"All dates are given in the New Style," VN wrote in the introduction to Speak, Memory: "we lagged twelve days behind the rest of the civilized world in the nineteenth century, and thirteen in the beginning of the twentieth. By the Old Style I was born on April 10, at daybreak, in the last year of the last century; and that was (if I could have been whisked across the border at once) April 22 in say, Germany; but since all my birthdays were celebrated, with diminishing pomp, in the twentieth century, everybody, including myself, upon being shifted by revolution and expatriation from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, used to add thirteen, instead of twelve days to the 10th of April. The error is serious. What is to be done? I find 'April 23' under 'birth date' in my most recent passport, which is also the birth date of Shakespeare, my nephew Vladimir Sikorski, Shirley Temple and Hazel Brown (who, moreover, shares my passport). This, then, is the problem. Calculatory ineptitude prevents me from trying to solve it."
. . . But that problem (a calendrical echo, perhaps, of the occasional difficulty of pinpointing, spelling, or pronouncing Sirin-Nabokoff's name outside of Russia) should not prevent us from continuing to celebrate, with undiminished pomp, in the twenty-first!
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Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L