstanding eye-hand coordination. In the 1910s, the game grew in popularity among the Russian middle class. Nabokov aptly describes how “from dacha gardens came the knocking of croquet balls” (Mary 47). The writer mentions the game throughout his oeuvre in both the “Russian” and “American” years, as for example, in the story “The Admiralty Spire” (Stories 352) and in the novels The Gift (27), Lolita (99), Pnin (130–31), and Ada (65).

Nabokov's childhood recollections of the game find their expression in The Gift in the juvenile poetry of his alterish ego, Fyodor, which reflects the protagonist's major summer recreational activities at the family country estate: Page 212 → “Bicycling and riding, boating and bathing, tennis and croquet” (27). Nabokov's close familiarity with croquet and its rules are palpable from his expert description of the game in Pnin, in which the novel's title character, “a champion of kroket” in his youth (106), plays an excellent game at the Pines: After dinner, a game of croquet was suggested. These people favored the time-honored but technically illegal setting of hoops, where two of the ten are crossed at the center of the ground to form the so-called Cage or Mousetrap. It became immediately clear that Pnin, who teamed with Madam Bolotov against Shpolyanski and Countess Poroshin, was by far the best player of the lot. As soon as the pegs were driven in and the game started, the man was transfigured. From his habitual, slow, ponderous, rather rigid self, he changed into a terrifically mobile, scampering, mute, sly-visaged hunchback. It seemed to be always his turn to play. Holding his mallet very low and daintily swinging it between his parted spindly legs (he had created a minor sensation by changing into Bermuda shorts expressly for the game), Pnin foreshadowed every stroke with nimble aim-taking oscillations of the mallet head, then gave the ball an accurate tap, and forthwith, still hunched, and with the ball still rolling, walked rapidly to the spot where he had planned for it to stop. With geometrical gusto, he ran it through hoops, evoking cries of admiration from the onlookers. […] Plaints and protests, however, would mingle with the applause when Pnin, with brutal indifference, croqueted, or rather rocketed, an adversary's ball. Placing in contact with it his own ball, and firmly putting his curiously small foot upon the latter, he would bang at his ball so as to drive the other up the country by the shock of the stroke. When appealed to, Susan said it was completely against the rules, but Madam Shpolyanski insisted it was perfectly acceptable and said that when she was a child her English governess used to call it a Hong Kong. (130–31) The writer accurately defines the Mousetrap, a unique feature of Russian croquet, and correctly intimates that Pnin's motion, “Hong Kong,” was obsolete.98 Overall, Nabokov's detailed description of the game reveals his great expertise in the sport. Page 213 →

Soccer The modern game of soccer, that podalic offshoot of rugby, originated in England in the second half of the nineteenth century and became widespread by the end of that century. In Russia, the earliest practitioners of the game were foreigners, mostly British citizens, residing in the imperial capital. Although an Anglophile, Vladimir Dmitrievich did not play soccer in his boyhood, as the game was rather uncommon among Russians at the time. As we recall, when writing in his gymnasium memoirs that sports were not part of its curriculum, he poignantly singles out the absence of soccer and tennis. V. D. Nabokov became an avid tennis player, and he apparently learned in due time to play soccer as well.99 Soccer became fashionable among Russians, however, only at the turn of the twentieth century, precisely at the time when the future writer was growing up.100 Russia took part in the Olympic soccer competitions for the first time in 1912 in Stockholm. Nabokov knew about it: on his airplane trip to Soviet Russia in Look at the Harlequins!, Vadim Vadimovich reads in a Soviet “publicity magazine” that “Russia had not done so well in the Soccer Olympics of 1912 when the ‘Tsarist team’ […] lost 12–0 to a German side” (207). The “publicity magazine” errs: there were no “Soccer Olympics of 1912” but rather soccer tournaments that were held at the Stockholm Summer Olympics that year. Furthermore, in the consolation round, Russia lost to Germany 16–0, not 12–0.101 As an athletic recreational activity that relies on a team effort, soccer was much encouraged at Tenishev School, where Nabokov studied between 1910 and 1917. Osip Mandelstam, a fellow Teneshevian eight years Nabokov's senior, reminisces in the essay devoted to his alma mater and included in The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni, 1925) that “about thirty boys dressed in shorts, wool socks, and English blouses played soccer to the accompaniment of

horrendous shouting.”102 It appears that Mandelstam did not know soccer rules: altogether there are precisely twenty-two players on two competing teams, not “about thirty” of them. In his description of these soccer games, which to him Page 214 → were nothing but a noisy nuisance, Mandelstam is somewhat reminiscent of Luzhin, the protagonist of The Defense, with his fear of the fast-moving ball and horror of his classmates’ fierce and loud rallies at “Balashevski school” (196), for which Tenishev School served as the obvious prototype:103 Next to Luzhin senior stood the literature teacher and when the large gray rubber ball the boys used for soccer happened to roll up to his feet, the literature teacher, instinctively continuing that enchanting tradition, made as if he wanted to kick it, but only shifted awkwardly from foot to foot and almost lost one of his galoshes, and laughed with great good humor. […] Through the glass of the door, between the cast-iron rays of the star-shaped grille, he [Luzhin] saw his father suddenly remove his glove, quickly take leave of the teacher and disappear through the gate. Only then did he creep out again, and, carefully skirting the players, make his way left to where firewood was stacked under the archway. There, raising his collar, he sat down on a pile of logs. In this way he sat through approximately two hundred and fifty long intermissions, until the year that he was taken abroad. Sometimes the teacher would suddenly appear from around a corner. “Why are you always sitting in a heap, Luzhin? You should run about a bit with the other boys.” Luzhin would get up from the woodpile, trying to find a point equidistant from those three of his classmates who were especially fierce at this hour, shy away from the ball propelled by someone's resounding kick and, having reassured himself that the teacher was far off, would return to the woodpile. (28–29) Nabokov played soccer as a goalkeeper on the Tenishev School team and was characterized by one of his teachers as “a fervent footballer.”104 Nabokov recalls, for example, “in that spring of 1916,” “a hard-fought interscholastic soccer game, in which, that Sunday, the most sparkling luck helped me to make save after save in goal” (SM 239). Savely Kiandzhuntsev, a Tenishev School classmate, singles out for praise Nabokov's impressive goalkeeping. In his report, “Tenishevians and Soccer” (“Tenishevtsy i futbol”), for the school Page 215 → paper Youthful Thought (Yunaia mysl´), he writes, “Among the new players, the goalkeeper Nabokov, who holds forth hope and promise, showed a beautiful play.”105 Tenishev School was a member of the League for the Promotion of Physical Development among Studying Youth (OSFRUM), founded in 1907, and took part in the League's Cup matches. The League's surviving records corroborate that Nabokov was a member of the Tenishev School team captained by Kostia Beketov (cf. “Kostya Buketov” [SM 205]; in Other Shores, the captain's name is bifurcated, with a minor alteration, between the two classmates, Vasia Buketov and Kostia Mal´tsev; see Ssoch 5:277). The article about Nabokov the footballer of that period lists the scores of Tenishev School team OSFRUM Cup matches (mostly losses). Nabokov played as the left halfback or center forward before finding his true vocation as a goalkeeper. The article includes a team petition that protests the use of a ringer by the opposing team. The petition, dated September 17, 1915, addressed to Georgy Diuperron, the chair of the All-Russia Soccer Union, reads, “We, the undersigned, players of the Tenishev School, hereby bring to your attention that during the soccer match between our school and the district teacher's school, a ringer played for the latter team: the first half as a defender and the second half as the center midfielder. We are humbly requesting that you take a proper notice of this. Respectfully yours” (followed by the signatures of all eleven players, with Nabokov's signature appearing second).106 Upon entering Cambridge in 1919, Nabokov's goalkeeping was deemed so impressive that he was offered the position on his Trinity College soccer team. As Nabokov recalls, “I was an erratic but rather spectacular goalkeeper in my Cambridge University days” (SO 59). He described these goalkeeping sensations in Glory when Martin defends the goal of his college team. As a keen sportsman himself, Vladimir Dmitrievich was no doubt proud of his son's athletic accomplishments. Nabokov believed that he had been destined to become a goalie: “As one Page 216 → was born a hussar, so I was born a goalkeeper.”107 Here is what Nabokov says of the position: I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always

surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender. Photographers, reverently bending one knee, snap him in the act of making a spectacular dive across the goal mouth to deflect with his fingertips a low, lightning-like shot, and the stadium roars in approval as he remains for a moment or two lying full length where he fell, his goal still intact. (SM 267)

It is very telling that Nabokov calls goalkeeping an art, thereby underscoring its creative aspect. No less important is the fact that throughout this passage Nabokov emphasizes the unique character of goalkeeping, its enigmatic and singular nature. For Nabokov, a goalkeeper is vested with utmost responsibility as “the last defender” of the team's honor. He calls goalkeeping “gallant,” perhaps viewing a goalkeeper as the knight who comes to the rescue of damsel in distress, especially since the word team in Russian (komanda) is feminine. Overall, Nabokov values creativity, artistry, individuality, and courage in goalkeeping—the key qualities in fiction writing. While residing in the interwar Berlin, Nabokov continued playing soccer as a goalie. According to Brian Boyd, the writer played soccer in Berlin only briefly, between late November 1931 and February 14, 1932. Boyd's assertion that Nabokov played his last soccer match in 1932 is corroborated in Nabokov's September 4, 1937, letter to Samuil Rozov, in which the writer recalls playing soccer “on a Russian team up to 1932, when, unconscious, I was carried off the field.”108 When Nabokov intimates that he played on a German team, as he specifies in his letter to Rozov, he means Unitas, a Russian Sports Club team in Berlin. Nabokov jokes about the team's name sounding very much like unitaz, which means “flush toilet” in contemporary Russian. The word's modern Page 217 → usage derives from the name of the Spanish firm Unitas, which began a mass production of faience flush toilets in 1909.109 The original name means, of course, “unity” in Latin and was adopted by the Berlin Russian team to indicate, first and foremost, the continuity of Russian soccer, as a famous St. Petersburg soccer club by that name (1911–23) was the city champion (1912) and two-time Spring Cup champion (1912–13).110 A devoted soccer player and fan, Nabokov was well aware of the existence of that soccer club. As a member of the Tenishev School squad, Nabokov played a match at least once on the Unitas field. This occurred when the OSFRUM field, where the match was initially scheduled to take place, turned into a Page 218 → pool of mud.111 The Berlin Unitas team even adopted a uniform similar to that of its St. Petersburg predecessor: shirts with longitudinal white and colored stripes (the color cannot be determined from the extant black and white photograph), and white shorts. The St. Petersburg club team wore shirts with longitudinal white and red stripes and white or blue shorts.112 In his early poem, “Football” (1920), in “The University Poem” (stanzas 20 and 21), and in Glory (chapter 26), the writer conveys his great appreciation for the sport and reflects on his experience as a goalkeeper. Nabokov also took pleasure in watching soccer matches all his life. In an April 4, 1937, postcard he sent to Véra from Paris, Nabokov writes,: “Today I am going with the Kiandzhuntsevs to a soccer match.”113 Although Nabokov did not play soccer after the debilitating 1932 incident, he continued to envisage himself as a goalkeeper for many years. Writing to Roman Grinberg on November 18, 1950, Nabokov reports, “I just was at a football (in the European sense, that is, at a soccer) game. I love to stand behind the net of a goal and imagine defending it.”114 With the advent of television, Nabokov enjoyed watching various athletic events, including soccer. Dmitri Nabokov writes of his father, “He did enjoy watching Lev Yashin [Iashin, the renowned Russian soccer goalkeeper of the 1950s and 1960s]. Among other reasons, besides the moon landing, that my parents temporarily ordered a TV, were the Olympics, major tennis finals, and sometimes hockey championships.”115 Nabokov's penchant for sports, as reflected in his fiction and memoirs, shines through ever so brightly by its juxtaposition to the treatment of this subject matter by Mandelstam, another graduate of the Tenishev School,

where the interest in sports, especially team sports like soccer, had been strong. It appears that Mandelstam depicts athletic activities, such as tennis and soccer, without any intimate knowledge but primarily as a mere pretext for his use of dazzling metaphoric language and imagery. At times, he does so benevolently, as in the poem “Tennis” (1913), in which he acknowledges the English invention of this game (the poet calls it in “Sports,” written the same Page 219 → year, “that gift of the gods—magnificent tennis!”) that rejuvenated the world: “an Englishman, forever young, / set strings on a golden racket / and tossed it into the world.”116 At times, however, Mandelstam's intricate metaphorization betrays the poet's deep-seated discomfort with the game of soccer, which he explicitly conveyed in the earlier cited passage from his memoir. Such is the poem “Football Again” (“Futbol vtoroi,” 1913), in which he likens a soccer ball to the head of Holofernes and a soccer player, who tackles it with his foot, to Judith.117 In addition to his deep-seated discomfort with soccer and his ignorance of its rules, Mandelstam demonstrates unfamiliarity with the history of sports in general when he suggests that “polo on horses,” which in fact is by far older than soccer, is the “progeny of thick-skinned football.”118 In stark contrast, Nabokov depicts the game of soccer with an intimate knowledge of the subject and with great relish. For example, in his last Russian novel, he describes a painting by a fictional artist, Romanov: You know his “Footballer”? There's a reproduction in this magazine, here it is. The pale, sweaty, tensely distorted face of a player depicted from top to toe preparing at full speed to shoot with terrible force at the goal. Tousled red hair, a burst of mud on his temple, the taut muscles of his bare neck. A wrinkled, soaking wet, violet singlet, clinging in spots to his body, comes down low over his spattered shorts, and is crossed with the wonderful diagonal of a mighty crease. He is in the act of hooking the ball sideways; one raised hand with wide-splayed fingers is a participant in the general tension and surge. But most important, of course, are the legs: a glistening white thigh, an enormous scarred knee, boots swollen with dark mud, thick and shapeless, but nevertheless marked by an extraordinarily precise and powerful grace. The stocking has slipped down one vigorously twisted calf, one foot is buried in rich mud, the other is about to kick—and how!—the hideous, tar-black ball—and all this against a dark gray background Page 220 → saturated with rain and snow. Looking at this picture one could already hear the whiz of the leather missile, already see the goalkeeper's desperate dive. (Gift 181–82)119 In this episode, Nabokov starts by describing the soccer player's act of striking the ball in painstaking detail but seals it with the action intimately familiar to him—“the goalkeeper's desperate dive.” It is telling that Nabokov chooses here to depict soccer by way of painting, thereby blending the two activities, the athletic and the artistic, for which he himself showed such great predilection. Overall, in his athletic poems, Mandelstam comes out as an outside observer and not always a sympathetic one. Nabokov, on the contrary, depicts sports with great enthusiasm, to the point of elation, and with the deep expert knowledge of a keen practitioner.120 Thomas Karshan speaks of Nabokov “imitating these poems of his boyhood idol.”121 While I agree that Nabokov drew upon Mandelstam's athletic poems, it appears that rather than imitating them, Nabokov, to no small degree, conducts a polemic with his older contemporary's attitude to sports. In general, Nabokov tends to poeticize athletic activities, focusing on their vibrant, competitive, and entertaining attributes. Thus, in his lecture, “On Generalities” (ca. 1926), Nabokov writes, “The Greeks played hockey and hit the punching ball. Sports, be it hunting, or a joust […], or a good old Russian lapta, always gladdened and captivated mankind. It is senseless to search in it [sport] for signs of barbarity because a true barbarian is always a very poor sportsman.”122 Nabokov also emphasizes the heroic and virtuous nature of sports that originated in the Olympic Games in ancient Greece. To him, athletic activities are above all a test of personal resolve and courage—an Page 221 → opinion he no doubt shared with his father.123 That is why Nabokov preferred individual sports: even in the team game of soccer he chose the unique role of goalkeeper—the last line of defense. At the close of his poem “Olympicum,” Nabokov not only sings a hymn to speed but also describes the thrill and excitement associated with various sports, such as soccer, tennis, skiing, and bicycling. Furthermore, in the spirit

of his father, whose study combined “the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves,” Nabokov asserts that the immersion of the poem's lyrical I in sports enables him to comprehend the magical mysteries of poetry: “Reflection of soulful upsurges / you, oh music of motion, / delight of smooth speed / I praise. You gladdened / my exultant body: / it was ringing and flying, / for a moment free as spirit, / and at that extraordinary moment / the sovereign secrets of verse / I blissfully comprehended!”124 •

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Several factors contributed to Nabokov's love for butterflies, chess, and sports. In addition to the advancement of interest in lepidoptery worldwide, specifically at the turn of the twentieth century in Russia, it was Vladimir Dmitrievich who passed his own passion on to his firstborn and kept encouraging him, particularly at the early stages of the boy's fascination. Falling on fertile ground, this Aurelian fervidness quickly evolved into an indefatigable pursuit, second only to literature. V. D. Nabokov also instilled in his eldest son a fondness for chess playing and problem-solving. Over time, this fondness manifested itself primarily Page 222 → in Nabokov's composition of chess problems, of which the writer spoke so eloquently in his memoirs and in the introduction to Poems and Problems. Nabokov's boyhood and early youth coincided with the tremendous appeal of recreational athletic activities all over the world, including Russia and its imperial capital. Nabokov grew up in an Anglophile family, and it was only natural that he adopted the family interest in sports that by and large originated in England: boxing, bicycling, tennis, and soccer. Last, but not least, it was the senior Nabokov, himself an eager and capable athlete, who inculcated in his son and namesake the enthusiasm for sports that accompanied the writer throughout his life, even providing an ancillary and by no means negligible income during the interwar years in Europe. Mutual fondness for butterflies, chess, and sports added a significant component to the already existing powerful bond of friendship and to the mutual lasting admiration between the father and the son. 1. For a detailed survey of the history of lepidopterology in Russia and about the Russian Entomological Society, see Korolev and Murzin, Istoriia lepidopterologicheskikh issledovanii v Rossii; Medvedev, “140 let Russkomu entomologicheskomu obshchestvu.” 2. Zimmer, Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths, 174. 3. Boyd, “Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera,” 3. 4. Boyd, “Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera,” 3. 5. «Сейчас получил твое драгоценное письмецо с бабочкой от Володи. Был очень тронут. Скажи ему, что здесь в саду кроме rhamni и P. brassicae никаких бабочек нет. Нашли ли вы egeria?»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene.,” 272. “Rhamni” is an abbreviation of Gonepteryx rhamni, the Latin name for Common Brimstone, known in Russian as limonnitsa because of its habitual lemony color; “P. brassicae” is an abbreviation of “Pieris brassicae,” the Latin name for Large White or Cabbage White, known in Russian as kapustnitsa (kapusta in Russian is “cabbage”); “egeria,” abbreviated from Pararge aegeria, is the Latin name for Speckled Wood, known in Russian as kraeglazka (“edgeeyed”) egeria. 6. About Nabokov the lepidopterist, in addition to the already cited sources, see Remington, “Lepidoptera Studies”; Daniil Aleksandrov, “Nabokov—naturalist i entomolog”; Kurt Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues; Dirig, “Theme in Blue.” 7. See Vila et al., “Phylogeny and Palaeoecology.” 8. «и, диссертацию большую / о мимикрии защитив»; «То—по-латыни описанье / мохнатой бабочки одной»; «Тебе завидую, ученый: / отрадно творческим умом / миров угадывать законы / по жилке на сквозном крыле. / Отрадно нравы и строенье / существ малейших изучать / и вековое их значенье / в сопоставленьях постигать»; see Vladimir Nabokov, “Dvoe,” 126 and 129a, VNA. 9. See Kogan, Ocherki po istorii shakhmat v SSSR, 5–44. 10. For a history of the development of chess in Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in addition to Kogan’s study, see Murray, History of Chess, 366–88; Linder, Shakhmaty na Rusi; www.ru-chess.com /history; Wall, “Russian Chess History.”

11. Dmitri Nabokov, “Laura Is Not Even the Original’s Name.” 12. «Вечером, как всегда, шахматы с Володей. Он стал играть оч недурно»; see V. D. Nabokov, Scrapbook, VNA. 13. Coincidentally, six years later, on the very same day, Nabokov married Véra Slonim. 14. «С трепетом жду воскресенья—в «Morning Post» был милый 3er, который я решил. А ты?»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma k synu,” 165. 15. «Посылаю Тебе очень милую задачку. «Weiss zieht und macht Remis»—значит не «белый тянет и ремизится», а «белые начинают и делают ничью». Пришли мне ответ. Для решения задачи Тебе потребуется не более 5-ти минут.»; V. D. Nabokov, “Pis´ma k synu,” 169. 16. For a succinct presentation of Nabokov’s fondness for chess and chess problem-composing and previous scholarship on the subject, see Gezari, “Chess and Chess Problems.” Two essays missing from Gezari’s bibliography are Shtein, “Vladimir Nabokov”; Edelman, “Cooks, Forks, Waiters.” 17. «А третьего дня известный шахматист Нимцович играл в кафэ «Эквитебль» против сорока любителей одновременно. […] Я проиграл, но продержался очень долго—с восьми до половины первого. На днях буду играть там же против Алехина»; see Vladimir Nabokov, 99 A.L.S., 33 postcards to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, VNA. 18. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 259. 19. Thus, Nabokov writes to Grinberg, “Aren’t you coming to our neck of the woods? Chessboard, Pushkin, and Sirin await you here” («Не собираетесь ли в наши палестины? Здесь тебя ждут шахматная доска, Пушкин и Сирин») and “We haven’t seen each other in a long time. I wish to talk to you about many things, and I have also not set up a mate trap for you in a long time” («Мы с тобой давно не видались—хочется с тобой обо многом побеседовать, да и матовую ловушку давно тебе не ставил»); Iangirov, “‘Drebezzhanie moikh rzhavykh russkikh strun…,’” 372, 392; personal communication from Avgusta L. Jaryc, spring 1988; Proffer, Vladimir Nabokov, 122–23, which reproduces Philippe Halsman’s photograph of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov playing chess. 20. For a description of “In Spring” and its chess contents, see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 141–42. 21. For a detailed discussion of the importance of chess in The Defense, see Alexandrov, “The Defense.” 22. Maar, Speak, Nabokov, 126 n. 32. For chess occurrences in Nabokov’s works, see Gubnitsky, “Nabokov i shakhmaty”; for a detailed discussion of chess in Lolita, see Bernhard, “Thématique échiquéenne de Lolita.” 23. See Cross, “British Sports in Imperial Russia.” For additional studies on the development of sports in imperial Russia, see McReynolds, Russia at Play, 76–112; and most recently, Khmel´nitskaia, Sportivnye obshchestva i dosug v stolichnom gorode nachala veka. 24. «чудные скрипучие кожаные футболы, и белые как тальк, с девственным пушком, теннисные мячи в упаковке, достойной редкостных фруктов»; Ssoch 5:189. 25. «Большой гимназический двор оживлялся только весной, в апреле и мае. Там играли в лапту и пятнашки. О другом спорте (футболе, лоун-теннисе) в то время и помину не было»; V. D. Nabokov, “Peterburgskaia gimnaziia sorok let tomu nazad,” 23–24 (Za sto let, 127). The Third Gymnasium was among the best classical-education secondary schools in the country. Aside from V. D. Nabokov, its graduates included the literary critic Dmitri Pisarev, the writer Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and the philosopher, economist, and statesman Petr Struve; see Lavrov, Pamiatka byvshim uchenikam S.-Peterburgskoi 3-i gimnazii, 35, 54, 60. 26. «Гимнастика была введена в Училище с самого его основания; первым ее учителем был швед Паули. […] С 1896–97 годов в Училище также введено обучение воспитанников боксу, который преподается парижским чемпионом бокса—учителем гимнастики и фехтования, французским подданным Лустало»; Siuzor, Ko dniu LXXV iubileia Imperatorskogo Uchilishcha Pravovedeniia 1835–1910 gg., 230–31. 27. For more information about Loustalot, see Sklyarenko [A. Sklepikov], “Loustalot”; Mkhitar´iants, Priglashenie na ring, 34–35, 37. 28. Zverev, Nabokov, 41. Lazar´ Rozental´, a Tenishev School graduate, confirms that Loustalot taught boxing and fencing there; see his Neprimechatel´nye dostovernosti, 488. 29. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 100.

30. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 274, 271–72. 31. «[В. Д.] Набоков сам большой поклонник и тоже виртуоз бокса; недаром он ежедневно предается упражнениям в этом искусстве вместе с сыновьями»; Benois, Moi dnevnik, 175. 32. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 192. 33. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 173; Field, VN, 62. 34. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 267. 35. Berberova, Italics Are Mine, 324. 36. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 12. 37. Field, Vladimir Nabokov: His Life in Part, 60. 38. See Ssoch 1:749–54, 814. For a detailed description of the match, see Zimmer, Nabokovs Berlin, 78–79. 39. «охотно дружил с боксерами и любил глядеть на их бои»; Ssoch 1:750. Cf. this passage from “The University Poem”: “Clutching his bear from Muscovy, / esteemed the boxer’s fate, / of Italic beauty dreaming / lame Byron passed his student days” (SP 30); («Держа московского медведя, / боксеров жалуя и бредя / красой Италии,—тут жил / студентом Байрон хромоногий»); Ssoch 2:563–64. 40. Lord Byron, Confessions of Lord Byron, 4. 41. «как это любили бы Пушкин и Лермонтов, живи они в Англии»; Ssoch 1:750; for the quotation from Lermontov’s poem, see Ssoch 1:752, 814–15. 42. See Gruntovsky, Russkii kulachnyi boi; Mkhitar´iants, Priglashenie na ring, 22–28. 43. For a detailed analysis of the story, see Connolly, “Play of Light and Shadow.” 44. «Предстоящая в пятницу 26-го сентября вечеринка с газетой-фарсом «Веселыми ногами» вызвала живейший интерес. […] Много ждут от бокса, который по всем правилам искусства будет показан В. Сириным и Г. Гессеном в сопутствии многолюдного антуража арбитров и секундантов»; Anon., “Veselymi nogami”; cf. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 356. 45. Herlihy, Bicycle, 6–7. 46. For the history of bicycling in Russia, see Miatiev, Velosiped v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii; Efimov, “Velikii kniaz´ Sergei Mikhailovich i Sankt-Peterburgskoe obshchestvo velosipednoi ezdy.” 47. See Petrova, St. Petersburg in Focus, 201. 48. See Sklyarenko, “Colonel Gusev and King Alfin.”. 49. For information about the life of Utochkin, see Liakhovetsky and Rudnik, V nebe—Utochkin!; Taubenshlak and Shchurova, Sergei Utochkin. 50. Miatiev, Velosiped v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 17–18. 51. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 32, between 160 and 161. 52. Actually, the game was patented in early 1874; see Gillmeister, Tennis, 174–75. I am indebted to Constantine Muravnik of Yale University for referring me to this source. On the origins and history of tennis, see Potter, Kings of the Court; Gillmeister, Tennis. 53. Nabokov, who acknowledges the source, skillfully reproduced the drawing in his own hand from Cecil Willett Cunnington’s English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, 293. There is, however, one minor inaccuracy on the part of Nabokov: he dates the costume as “c. 1875” (LRL 235), whereas Cunnington’s book caption provides the precise date—1879. 54. Alexandrov, “Tolstoy i tennis.” For photographs portraying Tolstoy on the tennis court in the 1890s at his Iasnaia Poliana country estate, see Popovkina and Ershova, Tolstoy v zhizni, 1: plates 18 and 36, 2:137. 55. On the history of lawn tennis in Russia, see Fomenko, Istoriia laun-tennisa v Rossii. 56. Wonlar-Larsky, Russia That I Loved, 13. 57. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 75. 58. See Bush, “Tennis by the Book,” 269. 59. François Flameng depicted Décugis in action in Max Décugis at the Net (Paris, Racing Club de France, 1920). 60. Nabokov refers here to Myers, Complete Lawn Tennis Player. Frank Riseley was a British tennis player, a two-time (with Sidney Smith) Wimbledon doubles champion (1902 and 1906). The terms lifting drive and follow-through are explained in Myers’s book. 61. «чуть ли не с каренинских времен»; Ssoch 5:163. For an observation on this temporal discrepancy, see Alexandrov, “Tolstoy i tennis,” 42 n. 14. 62. «Вижу мать, отдающую мяч в сетку», «я сержусь на ее промахи»; Ssoch 5:163.

63. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagazh, 110. 64. For the dates of the Nabokov family’s arrival in and departure from London, see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 165, 176. The Wimbledon tournament traditionally takes place over the two weeks in late June and early July. 65. See Collins, Bud Collins History of Tennis, 409. 66. See http://grandslamtennis.freeukisp.co.uk/WIMBLEDON%1920.htm. See also Myers, Fifty Years of Wimbledon, 86. 67. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Pro_Championship. 68. «Милая Мамочка, мы с В решили поехать пораньше, чтобы получить места в Wimbledon’е»; V. D. Nabokov, Scrapbook, VNA. 69. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 259, 267. 70. Appel, “Nabokov,” 7. 71. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 88. 72. See Shapiro, “Lolita Class List,” 321. 73. Gibian and Parker, Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov, 222–23. 74. «Я вешу 86 килогр. […] Но играю в теннис совершенно свободно»; Perepiska 62. 75. «Очень хлестко и хорошо»; Iangirov, “‘Drebezzhanie moikh rzhavykh russkikh strun…,’” 365. 76. «Играю тут с профессионалом Negro, который когда-то учил в русских теннисных клубах, напр в Одессе до первой войны! Чудный полухромой смуглый старик, который оживает на площадке, как зацветший кактус»; Iangirov, “Druz´ia, babochki i monstry,” 534. 77. See Clerici, Divina, esp. 29. 78. Engelmann, Goddess and the American Girl, 11–12. 79. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Pro_Championship. For more on Joseph Negro, see Shapiro, “Tennis References.” 80. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 423. 81. «Даю Вере теннисные уроки и она играет уже совсем не дурно»; Vladimir Nabokov, 99 A.L.S., 33 postcards to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, VNA. 82. Nabokov compared Frank’s serve to “white lightning” because tennis balls have historically for the most part been white (and occasionally black). Only in 1972 did the International Tennis Federation introduce yellow tennis balls, which would be more visible to television viewers. Wimbledon continued to use the traditional white balls until 1986, when it, too, adopted yellow balls; see http://www.itftennis.com/technical /equipment/balls/history.asp. 83. «ракетка теннисная в раме», «белая отрада», «и разговор о том, кто ныне / стал мастер теннисной игры»; Ssoch 2:566, 573, 581. 84. The original passages read: «пламенный игрок»; «Подбросить мяч, назад согнуться, / молниеносно развернуться, / и струнной плоскостью сплеча / скользнуть по темени мяча, / и, ринувшись, ответ свистящий / уничтожительно прервать,—/на свете нет забавы слаще…/ В раю мы будем в мяч играть»; Ssoch 2:573, 574. 85. The last name of Martin’s opponent brings to mind Harry Austin Kitson, an English-born South African professional tennis player who won a gold medal in the men’s doubles and a silver medal in the men’s singles at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Nabokov would have been pleased to know that in life-imitatingart fashion, his fleeting character’s namesake, Robert Kitson, is a present-day sportswriter for the Guardian who frequently covers tennis events. 86. In Nabokov’s Russian memoir, the wording is closer to Martin’s sensation: «он все справляется у меня и у брата, сошла ли на нас благодать—отзывается ли драйв у нас от кисти до самого плеча, как полагается»; Ssoch 5:163; or in the reverse English translation: “He keeps inquiring of me and my brother whether the grace has descended upon us—whether the drive resonates, as it is supposed to, from the wrist to the very shoulder.” 87. For further connection between tennis and butterflies with regard to Nabokov, see Dirig, “Theme in Blue,” 214, n. 40. 88. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 101. The quoted phrases in the original are «страшно увлекательно », «прескучная», «гораздо веселее»; Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 32:92. 89. In the original, Zilanov’s pronouncement is identical with the book’s title—“Podvig”; see Ssoch 3:248.

90. For a discussion of the role of tennis in Transparent Things, see Sampson, “Game, Set, Mismatch,” 393–94. 91. For a description of the match, see Engelmann, Goddess and the American Girl, 154–86. 92. Nabokov employs the surname in his earlier works: in the story “Time and Ebb” (1944), in which Dr. de Sutton is mentioned (Stories 585), and repeatedly in Pale Fire as, for example, in reference to “Old Dr. Sutton’s last two windowpanes” (69). 93. For information about croquet, see Prichard, History of Croquet; Charlton and Thompson, Croquet. 94. Carroll, Complete Works, 72. 95. See Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 268. The original passage reads: «Общество партии крокета, на которое княгиня Тверская приглашала Анну»; Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 18:310. 96. Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 325. 97. «крокетными дужками ее девичества», «фотографических альбомах, подробно иллюстрирующих ее молодые годы, среди пикников, крокетов»; Ssoch 5:163, 168. 98. For a brief history of croquet in Russia, see http://www.croquetclub.com/history/russian.htm; for a discussion of “Hong Kong,” see Olszewska and Ross, “‘Hong Kong’ in Croquet.” 99. Alexander Mendeleev asserts, albeit without any substantiation, that V. D. Nabokov played soccer; see “Rokovaia, rodnaia strana…,” 275. 100. On the history of soccer in Russia, see Kucherenko, Sto let rossiiskomu futbolu; Lukosiak, Futbol. 101. See Kucherenko, Sto let rossiiskomu futbolu, 38. 102. Mandelstam, Noise of Time, 90. The original reads: «десятка три мальчиков в коротких штанишках, шерстяных чулках и английских рубашечках со страшным криком играли в футбол»; Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 2:74. 103. Nabokov names Luzhin’s school after his classmate, Andrei Balashov, with whom he jointly published his second collection of poetry, Almanac: Two Paths (Al´manakh: Dva puti, 1918) (see Ssoch 2:716). For information about Balashov, see Stark, “Vladimir Nabokov i Andrei Balashov.” 104. «ярый футболист»; as cited in Leving and Shrayer, “‘V svoikh knigakh Vy prodolzhaete okunat´sia v ledianuiu glubinu,’” 205. 105. «Из новых игроков красивую игру показал подающий надежды голкипер Набоков»; as cited in Leving, “Palestinskoe pis´mo V. Nabokova,” 29. 106. «Милостивый государь Г-н Дюперрон! Мы, нижеподписавшиеся, игроки команды Тенишевского училища, доводим до Вашего сведения, что во время состязания в футболе между нашим училищем и Земской учительской школой, в команде последней, первый хаф-тайм бэка, а второй, центр хаф бэка играл подставной игрок. Покорнейше просим обратить на это должное внимание. Остаемся с почтением [далее следуют подписи всей команды, с подписью Набокова второй по счету]»; see Lukosiak, “Golkiper Vladimir Nabokov,” 21. For information about Diuperron, see Mikheeva, “Georgy Aleksandrovich Diuperron.” 107. “Как иной рождается гусаром, так я родился голкипером”; Ssoch 5:307. 108. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 376–77. The excerpt from Nabokov’s letter to Rozov reads in the original: «в русской команде в Берлине до 1932 года, когда меня замертво унесли с поля»; Leving, “Palestinskoe pis´mo V. Nabokova,” 20. 109. See Field, VN, 104; Bogdanov, Unitaz, 55. 110. The sport club Unitas, with its emphasis on soccer, was founded in Berlin in 1919; see Anon., “Unitas.” Nabokov read this announcement; in his June 3, 1921, letter to his mother, he writes, “I learned from The Rudder that a German-Russian soccer circle has been formed in Berlin” («Из «Руля» я узнал, что в Берлине образовался немецко-русский футбольный кружок»); Vladimir Nabokov, 99 A.L.S., 33 postcards to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, VNA. 111. Lukosiak, “Golkiper Vladimir Nabokov,” 20. 112. See Field, VN 104; Lukosiak, Futbol, 162–66. 113. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 88–89, 173, 376–77. «Сегодня иду на футбольный матч с Кянджунцевыми». Quoted by permission of the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. All rights reserved. 114. «Сейчас был на футбольной (в Европейском смысле, т.е. soccer’ной игре). Люблю стоять за сеткой гола и воображать, что его защищаю»; Iangirov, “‘Drebezzhanie moikh rzhavykh russkikh strun…,’” 372.

115. Dmitri Nabokov, “Replies and Comments.” 116. Mandelstam, Complete Poetry, 156, 61. The original passages read: «И дар богов—великолепный теннис!», «Золотой ракеты струны / Укрепил и бросил в мир / Англичанин вечно-юный »; Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 1:129, 32. 117. Mandelstam, Complete Poetry, 157; Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 1:129–30. 118. Mandelstam, Complete Poetry, 156. The original phrase reads: «поло на коне», «Потомки толстокожего футбола»; Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 1:129. For a discussion of the poet’s soccer poems, see Kobrinsky, “Stikhotvoreniia O. Mandel´shtama o futbole.” 119. For an illuminating discussion about the artists on whose life and work Romanov was modeled, see Leving, “Hide and Seek.” 120. For a brief comparison between Mandelstam’s and Nabokov’s attitudes toward sports as reflected in their respective poetry and for a detailed discussion of Mandelstam’s athletic poems, see Leving, “Tenishevtsy Vladimir Nabokov, Osip Mandel´shtam, Samuil Rozov”; Harte, “Game, Set, Stanza.” 121. See Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, 63. 122. Translated by Gavriel Shapiro with Dmitri Nabokov. The Russian original reads: «Греки играли в хоккей и били по punching ball. Спорт, будь это охота, или рыцарский турнир […], или добрая русская лапта, всегда веселил и увлекал человечество. Искать в нем признаки варварства уже потому бессмысленно, что настоящий варвар–всегда прескверный спортсмен»; Vladimir Nabokov, “On Generalities,” 13–14. Lapta is referred to in Podvig and is translated in Glory as “tag-bat”; see Ssoch 3:226; Glory 175. 123. On Nabokov’s attitude toward athletics, reminiscent of those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, specifically in Glory, see Buhks, Eshafot v khrustal´nom dvortse, 80. It is noteworthy that in Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Discourse on the Game of Florentine Calcio (1580), the Renaissance author speaks of calcio, a precursor of soccer, as “a public game, of two teams of young men, on foot and without arms, who, in an affable manner and for the sake of honor, contend to pass an inflated ball from the posta (on one end of the middle line) forward to the opposite goal.” Bardi argues that “from calcio there result all the fruits of the gymnastic art which are so much praised by so many philosophers, physicians, grammatici, and other serious and learned writers. These fruits are in substance: to make the body sound, dexterous, and robust, and to make the mind awake, sharp and desirous of virtuous victory.” Cited in Mommsen, “Football in Renaissance Florence,” 14, 16–17. The modern Olympic Games were revived by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1896, only three years prior to Nabokov’s birth. 124. «Душевных взлетов отраженье, / тебя, о музыка движенья, / усладу плавной быстроты / я славлю. Радовала ты / мое ликующее тело: / оно звенело и летело, / как дух, свободное на миг, / и в этот миг необычайный / стиха властительные тайны / я упоительно постиг!»; Vladimir Nabokov, “Olympicum,” 78, VNA.

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Conclusion Honor, glory, love for the homeland, respect for individuality, his own and another's, courage, trustworthiness are “big words” in the mouths of those who view the possession of these virtues as public merit and loud distinction. For [V. D.] Nabokov, they were as natural as sight and hearing, as his right hand and left hand. […] With no hackneyed, lofty phrases, yet without hesitation, he was guided by reason, conscience, and the instinct of unostentatious knighthood. Such was he at the initial choice of his path in life, moving away from the wide and easy road, which the advantages of birth and of his prominent individual qualities unfolded before him. And so he perished, dashing toward inevitable death, unarmed, moved only by the instantaneous imperative feeling—to stop the evil and vile deed. And this marvelous impulse, seemingly so unexpected in the measured, always even-tempered Nabokov, with his articulate speech and refined, artless gestures, in essence determined and concluded with one lightning stroke the entire enormous magnitude and entire internal beauty of his historical fine figure. —Alexander Kuprin1 Page 224 → I am sure that had he caught me out in physical cowardice he would have laid a curse on me. —Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift In this book, I have examined the various ways in which Nabokov's personality and worldview were affected by his father. To be sure, their lives were different in so many ways. Nabokov lived to the rather advanced age of seventy-eight and died of natural causes, whereas his father was cut down in the prime of life, shortly before his fifty-second birthday. Nabokov attained enormous success as a world-famous writer, whereas his father, who steadfastly toiled to create a democratic Russia, only witnessed his life's work destroyed by the Bolshevik usurpation of power, his own name and accomplishments gradually relegated into undeserved oblivion from which history only recently has begun extricating him. Different as their lives were, they were at the same time kindred in a great variety of ways. Like his father, Nabokov loved literature and became a man of letters, excelling in fiction rather than in legal, political, and journalistic prose. Like his father, Nabokov was an educator, although V. D. Nabokov's teaching career lasted merely eight years and was terminated due to his opposition to tsarist regime policies, whereas Nabokov had a long and prolific academic career in the United States, his newly adopted country, at Stanford, Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. Like his father, Nabokov was a cultural ambassador of sorts between the Russian and Western—specifically English-speaking—worlds. V. D. Nabokov reviewed books on law written in German, English, and French; lectured and wrote about belles lettres, particularly his beloved Dickens; and familiarized his fellow Russians with the state of affairs in the fine arts, theater, and music in wartime England and France. After being forced into exile, he enlightened the English-reading audience about the situation in the civil war–torn Russia; later in Berlin, he commented on world politics and surveyed noteworthy events in literature, the fine arts, theater, and music. In his turn, Nabokov extensively rendered German, French, and English verses into Russian and translated into English an impressive corpus of Russian poetry and prose, most notably Eugene Onegin, at the same time supplying Pushkin's magnum opus with thorough and copious commentary. Also worthy of note are Nabokov's seminal lecture (in French) on Pushkin, commemorating the centenary of the poet's death; his monograph on Gogol; and his Cornell lectures (in English) on Russian and Western literature. Page 225 → Further, as I have shown in the preceding pages, V. D. Nabokov was a Renaissance man: alongside his legal and political career, Vladimir Dmitrievich was an exceptional cognoscente of literature, theater, painting, and music; a passionate lover of butterflies and chess, and a devoted athlete. And so was Nabokov. Like his father, who lectured and wrote essays on literature, Nabokov exhibited scholarly

prowess in literary criticism by way of lectures, articles, books, and commentaries. V. D. Nabokov's enthusiasm for painting, landscapes in particular, presumably was one of the motivations for the young Nabokov's desire to become a landscape painter. Vladimir Dmitrievich's passion for theater transformed and evolved in his son into a knack for dramaturgy: Nabokov wrote a large number of plays that still await proper staging and studying. Nabokov senior's infatuation with music, especially opera, undoubtedly exerted considerable influence on his son and found expression in his heretofore unfamiliar essay on this syncretic genre. The ardor for lepidoptery, which Nabokov caught from his father, turned out to become his calling, second only to literature. Nabokov loved chess and throughout his life composed the kinds of chess problems his father so enjoyed solving. As an Anglophile, Vladimir Dmitrievich believed that sports enhance and complement one's intellectual pursuits. A distinguished criminologist and prominent statesman, Vladimir Dmitrievich was also a proficient sportsman: boxer, fencer, bicyclist, and tennis player. Taking this cue from his father, Nabokov too combined his intellectual and aesthetic quests—creative writing, literary scholarship, and entomology—with various athletic activities, most of which overlapped with those of his father: boxing, bicycling, tennis, and soccer. In the spirit of his father, whose library “combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves,” Nabokov avers in his little-known “Olympicum” that the immersion of the poem's lyrical I in sports enables his hero to comprehend the magical mysteries of poetry. As I have demonstrated in this book, Nabokov's personality was greatly impacted by that of his father. One of the most essential qualities shared by both the father and the son was courage. Fearlessness looms as a distinctive attribute of the Nabokovs, whose coat of arms contains the device “for valour” (SM 51). Nabokov's great-granduncle, Major General Ivan Alexandrovich, was a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Nabokov's grandfather—the senior Nabokov's father—Dmitri Nikolaevich, stood up to the all-powerful Pobedonostsev and succeeded in preserving the jury system at the expense of his ministerial post. All his life, Vladimir Dmitrievich lived up to this ancestral device and distinguished himself with honorable behavior and heroic Page 226 → deeds. In the spring of 1890, after being arrested for participating in a student protest, he, the son of the former Justice Minister, was offered an early release from jail, which he rejected outright because his fellow protesters would not be set free.2 The senior Nabokov showed outstanding moral fortitude years later when he broke away from the imperial court and the high society to which he belonged by birth. He put himself directly at odds with the tsarist administration and, as we recall, eventually lost his tenure at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence for his opposition to the regime—in particular, for vehemently condemning its anti-Semitic policies. He protested the dissolution of the Duma by signing the Vyborg Manifesto, an action that resulted in his imprisonment and the revocation of his electoral rights. He demonstrated extraordinary political resolve and presence of mind when suggesting the reinstatement of the death penalty in the fall of 1917 to prevent the army from disintegrating, even though he was a staunch opponent of capital punishment all his life. He bravely exposed the evils of Bolshevism and valiantly criticized the Western Allies for their lackadaisical attitude toward the conflict in Russia and their unwillingness to assist the White forces in their struggle against the Reds. He boldly disagreed with his longtime friend and fellow Kadet, Pavel Miliukov, on the tactics and strategy vis-à-vis the Bolshevik regime. And finally, he displayed exceptional intrepidity by shielding Miliukov from the assassins’ bullets at the cost of his own life. In a poem dedicated to V. D. Nabokov's memory, Nikolai Minsky described the bravery of his exploit: Alone amid the crowd blinded with fright, Running from the face of the blind lead, Only you stood up bravely in defense of the friend And your death was both victory and crown. Not a few glorious victims fell on the battlefield, They were driven by iron duty, drawn by a reward. You were not seeking glory. Unexpectedly, the spirit of a hero Collided with the high deed—and their encounter was Heavenly lightning, instantaneous Golgotha. Enviable is your lot and your thorns are imperishable. You gathered friends and foes around your grave.

