A Dozen Notes to Nabokov's Short Stories
by Maxim D. Shrayer
page three of three

9. Don Aminado Fictionalized

Nabokov's feuilletonistic story "Zaniatoi chelovek" (A Busy Man, 1931) features Graf It (Grafitski in the Engish), a subdued émigré littérateur who ekes out a living by composing versified political and social satire:

So here he is- a thirty-two-year-old, smallish, but broad-shouldered man, with protruding transparent ears, half-actor, half-literatus, author of topical jingles [iumoristicheskie stishki] in the émigré papers over a not very witty pen name (unpleasantly reminding one of the "Caran d'Ache" adopted by an immortal cartoonist [bessmertnogo Karan d-Asha]) (Stories, 286).

In Don-Aminado's remarkable book of summing-up, Poezd na tret'em puti (The Train on a Third Track, 1954), a weighty sentence about Nabokov follows a list of the leading authors of Contemporary Annals: "Strastnye spory vyzvalo poiavlenie mologodo pisatelia Vl. Sirina" (The appearance of the young writer Vl. Sirin stirred passionate debate; Don-Aminado, Poezd na tret'em puti, New York, 1954, 303). In Nabokov's fourth English-language novel, Pnin (1957), the last name Shpolianski is given to a liberal Russian-Jewish politician, whose wife approaches Pnin at a party and triggers a series of spasmodic recollections of Mira Belochkin's martyrdom and death in a Nazi concentration camp.

10. A Rehearsal of Speak, Memory

Nabokov's autobiography is exceptional in its insistence upon what he called "tainye temy v iavnoi sud'be" (secret themes in a wide-awake fate) in the preface to the Russian version. When the same motif receives a lifelong treatment, in letters, short stories, and autobiography, it blurs beyond distinction the conventional boundary between the fictional nature of art and the biographical shape of life. In "Vstrecha" (The Reunion, 1931), the protagonist tries to recall the name of a poodle which belonged to a little girl he used to know as a child:

Somewhere in his memory there was a hint of motion, as if something very small had awakened and begun to stir. [...] Everything vanished, but, at an instant his brain ceased straining, the thing stirred again, more perceptibly this time, and like a mouse emerging from a crack when the room is quiet, the live corpuscle of a word.... "Give me your paw, Joker." Joker! How simple it was. Joker.... (Stories, 311).

And now a delightful thing happens. The process of recreating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet stimulates my memory to a last effort. I try to recall the name of Colette's dog [Collete is the name of a French girl he met on the beach in Biarritz]-and triumphantly, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water, here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss! (Speak, Memory ,152/ Stories, 610).

The short story "Krasavitsa" (A Russian Beauty, 1934) reveals a possible connection to Nabokov's sister Olga: "Olga, of whom we are about to speak, was born in the year 1900 [Olga was born in 1903], in a wealthy carefree family of nobles. A pale little girl in a white sailor suit [v beloi matroske], with a side parting in her chestnut hair and such merry eyes that everyone kissed her there, she was deemed a beauty since childhood" (Stories, 385). This description echoes Olga's appearance on a published 1918 photograph of Nabokov with his four brothers and sisters, as well as on other family pictures. In addition to the sailor suit, one is especially struck by Olga's "enchanting" expression of her closed lips (see Ellendea Proffer, Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography, Ann Arbor, 1991, 31). The reader is also told that "a supply of memories [...] comprised her sole dowry when she left Russia in the spring of 1919 (Stories, 385). Details of Olga's physique, character, and biography make their way to the story, as in the following passage which describes the émigré Berlin in the 1920s:

In Berlin, Olga gradually acquired a large group of friends, all of them young Rusians. A certain jaunty tone was established. "Let's go to the cinemonkey," or "That was a heely deely German Diele, dance hall." [...] At the Zotovs', in their overheated rooms, she languidly danced the fox-trot to the sound of the gramophone, shifting the elongated calf of her leg not without grace and holding away from her the cigarette she had just finished smoking [...] The word "boor," by the way, was used by Olga on any and every occasion. "Such boors," she would sing out in chest tones, languidly and affectionately. "What a boor..." (Stories, 387-7).

Evenings of a quite a different nature followed-a multitude of guests, dancing to records, dancing in a nearby café, the murk of the corner cinema. [...] Definite labels and features were found for the Russian substance scattered about Berlin, for all those elements of expiration which so excited Martin, be it merely a snatch of routine conversation amid the shoving sidewalk crowd, a chameleon word (such as that russified plural with its wandering accent: dóllary, dolláry, dollará), or a squabbling couple's recitative, caught in passing ("And I'm telling you-" for female voice; "Oh, have it your way-" for the male voice) [...] (Glory, 139).

