LUCIE LEON NOEL
The extent to which I was concerned with the fragility of my English at the time of my abandoning Russian in 1939 may be gauged by the fact that even after Mrs. Leon had gone over the manuscript of my Sebastian Knight in Paris where it was written, and I had moved to the USA, I begged the late Agnes Perkins, the admirable Head of the English Department at Wellesley, to assist me in reading the galleys of the book (bought for $150 in 1941, by New Directions), and that later, another kind lady, Sylvia Berkman, checked the grammar of my first English stones that appeared in The Atlantic in the early forties.
1 am sorry that Lucie Leon in her amiably modulated «Playback» does not speak more than she does of her brother Alex Ponizovski of whom I was very fond (I particularly like recalling the streak of quiet eccentricity that endeared him to fellow students at Cambridge, such as the time he casually swallowed the contents of a small bottle of ink that happened to be within reach while we sat and talked by the fire). In her account of a dinner with Janies Joyce in Paris, I found it refreshing to be accused of bashfulness (after finding so frequently in the gazettes complaints of my «arrogance»); but is her impression correct? She pictures me as a timid young artist; actually I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid awareness of what I had already done for Russian letters preventing me from feeling awed in the presence of any living writer. (Had Mrs. Leon and I met more often at parties she might have realized that I am always a disappointing guest, neither inclined nor able to shine socially.)
Another little error occurs in the reference to the palindrome that I wrote in her album. There was nothing new about a reversible sentence in Russian: the anonymous sandglass «a roza upala na lapu Azora» («and the rose fell upon Azor's paw») is as familiar to children as, in another nursery, «able was I ere I saw Elba». The first line of my Kazak is, in fact, not mine (I think it was given me by the late Vladimir Piotrovski, a wonderfully skillful poet); what I claimed was new referred to my expanding the palindrome into a rhymed quatrain with its three last verses making continuous sense in spite of each being reversible.
IRWIN WEIL
Curiously enough, the note appended to my Kazak by Irwin Weil (who contributes an interesting essay on my «Odyssey» elsewhere in the volume) also requires correction. His statement that «the third and fourth lines are each palindromes if one excludes the last [?] syllables» is quite wrong; all four lines are palindromes, and no «last syllables» have to be excluded.* Especially regrettable is Mr. Weil's mistranslation of one of them. He has confused the Russian word for aloes (a genus of plant) with aloe, which means «red» or «rosy», and that, too, is mistranslated, becoming «purple»!
* This error is due to a faulty transcription of the palindrome on p. 218 of TriQuarterly 17. The Russian word rvat', the first word of line four, has been placed at the end of line three. The errors in the transcription and note (p. 217) will be corrected in the paperback edition of the volume, to be published this fall by Simon and Schuster.
I must also question an incomprehensible statement in Mr. Weil's article «Odyssey of a Translator». The Russian lawyer E. M. Kulisher may well have been «an old acquaintance» of my father's, but he was not «close to the Nabokov family» (I do not remember him as a person) and I have never said anywhere what Mr. Weil has me indicate in the opening paragraph of his article.
MORRIS BISHOP
My old friend Morris Bishop (my only close friend on the campus) has touched me very deeply by his recollections of my stay at Cornell. I am assigning an entire chapter to it in my Speak On, Mnemosyne, a memoir devoted to the 20 years I spent in my adopted country, after dwelling for 20 years in Russia and for as many more in Western Europe. My friend suggests that I was bothered by the students' incompetence in my Pushkin class. Not at all. What bothered and angered me was the ineptitude of the system of Scientific Linguistics at Cornell.
ROSS WETZSTEON
I remember most of the best students in my Cornell classes. Mr. Wetzsteon was one of them. My «Bleak House diagram», which he recalls so movingly, is preserved among my papers and will appear in the collection of lectures (Bleak House, Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, etc.) that I mean to publish some day. It is strange to think that never again shall I feel between finger and thumb the cool smoothness of virgin chalk or make that joke about the «gray board» (improperly wiped), and be rewarded by two or three chuckles (RW? AA? NS?).
JULIAN MOYNAHAN
Mr. Moynahan in his charming «Lolita and Related Memories» recalls his professor of Russian, the late Dr. Leonid Strakhovski (most foreign-born lecturers used to be «doctors»). I knew him, he did not really resemble my Pnin. We met at literary parties in Berlin half a century ago. He wrote verse. He wore a monocle. He had no sense of humor. He dwelt in dramatic detail on his military and civil adventures. Most of his yarns had a knack of fading out at the critical point. He had worked as a trolley car driver and had run over a man. The rowboat in which he escaped from Russia developed a leak in the middle of the Baltic. When asked what happened then, he would wave a limp hand in the Russian gesture of despair and dismissal.
ELLENDEA PROFFER
Ellendea Proffer's report on my Russian readers is both heartening and sad. «All Soviet age groups», she observes, «tend to feel that literature has a didactic function». This marks a kind of dead end, despite a new generation of talented people. «Zhalkiy udel (piteous fate)», as the Literaturnaya Gazeta says a propos de bottes (March 4, 1970).
STANLEY ELKIN
Several passages in Mr. Elkin's «Three Meetings», a parody of an «I remember . . «. piece, are extremely funny, such as the farcical variety of repetition or the casual reference to the «lovely eggal forms» he and I encountered on «an expedition up the Orinoco». And our third meeting is a scream.
ROBERT P. HUGHES
Mr. Hughes in his «Notes on the Translation of Invttatton to a Beheading» is one of the few critics who noticed the poetry of the Tamara terraces with their metamorphosed tamaracks. In the trance of objectivity which the reading of the festschrift has now induced in me, I am able to say that Mr. Hughes' discussion of the trials and triumphs attending that translation is very subtle and rewarding.
CARL R. PROFFER
Mr. Proffer, who discusses another translation, that of my much older Korol', Dama, Valet, tackles a more ungrateful task, first because King, Queen, Knave «does not surmount its original weaknesses», and secondly because revision and adaptation blur one's interest in faithfulnesses. He wonders what «worse sins» (than planning the murder of his uncle) cowardly and brutal Franz could have committed between the twenties and sixties in Germany, but a minute's thought should reveal to the reader what the activities of that type of man could have been at the exact center of the interval. Mr. Proffer ends his «A New Deck for Nabokov's Knaves» by saying he expects the English version of Mashenka to be quite different from the Russian original. Expectation has been the undoing of many a shrewd gambler.