Vladimir Nabokov

...VN doesn't seem to have found a correspondent to replace his old friend...

...And it's too bad that the article Life proposed on his butterfly-collecting was dropped: "I take it for granted that your photographer is prepared to do some crawling and wriggling and to ignore completely the possible presence of snakes...

...When Solzhenitsyn was allowed to emigrate, VN turned down a public proposal from the New York Times Magazine ("he regrets he cannot write a 'letter to Solzhenitsyn...

...We should also remember his dismissals of quite a few famous writers, as in his accepting an invitation from the New York Times Book Review in 1949 to "do an occasional review...

...Similarly, VN privately considered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a heroic figure but "not . . . a great writer," and was distressed when casual remarks to this effect were made public...

...this collection of letters are that the selection and editing are very much a family affair and that it starts not in 1940 but in 1923, maintaining that mild eccentricity often associated with items Nabokovian...

...He even submitted a Burma Shave jingle...

...All that they lack is the kind of intense intellectual debate found in the Nabokov/Wilson Letters...

...Occasionally his strong opinions give a salutary jolt, as in his 1945 letter to a local Reverend, refusing to let Dmitri participate in a clothing drive for German children: "When I have to choose between giving for a Greek, Czech, French, Belgian, Chinese, Norwegian, Russian, Jewish or German child, I shall not choose the latter one...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 39...

...His absolute rejection of Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes was based on a lifetime of painful experience, but sometimes went to surprising lengths, as when he abruptly cancelled a planned collaboration with fellow émigré and well-known linguist Roman Jakobson, presumably ending their acquaintance as well: "Frankly, I am unable to stomach your little trips to totalitarian countries, even if these trips are prompted merely by scientific considerations...

...I n general, this collection seems to contain too many letters to editors and publishers, especially in regard to Lolita...

...Four of the early letters are to his wife, and the first footnote to them is one of the few signed with her name: "When my husband was absent from home he wrote me every day...

...Rachmaninoff gave Dmitri his first radio...

...Dmitri, who has continued to translate his father's early Russian (and French) works into English (and Italian), and Vera, who handled much of her husband's (English, Russian, French) typing and correspondence, have both contributed substantially...

...DN" (which has the tone of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich calling himself "little Vanya...

...Perhaps stalwart, formidable Dmitri, who tends to overwhelm his father's critics, has been overzealous: Would VN himself have included all this material...

...Among the many footnotes supplied by the family, a few "of a personal nature" are signed or initialed...

...He had to keep refusing honorary degrees...

...of Field's biography (Spectator-savers may be able to content themselves with mine of January 1987...

...Took me 28 minutes but came out beautifully...

...Then there are the projects that fell through during his leaner years in America, including a revised, annotated Anna Kruenin (as VN would have it) and, amazingly enough, a proposed translation of The Brothers Karamazov...

...But as might be expected, he kept up his scientific correspondence with lepidopteral colleagues...

...Most of these letters to editors contain items of considerable interest, such as evaluations of his own works, or comedy, such as the handwritten ending of a short note to White: "This is the first letter I have typed out myself in my life...

...This endearing letter contains a touch of synesthesia ("I took a walk around the plantation, behind the grove of cork oaks, ate peaches and Charles Nicol who teaches English at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, is currently editing a study of Nabokov's short fiction...

...Another of these letters to Vera contains the darkest mood of the whole collection, concerning Vladimir's—VN's--radiation treatments for psoriasis: "You know—now I can tell you frankly—the indescribable torments I endured in February, before these treatments, drove me to the border of suicide—a border I was not authorized to cross because I had you in my baggage" (Vladimir and John Updike—our most famous current psoriatic—considerably admired each other's works...

...Still, an unsigned footnote here to "all the Irinas in the world" intriguingly identifies them as "various ladies by that name who flirted with or had designs on VN...

...See Beckley-Cardy's (Chicago) School Buyer's Guide of FurnitureSupplies-Equipment, Catalog No...

...96, School year 1953-1954...

...Occasionally his renown could be used to advantage: VLADIMIR NABOKOV: SELECTED LETTERS 1940-1977 Edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/582 pp...

...Later still, Vladimir noted that "I am still at war with Field, who turned out to be a rat...