You justified our gloom. You defied death by death.3

Page 227 → Nabokov's life too was permeated with noble and courageous acts. Like his father, he always sided with the disenfranchised and the persecuted. As a student at the Tenishev School, he protected his weaker classmates from the fists of bullies. At home, he defended his Jewish-born tutor against the anti-Semitic diatribes of his aunts. He courageously spoke against Bolshevism at Cambridge, even though that position was quite unpopular. He fearlessly published the essay, “The Jubilee,” in which he expressed disdain toward Leninist Russia, knowing full well that it might bring Bolshevik wrath upon him. Years later, he deliberately entered Jewish shops in Berlin when the Nazis demanded a boycott, stationing uniformed soldiers at the doors to deter prospective customers. While residing in the capital of the Third Reich, he daringly composed Invitation to a Beheading. After moving to Paris, where the novel came out in book form at a time when the city was teeming with Soviet and Nazi agents, he also penned the story “Tyrants Destroyed”—both works being his indictment of totalitarianism.4 He boldly spoke out against the Soviet regime after coming to America. This stance, especially unfashionable during World War II, when public opinion for the most part was sympathetic to the Red ally, in all likelihood cost him his “permanent appointment” at Wellesley College (SL 75). He fearlessly laid bare in Bend Sinister the close affinity between Nazism and communism—“Communazism,” as he wittily portmanteaued the names of these two kindred political systems. Although Nabokov published the novel in 1947, when the Cold War had already begun, he composed it while the warm attitude toward Soviet Russia was still prevalent in the West. Nabokov's description of “the lever of love”—subjecting victims’ loved ones to torture—was prompted by his father's alert to this method of the Bolshevik “persuasion” at the dawn of the Red Terror. In Lolita, Nabokov bravely exposed the detrimental effect of child abuse on the underaged, thereby showing the urgent need for juvenile protection. In Lolita and especially in Pnin, he was among the first to write about the atrocities of the Holocaust. And in the early 1970s, he voiced his strong opposition to the political trials of Vladimir Bukovsky and Vladimir Maramzin in Soviet Russia (see SL 531, 540, 543). Another very important attribute of V. D. Nabokov's personality was Page 228 → optimism. Even under the most dire circumstances, Vladimir Dmitrievich was never prone to despondency. Although he temporarily lost the fight for Russia's future in 1917, he continued to believe that the country would eventually shake off the Bolshevik yoke, and his prediction, albeit posthumously and long overdue, came true. Nabokov inherited his father's positive attitude toward life. Elsewhere I point out that Nabokov “has taught several generations of his innumerable readers to recognize and appreciate the sunny sense of Creation, the joy and happiness of imaginative magic. Therein lies Nabokov's main exploit: in spite of his deep personal traumas and tragedies (loss of his close friend and cousin, loss of his father, and forced exile from his native Russia), he found solace and happiness in everything he did—writing, butterfly collecting, scholarship, college teaching, marriage, fatherhood—and this happiness, as the leitmotif and the light motif, traverses and shines throughout his entire life.”5 Not until I delved into this project, however, did I realize that Nabokov to a large extent adopted this attitude from his father. As I showed earlier, Vladimir Dmitrievich's essay on Fet evidently served as a blueprint not only for the protagonist of Nabokov's first novel, Mary, but most important for the author, who found happiness first and foremost in the magic of verbal creation. In this sense, Nina Khrushcheva is right when, discussing the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia, she contends that Nabokov redefined the conventions of Russian fiction by shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging one's own destiny: she calls the writer “our textbook, and our road map for today's transitional period from a closed and communal terrain to its Western alternative, one open and competitive.”6 This recipe for happiness and self-fulfillment that manifests itself in Nabokov's life and work nonetheless cannot be properly understood without taking into account the senior Nabokov's life and accomplishments and their profound impact on his renowned son. Furthermore, this “road map” is by no means the writer's invention: had Russia followed the road charted by the senior Nabokov and his Kadet Party—individual liberties and the democratic state of law as the most cherished conditions of human existence—rather than the murky trail of totalitarianism furrowed by the Bolsheviks, the country would have

saved itself almost a century of misery and would have long been a prominent member of the community of civilized nations. Page 229 → In her captivating memoir, Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams recalled V. D. Nabokov inscribing in her album the phrase per aspera ad astra (“through hardships [literally thorns] to the stars”).7 This Latin saying, evidently the motto of the senior Nabokov, encapsulated, as it were, his entire life. Vladimir Dmitrievich fulfilled his destiny by reaching the stars through the thorns of his courageous struggle against the ills of Russian autocracy and the menace of Bolshevism. He further reached the stars through his valiant act of martyrdom, shielding and saving the life of his erstwhile friend and political opponent at the expense of his own. Nabokov's life, too, was a manifestation of the same motto: throughout his adult life, he courageously expressed his strong opinions, regardless of the consequences. Nabokov steadfastly persevered through the thorns of personal tribulations and geopolitical calamities and reached the stars of illustrious literary and entomological accomplishments that would have made his father immensely proud. 1. «Честь, подвиг, любовь к родине, уважение к своей и чужой личности, смелость, верность слову являются «высокими словами» в устах людей, ставящих себе в публичную заслугу и в громкое отличие обладание этими достоинствами. Для Набокова они были естественны, как зрение и слух, как собственная—правая и левая—рука. […] Без обыденно-пышных фраз, но и без колебаний шел он туда, куда его влекли разум, совесть и инстинкт непоказного рыцарства. Таков он был при начальном выборе своего жизненного пути, отойдя далеко в сторону от широкой и легкой дороги, которую развертывали перед ним преимущества рода и личных крупных качеств. Так он и погиб, кинувшись навстречу неизбежной смерти, безоружный, движимый лишь мгновенным повелительным чувством—помешать злому и гадкому делу. И этот чудесный порыв, как будто столь неожиданный для размеренного, всегда уравновешенного Набокова, с его чеканной речью и изысканно простыми жестами—в сущности, определил и закончил одним молниеносным штрихом весь громадный рост и всю внутреннюю красоту его исторической прекрасной фигуры»; Kuprin, “V. D. Nabokov,” 355–56. 2. See Mogiliansky, “V. D. Nabokov.” 3. The original reads: «Один, среди толпы, ослепшей от испуга, / Бежавшей пред слепым свинцом, / Лишь ты подставил грудь в защиту друга / И смерть твоя была победой и венцом. / Не мало славных жертв легло на поле боя, / Их гнал железный долг, награда их влекла. / Ты славы не искал. Нежданно дух героя / Столкнулся с подвигом—и встреча их была / Небесной молнией, Голгофою мгновенной. / Завиден жребий твой и тернии нетленны. / Друзей и недругов вкруг гроба ты собрал. / Ты оправдал наш мрак. Ты смертью смерть попрал»; as cited in T [Vladimir Tatarinov], “Dom Iskusstv—V. D. Nabokovu.” 4. In Paris, OGPU agents kidnapped former White Army generals and leaders of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) Alexander Kutepov (1930) and Evgeny Miller (1937). A fictionalized version of General Miller’s abduction, with the assistance of General Nikolai Skoblin and of the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaia, appears in Nabokov’s story, “The Assistant Producer” (1943). 5. Shapiro, Sublime Artist’s Studio, 192. Most recently, an entire book has been devoted to this subject; see Zanganeh, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness. 6. Khrushcheva, Imagining Nabokov, 20. 7. Tyrkova-Williams, To, chego bol´she ne budet, 450.Page 230 →

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Appendix 1 V. D. Nabokov, “The Kishinev Bloodbath,” Pravo, April 27, 1903, 1281–85. (The notes are numbered as they were in the original article.) Everyone in whom human sentiment is not dead has read the sad tale of the Kishinev pogroms with deep indignation and heartache. Already a concise government report that enumerated the dead and the wounded, in spite of its laconism and official aridity, made it possible to guess that something monstrous had happened.1 Further information,2 placed in the St. Petersburg Gazette, the Russian Gazette, Daybreak, and the News, confirmed these conjectures. Such a picture emerged that according to eyewitness testimony, a recollection of the 1882 Kiev pogrom pales in comparison. About fifty killed and 150 seriously wounded. According to the St. Petersburg Gazette, disfigured and mutilated corpses were lying next to each other in the morgue, many of them covered with feathers and appearing white…One mother found her three sons murdered. It goes without saying that these murders were accompanied by a brigandly assault on property and by plundering. The dimensions of the disaster are incalculable. Four thousand families are ruined and became literally destitute. Upon reading this news, starting with the government report, one is amazed first of all by the actual possibility of such events in the large and well-equipped city, with its administration, police, and considerable military force. The amazement grows further upon learning that the pogrom was foreseen and therefore no one, except the poor victims, was caught unawares. It Page 232 → reaches extreme limits upon familiarization with the very course and forms of the pogrom, which lasted for more than two days and which had the character of systematic and successive attacks by separate and small gangs of twenty to twenty-five people on individual houses and shops. Quite naturally, the press, not only mainstream but a specialized one (the Judicial Review), has raised the question of the likely responsibility—criminal and civil—of the Kishinev authorities for inaction. According to the Russian Gazette report, the Kishinev city council resolved at its emergency meeting to turn to the minister of the interior and to point at “poor functioning of the local police.” The Judicial Review rightly indicates that insufficient prevention by local authorities at the emergence of the disturbances in general has been noticed time and again by the supreme authority. It also points out that already concerning the disturbances of 1882, it was resolved by the May 3, 1882, imperial injunction, “to inform the respective gubernatorial authorities that they are vested with responsibility of taking timely preventive measures against such disturbances and of nipping them in the bud, if they arise. And that any negligence in this regard by the administrative and police authorities, when they were able but did not take measures to prevent violent actions, if they are found guilty, will result in their removal from the positions.” In Kishinev, it appears, no attempt was made to suppress the disturbances. One of the most Judeophobic local periodicals, which has made nationalistic persecution its preoccupation, says outright that the action “while playing out for two days and reaching its apogee,” “suddenly” died down, and “already by the third day it was felt that strict measures of precaution were already superfluous.” The authorities thus began fulfilling their duties only when the need for it had passed. We do not know whether the question of their criminal and civil responsibility will be raised. They, however, will not escape moral responsibility before enlightened society and before history. It falls upon them with all the gravity of lost human lives, ruined and dispossessed families. It was hard to anticipate that the crying facts of the Kishinev pogrom could serve an excuse for a new assault on the part of the notorious portion of the press that propagates combative anti-Semitism. Such an assault, however, became possible. It has revealed the full, in essence, spiritual solidarity between some (fortunately, not many) representatives of the printed word and that unruly rabble that on April 6 and 7 raged, unimpeded, in Kishinev. A corrupt quill has turned up, unafraid to write the following truly reprehensible words concerning the reports that appeared in the News: “Jews are always like that: first they mess up, and then they raise a hubbub and appeal to public compassion.” Page 233 →

In another issue of the paper that printed this phrase, we read, “Be that as it may, the terrible tragedy broke out. One would wish that it would serve a redemptive lesson to Jews, at least for the future. And mainly that it would not bring suffering upon those unfortunate Christians (!!) who, by no fault of their own, are doomed to live together with them, doomed to live near the gunpowder cellar, where at every minute they risked becoming victims (!!) of its fatal proximity.” Finally, in the third issue of the paper, a remedy to avoid pogroms is recommended: Jews should become benevolent toward the population in whose midst they live, get along with it, not estrange themselves from it; they should prove that Jews are not parasites but the same devoted citizens as its children, respecting the laws and being ready every minute to give “life to the last drop of their blood (?!)” for this motherland.3 We would not have dwelled on these statements unless the possibility of their dissemination in the press explained, at least to some degree, the likelihood of such events as the Kishinev pogrom. It turns out, however, that it is conceivable to hold such a point of view, according to which Jews must earn the right of personal inviolability—of their life and health—for it does not belong to them as such. If a Jew is murdered or disfigured, the first sentiment is compassion toward that “unfortunate Christian,” a murderer who will suffer only because a Jew got in his way. The crying and wailing of beaten Jews are contemptuously called Yid hubbub. It is suggested to the mother mourning her three murdered sons that she must perceive this murder as the redemptive lesson for the transgressions of the Jewish tribe… This kind of advocacy appears to be an ugly but unfortunately natural consequence of the regime that incidentally supports it—the regime of oppression and lawlessness. We shall note that even the shameless newspaper quoted here dared not in this case explain the pogrom exclusively as revenge by the population for economic oppression and exploitation. It dared not, both because no data in this case can be provided as testimony of such oppression and in light of the very character of the pogrom. It was necessary to come up with a new explanation—again, understandably, accusatory of the Jews: they purportedly demoralized the workers and exacerbated the already tense situation by distributing proclamations that called for anarchy. Before you know it, the rowdy Kishinev rabble will be declared defenders of the “foundations” who taught a good lesson to those who were undermining these foundations. Page 234 → The true explanation lies, of course, elsewhere. It lies, as was said, in that legislative and administrative regime under whose influence the relations between the Christian and the Jewish populations are formed. From this regime's point of view, a Jew is a pariah, a creature of the lowest order, something malevolent in and of itself. He can be merely tolerated, but he ought to be limited and bound by confinement within the narrow limits of the artificial pale. In the strata of the populace, alien to true culture, the historically formed outlook on a Jew that passes from generation to generation is that of a “Yid” who is to blame for merely being born a “Yid.” Such a cruel and coarse attitude toward the entire nationality finds, as it were, an implicit affirmation and recognition in the ruling regime, and as a result, makes possible the sincere belief of a peasant lad who murdered a Jew that “for them, there is no judgment.” One may be absolutely certain that the vast majority of the Kishinev pogrom participants, if they did not think precisely that in any case foresaw for themselves no dire consequences. In this, there undoubtedly lies the most tragic side of the occurred events. They indeed constitute the “redemptive lesson”…but only not for the Jews!

Кишиневская кровавая баня С глубоким негодованием и с болью в сердце прочел каждый, в ком не заглохло человеческое чувство, печальную повесть Кишиневских погромов. Уже краткое правительственное сообщение,4 перечислявшее убитых и раненых, несмотря на свой лаконизм и официальную сухость, давало возможность догадываться, что произошло нечто чудовищное.

Дальнейшие сведения,5 помещенные в «СПБ. Ведомостях», «Русских Ведомостях», «Восходе» и «Новостях», подтвердили эти догадки. Получилась такая картина, перед которой, по свидетельству очевидца, бледнеет воспоминание о Киевском погроме в 1882 г. Около пятидесяти убитых, около ста пятидесяти тяжело раненых. По сообщению «С.-Петербургских Ведомостей», в «мертвецкой» обезображенные и изуродованные трупы лежали друг около друга, многие были покрыты перьями и казались белыми…Одна мать нашла убитыми трех своих сыновей. Само собою разумеется, что эти убийства сопровождали разбойнические нападения на имущество, Page 235 → расхищение добра. Размеры бедствия неисчислимы, 4000 семейств разорено и остались буквально нищими. При чтении этих известий, начиная с правительственного сообщения, изумляет прежде всего фактическая возможность подобных событий в большом и благоустроенном городе, с администрацией, полицией и значительной военной силой. Изумление возрастает, когда узнаешь, что погром предвиделся заранее и, стало быть, никого, кроме несчастных жертв, врасплох не захватил. Оно достигает последних пределов при ознакомлении с самым ходом и формами погрома, продолжавшегося более двух дней, имевшего характер систематических и последовательных нападений отдельными и небольшими кучками в 20–25 человек на отдельные дома и лавки. Вполне естественно, что в печати не только общей, но и специальной («Судебное обозрение»), поднят вопрос о возможной ответственности—уголовной и гражданской—кишиневских властей за бездействие. По сообщению «Русских Ведомостей», кишиневская городская дума постановила в экстренном своем собрании обратиться к министру внутренних дел с указанием на «слабую деятельность местной полиции». «Судебное обозрение» справедливо указывает, что недостаточная предупредительность местной власти при возникновении вообще беспорядков уже не раз отмечалась высшею властью, и что еще по поводу беспорядков 1882 г. Высочайшим повелением от 3 мая 1882 г. было постановлено «дать знать подлежащим губернским начальствам, что на их ответственность возлагается своевременное принятие предупредительных мер для отвращения поводов к подобным беспорядкам и для устранения беспорядков в самом начале, если бы они возникли, и что за всякое в сем отношении небрежение административных и полицейских властей, когда они могли, но не озаботились отвратить насильственные действия, виновные будут подлежать устранению от должностей». В Кишиневе, повидимому, не было сделано и попытки подавления беспорядков. Одно из наиболее юдофобских местных изданий, сделавшее националистскую травлю своей специальностью, прямо говорит, что движение, «разыгрываясь в течение двух дней и достигнув апогея», стихло «вдруг» и «уже на третий день чувствовалось, что строгие меры предосторожности уже излишни». Власти, таким образом, приступили к выполнению своего долга только тогда, когда миновала в том надобность. Не знаем, будет ли поставлен вопрос об их уголовной и гражданской ответственности: от нравственной Page 236 → ответственности перед культурным обществом и перед историей им не уйти, она ложится на них всей тяжестью погибших человеческих жизней, разоренных и обездоленных семей. Трудно было ожидать, чтобы вопиющие факты кишиневского погрома могли дать повод к новому натиску со стороны известной части прессы, проповедующей боевой антисемитизм. Такой натиск оказался, однако, возможным. Обнаружилась полнейшая, в сущности, духовная солидарность некоторых (к счастью, немногих) представителей печатного слова с той разнузданной чернью, которая 6 и 7 апреля беспрепятственно бушевала в Кишиневе. Нашлось растленное перо, не побоявшееся написать по поводу сообщений, появившихся в «Новостях», следующие, по истине позорные, слова: «Евреи всегда так: сначала напакостят, а потом сами же гвалт поднимают и взывают к общественному состраданию». В другом № газеты, где напечатана эта фраза, мы читаем: «Как бы то ни было, ужасная трагедия разразилась. Остается пожелать, чтобы она послужила искупительным уроком для евреев, хотя на будущее время, а главное, чтобы из-за нее не пострадали те несчастные христиане (!!), которые не по своей вине обречены жить вместе с ними, обречены жить у порохового погреба, рискуя каждую минуту стать жертвой (!!) его рокового соседства». Наконец, в третьем № рекомендуется и средство избежать погромов: оно заключается в том, что евреи должны стать доброжелательны по отношению к народу, среди которого они живут, уживаться с ним, не отчуждаться от него, доказывать ему, что евреи не паразиты, а такие же преданные родине граждане как и его дети, что они уважают законы и также готовы каждую минуту отдать за эту родину «свою жизнь до последней капли крови (?!)».6

Мы бы не отстанавливались на приведенных заявлениях, если бы возможность их распространения в печати не объясняла, по крайней мере в известной степени, возможности таких событий, как кишиневский погром. Оказывается, ведь, мыслимым такое воззрение, согласно которому право неприкосновенности жизни и здоровья должно быть еще заслужено евреями,—само по себе оно им не принадлежит. Если еврей убит или изувечен, то первое чувство—жалости к тому «несчастному христианину»—убийце, который пострадает из за того лишь, что ему подвернулся еврей. Крики и вопли Page 237 → избиваемых презрительно именуются жидовским гвалтом. Матери, оплакивающей трех убитых своих сыновей, внушается, что она должна воспринять это убийство, как искупительный урок за прегрешения еврейского племени… Такого рода проповедь представляется хотя и уродивым, но к несчастью естественным плодом того режима, который, между прочим, ею же и поддерживается,—режима угнетения и бесправия. Заметим, что даже цитированная нами беззастенчивая газета не решилась в этом случае объяснять погром исключительно местью населения за экономический гнет и эксплуатацию,—не решилась как потому, что никаких данных, свидетельствующих о таком гнете, в данном случае нельзя было привести, так и в виду самого характера погрома. Пришлось придумать новое объяснение, опять таки, понятно, обвиняющее евреев: они, дескать, деморализовали рабочих и обострили и без того напряженное положение раздачей прокламаций, проповедующих анархию. Недостает немногого до того, чтобы объявить буйную кишиневскую чернь защитницей «устоев», давшей хороший урок подкапывающимся под эти устои… Истинное объяснение, конечно, не в этом. Оно заключается, как сказано, в том законодательном и административном режиме, под влиянием которого создаются отношения христианского населения к еврейскому. С точки зрения этого режима еврей—пария, существо низшего порядка, нечто зловредное an und für sich. Его можно только терпеть, но его следует всячески ограничить и связать, замыкая его в тесные пределы искусственной черты. В слоях населения, чуждого истинной культуры, от поколения к поколению переходит исторически сложившееся воззрение на еврея, как на «жида», виноватого уже в том одном, что он родился «жидом». Такое жестокое и грубое отношение к целой народности встречает себе в господствующем режиме как бы косвенное подтверждение и признание, и в результате оказывается возможным чистосердечное убеждение крестьянского парня, убившего еврея, что «за них суда нету». Можно быть совершенно уверенным, что огромное большинство участников кишиневского погрома, если и не думало совершенно того же, то во всяком случае никаких опасных последствий для себя не предвидело. В этом, несомненно, самая трагическая сторона происшедших событий. Они действительно являются «искупительным уроком»…но только не для евреев! 1. See Pravo, no. 16, chronicle. 2. See Pravo, no. 17, chronicle; Novosti, no. 105. 3. See Znamia, nos. 99, 100, 102. 4. См. № 16 «Права», хроника. 5. См. № 17 «Права», хроника и «Новости» № 105. 6. См. «Знамя», №№ 99, 100, 102.Page 238 →

