Photo: Maria Singalevich
Text: Boris E. Mikirtumov
English translation: E. Gladkova, K. Zubinsky
A Literary Landscape: Nabokov's Vyra: a View Getting Clearer
[Here and in the following text Nabokov`s words are typped in italics]
1
Vyra and its outskirts, thick forest, meadows and bogs – this is what Nabokov loved more than anything else till the last day of his life. It was just a patch of land, a tiny bit, but it possessed such an attracting power that could encompass all the irresistible impressions that the true and genuine life can grant.
To love with all one's soul and leave the rest to fate . A simple rule that was followed by his mother, Elena Ivanovna Nabokova, nee Rukavishnikova (1876-1939).
Now remember - she used to say in a mysterious voice before sharing a cherished insight with her son: a lark ascending the curds-and-whey sky of a dull spring day, heat lightning…a small birds cuneate footprints on new snow. As if feeling that in a few years the tangible part of her world would perish, she cultivated an extraordinary consciousness of the various time marks distributed throughout our country place”, Batovo , as well as the neighboring manor of Vyra belonging to his mother-in law, and his brother's estate of Rozhdestveno , just over the river.
2
Manor of Batovo was damaged by fire in 1923, the house in Vyra – at the end of the war. The house in Rozhdestveno was on fire in modern times, in the spring of 1995.
Some parts of the stone basement remained from the house in Vyra, and later a small grove of deciduous trees grew over it (photo #3). The manor in Rozhdestveno was restored after the fire (photos #5 and 12).
This was an unusual, magnificent house , Vladimir Nabokov recalled. I particularly remember the cool and sonorous quality of the place, the checkerboard flagstones of the hall, a sarcophagus and an organ, the skylights and the upper galleries, porcelain animals, the colored dusk of mysterious rooms, and carnations and crucifixes everywhere…
3
This all, and a lot more, no longer exists.
As if feeling that in a few years the tangible part of her world would perish,she cultivated an extraordinary conciousness of the various time marks distributed throughout our country place.
Here is a foresight of Fedor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (“The Gift”)
These are the words of prophecy – because everything happened – both the fire, and reconstruction and tree-felling… everything is ruined, and the destruction is still going on.
4
…that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen . Her special tags and imprints became as dear as sacred to me as they were to her. There was the room which in the past had been reserved for …a chemical laboratory . there was the linden tree marking the spot by the side of the road that sloped up towards the village of Gryazno…where my father had proposed… (photo # 2)
“ The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and name-days used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors….Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech...the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.”
The viewpoint is found. I can now see clearly.
My memory brings everything back.
The lights go out, the curtain rises and a Russian summer landscape is disclosed: the bend of a river half in the shade because of the dark fir trees…. Names, dates and even faces have been hewn in the red clay of the steeper bank and swifts dark in and out of holes therein. (photo # 7).
5
“What it would be actually to see again my former surroundings? A painful issue…”
But I do not think.. , Vladimir Nabokov wrote, … I shall ever do it. I have been dreaming of it too idly and for too long.
6
In one episode, in “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”, he wrote: Don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of present . At the beginning of his autobiography he already says with definiteness about the illusory character of life that is quickly becoming the past. What we know from the stories it told us, is nothing but a mirage that we consider a landscape .
A Dream of the Motherland.
Vladimir Nabokov keeps getting back to his past, time and again. This has a truth and meaning of its own. You lose your immortality when you lose your memory .
To a joke, then. I owe my first gleam of complete consciousness. - Vladimir Nabokov recalls.
On July, 21, 1902, my father, just for fun, put on his regiment's uniform. But now my father attire the resplendent uniform of the Horse Guards, with that smooth golden cell of cuirass burning upon his chest and back, came out like the sun…;
At that instant, I became acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year –old being, in hard white and gold, was my father. Between them, as they evenly progressed, I strutted, and trotted, and strutted again, from sun fleck to sun fleck, along the middle of a path, which I easily identify today with an alley of ornamental oaklings in the park of our country estate, Vyra…
Vladimir Nabokov, when he spoke of his mother, recalled how gently she treated all the landmarks of the past that were scattered all over her family manor. Mother's marks and notches were also cherished by the son, who inherited the memory of all that lavish and faraway life . Her special tags and imprints became as dear as sacred to me as they were to her.
There was the linden tree marking the spot , by the side of the road that sloped up toward the village Gryazno…where my father had proposed.
