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Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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mention it only because this was one of the few salons that my unsociability deigned to frequent. Iris helped with the sandwiches. I smoked my pipe and observed the feeding habits of two major novelists, three minor ones, one major poet, five minor ones of both sexes, one major critic (Demian Basilevski), and nine minor ones, including the inimitable “Prostakov-Skotinin,” a Russian comedy name (meaning “simpleton and brute”) applied to him by his archrival Hristofor Boyarski.
The major poet, Boris Morozov, an amiable grizzly bear of a man, was asked how his reading in Berlin had gone, and he said: “
Nichevo
” (a “so-so” tinged with a “well enough”) and then told a funny but not memorable story about the new President of the Union of
Emigré
Writers in Germany. The lady next to me informed me she had adored that treacherous conversation between the Pawn and the Queen about the husband and would they really defenestrate the poor chess player? I said they would but not in the next issue, and not for good: he would live forever in the games he had played and in the multiple exclamation marks of future annotators. I also heard—my hearing is almost on a par with my sight—snatches of general talk such as an explanatory, “She is an Englishwoman,” murmured from behind a hand five chairs away by one guest to another.
All that would have been much too trivial to record unless meant to serve as the commonplace background, at any such meeting of exiles, against which a certain reminder flickered now and then, between the shoptalk and the tattle—a line of Tyutchev or Blok, which was cited in passing, as well as an everlasting presence, with the familiarity of devotion and as the secret height of art, and which ornamented sad lives with a sudden cadenza coming from some celestial elsewhere, a glory, a sweetness, the patch of rainbow cast on the wall by a crystal paperweight we cannot locate. That was what my Iris was missing.
To return to the trivia: I recall regaling the company with one of the howlers I had noticed in the “translation” of
Tamara
. The sentence
vidnelos’ neskol’ko barok
(“several barges could be seen”) had become
la vue était assez baroque
. The eminent critic Basilevski, a stocky, fair-haired old fellow in a rumpled brown suit, shook with abdominal mirth—but then his expression changed to one of suspicion and displeasure. After tea he accosted me and insisted gruffly that I had made up that example of mistranslation. I remember answering that, if so, he, too, might well be an invention of mine.
As we strolled home, Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to put up with her deliberateinsularity but implored her to cease announcing
à la ronde:
“Please, don’t mind me: I love the sound of Russian.”
That
was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but beautifully printed.
“I am going to make reparations,” she gaily replied. “I’ve never been able to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only one—and you refused to teach me, because you were busy, because you were tired, because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I’ve discovered at last someone who speaks both languages, yours and mine, as two natives in one, and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In fact it’s her own suggestion.”
Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of a
leytenant
Starov (Christian name unimportant), who had served under General Wrangel and now had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, as fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or “adopted nephew” (whatever that meant), he was said to be. He was a dark-eyed, dark-complexioned man, three or four years my senior; I thought him rather handsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the civil war had left him with
The major poet, Boris Morozov, an amiable grizzly bear of a man, was asked how his reading in Berlin had gone, and he said: “
Nichevo
” (a “so-so” tinged with a “well enough”) and then told a funny but not memorable story about the new President of the Union of
Emigré
Writers in Germany. The lady next to me informed me she had adored that treacherous conversation between the Pawn and the Queen about the husband and would they really defenestrate the poor chess player? I said they would but not in the next issue, and not for good: he would live forever in the games he had played and in the multiple exclamation marks of future annotators. I also heard—my hearing is almost on a par with my sight—snatches of general talk such as an explanatory, “She is an Englishwoman,” murmured from behind a hand five chairs away by one guest to another.
All that would have been much too trivial to record unless meant to serve as the commonplace background, at any such meeting of exiles, against which a certain reminder flickered now and then, between the shoptalk and the tattle—a line of Tyutchev or Blok, which was cited in passing, as well as an everlasting presence, with the familiarity of devotion and as the secret height of art, and which ornamented sad lives with a sudden cadenza coming from some celestial elsewhere, a glory, a sweetness, the patch of rainbow cast on the wall by a crystal paperweight we cannot locate. That was what my Iris was missing.
To return to the trivia: I recall regaling the company with one of the howlers I had noticed in the “translation” of
Tamara
. The sentence
vidnelos’ neskol’ko barok
(“several barges could be seen”) had become
la vue était assez baroque
. The eminent critic Basilevski, a stocky, fair-haired old fellow in a rumpled brown suit, shook with abdominal mirth—but then his expression changed to one of suspicion and displeasure. After tea he accosted me and insisted gruffly that I had made up that example of mistranslation. I remember answering that, if so, he, too, might well be an invention of mine.
As we strolled home, Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to put up with her deliberateinsularity but implored her to cease announcing
à la ronde:
“Please, don’t mind me: I love the sound of Russian.”
That
was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but beautifully printed.
“I am going to make reparations,” she gaily replied. “I’ve never been able to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only one—and you refused to teach me, because you were busy, because you were tired, because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I’ve discovered at last someone who speaks both languages, yours and mine, as two natives in one, and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In fact it’s her own suggestion.”
Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of a
leytenant
Starov (Christian name unimportant), who had served under General Wrangel and now had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, as fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or “adopted nephew” (whatever that meant), he was said to be. He was a dark-eyed, dark-complexioned man, three or four years my senior; I thought him rather handsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the civil war had left him with
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