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Appendix 2 V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia's Future,” a Lecture delivered at King's College, London, January 16, 1920, Supplement to The New Commonwealth, no. 15, January 23, 1920, 1–8. (V. D. Nabokov's punctuation and style, including italics, are preserved. Only obvious typographical errors were corrected. The notes † and ‡ are V. D. Nabokov's; the rest are current author's comments.) When in the autumn of 1917 the question of a Bolshevist coup d'état was discussed in authoritative circles, all those in Russia who admitted this contingency—and there were not a few—entertained no doubt that the duration of a Bolshevist regime would be ephemeral. These anticipations were based on essentially the same line of argument as those which were applied to the great European War. In August, 1914, everybody thought that in 1915 all would be over. But when in 1916, after a whole year's absence Shackleton returned back to civilisation, he could only be overwhelmed at the news that war was raging more destructively than ever, that all Europe had gone mad, and men were killing each other by thousands daily.* If any Russian could have been for two years out of reach of news from his country and would be now returning there, he would be also overwhelmed at the news that Lenin was ruling Russia as a dictator from the very heart of the country—the Page 240 → Kremlin and Trotsky was at the head of a Red army several hundred thousands strong. Then, in 1914 and three years later in 1917 the reason for these misconceptions lay in the lack of capacity to judge and appreciate rightly the character and meaning of the momentous forces which had entered in action and the magnitude of the issues involved. As regards the Bolshevik coup d'état many far-seeing and acute observers were unable to realise the whole system of historical and social causes by which the Russian Revolution of 1917, itself a result of historical and social premises, was bound to degenerate in a dissolution of the existing social order. At the same time they failed to grasp the full meaning of the coming into power of Bolshevism, with its doctrines, its men, its methods. They did not discern the abyss that lay between the appeal of the Provisional Government and that of the Bolsheviks. The Provisional Government and the parties which helped it in its struggle against the Bolsheviks, appealed to the sense of duty of the citizens, to their patriotism, to national honour, all motives which were bound to exact new and heavy sacrifices. The Bolsheviks on the other hand appealed to the lowest instincts, to the egotistical appetites of the masses and advocated class hatred, unrestricted violence, exclusion of all patriotic motives. At the same time, only a few realised how utterly disorganised were the economic forces of the country, how small was the proportion of conscious elements which could alone, if organised, oppose the coming wave of anarchy. Only a few understood that the two fundamental points in Lenin's programme, which have been rightly described as an appeal to the latent forces of revolt in the peasant masses and as the transformation of the international war in a war of classes, if thoroughly applied in practice would give to the Soviet regime an unthought-of vitality. And certainly nobody could have foreseen and taken into account the international situation created by the course the war took in 1918. The collapse of Germany brought in a new conjuncture. The Allies had no more strategical grounds compelling them to fight Bolshevism in order to reach the ultimate goal—victory over the Germans. This had already been achieved. But I do not propose to attract your attention just now to the causes which gave the Bolsheviks such an exterior strength and allowed them to last for two years. This question will be dealt with later on. The question I now want to put is the following: Can Bolshevism live? Does it dispose of such vital elements which could secure for it the future? And if Bolshevism is to last, what results can it have for Russia at first, and then for the whole of Europe and perhaps even farther? Page 241 →

I. It would be very superficial to answer these questions solely on the basis of the latest developments and successes of the Bolshevist armies. These successes have their repercussion in the latest New Year message from Lenin sent out by wireless from Moscow. It solemnly predicts for the coming year, Soviets in Berlin, Washington, Paris and London—in fact Soviet[s] throughout the world. However exaggerated these utterances may seem, I do not believe, and I will explain why I do not believe them to be a mere piece of bluff. But at the same time I must ask you to try to imagine the same question put several years ago, e.g., in 1912 or 1913 in the form: Will Tsarism live? I wish it to be noted at once that there was then much more material available for a considered answer to such a question than there is now. There existed then a Russian press which, granted all difficulties created for its work by the Tsarist regime, could however, throw some light on many dark and hidden features of current life. The great bulk of the press belonged moreover to the opposition. This, of course, did not only induce to conceal facts, but on the contrary might even lead to a certain exaggeration of the evils of the regime. The tribune of the Imperial Douma enjoyed still greater freedom, and this tribune voiced the opinion of the representative body, however incomplete and imperfect, of a wide and united Empire. There existed, moreover, the possibility of a personal acquaintance with the life of the country. Travelling throughout the Empire, conversation with the people, were means open to everybody. The conditions for an exact appreciation were then manifestly more favourable than now. And still, hardly anybody could boast of a truthful diagnosis. Of course, people who had passed through the so-called revolution of 1905–6, caused by the unsuccessful war with Japan, could have had a kind of foretaste of what might happen if Russia was to become involved not in a colonial war waged in distant regions but in a European world-conflagration. Such a war, however, did not seem then near or even possible. The Tsarist regime having successfully coped with the movement of 1905–6, seemed outwardly even strengthened. The Government could fully rely on the third and fourth Imperial Doumas, elected on the basis of a law which specially aimed at the exclusion of all elements of opposition. The Bolshevik wireless tell[s] us nowadays of the alleged participation of hundreds of thousands of Petrograd workmen in the latest election of the Soviets and that these workmen elected over a thousand of communists. But we must surely remember that the Tsarist regime also boasted of millions of members of the “Union of the Russian Page 242 → People” which however in the days of trial, in the days of war and revolution, unexpectedly disappeared altogether. In any case the exterior strength and security of the Tsarist regime must have appeared incomparably greater than the strength and security of the present Bolshevik rule. An extraordinary acuteness and an exceptional degree of information must have been needed to discern at that time behind the show of outward brilliancy and force of the old regime, the germs of its decomposition. Some very prominent foreigners declared after their visit to Petrograd at the end of 1916, that the regime was stronger than ever. Two months later this same regime crumpled to pieces as a house of cards, and disappeared without leaving any traces, without even any resistance. Is the same fate in store for the present federative socialist Republic of the Russian Soviets? If Tsardom could not live, can Bolshevism live? But before answering this question we must make it clear that Bolshevism may be spoken of in different senses. In its origin Bolshevism was the advanced wing of the Russian social democratic party, which split into two sections on one of the party congresses held in London in the early years of this century.† The Bolsheviks represented the majority, and favoured the extremist programme, the Mensheviks were less extreme, in their tactical programme, but represented only the minority. At the present day Bolshevism has three different meanings: (1) it is a definite socialistic doctrine; (2) it is also a definite political and social system; (3) it is a psychological and every-day phenomenon. All these aspects of Bolshevism are closely connected with each other. What, then, is the doctrine? I shall try to state it in the fewest possible words, referring to Lenin's authentic version.‡

The existing capitalist state, which chiefly aims at the oppression and the Page 243 → exploitation of the workingclass, must give way to a proletarian state. This change can only be brought about by a violent subversive revolution. Quoting Karl Marx, Lenin tells us that between capitalist and communist society there lies a period of revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter. A stage of political transition corresponds to this period, during which the state can assume no other form than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. What is the relation of this dictatorship to democracy? As Engels says in his letter to Bebel, “The proletariat needs the State not in the interests of liberty, but for the purpose of crushing its opponents. Resistance must be broken by force.” It is however clear that where there is suppression there must also be violence, and there can be no place for either liberty or democracy. Suppression and violence must certainly cost blood, but blood will be shed on a comparatively reduced scale. The people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “machine,” almost without any machine at all, without any special apparatus by the simple organisation of the armed masses—such as the councils of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Thus will be paved the way for Communist Society. Only in Communist Society, when the resistance of the capitalist has been finally broken, when the capitalists have disappeared, and when there are no longer any classes, only then does the State disappear and one can speak of freedom. People will become accustomed to the observance of the elementary rules of social life without force, without constraints, without subjection, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the State. But this can only happen in the final stage of development. It must be preceded by another phase, when Communist Society has just actually emerged out of capitalism and still bears in all respects—economic, moral and intellectual—the stamp of the old society. Bourgeois law and bourgeois justice, at this stage are not abolished in their entirety, but only in part, namely, in respect of the means of production, which are converted into common property. We cannot imagine, says Marx, that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any regulations by law. And there is no other standard yet than that of “bourgeois” law. The State is then not meant to be dead altogether since there still remains the protection of bourgeois law, which sanctifies actual inequality. For the complete extinction of the State, complete communism is necessary. The economic basis for the complete withering away of the State is that high stage of development of Communism, when the distinction between brain and manual work will disappear. The expropriation of the capitalists make[s] it possible to develop gigantically the forces of production. This process must be of a protracted Page 244 → nature. The State will be able to wither away completely when the society has realised the formula, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” To those who are inclined to consider this ultimate goal as a pure Utopia, Lenin answers: “It has never entered the head of any Socialist to promise that the highest stage of Communism will actually be reached. The anticipations of the great Socialists that it will arrive are based on something else than the present productive powers of labour, or the present unthinking man in the street, capable of spoiling, without reflection, the stores of social wealth and demanding the impossible. As long as the “highest” phase of Communism has not been attained the Socialists demand the strictest control, by society and by the State, of the quantity of labour and the quantity of consumption; only this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the control of the workers over the capitalists, and must be carried out not by a Government of bureaucrats but by a Government of the armed workers. These, then, are the essentials of the doctrine. The new social and economic world which forms the ultimate ideal is, as we see it, relegated to a remote future. The present productive powers of labour and the present unthinking man in the street are not adapted to the second stage of Communism. But they are ripe for the first stage and this has to be reached by violence and bloodshed. The armed masses of the people, who are to use this weapon, must rise against their oppressors, they must crush them and with this dictatorship in their own hands, they must pass through the period of transition. There is no room either for liberty or democracy during this time, nor can any room for it be allowed. But are the people everywhere ripe for this stage? The answer seems to be in the negative. Here it is in Lenin's own words: “As a matter of fact, capitalism as it develops, prepares itself the ground for everyone to take part in the administration of the State. We may consider [says he] as part of this preparation the universal literacy of the population, already realised in most of the more progressive capitalist countries; then in

the education and discipline inculcated upon millions of workers by the huge complex and socialised apparatus of the post, railways, big factories, commerce on a large scale, banking, and so on. With such an economic groundwork it is quite possible, within twenty-four hours, to pass to the overthrow of the capitalists and bureaucrats, and to replace them, in the control of production and distribution, in the business of apportioning labour and products, by the armed workers or the people in arms.” I have no intention to analyse or criticise the whole of this programme. It will be enough for my purpose to show, that it is absolutely unadaptable to Page 245 → the stage of economic and cultural development actually prevalent in Russia. This is so obvious that it does not require to be laid great stress upon. Capitalism in Russia is yet in swaddling clothes. Industrial life is still very feebly developed, except perhaps in some big cities. The working proletariat forms only a very small proportion of the whole population, about three or four per cent. Its organisation is still young. It is politically on a very low stage of development and has never passed through any apprenticeship that could have prepared it for the use of power. The peasant proletariat which by a curious and deeply-rooted mistake is reckoned among the sympathizers of socialisation of land, has neither literacy, nor education, nor discipline. The level of its political conceptions is still lower than that of the working proletariat. The economic foundation for implanting Communism to which, as we have seen, Lenin refers does not in fact exist at all. Were Bolshevism a constructive doctrine, its fate would be sealed, and it would have soon passed into complete oblivion. Unhappily, the force of Bolshevism does not spring from its economic groundwork but is manifested in its psychological effect. And this effect was aggravated by the conditions of life which prevailed when the preaching of the doctrine and the putting it into practice were started. Some of these conditions are of a more general character, others again are incidental and connected with the war and the downfall of the Tsarist regime. The people who spent the summer of 1917 in Russia and witnessed the propaganda of the Bolshevik press raging through the country, the speeches of the orators, the leaflets and pamphlets published, know very well to what forces Lenin and his acolytes were appealing. They appealed to the hidden forces of revolt and destruction, which have often revealed themselves in more or less identical forms in the course of the history of the Russian people. In 1905–1906 they almost led to a catastrophe. I have not the time to examine in detail the psychology of the Russian masses or to define the causes which brought about this psychology. It will be enough to say here that the latent tendency of these masses to anarchy is provoked by a great number of very complex causes. We can only mention a few of them: the low standard of culture possessed by the masses, the breadth of the territory on the surface of which they are scattered, the close connection of the greater part of them with nature and soil, the bad organisation of power, the lack of traditions, and last—not least—some peculiar and innate elements of the Slav soul. Russian literature shows classical examples of these elements vividly pictured in the works of Dostojeffsky, Tchechov, Bounine and Gorky, to mention Page 246 → only the greatest among them. The type of the Bolshevist has been foreshadowed long ago in Russian history and Russian fiction. The records of the Russian history of the so-called Period of Disturbance in the seventeenth century will provide their readers in the manifestos of Bolotnikoff, and other leaders of robber bands who overran the country with the first draft of Lenin's contemporary programme.§ The same appeal is now made to the same forces. Under normal conditions when the existing power of Government is strong and secure and can be exercised over all the country, the psychology of the masses is not suitable to the fomenting of sedition. The State has then at its disposal an organised and disciplined army of officials and another still greater of trained and armed soldiers. Life is healthy and peaceful, there are no economical or other fateful disasters which could provoke deep-rooted and latent forces of destruction to an upheaval. An attempt to bring them into action under these circumstances would be doomed to immediate failure.

It is otherwise when the authority of power and the idea of discipline have been deeply shaken. The unparalleled efforts and sacrifices which during three years of war failed to prevent heavy reverses, the sudden revolution which swept away the throne and the dynasty and removed in a few days the bureaucracy and the police of the country[;] all this created a tremendous upheaval in the psychology of the people. And this happened in a moment when thousands of armed workers who constitute modern armies were concentrated all over the country, and millions of these men on the fronts were losing their faith in the ultimate victory. To these deluded and ignorant masses Lenin threw the promise: Bread, Land, Peace. And in order to reach this goal he shows the way of revolt, of seizing governing power, of crushing the oppressors and the capitalists for whose sake alone the war was represented to be waged and blood to be shed. Who could wonder that this call was responded to and let Satan loose all over Russia? Any one, however, slightly acquainted with the Communist idea must realise that even the first stage of Communist society referred to by Lenin, cannot be reached by appeals to the destructive elements alone or by using them alone. A few days after the Bolsheviks’ coup d'état Maxim Gorky who was then an eloquent antagonist of the Bolsheviks wrote as follows: “Blind fanatics, adventurers without conscience, they throw themselves recklessly on the road of a supposed revolution. But in reality this road leads only to anarchy, to the loss of the revolution and of the proletariat…. The working Page 247 → class cannot understand that Lenin is making a mere experiment with its blood and flesh. He tries to rouse the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat to its extreme in order to watch the results. He does not, of course, believe that the victory of the proletariat is possible in Russia under the present circumstances. But he is perhaps hoping for a miracle? The working class must know that miracles do not exist. The workers must realise that what is in store for them are famine, disorganisation of all transports, a protracted cruel anarchy and finally a dark bloody reaction. This is where the present leader of the proletariat is leading it to.” All these prophecies of Gorky are now facts, all but the prophecy of reaction. It must, however, always be remembered that Lenin never thought of working for Russia alone. Russia's welfare and progress are for him a matter of slight importance. For him the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia is a first step to the conquest of the whole world. If Bolshevism be compressed in the limits of the former Empire, it is doomed to perish. This conception is completely in accordance with the spirit of Bolshevism, and on the other hand proved the only practicable and workable idea in the whole doctrine. The Bolshevist doctrine in its essence is international. Its aims go much farther than the limits of any given state or nation. These can interest Lenin only as a “cultural milieu” where the germ of Bolshevism can be fostered. From a practical point of view it is manifest that the establishment of a Communist regime in a country surrounded by capitalism is a hopeless task. To live Bolshevism must spread over the world. And it has to be confessed that as regards Europe never has this task been so tempting as at present. The heritage of the war: social unrest in all countries, economical perturbations having their repercussion in the conditions of life in every one of them, the terrifying distress of Central Europe, all this is welcome for Bolshevism. But even at the time when Lenin was seizing power the conditions of Europe were opening for him wide prospects. The chief aim was to retain power at any price. This aim pervades all the activities of the Soviet Government during the first months of its establishment. Up to now it remains the moving spirit. The interests, the welfare of Russia and of the Russian people are placed in the background. Lenin himself and his fellow workers would not lose anything by this experiment carried through on a grandiose scale. Until then they had only written about revolution. In the afterword of Lenin's book ‘The State and the Revolution,’ written in November, 1917, he says: “It is more pleasant and more useful to live through the experience of a revolution than to write about it.” And so they are pursuing this pleasant and useful experiment. Page 248 →

II. To be able to retain power it was necessary to organise it, to create a political system on the basis of the

dictatorship of the proletariat. The “Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic” established by order of the fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets passed on July 10th, 1918, declares that its principal object (for the present period of transition) consists in the establishment (by means of a strong Soviet Government) of the Dictatorship of the urban and rural workers, combined with the poorer peasantry, to secure the complete destruction of capitalism, the ending of exploitation of man by man, and the bringing about of Socialism, under which class division and State coercion arising therefrom will no longer exist. All the central and local power is vested in the Soviets (councils) of Workers', Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Delegates (Art. 1), representing the entire working population of the country (Art. 10). The “supreme authority” of the Russian Soviet Republic is the AllRussian Congress of Soviets which is convened at least twice a year, by the Central Executive Committee, a body of not more than 200 members, itself elected by the All-Russian Congress (Art. 24, 26, 28). In the period between two congresses the Central Executive Committee is the supreme authority of the Republic (Art. 30). Generally speaking, this Committee is the supreme legislative, administrative and controlling body of the Republic (Art. 31). It has in its hands “the general direction of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government” (Art. 32). At the same time another paragraph complicates matters by declaring that the general direction of the affairs of the Republic rests with the “Council of People's Commissars,” which is “appointed” by the Central Executive Committee. The relations between those two bodies, namely, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars—are rather complicated. The Council issues decrees, orders and regulations and takes all general measures necessary to secure prompt and orderly administration. The Council immediately informs the Executive Committee of all its orders and decisions. The Executive Committee has the right to annul or suspend any decision or order of the Council. All decisions by the Council of fundamental importance affecting general policy are submitted to be examined and ratified by the Executive Committee. But an ominous note to Art. 41 declares that “measures of extreme urgency may be enforced on the sole authority of the Council of People's Commissars.” All the “local power” is concentrated in a complex system of local Soviets, each electing its own executive committee and having at their basis the Soviets of deputies in towns and villages, elected for a period of three months. Page 249 → These are the broad lines of the system. As the whole power is, according to the Soviet Constitution vested in elected bodies, the question of the right of voting and the electoral procedure has a special importance. The articles of the Constitution relating to this question dispose that “the right to vote and that of being elected to the Soviets belongs to all citizens of the Russian Soviet Republic without distinction of sex, religion or nationality, or any residence qualification, provided that on the day of the election they have reached the age of eighteen and are in the following categories: (1) all those who earn their living by productive work useful to society and those who are engaged in domestic occupations which enable the former to follow their callings, workers and employees of all sorts and kinds, whether in industry, commerce or agriculture, &c., peasants and agricultural cossacks who do not employ others for the sake of profit; (2) soldiers in the army and navy of the Soviet Republic; (3) citizens of the above categories who are incapacitated for work. It will be interesting to note, that the local Soviet may, after approval of the Central Power—whatever that may be—lower the legal age fixed by this paragraph and send to the ballot-box boys and girls under eighteen, presumably when they can be expected to have developed a true proletarian spirit. On the whole, this appears to give a very wide franchise. However, if we turn to the next article what do we find? “The following persons have neither the right to vote nor to be elected even if they are within one of the above-mentioned categories: (a) those who employ others for the sake of profit; (b) those who live either on income not arising from their own work, or on interest on capital, industrial enterprises or landed property, &c.; (c) private business men, agents, middlemen, &c. (these ‘&c.’ are not very enlightening); (d) monks and priests of all religious denominations; (e) late agents and employees of the old police, special constabulary, and secret service, and also members of the late ruling dynasty of Russia; (f) persons legally recognised as mentally deficient, maniacs, and imbeciles; (g) persons convicted of infamous or mercenary crimes: these are disqualified during a period fixed by law or by sentence of the court.” It is characteristic of the Soviet rule that, in these regulations of electoral franchise, people who live on income rising from industrial enterprises, and private businessmen of every description are placed on the same footing with madmen, imbeciles and infamous criminals. In a certain way the last named—the infamous criminals—are even better off, because their disability is temporary. It is true, that if business men in the Soviet Republic are on the niveau of lunatics and criminals they

have the consolation of finding priests and members of the Romanoff dynasty treated in the same way. Page 250 → As to electoral procedure, that all-important matter is summarily dismissed in two articles, which declare that: “elections are conducted according to established practice, on dates fixed by the local Soviets” and that “details of electoral procedure and the participation in it of professional and industrial organisation are fixed by the local Soviets, in conformity with instructions issued by the Central Executive Committee.” The questions of proportional representation, of the majority system, of the representation of minorities, of the electoral quorum, all these and many other questions do not interest the Soviet authorities. They are merely the surviving rubbish of bourgeois jurisprudence. The only thing of importance is to secure obedient and subservient Soviets. The established practice has provided reliable means to serve this purpose. An independent press has not existed in Soviet Russia for the last two years, whereas the Soviet newspapers are dumb as regards all details of everyday life. It is therefore impossible to have anything like an accurate idea of how the elections to the Soviets are actually worked, e.g., what is the proportion of voters participating in the elections or in how far the deputies represent the prevailing opinion of the local population. But I think that the rules referred to just now give us the right to characterise this electoral system as the most arbitrary and deformed system in the world. As all the other Soviet institutions it aims at the domination of one class over all others. But its outstanding feature is a selection of the unfittest. All those who by their energy, work, and talent have succeeded in breaking away from the general level and who while continuing their work for the good of the society, have attained a higher degree of welfare, are deliberately thrown aside. In our analysis of the Soviet system of government we must not overlook another important fact. In spite of its thoroughly arbitrary character, even this absurd electoral system could have, if equitably worked, been used as a machine for controlling and combating the misdeeds of the local and central administrations and for limiting the autocracy of the actually dictatorial powers of the Council of the People's Commissars. But this could have been so on the condition that the people were guaranteed political liberty, even on the small scale, which was enjoyed by them under the Tsarist regime. This condition is essential. In fact, however, even that small amount of liberty is denied to them. In no other measure have Bolshevik hypocrisy and falsehood revealed themselves so conspicuously. The Soviet Constitution states that “in order to assure to the workers effective liberty of opinion, the Russian Soviet Republic puts an end to the dependence of the press upon capital; transfers to the workers and to the peasants all the technical and material resources necessary Page 251 → for the publication of newspapers, pamphlets, books and other printed matter and guarantees their unobstructed circulation throughout the country.” Liberty of opinion—as we see—only for the workers! Even that would be something. But even that does not exist. The article quoted means in fact just this: The Soviet authorities robbed all newspaper proprietors as well as the owners of printing offices, confiscated all the materials (printing-presses, types, paper), and handed them over to their own party instruments. This was the summary way in which they actually destroyed every possibility of voicing an independent opinion in print. The Socialist press, which expresses the views of workers who happened to disagree with them, had to endure the same treatment. Thus they attained a fallacious unison of the press which was never dreamt of, even in the darkest times of unchecked autocracy. In Soviet Russia there does not only not exist, but there cannot exist any liberty in the expression of an opinion in print which would be in dissent with the official creed. Practically the whole of the Bolshevist press belongs to the category appropriately denominated reptile press. Another means, though of less importance, of expressing opinions is in principle open to everybody. Though complete freedom of meeting is ensured only to workmen, even these meetings could be used by those workers who are opposing Soviet rule. In the same way liberty of association, although secured for workmen alone, could be made use of for the same purpose. But these possibilities are prevented by the gruesome methods of coercion by terror, which form the actual basis of the whole system of Soviet rule. The instruments which are destined to put into practice this part of the system are the Extraordinary Commissions for combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage—the dreaded “Tchresvychaiky.” Every government, every district and all important

centres, have their “tchresvychaika.” They are all united by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, which has an influence the importance of which can be measured by the fact that at one time it was competing for power with the Soviet of the People's Commissars. This unification of the tchresvychaiky however is quite formal. Every one of them is working quite independently and following its own principles and aims. All of them, however, have an unchecked power over the lives and properties of the citizens without carrying any responsibility. This feature they have all in common. In my statements I have purposely avoided all references to what may be called an appeal to feelings. I do not intend now to unfold before you the picture of the red terror to which some of my closest and dearest friends have fallen victims. This picture is moreover sufficiently well known. We can Page 252 → even admit that under the influence of horrors which have actually taken place amidst a society which is perpetually panic-stricken, and lives under the worst possible moral and physical conditions, stories even amplifying the dreadful truth, are hereby formed and spread. But does not this fact by itself indicate what sort of moral atmosphere is created by Bolshevism? I sincerely trust the time will come when the secrets of the Bolshevist dungeons will be brought to light. The whole world will then learn the truth, and those worthy gentlemen who are now persuading the public that the Soviet rule is popular and the people like it will realise at last what they were defending. I will confine myself here to a single quotation which originates from an official document—the official weekly bulletin of the Extraordinary Commission. In September, 1918, the bulletin No. 3 published an appeal to the comrades of Moscow. It refers to the case of your countryman, Lockhart, who was then accused of conspiring against the Bolsheviks. It appeared evidently with the approval of the editorial commission, and is couched in the following terms:— “Say why have you not submitted Lockhart to specially selected tortures in order to obtain from him the information and addresses which such a bird is sure to possess in great numbers? “Say why instead of applying to him tortures, the bare description of which would set any counter-revolutionary in cold perspiration, say why have you allowed him to quit the precincts of the Extraordinary Commission?” The results of a political system, where the whole extensive and complex organisation of elected bodies (the Soviets) is based on the principle of oppression of any attempt to voice an independent opinion, a criticism or an opposition, is surely obvious! Gradually, but as a rule very soon all these elected bodies cease to attract the interest of the population. The population knows only too well the effect of the watchful control exercised by the local tchresvychaiky and other local administrative bodies and officials. And the effects are to render the Soviets incapable of any other work but an obedient and unprotesting execution of all orders given to them by the central and local authorities. Such a spirit of subservience permeates the whole system of the Soviets up to the Supreme authority of the Russian Soviet Republic—the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. This Congress meets twice a year to acclaim Lenin and his creatures, to pronounce a curse on all interior and exterior enemies of the Soviet Republic, to make and listen to a number of frenzied demagogue speeches, to sign whatever the Council of the People's Commissars thinks fit to propose for its signature, and lastly to disperse at the strains of the Internationale the very existence of which has never been, before 1917, suspected by 999 out of 1,000 Russian workers and peasants. The Page 253 → whole power is said to be vested in the Soviets! As a matter of fact they are merely the appearance of a bogus power. The real power belongs to a dictatorial oligarchy of which Lenin is the head. This central dictatorship is tempered by the tyranny of hundreds of thousands of little local dictators mostly recruited from the scum of society, very often released convicts, Communists by name, but quite ready to serve any power which will guarantee them the satisfaction of their gross appetites. The co-operation of all these destructive forces leads to the decomposition of the entire fabric of social life. I do not dispose of the necessary time to deal with economic and financial systems which have developed under the ægis of the Soviet rule. The economic system means nationalisation of the instruments of production and the distributing apparatus. The financial system has degenerated in a reckless printing of paper currency.