A linden tree was planted in that spot later, in commemoration of the event.
As late as in 2004 one could see that tree, old, crooked of age, and bent to the ground; it did not survive the cold winter that became its last one. The fallen trunk is now lying in the grass under the crown of another linden tree.
On a high stone basement (its remains can still be seen here and there) rested an old wooden house … a large, sturdy and extraordinarily house… painted light-green, with patterned grooves under the roof. It looked cheerfully with the two eyes of its porches upon the park's margin.
On the remains of the stone basement a small grove of deciduous trees sprang up with time.
A branch of lilac in the foreground is the sign of Nabokov's invisible presence. It is not fortuitous that lilac is often mentioned as a part of landscape in his prose. Lilac ( siren , in Russian) and the color of lilac is an indication of the author's presence. A trace that Nabokov-Sirin left after himself (his first books were published under the pseudonym Sirin).
Lilac is the marking feature of Russian gardens, its spring magnificence…
Nabokov could have said those words about himself, and had a reason to say them.
When I first met Tamara…she was fifteen, and I was a year older . Around us the Vyra summer flowed, as if nothing had happened...
She was short and a trifle on the plump side but very graceful, with her slim ankles and supple waist…
Seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time, the beauty of her face is as near and as glowing as ever….
… Tamara, on the points of her toes, trying to pull down a racemose brunch in order to pick its puckered fruit.
We lost ourselves in mossy woods and bathed in a fairy-tale cove and swore eternal love by the crowns of flowers that, like all little Russian mermaids, she was so fond of weaving.
5. The Manor House in Rozhdestveno (uncle Vassily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov. 1872-1916 ãã .)
On a steep grass-covered hill behind the river Oredezh, opposite of Vyra, there was a white-painted manor with pillars on the facade and the attic.
The manor was situated in the village of Rozhdestveno, 69 miles from St.-Petersburg. The owner of the manor was Vassily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov, who devised it to his favorite nephew, Vladimir Nabokov.
Vassily Ivanovich led the life of leisure. Pink-coated, he rode to hounds in England or Italy…wearing an opera cloak, he almost lost his life in an airplane crash on a beach near Bayonne.
When he died…he left me what would amount nowadays to a couple of million dollars and his country estate with its white-pillared mansion on a green escarped hill and its two thousand acres of wildwood and peatbog.
and still father downstream, the endless tumultuous flow …gave a spectator…the sensation of receding endlessly, as if this were the stern of time itself.
A terracotta-red riverside was reflected in the water…farther down its sinuous course, where the riparian swallows shot out of their holes in a steep clay embankment, it as deeply suffused with the reflections of great romantic firs (the fringe of my father's estate)
The cellars were filled with ice in late winter, after Epiphany frosts. Ivan Shmelev describes the ice-breaking on the river in these words: ”Some five people with crowbars stand at the ice floe edge and start hitting, time and again. Cracking and splashing sounds are heard, then the long ice flow starts giving in and heaving slightly; it is caught with sharp pike-poles and dragged onto the shore to break it up.
Hard and transparent chunks of ice remain till the summer, or even longer. Food is stored on them – cranberries, foxberries, sauerkraut, pickles in salt, various salted foods, chickens, fish.
At some distance the sluice of the water-mill hummed evenly; along the white folds of the falling water the floating pine trunks glowed with reddish gold.
In late August, on a gloomy day, little Luzhin was running up that path heavily.
Only today, on the day of their annual move from country to city…only today did he realize the full horror of the change…His daily morning walks with the governess…would never be repeated. Finished also were his agreeable after lunch musing the sofa, beneath the tiger rug…in exchange for all this came something new, unknown and therefore hideous, an impossible, unacceptable world where there would be five lessons from nine to three and a crowd of boys…
Little Luzhin … got up from the ground, found a familiar footpath and, stumbling over roots, started to run with vague vengeful thoughts of getting back to the manor: he would hide there, he would spend the winter there, subsisting on cheese and jam from the pantry.
The footpath meandered for ten minutes or so through the wood, descended to the river…and five minutes later there hove into sight the sawmill, its footbridge…and the path upward, and then-through the bare lilac bushes-the house .
11. A New Tennis Court (Elena Ivanovna, the Writer's Mother)
An excellent modern court had been built at the end of the new part of the park….I see her [mother] returning the ball into the net and stamping her little foot at the ball boy.
