MARKING 125 YEARS OF NABOKOV

In the story ‘The Circle’, the hero feels that nothing is lost, because ‘memory accumulates treasures, stored-up secrets grow in darkness and dust, and one day a transient visitor at a lending library wants a book that has not once been asked for in twenty-two years.’

For all its elegance, this image is somewhat at odds with Nabokov’s own mnemonic method. Nabokov is definitely neither a storekeeper nor an archivist; for him, memory is not a passive accumulation waiting for a passerby, but a constant hard work, an ‘act of retention’, as he himself called it. In this sense, he is not so much a collector as a hunter. Speak, Memory, the commanding title of his autobiographical book, captures the essence of his principle, comparable to making fire.

In an early youthful poem, appropriately titled ‘Youth’, he wrote:

Forgive me, O extinguished Russia,

The steep flame of my memory.

This steep flame of memory is one of the foundations of Nabokov’s art. The image of the flame itself is somewhat similar to Osip Mandelstam’s early motto, stated in 1924 (the year after Nabokov’s poem was written): ‘… say goodbye to the past, but say goodbye in such a way that you burn the past with this goodbye.’

The story ‘A Busy Man’ begins with a description of how a trivial memory dies, unable to withstand the light of the present and only the memory of a memory remains. It is precisely for this reason that Nabokov’s memory is selective and tempered, otherwise everything would descend into the usual nostalgic vulgarity for which Nabokov, as usual, has no pity.

‘[A] a trivial remark related to some unknown topic coiled and clung to one’s own intimate recollection, a parasite of its sadness,’ he says. ‘A pink flush of mnemonic banality’ are his words, too. ‘Biryul’ki proshlago’, ‘the tidbits of the past,’ muses Ada contemptuously.

Marcel Proust, the world’s foremost singer of memory, was undoubtedly dear to Nabokov, at least in his youth. But this did not prevent him from ridiculing the writer Udo Conrad, whose prose consists of long, rambling passages that can easily be recognized as a reference to In Search of Lost Time in Laughing in the Dark.

‘[T]he past offers no clues, no modus vivendi—for the simple reason that it had none itself when toppling over the brink of the present into the vacuum it eventually filled,’ Nabokov warns. And so, his memory is never confined to the empty recollections of memory, but takes in the power of the imagination as well.

Russia is the entity that triggers in Nabokov the reaction which he thought ‘to reveal the soft side of myself’. As one of his poems says,

He who left the motherland on his own accord,

Is free to howl about it on the peaks.

Nabokov does not howl, but in his references to his homeland, he allows in those sensitive emotions that are not often found in his prose. In The Gift, it is called ‘a yearning for Russia’, and just as Nabokov, while studying at Cambridge, tirelessly studied Vladimir Dal’s dictionary, the hero of The Gift is sure that he will return because he has taken the keys to Russia with him.

Nabokov and his parents left Russia in the spring of 1919, and the feeling of departure is best captured by a line from the story ‘Razor’: ‘His vast, noble, splendid homeland had been ruined by some dull buffoon for the sake of a well-turned scarlet phrase.’ The dull buffoon is, of course, Lenin.

The story ‘Natasha’ describes the touching emigrant belief that everyone will return to Russia with the cranes in the spring. The culmination of this feeling in Nabokov’s work is the phantom return to the spectacle of an execution, the subject of the poem ‘The Firing Squad’, whose lyrical hero dreams of his own death at the hands of what is probably the Red Army. Incidentally, this is probably why Nabokov liked Bulat Okudzhava’s song ‘Hope’ (see the letter H in Part 1 of this series). Both poems contain the motif of self-sacrifice in the civil war, albeit from starkly different sides of the conflict. In turn, ‘The Execution’ can be seen as a paraphrase of the plot of the novel Glory, in which the main character opts for the suicidal crossing of the Soviet border.

