Books in the Collection
Mayne Reid. The Headless Horseman: a Strange Tale of Texas. – London.: Richard Bentley, 1866
The adventure novel written by an Irish author and set in Texas is little known in the English-speaking world and still popular in Russia. Vladimir Nabokov read it in the original and translated it, not into Russian prose but into French verse as early as 1910 when he was 11 years old.
“The Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid (1818 – 1883), translated and simplified, was tremendously popular with Russian children at the beginning of this century, long after his American fame had faded. Knowing English, I could savor his Headless Horseman in the unabridged original. […] The edition I had (possibly a British one) remains in the stacks of my memory as a puffy book bound in red cloth, with a watery-gray frontispiece, the gloss of which had been gauzed over when the book was new by a leaf of tissue paper”.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
A Hero of Our Time
Lermontov M. A Hero of Our Time / Translated from Russian by Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov. – NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.
Книга из личной библиотеки автора.
«Было решено, что Дмитрий вместе с отцом будет переводить «Героя нашего времени». […] Набоков считал, что переводческая работа дисциплинирует Дмитрия – ведь именно в этом возрасте он сам переводил, под наблюдением и нажимом отца, «Кола Брюньона», – и к тому же позволит ему освоить более солидную профессию, нежели оперное пение. […] Но гонки на стареньком «эм-джи» влекли его [Дмитрия] куда сильнее, чем лавры переводчика. […] Набоков отмечал в дневнике, как мало продвинулся перевод, а чаще с отчаянием констатировал, что книга по-прежнему открыта на той же странице – это означало, что заканчивать работу ему придётся самому. […] К июлю [1956 г.] «Герой нашего времени» был переведён, и Набоков начал писать предисловие к роману»
Брайан Бойд, «Владимир Набоков: американские годы»
С годами, после завершения оперной карьеры, Дмитрий Владимирович Набоков стал профессиональным переводчиком, перу которого принадлежат переводы многих романов, рассказов и стихотворений своего отца на английский язык.
Eugene Onegin
A Novel in Verse by Alexandr Pushkin,
Translated from the Russian, with a commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov
Four volumes of Nabokov’s controversial translation and commentary to Eugene Onegin published by Bollingen Foundation in 1964 remains both an academic achievement and a fascinating reading.
The experience of annotating a poem is echoed in Pale Fire, in an inverted way.
The Luzhin Defence
В.Сирин. Защита Лужина. – Берлин: «Слово», 1930.
Защита Лужина, под псевдонимом «В. Сирин», печаталась в русском зарубежном журнале «Современные записки» в Париже, и тотчас вслед за этим вышла отдельной книгой в русском зарубежном издательстве «Слово» (Берлин, 1930). Брошюрованная – 234 стр., размером в 21 на 14 см – в матово-чёрной с золотым тисненым шрифтом обложке, книга эта теперь стала редкостью и, может быть, станет в дальнейшем ещё более редкой»
Публикация Защиты Лужина – первого настоящего шедевра Набокова – сразу сделала его имя знаменитым среди русской зарубежной аудитории. Роман никого не оставил равнодушным. Наиболее известна оценка Бунина: «Этот мальчишка выхватил пистолет и одним выстрелом уложил всех стариков, в том числе и меня». А вот как вспоминала о публикации романа Нина Берберова: «Я села читать эти главы, прочла два раза. Огромный, зрелый, сложный современный писатель был передо мной, огромный русский писатель, как Феникс, родился из огня и пепла революции и изгнания. Наше существование отныне получало смысл. Все мое поколение было оправдано».
Mary
Donated by Terry Myers.
Mary (Mashen’ka) was Nabokov’s first novel. Before that, he published a great number of poems and short stories.
“ When Mary appeared in English in 1970 readers enjoyed it for the echoes of Nabokov’s first love, the “Tamara” of the recently revised Speak,Memory (1966). But to Sirin’s first audience the novel was not autobiographical but a portrait of exile, “a novel of emigre life”, as the advertisements proclaimed”.
Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian Years
Korol, Dama, Valet (King, Queen, Knave)
Donated by Terry Myers.
This copy is the first edition of the novel and it comes from Nabokov’s own library. The autograph on the title page tells us that the copy was given by the author as a gift to Nikolai Kardakov, a friend of Nabokov and a fellow entomologist.
