An Open Letter to Dmitri Vladimirovich

Amelia Glaser An Earnest Proposal to Dmitri Nabokov1 The damage, I fear, has been done. Dmitri Nabokov, after years of teasing his father’s readers, has announced the imminent publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished last manuscript, The Original of Laura, which has been sitting, we are told, in a Swiss safety deposit box, hostage to filial indecision. Early this year it seemed that Dmitri was close to carrying out Vladimir Nabokov’s deathbed wishes, thus spiting the maxim uttered by Mikhail Bulgakov’s devilish Woland in Master and Margarita that “manuscripts don’t burn.” The suspense story, as it has been narrated by bloggers, scholars and journalists for the past couple of months, continued to shift the devil from the shoulder inclined to burn the text to the shoulder inclined to capitalize on it. Those who have weighed in on Laura have gleefully changed their minds time and again. Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd, who has seen the novel and initially advised burning, publicly changed his mind. He recently told The Times reporter Stephanie Marsh, “It is very fragmentary, people shouldn’t expect to be swept away. He is doing some very brilliant things with the prose, the story just flashes by, the characters are rather unappealing. It seems a technical tour de force, just as Shakespeare’s later works where he is extending his own technique in very, very concentrated ways.”2 A more skeptical Vladimir Meskin, docent at the Moscow State Pedagogical University told Viktor Borzenko of Novye Izvestiia on April 28, 2008: “Once the author made his request, that meant that the publication of the text would ruin the overall system of his life’s work.” The Swiss safe, Meskin concludes, is the best possible place for the unfinished work. <…> Making Laura widely available will mean subjecting Nabokov to a new wave of imperfect criticism. Dmitri hinted at his apprehension about Nabokov critics in an interview with Suellen Stringer-Hye for the Nabokov Online Journal, “Of course, one of the most offensive critical cracks was that of certain dour post-Soviet pundits affirming that Lolita and other writings of Nabokov’s suggest a malignant contempt for America and all things American. Nothing could be further from the truth.” One is apt to be reminded of the final scene in Pale Fire, in which the critic and madman Kinbote snatches John Shade’s manuscript, and the latter is shot down, leaving the fate of his last masterpiece in imperfect hands. “My commentary to this poem,” Kinbote writes, “now in the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me.”3 The text that remains might be the work of a maniac, a genius, or some collaboration between the two, John Shades’ ghost (or the ghost of his child) reappearing to dictate changes to the text. Nabokov’s ghost, or the shadow of it, has also conversed with Dmitri. In a February 15, 2008, instalment of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Book Talk,” the host, Ramona Koval, cited an apparent change of heart: To wit, and quite independently of any words anyone might have wanted to put in my mouth or thoughts into my brain, I have decided that my father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself upon seeing me in my present situation and said, “Well, why don’t you mix the useful with the pleasurable? That is, say or do what you like but why not make some money on the damn thing?”4 But wait, Dmitri Vladimirovich – before you dash our hopes for Laura by publishing her, consider a proposal that would both adhere to the letter of your father’s request, and give his readers a taste of the last moments of his creativity. My solution, I believe, allows for both, throwing in a bit of healthy rebellion to boot. I say, translate the text (into whatever language you please). That is, change every word of the original without burning its content. Let translation save Laura and its mystery, not so much from the furnace, as from the kind of criticism that plagued your father at the end of his life. Precisely the uncertainty of translation – its invitation to doubt accuracy and meaning – would offer a glimpse of Nabokov’s poetic narrative, and an excuse for the failings of an unfinished plot. Dmitri Nabokov, upon graduating cum laude from Harvard, became an opera singer. His musical career did not eliminate his responsibility to a close-knit literary family, which included working with his father on a series of Russian-English translations – both his father’s works and samples from the Russian literary canon. “Nabokov naturally preferred his son to any other translator,” Boyd tells us in The American Years. “Dmitri accepted his father’s principle of literality and knew that an undulating or knobby Russian phrase should not be flattened into plain English. Where other translators often felt Nabokov’s exacting corrections and innumerable rephrasings a threat to their professional competence, Dmitri could simply welcome the improvements.”5 Four years ago, at an auction in Geneva, Dmitri, the last heir to Vladimir Nabokov’s estate and legacy, was forced to sell his family’s library. According to a May 6, 2004 New York Times article, among these was a copy of Despair, inscribed: “For Dmitri. From translator to translator. With love. Vladimir Nabokov. Papa. Montreux. 