The two sinister ruffians who attacked P. N. Milyukov at a public lecture in Berlin on March 28, 1922, had planned to assassinate him, not my father; but it was my father who shielded his old friend from their pistol bullets and while vigorously knocking down one of the assailants was fatally shot by the other.
I wish to submit that at a time when in so many eastern countries history has become a joke, this precise beam of light upon a precious detail may be of some help to the next investigator.
5 TO THE EDITOR OF ENCOUNTER
published February, 1967
Sir,
I welcome Freud's «Woodrow Wilson» not only because of its comic appeal, which is great, but because that surely must be the last rusty nail in the Viennese Quack's coffin.
6 TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW STATESMAN
Pushkin and Byron
published November 17, 1967
Sir,
Mr. Pritchett (NS, 27 Oct.) says he would have liked Mr. Magarshack to tell him in what language Pushkin read Byron and other English authors. I do not know Mr. Magarshack's work or works, but I do know that since neither he, nor anybody else, could answer Mr. Pritchett without dipping into me, a vicious spiral is formed with an additional coy little coil supplied by Mr. Prichett's alluding to the «diverting» article I published in Encounter (Feb. 1966). If, however, your reviewer would care to combine the diverting with the instructive I suggest he consult the pages (enumerated in the index to my work on Eugene Onegin under Pushkiniana, English) wherein 1 explain, quite clearly, that most Russians of Pushkin's time, including Pushkin himself, read English authors in French versions.
By a pleasing coincidence the same issue of your journal contains another item worth straightening out. Mr. Desmond MacNamara, writing on a New Zealand novel, thinks that there should be coined a male equivalent of «nymphet» in the sense I gave it. He is welcome to my «faunlet», first mentioned in 1955 (Lolita, Chapter 5). How time flies! How attention flags!
7
Answer cabled on March 13, 1969, to William Honon who had asked me, for quotation in Esquire magazine, what I would like to hear an astronaut say when landing on the moon for the first time.
Published in the July, 1969 issue of Esquire
I WANT A LUMP IN HIS THROAT TO OBSTRUCT THE WISECRACK
8
Answer cabled July 3, 1969, to Thomas Hamilton, who had asked me, for publication in The New York Times, what the moon landing means to me. Published *** 1969, with a disastrous misprint in the seventh word.
«TREADING THE SOIL OF THE MOON PALPATING ITS PEBBLES TASTING THE PANIC AND SPLENDOR OF THE EVENT FEELING IN THE PIT OF ONES STOMACH THE SEPARATION^ FROM TERRA THESE FORM THE MOST ROMANTIC SENSATION AN EXPLORER HAS EVER KNOWN»
9 TO THE EDITOR OF Time MAGAZINE
published on January 18, 1971
I find highly objectionable the title of the piece («Profit without Honor», December 21, 1970) on the musical adaptation of Lolita as well as your sermonet on the scruples that I once happened to voice concerning its filming (« . . . to make a real twelve-year-old girl play such a part would be sinful and immoral. . . ). When cast in the title role of Kubrick's neither very sinful nor very immoral picture, Miss Lyon was a wellchaperoned young lady, and I suspect that her Broadway successor will be as old as she was at the time. Fourteen is not twelve, 1970 is not 1958, and the sum of $150,000 you mention is not correct.
10 TO JOHN LEONARD, ЕDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
published on November 7, 1971
I seek the shelter of your columns to help me establish the truth in the following case:
A kind correspondent Xeroxed and mailed me pp. 154162 referring to my person as imagined by Edmund Wilson in his recent work Upstate.* [* Upstate. Records and Recollections of Northern New York. 386 pages. Farrar. Straus and Giroux.]
Since a number of statements therein wobble on the brink of libel, I must clear up some matters that might mislead trustful readers.
First of all, the «miseries, horrors, and handicaps» that he assumes I was subjected to during forty years before we first met in New York are mostly figments of his warped fancy. He has no direct knowledge of my past. He has not even bothered to read my Speak, Memory, the records and recollections of a happy expatriation that began practically on the day of my birth. The method he favors is gleaning from my fiction what he supposes to be actual, «real-life» impressions and then popping them back into my novels and considering my characters in that inept light — rather like the Shakespearian scholar who deduced Shakespeare's mother from the plays and then discovered allusions to her in the very passages he had twisted to manufacture the lady. What surprises me, however, is not so much Wilson's aplomb as the fact that in the diary he kept while he was my guest in Ithaca he pictures himself as nursing feelings and ideas so vindictive and fatuous that if expressed they should have made me demand his immediate departure.
A few of the ineptitudes I notice in these pages of Upstate are worth considering here. His conviction that my insistence on basic similarities between Russian and English verse is «a part of [my] inheritance of [my] father . . . champion of a constitutional monarchy for Russia after the liritish model» is too silly to refute; and his muddleheaded and ill-informed description of Russian prosody only proves that he remains organically incapable of reading, let alone understanding, my work on the subject. Equally inconsistent with facts — and typical of his Philistine imagination — is his impression that at parties in our Ithaca house my wife «concentrated» on me and grudged «special attention to anyone else».
A particularly repulsive blend of vulgarity and naivete is reflected in his notion that I must have suffered «a good deal of humiliation», because as the son of a liberal noble I was not «accepted (!) by the strictly illiberal nobility» — where? when, good God? — and by whom exactly, by my uncles aunts? or by the great grim boyars haunting a plebeian's fancy?
I am aware that my former friend is in poor^health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins. Indeed, the publication of those «old diaries» (doctored, I hope, to fit the present requirements of what was then the future), in which living persons are but the performing poodles of the diarist's act, should be subject to a rule or law that would require some kind of formal consent from the victims of conjecture, ignorance, and invention.
11 TO JOHN LEONARD, EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
published March 5, 1972