Subject
Re: ANNC: Rescuing the house where VN lived in Palo Alto, CA
Date
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Dear Susan,
Where did Juan learn about the new owners' plans to tear the Palo Alto house down? Just curious. I live in the Bay Area and it would be lovely to save a house that I have visited a few times each year for the past twenty or so years. I don't know, however, how the house could be saved. One would think that Stanford might be interested, but the university did little (anything?) to celebrate Nabokov's centenary and I don't recall many postings from its Slavic faculty over the years. In any case, the cost of purchasing the house, probably approaching $1 million, would be prohibitive. And then there's that matter of the enormous redwood engulfing the front yard. It will certainly need to be removed at some point, at great expense. Preserving a home in Ithaca sounds like a better option.
And yet I would certainly miss the house. Has anyone approached Stanford, with its large endowments, about interceding?
Terry Myers
-----Original Message-----
From: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 3:08 pm
Subject: [NABOKV-L] ANNC: Rescuing the house where VN lived in Palo Alto, CA
Dear List,
No one has responded to the June 4 post (a query sent to Juan Martinez, which he
orwarded to the List) about rescuing the house in Palo Alto, CA, where Nabokov
nd his family spent the summer of 1941 while he taught at Stanford University.
pparently, the house was recently sold to new owners who plan to tear it down.
Is anyone interested in volunteering to try to help save this house? It would
robably require asking for support from various institutions -- the Nabokov
ociety, the Stanford University English Department, any local neighborhood
ssociations or historic preservation societies in California, and so forth --
nd seeking press coverage. Does anyone have any other ideas on how to proceed?
n VNAY, Brian Boyd describes the house as follows: "The Nabokov rented a neat
ittle house, a trim Riviera villa, at 230 Sequoia Avenue, just across El Camino
eal from the Stanford campus: a sequoia in their own front garden, but no phone
nd no car" (p. 29). [See attached photos.] The house is especially
ignificant because it was the first of many houses that the Nabokovs rented in
merica after arriving in that country in 1940 -- they never owned a home --
nd because Nabokov lived there at the beginning of his teaching career in the
nited States. Dmitri Nabokov recently remarked that "among my childhood
emories of America, this house and the life I led there figure prominently and
ill me with affection. My father's particular happiness at that time was, I
hink, contagious."
Sincerely,
usan Elizabeth Sweeney
o-Editor, NABOKV-L
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