1966.”6 Ironically, it seems to have been a translation of his Russian stories, Details of a Sunset, in part, that kept Vladimir Nabokov from finishing Laura. The burden of translation indeed weighed heavy in Nabokov’s life, absorbing, delaying, but perhaps, at times, accounting for, the author’s genius. Walter Benjamin, who, in his 1923 “The Task of the Translator” set the tone for theories of translation that would dominate the past century, suggests that a translation adds to our understanding of the concept behind the original text, issuing out of a work’s afterlife: “For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life.”7 Which returns me to my plea: If it has been so painful to give Laura life, why not go straight for an afterlife? Lose the text in translation. Or rather, let us find it there. After all, as Boyd informs us, a provisional title for the novel was The Original of Laura: Dying is Fun. Solomonic wisdom? The Modern Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik has famously compared reading a translation to kissing a bride through her veil. Generations of readers would never know how thick the fabric is through which they are kissing Laura. But speculation would also force those critics who, driven by referential mania, have attempted to blend Nabokov’s past with his fiction, to take a step back, to consider the possibility of a translator’s faulty wording. Students of Nabokov would wonder whether Dmitri (or whoever has done the deed) has missed something, added something of his own, tricked them. Mystics would enjoy the possibility that Nabokov, appearing in dreams, dictated the translation himself. Hungry fans would read this book differently from the others, humbled by their obscured view. Granted, the translator may be left with nightmares of inadequacy, haunted by Nabokov’s compendium of criticism of his fellow translators. (Found in his posthumous Selected Letters 1940-77: “I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit;”8 “Paraphrases are related to the original text as dreams are to reality, and Miss Deitsche’s version is little more than a nightmare.”9) But in compensation for a daunting translator’s task, this rendition will never be compared to an original. To relieve the burden of responsibility, why not commission two translations, or three, or seventy-two? Once this is done, Dmitri Vladimirovich, burn Laura in good faith. Or tell us you did. The Creation, and Erasure, of Laura10 The dedication to The Original of Laura, or, Dying is Fun, is in Dmitri Nabokov’s hand: “To all the worldwide contributors of opinion, comment, and advice, of whatever its stripe, who imagined that their views, sometimes deftly expressed, might somehow change mine.”11 For the last few years Mr. Nabokov, son of the literary giant, has been on the receiving end of much eccentric, unsolicited advice. Should his father’s unfinished final novel be burned, as the author had requested before his death in 1977, or should the ailing author’s instructions, like the words of Kafka and Gogol before him, be ignored and his work spared? I too had my say, and Open Letters indulgently published it. My Solomonic two cents—publish a translation of the novel but burn the original—were intended to comment less upon the Nabokov estate than on a useful potential of translation. The semi-transparent veil of translation, I argued, might protect the deceased from ruthless misinterpretation. Two years later I am grateful to Dmitri Vladimirovich for his decision not only to publish Laura, but to publish it in just the form in which his father had abandoned it: in note-cards, facsimiles of the author’s stained originals, perforated for easy removal, reshuffling and contemplation. These cards are deciphered in typed footnotes so that, like the reader of Pale Fire, Laura’s reader must choose whether to begin with the upper or lower portion of each page. Reading Laura from start to finish (admittedly, the typed lower half), I was surprised at how captivated I became by the story, disjointed and confusing though it often is. And should a disgruntled Vladimir Nabokov return from the dead he could hardly rebuke his son who has been careful to discourage misinterpretation, not by obscuring Laura, but by publishing it in what could never be mistaken for a final draft. The book practically shouts, “interpret away, but you’ll never know how it ends.” Laura braids three narratives, the first of which chronicles the life of Flora, daughter of a photographer and a dancer, desired in childhood by one “incidental, but not unattractive” Hubert H. Hubert. (Unlike her distant cousin Lolita, who wanders into Humbert’s trap, Flora kicks Hubert in the groin, putting an early end to his advances.) The grown-up Flora is somewhat fickle and annoying. Her lover, the impressively fat, eminent neurologist Dr. Philip Wild, invents a fictional version of her named Laura, who flows seamlessly from Flora. <…> The creation of Laura, however, marks the disappearance of Flora. Wild, like his near-namesake Wilde’s foppish Dorian Gray, must choose between a portrait and its original. The third, most poignant, strip of narrative finds an author studying self-erasure, attempting to psychologically master death by visualizing his own slow disappearance. This author is Dr. Wild, presumably, though it’s impossible not to envision Nabokov. The chapter heading “Settling for a single line” teases the reader with an allusion to the Greek artist Apelles’ famous determination to go “no day without painting a line.” But Nabokov’s narrator refers to a single vertical line, which represents the protagonist’s body: “[A] simple vertical