Celebration of the Nabokov Centennial at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg
by Olga Voronina
Deputy Director of the Nabokov Museum
"I wished to go back to you..., and I could not."
As much as all of us, the staff of the St. Petersburg V.V. Nabokov Museum, would like to think of the house at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street (where the museum is located) as the writer's "only home in the world", Nabokov himself probably would not have approved of our claims to the exclusivity of site. It is true that he was born 100 years ago in this stately, Florence-style mansion, that his family lived here for almost 20 years, that he fled for his life into exile from here. But it is also true that there were the family estates that he worshiped: Rozhdestveno, Vyra, and Batovo. He also spent years in Berlin, Paris, and small university towns in America. And, last but not least, was the stunning suite in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, which, although far from the image of Nabokov's Russian home, became his last residence, his protective shell, his shining shelter... After Nabokov fled Russia and joined the perplexing and fascinating cosmopolitan reality of the Russian diaspora, he belonged to the entire world. No wonder that this year many countries have been celebrating the Nabokov Centennial. Great Britain and Germany, the United States and Switzerland, as well as others now pay tribute to the writer whose home was this world's harmonious "everywhere."
In Russia, the Nabokov Centennial naturally centered around St. Petersburg . It is to St. Petersburg that many of Nabokov's characters/exiles return mentally and spiritually: "the facade of a house on Gertsen Street" transfixes Vadim Vadimovich's memory in Look at the Harlequins!; in his poetic raptures, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev dreams about "the smoke, the gold, and the hoar-frost of St.Petersburg" in The Gift. The ghost of the house on Bolshaya Morskaya, just like the ghosts of other St. Petersburg buildings, streets, and squares, haunts the pages of Drugie berega and Speak, Memory. And although the "idiotic tangibility of isolators" did not allow Nabokov to return in person to the city where he spent his childhood and youth, some intangible, palpable, and divine essence at the core of his art has finally returned St. Petersburg to Nabokov and Nabokov to St. Petersburg.
While planning the Nabokov Centennial, the St. Petersburg Nabokov Museum decided to choose the writer's return to his native city as a principal theme of the festival's program. Although the museum was "officially" opened on April 24, 1999, even the St. Petersburg intelligentsia had a hard time locating it on a city map. We wanted to place the name of the "Nabokov House" in the contemporary cultural context of St. Petersburg as well as to announce the concept and philosophy of the new literary museum. We hoped to attract the attention of both visitors and future partners and sponsors so that they could then understand the museum's plans and possibilities. As a result, the Centennial events, which took place over a two-week period covering Nabokov's "two" birth dates (April 10, according to the old calendar, and April 23), helped us make Nabokov's name audible and the Nabokov House visible in St. Petersburg. Actually, in spite of our fear of interfering with the Pushkin Bicentennial Festival, which was gaining momentum everywhere in Russia, the Nabokov Centennial fit in harmoniously, for it complemented "The City and Its Genius" theme.
The Nabokov Centennial Festival, organized and conducted by the Nabokov Museum, often spread out beyond the boundaries of Bolshaya Morskaya Street: onto the stages of the Alexandrinsky Theater, the Lensoveta Theater, and the Zazerkalie Children's Musical Theater, into the concert and conference halls of the House of Composers, House of Scientists, and the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinsky Dom). Dom Kino (Cinema House) screened the documentary, "Nabokov's Other Shores"; the St. Petersburg Center of Books and Graphic Design held a contest to judge the illustrations to Nabokov's works. Zvezda magazine published its new issue dedicated to Nabokov. There were literary soirees in Siverskaya and Rozhdestveno, organized and sponsored by the Gatchina District Administration, and an exhibition of books from the Nabokov family library at the Russian National Library. One of the most important events of the Centennial, the "Pushkin and Nabokov" conference at Pushkinsky Dom, gathered Nabokov scholars from Russia and from all over the world.