Such sentimentality, however, does not make up for the scattered hail of blows against the emigrated compatriots. ‘The pension was both Russian and nasty,’ reads a phrase from Mary, and then there is the disgusting hero of the story ‘A Dashing Fellow’, named Kostya, and ‘fat Russian nose’ and ‘cocky and corny Russians who, when the occasion presents itself, savor the word Yid as if it were a fat fig.’ Nabokov presents a rather exhaustive picture of the community in ‘A Russian Beauty’: ‘In Berlin, Olga gradually acquired a large group of friends, all of them young Russians. A certain jaunty tone was established. “Let’s go to the cinemonkey,” or “That was a heely deely German Diele, dance hall.” All sorts of popular sayings, cant phrases, imitations of imitations were much in demand. “These cutlets are grim.” “I wonder who’s kissing her now?” Or, in a hoarse, choking voice: Mes-sieurs les officiers…’

In 1989, two records of Nabokov’s poetry and prose were released in the USSR. Both records were called Other Shores, and their liner notes were lavishly titled Ticket to the Motherland. A year earlier, the same Melodiya company had released an old (1984) tape album of Nabokov’s poems by Alexander Gradsky with the imposing title Nostalgia. Incidentally, this album also contains the previously mentioned sacrificial poem ‘The Execution’, which has become a song. It is hard to imagine Nabokov’s reaction if he heard this art-rock macabre music because Vladimir Vladimirovich did not tolerate this kind of music at all.

Meanwhile, all these tickets to his motherland and other kinds of nostalgic rhetoric are not quite about Nabokov. He did not fit neatly into the perestroika stream of what were then called ‘returning names’, from Dmitry Merezhkovsky to Yuri Mamleev. It is no accident that the first Soviet edition of Lolita was published in the collection of the magazine Foreign Literature. He is the only great Russian writer to not only have developed his talent in English but also achieved fame in the language—this is the reason for his special kind of distant relationship with Russian literature.

As Dmitry Galkovsky has rightly observed, Nabokov’s prose is written in a tone of utter intellectual superiority. The reasons for this superiority are hardly reducible to background, talent, or intellect proper. It was facilitated by the very role of the semi-neglected emigrant that he played for decades until the triumph of Lolita in 1955. It was the desperation of his situation and the prolonged stay in the ‘bend sinister’ mode that sharpened his style and his ear to such an extent that he overcame both the inertia of his natural language and the barriers of the foreign-language canon on paper, finding himself in a kind of superposition.

Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn recognized that Nabokov was right to move from Russian literature to a fundamentally different one. Galkovsky went further when he said in the 1980s: ‘Nabokov was actually almost as alien to Russian culture as a modern Komsomolets. And yet, what an intuitive insight into the essence of things.’

Vladimir Nabokov is a kind of doppelgänger of Russian literature, ‘the eye’ from birth, at once inside and outside. There is a good detail of his sublime doubleness in a letter from 1949, when Nabokov confesses: ‘I sincerely regret that I cannot comply with your request: to give a lecture on Pushkin in Russian (in English it would have been easy for me).’

Nabokov was one of the world’s most famous synesthetes (along with, for example, Van Gogh), that is, a person capable of combining incompatible sensations. Synesthesia allows one to hear colors or taste sounds. Nabokov did not see this as an artistic device, but as an organic ability inherited from his mother: ‘I have this rather freakish gift of seeing letters in color. It’s called color hearing.’

Nevertheless, he fully understood the power of this kind of eccentricity (literary synesthesia can be found in texts as far back as Homer) and readily used it in his writing. For example, in Ada, the hero uses this method to try to understand the nature of time: ‘Synesthesia, to which I am inordinately prone, proves to be of great help in this type of task.’

Nabokov has quite a number of purely synesthetic metaphors like ‘the pink puffs of blossoming almond trees’, or ‘the word loyalty phonetically and visually remind[ing the hero] of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk’. One of the most impressive examples of this device is found in Transparent Things: ‘He felt a roaring redness fill his head.’ To compare, a stroke is described somewhat more mundanely by Ivan Bunin: ‘A red blur floated before the eyes.’

For Nabokov, synesthesia is directly related to the functioning of memory. He remarks that ‘the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory.’

Interestingly, this retention process works differently in different languages. As literary scholar Velta Zadornova noted, ‘Comparing the text of Other Shores with its author’s translation into English, it turns out that in fifteen out of thirty-five cases synesthesia disappears completely.’

It should be noted that the relationship between Other Shores and the English version, Conclusive Evidence (1951), is actually reversed. The English book was the original, and Other Shores (1953) the translation. There was a later English version, Speak, Memory (1967), which is also difficult to label as a translation of the Russian translation.

