Subject
NEWS: Elena Levin, close friend of VN and Vera Nabokov,
dies; VN's research for Lolita
dies; VN's research for Lolita
From
Date
Body
[EDNOTE. I am including the full text of the obituary because it refers repeatedly to Elena Levin's friendship with the Nabokovs and, near the end, to her daughter Marina's contributions to Nabokov's research for LOLITA. -- SES]
Elena Levin; translator opened home, life to novelists and poets
By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff | April 18, 2007
A letter arrived at Elena Levin's Cambridge home in 1989 from her friend Vera Nabokov, who was in Switzerland and lamenting the ravages of old age.
"In my memory you're a marble-white beauty with animated facial expressions," Mrs. Levin wrote back in a letter her friend so treasured that she kept it in a box reserved for jottings by her late husband, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.
As a confidante of the Nabokovs and a hostess who opened her home to the likes of poet T.S. Eliot, critic Edmund Wilson, and novelist John Dos Passos, Mrs. Levin watched and listened from the vantage of her kitchen table as some of the greatest writers of the 20th century discussed their lives and work.
Friends, family, and scholars will gather Friday to remember Mrs. Levin and a fading literary era in Cambridge. She died Nov. 21 in Mount Auburn Hospital. Mrs. Levin was 93 and her health had been failing the past few years.
A translator of Russian writings, she had immigrated to the United States after growing up in the throes of the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1921, her mother was executed by firing squad in Siberia for refusing to disclose details about a political fugitive whom she had briefly offered shelter. The third of six children, Mrs. Levin was 8 years old.
"She seemed like a character from Chekhov or Turgenev, although she said it was Tolstoy she loved best," the novelist Mary Gordon wrote in an e-mail to Mrs. Levin's daughter, Marina Frederiksen of Cambridge. "She was optimistic against all odds; she believed in people but was nobody's fool."
Married more than 50 years to Harry Levin, a Harvard professor and a pioneering scholar in comparative literature, Mrs. Levin held tight to her heritage. A photograph of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was perched on the family's kitchen table in Cambridge. That room, with its brilliant red walls, was where Mrs. Levin entertained the grand and the aspiring, from the literary pantheon to the latest crop of Harvard graduate students.
"After your father died . . . I came over to the house," Mrs. Levin's niece Susan Steiner recalled in an e-mail to Frederiksen. "Elena was in her chair, her throne, at the kitchen table with sheaves of letters in front of her. Sorting them out, reading bits and pieces, a grown lady, a little girl filled with new joy, as if reading them for the first time. They were in Russian; some from Nabokov, some from his wife. All exclusively to Elena with regards to Harry."
All this was a mind-staggering leap from Mrs. Levin's beginnings. Elena Zarudny was born in Latvia and her father was a naval officer who turned to engineering and running factories. As the revolution swept through Russia, the family moved to Petrograd, then to the Urals region and to Omsk in Siberia. Her father traveled ahead to Manchuria.
One night in Omsk, a loud knock on the door signaled the arrival of soldiers. They seized her mother, who spent several months in prison before her execution.
"I tried to imagine how Mother must have felt when she was told that she must face death. How she walked, what she thought," Mrs. Levin's older sister, Margaret Zarudny Freeman of Belmont, wrote in "Russia and Beyond," a memoir. "What did she feel standing there, facing the cocked guns?"
Months later, the children were reunited with their father and the family moved to the United States. Captivated by poetry, Mrs. Levin majored in English literature at Radcliffe College, and she was shopping at a communist bookstore in Cambridge when she was introduced to Harry Levin. They married in 1939, on her graduation day.
She taught for a short time at Radcliffe and was a translator; among her work was the English version of "Trotsky's Diary in Exile." Her husband also relied on her to be the first eyes and ears for his literary scholarship.