line across my field of inner vision could be chalked in an instant, and what is more I could mark lightly by transverse marks the three divisions of my physical self: legs, torso, and head.”12 The novel is heavy with sexual innuendo, from Flora’s conception, childhood, and translation into Laura, to the sheer physicality in Wild’s experimental self-erasure. If he cannot control the growth and disappearance of his flesh, Dr. Wild aims to at least preserve his carnal desire, through Laura, ad aeternum. By preserving Laura, he preserves “the mouth she made automatically while using that towel to wipe her thighs after the promised withdrawal.”13 If Philip Wild’s book is about sex, Nabokov’s Original is about art. It is about which gifts are preserved, and the artist’s loss of any say in the matter. Most of the characters in The Original of Laura are artists, and a great many have misplaced, miscalculated or misinterpreted their artistic gifts. <…> The most famous Nabokovian signposts appear on these cards. Devoted readers will appreciate the trademark wordplay, recognize the sophisticated pedophile, the game of chess and Pushkin’s Onegin. Annabel Lee, who haunts Humbert Humbert’s memory in Lolita, is transformed into Aurora Lee, a reminder of the Baltic Sea Cruiser, Avrora, from Nabokov’s native Petersburg, and a rhyming triplet with our doubled heroin FLaura. Annabel is, of course, on loan from Poe: For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.14 Dr. Philip Wild, too, has a moon-lit dream in which Aurora reveals her ambiguous sex— “At the height of your guarded ecstasy I thrust my cupped hand from behind between your consenting thighs and felt the sweat-stuck folds of a long scrotum and then, further in front, the droop of a short member.” 15 The unexpected male organ (which may shock the reader into discomfort, titillation, or confusion), beyond muddying the protagonist’s sexuality, hints at his oddly masturbatory pleasure of studying his own body. Lover and self, fille and phallus, become one and the same. Nabokov and Poe scholars will no doubt observe that Dr. Wild’s doubled muse, like Poe’s Annabel, is not “wife and bride” but “life and bride”. When confronted with Dr. Wild’s novel Flora cannot bring herself to open it. An acquaintance insists, ‘Oh, but I simply must find that passage for you. It’s not quite at the end. You’ll scream with laughter. It’s the craziest death in the world.’ 16 Vladimir Nabokov’s death, too, comes not quite at the end. As he wrote in his autobiography, “Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.” But if the walls of time closed for V. Nabokov in 1977, the gift of his note-cards to his survivors comes remarkably close to the kind of echo from the other side Nabokov’s characters strained to make heard—a deceased author narrates Transparent Things; the departed Humbert Humbert narrates Lolita through a diary; Cincinnatus C. leaves the arena following his own beheading. When I removed the cards (surely you didn’t expect me to leave them on their pages?), I’ll admit I was unable to glean much meaning beyond what I had gotten from their more legible, typed shadows. The odd spelling patterns, the Cyrilloid handwriting and many blotted out words distracted me from the sense of the novel. (However, the cavity left by the dislodged note-cards is a delightful little casket, a hiding place for a Fabergé egg or a resting place for a butterfly.) Shuffling the cards did little for the already charmingly fragmented plot. Having reached the limits of my imagination I solicited the help of 34 smart undergraduates who had only a few days earlier signed up for 10-weeks’ worth of Nabokov (not including Laura). Passing out the cards I asked how they would read them. Their answers were lucid and, unlike the referential mania I contracted in reading this book from front to back, showed fresh insight into Nabokov’s last lines. 1 First published in Open Letters Monthly, May 2008, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/may08proposal-to-nabokov/ 2 Stefanie Marsh, “Vladimir Nabokov, his masterpiece and the burning question,” The Times 14 February 2008, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3364183.ece?token=null&of fset=0. 3 Vladimir Nabokov, Novels, 1955-1962 (New York: Library of America, 1996) 2:655. 4 Ramona Koval, “Should Nabokov’s Unpublished Manuscript be Burned?” The Book Show, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) Radio, February 15, 2008 (Transcript available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2157977.htm) 5 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991), 377. 6 Lila Azam Zanganeh, “Butterflies and Other Bits of Nabokov’s Life, Dispersed to the Wind,” The New York Times, May 6, 2004. 7 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. I. 1913-1926, Ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press 2002), 254. 8 Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977, Ed. by Dmitri Nabokov, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1989), 41. 9 Ibid. 371-2. 10 First published in Open Letters Monthly, February 2010, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/lauranabokov/ 11 Dmitri Nabokov, “Acknowledgments” in Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (New York: Penguin, 2010) xix 12 Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (New York: Penguin, 2010) 137. 13 Ibid, 25. 14 Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (New York: Penguin, 2010) 15. 15 Ibid., 205. 16 Ibid., 227.