12. The Mistaken Candidate

In his vividly written memoir, Bagazh (1975), the composer Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) reminisced about the atmosphere in the house of Vladimir Nabokov's parents in Berlin. He sketched a characteristic portrait of the young writer, a portrait not spared toung-in-cheek irony:

Or else cousin Vladimir would invent a writer or a poet, a king or a general, and ask questions about his nonexistent life. The victims would get upset (especially cousin Olga) and call the teaser names. But these games always stopped short of cruelty [...] Of my two cousins, Vladimir and Sergei, in those Berlin years I was closer to Sergei. Sergei loved music and Vladimir did not. Rarely have I seen two brothers as different as Volodya and Sergei. The older one, the writer and poet, was lean, dark, handsome, a sportsman, with a face resembling his mother's. [...] Volodya always did everything with une superbe sans égal, and I was a bit scared if his awesome store of information. [...] Cousin Vladimir always led a carefully circumscribed life. Though by no means a recluse, he was uninterested in our homey games, our music-making, our amusements. He had his own hobbies [...] (Bagazh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan, New York, 1975, 109; 110-11).

In April 1936, Nabokov mentioned to Zinaida Shakhovskaia that he had finished the short story "Spring in Fialta": "Ia zdorovo porabotal ètot mesiats i tol'ko-chto otoslal sdobnyi rasskaz Sov. Zapiskam, "Vesna v Fial'te", tres païen [written in French], vam ne ponravitsia" (I've worked hard this months and have just sent off a rich story to Contemporary Annals, something very pagan, you won't like it; stamped 30 April 1936, postcard in ZSh). A few months later, and following the publication of the story in Paris, Nabokov sent Shakhovskaia an alarmed postcard from Berlin:

Dorogaia Zinochka,
Ia vstrevozhen duratskoi spletnei, kotoraia doshla do menia - budto ia v "Vesne v Fial'te" vyvel Niku i Natashu. Po sushchestvu èto, razumeetsia, sovershenno nelepo (vy to khorosho znaete, chto ia chisteishei iskry vydumshchik i nikogo ne suiu v svoi veshchi), no mne protivno, chto èto mogut razdut'-potomu ochen' proshu vas, esli spletnia doidët do vas, oprovergat' eë moim-zhe vozmushcheniem. Dobro-by v Ferdinande moëm vzdumali iskat' avtora, a tak vot vovse bessmyslenno, darom, chto nikakogo, konechno, skhodstva lichnogo s N-ami net.
[...] Ia vozmushchën i rasstroen.
Tseluiu vashu ruchku,
Vash, V.

(Dear Zinochka [diminutive of Zinaida]:
I am distressed by a foolish gossip, which has reached me: that supposedly in "Spring in Fialta" I rendered Nicolas and Natalie [the Russian uses their diminutive names, Nika and Natasha]. In essence, this is, naturally, sheer nonsense (you of all people know well, that I am a pure writer of fiction and insert no one into my works), but I find it repulsive that this rumor might be inflated, and would very much appreciate it if you could deny it with words of my own indignation when the gossip reaches you. I suppose I would understand it if they opted to look for the author in my Ferdinand, whereas this is totally senseless, never mind the fact that, of course, there is no resemblance with [the Nabokovs?; this abbreviated last name is problematic because the correct instrumental plural of Nabokovy would be Nabokovymi].
[...] I am angry and upset.
I kiss your hand.
Yours, V.)

Nabokov's categorical denial of the validity of the émigré gossip could be of interest to those studying the deceptively mirroring relationship between Nabokov's art and life, a relationship where design often poses as chance. I do not believe that one should always expect perfect clarity in a hasty postcard to a friend-probably written in exasperation and dashed off the same afternoon. Still, I find two circumstances about the postcard intriguing. First, Nabokov is willing to concede that a reader might seek a resemblance between himself and Ferdinand, the French-Hungarian belletrist in the story. (Critics, including Charles Nicol, have pointed out some connections between the fictional writer Ferdinand and his creator Nabokov). Second, Nabokov never explains why Vasen'ka (Victor in the English version) would be a more unlikely candidate for an exposé of Nicolas Nabokov than Ferdinand for a self-parody of his author. To recall the story, Vasen'ka is a married Russian expatriate-working in the entertainment business-who is involved in an ephemeral love affair with Ferdinand's Russian wife Nina.

A future biographer of Nicolas Nabokov might consider checking the text of "Spring in Fialta" for possible links with the émigré composer and his then wife (they were divorced in 1938; for Nabokov's comments about the divorce, see 18 February 1938, letter in ZSh). Nicolas Nabokov provides an account of his postwar relationship with Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, and an historian of Russian émigré culture may also pick up this curious bit of quasiliterary information:

Our warm familiar friendship continued unchanged. Every time I visit cousins Vladimir and Vera [sic] at their Montreux Palace retreat, je gourmande, their sharp, brittle, a bit abrasive, and at times boisterously hilarious wit, their all-pervasive sense of humor, his mannerisms and his "strong opinions," his biases, his loves and hates, and his bottomless, punctiliously precise memory...and all of it bathed in grand, lordly, but amiably unostentatious hospitality" (Bagazh, 113).

© Copyright 1998 Maxim D. Shrayer. All rights reserved. This article, which originally appeared in The Nabokovian no. 40 (Spring 1998), is reprinted here by kind permission of the author and the editor of The Nabokovian. This material may not be duplicated or used in any way without prior permission.