"He used to lie down on one elbow on a studio couch upstairs and write one paragraph at a time, and then he would call her in," their daughter said. "She would listen, she wouldn't interrupt. She would generally make suggestions, which generally he wouldn't take too kindly. And she would say, 'Harry, sleep on it.' "
Mrs. Levin "always appeared not merely content, but blessed to be Harry's wife, companion, and literary mate," Steiner wrote. She added that even though "everyone knew her talents, her genius, her warmth, her intelligence, and critical mind, she herself never paraded her own brilliance."
As Harry Levin's reputation grew, the couple's Cambridge house became the salon of choice for many writers.
"Last night we saw Dos Passos, mellow and merry, at dinner at the Levins," Vera Nabokov wrote in 1956 to Elena Wilson, whose husband, Edmund, was a longtime epistolary sparring partner of Vera's husband, Vladimir.
To the duties of translator, spouse, and host, Mrs. Levin added another: She was the mother of one exemplar for Nabokov's Lolita.
When Nabokov was writing his famous novel, his research included spending time in public places where he could study the vernacular of American children. Marina Levin was close to his title character's age, so Nabokov spoke with her for hours, capturing the nuances of a girl's language. From those conversations came snippets of dialogue in "Lolita," which recounts a middle-aged man's infatuation with a 12-year-old girl. In the years since, Frederiksen said, many have asked an obvious question. Her reply is that nothing improper ever occurred.
"He was just very solicitous," she said. "But my mother used to say, 'Harry, he understands so much about little girls.' "
When Nabokov sent a copy of "Lolita" to Elena and Harry Levin, they liked the book and "my parents recognized all my 9-year-old expressions," Frederiksen said. "He had this wonderful ear, and there it was."
Harry Levin died in 1994 and Mrs. Levin settled into a life of reading and continuing to inspire the many visitors she entertained in Cambridge and at a summer house in Wellfleet.
"She was never without a book in her hand," Frederiksen said. "She was always reading several things at once. Our house was bulging with books. There were just never enough places for books."
"She knew how to live each day on its own terms and to its fullness extent," Gordon wrote in her e-mail. "She is irreplaceable; she leaves a hole in the membrane of the world that cannot be filled."
In addition to her daughter and her sister Margaret, Mrs. Levin leaves two sisters, Katya Singleton of Providence and Zoya Chambers of New York City; a grandson; and a granddaughter.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Friday in Harvard's Memorial Church.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Elena Levin; translator opened home, life to novelists and poets
By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff | April 18, 2007
A letter arrived at Elena Levin's Cambridge home in 1989 from her friend Vera Nabokov, who was in Switzerland and lamenting the ravages of old age.
"In my memory you're a marble-white beauty with animated facial expressions," Mrs. Levin wrote back in a letter her friend so treasured that she kept it in a box reserved for jottings by her late husband, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.
As a confidante of the Nabokovs and a hostess who opened her home to the likes of poet T.S. Eliot, critic Edmund Wilson, and novelist John Dos Passos, Mrs. Levin watched and listened from the vantage of her kitchen table as some of the greatest writers of the 20th century discussed their lives and work.
Friends, family, and scholars will gather Friday to remember Mrs. Levin and a fading literary era in Cambridge. She died Nov. 21 in Mount Auburn Hospital. Mrs. Levin was 93 and her health had been failing the past few years.
A translator of Russian writings, she had immigrated to the United States after growing up in the throes of the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1921, her mother was executed by firing squad in Siberia for refusing to disclose details about a political fugitive whom she had briefly offered shelter. The third of six children, Mrs. Levin was 8 years old.
"She seemed like a character from Chekhov or Turgenev, although she said it was Tolstoy she loved best," the novelist Mary Gordon wrote in an e-mail to Mrs. Levin's daughter, Marina Frederiksen of Cambridge. "She was optimistic against all odds; she believed in people but was nobody's fool."
Married more than 50 years to Harry Levin, a Harvard professor and a pioneering scholar in comparative literature, Mrs. Levin held tight to her heritage. A photograph of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was perched on the family's kitchen table in Cambridge. That room, with its brilliant red walls, was where Mrs. Levin entertained the grand and the aspiring, from the literary pantheon to the latest crop of Harvard graduate students.
