The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 46

and it is time now for us to go.

And this not because we're afraid of offending

with our freedom good people; simply, it's time

for us to depart-and besides we prefer not

to see what lies hidden from other eyes;

not to see all this world's enchantment and torment,

the cas.e.m.e.nt that catches a sunbeam afar,

humble somnambulists in soldier's niform,

the lofty sky, the attentive clouds;

the beauty, the look of reproach; the young children

who play hide-and-seek inside and around

the latrine that revolves in the summer twilight;

the sunset's beauty, its look of reproach;

all that weighs upon one, entwines one, wounds one;

an electric sign's tears on the opposite bank;

through the mist the stream of its emeralds running;

all the things that already I cannot express.

In a moment we'll pa.s.s across the world's threshold

into a region-name it as you please:

wilderness, death, disavowal of language,

or maybe simpler: the silence of love;

the silence of a distant cartway, its furrow,

beneath the foam of flowers concealed;

my silent country (the love that is hopeless);

the silent sheet lightning, the silent seed.

Signed: Vasiliy s.h.i.+shkov The Russian original appeared in October or November 1939 in the Russkiya Zapiski, if I remember correctly, and was acclaimed by Adamovich in his review of that issue with quite exceptional enthusiasm. ("At last a great poet has been born in our midst," etc.-I quote from memory, but I believe a bibliographer is in the process of tracking down this item.) I could not resist elaborating the fun and, shortly after the eulogy appeared, I published in the same Poslednie Novosti (December 1939? Here again the precise date eludes me) my prose piece "Vasiliy s.h.i.+shkov" (collected in Vesna v Fialte, New York, 1956), which could be regarded, according to the emigre reader's degree of ac.u.men, either as an actual occurrence involving a real person called s.h.i.+shkov, or as a tongue-in-cheek story about the strange case of one poet dissolving in another. Adamovich refused at first to believe eager friends and foes who drew his attention to my having invented s.h.i.+shkov; finally, he gave in and explained in his next essay that I "was a sufficiently skillful parodist to mimic genius." I fervently wish all critics to be as generous as he. I met him, briefly, only twice; but many old literati have spoken a lot, on the occasion of his recent death, about his kindliness and penetrativeness. He had really only two pa.s.sions in life: Russian poetry and French sailors.

V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975

ULTIMA THULE and SOLUS REX

The winter of 193940 was my last season of Russian prose writing. In spring I left for America, where I was to spend twenty years in a row writing fiction solely in English. Among the works of those farewell months in Paris was a novel which I did not complete before my departure, and to which I never went back. Except for two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed the unfinished thing. Chapter 1, ent.i.tled "Ultima Thule," appeared in 1942 (Novyy Zhurnal, vol. 1, New York). It had been preceded by the publication of chapter 2, "Solus Rex," in early 1940 (Sovremennyya Zapiski, vol. 70, Paris). The present translation, made in February 1971 by my son with my collaboration, is scrupulously faithful to the original text, including the restoration of a scene that had been marked in the Sovremennyya Zapiski by suspension points.

Perhaps, had I finished my book, readers would not have been left wondering about a few things: was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator's dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognize? Be that as it may, one thing is clear enough. In the course of evolving an imaginary country (which at first merely diverted him from his grief, but then grew into a self-contained artistic obsession), the widower becomes so engrossed in Thule that the latter starts to develop its own reality, Sineusov mentions in chapter 1 that he is moving from the Riviera to his former apartment in Paris; actually, he moves into a bleak palace on a remote northern island. His art helps him to resurrect his wife in the disguise of Queen Belinda, a pathetic act which does not let him triumph over death even in the world of free fancy. In chapter 3 she was to die again, killed by a bomb meant for her husband, on the new bridge across the Egel, a few minutes after returning from the Riviera. That is about all I can make out through the dust and debris of my old fancies.

A word about K. The translators had some difficulty about that designation because the Russian for "king," korol, is abbreviated as "Kr" in the sense it is used here, which sense can be rendered only by "K" in English. To put it rather neatly, my "K" refers to a chessman, not to a Czech. As to the t.i.tle of the fragment, let me quote Blackburne, Terms & Themes of Chess Problems (London, 1907): "If the King is the only Black man on the board, the problem is said to be of the 'Solus Rex' variety."

Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S. P. Diaghilev (18721929), remains one of my favorite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises. I do not remember the details of poor Adulf's death, except that he was dispatched, in some horrible, clumsy manner, by Sien and his companions, exactly five years before the inauguration of the Egel bridge.

Freudians are no longer around, I understand, so I do not need to warn them not to touch my circles with their symbols. The good reader, on the other hand, will certainly distinguish garbled English echoes of this last Russian novel of mine in Bend Sinister (1947) and, especially, Pale Fire (1962); I find those echoes a little annoying, but what really makes me regret its noncompletion is that it promised to differ radically, by the quality of its coloration, by the amplitude of its style, by something undefinable about its powerful underflow, from all my other works in Russian. The present translation of "Ultima Thule" appeared in The New Yorker, April 7, 1973.

V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973

THE a.s.sISTANT PRODUCER.

"The a.s.sistant Producer" is from Nabokov's Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).

"THAT IN ALEPPO ONCE ..."

" 'That in Aleppo Once ...' " is from Nabokov's Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).