Notes on My Father

...He is said to have coolly advertised in the papers his court uniform for sale...

...His desire to excel was overwhelming...

...In 1895 he had been made Junior Gentleman of the Chamber...

...meaning "citoyens...

...on the morrow he still enjoyed perfect health, and, undeservedly, it was the dreaded teacher who happened to be laid up...

...With the aid of those papers and my own recollections, I have composed the following short biography of my father...

...The November Revolution had already entered upon its gory course, its police was already active, but in those days the chaos of orders and counterorders sometimes took our side: My father followed a dim corridor, saw an open door at the end, walked out into a side street and made his way to the Crimea with a knapsack he had ordered his valet Osip to bring him to a secluded comer and a package of caviar sandwiches which good Nikolay Andreevich, our cook, had added of his own accord...

...He used to confess that the creation of a story or poem, any story or poem, was to him as incomprehensible a miracle as the construction of an electric machine...

...In 1913, he was fined by the government the token sum of 100 rubles (about as many dollars of the present time) for his reportage from Kiev, where after a stormy trial Beylis was found innocent of murdering a Christian boy for "ritual" purposes: Justice and public opinion could still prevail occasionally in old Russia...

...Did V. get any Egerias (Speckled Woods) this summer...

...Only recently have I read for the first time his important Sbornik statey po ugolovnomu pravu (a collection of articles on criminal law), published in 1904 in St...

...In May 1908, he began a prison term of three months in somewhat belated punishment for the revolutionary manifesto he and his group had issued at Vyborg...

...The preserved drafts of some of his proclamations (beginning "grazhdane...

...No wonder he was also an admirable speaker, an "English style" cool orator, who eschewed the meat-chopping gesture and rhetorical bark of the demagogue, and here, too, the ridiculous cacologist I am, when not having a typed-sheet before me, has inherited nothing...

...The (victorious) apologist was a man from the Manchester Guardian, I forget his name, but recall drying up utterly after reciting what I had memorized, and that was my first and last political speech...

...Till the age of 13 he was educated at home by French and English governesses and by Russian and German tutors...

...In this manner, he 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 (next in line of succession after the Tsar had renounced his and his son's throne...

...His drafts were the fair copies of immediate thought...

...they had only five years to go...

...Unswervingly he conformed to his principles in private and public matters...

...In 1919, he went into voluntary exile, living first in London, then in Berlin where, in collaboration with Hessen, he edited the liberal émigré daily RuV ("Rudder") until his assassination in 1922 by a sinister ruffian whom, during the Second World War, Hitler made administrator of émigré Russian affairs...

...From 1905 to 1915 he was president of the Russian section of the International Criminology Association and at conferences in Holland amused himself and amazed his audience by orally translating, when needed, Russian and English speeches into German and French and vice-versa...

...and editorials are penned in a copybook-slanted, beautifully sleek, unbelievably regular hand, almost free of corrections, a purity, a certainty, a mind-and-matter confunction that I find amusing to compare to my own mousey hand and messy drafts, to the massacrous revisions and rewritings, and new revisions, of the very lines in which 1 am taking two hours now to describe a two-minute run of his flawless handwriting...

...When less than a year later the Tsar dissolved the Duma, a number of members, including my father (who, as a photograph taken at the Finland Station shows, carried his railway ticket tucked under the band of his hat), repaired to Vyborg for an illegal session...

...There he made several splendid speeches with nation-wide repercussions...

...Petersburg...

...It contains old documents, including diplomas, drafts, diaries, identity cards, pencilled notes, and some printed matter, which had been in my mother's meticulous keeping in Prague until her death there, but then, between 1939 and 1961 went through various vicissitudes...

...It would be impossible to list the literally thousands of his articles in various periodicals, such as Rech or Pravo...

...In the spring of the same year I learnt by heart most of it when preparing to speak against Bolshevism at a Union debate in Cambridge...

...One winter night, being behind with a set task and preferring pneumonia to ridicule at the blackboard, he exposed himself to the polar frost, with the hope of a timely sickness, by sitting in nothing but his night shirt at the open window (it gave on the Palace Square and its moon-polished pillar...

...In 1906 he was elected to the First Russian Parliament (Pervaya Duma), a humane and heroic institution, predominantly liberal (but which ignorant foreign publicists, infected by Soviet propaganda, often confuse with the ancient "boyar dumas...

...Thirty years later, a fellow student of his, with whom he had gone for a bicycle trip in the Black Forest sent my widowed mother the Madame Bovary volume which my father had had with him at the time and on the fly-leaf of which he had written "The unsurpassed pearl of French literature"-a judgment that still holds...

...In the winter of 1917-18, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, only to be arrested by energetic Bolshevist sailors when it was disbanded...

...This permission my father did not ask, naturally, when publishing in the review Pravo his celebrated article "The Blood Bath of Kishinev" in which he condemned the part played by the police in promoting the Kishinev pogrom of 1903...

...In 1917, during the initial stage of the Provisional Government-that is, while the Kadets still took part in it-he occupied in the Council of Ministers the responsible but inconspicuous position of Executive Secretary...

...15 (neatly pasted in my mother's album...