The results of both are identical. Nationalisation in the cases where it was actually applied led to a complete breakdown of the system of credit, to an utter and final disorganisation of industry, to the stoppage of factories and works and the dismissal of the majority of the workmen in a great number of industrial centres and to a lowering of the output to a minimum. It must, however, be noted that in several cases as regards industries, nationalisation could not be put into practice at all, and remained a dead letter. The same applies to the question of land nationalisation, which the peasants resolutely and victoriously opposed. On the other hand, the nationalisation of the distributing apparatus having done with private commerce, created a whole army of officials and a net of bureaucratic institutions which stand between the product and the consumer. This does not by any means render accession to the product easy. The chief result of the system is an unbearable, unfruitful and foolish waste of time. The vital needs being, however, stronger than any regulations, they are met by an incredible development of bribery among the Bolshevik bureaucracy. They have created a secret and illicit traffic, a regular prohibited mechanism which works parallel to the official mechanism. The serious peril and the great risk connected with this kind of commerce can only be compensated by enormous profits. This is the logical reason of the colossal development of speculation, and of the inflation of prices which raises the so-called minimum for existence, i.e., the minimum of expenses needed in order not to die of hunger, to an unheard of limit. The financial policy of the Soviet rule brings analogous consequences. There is no revenue. The permanently increasing flood of unguaranteed paper money is daily losing its value. And it cannot be stopped, for the needs of the increasing army of officials and the red army cannot be met in any other way. Page 254 →

III. Such are the main outlines of the political and economical situation of the country under Soviet rule. The argument of those who advocate the regime can be summed up in the form of the three following questions:— 1. The first of them has already been anticipated in my previous exposition and runs as follows: How is it possible for this hopeless regime to have been maintained for over two years, and even more, to have won military victories? 2. Does not the inextricable international position concur in the creation of the difficulties in which Bolshevism finds itself involved? Or to say plainly, does not the blockade and the war with military forces upheld by foreign powers, help to make Bolshevism what it is? 3. Could it not be expected that were Bolshevism released from its struggle for life, it would take the path of evolution towards healthier and less inhuman methods of government? Reducing these three questions to a short formula it means, ought we not to give Bolshevism a chance? I will say what I think of this formula, but first I will answer the three questions as they are usually put. How can Bolshevism have maintained itself up to now? The foregoing may have given some answer to this question. We have seen under what conditions the Bolsheviks seized power, and what methods they are applying to crush every resistance, every opposition. At present the chief basis of their force is the Red army. They stopped before nothing to organise it successfully. The first decree concerning the army was issued by the Bolsheviks on January 1st, 1918, less than three months after they had seized power. It stated that the old army was used by the bourgeoisie for the purpose of oppressing the working classes. Now that the power has been transferred to the exploited and working masses, the necessity has arisen to create a new army. Its aim will be to uphold the power of the Soviets, and this must be specially noted, to support the coming Soviet Revolution in Europe. The decree went on to say that the Red army of soldiers and workers was to be formed from the most conscious and organised elements among the working class. Every citizen expressing the desire to join the ranks of the Red army has to be ready to devote all his forces and his life towards the defence of the October Revolution, of the power of the Soviet and of Socialism. The essential conditions for joining Page 255 → the force were a recommendation from

the regimental committee and other democratic institutions which had accepted the programme of Soviet rule. Their aim was to create a convinced Communist army under Communist leaders. Very soon, however, this illusory plan had to be dropped and the rulers were compelled to return to the good old system of compulsory service. Of course, the new recruits who joined the army were much less tempted by the idea of defending the October revolution, Soviet rule and Socialism than by material privileges attached to service in the Red army. These were, and still are, increased rations, the possibility of obtaining meat, tobacco, &c. The menace of severe punishment pronounced against all those who would fail to report themselves or who would desert are not to be underestimated. In a country where terror is the order of the day and has become the usual means of government, these menaces have their meaning. Thus led by motives based on the instinct of self-preservation, the bulk of the people joins the red banner with the same passiveness with which they joined the colours of the Tsar. Certainly the percentage of evaders and deserters is much greater now than then. This is confirmed by the orders issued by Trotsky himself. Still the wide territory over which Bolshevism is ruling and the repeated recruitments provide the Bolsheviks with a numerous human material. The martyrology of the officers, which had belonged to the old army, is already known. They were mobilised and a direct alternative was given them either to submit to the Soviet or to die. Many of them perished. Others have submitted, and against their will went under the Bolshevik yoke. And let those who can vouch for their own heroism in equal circumstances be the first to cast a stone at them. A few only succeeded, after passing through heavy hardships and at the risk of their lives, to escape from the Bolshevik tyranny and to join the anti-Bolshevik armies. But still less is the number of those who have of their own accord joined the ranks of the Bolshevik army and offered the Soviet power whole-hearted support. The Soviet Government on perceiving how small the number of these proselytes was, had to resort to the most extraordinary measures. Commissars with unlimited powers were attached to every different military unit. But even more, by far surpassing everything known in history, the Bolsheviks declared the wives and children of officers hostages, who were to be put to death if their husbands and fathers should pass to the other side. And what is worse, this menace has been carried out. This was the way in which the Red army has been formed, to “fight for a plot, whereon the numbers cannot try the cause.”** Of course, the secret leaders direct all their efforts to persuade the masses that all anti-Bolshevik Page 256 → chiefs are black reactionaries. The aim of their active and unceasing propaganda is to make the people believe that their adversaries fight only in order to bring back the Tsar, and the big landowners and with them all the evils of olden times. This propaganda spreads the idea that all the troubles inside the country are provoked by the war waged by the imperialists and capitalists of the whole world, and thus fuel is added to the fire. The people are being persuaded that only after a successful repulse of those attacks they will be able to look forward to a socialistic millennium. Is it to be wondered that these unhappy and deluded masses are fighting their best and have gradually developed into a serious combative force. It is the consciousness of this peril which leads many people to put the two other questions which can be summed up in the formula: “Ought we not to try to give Bolshevism a chance?” The events that have lately taken place in Siberia and South Russia seem to bring a special weight to the argument of those who want to give Bolshevism this chance. I hope I have made it clear in my preceding statement that whatever the conditions surrounding Bolshevism, the political and economical systems based on the Bolshevik doctrine cannot be altered. To live they have to use violence and oppression and these lead inevitably to the ruin of the vital forces of the country. The essence of the doctrine and of the system and the spirit of the leading men, are incompatible with healthy evolution. Confining ourselves to the narrowest limits we can state that, e.g., the raising of the blockade cannot produce any improvement in the general situation. It would be futile to expect normal commercial relations to be resumed with a country where private property is disregarded and undefended, where credit has been completely ruined, and where the legal tender has no definite value. But it would be still more futile to hope that Bolshevism shall be kept for internal absorption alone, and that it shall gradually lose its violent character and become more humane and more equitable. People who confide in such illusions forget that Bolshevism is primarily an active militant and destructive force, and that its triumph in Russia is meant to be only a first step. They forget the third aspect of Bolshevism, to which I referred at the beginning, namely, Bolshevism as a psychological and every-day life

phenomenon, which does not confine itself to Russia alone. They purposely overlook the repeated statements of the spiritual leaders of Bolshevism whose ultimate and, in fact, whose only real aim is Social Revolution throughout the world. There may be found here an affirmative answer to my initial question, Can Bolshevism live? But it is a qualified answer. If we admit that Bolshevism is a dangerous disease, provoked mainly by the catastrophic experiences of the great war, thence we must conclude that the disease can spread, by attacking Page 257 → new tissues. It finds everywhere forces on which it can rely. For everywhere in human society there exist the elements, which Carlyle appropriately calls “rascality.”†† And besides, the social order, within its own limits, possesses its own convinced and fanatic enemies, who are at any time ready to set the world on fire. Bolshevism can live, but its life is death to civilisation, to progress—as it has been proved by Russia's terrible experience. I, for one, do not however believe that such can be the road of the future. In the struggle between Ormusd and Ariman, the latter cannot be the ultimate victor!‡‡ In one of his pamphlets Lenin says, “Outside civil war for Socialism there is no possibility of progress in Europe.” He would certainly like to give a wider scope to his pleasant and useful experiment. And it may be that he will be able to do so for some time. But in the ultimate result victory will be secured by those forces which have their source in the higher aspirations of human nature. The progress of humanity as a whole cannot be based on the realisation of appeals which advocate class warfare, oppression and extermination of one part of the society by the other. Its real basis must be the great principle of solidarity and the actual realisation of Liberty and Equality. But this is not all. Bolshevist practice is upheld by the application of ruthless force, but its doctrines and the moral atmosphere in which it rises and develops, are in a yet stronger degree pervaded by the spirit of the grossest materialism. There can hardly exist any darker and more dismal conception of the world; at the same time it is hopelessly terre à terre and deprived of any creative power. And this conception, when penetrating the minds of those to whom it appeals, produces deep ravages and is understood as a defence and instigation of envy and hatred. A French writer who was in a position to observe Bolshevism from close quarters, and who is not entirely unsympathetic towards it—Étienne Antonelli—says: “The new element which the Bolsheviks have introduced in the Russian Revolution, is in the first place, a moral atmosphere which cannot be grasped by the mere study of positive legislative documents, but which is however directing all their governmental and social policy.”§§ That atmosphere is deadly to all loftier claims of the human soul. Page 258 → Here is the point which connects the future of Russia with the future of Europe. I do not intend to dwell upon the questions which have created such bitter controversies during the last months. I wish only to point out one fact: there is for Europe no prospect of peace and order while the Bolsheviks are ruling over Russia. And still more, all attempts to treat with the Bolsheviks while military success is theirs, can only increase their power and decuple their capacity for doing evil. They will not fail to persuade the people that these attempts signify the capitulation of imperialism and of the bourgeois-capitalistic world, before the coming force of the proletariat. The hope that an agreement may abate the ruinous influence of Bolshevism is a childish hope. But this agreement will have other most depressing tangible results. Europe will have to pay the price and it will be a heavy one. And still heavier it will be for Russia: with every elapsing month Russia sinks deeper and deeper in an abyss of destruction. Sir Bernard Pares whose deep knowledge of Russia is unquestionable, could write a few weeks ago without exaggeration the horror of the situation: “The forces by which Russia could recover are now under our eyes being systematically destroyed day by day and very shortly there will be nothing of them left.”*** We may, of course, expect that the Bolsheviks will readily make on paper any concession in order to obtain a respite. They will promise and in fact have already made the promise in the celebrated Bullitt proposal, to grant complete amnesty to their political opponents and thereby alleviate the conscience of those who will conclude the agreement.††† After Page 259 → all, such an amnesty, if it will be met with trust by those who were able to escape from Bolshevist hands, may just give to Lenin new hostages for the future. Were the Soviet rulers to fulfill their promise, they would have in the first place to abdicate the policy of oppression and destruction on which their power is founded. But would it not be illogical firstly to infuse by an international agreement new life into their veins and after that to expect them to commit suicide?

I may be asked where then lies the solution? One of the most eminent statesmen of Europe recently declared that the man who says he sees his way clearly in the midst of this formless and chaotic matter to reorganise a new free, self-governing and constitutional Russia, was in the opinion of that statesman grossly deceiving himself.‡‡‡ To rest satisfied with such a testimonium paupertatis would be however too sad. But on the other hand it would also be useless to give out a quack's prescription boasting of unfailing effect, whatever the actual condition of the patient. The question must be met on other lines. I should say that any path leading to the reorganisation of a new free, self-governing and constitutional Russia must begin with the subversion of the Bolshevik tyranny. Any attempt to conciliate them or to collaborate with them is futile and self-destructive. Any step that upholds the Soviet power—whether by recognising them or by treating with them—can only increase Russia's plight and imply very far-reaching peril for the whole of Europe. And whereas all policy of wait and see in relation to the Soviet power is only, as already said, rendering the situation in Russia worse and postponing the day of Russia's regeneration, the logical conclusion is that we have to gather all our powers in order to fight this odious regime. It is no fight against ideas but against the men who have adopted and even perverted a certain system of ideas in order to subjugate the ignorant masses and sway them. Were such a struggle possible within Soviet Russia itself, it could be carried through on constitutional lines, by organising public opinion and the social forces of the country, it would be of course the best and the only painless way to overthrow the Soviet rule. But we have already seen that at least for the present time such a struggle is out of question. Every attempt to organise Page 260 → these forces of opposition is denounced as “counterrevolutionary,” as a conspiracy against the Soviet power and has invariably led to executions en masse. Consequently, there remains—under present conditions and putting aside contingencies that cannot be foreseen—only one method, and that is military action. To speak of military action seems to-day rather hopeless. Three months ago the military collapse of Bolshevism seemed near and inevitable. I will not dwell on the presumable causes which ruined these prospects and wrought disaster on the anti-Bolshevik armies. Our information is as yet far from complete. If, however, the worse expectations should come true and the military apparatus of the anti-Bolshevist movement should prove to be shattered beyond recovery, it is for me quite evident that before long the momentary triumph of Bolshevism in Russia will be followed by consequences of a most serious international character. To begin with, there can hardly be any doubt concerning the fate of the boundary states that were intended to form the cordon sanitaire, preventing the expansion of Bolshevism. The Soviet rulers will readily acknowledge the independence of these states, but in a very short time they will blow up the respective anti-Bolshevist governments and we shall have Soviet rule in Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Poland and Finland will hardly be spared. What such a sequence of events should mean to Western Europe is easily conjectured. The forces of Spartacism are not wiped out in Germany and the stability of the actual German Government is far from being assured. The execution of the treaty of Versailles is however dependent upon that stability, and thus the Russian problem throws a dark shadow on the destinies of all Western Europe. At the present moment the black clouds surrounding Russia's future have condensed to very nigh impenetrable obscurity. But the healthy and vital forces of a great nation cannot be stamped out of existence. Gradually, through all the suffering and misery they will be revealed. Russia must live and will live as a free, self-governing and constitutional country. Our greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, once said of her: But in the test of long chastisement, After enduring the blows of fate, Russia was strengthened. Thus under a heavy hammer Glass is shattered but steel is forged. §§§ Page 261 → The heavy hammer has shattered many values, many lives. But we trust that the steel is being forged. We trust that the time will come when glancing back towards the gloomy days which we are now living through, a new generation, happier and stronger than ours, will read in them the record of a protracted and bloody episode in the history of the growth of a powerful and great Empire.

*Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was a British explorer of Antarctica, alongside his countryman Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. The younger Nabokov wrote a play, The Pole (1924), about Scott’s final expedition (1912). †In 1903 was organised the League of Deliverance (Sojuz Osvobozhdenija). The same year, at the second congress (held in London), occurred the formal split in the Social Democratic Party. In especial the group which controlled “Iskra” became severed into two distinct trends, the majority being led by Lenin and the minority by Martov. Simultaneously the Jewish Bund severed its connection with the party. (At first people spoke of the “hard” iskrovcy and the “soft” iskrovcy, the former designation attaching to the majoritarians).—Masaryk, [Spirit of Russia,] v. II, p. 296. At the second congress of the whole Social Democratic Party (1903), the original split was greatly widened, and the programme of Lenin became the creed of the extreme wing known under the name of the “majority men.”—Sir Bernard Pares’ article in Bainbridge, Modern History, Vol. xii, p. 322 [332]. ‡Lenin, N. The State and Revolution. October 1919. [V. D. Nabokov refers here to V. I. Ul´ianov-Lenin, The State and Revolution: Marxist Teaching on the State and the Task of the Proletariat in the Revolution (London: Allen and Unwin, 1919).] §Ivan Bolotnikov was the leader of a 1606–7 Russian popular uprising known as the Bolotnikov rebellion, during the period of instability dubbed the Time of Troubles or, as V. D. Nabokov calls it, the Period of Disturbance. **V. D. Nabokov quotes here from Hamlet (IV.4, 62–63). ††V. D. Nabokov employs the locution used by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in French Revolution, 218–19 (originally published in 1837). ‡‡V. D. Nabokov refers here to Zoroastrian teachings, according to which there is an eternal struggle between Ariman (or Ahriman), the angel of darkness and evil, and Ormusd (or Ormuzd), the angel of light and good. Zoroastrianism predicts Ormusd’s ultimate triumph. §§Étienne Antonelli was a French political economist. V. D. Nabokov quotes from Antonelli’s book, La Russie bolchéviste (1919), in which Antonelli astutely comments, “For my part, I do not believe that Bolshevism is a system that can survive. You cannot build society against culture and intelligence.” Yet in complete contradiction to this statement, Antonelli later writes, “I believe that Bolshevist Russia […] will prepare for humanity the spectacle of a singular democracy, such as the world will not have known until then, a democracy which will not be made up of gradual conquests plucked by shreds from a plutocratic bourgeoisie, but which will build itself up out of the very stuff of the people, a democracy which will not descend from the powerful ones to the people, as in all present forms of society, but which will rise voluntarily and surely from the unorganized and uncultivated folk to an organizing intelligence.” See Bolshevik Russia, 306, 307. ***Sir Bernard Pares was an eminent British Slavist who had taught at Cambridge, University of Liverpool, and after 1919 at King’s College, London, where V. D. Nabokov delivered this lecture, presumably at Pares’s invitation. Pares and V. D. Nabokov became personally acquainted in 1906, when Pares visited St. Petersburg, where he met with the most prominent members of the First State Duma. In 1936, Nabokov junior turned to Sir Bernard to request assistance in obtaining an academic position in either Great Britain or any English-speaking country; see Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 64, 431. †††William Christian Bullitt Jr. was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. V. D. Nabokov refers to Bullitt’s spring 1919 mission to Soviet Russia to negotiate diplomatic relations with the Bolshevik regime, which resulted in the so-called Bullitt Proposal: an armistice between the Allies and Soviet Russia, during which period negotiations were to be conducted for a peace treaty, followed by diplomatic relations. For a discussion of the Bullitt Proposal, see Bullitt, Bullitt Mission to Russia; Cassella-Blackburn, Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club. ‡‡‡Lord Arthur James Balfour, British prime minister (1902–5) and foreign secretary (1916–19). See Balfour, “Chaos of the World,” 12 (Living Age, 215). V. D. Nabokov met Balfour during his 1916 visit to wartime England and had enormous respect for the Briton; see V. D. Nabokov, Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 19–20. §§§V. D. Nabokov quotes a passage from Canto I of Pushkin’s narrative poem, Poltava (1829): «Но в искушеньях долгой кары, / Перетерпев судеб удары, / Окрепла Русь. Так тяжкий млат, / Дробя стекло, кует булат».Page 262 →

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Appendix 3 Vladimir Nabokov's Contribution to the Panel Discussion, “What Faith Means to a Resisting People,” Wellesley Magazine, April 26, 1942, 212. Reproduced with permission of the Wellesley Magazine. (Nabokov's punctuation and style, including italics, are preserved.) When a certain scientist in a certain country after a certain civic upheaval was asked officially how he regarded the new regime, his answer was, “with surprise.” To a normal human being it is a surprise to discover that one's mind is something that can and must be nationalized and rationed by the government, and this is about all that can be said about modern dictatorships. In themselves they are much too ugly and dull and unappetizing to provoke anything more than contempt. But another kind of surprise comes when we try to define what we mean exactly by a normal state of affairs. The best definition turns out to be “democracy” and we are as astonished as Molière's Monsieur Jourdain was when he found out that he was speaking in prose. The splendid paradox of democracy is, that while stress is laid on the rule of all and equality of common rights, it is the individual that derives from it his special and uncommon benefit. Ethically, the members of a democracy are equals; spiritually, each has the right to be as different from his neighbors as he pleases; and taken all in all, it is not perhaps an organization or a government or a community that we have really in mind when we say “democracy” but the subtle balance between the boundless privileges of every individual and the strictly equal rights of all men. Life is a state of harmony—and that is why I think that the spirit of democracy is the most natural human condition. Here lie the difficulties experienced Page 264 → by those who try to express democracy in banners and catchwords when opposing the banners and catchwords of hideous political creeds. Because democracy is not really a political phenomenon—no wonder its well-meaning defenders encounter awkward difficulties when trying to meet the enemy on its own level. A German racial creed may be utterly vile and despicable, but politically it works perfectly and the best one can do in opposing it politically would be to shriek rather helplessly that this or that democratic regime is politically perfect too; but in doing so we degrade our democratic condition by trying to use terms intelligible to barbarous mentalities. Democracy in its inner sense is not politics, or party-regulation, or things like that. A Russian democrat of the old days, and an American or an English one, despite the differences in forms of government in their respective countries, could meet with perfect ease on a common and natural basis—which basis is so familiar to democrats that it almost escapes definition. Democracy is humanity at its best, not because we happen to think that a republic is better than a king and a king is better than nothing and nothing is better than a dictator, but because it is the natural condition of every man ever since the human mind became conscious not only of the world but of itself. Morally, democracy is invincible. Physically, that side will win which has the better guns. Of faith and pride, both sides have plenty. That our faith and our pride are of a totally different order cannot concern an enemy who believes in shedding blood and is proud of its own. Hyenas believe in dead bodies,—it is useless to talk to them of life,—and a snowstorm of propaganda leaflets over Germany is not quite as efficient as a little real snow in Russia!