In his book Nabokov Without Lolita, the critic Vyacheslav Kuritsyn points out that in the summer of 1926, Nabokov and his wife Vera rented a room in Berlin from a woman who kept a telephone in a drawer under lock and key. In general, the telephone in Nabokov’s writing is always an instrument of intrusion that never bodes well. This is not surprising, since Nabokov received the news of the murder of his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich (as recounted in Speak, Memory), through a phone call.

In Nabokov’s texts, the telephone is primarily used by various unpleasant types to solve their equally unpleasant problems. For example, in ‘Spring in Fialta’, Ferdinand, the heroine’s husband, ‘was particularly fond of long-distance calls … to make sure of free lodgings.’ Margot keeps calling Albinus in Laughter in the Dark, making him tremble in fear of his wife. Berg in ‘An Affair of Honor’ calls five times a day, and then finally seduces the main character’s wife. In The Gift, ‘[t]he ringing went on and on, with brief pauses to catch its breath. It did not wish to die; it had to be killed.’ In Glory, talking about the invited old couple, Sonia says, ‘They would die of a heart attack if one tried to phone them’. In Bend Sinister, a telephone signal becomes something like an impersonal personality decay: ‘That sequence of small bar-shaped hoots was like the long vertical row of superimposed Is in an index by first lines to a verse anthology.’

A phone call is the principal element in two important short stories by Nabokov, ‘Signs and Symbols’ and ‘The Doorbell’. In both cases, it is a sign of strangeness, fear, and fatal error. It is difficult to say whether it is directly related to the telephone message of the father’s death, but it is their unhappy sons who are the subject of both stories.

For an even more confusing dive into the subject, one can turn to the scholar Sigi Jöttkandt’s recent book The Nabokov Effect. There is a chapter devoted to the function of the telephone in Nabokov’s texts, and the book contains an epigraph from Jacques Derrida, ‘In the beginning was the telephone.’

Ultima Thule, the northernmost point of the earth, beyond which another world begins, is the first chapter of Nabokov’s last unfinished Russian novel, the drafts of which he presumably burned. It is not Nabokov’s most characteristic text, with its almost Lovecraftian plot. A predilection for the otherworldly is the subject of another Nabokov story, ‘Wingstroke’, but ‘Ultima Thule’ is undoubtedly a more grounded statement.

The hero of the story, the artist Sineusov, buries his wife (along with their unborn child) and seeks solace in the act of drawing. Art is somewhat akin to the afterlife because art has the same ‘spectral, intangible nature’. The artist is sent to the mad mathematician Falter, who supposedly has accidentally solved the riddle of existence. The truth discovered is too horrible to recount—Falter once revealed himself to a doctor, killing him in the process.

This text has several levels and subtexts (including mythological ones), but we will touch on only one aspect here. Nabokov’s works are often abruptly interrupted by the death of the hero/heroine, and thus it is in The Defense, in ‘Spring in Fialta’, in ‘Lik’, in ‘A Russian Beauty’, and in a sense in ‘The Dashing Fellow’. The rest is silence. ‘Ultima Thule’ is about going beyond the edge of that silence and trying to speak of what lies beyond the threshold of death. The author does not find the words to describe the afterlife, but inspires the belief that such words exist in principle. For example, Falter accidentally tells Sineusov about the terrible mystery of existence, but does not explain where exactly the fatal slip of the tongue occurred. We understand all the pieces on the chess board, but we are unable to unravel the exact sequence of the moves to win. Here, Nabokov is no longer a writer, but a scientist (which he actually was). Metaphors do not work in this field, you need the exact word in the exact meaning. Therefore, in the absence of this word, ‘Ultima Thule’ ends with a dotted line. Nabokov said something similar and on the same subject in one of his poems:

Here’s the secret: dum-dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum,

And to tell you more I’m not entitled.

Fialta is a fictional town from Nabokov’s story ‘Spring in Fialta’, located over a sea ‘less glaucous than gray’, with steps of stairs leading nowhere, a half-built white villa, and a specialty in the form of moonstone candy. Nabokov has invented many toponyms—Zoorlandia, Zembla, Amerossia, Antiterra, Tataria, Belokonsk. But all of them usually have an abstract satirical and punning character, and only Fialta, which rhymes with the violets in the hand of the heroine Nina, is truly tangible and tender. At one point, the narrator’s perspective opens up like an eye, revealing the meticulously invented city to be truly dazzling even on paper.