The Nabokov Museum had good reason to invite the most dedicated Nabokovians and Nabokov family members to the celebration, and we were pleased that most of our invitations were accepted. Our "guest-list" proudly displayed such names as Donald Barton Johnson (USA), Brian Boyd (New Zealand), Charles Nicol (USA), Serena Vitale (Italy), Alexander Blok (France). Nabokov's relatives, including Marina Ledkovsky , Nicholas Fasolt, Baron Edward Falz-Fein, and Ivan Nabokov, came from both the New World and the Old ... We were sorry that Dmitri Nabokov couldn't come due to an unexpected illness. We are certain he would have enjoyed the April 22 ceremony, which crowned the Centennial. After the official portion of the event - the speeches, exhibition openings, and presentations - the lights went off in the museum's central hall, and the staff wheeled in two enormous birthday cakes with candles glittering softly, which summoned up the festive spirit of the many parties given at the house almost a century before. The museum's guests of honor blew out the candles' pale birthday fire, and it felt as if the cozy atmosphere of family celebrations had returned to Nabokov House.
The help of the Centennial's foreign guests as well as the generous support of several of St. Petersburg's cultural institutions, foundations, and commercial enterprises allowed us to conduct several programs, unprecedented for a St. Petersburg literary museum. The International Nabokov Festival opened on April 10 with a Gift-Giving Ceremony. Our American patron Terry Myers presented his collection of rare Nabokov books and publications to the museum. Among them were first editions of Mary, The Defense, and Glory, Conclusive Evidence, Drugie berega, Vesna v Fialte, the 1955 Olympia Press Lolita, several magazines and almanacs with Nabokov/Sirin's first publications (Yakor', La Nouvelle revue française, Sovremennye zapiski), and some of the books Nabokov mentions in Speak, Memory that filled his childhood reading (Meyne Reid's Headless Horseman was one of them). It was a great occasion for us to name and thank all of the people who had made donations to the museum's collection. Some gift-givers arrived unannounced at the ceremony, pleasantly surprising us with unexpected Nabokov treats, such as an old copy of Les Malheurs de Sophie, a children's book Nabokov affectionately recalled in Speak, Memory.
The tradition of public lectures at the Nabokov Museum was enhanced by two wonderful appearances: on April 14, Alexander Blok, Vice-President of the International PEN-Club, gave a talk about Nabokov's importance to the culture of the Russian emigration. On April 19, Brian Boyd brilliantly outlined the main ideas in his new book Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Both lectures gathered huge crowds of Nabokov aficionados, confirming that the museum's goal to open a Nabokov Information Center is worth the fund-raising and organizational effort. The Center will be a place where all those interested can meet, talk, and read books by and about Nabokov. They will also be able to communicate via Internet with Nabokov scholars as well as other Nabokophiles.
The museum decided to celebrate Vladimir Nabokov's birthday on two separate days, partly because of the argument caused by the calendar change: Nabokov himself preferred the unorthodox April 23, though many calendar-obsessed people here still call April 22 his birth date. On the first day, April 22, the museum opened three exhibitions. One was a show of children's drawings entitled "Nabokov's Butterflies." More than 500 stunning butterflies "landed" on the walls of the writer-lepidopterist's house. Another exhibition, called "The Nabokov Museum in 1999" showed the Bolshaya Morskaya mansion through the eyes of five celebrated St. Petersburg photographers. We also exhibited all the gifts the museum has received from its patrons, friends, and, especially, from Dmitri Nabokov. After the guests blew out the candles on the birthday cake, we had a small reception with champagne, cake, and sweets.
On April 23, guests of the Nabokov Centennial toured the Nabokov estates. Meanwhile, radio- and TV journalists explored the museum, preparing their reports for the evening news programs. In the evening, the museum hosted a fascinating one-man performance of "Lolita" by Leonid Mozgovoi. As we say in Russia, the place was so crowded that even an apple couldn't fall to the floor. Well, if Lolita had dropped her "beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple", it would have had no place to land...
The Nabokov Centennial is over, but people who have discovered the museum keep coming back, bringing their friends along. Their interest proves that our hope to return Nabokov to St. Petersburg has not been in vain. "I wished to go back to you, -- we read in Look at the Harlequins! -- and I could not. What used to happen so often in thought, now had happened for keeps: I could not turn. To make that movement would mean rolling the world around on its axis and that was as impossible as traveling back physically from the present moment to the previous one." Vladimir Nabokov, alas, never "traveled back physically" to his home. Instead, his readers have returned to his childhood house, to St.Petersburg, to Russia.
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