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Appendix 4 Vladimir Nabokov, “About Opera” (Berlin, 1928). Holograph of lecture signed. Manuscript box 1, Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York It would be rather amusing to find out whether or not opera is a natural art. By natural art I mean such art that either has its likeness or correspondence in nature, as for example a Doric column or Beethoven sonata, or that directly emulates nature and human life, as for example painting or theater. The question about the naturalness of opera, of course, gets more complicated in that opera is a mixture of several arts; it is necessary therefore to determine whether this mixture is something natural, or more precisely, which conditions are required for this mixture to be natural. Let's begin ab ovo. At present, I am not in fact preoccupied with the emergence of opera but rather with the way it could have emerged. Whether it could originate in life itself, from the desire to imitate life, to depict it with the internal precision with which, for example, a statue depicts life. In other words, whether opera exists, could exist outside the stage in the natural world, in life itself. I think so. Imagine a man who is working and singing. It is important here: why specifically does the song, the desire to sing, emerge? I suppose that a human being is inclined to singing the most when there is a full correspondence between the state of his soul and the external environment, external nature. A worker sings to his work just as a prima donna sings to her music. A plowman, returning home in the evening, is singing to serenity and quietude of the evening, to a vesper bell, to the soft trampling and mooing of the herd. A street urchin, who is walking and whistling (and whistling is nothing but a Page 266 → labial song, unlike guttural or thoracic ones), tucking his hands in his trouser pockets, finds himself soulfully in complete harmony due to this concord with the pleasurable rumble of the city; and his whistle, his song, emerge due to this concord. All these cases already contain the essence of opera. Transfer this plowman or this whistler to the stage, substitute music for that nature, for that atmosphere that unwittingly forced them to sing, and you will get an opera. But at the same time, one has to bear in mind that the situations when a human being expresses his feelings with a song—and those melodious feelings themselves—are limited. What, then, is happening? When a cobbler is singing at work, or rather to work, where the work is equal to the music, we are not surprised, but when a fat, aged tenor expresses his love not by colloquial speech but by musical wails it seems unnatural to us. I think that it is not opera that is to blame, but that mysterious spirit that governs mankind from time immemorial, the mysterious spirit, or in my opinion, simply a happenstance. Quite by accident we express our regular thoughts by words and not by a song. Algebra triumphs over music. If the semantic value of speech lay not in words, not in signs, but in certain risings and fallings of the voice, we would have spoken like birds, that is, by means of song. To learn singing, to unlearn speaking, now is of course too late; but, I repeat, mankind followed the path of speech completely fortuitously. Frisky imagination will find some pleasure in a picture of this kind: a country in which all books are written in music and salesmen in stores respond with an aria to the aria of a customer. And so it seems to me that opera, being most natural at its initial stage—we daily see a small opera in the street, in the grain field, in the tavern—is natural in its further development insofar as it gives us the picture of how humans would have expressed their feelings had they been singing always, and not only at work or in the bath tub. And if the correspondence, the harmony between the environment and the song, is always observed in everyday life, then this harmony must exist in opera too. And only when this harmony is observed, is the opera beautiful. Beautiful in this sense are Pelléas et Mélisande, Boris Godunov, and in part Carmen. Signed [V. Nabokov] 1928 Berlin

Об опере Довольно занятно было бы выяснить, является ли опера естественным искусством? Под естественным

искусством я подразумеваю такое Page 267 → искусство, которое либо имеет свое подобие или соответствие в природе, как например дорическая колонна и бетховенская соната, либо непосредственно подражает природе и человеческой жизни, как например живопись или театр. Вопрос об естественности оперы, конечно, усложняется тем, что опера есть смесь нескольких искусств; вот и нужно установить, являет ли эта смесь нечто естественное, или точнее, какие условия требуются для того, чтобы это сочетание было естественным? Начнем ab ovo. Меня не занимает сейчас фактически возникновение оперы,—а то, как она могла бы возникнуть. Могла ли она возникнуть из самой жизни, из желанья подражать жизни, изображать ее с той внутренней точностью, с которой, например, статуя изображает жизнь. Другими словами существует ли, может ли существовать опера вне подмостков, в самой природе, в самой жизни. Я думаю, что да. Представим себе человека, который работает и поет. Тут важно: отчего именно возникает песня, желанье петь. Полагаю, что человек более всего склонен к песне когда есть наиболее полное соответствие между его душевным состоянием и внешней обстановкой, внешней природой. Рабочий поет под свою работу точно так же как примадонна поет под музыку. Пахарь возвращающийся вечером домой поет под светлость и покой вечера, под вечерний звон, под мягкий топот и мычанье стада. Уличный мальчишка, который засунув руки в карманы штанов, идет и свищет (а свист—это есть губная песня, в отличие от горловой или грудной) находится душевно в полном соответствии благодаря этому согласию с приятным грохотом города—и благодаря этому согласию и возникает его свист, его песнь. Во всех этих случаях есть уже сущность оперы. Перенесите этого пахаря или этого свистуна на сцену, замените музыкой ту природу, ту обстановку, которая невольно заставляла их петь и вы получите оперу. Но при этом нужно иметь в виду, что случай, когда человек выражает свои чувства песнею—и сами эти певучие чувства—ограничены. Что же происходит? Когда сапожник поет за работой—вернее под работу—где работа равняется музыке—мы не удивляемся, но когда жирный пожилой тенор выражает свою любовь не разговорной речью,—а музыкальными воплями—нам это кажется неестественным. Думаю, что в этом виновата не опера, а тот таинственный дух, который спокон веков управляет человечеством, таинственный дух или, по моему мнению, просто случай. Совершенно случайно мы выражаем свои обычные мысли словами, a не песней. Алгебра торжествует над музыкой. Если Page 268 → бы смысловое значенье речи лежало бы не в словах, не в знаках, а в тех или иных повышениях и понижениях голоса, то мы бы разговаривали бы как птицы, то есть посредством песни. Учиться петь, разучиться говорить теперь, конечно, поздно, но, повторяю, совершенно случайно человечество пошло по пути разговора. Резвое воображение найдет некоторое удовольствие в картине такого рода—страна, где все книги написаны нотами и прикащики в магазинах отвечают арией на арию покупателя. Вот мне и кажется, что опера, будучи совсем естественною в своих зачатках,—мы каждый день видим на улице, на ниве, в кабаке маленькую оперу—является естественной и в своем дальнейшем развитии постольку поскольку она дает нам картину того, как люди выражали бы свои чувства если бы они всегда—а не только на работе или в ванне—распевали бы. И если соответствие, гармония между обстановкой и песней всегда соблюдена в обиходной жизни, то и гармония эта должна существовать и в опере—и только когда эта гармония соблюдена, опера прекрасна. Прекрасны в этом смысле Пельас и Мелизанд, Борис Годунов, и отчасти Кармен.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. Ed. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle. Boston: Beacon, 2000. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Neskol´ko slov ob ubozhestve sovetskoi belletristiki i popytka ustanovit´ prichiny onogo.” Diaspora: Novye materialy 2 (2001): 7–23. Nabokov, Vladimir. “O Bloke.” 1931. Manuscript box 1. Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Ob opere.” 1928. Manuscript box 1. Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Olympicum.” 1921. Album 22, box 3, 65–78. Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. Nabokov, Vladimir. “On Generalities.” Zvezda 4 (1999): 12–14. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita.” Trans. Earl D. Sampson. In Nabokov's Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life's Work, ed. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol, 188–94. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible.” Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988, 38–42. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Reputations Revisited.” Times Literary Supplement, January 21, 1977, 66. Nabokov, Vladimir. Review of G. P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work. Chicago: Chicago Section of the Alexander Berkman Fund, 1940. Vladimir Nabokov Archives, container 10, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Nabokov, Vladimir. Tragediia gospodina Morna. P´esy. Lektsii o drame. St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2008. Nabokov, Vladimir. Unititled poem. Stikhi miscellani, signed Vas Shishkov Page 276 → and tentatively dated [1941]. Manuscript box 2. Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. Nabokov, Vladimir. “V. D.” Notes on family background. Holograph unsigned and undated. Part of 9 index cards. Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. Nabokov, Vladimir. “What Faith Means to a Resisting People: A Panel Arranged by the Emergency Service Committee.” Wellesley Magazine, April 26, 1942, 212. Nabokov, Vladimir, trans. “Three Poems by Fet.” Russian Review 3 (1943): 31–33. Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Nemser, Alexander. “Vlad the Impaler.” Review of Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry, trans. Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin. New Republic, March 4, 2009, 41–44. Nicol, Charles. “Music in the Theater of the Mind: Opera and Vladimir Nabokov.” In Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries, ed. Lisa Zunshine, 21–41. New York: Garland, 1999. Nivat, Georges. “Speak, Memory.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 672–85. New York: Garland, 1995. Peterson, Dale E. “Nabokov and Poe.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E.

Alexandrov, 463–72. New York: Garland, 1995. Pifer, Ellen. “Nabokov's Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin.” In Ellen Pifer, Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture, 65–88. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pitzer, Andrea. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Pegasus, 2013. Proffer, Ellendea, comp. and ed. Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1991. Remington, Charles Lee. “Lepidoptera Studies.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 274–83. New York: Garland, 1995. Rippl, Daniela, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: Seine Leben in Bildern und Texten. Berlin: Fest, 1998. Ronen, Omry. “Véra.” Zvezda 1 (2002): 233–38. Rusanov, Alexei. “Motiv dueli v tvorchestve V. V. Nabokova.” 2002. http://www.nabokovandko.ru/duel.html. Rydel, Christine A. “Nabokov and Tiutchev.” In Nabokov at Cornell, ed. Gavriel Shapiro, 123–35. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Sampson, Earl D. “Game, Set, Mismatch: On the Role of Tennis and Other Sports in Nabokov's Fiction.” In And Meaning for a Life Entire: Festschrift for Charles A. Moser on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Peter Rollberg, 391–401. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1997. Schuman, Samuel. “Nabokov and Shakespeare: The Russian Works.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 512–17. New York: Garland, 1995. Senderovich, Savely. “Dickens in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading: A Figure of Concealment.” Nabokov Studies 3 (1996): 13–32. Page 277 → Senderovich, Savely, and Elena Shvarts. “Starichok iz evreev (kommentarii k Priglasheniiu na kazn´ Vladimira Nabokova).” Russian Literature 43 (1998): 297–327. Shadursky, V. V. “A. Blok v khudozhestvennom mire V. Nabokova.” In Aleksandr Blok i mirovaia kul´tura: materialy nauchnoi konferentsii 14–17 marta 2000 goda, ed. V. V. Musatov and T. V. Igosheva, 256–87. Velikii Novgorod: Novgorodskii gosudarstvennyi universitet imeni Iaroslava Mudrogo, 2000. Shapiro, Gavriel. Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov's “Invitation to a Beheading.” New York: Lang, 1998. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Henry Cumming—Vladimir Nabokov's First Drawing Master.” Nabokov Studies. 12 (2009–11): 49–62 (published in 2013). Shapiro, Gavriel. “‘Homeland Stuck to the Skin of My Soles’: Nabokov and Danton.” Nabokovian 61 (2008): 10–14. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Lolita Class List.” Cahiers du Monde Russe 37 (1996): 317–35. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Methods of Control and Power in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.” In The Imprints of Terror: The Rhetoric of Violence and the Violence of Rhetoric in Modern Russian Culture. In Memoriam Marina Kanevskaya, ed. Anna Brodsky, Mark Lipovetsky, and Sven Spieker, 167–80. Munich: Institut für Slavische Philologie, 2006.

Shapiro, Gavriel. “Nabokov and Pellico: Invitation to a Beheading and My Prisons.” Comparative Literature 62 (2010): 55–67. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Nabokov and the ‘Other Shores.’” In The Russian Emigration: Literature, History, Chronicle of Films, ed. V. Khazan, I. Belobrovtseva, and S. Dotsenko, 109–16. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Tallinn: Tallinn Pedagogical University, 2004. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Nabokov-Chukovsky Controversy: The Oscar Wilde Episode.” Nabokovian 66 (2011): 30–34. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Nabokov's Allusions: Dividedness and Polysemy.” Russian Literature 43 (1998): 329–38. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Otgoloski Tiuremnykh dosugov V. D. Nabokova v Priglashenii na kazn´.” Cahiers de l'Émigration Russe 5 (1999): 67–75. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Painterly Connotations in The Original of Laura.” Nabokovian 64 (2010): 23–30. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Pictorial Origins of Three Biblical Poems by Vladimir Nabokov.” Slavic Almanac 15 (2009): 43–58. Shapiro, Gavriel. “‘Podlets’ Nabokova i ‘Trus’ Mopassana.” Revue des Études Slaves 72 (2000): 53–60. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Reministsentsii iz Mertvykh dush v Priglashenii na kazn´ Nabokova.” In Gogolevskii sbornik, ed. S. A. Goncharov, 175–81. St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1994. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Setting His Myriad Faces in His Text: Nabokov's Authorial Presence Revisited.” In Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Julian W. Connolly, 15–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Smysloobrazovatel´naia rol´ miniatiury v romane Nabokova Page 278 → Dar.” In La forme brève dans la littérature russe: Mélanges offerts à André Monnier, ed. Nora Buhks, 201–9. Paris: Institut d'Études Slaves, 2010. Shapiro, Gavriel. The Sublime Artist's Studio: Nabokov and Painting. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Shapiro, Gavriel. “Tennis References in The Original of Laura.” Nabokovian 67 (2011): 7–13. Shapiro, Gavriel, ed. Nabokov at Cornell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Shrayer, Maxim D. “Death, Immortality, and Nabokov's Jewish Theme.” Nabokovian 38 (1997): 17–25. Shrayer, Maxim D. “Jewish Questions in Nabokov's Art and Life.” In Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Julian W. Connolly, 73–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Shtein, Emmanuil. “Vladimir Nabokov: Shakhmatno-poeticheskie kollizii tvorchestva.” Novyi Zhurnal 166 (1987): 167–75. Sisson, Jonathan B. “Nabokov and Some Turn-of-the-Century English Writers.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 528–36. New York: Garland, 1995. Sklyarenko, Alexey. “Colonel Gusev and King Alfin.” The Vladimir Nabokov Forum, March 11, 2011. Sklyarenko, Alexey. “Fathers and Children in Ada.” Nabokovian 54 (2005): 38–51. Sklyarenko, Alexey [A. Sklepikov]. “Loustalot: The Nabokov Family Trainer.” http://www.libraries.psu.edu /nabokov/lousta.htm.

Sklyarenko, Alexey. “Oscar Nattochdag.” The Vladimir Nabokov Forum, September 24, 2010. Sommers, Elena. “The ‘Right’ versus the ‘Wrong’ Child: Shades of Pain in Bend Sinister and Pnin.” Nabokov Studies 6 (2000–2001): 35–50. Stark, V. P. “Vladimir Nabokov i Andrei Balashov: ‘Dva puti.’” In Zarubezhnaia Rossiia 1917–1939. Kniga 2, ed. V. Iu. Cherniaev et al., 322–29. St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Liki Rossii, 2003. Stark, V. P. “V. V. Nabokov—rodoslovnye otrazheniia.” Nabokovskiii vestnik 2 (1998): 5–19. Stark, V. P., ed. A. S. Pushkin i V. V. Nabokov. Sbornik dokladov mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii, 15–18 aprelia 1999 g. St. Petersburg: Dorn, 1999. Steiner, George. “Extraterritorial.” TriQuarterly 17 (1970): 119–27. Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Toker, Leona. “Between Allusion and Coincidence: Nabokov, Dickens, and Others.” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 12 (1984): 175–98. Toker, Leona. “Nabokov's Worldview.” In The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, ed. Julian W. Connolly, 232–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Toker, Leona. “‘Who Was Becoming Seasick? Cincinnatus’: Some Aspects of Nabokov's Treatment of the Communist Regime.” Cycnos 10 (1993): 81–90. Uchitel´, Konstantin. “Muzykal´nyi uzor sud´by Vladimira Nabokova.” Muzykal´-naia akademiia 4 (1992): 95–97. Verizhnikova, T. F. “Vladimir Nabokov i iskusstvo knigi Anglii rubezha vekov: Page 279 → ‘Khram Shekspira’ v biblioteke V. D. Nabokova.” Nabokovskii vestnik 1 (1998): 201–8. Zanganeh, Lila Azam. The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness. New York: Norton, 2011. Zimmer, Dieter E. A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths. 1993. Rpt. Hamburg: n.p., 2001. Zimmer, Dieter E. Nabokovs Berlin. Berlin: Nicolai, 2001. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries. New York: Garland, 1999. Zverev, Alexei. Nabokov. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2001.

Works by and about Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov Anonymous. “Khronika.” Rech´, August 13 (26), 1908, 3. Anonymous. “Pogrebenie V. D. Nabokova.” Rul´, April 4, 1922, 2. Barabtarlo, Gennady. “V. D. Nabokov and Capital Punishment.” Nabokovian 25 (1990): 50–62. Buzhansky, Osip. “V. D. Nabokov.” Rul´, March 31, 1922, 1. Chernobel´, G. T. “Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov: Zhizn´ i tvorchestvo (1870–1922).” In Istoriia russkoi pravovoi mysli, ed. V. P. Kashepov, A. V. Mitskevich, and S. A. Piatkina, 425–43. Moscow: Ostozh´e, 1998. Ganfman, M. I. “V. D. Nabokov.” Rul´, March 30, 1922, 1–2.

Gruzenberg, O. O. “Moia pamiatka o V. D. Nabokove.” In O. O. Gruzenberg, Ocherki i rechi, 161–63. New York: Grenich, 1944. Kaminka, A. I. “Pamiati V. D. Nabokova.” Trudy russkikh uchenykh za granitsei. Sbornik akademicheskoi gruppy v Berline 2 (1923): 1–10. Kanishcheva, N. I. “Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich.” In Gosudarstvennaia duma Rossiiskoi imperii, 1906–1917: Entsiklopediia, ed. B. Iu. Ivanov, A. A. Komzolova, and I. S. Riakhovskaia, 390–91. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008. Kizevetter, A. A. “V. D. Nabokov.” Rul´, March 29, 1927, 1–2. Kovalenko, N. A. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov: chelovek i politik. Moscow: MAKS Press, 2002. Kulisher, Evgeny. “Pamiati V. D. Nabokova. (Rech´ na sobranii po povodu 10-letiia so dnia ego konchiny).” Poslednie novosti, April 19, 1932, 4. Kuprin, A. I. “V. D. Nabokov.” In A. I. Kuprin, Golos ottuda, 1919–1934, 355–56. Moscow: Soglasie, 1999. Landau, Grigory. “Pokhoronnoe.” Rul´, April 6, 1922, 2–3. Makletsov, A. V. “V. D. Nabokov, kak uchenyi kriminalist. K 10-letiiu so dnia konchiny.” Rossiia i slavianstvo, April 23, 1932, 2–3. Medlin, Virgil D., and Steven L. Parsons, eds. V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917. Intro. Robert P. Browder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Miliukov, P. N. “Pamiati starogo druga.” Poslednie novosti, April 1, 1922, 2. Miliukov, P. N. “V. D. Nabokov (k godovshchine smerti).” Poslednie novosti, March 28, 1923, 2–3. Page 280 → Mogiliansky, N. M. “V. D. Nabokov (iz vospominanii).” Poslednie novosti, April 1, 1922, 2. Nabokov, V. D. “Artur Nikish.” Rul´, January 25, 1922, 3. Nabokov, V. D. “British Liberalism and Russia.” New Russia 1 (1920): 7–10. Nabokov, V. D. “‘Ceterum censeo…’ (K voprosu o smertnoi kazni).” Pravo, 1913, 1674–82, 1723–31, 1849–54. Nabokov, V. D. “Charl´z Dikkens.” In Istoriia zapadnoi literatury, ed. F. D. Batiushkov, 4:52–70. 4 vols. Moscow: Mir, 1912–17. Nabokov, V. D. “Charl´z Dikkens (K 100-letiiu so dnia ego rozhdeniia).” Rech´, January 25 (February 7), 1912, 3. Nabokov, V. D. “Charl´z Dikkens, kak kriminalist.” Pravo, 1912, 188–95. Nabokov, V. D. “Deiatel´nost´ partii narodnoi svobody v gosudarstvennoi dume, 27 aprelia–8 iiulia 1906 g. (Doklad IV obshcheimperskomu s´´ezdu partii).” Vestnik partii narodnoi svobody, 1906, 1530–41, 1595–603. Nabokov, V. D. “Delo Beilisa.” Pravo, 1913, 2519–24, 2569–80. Nabokov, V. D. “A Distressing Problem.” Struggling Russia, February 7, 1920, 737–38. Nabokov, V. D. “Drugu-protivniku.” Rul´, March 4, 1922, 2. Nabokov, V. D. Duel´ i ugolovnyi zakon. St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol´za, 1910.