‘Spring in Fialta’ is a text about a voluptuous, lifelong union, without commitment so to speak. It is perhaps the most Chekhov-Bunin-esque of Nabokov’s stories, something between Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ and Bunin’s ‘Clean Monday’. There are even slippers trimmed with swan’s down, like in ‘Clean Monday’. Nabokov has toughened, dissected, and whitewashed the plot in a manner worthy of his predecessors, making it clear that love itself is as severe as heavenly punishment and as fictitious as the name of this seaside town. It is the carnal and careless nature of the ‘seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings’ that is important in the story. As long as Nina is surrounded by vulgarities, casual romances, silly French songs, obscene words, and other ‘poor bright bits’, she lives in ‘perfect simplicity’. Once the threatening verb ‘to love’ is uttered, she perishes and disappears in a white glow.

We have touched a little on Nabokov’s theme of misogyny (see the letter M in Part 1 of this series), but his retribution against men is even harsher and more painful. The ‘husband’s cheerful off-key whistle’ from King, Queen, Knave alone defends and justifies women more than a dozen feminist treatises. At the head of the ranks of the vulgar fools who populate his texts is the aggressive, self-absorbed bastard, who can be labeled ‘a dashing fellow’ after the title of the eponymous story about a promiscuous scoundrel named Kostya Obolenski (however, in the story ‘Natasha’, the heroine uses the more common and harmless word ‘boor’ in the same context).

Nabokov’s dashing fellows are wholesome, simple, triumphant creatures, with hairy nostrils, ‘their backsides … exactly the same, big and triumphant, with identically checkered cloth enclosing tightly their prominent buttocks’. They blow beer (‘which hissed like horse urine’ as observed in the story ‘The Fight’), and they smell of ‘sweat, tobacco, and garlic’ as in Invitation to a Beheading. They call women ‘Goldie’ and are characterized by their lust (such as the roommate with his memories of Russian adventures in ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’).

The hallmark of a dashing fellow is a programmed propensity for violence and humiliation in any form. They force recruits to clean the barracks floor with toothbrushes, and Pale Fire features ‘[f]ake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks’, while a character in the story ‘An Affair of Honor’ boasts of killing 523 people. For Nabokov himself, systemic violence is an obvious taboo. His credo is expressed quite clearly in his novel Bend Sinister: only those who ‘are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and … are not apt to commit physical murder’ are worthy of respect.

The dashing fellows are not necessarily adults. Children torment Luzhin at school, the quite innocent hero of King, Queen, Knave soon turns into an exemplary brute. And it is certainly not only ordinary people, but also what Carl Jung called ‘enlightened stupidity’, that Nabokov despises even more. Thus, the hero of Ada, Van, embarking on a first-class voyage, squeamishly examines the list of passengers like himself in order to understand in advance whom he should avoid. In Despair, the narrator says, ‘It is always a wonder to me the amount of saliva that simple folk seem to possess.’ However, the same fearful disgust of male physiology is found again in Ada, only this time it is caused by the public urination of the very noble Count Percy.

It’s rather funny how Nabokov identified pop music as a hallmark of the type of people he loathed. In Bend Sinster, men ‘got drunk on beer in sloppy bars, the process of thought satisfactorily replaced by swine-toned radio music’. In ‘Wingstroke’, ‘the instruments of a Negro band had started pounding and moaning’. And the hero of ‘A Dashing Fellow’ himself dreams that ‘life will regain its looks, and the American instruments will make music in the merry café’.

