MORE WORDS OF WISDOM FROM VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Once again, the redoubtable Brian Boyd, who has dedicated himself for years now to commendable scholarship on Nabokov, is to be congratulated. His latest publication is Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy (NY: 2019). What follows below is not a book review, but a series of citations.
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“For good reason, Nabokov has often been considered the finest prose stylist in English. He knew that if he worked at what he wrote he could make it sing, sometimes with the complex amplitude of choral polyphony.” (Introduction, xxxii)
“I write what I like and some like what I write.” (Nab. quoted, xxxvi)
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! – Death eddies near –
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
Citation from the Rupert Brooke poem “Heaven,” written from a fishy viewpoint, in an early book review by Nabokov on Brooke (8-9)
“History as an exact science is just for convenience, ‘for the simple folk,’ as the museum guard used to say, showing two skulls of one and the same criminal, in youth and old age.” (56)
“As for the whiff of revolution, it, too, having appeared by chance, will disappear by chance, as has already happened a thousand times in human history. In Russia simpleminded communism will be replaced by something more intelligent . . .” (58)
This opinion is from an essay written in 1926. Nabokov did not live to see the demise of communism in Russia, but, as he might have guessed from contemplating a thousand years of Russian history, his hapless homeland remains luckless when it comes to political systems. They got rid of the Soviets, they brought God back, but the new system turned out to be far from intelligent.
“…how eagerly and how adroitly the very slightest thing strives to slip away from man, and how inclined it is to suicide. A dropped coin, with the haste of a desperate fugitive, traces a wide arc on the floor and disappears into the farthest corner under the farthest sofa.” (69) From an essay titled “Man and Things,” 1928.
On the other hand, some things are more likely to vanish not at the hands of suicide, but of homicide. Take a donut, for example.
In Russian hotels during pre-Soviet times people would leave their footwear outside their rooms at night to be cleaned. The man in the next room, say, leaves his boots by the door. What do I care about the downtrodden, dirty clompers, as they sit there forlornly in the corridor? Not a jot. “But were my neighbor to die tonight, [be found dead in his bed in Room 606], what human warmth, what pity, what live and tender beauty would these shabby old boots—with their eyelet flaps sticking out like little ears—radiate over me.” (70) From “Man and Things.”
A small child (Nabokov) has an uncle who has died of diphtheria. They disinfect his rooms, and the child understands the disinfection as a means of separating the essence of the uncle from the things that had belonged to him, “removing from the things the dust, the smell, [all of that avuncular something] that had made these things precisely his.” (Ibid)
“A pencil is, by its very nature, softer, kinder than a pen. The pen speaks, the pencil whispers.” (72)
Идиосинкразия (idiosinkrazija) vs. Idiosyncrasy
In some of his books Nabokov likes to emphasize how paronomasia and wordplay can be overdone, to the point where the character, or even author, finds himself skipping about in a madhouse of dancing sounds and consonants. This is especially noticeable in Bend Sinister and in the index to his Gogol book.
In November, 1937, prior to the publication of his first novel published in the U.S.—Laughter in the Dark, in English—Nabokov filled out a publicity questionnaire for the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill.
In answer to one question he was thrown by the different meanings of what looks like the same word in two different languages. Here is the definition of idiosinkrazija in Russian: “an acute morbid sensitivity of the organism to certain substances or influences.” You can say, in Russian, “I have an idiosinkrazija to (morbid sensitivity to) the squeak of cotton wool.” In other words, cotton wool squeaking makes my skin crawl.
The most common meaning of the word idiosyncrasy in English is “a physiological or temperamental peculiarity.” When the questionnaire reads, “Idiosyncrasies, if any,” it is requesting a listing of odd or eccentric habits or characteristics, quirks. Nabokov might have mentioned, e.g., his synesthesia, or the way he cannot get started in the morning without the squeezed juice from two oranges. But reading the word in its Russian meaning, he answers, “The squeak of cotton wool, the touch of satin.” (133)
Coincidence
“Once, in London, I dreamt of a green wall and the very next day I was introduced to a person whose name turned out to be Greenwall. I never met him again, nor did that meeting in any way affect the course of my existence, but several years later I picked up a book from a stall and its title was Dreams and Their Meaning, by A. Greenwall.” (134)
“All writers that are worth anything are humorists. I’m not P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. The best tragedian is O’Neill. He is probably the worst writer. Dostoevsky’s slapstick is wonderful, but in his tragedy he is a journalist.” (310)
“Some of my readers have read my books better than I have written them.” (314)
“The highest virtue of a writer, of any artist, is to stimulate in others an inward thrill.” (256)
In 1959, back in Paris for the first time since 1940, Nabokov doesn’t like the way it smells. “It doesn’t smell like before. What has become of the smell of dead leaves? I imagine they treat the trees with pesticide and that kills the autumn odor, or God knows what.” (273)
Reminds me of Kiev in the fall of 1986, right after Chernobyl. You wonder about the irradiated leaves that fell from the horse chestnut trees downtown. Did they smell any different?
Three Kinds of Readers
“You have lowbrow readers, for whom only the sentimental side of a book counts; middlebrows, fond of ideas, and finally the highbrows, responsive to art.” (274)
A beautiful name, Dolores, “A name with a long veil, a name with liquid eyes.” (283)
“My pleasures are the most intense known to man: butterfly hunting and writing.” (319)
“One could define a pun as two words caught in flagrante.” (370)
“I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or dull or adorned with motley hues absent on its upperside . . . . one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the underside of a word—unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word.” (469)
“the good reader [when presented with “serious wordplay”] suddenly sees a completely new facet of an iridescent sentence.” (Ibid)
Natan Altman, "Landscape in Blue"
