The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage International) by Vladimir Nabokov

Author:Vladimir Nabokov [Nabokov, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE ADMIRALTY SPIRE

YOU will please pardon me, dear Madam, but I am a rude and straightforward person, so I’ll come right out with it: do not labor under any delusion: this is far from being a fan letter. On the contrary, as you will realize yourself in a minute, it is a rather odd little epistle that, who knows, might serve as a lesson of sorts not only for you but for other impetuous lady novelists as well. I hasten, first of all, to introduce myself, so that my visual image may show through like a watermark; this is much more honest than to encourage by silence the incorrect conclusions that the eye involuntarily draws from the calligraphy of penned lines. No, in spite of my slender handwriting and the youthful flourish of my commas, I am stout and middle-aged; true, my corpulence is not flabby, but has piquancy, zest, waspishness. It is far removed, Madam, from the turndown collars of the poet Apukhtin, the fat pet of ladies. But that will do. You, as a writer, have already collected these clues to fill in the rest of me. Bonjour, Madame. And now let’s get down to business.

The other day at a Russian library, relegated by illiterate fate to a murky Berlin alleyway, I took out three or four new items, and among them your novel The Admiralty Spire. Neat title—if for no other reason than that it is, isn’t it, an iambic tetrameter, admiraltéyskaya iglá, and a famous Pushkinian line to boot. But it was the very neatness of that title that boded no good. Besides, I am generally wary of books published in the backwoods of our expatriation, such as Riga or Reval. Nevertheless, as I was saying, I did take your novel.

Ah, my dear Madam, ah, “Mr.” Serge Solntsev, how easy it is to guess that the author’s name is a pseudonym, that the author is not a man! Every sentence of yours buttons to the left. Your predilection for such expressions as “time passed” or “cuddled up frileusement in Mother’s shawl,” the inevitable appearance of an episodic ensign (straight from imitations of War and Peace) who pronounces the letter r as a hard g, and, finally, footnotes with translations of French clichés, afford sufficient indication of your literary skill. But all this is only half the trouble.

Imagine the following: suppose I once took a walk through a marvelous landscape, where turbulent waters tumble and bindweed chokes the columns of desolate ruins, and then, many years later, in a stranger’s house, I come across a snapshot showing me in a swaggering pose in front of what is obviously a pasteboard pillar; in the background there is the whitish smear of a daubed-in cascade, and somebody has inked a mustache on me. Where did the thing come from? Take away this horror! The dinning waters I remember were real, and, what is more, no one took a picture of me there.

Shall I interpret the parable for you? Shall

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