Pop music is not the worst thing in Nabokov’s universe. In a 1970 interview, he admitted to hating the circus, ‘especially animal acts and robust ladies hanging by their teeth in the air.’ But even without this interview, his texts make it clear that the circus is evil. It is no coincidence that in ‘Spring in Fialta’, the heroine dies after crashing her car into a traveling circus’s truck, and in Invitation to a Beheading, everything reminds Cincinnatus of a circus, including the director of the prison, while for the actual execution, ‘circus tickets are valid’ in order to attend. In Bend Sinister, we read of imbeciles being amused by trained animals, and the apotheosis, of course, is the story ‘The Potato Elf’, which is about the unfortunate circus dwarf. The circus is unbearable not only because of the torture of animals (after all, Ada, in the eponymous novel, claims that she could dissect a koala but not its baby). Indeed, the horror of it for Nabokov lies in the fact that the circus is where his eternal motif of duplicity and substitution is most clearly and sickeningly manifested. Thus, in Mary there is a circus poodle pitifully dressed up in human clothes, and in King, Queen, Knave, we see a chimpanzee also in ‘degrading human clothes’. The hero of ‘Ultima Thule’ uses an almost circus-like image, exclaiming in despair, ‘How does superhuman knowledge of the ultimate truth combine in you with the adroitness of a banal sophist who knows nothing?’

In his memoirs of childhood, however, Nabokov is traditionally soft and indulgent even in the face of such pernicious entertainment as he writes in Speak, Memory: ‘A street on the left side with a lovely name—Karavannaya (the Street of Caravans)—took one past an unforgettable toyshop. Next came the Cinizelli Circus (famous for its wrestling tournaments).’

Having become wealthy after the publication of Lolita, Nabokov moved to Switzerland in 1961 to Le Montreux Palace Hotel, where he lived until his death in July 1977. At the same time, the country itself and its inhabitants rarely feature in Nabokov’s work. Humbert Humbert is only suspected of being Swiss, but Martin, the hero of Glory, has inherited Swiss blood directly from his grandfather. The characters of Laughter in the Dark travel across Switzerland. ‘Easter Rain’ tells the story of an old Swiss woman, Josefina Lvovna, who is, however, more attached to the lost St. Petersburg than her own homeland. Nabokov himself had a Swiss governess as a child, and Ada, in the novel of the same name, remembers that her black nurse was ‘Swiss-laced with white whimsies’. Finally, Transparent Things (1972), the last of Nabokov’s great novels, is set in Switzerland. Its hero, Hugh Person, dreams of the ‘celestial … solitary confinement’, and its creator clearly found something similar in Montreux.

Just as fame and money for Lolita were the long-awaited reward for decades of living in poverty among bedbugs and cockroaches and for dozens of earlier brilliant texts, Switzerland became a symbolic final argument in favor of his uniqueness and isolation. Nabokov compared his stay in the hotel to living on an island—he had finally found that cherished neutrality that one gains only after losing one’s first and only home. The immovable middle-class nature of the country he had chosen to spend his old age in no way contradicted his true nature. As Brian Boyd wrote, ‘He had a fascination for human perversity, for the insane, the cruel, the sexually deviant. But although he was himself decidedly singular, he was also quite “normal”: lucidly sane, outraged by cruelty, committed to faithful love after a youth of energetic sexual adventure.’

Nabokov favored dachshunds—he’d had a dachshund, ‘nervous and gruff’, since childhood, and this breed was a favorite with his mother, Yelena Ivanovna, as well. Thus, it is not surprising that the dachshund appears in his first novel, Mary. From then on, dogs of all breeds and colors would appear regularly in his prose—in ‘The Potato Elf’, in King, Queen, Knave, in ‘Spring in Fialta’, et cetera. A whimpering puppy appears in The Gift. Luzhin examines a drawing on the wallpaper, where a goose is advancing on a red pup. Ada loves ‘pupating puppies’, and there is a puppy in the story ‘A Nursery Tale’ as well. The few things that pleased Nabokov in Berlin, if his letters are to be believed, were the ‘angelic’ guide dogs.

The synesthetic ‘motley barks of dogs’ appear in the early poems, and a ‘dog still quite young’ follows the hero of ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ as a good omen of the happiness that suddenly appears on the horizon. At the beginning of The Gift, the émigré poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev sees, among other things, a vague announcement (‘runny ink, blue runaway dog’) about some hazy detail of the past. Finally, a dog appears as a link to lost happiness in the poem ‘Islands’ (1928):

And it must be easier and nicer there,

and maybe we’d go far away,

if our books, our dog

and our love would not hold us.

