Nabokov family letters, 1906 - 1986

The collection consists of materials related to Vladimir Nabokov that were collected by Dave Barbor. It includes letters written by Nabokov (1946-1964), his father (1906), and his cousin, Nicolas Nabokov (to Misia Sert, 1932). It also includes letters written by Véra Nabokov to Irving P. Lazar (1971), a letter from Véra Nabokov to Dave Barbor (1986), and a letter written from Dmitri Nabokov to Dave Barbor (1986). It also includes newsclippings (1929-1973), a typescript of a musical version of Lolita by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry (1970), a typescript by Nabokov in German written under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin ("Das Grauen," 1928), and some miscellaneous materials.

A friend once questioned the purpose of collecting rare books: “With art you’re able to enjoy it on your walls; with books the work just sits on a shelf, and the thing doesn’t exist until it’s taken down and read.”

As a collector of both I answered that the instinct is pretty much the same: the possession of a rare signed work by a maker about whom one is passionate; having at hand such a work enhances one’s connection to the artist or writer.

Studying Russian at Georgetown in the early 1960s I was introduced to Nabokov through his translations of “The Song of Igor’s Campaign” and “A Hero of Our Time.” Simultaneously I began discovering his fiction on my own and with several classmates: the short stories, the novels in print at the time, the autobiography which was then called “Conclusive Evidence.” Friends and I played word games with passages from “Lolita” (e.g. “Between a ______ and a ______, Lolita would always plump for the former.” Answer: “Between a hamburger and a Humburger.”)

I made a pilgrimage to Montreux in 1975 with the intention of amiably intercepting Nabokov at the kiosk where he was known to buy his morning papers (the Montreux Palace, where he lived, had a strict policy of discouraging fans stalking Nabokov in the hotel itself). He never showed up. I learned later that he’d taken a serious tumble earlier that spring while butterfly hunting in the hills above Montreux, a fall from which he never fully recovered.

In 1980 I began a correspondence with his widow while working in foreign rights and later as an editor at Doubleday. (Rather, Mrs. Nabokov herself must have begun the correspondence in pursuit of information about a translation issue I can no longer recall.) However it began, it developed into a warm and frequent exchange with the exception of a glitch which occurred after I sent Mrs. Nabokov a proposed new jacket for “A Hero of Our Time.” She quickly wrote back in high dudgeon asking if I understood that the original design by Edward Gorey was based on a painting by Lermontov. As a peace offering after a trip to Leningrad in 1982, I sent her photos I’d taken of the Nabokov town house on Bol’shaya Morskaya (then Herzen Street) which she gratefully acknowledged, thanking me somewhat presciently for “the pictures of St Petersburg.” On that same trip I smuggled into the Soviet Union copies of “Speak Memory” and “Lolita” which I left behind in hotel rooms throughout the country hoping at least some of them would find readers.

In the same year I offered Dmitri Nabokov a contract on behalf of Doubleday’s Anchor Books to visit the Soviet Union and record his impressions on visiting the Nabokov town house in Leningrad, the country estates nearby, other locations which figure so indelibly in “Speak Memory.” He politely declined, “I do not think I could make a valid comparison between the Russia I know only through my father and the dreary Russia of today.” I last saw Dmitri in 1986 at a publication party for “The Enchanter” where he interrupted a conversation he was having with William Buckley, Jr to thank me for my kindness to his mother.

Several books in the collection which have the most personal value are ones that have no material value at all:

A copy from my Georgetown days of “A Hero of Our Time” which I see myself holding in my hands in the fall of 1964 on a bench overlooking Morningside Park, lost “in the ruins of knowledge” to use a locution from “Pnin”. I realized at that moment that I was hopelessly out of my element in New York City, matriculating in a PhD program at Columbia.

A foul matter copy of “Nabokov’s Dozen,” a first edition of the story collection which had been heartlessly torn apart in order to offset a new paperback edition. I rescued it from the trash at Doubleday. That collection was the first fiction of Nabokov’s I’d ever read and contains two of my favorite stories, “The Vane Sisters” and “Signs and Symbols.”

3) A somewhat worn copy of the first Soviet edition of Nabokov’s Russian translation of “Lolita” (Izvestia, 1989), given to me in 1990 or 1991 by the kindly and terminally ill managing editor of Inostrannaya Literatura on his last visit to New York. He was sent to me by Lynn Franklin, an agent for Russian authors. I deeply regret that I no longer recall the dear man’s name. Among the notable rare editions are a copy of Nabokov’s first published novel, “Mashen’ka” (“Mary”), brought out in 1926 by the emigre publishing house Slovo, along with the first translation of that novel, or any Nabokov novel, “Sie kommt—kommit sie?” (Ullstein Verlag, 1928). The German translation contains Nabokov’s dedication to Vera’s close friend, Lisbet Thompson, whose husband Bertram was an African-American scientist, academic, and businessman whom Nabokov thought one of the most interesting men he’d ever met; the two couples remained life-long friends. The appearance of my copy of “Mashen’ka” bothered me so that I sought out advice from a paper conservator on how to restore it. He advised against cosmetic intervention which would ruin the book’s value. We agreed that he would disassemble it, wash the pages, then re-bind it with linen thread instead of the steel staples which had originally been used. Had he re-bound the book with the original steel staples, he told me, the book could never be opened again.