...We return to this matter only 500 pages later, in Nabokov's towering reply to Field's "ignoble letter of July 9, 1973" and Dmitri's footnote referring the reader to his own devastating review "Did He Really Call His Mum Lolita...

...Many of Nabokov's novels are crafted so that a revelation on the last few pages—sometimes even in the last sentence—throws new light on the whole affair, compelling the reader to start over again, now with the pages illuminated by 500 watts instead of a dim bulb...

...but we seem to have more an exhaustion than a selection, and the dozen pages devoted to three lists of proof corrections are surely of interest only to the extremely dedicated Nabokovian...

...No wonder VN was especially fond of The Centaur...

...Was there a kind of dermal sympathy...

...He even gave thorough instructions ("I am sending you some photographs of Pnin-like Russians, with and without hair, for avisual appreciation of the items I am going to discuss") for Milton Glaser's extraordinary portrait on the dust jacket of Pnin...

...29.95 Charles Nicol 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 although he refused to join a committee to support a Soviet writer incarcerated in a mental hospital, he sent a telegram of protest to Leningrad...

...privately he had already written just such a letter of welcome...

...apricots, admired the sunset, listened to a nightingale's twees and whistles, and both its song and the sunset tasted of apricot and peach"), but the Russian facsimile and the English translation are really here to refute one of the wilder claims of Nabokov's first biographer, Andrew Field, that Nabokov addressed his mother Elena Ivanovna by the unlikely diminutive "Lolita...

...Fame brought its own problems: autograph hounds, interviewers, biographers, scholars...

...T. S. Eliot and Mr...

...These are delightful letters...

...Thomas Mann...

...This collection does reprint Nabokov's side of later public exchanges and one last comment included with his refusal to contribute to a volume of essays on Wilson (the letter is signed by Vera): "Psychologically it would be very difficult for VN to ignore in a biographic paper the Pushkin controversy which revealed not only ignorance of Russian on EW's part, but also a bizarre animosity that he appears to have been nursing since the late nineteen-fifties...

...I have suggested four letters from those I received from him in 1937 during our longest `separation.' Vera Nabokov...

...much later his father gave him some good prophylactic advice: "In Italy, for his own good, /A wolf must wear a Riding Hood...

...The last letter in this collection (9 May 1977) is also to Dmitri...

...Thus young Vladimir's first letter, written during a summer of farm labor in the south of France, starts with a two-word salutation to his mother and an annotation...

...He took on Jean-Paul Sartre instead...

...a collection from the earlier European years is promised...

...Better yet, one tries to imagine the reaction of James Laughlin (editor and proprietor of New Directions) upon, after VN's butterfly-collecting visit, receiving a letter asking him to collect two types of plants from areas designated on an enclosed map, plus a few ants: "Kill the ants with alcohol or car-bona or any other stuff handy (just drown them, do not squash) and put them into a small box with cotton wool...

...the writer, Vladimir Maramzin, was allowed to emigrate soon afterward...

...Administrator's edition, p. 17, No...

...VN's increasingly desperate search for a publisher doubtless needs documentation, as does the struggle for rights with its slime-slippery first publisher...

...Those quotes around separation seem to indicate that these vigorous husbandly love-letters are squelching another rumor, this time one originating either in Field's opus or in a gossipy book by Zinaida Shchakovskaya, a Parisian Russian acquaintance not in the index...

...in addition to personal glimpses, these sometimes set up defenses against snipers or supply additional—everything Nabokov wrote has wonderful comic moments—humor, such as the following comment about Nabokov's first American literary agent: "De Jannelli gave little Dmitri Nabokov his first camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie...

...He sent a get-well telegram to Lyndon Johnson after the President's surgery...

...After all, nobody doubts his extreme care for his texts, and this is certainly made clear again in his explanations to Katharine A. White of the New Yorker of minute details in shorter works: "Low boy file is the right term...

...This collection of letters almost has to be mad the same way, and its last few pages help explain the dozen pre-1940 (pre-American) letters that constitute its beginning...

...Perhaps Nabokov's correspondence with fellow emigres has more intellectual echoes of the Wilson letters...

...D 250, 'all-in-one lowboy file,' illustr...

...I have been waiting for a long time to take a crack at such big fakes as Mr...