It was, I recollect, a splendid summer day and we played, played, played until all the twelve balls were lost.
But those were the words Timophei Pnin said to his step-son Viktor. You also will recollect the past with interest when old.
As I reached the top, my livid light flitted across the six-pillared white portico at the back of my uncle's mute shuttered manor…There, in a corner of ar ñ hed shelter…Tamara would be waiting perched on the broad parapet with her back to a pillar.
The red Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God was built in 1833. It is situated on the left-hand side of the Kiev highway, former Luga road, and is separated by the tributary of Oredezh, the river Gryaznaya, from the manor of Rozhdestveno that is situated opposite, on the other hill.
Late in the summer, in August, a holiday of Apple Spas (Transfiguration Day) is still held in Rozhdestveno. Ivan Shmelev (in “The Summer of God”), probably bringing back his childhood recollections, describes the holiday like this: “The church is crammed with people, the hot and thick air smells of fresh apples in a special way. Apples are everywhere, even in the choir-place… The priest, dressed in green and blue brocade, “the apple chasuble”, reads the sermon of fruit and grapes and starts to sprinkle apples with holy water. Sextons give an apple to every person. Everyone eats an apple with a cheerful air, as if it was a party at a friends' place…”
Carrara marble vault was built by Ivan Rukavishnikov (1841-1901), the grandfather of Vladimir Nabokov, for his son Vladimir, the family's favorite, who died young (1870-1886 ãã .). After his son, Ivan Rukavishnikov himself, and his wife, were buried in that vault.
Ivan Vassilyevich Rukavishnikov was “an old-fashion country landlord, a chip off the old block”, a passionate theatre-lover, a tyrant who was stern on his son, a sensitive and delicate boy Vassily, the uncle of Vladimir Nabokov, who devised the manor of Rozhdestveno to the writer.
Olga Nikolayevna Rukavishnikova, nee Kozlova (1845-1901), the wife of Ivan Vassilyevich and the grandmother of Vladimir Nabokov, was the daughter of the first President of the Russian Emperor's Medical Academy. She was interested in natural sciences and arranged a chemical laboratory in one of the rooms of Vyra mansion.
Vladimir Nabokov recollects funny duels he had with his cousin at the “grande allee” in Batovo. The magnificient alley, planted with linden trees and birches, where Ryleev had duel with Pushkin, according to the family legend.
In his comments to “Eugene Onegin” novel, Vladimir Nabokov expressed his supposition, that duel took place in time between 6 th and 9 th of May the 1820 at the Batovo manor belonged to Ryleev's mother. Ryleev retold the rumor that according to the Tzar's order, count Miloradovich whipped Pushkin at the Secret Chansellery of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Pushkin supposedly called Ryleev to the duel, A.Delvig and P.Yakovlev were seconds.
According to the Vladimir Nabokov comments, Batovo manor belonged to his grandparents – Dmitry Nabokov (1826-1904), Minister of Justice at the court of Alexander II and Alexander III and Maria Ferdinandovna, nee baroness fon Korf. Vladimir Nabokov recollects indispensable summer journeys to Batovo by tarantass, char-a-banc or automobile, the forest path beyond Batovo, known as “Hanged-man's Path”, the favourite walk place of the Ryleev's “Hanged man” himself.
An upright candle, a lonely and splendid queen's-qulliflower, “a bog orchid” opens in the twilight, literally soaking the butterflies who drink its nectar, with its odor.
An old name of orchid is “satiricon”, as it was considered an aphrodisiac, an excitant means in the ceremony of courtship.
The wild orchid is one of favorite flowers of Ada, the eternal beloved of the main character of the novel “Ada, or Ardor”
The queen's-qulliflower - “ mauve shade of Monsieur Proust”. In the chapter “Love of Svan”, Svan's lover, Odetta, pretended that the flower looked like something obscene to her (probably, a sign of female identity).
And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their foodplants. This is ecstasy….
In the north of Russia, the end of July already smells a bit like autumn. A small yellow leaf accidentally falls off a birch-tree; the mowed fields already look vacant and light in the autumn's way.
And the sky is all blue, full of light, and cherishes the ground…
… a distant summer in the dreamland of Russia…A V-shaped flight of migrating cranes; their tender moan melting in a turquoise-blue sky high above a tawny birch-grove…