“Kamera Obskura,” the original Russian version of “Laughter in the Dark,” which was published in 1933 simultaneously in Paris and Berlin, was the acquisition that perhaps excited me most. A copy hadn’t been on the market for decades and its cover design - a sprocketed strip of film - intrigued and drew me. Nabokov had written the novel, his closest to a potboiler, very likely with a film deal in mind. When my copy arrived from a Montreal bookseller I began reading the first page in Russian and soon realized that the opening was entirely different from Nabokov’s own eventual English translation. The novel was his first to be translated into French (“Chambre Obscure,” Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1934) by Nabokov’s Paris agent, Doussia Ergaz, whose translation was probably used in turn by Winifred Roy as the basis for the first English translation of a Nabokov novel (“Camera Obscura,” London: Long John Ltd, 1935). Nabokov regretted the English version “being insufficiently revised by me.” The British edition was small, sold poorly, and the remaining copies stored in a warehouse were destroyed in the London Blitz of 1940. My copy of it is inscribed by Nabokov’s London representative, Otto Klement, who I discovered decades later was one of the screenwriters for the 1966 film “Fantastic Voyage.”

As for “Chambre Obscure,” Nabokov insisted from the start on having the right to revise the translations of his works into French, his third language. His deep involvement in his French translations, especially those of “Pale Fire” and “Ada,” led me to include French first editions in my collection. I imagine those translations, many published in deluxe “tirage de tete” editions on special paper, have his fingerprints all over them. In February 1957 a short excerpt of “Lolita” appeared in French in the Paris literary review “Les Lettres Nouvelles” whose editor was Maurice Nadeau, formerly literary critic for “Combat,” the Resistance newspaper. I believe this to be the first translated excerpt of “Lolita” and it caught Nabokov unaware. In a letter to M Nadeau of May 3, 1959, Nabokov asks apparently not for the first time who authorized its publication: “This affair is something of a mystery, and it must be cleared up before I can agree to your publishing in your review any more of my work.” Nabokov pursued the matter again in a letter of July 11, 1959 in which he also harangues Nadeau at length for his faulty translation of the short story “The Vane Sisters” in “Les Lettres Nouvelles.” Nabokov goes so far as to instruct Nadeau’s translator on what must be done to rectify the matter. Nabokov had closer relationships with other French publishers, including Goncourt Prize winner Jean Fayard to whom Nabokov inscribed the French copy of “Despair” (“La Meprise”) in my collection. His cousin, Ivan Nabokov, became a prominent editor in charge of acquiring foreign literature at Albin Michel and Plon with whom I occasionally had business during my years selling translation rights in works by American authors. Ivan was (and still is at 92) a charming, unassuming gentleman with something of the aristocratic bearing of Vladimir. He would often urge me to read his father’s memoir “Bagazh” after I had effused at too great length, I fear, about his cousin. His father, Nicolas Nabokov, was a prominent composer of symphonic and ballet music (“Union Pacific”) in Europe and America whose autograph letter of 1932 to Misia Sert is included in the collection.

I acquired my first ‘rare’ first edition, a copy of Nabokov’s eccentric study of Nikolai Gogol (New Directions, 1944), in the legendary New York bookstore Gotham Book Mart circa 1973. It had coffee stains on the front end paper and title page and cost $2.50. A decade later in the same store I encountered Nabokov’s brilliant and, unfortunately in the years to come, rogue biographer Andrew Field. When I told Field that I was in touch with Vera Nabokov he asked that I not mention his name. What had begun in the early sixties as a trusting relationship between author and aspiring biographer had devolved into one of mistrust bordering on paranoia on the part of Nabokov and Vera. As for “Nikolai Gogol,” thirty years later I had the funds to buy a beautiful rare first issue (with different jacket art) of the first edition with a pen & ink butterfly drawn by the author along with a Russian inscription to a mysterious Dr Dinkin. In a unique letter of Vera Nabokov to her husband - she later purposely destroyed virtually her entire correspondence to him - reproduced in the foreword to “Letters to Vera” (edited by Brian Boyd and Olga Voronina), there’s reference to a certain “D” who had performed an appendectomy on Dmitri in June 1944. Curious to pin down the identity of “D,” I wrote to Nabokov’s authorized biographer Brian Boyd who replied: “If we knew who D was, we would have said so. But it seems highly likely, given the proximity of the two dates, that it is your Dinkin. The only reference to him I have on my files is that he was on the presentation list for copies of Nikolay Gogol, in a letter to New Directions, 14 August 1944, which further closes the gap to Vera’s letter of June 1. All I can say is that it now seems highly likely D is Dinkin. Congratulations!” Such is my extremely minor contribution to Nabokov biographical scholarship…

The most valuable book in the collection in terms of dollars is probably Nabokov’s inscribed copy of “Ada” to Vera’s cousin Anna Feigin, with a pen & Ink and colored pencil butterfly drawing. ‘Anyutochka’, as Nabokov tenderly invokes her in his dedication, stood in for Vera’s mother once her parents separated; and for the next half century she more or less acted as surrogate mother to both Nabokov and Vera, giving them shelter, food, and money whenever and wherever needed - Berlin, Paris, or New York. In New York City she lived around the corner from where I now live until Vera fetched her to Montreux where she died in 1973. In that very exclusive, tight knit family, Anna Feigin seemed to me to constitute the fourth member. Nabokov’s signature, once elegantly articulated in both Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, by 1970 had become almost illegible as evidenced by his inscription in my copy of “Ada.” Once again, I turned to his biographer Brian Boyd for his take on the matter: “VN’s signature is just ‘V Nabokov’ in Cyrillic, as far as I can see, although with a big flourish at the end and with the final k and v almost disappeared in the stylization, so that it looks almost like ‘VNaboo’. It’s also cramped (left-to-right) handwriting. Reminds me of my own signature when I try to make it with a flourish, the motor habits get a little confused and I skip a letter and may or may not try to recover it, but not necessarily in the right way….And you’re right about the fourth member of that tight-knit family!”