...From 1906 to 1917 he co-edited with I. V Hessen and A. I. Kaminka one of the few liberal dailies in Russia, the Rech ("Speech") as well as the jurisprudential review Pravo...

...With his keen sense of humor he would have been tremendously tickled by the helpless though vicious hash Soviet lexicographers have made of his opinions and achievements in their rare biographical comments on him...

...Some of his memoirs pertaining to the years 1917-1919 have appeared in the Arhiv russkoy revolyutsii, published by Hessen in Berlin...

...Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, jurist, publicist and statesman, son of Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, Minister of Justice, and Baroness Maria von Korff, was born on July 20, 1870, at Tsarskoe Selo near St...

...On January 16, 1920, he delivered a lecture at King's College, London, on "Soviet Rule and Russia's Future,' which was published a week later in the Supplement to the New Commonwealth, No...

...By imperial decree he was deprived of his court title in January 1905, after which he severed all connection with the Tsar's government and resolutely plunged into anti-despotic politics, while continuing his juristic labors...

...Military ethics prevented him from taking an active part in the first turmoil of the liberal revolution of March 1917...

...At an official banquet in 1904 he refused to drink the Tsar's health...

...From mid-1918 to the beginning of 1919, in an interval between two occupations by the Bolshevists, and in constant friction with trigger-happy elements in Denikin's army, he was Minister of Justice ("of minimal justice" as he used to say wrily) in one of the Regional Governments, the Crimean one...

...Gentlemen of the Chamber were supposed to ask permission of the "Court of Ministers" before performing a public act...

...It is a volume of 316 pages containing 19 papers...

...from one of the latter he caught and passed on to me the passio et morbo aureliana...

...I find therein excellently described the terrible tantrums of his pedantic master of Latin at the Third Gymnasium, as well as my father's very early, and life-long, passion for the opera: He 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...

...At 16, in May 1887, he completed the gymnasium course, with a gold medal, and majored in law at the St...

...Petersburg University, graduating in January 1891...

...He continued his studies in Germany (mainly at Halle...

...Tell him that all I see in the prison yard are Brimstones and Cabbage Whites...

...In the autumn of 1883, he started to attend the "Gymnasium" (corresponding to a combination of American "High School" and "Junior College") on the then Gagarin street (presumably renamed in the '20s by the shortsighted Soviets...

...A couple of months before my father's death, the émigré review Teatr i zhizn' ("Theater and Life") started to serialize his boyhood recollections (he and I are overlapping now-too briefly...

...He was mobilized soon after the beginning of World War I and sent to the front...

...Petersburg, and was killed by an assassin's bullet on March 28, 1922, in Berlin...

...He 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, and, besides Flaubert, prized highly Stendhal, Balzac and Zola, three detestable mediocrities from my point of view...

...In the same essay he reveals a very liberal and "modern" approach to various abnormal practices, incidentally coining a convenient Russian word for "homosexual": ravnopolïy...

...On the other hand, he had no trouble at all in writing on juristic and political matters...

...Eventually he was attached to the General Staff in St...

...He was eloquently against capital punishment...

...Petersburg...

...From the very start, History seems to have been anxious of depriving him of a full opportunity to reveal his great gifts of statesmanship in a Russian Republic of the Western type...

...Along this vibrant string a melodious gene that missed me, glides, through my father, from the 16th century organist Wolfgang Graun to my son...

...He wrote prolifically, mainly on political and criminological subjects...

...After his release he was forbidden to participate in public elections, but (one of the paradoxes so common under the Tsars) could freely work in the bitterly liberal Rech, a task to which he devoted up to nine hours a day...

...Petersburg, of which a very rare, possibly unique copy (formerly the property of a "Mihail Evgrafovich Hodunov," as stamped in violet ink on the flyleaf), was given me by a kind traveller, Andrew Field, who bought it in a second hand bookshop, on his visit to Russia in 1963...

...Politically he was a "Kadet," i.e., a member of the KD (Konstitutsionnodemokraticheskaya partiya) later renamed more aptly the party of the People's Freedom (partiya Narodnoy Svoldi...

...From 1896 to 1904 he lectured on criminal law at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence (Pravovedeniya) in St...

...On November 14 (a date scrupulously celebrated every subsequent year in our anniversary-conscious family), 1897, he married Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov, the 21-year-old daughter of a country neighbor with whom he had six children (the first was a stillborn boy...

...he asks in one of his secret notes from prison, which, through a bribed guard, and a faithful friend (Kaminka) were transmitted to my mother at Vyra...

...He had a correct, albeit rather monotonous style, which today, despite all those old-world metaphors of classical education and grandiloquent clichés of Russian journalism has-at least to my jaded ear-an attractive gray dignity of its own, in extraordinary contrast (as if belonging to some older and poorer relative) to his colorful, quaint, often poetical, and sometimes ribald, everyday utterances...

...In one of these ("Carnal Crimes," written in 1902), my father discusses, rather prophetically in a certain odd sense, cases (in London) "of little girls à l'âge le plus tendre (v nezhneyshem vozraste), i.e., from 8 to 12 years, being sacrificed to lechers (slastolyubtsam...