On the title page of the book Nabokov wrote a poem on butterflies that he called “an excerpt from a poem”. The poem was never published in any of Nabokov’s poetry collections.
As we know from Vera Nabokov’s letter to Terry Myers she knew nothing about the poem. Apparently, Nabokov never finished the poem in full and this is the only existing copy of the excerpt.
Les malheurs de Sophie
M-me La Comtesse de Segur. Les Malheurs de Sophie. – Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1902. – (Bibliotheque Rose Illustree)
Written by a Russian-born French writer, Les Malheurs de Sophie was another children’s book immensely popular in Russia in the late 19th - early 20th century.
Sophie de Segur was the daughter of Fyodor Rostopchin, the governor of Moscow at the time of the war with Napoleon. She spent most of her life in France married to a French aristocrat. Unlike Nabokov, she never wrote in Russian and became a prolific French writer.
“I rediscovered, in a chance nursery, those same “Bibliotheque Rose” volumes, with their stories about boys and girls who led in France an idealized version of the vie de chateau which my family led in Russia. The stories themselves (all those Les Petites Filles Modeles, Les Vacances) are, as Isee them now, an awful combination of preciosity and vulgarity; but in writing them the sentimental and smug Mme de Segur, nee Rostopchine, was Frenchifying the authentic surroundings of her Russian childhood which preceded mine by exactly one century”.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Samizdat
Samizdat is the word that used to be known to most Soviet citizens in the Soviet time. Literally it means “publishing on one’s own”.
Not a word by Vladimir Nabokov was officially published in the Soviet Union until 1986, the eve of the “glasnost” time. Nevertheless, many Russian readers had access to his writings thanks to the samizdat. The original copy was often brought to the country by foreign visitors or by those few Soviet citizens who could travel abroad.
The works were copied in many different ways – by photocopying, by typing (typewriters common in the Soviet Union could produce four carbon copies), even by hand. The volume of production of the underground scriptorium was overwhelming: even Nabokov’s collected works in nine volumes were published underground. Sometimes the book bindings were also made by hand.
Needless to say, all the samizdat work was done on the voluntary basis – the “publishers” charged nothing for their work. Moreover, their jobs or their academic careers were often at risk even though Nabokov’s works were not regarded as highly subversive as he never addressed political issues in a direct way.
The museum has a vast collection of samizdat copies of Nabokov’s works some of which have not only historical but also artistic value.
The Song of Igor’s Campaign
The Song of Igor’s Campaign / Translated by V. Nabokov. – NY: Vintage, 1960.
A book from Morris Bishop’s library. Donated by Terry Myers.
The book is Nabokov’s translation of the major Russian medieval epic better known to the international readers from Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor”. While European medieval literary motifs are visible in many Nabokov’s novels, Russian medieval heritage seemed to be of less importance to him before he started teaching Russian in the US. However, distant echoes of his study of the Russian medieval epic are present in Pale Fire where the history of the fictitious Zembla, a country bordering on Russia is told.
Newman E. An Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies and Moths
Newman E. An Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies and Moths / The figures drawn by George Willis, engraved by John Kirchner. – London: William Glaisner, 1870.
A book from V.D.Nabokov’s library. Donated by Terry Myers
This book was one of the many books on entomology in the family library and
one of the first books on butterflies that Nabokov read as child. The illustrations in the book are colored in pencil by a child’s hand and the inscription in pencil on the title page reads “coulored by W. Nabocow”. Many negative comments on the margins look exactly like Nabokov’s comments on books he read in his mature years.
“I must have been eight when, in a storeroom of our country house, among all kinds of dusty objects, I discovered some wonderful books acquitted in the days when my mother’s mother had been interested in natural science and had had a famous university professor of zoology (Shimkevich) give private lessons to her daughter.
[…] Still more exciting were the products of the latter half of the century – Newman’s Natural History of British Butterflies and Moths, Hoffman’s Die Gross-Schmetterlinge Europas, the Grand Duke Nikolay Mihailovich’s Memoires on Asiatic Lepidoptera (with incomparably beautiful figures painted by Kavrigin, Rybakov, Lang), Scudder’s stupendous work on the Butterflies of New England.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
