The same situation was used much earlier in The
Defense, on page 86 (1st US ed.) we read:
She made his acquaintance on the third day after his arrival,
made it the way they do in old novels or in motion pictures: she drops a
handkerchief and he picks it up -with the sole difference that they interchanged
roles.
Luzhin was walking along a path in front of her and in
succession shed: a large checked handkerchief that was unusually dirty [...] She
gathered up only the handkerchief and the coin and walked
on,
slowly catching up with him and curiously awaiting some new
loss.
A. Bouazza.
The episode in LATH, when Vadim meets his
last love ("you" of the book) for the first time, seems to
parody the real episode as recounted by Irina Odoevtseva in
her first book of memoirs "На берегах Невы" (Upon the Neva's
Banks, 1967). Below is an excerpt from LATH followed by the
fragments from the Odoevtseva book (sorry I bring them up in the
original, it would take too long and cost me a lot of trouble to
translate them):
"I was on the way to the parking lot when the bulky
folder under my arm - replacing my arm, as it were - burst its string and spilled its contents all over the gravel and
grassy border. You were coming along the same campus path, and we crouched side
by side collecting the stuff. You were pained you said later (zhalostno
bylo) to smell the liqour on my breath. On the breath of that great
writer." (Part Six, 1)
"И будто в доказательство того, что я очень нервна,
руки мои начинают дрожать и я роняю свои тетрадки на тротуар. Тетрадки и листы
разлетаются веером у моих ног. Я быстро нагибаюсь за ними и стукаюсь лбом о лоб
тоже нагнувшегося Гумилёва. Шляпа слетает с моей головы и ложится рядом с
тетрадками.
Я стою красная, не в силах пошевельнуться от ужаса
и стыда...
я стою не месте и бессмысленно слежу за тем, как
Гумилёв собирает мои записки и аккуратно складывает их. Он счищает пыль с моей
шляпы и протягивает её мне.
"Я ошибся. Вы нервны. И даже слишком. Но это
пройдёт.
Бывают головокруженья
У девушек и стариков -
цитирует он самого себя."
"Young girls and old men
can be dizzy sometimes."
In the episode recalled by the memoirist, a
distinguished poet and lecturer (Gumilyov) helps a young lady (Irina
Odoevtseva, Gumilyov's favorite pupil in his poetic class*) to collect
from the ground her copy-books and sheets of paper. Nabokov reverses the
situation by making a young woman help the venerable old writer to do the same
thing.
A few words about Irina O. and her
maître:
By the time of his death, Nikolai Gumilyov
(1886-1921) was a leading Russian poet (and a famous explorer of Africa). He
was a World War One hero, was in London in 1917, at the the time
of Revolution, returned to Petrograd in 1918, just before the civil war
broke out. He didn't participate in it, although he was a brave
officer and a staunch monarchist. After the Kronstadt riot, Gumilyov was
accused of counter-revolutionary activities and executed in August, 1921,
surviving Alexander Blok (whom he considered his main rival in poetry) less than
three weeks.
Irina Odoevtseva (Iraida Heinike, 1901?-1990) left
Russia in 1922. She married Georgiy ("Zhorzhik") Ivanov (1894-1958), a talented
poet, who was a friend of Gumilyov in Petrograd and who became
Nabokov's foe in emigration. The enmity between the two writers began after
Odoevtseva had sent to Sirin a copy of her novel Isolda (1931), with
the inscription "Thank you for King, Queen, Knave", and Sirin had
published a negative review of it. Odoevtseva lived in Paris
till 1987, when she returned to Leningrad where she died three years later.
In her memoirs, Upon the Neva's Banks
and Upon the Seine's Banks, she mentions practically all more
or less significant Russian writers of the time (including Mayakovsky and
Kuzmin, both of whom I mentioned earlier in connection with LATH), with only one
exception: Sirin.
*it is unclear if Odoevtseva ever became Gumilyov's
mistress; anyway, when she met him in October 1918, he was, like Vadim in
LATH, a married man (his second wife, Anna Engelgardt, lived with
Gumilyov's mother and his two children from the previous and the current
marriage in Bezhetsk, in the province of Tver). It was a shock to learn
that, a few months before he was arrested, Gumilyov had placed his little
daughter in a children's home. His (and Akhmatova's) son Lev (the famous
historian and etnographer, 1911-90) seems to have had a somewhat happier
childhood.
Alexey Sklyarenko
All private
editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.