In a letter of July 16, 1944, to Edmund Wilson and his wife VN mentions his brother Pavel who teaches horsemanship at a place in Maine and who has married an American girl who was together with Mary [McCarthy] at the convent.
In a footnote DN explains that this is a leg-pull. Nabokov did not have a brother or a close cousin (who can also be referred to in Russian as “brother”) named Pavel. The reference is to the possibly non-existent uncle of the heroine and to his American wife in Nabokov’s story “That in Aleppo Once…” (The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, pp. 138-139)
In VN’s story That in Aleppo Once… (1943) the heroine’s uncle is mentioned twice:
As you know, I had been for some time planning to follow the example of your fortunate flight. She described to me an uncle of hers who lived, she said, in New York: he had taught riding at a southern college, and had wound up by marrying a wealthy American woman; they had a little daughter born deaf. She said she had lost their address long ago, but a few days later it miraculously turned up, and we wrote a dramatic letter to which we never received any reply. This did not much matter, as I had already obtained a sound affidavit from Professor Lomchenko of Chicago; but little else had been done in the way of getting the necessary papers when the invasion began, whereas I foresaw that, if we stayed on in Paris, some helpful compatriot of mine would sooner or later point out to the interested party sundry passages in one of my books where I argued that, with all her many black sins, Germany was still bound to remain forever and ever the laughingstock of the world.
This is, I gather, the point of the whole story - although if you write it, you had better not make him a doctor, as that kind of thing has been overdone. It was at that moment that I suddenly knew for certain that she had never existed at all. I shall tell you another thing. When I arrived I hastened to satisfy a certain morbid curiosity: I went to the address she had given me once; it proved to be an anonymous gap between two office buildings; I looked for her uncle's name in the directory; it was not there; I made some inquiries, and Gekko, who knows everything, informed me that the man and his horsy wife existed all right, but had moved to San Francisco after their deaf little girl had died.
At the beginning of his letter to V. the narrator and hero of VN’s story mentions “our good old Gleb Alexandrovich Gekko:”
DEAR V. - Among other things, this is to tell you that at last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have led. One of the first persons I saw was our good old Gleb Alexandrovich Gekko gloomily crossing Columbus Avenue in quest of the petit café du coin which none of us three will ever visit again. He seemed to think that somehow or other you were betraying our national literature, and he gave me your address with a deprecatory shake of his gray head, as if you did not deserve the treat of hearing from me.
I have a story for you. Which reminds me - I mean putting it like this reminds me - of the days when we wrote our first udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a lighted window, cried out to us: "I'm a rhyme!" Yes, this is a most useful universe. We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept embankment. But just now I am not a poet. I come to you like that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described.
I married, let me see, about a month after you left France, and a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris. Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am positive now that my wife never existed. You may know her name from some other source, but that does not matter: it is the name of an illusion. Therefore, I am able to speak of her with as much detachment as I would of a character in a story (one of your stories, to be precise).
“None of us three” must be the author of the letter to V., his fickle wife and his wife’s lover (who crossed the Atlantic on the same ship and whom the hero probably found in the petit café du coin that none of them three will ever visit again).
In VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy tells V. (Sebastian Knight’s half-brother whose full name seems to be Vasiliy Shishkov) that he often catches himself thinking that his wife has never existed:
'What exactly was her name?' I asked.
'Well, when I met her her name was Nina Toorovetz – but whether – No, I think, you won't find her. As a matter of fact, I often catch myself thinking that she has never existed. I told Varvara Mitrofanna about her, and she said it was merely a bad dream after seeing a bad cinema film. Oh, you are not going yet, are you? She'll be back in a minute….' He looked at me and laughed (I think he had had a little too much of that brandy). (chapter 15)
Pahl Pahlich compares his wife to Mata Hari:
'You haven't got a photo of her or something?'
'Look here,' he said, 'what are you driving at? Are the police after her? Because, you know, I shouldn't be surprised if she turned out to be an international spy. Mata Hari! That's her type. Oh, absolutely. And then…. Well, she's not a girl you can easily forget once she's got into your system. She sucked me dry, and in more ways than one. Money and soul, for instance. I would have killed her… if it had not been for Anatole.' (ibid.)
The characters in TRLSK include Uncle Black (Pahl Pahlich’s brother) and old Dr. Starov. In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Iris Black (the first of Vadim Vadimovich’s three or four successive wives) is killed by Wladimir Blagidze, alias Starov:
The story that appeared among other faits-divers in the Paris dailies after an investigation by the police--whom Ivor and I contrived to mislead thoroughly--amounted to what follows--I translate: a White Russian, Wladimir Blagidze, alias Starov, who was subject to paroxysms of insanity, ran amuck Friday night in the middle of a calm street, opened fire at random, and after killing with one pistol shot an English tourist Mrs. [name garbled], who chanced to be passing by, blew his brains out beside her. (1.13)
At the restaurant Ivor Black (Iris’s brother) asks Vadim and his wife how is his friend Mata Hari (the ara):
"And how's my friend Mata Hari?" inquired Ivor turning to us again, his spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward the "bugs" under discussion.
We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed. And what about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was—
"In fact," Iris continued, touching my wrist, "we've decided to set off tomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can't join us, Ives, but perhaps you might come later."
I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision. (ibid.)
Iris Black and her murderer take riding lessons together:
One afternoon, in March or early April, 1930, she peeped into my room and, being admitted, handed me the duplicate of a typewritten sheet, numbered 444. It was, she said, a tentative episode in her interminable tale, which would soon display more deletions than insertions. She was stuck, she said. Diana Vane, an incidental but on the whole nice girl, sojourning in Paris, happened to meet, at a riding school, a strange Frenchman, of Corsican, or perhaps Algerian, origin, passionate, brutal, unbalanced. He mistook Diana--and kept on mistaking her despite her amused remonstrations--for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he had last seen ages ago. We had here, said the author, a sort of hallucination, an obsessive fancy, which Diana, a delightful flirt with a keen sense of humor, allowed Jules to entertain during some twenty riding lessons; but then his attentions grew more realistic, and she stopped seeing him. There had been nothing between them, and yet he simply could not be dissuaded from confusing her with the girl he once had possessed or thought he had, for that girl, too, might well have been only the afterimage of a still earlier romance or remembered delirium. It was a very bizarre situation. Now this page was supposed to be a last ominous letter written by that Frenchman in a foreigner's English to Diana. I was to read it as if it were a real letter and suggest, as an experienced writer, what might be the next development or disaster.
Beloved!
I am not capable to represent to myself that you really desire to tear up any connection with me. God sees, I love you more than life--more than two lives, your and my, together taken. Are you not ill? Or maybe you have found another? Another lover, yes? Another victim of your attraction? No, no, this thought is too horrible, too humiliating for us both.
My supplication is modest and just. Give only one more interview to me! One interview! I am prepared to meet with you it does not matter where--on the street, in some cafe, in the Forest of Boulogne--but I must see you, must speak with you and open to you many mysteries before I will die. Oh, this is no threat! I swear that if our interview will lead to a positive result, if, otherwise speaking, you will permit me to hope, only to hope, then, oh then, I will consent to wait a little. But you must reply to me without retardment, my cruel, stupid, adored little girl!
Your Jules
"There's one thing," I said, carefully folding the sheet and pocketing it for later study, "one thing the little girl should know. This is not a romantic Corsican writing a crime passionnel letter; it is a Russian blackmailer knowing just enough English to translate into it the stalest Russian locutions. What puzzles me is how did you, with your three or four words of Russian--kak pozhivaete and do svidaniya--how did you, the author, manage to think up those subtle turns, and imitate the mistakes in English that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family, but still--"
Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to the heroine of my Ardis forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, she must have had too many muddled lessons in Russian and she would certainly correct that extraordinary impression by simply giving the whole letter in French--from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian had borrowed a lot of clichés.
"But that's beside the point," she added. "You don't understand—the point is what should happen next--I mean, logically? What should my poor girl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed, she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?"
"In the wastepaper basket," I whispered, interrupting my work to gather her small form onto my lap as I often did, the Lord be thanked, in that fatal spring of 1930.
"Give me back that scrap," she begged gently, trying to thrust her hand into the pocket of my dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced her closer.
My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by the surmise that my wife had been transcribing an authentic letter--received, say, from one of the wretched, unwashed émigré poeticules, with smooth glossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons of exile. But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just might be her own composition with some of the planted faults, borrowed from the French (supplication, sans tarder), while others could be subliminal echoes of the Volapük she had been exposed to, during sessions with Russian teachers, through bilingual or trilingual exercises in tawdry textbooks. Thus, instead of losing myself in a jungle of evil conjectures, all I did was preserve that thin sheet with its unevenly margined lines so characteristic of her typing in the faded and cracked briefcase before me, among other mementos, other deaths. (1.12)
In a letter to V. the hero of That in Aleppo Once... compares himself to Pushkin and his wife to Pushkin’s wife Nathalie (as she was portrayed by Alexander Bryullov):
She was much younger than I - not as much younger as was Nathalie of the lovely bare shoulders and long earrings in relation to swarthy Pushkin; but still there was a sufficient margin for that kind of retrospective romanticism which finds pleasure in imitating the destiny of a unique genius (down to the jealousy, down to the filth, down to the stab of seeing her almond-shaped eyes turn to her blond Cassio behind her peacock-feathered fan) even if one cannot imitate his verse. She liked mine, though, and would scarcely have yawned as the other was wont to do every time her husband's poem happened to exceed the length of a sonnet. If she has remained a phantom to me, I may have been one to her: I suppose she had been solely attracted by the obscurity of my poetry; then tore a hole through its veil and saw a stranger's unlovable face.
One of Pushkin’s closest friends in the last years of his life was Pavel Nashchokin. “We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme” brings to mind Pushkin’s poem that he wrote in the album of Pavel Vyazemski (the son of his friends Pyotr and Vera Vyazemski):
Душа моя Павел,
Держись моих правил:
Люби то-то, то-то,
Не делай того-то.
Кажись, это ясно.
Прощай, мой прекрасный.
My sweet Pavel,
do stick to my rules:
love such and such things,
don’t do such and such things.
This seems to be clear.
Good-bye, my dear.
Ne delay togo-to (don’t do such and such things) reminds one of the hero’s plea (ignored by V.) at the end of VN’s story:
Yet the pity of it. Curse your art, I am hideously unhappy. She keeps on walking to and fro where the brown nets are spread to dry on the hot stone slabs and the dappled light of the water plays on the side of a moored fishing boat. Somewhere, somehow, I have made some fatal mistake. There are tiny pale bits of broken fish scales glistening here and there in the brown meshes. It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V.: you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for a title.
That in Aleppo Once… (the story’s title) hints at Othello’s words at the end of Shakespeare’s play, but it also brings to mind a paragraph in the story in which the word “that” is repeated five times:
During several preceding weeks, my dear V., every time she had visited by herself the three or four families we both knew, my ghostly wife had filled the eager ears of all those kind people with an extraordinary story. To wit: that she had madly fallen in love with a young Frenchman who could give her a turreted home and a crested name; that she had implored me for a divorce and I had refused; that, in fact, I had said I would rather shoot her and myself than sail to New York alone; that she had said her father in a similar case had acted like a gentleman; that I had answered I did not give a hoot for her cocu de père.
At the beginning of VN’s play Sobytie (“The Event,” 1938) the portrait painter Troshcheykin mentions Shakespeare and his Othello:
Трощейкин. Видишь ли, они должны гореть, бросать на него отблеск, но сперва я хочу закрепить отблеск, а потом приняться за его источники. Надо помнить, что искусство движется всегда против солнца. Ноги, видишь, уже совсем перламутровые. Нет, мальчик мне нравится! Волосы хороши: чуть-чуть с чёрной курчавинкой. Есть какая-то связь между драгоценными камнями и негритянской кровью. Шекспир это почувствовал в своём "Отелло". Ну, так. (Смотрит на другой портрет.) А мадам Вагабундова чрезвычайно довольна, что пишу её в белом платье на испанском фоне, и не понимает, какой это страшный кружевной гротеск... Всё-таки, знаешь, я тебя очень прошу, Люба, раздобыть мои мячи, я не хочу, чтобы они были в бегах. (Act One)
Troshcheykin’s wife Lyubov calls her lover Ryovshin “Sherlock Holmes from Barnaul.” The author of the letter to V. calls an indolent plain-clothes man in Nice “my friend Holmes:”
A week after my arrival an indolent plain-clothes man called upon me and took me down a crooked and smelly street to a black-stained house with the word "hotel" almost erased by dirt and time; there, he said, my wife had been found. The girl he produced was an absolute stranger, of course, but my friend Holmes kept on trying for some time to make her and me confess we were married, while her taciturn and muscular bedfellow stood by and listened, his bare arms crossed on his striped chest.
The action in “The Event” takes place on the fiftieth birthday of Antonina Pavlovna Opayashin (Troshcheykin’s mother-in-law), the lady writer whose name and patronymic hint at Chekhov. Pahl Pahlich’s wife who had an affair with Sebastian Knight, Nina Rechnoy (alias Mme Lecerf) brings to mind Nina Zarechnyi, Trigorin’s mistress in Chekhov’s play Chayka (“The Seagull,” 1896). At the end of Chekhov’s play Treplev shoots himself dead (and Dr. Dorn mentions a letter from America that interests him very much). After murdering his wife and her lover and writing his letter to V. the hero of VN’s story commits suicide.
“The wild gesticulation of trees” in That in Aleppo Once becomes “darkly gesticulating trees” in VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1947) and “nights of gesticulating trees” in VN’s poem Rain (1956).
Like Pushkin’s friend Vyazemski, Vadim Vadimovich Yablonski (the narrator and main character in LATH) is knyaz’ (a Prince). According to Demian Basilevski (Vadim's faithful Zoilus), Vadim managed to become his own American uncle:
Neither Slaughter in the Sun (as the English translation of Camera Lucida got retitled while I lay helplessly hospitalized in New York) nor The Red Topper sold well. My ambitious, beautiful, strange See under Real shone for a breathless instant on the lowest rung of the bestseller list in a West Coast paper, and vanished for good. In those circumstances I could not refuse the lectureship offered me in 1940 by Quirn University on the strength of my European reputation. I was to develop a plump tenure there and expand into a Full Professor by 1950 or 1955: I can't find the exact date in my old notes.
Although I was adequately remunerated for my two weekly lectures on European Masterpieces and one Thursday seminar on Joyce's Ulysses (from a yearly 5000 dollars in the beginning to 15,000 in the Fifties) and had furthermore several splendidly paid stories accepted by The Beau and the Butterfly, the kindest magazine in the world, I was not really comfortable until my Kingdom by the Sea (1962) atoned for a fraction of the loss of my Russian fortune (1917) and bundled away all financial worries till the end of worrisome time. I do not usually preserve cuttings of adverse criticism and envious abuse; but I do treasure the following definition: "This is the only known case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle [amerikanskiy dyadyushka, oncle d'Amérique]," so phrased by my faithful Zoilus, Demian Basilevski; he was one of the very few larger saurians in the émigré marshes who followed me in 1939 to the hospitable and altogether admirable U.S.A., where with egg-laying promptness he founded a Russian-language quarterly which he is still directing today, thirty-five years later, in his heroic dotage. (3.1)