Nabokov, V. D. “Dva obvinitel´nykh akta (Delo Beilisa).” Pravo, 1913, 2693–702. Nabokov, V. D. “Enriko Karuzo.” Rul´, August 4, 1921, 3. Nabokov, V. D. “Fet (K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia).” Rul´, December 5, 1920, 6. Nabokov, V. D. “Gruzenberg, Oskar Osipovich.” In Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar´, 15:120. 29 vols. St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Brokgauz and Efron, 1911–16. Nabokov, V. D. Iz voiuiushchei Anglii: putevye ocherki. Petrograd: Union, 1916. Nabokov, V. D. “Iz vospominanii o teatre: Napravnik.” Teatr i Zhizn´ (Theater und Leben) 9 (1922): 10–11. Nabokov, V. D. “Iz vospominanii o teatre (za 35 let).” Teatr i Zhizn´ (Theater und Leben) 1–2 (1921): 4–5. Nabokov, V. D. “K istorii obnovlennogo zakonodatel´stva o pechati. (‘Komissiia D. F. Kobeko’).” In Svoboda pechati pri obnovlennom stroe, 1–42. St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol´za, 1912. Nabokov, V. D. “K konchine Al. Bloka.” Rul´, August 14, 1921, 4. Nabokov, V. D. “K priezdu P. N. Miliukova.” Rul´, March 28, 1922, 2. Nabokov, V. D. “K voprosu ob ‘opasnom sostoianii.’” Zhurnal ugolovnogo prava i protsessa 3 (1912): 25–34. Nabokov, V. D. “Kishinevskaia krovavaia bania.” Pravo, 1903, 1281–85. Nabokov, V. D. “Kopengagenskii s´´ezd mezhdunarodnogo soiuza kriminalistov.” Pravo, 1913, 2150–58, 2211–22. Nabokov, V. D. “Krovavyi god.” Poliarnaia zvezda, January 12, 1906, 315–23. Nabokov, V. D. “List i Binding.” Pravo, 1907, 1933–38, 1983–91. Nabokov, V. D. “Mery sotsial´noi zashchity protiv retsidivistov.” Zhurnal ugolovnogo prava i protsessa 1 (1913): 1–29. Nabokov, V. D. “Mir iskusstva.” Rul´, July 10, 1921, 7. Page 281 → Nabokov, V. D. “Moskovskie khudozhniki.” Teatr i Zhizn´ (Theater und Leben) 5–6 (1921): 4–6. Nabokov, V. D. “My i Oni. (Istoriia russkoi emigratsii).” Rul´, December 2, 1920, 3. Nabokov, V. D. “My, Tolstoy, bol´sheviki.” Rev. of Tolstoy i bol´shevizm, by V. A. Maklakov. Rul´, July 10, 1921, 7. Nabokov, V. D. “Nishchenstvo i brodiazhestvo, kak nakazuemye prostupki.” Zhurnal Iuridicheskogo Obshchestva pri Imperatorskom S. Peterburgskom Universitete 3 (1895): 39–73. Nabokov, V. D. “O Flobere. (Po povodu sotoi godovshchiny ego rozhdeniia).” Rul´, December 18, 1921, 2. Nabokov, V. D. “Ob ‘opasnom sostoianii’ prestupnika kak kriterii mer sotsial´noi zashchity.” Pravo, 1910, 1114–23, 1173–85. Nabokov, V. D. “Pervaia duma: 27 aprelia (10 maia) 1906 g.–27 aprelia (10 maia) 1921 g.” Rul´, May 10, 1921, 1–2.

Nabokov, V. D. “Peterburgskaia gimnaziia sorok let tomu nazad. (Stranichka vospominanii).” Molodaia Rossiia 1 (1922): 20–24. Rpt. Za sto let. Vospominaniia, stat´i i materialy, 126–30. Petrograd: Izdanie 13-i Sovetskoi Trudovoi Shkoly, 1923. Nabokov, V. D. “Piatidesiatiletie Literaturnogo Fonda.” In Iubileinyi sbornik Literaturnogo Fonda, 1859–1909, ed. S. A. Vengerov, 474–87. St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol´za, ca. 1910. Nabokov, V. D. “Pis´ma k synu.” Nabokovskii vestnik 3 (1999): 165–73. Nabokov, V. D. “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene. 1908 g.” Vozdushnye puti 4 (1965): 265–75. Nabokov, V. D. “Plotskie prestupleniia po proektu ugolovnogo ulozheniia.” Vestnik prava 32 (1902): 129–89. Nabokov, V. D. “Proekt ugolovnogo ulozheniia i smertnaia kazn´.” Pravo, 1900, 257–63. Nabokov, V. D. The Provisional Government. Ed. Andrew Field. Intro. Richard Pipes. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1970. Nabokov, V. D. “Razvenchanie evropeiskoi kul´tury.” Rev. of Evropa i chelovechestvo, by N. S. Trubestkoy. Rul´, April 24, 1921, 6. Nabokov, V. D. Rechi: Iz dumskikh otchetov. St. Petersburg: Tipo-litografiia Busselia, 1907. Nabokov, V. D. “Revoliutsiia i kul´turnost´.” Rech´, March 15 (28), 1917, 2. Nabokov, V. D. Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu. St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol´za, 1904. Nabokov, V. D. Scrapbook, containing notes, photographs, diary extracts, clippings, and miscellaneous matter. Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. Nabokov, V. D. “Soviet Rule and Russia's Future.” A Lecture Delivered at King's College, London, on January 16, 1920. Supplement to The New Commonwealth, January 23, 1920, 1–8. Nabokov, V. D. “Teatr i muzyka: Beethoven-Saal. 3-i kontsert A. K. Borovskogo.” Rul´, March 10, 1922, 4. Page 282 → Nabokov, V. D. “Teatral´nyi Peterburg: Vos´midesiatye gody.” Teatr i Zhizn´ (Theater und Leben) 7 (1922): 7–8. Nabokov, V. D. Tiuremnye dosugi. St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol´za, 1908. Nabokov, V. D. “Ugolovnoe pravosudie.” Ezhegodnik gazety “Rech´” na 1914 god, 1914, 70–88. Nabokov, V. D. Untitled article. In O smertnoi kazni: Mneniia russkikh kriminalistov. Sbornik, 68–72. Moscow: Tipo-litografiia “Russkogo Tovarishchestva” pechatnogo i izdatel´skogo dela, 1909. Nabokov, V. D. “Vnutrenniaia voina.” Poliarnaia zvezda, February 3, 1906, 515–23. Nabokov, V. D. Vremennoe pravitel´stvo i bolshevistskii perevorot. 1921. Rpt. London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1988. Nabokov, V. D. “Zakonoproekt ob otmene smertnoi kazni.” In Pervaia gosudarstvennaia duma. Vypusk vtoroi. Zakonodatel´naia rabota, ed. A. A. Mukhanov and V. D. Nabokov, 75–88. St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol´za, 1907. Nol´de, B. E., Baron. “V. D. Nabokov v 1917 g.” Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii 7 (1922): 5–13.

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Index Abrams, Meyer H., 90 aesthetics, 2, 3, 5, 15, 102, 107, 108, 166, 209, 225 Afonin, Matvei, 181 Aikhenval´d, Yuri, 165 “The Rejection of Theater,” 165 Akhmatova, Anna, 163n80 “If only you knew from what rubbish…” (from Secrets of the Craft), 163n80 Alekhine, Alexander, 186 Alexander, Grand Duke, 54n20 Alexander I, 29 Alexander II, 8, 17, 211 Alexander III, 8 Alexandrov, Vladimir E., 198 Alexeev, General Mikhail, 62 Alexis, Crown Prince, 54 Amis, Martin, 44 Amundsen, Roald, 239n* anagram, 87, 134n124, 146, 209 Anisfeld, Boris, 157 Antonelli, Étienne, 257 Appel, Alfred, Jr., 89, 90, 108, 155, 202 Apukhtin, Alexei, 132 Arnoldson, Sigrid, 169 attention to detail, 99, 100, 111, 124, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150 authorial presence, 17 Bach dynasty, the, 173–74 Bachmann, Wilhelm, 174

Bakst, Léon, 156, 157 Portrait of E. I. Nabokov, 156 Turks, 157 Balakirev, Mily, 134, 157, 174 Islamey (piano composition), 157, 174 Balashov, Andrei, 214n103 Balfour, Arthur James, Lord, 259n‡‡‡ Balzac, Honoré de, 99, 112, 139 Bardi, Giovanni de', 221n123 Barth, John, 122 “Lost in the Funhouse,” 122 Batiushkov, Fedor, 103 Beardsley, Aubrey, 153, 154, 155 “Ali Baba,” 155 “The Eyes of Herod,” 155 Bebel, August, 243 Beecham, Sir Thomas, 170 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 129, 171, 174, 176, 265 Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major, opus 101, 130n110, 176 “Thirty-Two Variations,” 174 Beilis, Mendel, 72, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87 Beketov, Konstantin, 215 Bely, Andrei, 137, 165 “Theater and Contemporary Drama,” 165 Bennett, Arnold, 110 Benois, Alexander, 48, 142, 143n8, 144, 155, 156, 157, 158, 167, 168, 190 Breton Landscape, 157 Page 294 → History of the Russian School of Painting in the Nineteenth Century, 155

Versailles, 157 Berberova, Nina, 191 Beretzky, Nurit, 94 Berlioz, Hector, 175, 176 The Damnation of Faust, 176 Symphonie fantastique, 175 Bertenson, Sergei, 161, 162 Binding, Karl, 9, 10 Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living, 10 Bizet, Georges, 176 Carmen, 176, 266 Blok, Alexander, 3, 88, 98, 102, 116, 129n109, 132, 135–38 “Italian Verses,” 136 “Russia,” 136 The Twelve, 137, 138 Boborykin, Petr, 104 Bolotnikov, Ivan, 246 Boltraffio, Giovanni Antonio, 142, 144 The Virgin and Child, 144 Borenstein, Eliot, 3n2 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3 Borisov-Musatov, Viktor, 153n45 Lady in Blue, 153n45 Borman, Paul de, 200 Borovsky, Alexander, 167–68, 174 Botticelli, Sandro, 144, 145 Primavera, 145 The Virgin and Child Enthroned between Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, 145 The Virgin and Child with Eight Angels, 145

Bowman, Becky, 146n17 Boyd, Brian, 4, 61n40, 87n110, 89, 164, 183, 216 Braikevich, Mikhail, 153, 158 Breitensträter, Hans, 191–92 Briusov, Valery, 129n109 Browning, Robert, 3, 98 Buchanan, Sir George William, 63 Bugaeva, Liubov´, 174n119 Buhks, Nora, 134 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 227 Bulla, Carl, 195 Bullitt, William Christian, Jr., 258 Bunin, Ivan, 137, 245 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley, 154 Bush, Ronald, 200 Butler, Richard Austen, 87n110 Buzhansky, Osip, 78 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 192 Cambridge University, 61, 67, 87, 127, 128, 151, 153, 185, 191, 201, 202, 208, 215, 227, 258n*** caricature, 43, 83, 155 Carlyle, Thomas, 63, 64, 257 The French Revolution: A History, 64, 257n†† On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 63 Carroll, Lewis, 211 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 211 Caruso, Enrico, 169 Casanova, Giacomo Girolamo, 116 Catherine II (the Great), 28, 184 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 112

René, 112 Cheever, John, 122 “The Country Husband,” 122 Chekhov, Anton, 3, 98, 113n50, 118–19, 129n109, 161, 165, 196, 245 “The Boys,” 118–19 The Cherry Orchard, 165n84 “Fragments of Moscow Life,” 119 “The Man in a Case,” 196 The Seagull, 165 Single Combat, 113n50 Three Sisters, 165n84 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 17, 75, 86n106, 133, 148–49 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 107 Chigorin, Mikhail, 184 Chukovsky, Kornei, 54, 63, 96–97, 103–4, 107, 147–48n23 Page 295 → cinema, 42, 122, 164, 166, 173 Colet, Louise, 112 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 107, 109 The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport, 109n34 The Lost World, 109 The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 109n34 The Mystery of Cloomber, 109n34 The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 109n34 A Study in Scarlet, 109n34 concealment, 126 Conder, Charles Edward, 154n49 Conrad, Joseph, 107, 110 Constable, John, 151

Cooper, James Fenimore, 119 Cornell University, 2, 75, 90, 112, 121, 131, 186, 202, 203, 204, 224 Correggio, 142, 143 Ecce Homo, 143 The Madonna of the Basket, 143 Portrait of a Lady, 143 St. Mary Magdalene, 143 Venus with Mercury and Cupid, 143 Coubertin, Baron Pierre de, 221n123 courage, 9, 30, 32, 44, 62, 78–79, 89, 168, 208, 216, 220, 223, 225–27, 229 Couturier, Maurice, 178n134 Cowan, J Milton, 203–4 Craig, Edward Gordon, 164 Cremer, Valentina, 86n108 Crivelli, Carlo, 142, 143–44, 146 The Annunciation with Saint Emidius, 143 The Demidoff Altarpiece, 143 The Madonna of the Swallow, 143 The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian, 143 The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, 143 Cromwell, Oliver, 63 Cumming, Henry James, 151 Dal´, Vladimir, 134 d'Annunzio, Gabriele, 115–16, 133 The Child of Pleasure, 115 The Flame of Life, 115, 116 The Triumph of Death, 115 Debussy, Claude, 176 Pelléas et Mélisande, 176, 266

Décugis, Maxime Omer, 200 Demidoff, Anatole, Prince, 143 Denikin, General Anton, 62 destiny, 17, 30, 35, 64, 123, 215, 228, 229, 251, 260 de Vries, Gerard, 146 Diaghilev, Sergei, 28n66, 154n49, 170 D´iakov, Mikhail, 195 Dickens, Charles, 64, 97, 102, 103–6, 139, 224 American Notes, 105–6 Bleak House, 104, 106n26 Our Mutual Friend, 104 A Tale of Two Cities, 106n26 Diment, Galya, 4 Diuperron, Georgy, 215 Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav, 153, 157–58, 161 Bank Bridge, 158 Dokuchaev, Alexander, 195 Dolinin, Alexander, 134n124 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 3, 24, 40, 99–101, 139, 164, 245 The Brothers Karamazov, 40, 99, 100, 101 Crime and Punishment, 40, 99, 100 The Possessed, 101 Dragunoiu, Dana, 5, 86n108 Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism, 5 Drozdov, Alexander, 37 Dumas, Alexandre fils, 3 Dumas, Alexandre père, 3 Dzerzhinsky, Felix, 87 Early Netherlandish art, 150

Eichendorff, Joseph von, 178 “In a Foreign Land,” 178 Engels, Friedrich, 243 ethics, 15, 28, 29, 58, 70, 83, 87, 263 Everdingen, Allaert van, 156 Landscape amidst the Rocks, 156 Page 296 → Eversmann, Eduard von, 181 Evreinov, Nikolai, 164, 165 Theater as Such, 165 exile, 17, 18, 56, 59, 60, 67, 73, 75, 83, 134, 157, 167, 224, 228 Eyck, Jan van, 150 Ezhov, Nikolai, 87 Farman, Henri, 195 fate, 3, 39, 77, 91, 93, 113, 114, 156, 192n39, 242, 245, 246, 260 Fest, Barbara, 14n27 Fet, Afanasy, 97, 102, 131–35, 139, 228 “The Butterfly,” 133n119 Eventide Lights, 132, 135 “The night was shining,” 132, 133 “The Nightingale and the Rose,” 134 “In quiet and murk of mysterious night,” 132 “Whispers, timid respiration, trills of nightingale,” 134 Field, Andrew, 3, 37, 85, 93 Filon, Augustin, 159 Le théatre anglais: hier, aujourd'hui, demain, 159n69 Flameng, François, 200n59 Max Décugis at the Net, 200n59 Flaubert, Gustave, 98, 102, 111–13, 139

Madame Bovary, 111–13, 116, 133 Fokine, Mikhail, 157 Islamey (ballet), 157 Fondaminsky, Il´ya, 91 Foster, John Burt, Jr., 4 Fra Angelico, 146 Francia, Francesco, 142 Pietà, 142 The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Other Saints, 142 The Virgin and Child with Two Saints, 142 Frye, Mitch, 106n26 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 171 Gainsborough, Thomas, 152–53 The Blue Boy, 153 Dr. Ralph Schomberg, 152 Musidora, 152 The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, 152 The Parish Clerk, 152 Portrait of a Lady in Blue, 152 Mrs. Sarah Siddons, 153 Galois, Évariste, 32 Gannibal, Abram, 134n124 George, Grand Duke, 54n20 George V, 54, 107 German expressionists, 14–15 Gessen, Georgy, 191, 194 Gessen, Iosif, 56, 79, 83, 85, 162 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 146 Glazunov, Alexander, 170

Glinka, Mikhail, 168 Ruslan and Liudmila, 168, 175 Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von, 175 Orpheus and Eurydice, 175 Gmelin, Johann Georg, 181 Gobert, André Henri, 200, 202 Godunov, Boris, 184 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 93 Gogol, Nikolai, 40, 60, 96, 111, 112, 127–28, 164, 165, 224 Dead Souls, 40, 127 The Government Inspector, 164, 165 “A May Night, or the Drowned Maiden,” 127 “An Overcoat,” 127 “The Portrait,” 111 “Viy,” 127 Gold, Herbert, 122 “Death in Miami Beach,” 122 González, Ricardo Alonso, 204 Gorky, Maxim, 101–2, 139, 245, 246, 247 “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl,” 101 Gough-Calthorpe, Vice-Admiral Sir Somerset Arthur, 52, 52–53n15 Gounod, Charles, 176 Roméo et Juliette, 176 Greene, Graham, 76 Grinberg, Roman, 186, 204, 218 Page 297 → Grosz, George, 14 Gruzdev, Il´ya, 88n112 Gruzenberg, Oscar, 80, 81, 82, 83

Guillén, Jorge, 203 Gul´, Roman, 88n112 Halsman, Philippe, 186–87n19 Hamilton, Alexander, 32 happiness, 135, 228 Harper, Frank, 32 Harvard University, 117, 224 Hemingway, Ernest, 122 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 122 “The Killers,” 122 The Old Man and the Sea, 122 Heine, Heinrich, 177 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 93 Herzen, Alexander, 85 Herzl, Theodor, 94 The Old New Land, 94 Hindemith, Paul, 176 News of the Day, 176 There and Back, 176 Hirschfeld, Ekaterina, 200 Hobbema, Meindert, 147, 149 Cottages in a Wood, 149 A Road Winding Past Cottages, 149 Hoche, Alfred, 10 Hooch, Pieter de, 147, 149–50 Concert, 147, 150 Musical Party in a Courtyard, 149 Hunt, William Holman, 154 Ian-Ruban, Anna, 177

Iaremich, Stepan, 156–57 Iaroshenko, Nikolai, 24n54 Prisoner, 24n54 Iashin [Yashin], Lev, 218 imagination, 13, 14, 74, 124, 128, 176, 206, 266 irony, 28, 43, 63, 67, 88, 133, 209 Ivan IV (the Terrible), 184 Izvol´sky, Alexander, 47 Jackson, John, 192 Jaenisch, Carl, 184 Analyse Nouvelle des ouvertures du jeu des Echecs, 184 James, Henry, 3 Jaryc, Avgusta L., 186 Jellicoe, Admiral Sir John Rushworth, 51–52 Joyce, James, 117 Dubliners, 117 “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man,” 117 Ulysses, 117 Kachalov, Vasily, 161 Kafka, Franz, 3, 31, 117 In the Penal Colony, 117 “The Metamorphosis,” 117 The Trial, 31 Kaminka, Avgust, 22, 56, 83 Karamyshev, Alexander, 181 Karlinsky, Simon, 59 Karsavin, Lev, 138 Karshan, Thomas, 220 Keats, John, 98

Kerensky, Alexander, 30, 86n108 Khazan, Vladimir, 82n97 Khitrovo, Alexei, 152n39 Khrushcheva, Nina L., 228 Kiandzhuntsev, Savely, 214–15, 218 Kipling, Joseph Rudyard, 107 Kitson, Harry Austin, 206n85 Kitson, Robert, 206n85 Kizevetter, Alexander, 104 Kleiber, Erich, 171 Klemperer, Otto, 171 Knipper-Chekhova, Ol´ga, 161 Kokoshkin, Fedor, 60, 72, 78 Kolchak, Admiral Alexander, 62 Kornilov, General Lavr, 62 Kotzebue, August von, 93 Koussevitzky, Sergei, 167 Kozlov, Illarion (Nabokov's maternal great-great-grandfather), 93 Kozlov, Nikolai Illarionovich (Nabokov's great-grandfather), 93, 156 Page 298 → Kramer, John Albert, 204 Krasheninnikov, Stepan, 181 Krym, Solomon, 55 Kubrick, Stanley, 166 Lolita (movie), 166 Kutepov, General Alexander, 227n4 Kuzmanovich, Zoran, 4, 69n61 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 127 “L'isolement,” 127

Landau, Grigory, 83, 85, 100, 123 Langdon, Olivia, 121 Laxman, Erik Gustaf, 181 Leiris, Paul, 191 Lenglen, Suzanne, 205, 210 Lenin, Vladimir, 25, 59, 60, 62, 67, 73, 77, 227, 239, 240–59 passim The State and the Revolution, 247 Lenôtre, G., 75 Leonardo da Vinci, 144, 145–46 The Last Supper, 145–46 The Madonna and Child (The Litta Madonna), 144 The Madonna with a Flower (The Benois Madonna), 144 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 169 Lepekhin, Ivan, 181 Lermontov, Mikhail, 3, 26n59, 32, 132, 192 “The Neighbor Girl,” 26n59 “A Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov,” 192 Levavi, Arye, 94 Levin, Harry, 117 Liapunov, Sergei, 167 Linnaeus, Carl, 181 Liszt, Eduard von, 9 Liszt, Franz, 167 Liszt, Franz von, 9–10 International Law in Systematic Presentation, 9 The Tasks of Criminal Politics, 9 Liszt, Friedrich, 9n9 Livni, Izhak, 94 Lockhart, Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce, 252

Lokhvitskaia, Mirra, 35 Lokhvitsky, Alexander, 35 Lorrain, Claude, 150–51 Landscape with Dancing Figures, 150 Morning in the Harbor, 150 Seaport, 150 Lotto, Lorenzo, 143 Loustalot, Ernest, 188–90, 191 Lyon, Amy (Lady Hamilton), 152, 153 Maar, Michael, 187 MacColl, Dugald Sutherland, 154n49 MacPherson, Arthur, 200 Maklakov, Vasily, 130 Tolstoy and Bolshevism, 130 Makovsky, Sergei, 153 Malikova, Maria, 4, 99n8 Mandelstam, Osip, 3, 213, 218–19, 220 “Football Again,” 219 The Noise of Time, 213–14 “Sports,” 218–19 “Tennis,” 218 Mantegna, Andrea, 141 Marais, John, 62n41 Maramzin, Vladimir, 227 Margulies, Mikhail, 52–53n15, 87n109 Mariinsky Theater, the, 157, 168 Maroncelli, Piero, 115 “Additions,” 115 Martov, Julius, 242n†

Martynova, Elizaveta, 153 Martynova, Nadezhda, 200 Marx, Karl, 243 Masaccio, 142, 144 The Virgin and Child, 142, 144 Mascagni, Pietro, 169 Maturin, Charles Robert, 108 Melmoth the Wanderer, 108 Maupassant, Guy de, 33, 35, 112, 113–14 “A Coward,” 33, 35, 113–14 Maximoff, Grigory, 67 Medtner, Nikolai, 134 Page 299 → memory, 16, 38, 65, 66, 135, 137, 138n141, 152, 182, 226 Mendeleev, Alexander, 213n99 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri, 188n25 Merian, Maria Sybilla, 181 Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, 181 Metsu, Gabriel, 147, 149 The Interior of a Smithy, 149 An Old Woman with a Book, 149 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 164 Michael, Grand Duke, 54 Mikhailov, Victor, 184 Miliukov, Pavel, 56–57, 83, 85, 86–87n108, 161, 190, 226 Millais, Sir John Everett, 154 Christ in the House of His Parents, 154 Ophelia, 154 Miller, General Evgeny, 227n4