"After your father died . . . I came over to the house," Mrs. Levin's niece Susan Steiner recalled in an e-mail to Frederiksen. "Elena was in her chair, her throne, at the kitchen table with sheaves of letters in front of her. Sorting them out, reading bits and pieces, a grown lady, a little girl filled with new joy, as if reading them for the first time. They were in Russian; some from Nabokov, some from his wife. All exclusively to Elena with regards to Harry."
All this was a mind-staggering leap from Mrs. Levin's beginnings. Elena Zarudny was born in Latvia and her father was a naval officer who turned to engineering and running factories. As the revolution swept through Russia, the family moved to Petrograd, then to the Urals region and to Omsk in Siberia. Her father traveled ahead to Manchuria.
One night in Omsk, a loud knock on the door signaled the arrival of soldiers. They seized her mother, who spent several months in prison before her execution.
"I tried to imagine how Mother must have felt when she was told that she must face death. How she walked, what she thought," Mrs. Levin's older sister, Margaret Zarudny Freeman of Belmont, wrote in "Russia and Beyond," a memoir. "What did she feel standing there, facing the cocked guns?"
Months later, the children were reunited with their father and the family moved to the United States. Captivated by poetry, Mrs. Levin majored in English literature at Radcliffe College, and she was shopping at a communist bookstore in Cambridge when she was introduced to Harry Levin. They married in 1939, on her graduation day.
She taught for a short time at Radcliffe and was a translator; among her work was the English version of "Trotsky's Diary in Exile." Her husband also relied on her to be the first eyes and ears for his literary scholarship.
"He used to lie down on one elbow on a studio couch upstairs and write one paragraph at a time, and then he would call her in," their daughter said. "She would listen, she wouldn't interrupt. She would generally make suggestions, which generally he wouldn't take too kindly. And she would say, 'Harry, sleep on it.' "
Mrs. Levin "always appeared not merely content, but blessed to be Harry's wife, companion, and literary mate," Steiner wrote. She added that even though "everyone knew her talents, her genius, her warmth, her intelligence, and critical mind, she herself never paraded her own brilliance."
As Harry Levin's reputation grew, the couple's Cambridge house became the salon of choice for many writers.
"Last night we saw Dos Passos, mellow and merry, at dinner at the Levins," Vera Nabokov wrote in 1956 to Elena Wilson, whose husband, Edmund, was a longtime epistolary sparring partner of Vera's husband, Vladimir.
To the duties of translator, spouse, and host, Mrs. Levin added another: She was the mother of one exemplar for Nabokov's Lolita.
When Nabokov was writing his famous novel, his research included spending time in public places where he could study the vernacular of American children. Marina Levin was close to his title character's age, so Nabokov spoke with her for hours, capturing the nuances of a girl's language. From those conversations came snippets of dialogue in "Lolita," which recounts a middle-aged man's infatuation with a 12-year-old girl. In the years since, Frederiksen said, many have asked an obvious question. Her reply is that nothing improper ever occurred.
"He was just very solicitous," she said. "But my mother used to say, 'Harry, he understands so much about little girls.' "
When Nabokov sent a copy of "Lolita" to Elena and Harry Levin, they liked the book and "my parents recognized all my 9-year-old expressions," Frederiksen said. "He had this wonderful ear, and there it was."
Harry Levin died in 1994 and Mrs. Levin settled into a life of reading and continuing to inspire the many visitors she entertained in Cambridge and at a summer house in Wellfleet.
"She was never without a book in her hand," Frederiksen said. "She was always reading several things at once. Our house was bulging with books. There were just never enough places for books."
"She knew how to live each day on its own terms and to its fullness extent," Gordon wrote in her e-mail. "She is irreplaceable; she leaves a hole in the membrane of the world that cannot be filled."
In addition to her daughter and her sister Margaret, Mrs. Levin leaves two sisters, Katya Singleton of Providence and Zoya Chambers of New York City; a grandson; and a granddaughter.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Friday in Harvard's Memorial Church.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm