The epigraph to VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) is from Smirnovski’s Uchebnik russkoy grammatiki (A Textbook of Russian Grammar):
Дуб - дерево. Роза - цветок. Олень - животное. Воробей - птица. Россия - наше Отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
П. Смирновский. Учебник русской грамматики.
An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.
P. SMIRNOVSKI, A Textbook of Russian Grammar.
At the end of his Foreword to the English translation of Dar VN says that the epigraph is not a fabrication:
The participation of so many Russian muses within the orchestration of the novel makes its translation especially hard. My son Dmitri Nabokov completed the first chapter in English, but was prevented from continuing by the exigencies of his career. The four other chapters were translated by Michael Scammell. In the winter of 1961, at Montreux, I carefully revised the translation of all five chapters. I am responsible for the versions of the various poems and bits of poems scattered throughout the book. The epigraph is not a fabrication. The epilogic poem mimicks an Onegin stanza.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Montreux, March 28, 1962
In Smirnovski’s textbook (the 26th edition reprinted without any changes from the 25th edition, 1915) the above examples are at the top of page 78. VN died in 1977, at the age of seventy-eight. VN’s Foreword to “The Gift” is dated March 28, 1962. VN’s father was assassinated in Berlin on March 28, 1922. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN points out that his grandfather, Dmitri Nabokov, died on 28 March 1904, exactly eighteen years, day for day, before his father:
He would lapse for ever-increasing periods into an unconscious state; during one such lapse he was transferred to his pied-à-terre on the Palace Quay in St. Petersburg. As he gradually regained consciousness, my mother camouflaged his bedroom into the one he had had in Nice. Some similar pieces of furniture were found and a number of articles rushed from Nice by special messenger, and all the flowers his hazy senses had been accustomed to were obtained, in their proper variety and profusion, and a bit of house wall that could be just glimpsed from the window was painted a brilliant white, so every time he reverted to a state of comparative lucidity he found himself safe on the illusory Riviera artistically staged by my mother; and there, on 28 March 1904, exactly eighteen years, day for day, before my father, he peacefully died. (Speak, Memory, Chapter Three, 1)
The author of A Textbook of Russian Grammar, P. Smirnovski (1846-1904) died in 1904. 1904 is also the year of Chekhov’s death. In Ob iyune i iyule (“On June and July”), a part of his humorous Filologicheskie zametki (“Philological Notes,” 1885), Chekhov points out that for the writers July is an unhappy month and mentions the inexorable red pencil with which Death scratched off six Russian poets and one Pamva Berynda:
Для писателей июль несчастный месяц. Смерть своим неумолимым красным карандашом зачеркнула в июле шестерых русских поэтов и одного Памву Берынду.
For the writers July is an unhappy month. With its inexorable red pencil Death scratched off in July six Russian poets and one Pamva Berynda.
Chekhov died on July 15, 1904, at the age of forty-four. At the beginning of VN's story Signs and Symbols (1948) the numeral 4 is repeated twice:
For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. He had no desires. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars. (1)
VN died on July 2, 1977. VN’s “Gift” (brought out by the Chekhov Publishing House, NY, 1952) is dedicated to the memory of VN’s mother. The action in “The Gift” begins on April 1, 1926:
Облачным, но светлым днем, в исходе четвертого часа, первого апреля 192... года (иностранный критик заметил как-то, что хотя многие романы, все немецкие например, начинаются с даты, только русские авторы - в силу оригинальной честности нашей литературы - не договаривают единиц), у дома номер семь по Танненбергской улице, в западной части Берлина, остановился мебельный фургон, очень длинный и очень желтый, запряженный желтым-же трактором с гипертрофией задних колес и более чем откровенной анатомией. На лбу у фургона виднелась звезда вентилятора, а по всему его боку шло название перевозчичьей фирмы синими аршинными литерами, каждая из коих (включая и квадратную точку) была слева оттенена черной краской: недобросовестная попытка пролезть в следующее по классу измерение. Тут же перед домом (в котором я сам буду жить), явно выйдя навстречу своей мебели (а у меня в чемодане больше черновиков чем белья) стояли две особы. Мужчина, облаченный в зелено-бурое войлочное пальто, слегка оживляемое ветром, был высокий, густобровый старик с сединой в бороде и усах, переходящей в рыжеватость около рта, в котором он бесчувственно держал холодный, полуоблетевший сигарный окурок. Женщина, коренастая и немолодая, с кривыми ногами и довольно красивым, лже-китайским лицом, одета была в каракулевый жакет; ветер, обогнув ее, пахнул неплохими, но затхловатыми духами. Оба, неподвижно и пристально, с таким вниманием точно их собирались обвесить, наблюдали за тем, как трое красновыйных молодцов в синих фартуках одолевали их обстановку.
One cloudy but luminous day, towards four in the afternoon on April the first, 192— (a foreign critic once remarked that while many novels, most German ones for example, begin with a date, it is only Russian authors who, in keeping with the honesty peculiar to our literature, omit the final digit) a moving van, very long and very yellow, hitched to a tractor that was also yellow, with hypertrophied rear wheels and a shamelessly exposed anatomy, pulled up in front of Number Seven Tannenberg Street, in the west part of Berlin. The van’s forehead bore a star-shaped ventilator. Running along its entire side was the name of the moving company in yard-high blue letters, each of which (including a square dot) was shaded laterally with black paint: a dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension. On the sidewalk, before the house (in which I too shall dwell), stood two people who had obviously come out to meet their furniture (in my suitcase there are more manuscripts than shirts). The man, arrayed in a rough greenish-brown overcoat to which the wind imparted a ripple of life, was tall, beetle-browed and old, with the gray of his whiskers turning to russet in the area of the mouth, in which he insensitively held a cold, half-defoliated cigar butt. The woman, thickset and no longer young, with bowlegs and a rather attractive pseudo-Chinese face, wore an astrakhan jacket; the wind, having rounded her, brought a whiff of rather good but slightly stale perfume. They both stood motionless and watched fixedly, with such attentiveness that one might think they were about to be shortchanged, as three red-necked husky fellows in blue aprons wrestled with their furniture.
It seems that the action in Signs and Symbols takes place on March 28, 1947 (the boy’s twenty-first birthday), a week before Good Friday. The boy in Signs and Symbols was born on March 28, 1926, in Leipzig (three days later the action in “The Gift” begins).
In a letter of June 28, 1888, to Pleshcheev Chekhov compares the little naked soloveichiki (nightingales) that just hatched out from the eggs to undressed Jewish babies:
Именье Смагиных велико и обильно, но старо, запущено и мертво, как прошлогодняя паутина. Дом осел, двери не затворяются, изразцы на печке выпирают друг друга и образуют углы, из щелей полов выглядывают молодые побеги вишен и слив. В той комнате, где я спал, между окном и ставней соловей свил себе гнездо, и при мне вывелись из яиц маленькие, голенькие соловейчики, похожие на раздетых жиденят. На риге живут солидные аисты. На пасеке обитает дед, помнящий царя Гороха и Клеопатру Египетскую.
The Smagins’ estate is “great and fertile,” but old, neglected, and dead as last year’s cobwebs. The house has sunk, the doors won’t shut, the tiles in the stove squeeze one another out and form angles, young suckers of cherries and plums peep up between the cracks of the floors. In the room where I slept a nightingale had made herself a nest between the window and the shutter, and while I was there little naked nightingales, looking like undressed Jew babies, hatched out from the eggs. Sedate storks live on the barn. At the beehouse there is an old grandsire who remembers the King Gorokh [Translator’s Note: The equivalent of Old King Cole.] and Cleopatra of Egypt.
In Signs and Symbols one of the old couple’s fellow travelers in the subway resembles Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago:
During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not exchange a word, and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and brown-spotted skin, she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she looked around, trying to hook her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of soft shock, a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers—a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails—was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman. Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago. (1)
In his memoir essay Muni (1926) Hodasevich says that his friend Muni (penname of Samuil Kissin) shot himself dead at daybreak on March 28, 1916, in Minsk:
Под конец и приезды его стали тяжелы. В последний раз, уезжая из Москвы 25 марта 1916 года, он еще с дороги прислал открытку с просьбой известить об исходе одного дела, касавшегося меня. Но не только он не дождался ответа, а и открытка пришла, когда его уже не было в живых. По приезде в Минск, на рассвете 28 марта Муни покончил с собой. Сохранился набросок песенки, сочиненной им, вероятно, в вагоне. Она называется "Самострельная".
Однажды, осенью 1911 года, в дурную полосу жизни, я зашёл к своему брату. Дома никого не было. Доставая коробочку с перьями, я выдвинул ящик письменного стола, и первое, что мне попалось на глаза, был револьвер. Искушение было велико. Я, не отходя от стола, позвонил Муни по телефону.
- Приезжай сейчас же. Буду ждать двадцать минут, больше не смогу.
Муни приехал.
В одном из писем с войны он писал мне: "Я слишком часто чувствую себя так, как - помнишь? - ты в пустой квартире у Михаила".
Тот случай, конечно, он вспомнил и умирая: "наше" не забывалось. Муни находился у сослуживца. Сослуживца вызвали по какому-то делу. Оставшись один, Муни взял из чужого письменного стола револьвер и выстрелил себе в правый висок. Через сорок минут он умер.
In his Foreword to “The Gift” VN mentions Vladislav Khodasevich, the greatest Russian poet that the twentieth century has yet produced:
The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust. We remained unknown to American intellectuals (who, bewitched by Communist propaganda, saw us merely as villainous generals, oil magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes). That world is now gone. Gone are Bunin, Aldanov, Remizov. Gone is Vladislav Khodasevich, the greatest Russian poet that the twentieth century has yet produced. The old intellectuals are now dying out and have not found successors in the so-called Displaced Persons of the last two decades who have carried abroad the provincialism and Philistinism of their Soviet homeland.
Ivan Bunin is the author of Grammatika lyubvi (“The Grammar of Love,” 1915). In his poem "January 29, 1837" Tyutchev says that, like first love, Russia will never forget Pushkin. VN's story First Love (1948) was included in Speak, Memory (as Chapter Seven). The day of Pushkin's death, January 29 (NS) is Chekhov's birthday. VN was born in 1899, one hundred years after Pushkin's birth. VN finished "The Gift" in 1937, the year of the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin's death. In Speak, Memory VN describes his life in Paris in the 1930s and mentions, among other émigré writers, Hodasevich and Bunin:
Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius, whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was, physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of a revengeful racket.
Another independent writer was Ivan Bunin. I had always preferred his little-known verse to his celebrated prose (their interrelation, within the frame of his work, recalls Hardy’s case). At the time I found him tremendously perturbed by the personal problem of aging. The first thing he said to me was to remark with satisfaction that his posture was better than mine, despite his being some thirty years older than I. He was basking in the Nobel prize he had just received and invited me to some kind of expensive and fashionable eating place in Paris for a heart-to-heart talk. Unfortunately I happen to have a morbid dislike for restaurants and cafés, especially Parisian ones—I detest crowds, harried waiters, Bohemians, vermouth concoctions, coffee, zakuski, floor shows and so forth. I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch) and in silence. Heart-to-heart talks, confessions in the Dostoevskian manner, are also not in my line. Bunin, a spry old gentleman, with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my irresponsiveness to the hazel grouse of which I had had enough in my childhood and exasperated by my refusal to discuss eschatological matters. Toward the end of the meal we were utterly bored with each other. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” remarked Bunin bitterly as we went toward the cloakroom. An attractive, frail-looking girl took the check for our heavy overcoats and presently fell with them in her embrace upon the low counter. I wanted to help Bunin into his raglan but he stopped me with a proud gesture of his open hand. Still struggling perfunctorily—he was now trying to help me—we emerged into the pallid bleakness of a Paris winter day. My companion was about to button his collar when a look of surprise and distress twisted his handsome features. Gingerly opening his overcoat, he began tugging at something under his armpit. I came to his assistance and together we finally dragged out of his sleeve my long woolen scarf which the girl had stuffed into the wrong coat. The thing came out inch by inch; it was like unwrapping a mummy and we kept slowly revolving around each other in the process, to the ribald amusement of three sidewalk whores. Then, when the operation was over, we walked on without a word to a street corner where we shook hands and separated. Subsequently we used to meet quite often, but always in the midst of other people, generally in the house of I. I. Fondaminski (a saintly and heroic soul who did more for Russian émigré literature than any other man and who died in a German prison). Somehow Bunin and I adopted a bantering and rather depressing mode of conversation, a Russian variety of American “kidding,” and this precluded any real commerce between us.
I met many other émigré Russian authors. I did not meet Poplavski who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas.
Go to sleep, O Morella, how awful are aquiline lives
His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse. I met wise, prim, charming Aldanov; decrepit Kuprin, carefully carrying a bottle of vin ordinaire through rainy streets; Ayhenvald—a Russian version of Walter Pater—later killed by a trolleycar; Marina Tsvetaev, wife of a double agent, and poet of genius, who, in the late thirties, returned to Russia and perished there. But the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to “windows giving upon a contiguous world … a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)