EDNOTE: In my strivings for ever greater
degrees of triviality, I share the following:
Chapter XIII of SPEAK MEMORY relates VN's years at
Cambridge. In section 3, VN writes of his encounters with "Nesbit" (a character
based in part on fellow student R.A. Butler) as an example of idealistic
"fellow travelers" who took an excessively benevolent view of Soviet Russia in
the early twenties. On p. 263, he writes "[Nesbit] maintained that
the reason for what he demurely called 'less variety of opinion' under the
Bolsheviks than in the darkest Tsarist days was 'the want of any tradition
of free speech in Russia,' a statement he got, I believe, from
the sort of fatuous 'Dawn in Russia' stuff that eloquent English and
American Leninists wrote in those years."
The words ('less variety of opinion'
& 'the want of any tradition of free speech in Russia,'
attributed to "Nesbit" are not "Nesbit's' but drawn by
VN verbatim from "Dawn in Russia" by American writer-journalist Waldo
Frank. The 1932 book (Scribner's: New York & London, p. 163) appeared
only some 10-12 years after VN's undergraduate
discussions with Nesbit/Butler, later a Tory deputy prime minister.
Nabokov's anachronism is, of course, inconsequential, but should make the reader
of SPEAK MEMORY alert to other possible slips.
As a side issue, one might wonder where VN read or
browsed Frank's book. It would not have been easily available on the continent
and it is likely that VN encountered it only after his arrival in the U.S. The
SM chapter in question was written in 1950 and VN may have found Frank's
volume on a library shelf. The Cornell library lists 35 volumes by Frank, but
not "Dawn in Russia." Nor is "Dawn in Russia" among the dozen Frank
volumes in the Wellesley libray. Frank (1889-1967), a man of wide cultural
and political interests His "Dawn in Russia" is his account of a tourist trip to
Russia circa 1930 and is by no means a whitewash. Frank was well aware of
the brutality of the Soviet regime, although hopeful for Russia's
future.
Memoirs of Waldo Frank. Edited by Alan Trachtenberg. Introd. by
Lewis Mumford.
| Database: |
Cornell University Library |
| Author/Creator: |
Frank, Waldo David, 1889-1967. |
| Title: |
Memoirs of Waldo Frank. Edited by Alan Trachtenberg. Introd. by Lewis
Mumford.
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| Published: |
[Amherst] University of Massachusetts Press, 1973. |
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| Location: |
Olin Library |
| Call Number: |
PS3511.R195
Z59 |