Milton, John, 130 mimicry, 183 Minsky, Nikolai, 226 Untitled (poem), 226 Moissi, Alexander, 161, 162n77 Moscow Art Theatre, the, 140, 161–63 movies. See cinema Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 172 Muravnik, Constantine, 198n52 Mussorgsky, Modest, 170, 176 Boris Godunov, 170, 175n123, 176, 266 Muther, Richard, 155 History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century, 155 Myers, Arthur Wallis, 200, 201n60, 207 The Complete Lawn Tennis Player, 201n60, 207 Nabokov, Dmitri Dmitrievich (uncle), 8n4 Nabokov, Dmitri Nikolaevich (grandfather), 8, 17, 225 Nabokov, Dmitri Vladimirovich (son), 89, 91, 93, 116–17, 178, 184, 191, 202–3, 218 Nabokov, Elena Ivanovna (née Rukavishnikov) (mother), 2, 17, 20, 22, 25, 29n71, 34, 87n109, 100, 102, 115, 129, 133n121, 136, 141, 156, 157, 161, 167n88, 173n117, 175, 179, 182, 186, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 205, 211, 217n110 Nabokov, General Ivan Alexandrovich (great-granduncle), 225 Nabokov, Konstantin Dmitrievich (uncle), 2, 8n4, 50–51, 141 Nabokov, Nicolas (Nikolai Dmitrievich) (cousin), 2, 161, 167, 170–71, 175n123 Nabokov, Sergei Dmitrievich (uncle), 8n4 Nabokov, Sergei Vladimirovich (brother), 91, 175, 178, 201 Nabokov, Véra Evseevna (née Slonim) (wife), 27, 32, 91, 102, 116, 118, 145, 158, 185n13, 186, 186–87n19, 190, 204, 205, 218 Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich (father), works by “British Liberalism and Russia,” 62n44, 69–70 “Carnal Crimes According to the Draft of the Penal Code” (“Plotskie prestupleniia po proektu ugolovnogo

ulozheniia”), 37–38 “Charl´z Dikkens (K 100-letiiu so dnia ego rozhdeniia),” 103, 105n24 “Charl´z Dikkens, kak kriminalist,” 105n25 A Collection of Articles on Criminal Law (Sbornik statei po ugolovnomu pravu), 11, 37 Dueling and Criminal Law (Duel´ i ugolovnyi zakon), 32, 33–34, 35, 37, 45, 80, 113, 114, 128 An Elementary Textbook on the Specific Part of the Russian Criminal Law (Elementarnyi uchebnik osobennoi Page 300 → chasti russkogo ugolovnogo prava), 11 “Enriko Karuzo,” 169 “Fet (K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia),” 97, 131–32, 134–35, 228 From England at War (Iz voiuiushchei Anglii), 50, 52, 109–10, 129, 140–60 passim, 170 “Iz vospominanii o teatre: Napravnik,” 169 “Iz vospominanii o teatre (za 35 let),” 158–59 “K voprosu ob ‘opasnom sostoianii,’” 17–18 “The Kishinev Bloodbath” (“Kishinevskaia krovavaia bania”), 11, 71, 78–79, 231–37 “Moskovskie khudozhniki,” 140, 161 “My i Oni,” 65–66 “Nishchenstvo i brodiazhestvo, kak nakazuemye prostupki,” 8 “O Flobere. (Po povodu sotoi godovshchiny ego rozhdeniia),” 112, 113 ““On Alexander Blok's Passing” (“K konchine Al. Bloka”), 136–37 “Pis´ma V. D. Nabokova iz Krestov k zhene. 1908 g.,” 17, 22, 25, 87n109, 115, 182 Prison Pastimes (Tiuremnye dosugi), 13, 15–30 passim, 99, 105, 114 The Provisional Government, 86n108 “Revolution and Culturedness” (“Revoliutsiia i kul´turnost´”), 58 “Soviet Rule and Russia's Future,” 61–63, 68, 69, 102–3, 239–61 “Teatr i muzyka: Beethoven-Saal. 3-i kontsert A. K. Borovskogo,” 168, 174 “To the Friend-Opponent” (“K drugu-protivniku”), 57 Untitled article, 128 Vremennoe pravitel´stvo i bol´shevistskii perevorot, 85n105 Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, works by

Ada, or Ardor (novel), 34, 111, 115, 119, 129, 131, 133, 139, 148, 150, 156, 182, 211 “The Admiralty Spire” (story), 88, 211 “An Affair of Honor” (story), 34–35, 37, 45, 113, 187 Ahasuerus (dramatic monologue), 164 Almanac: Two Paths (verse collection, with Andrei Balashov), 214n103 Ania v strane chudes (translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), 211 “The Assistant Producer” (story), 178, 227n4 “Bachmann” (story), 173–74, 178 Bend Sinister (novel), 67–68, 68–69, 77, 103, 106n26, 145, 153, 227 “A Boxer's Girl” (poem), 191 “Breitensträter-Paolino” (essay), 191–92 Butterflies in Art (unfinished project), 117 “The Chess Knight” (poem), 187 “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (story), 125–26 “Clouds” (poem), 151 Conclusive Evidence (memoir), 34, 64, 121 “Conversation Piece, 1945” (story), 89, 90 Death (play), 164 The Defense (novel), 28, 77, 88–89, 129, 145, 158, 173, 187, 188, 214 Despair (novel), 14, 107, 108, 163, 177 “Dostoevsky” (poem), 99 The Empyrean Path (verse collection), 205 The Enchanter (novella), 38n92, 103, 145, 163 Page 301 → Eugene Onegin (translation and commentary), 60, 64, 80, 112, 123, 125, 137, 177, 224 The Event (play), 101, 162, 164 “A Few Words about the Poverty of Soviet Belles Lettres and an Attempt to Establish Its Reasons” (lecture), 64, 74 “The Fight” (story), 192–93 “Football” (poem), 218

The Gift (novel), 1, 4, 17, 31, 38n92, 40, 65, 74–75, 76, 77, 79–80, 86n106, 89, 101, 108, 113, 116, 123, 129, 133, 134, 138, 148–49, 158, 163, 166, 178, 180, 182, 187, 197, 211, 219–20, 224 “The Glasses of St. Joseph” (poem), 154 Glory (novel), 20n42, 34, 77, 104n22, 113, 126, 153, 193, 206–8, 215, 218, 220n122, 221n123 “Gogol´” (lecture), 127 The Grand-Dad (play), 31, 164, 165 “In Spring” (play), 164, 187 Invitation to a Beheading (novel), 17, 18–24, 32, 45, 64–65, 67, 68n59, 77, 105, 106, 115, 126–27, 127–28, 139, 148, 174–75, 187, 227 “The Jubilee” (essay), 66, 227 King, Queen, Knave (novel), 13–14, 112, 133n119, 148, 160 “La Veneziana” (story), 146, 205 “Last Supper” (poem), 145–46 Laughter in the Dark (novel), 131, 145, 146 “Lawn Tennis” (poem), 205 Lectures on Don Quixote, 210 Lectures on Literature, 14, 60, 64, 104, 105, 106n26, 108, 112, 113, 224 Lectures on Russian Literature, 25, 33, 47n3, 60, 74, 75, 100–101, 104, 108, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 162–63, 164, 165, 198, 224 “Leonardo the Great” (talk), 146 Lolita (novel), 4, 38–43, 45, 76, 77, 90–91, 103, 108, 112, 113, 118, 121, 129, 138, 145, 153, 154, 155, 160, 163, 178, 187, 197–98, 200, 202, 203, 208–9, 210, 211, 227 Lolita (screenplay), 164, 166, 180 Look at the Harlequins! (novel), 34, 110, 116, 145, 154, 187, 213 The Man from the USSR (play), 164 Mary (novel), 133–35, 139, 158, 197, 211, 228 “Mists were floating after mists…” (poem), 132, 136 “Mother” (poem), 135 “Music” (poem), 177 “Music” (story), 172–73, 177, 178 “Na smert´ Sh. i K.” (poem), 60

Nikolai Gogol (monograph), 40, 60, 80, 111, 112, 127, 224 Nikolka Persik (translation of Romain Rolland's Colas Breugnon), 102, 139 “O Bloke” (lecture), 137 “Ob opere” (lecture), 176, 265–68 “Oculus” (poem), 127 “Olympicum” (poem), 151, 221, 225 “On Generalities” (lecture), 220 “Orache” (story), 33, 34, 35, 37, 45, 158, 189, 190 The Original of Laura (novel in fragments), 43–44, 154, 187, 205, 209–10 Other Shores (memoir), 34, 35, 53n18, 83, 96, 102–3, 125, 127, 157, 188, 201, 207n86, 211, 215 “Painted Wood” (essay), 151 Pale Fire (novel), 34, 103, 108, 177, 187, 195, 210n92 “Pegasus” (poem), 58 “Playwriting” (essay), 165 Pnin (novel), 91–93, 121, 128, 131, 146, 148, 150, 154, 178, 187, 192, 211, 212, 227 Poems and Problems (collection), 186, 222 Page 302 → The Pole (play), 164, 239n* “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible” (lecture), 123–25, 177 “Pushkin—rainbow over all the Earth” (poem), 136 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (novel), 34, 36–37, 38n92, 45, 111, 201 “The Return of Chorb” (story), 118 “Revolution” (poem), 58 “Shakespeare” (poem), 103 “The Skater” (poem), 158 “Sounds” (story), 178 Speak, Memory (memoir), 1, 3, 4, 20n42, 34, 35–36, 37–38, 45, 49–50, 53, 54, 61, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 82, 83, 87, 88, 93, 97, 99, 103, 107, 111, 119, 122, 125, 129, 131, 136, 140, 144, 147, 156, 158, 168, 172, 173n117, 175, 176, 181–82, 183, 185–86, 187–88, 189, 190, 197, 200–201, 202, 205, 207, 214, 215, 216, 222 “Spring in Fialta” (story), 150

Strong Opinions (interviews), 46, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117, 122, 123, 127, 128, 130, 131, 137, 149, 150, 153, 157, 166, 167, 172, 173n118, 175, 177–78, 180, 186, 197, 204, 215 “Three Chess Sonnets,” 187 “Through the garden walked Christ with his disciples…” (poem), 99 “Time and Ebb” (story), 210n92 “To Prince S. M. Kachurin” (poem), 119–20 “Tolstoy” (poem), 130 The Tragedy of Mr. Morn (play), 34, 102, 116, 164 “The Tragedy of Tragedy” (essay), 165 Transparent Things (novel), 118, 209 “The Two” (poem), 137–38, 172 “Tyrants Destroyed” (story), 24, 68 “The University Poem,” 205–6, 218 Untitled (poem), 61 “Ut pictura poesis” (poem), 157 “The Vane Sisters” (story), 108 “The Visit to the Museum” (story), 129, 148 The Waltz Invention (play), 164–65 The Wanderers (play), 164 “What Faith Means to a Resisting People” (panel discussion contribution), 46, 70, 263–64 “The Word” (story), 118, 209 Napoleon Bonaparte, 63, 225 Napravnik, Eduard, 169 Negro, Joseph, 204–5 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasily, 50 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 161, 162 Nemser, Alexander, 177–78 Nicholas I, 74 Nicholas II, 54, 72, 89 Nikisch, Arthur, 171, 172

Nimzowitsch, Aron, 186 Nivat, Georges, 4 Nol´de, Baron Boris, 54 nostalgia, 110, 120, 137 Obatnin, Gennady, 98n4 Old Masters, 145, 155, 156 Olesha, Yuri, 3 “I Am Looking into the Past,” 3 Olympic Games, 206n85, 213, 218, 220, 221n123 optimism, 228 Orechkin, Boris, 79n91 Orrente, Pedro de, 156 The Entry into Jerusalem, 156 Osip (V. D. Nabokov's valet), 197 Ostade, Adriaen van, 147, 149 The Interior of an Inn with Nine Peasants and a Hurdy-Gurdy Player, 149 A Peasant Courting an Elderly Woman, 149 Ostade, Isack van, 147 Pallas, Peter Simon, 181 Page 303 → Palma the Elder, Jacopo, 156 Flora, 156 The Madonna and Child, 156 Pares, Sir Bernard, 48, 258 Pasmanik, Daniil, 81 Patterson, Gerald Leighton, 202 Pearson, Raymond, 86n108 Pellico, Silvio, 114–15 Francesca da Rimini, 114

My Prisons, 114–15 Perugino, Pietro, 144, 146, 156 Peter I (the Great), 104, 117, 143, 181, 184 Petrov, Alexander, 184 Philippi, Adolf, 155 Monographs in Art History, 155 Piombo, Sebastiano del, 144, 145, 146 Portrait of a Young Roman Woman, 145, 146 Pipes, Richard E., 48 Pisarev, Dmitri, 188n25 Plevitskaia, Nadezhda, 227n4 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 8, 225 Poe, Edgar Allan, 98, 117–18 “The Bells,” 118 “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” 118 “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” 118 “Ligeia,” 118 “Silence” (poem and fairy tale), 118 “The Sphinx,” 117 poetic justice, 44 point of view, 65, 75, 78, 88, 100–101, 191, 233, 234, 247 polemics, 35, 99, 118, 127, 137, 220 Polivanov, Alexei, 63 Polo, Marco, 116 Popov, Grigory, 190 poshlost´, 80, 88, 112 Potemkin, Grigory, Prince, 28 Potter, Pieter Symonsz, 156 Portrait of an Officer, 156

Pre-Raphaelites, 153–54 Prins, Adolphe, 12 Proust, Marcel, 117, 149 Remembrance of Things Past, 117, 149 Puccini, Giacomo, 169 La bohème, 169 Pushkin, Alexander, 3, 28n66, 32, 66n54, 80, 96, 97, 102, 119, 122–25, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134n124, 138, 167, 177, 186n19, 192, 224, 260 Boris Godunov, 66n54, 123 The Bronze Horseman, 119 “The Covetous Knight,” 125 Eugene Onegin, 60, 123, 125, 177, 224 “A Feast during the Plague,” 125 “Here is Apollo-ideal, there is Niobe-grief” (from “To the Artist”), 123 “I've revisited that little corner of the earth,” 167 “Mozart and Salieri,” 125 “The Poet and the Crowd,” 133 Poltava, 123, 260n§§§ “The Queen of Spades,” 177 Pyle, Robert Michael, 183 Raeburn, Sir Henry, 151 Rakhmaninov, Sergei, 118, 177 Raphael, 144 Rausch von Traubenberg, Baron Yuri (Nabokov's cousin), 119 Regener, Susanne, 14n27 Reid, Thomas Mayne, 118–21 The Headless Horseman, 119–21 The Scalp Hunters, 119 The White Chief, 119 Reinhardt, Max, 164

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, 141, 147–49, 150 A Bearded Man in a Cap, 147–48 Christ at Emmaus, 148 The Deposition from the Cross (etching), 149 Ecce Homo, 147 The Man with the Golden Helmet, 147 Mars, 148 Pallas Athena, 148 Self-Portrait (1640), 147 Page 304 → Self-Portrait (1669), 147 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 151, 153 The Age of Innocence, 153 Rimbaud, Arthur, 98, 138 “Le Bateau ivre,” 138 Rimsky-Korsakov, Andrei, 168n99 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 134, 168 Le Coq d'Or, 168 Riseley, Frank, 200, 201n60, 205 Rodichev, Fedor, 78 Rogge, Herr (V. D. Nabokov's tutor), 182 Rolland, Romain, 102, 139 Colas Breugnon, 102, 139 Romney, George, 153 Portrait of Lady Hamilton, 153 Ronen, Omry, 118 Rostovtsev, Mikhail, 82n98 Rostovtseva, Sofia, 82n98 Rozental´, Lazar´, 144, 157, 190n28

Rozov, Samuil, 94, 216 Rubens, Peter Paul, 141, 156 The Crown of Thorns (Ecce Homo), 156 Head of an Old Man, 156 Rubinstein, Anton, 175 Rusanov, Alexei, 35n88 Ruskin, John, 3 Rydel, Christine A., 126n93 Salinger, Jerome David, 122 “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” 122 Salting, George, 149 Samsonov, Valentin, 163 “A Fairy-Tale Princess,” 163 Sardou, Victorien, 159 Schiller, Friedrich von, 93 Schleinitz, Otto, 153 Schnitzler, Arthur, 164 Liebelei, 164 Schubert, Franz, 177 Schumann, Robert, 169, 174, 177, 178 Schwartz, Delmore, 122 “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” 122 Scott, Robert Falcon, 239n* Scribe, Augustin Eugène, 159 Sergei Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, 195 Shabel´sky-Bork, Petr, 57 Shackleton, Sir Ernest Henry, 239 Shakespeare, William, 98, 102–3, 106, 121, 130, 159, 165 Hamlet, 103, 106, 165, 255n**

King Lear, 165 sonnets, 103 Shaliapin, Fedor, 167 Shaw, George Bernard, 160 Candida, 160 Shcheglovitov, Ivan, 81n96 Shilovsky, Konstantin, 177 Shimizu, Zenzo, 202 Shingarev, Andrei, 60 Shishkov, Admiral Alexander, 74 Shklovsky, Isaak (Dioneo), 64n51 Shul´gin, Valentina, 134, 197 Shumov, Il´ya, 184 Sikorski, Elena Vladimirovna (née Nabokov) (sister), 49, 90, 93, 132, 167, 204 Silver Age, the, 179 Sirin (Nabokov's pen name), 118, 120, 136, 186n19, 194 Sklyarenko, Alexey, 4 Skoblin, General Nikolai, 227n4 Sliozberg, Genrikh, 86n108 Slonim, Evsei (father-in-law), 186 Slonimsky, Alexander, 34n86 Smith, Sidney, 201n60 Snessarev, Nikolai, 34, 64 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 77 Somov, Konstantin, 153, 154, 157, 158 Lady in Blue, 153 Rainbow, 157 Spirescu, Constantin, 190 Stalin, Joseph, 25

Stanford University, 224 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 161, 162, 164 Steiner, George, 107 Steklov, Yuri, 84–85, 86 Page 305 → Steller, Georg Wilhelm, 181 Stendhal, 99 Stravinsky, Fedor, 169 Stravinsky, Igor´, 169 Struve, Petr, 188n25 Sukenick, Ronald, 75 Sumarokov-El´ston, Count Mikhail, 200 Sutton, May, 210 Suvchinsky, Petr, 168n99 Suvorin, Mikhail, 34, 64 Sviridova, Sofia, 169 Edda, 169 Schumann and His Songs, 169 Szeftel, Marc, 178n134 Taboritsky, Sergei, 57 Tagantsev, Nikolai, 10 Taine, Hippolyte, 64n51, 159 Les Origines de la France Contemporaine, 64n51 Notes on England, 159 Tchaikovsky, Modest, 177 Tchaikovsky, Petr, 170, 171–72, 176, 177 Eugene Onegin, 177 Fifth Symphony, 172 Queen of Spades, 175, 176, 177

Teffi, Nadezhda, 35 Tenishev School, 94, 189–90, 213, 214–15, 217, 218, 227 theatricality, 167, 179 Thomson, James, 152 The Seasons, 152 Tilden, William Tatem, 208–9 Titian, 141 Tiutchev, Fedor, 96, 97, 102, 125–27, 131, 132, 138 “Cache-cache,” 127 “The Last Love,” 127 “Lonesomeness,” 127 “Silentium!,” 125–27 “Urania,” 127 “Yesterday, in the enchanted dreams…,” 125–26 Toker, Leona, 59n34 Tolstoy, Leo, 3, 9, 96, 98, 101, 104, 125, 129–31, 139, 162, 164, 176, 198, 207, 211 Anna Karenina, 104, 129, 130, 131, 198, 201, 211 Childhood. Boyhood. Youth, 131 “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 131 The Kreutzer Sonata, 131, 164 The Living Corpse, 162 Resurrection, 9, 130, 131, 207–8 War and Peace, 131 What Is Art?, 129, 130n110 Tomishko, Anton, 13 La Traviata (Verdi), 25 tribute, 17, 80, 111, 112, 116, 118, 133, 134, 135, 139, 151, 169, 182, 210 Trostky, Leon, 240, 255 Trubetskoy, Evgeny, Prince, 65

Trubetskoy, Nikolai, Prince, 129 Europe and Mankind, 129 Turgenev, Ivan, 3, 33, 101, 128–29, 161 Fathers and Sons, 33, 128 Month in the Country, 161 On the Eve, 129 Smoke, 128 “Specters,” 129 “Tropman's Execution,” 128 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 151, 153 Twain, Mark, 121–22 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 121 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 121 Is Shakespeare Dead?, 121 The Prince and the Pauper, 121 The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories, 121 Tom Sawyer, Detective, 121 Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna, 63, 82n98, 88, 136n130, 229 Updike, John, 3, 122 “The Happiest I've Been,” 122 Page 306 → Uritsky, Moisei, 83–84 Urusov, Dmitri, Prince, 184 Urusov, Lev, Prince, 200 Urusov, Sergei, Prince, 184 Utochkin, Sergei, 195 Uzcudun, Paolino, 192 Vaksel´, Platon, 167 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 140

Vengerova, Zinaida, 109 Verlaine, Paul, 98 Vernadsky, Georgy, 60n35 Vinaver, Maxim, 52, 83, 86n108 Vishniak, Mark, 86n108 Vois, Arie (Adriaen) de, 156 Portrait of a Notary, 156 Voloshin, Maximilian, 165 “Theater and Dream,” 165 Vrubel´, Mikhail, 157 Wagner, Richard, 170, 175–76 Parsifal, 175–76 Waldheim, Gotthelf Fischer von, 181 Entomographia imperii Rossici, 181 Walter, Bruno, 171 Waterhouse, John William, 154 Flora, 154 Weber, Carl Maria von, 174–75 Invitation to the Dance, 174–75 Wellesley College, 60, 146, 202, 203, 224, 227 Wells, Herbert George, 102, 109–11, 139 Ann Veronica, 110 The Country of the Blind, 110 “The Door in the Wall,” 111 The First Men on the Moon, 110 The Invisible Man, 110, 111 Men Like Gods, 111 The Passionate Friends, 110 “The Temptation of Harringay,” 111

The Time Machine, 110 The War of the Worlds, 109, 111 Weyden, Rogier van der, 150 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 93 Wilde, Oscar, 106–9, 159–60 The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 108–9 De profundis, 106 “The Decay of Lying,” 107–8 Epigrams and Aphorisms, 106 The Happy Prince, 106 A House of Pomegranates, 106 An Ideal Husband, 106 Intentions, 108 Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, 106 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 106, 108 Salomé, 106, 107, 155 The Soul of Man under Socialism, 106 Williams, Harold, 63 Wills, Helen, 210 Wilson, Edmund, 67, 75, 76, 103, 118, 121 Wingfield, Major Walter, 198 Wonlar-Larsky, Nadezhda Dmitrievna (née Nabokov) (aunt), 200 wordplay, 66–67n55, 148, World of Art, The, 153, 154, 156–58 Wouwerman, Philips, 150 Wrangel, General Baron Petr, 56, 62n44 Yagoda, Genrikh, 87 Zamyslovsky, Georgy, 81n96 Zelensky, Filipp, 88

zemstvo, 11, 47n3 Zimmer, Dieter E., 183 Zionism, 94 Zola, Émile, 99, 139