But perhaps only in the story ‘The Reunion’ does a dog play a more or less plot-defining role. Two brothers, strangers to each other, meet after ten years apart. They have absolutely nothing to talk about, and the only thing that still connects them is the name of a black poodle that they have trouble remembering. The name is Joker.

Despite his correspondence with Alfred Hitchcock, Nabokov did not know much about movies. When he met John Wayne, for example, the writer asked him what he did in life.

Obviously, the most famous adaptation of Nabokov’s work was, and remains, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). This is due to many factors: Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay, the quality of the directing and acting (James Mason as Humbert and Peter Sellers as Quilty) were outstanding, and the added ad-libbing that was neither in the novel nor in the screenplay. The film begins where the novel ends, with Quilty’s murder and a magnificently invented scene by Kubrick in which the characters play ping-pong. In the situation of this game, the doppelgängers (and there is a widespread theory that Humbert and Quilty are actually the same person) become caricatured rivals in the logic of mimetic desire, or imitative desire, where one wants what the other wants. Thus, Kubrick adds a witty proviso to Nabokov’s work, not Freudian, but René Girardian.

Nabokov’s story ‘Wingstroke’ mentions ‘a ragged copy of the Tattler’, and the next film version of Lolita (1997) by 9½ Weeks director Adrian Lyne was definitely ragged, though surprisingly good overall. Jeremy Irons made a good Humbert, especially since he had already played a similar role in Louis Malle’s Damage (1992). In 1997, a strictly pornographic version of Lolita was also released, starring the blonde German Kelly Trump. At the time of filming, she was almost thirty years old, but if anyone deserves to be called the ‘fire of my loins’, it is undoubtedly her. The film, by the way, was not made by just about anybody—the Italian Joe D’Amato, revered by cinephiles, who, in addition to porn, also made cult horror films. In fact, twenty years ago there was even an official retrospective of his films in Moscow. To conclude the topic of Lolita, let us recall the video of the then underage singer Alsou for the song ‘Winter Dream’ (1999), in which she shyly tried to play a nymphet with actor Sergei Makovetsky (who, in turn, played Quilty in a theater production of the novel by Roman Viktyuk in the early 1990s) at the dacha of the famous old Russian film diva Lyubov Orlova near Moscow. All this was eagerly broadcast on Russian television.

As long as we are talking about interpretations of a bizarre nature, it would be wrong to ignore the absolutely insane film A Sex Tale (1991) with Lyudmila Gurchenko as the devil, which was loosely based on Nabokov’s story ‘A Fairy Tale’.

But let us return to serious cinema, which is not without its problems. In 1969, the great British Oscar-winning director Tony Richardson adapted Camera Obscura. He used the English-language version that Nabokov had remade himself, in which Magda became Margot and the novel itself was titled Laughter in the Dark (but the French title of the movie was true to the original Russian title of the novel, La Chambre Obscure). Richardson also moved the action from 1920s Berlin to London in the swinging 1960s, where eighteen-year-old Margot, played by twenty-nine-year-old Anna Karina, rattles off lines like ‘I’ll go crazy if you don’t fuck me right now.’ Richard Burton was supposed to star in the title role and even shot a few scenes, but was fired for absenteeism. In 1986, a remake of the film was planned with Mick Jagger as the villain (whose name was changed for the third time: he was Robert Horn in Camera Obscura, Axel Rex in Laughter in the Dark, and Herve Tourace in La Chambre Obscure), but it never came to fruition. The Russian director Aleksei Balabanov also dreamed of adapting Camera Obscura, but nothing went further than the idea.

In 1972, Jerzy Skolimowski directed King, Queen, Knave, and Gina Lollobrigida as Martha is, of course, her usual voluptuous self, but the black comedy style itself is still not quite Nabokovian. Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted Nabokov’s Despair (from a script written by Tom Stoppard) in 1978 at a studio in Bavaria. Dirk Bogarde, who played the lead role, was of course a distinctly Nabokovian type (he would have made the perfect Humbert Humbert!), but in general, the film turned out to be too farcical, painful, and grotesque in the typical Fassbinder way.

John Turturro is expressive as Luzhin (though Nabokov’s Luzhin, unlike the actor, is obese) in the 2000 Dutch production, but the film itself has not received much praise. In other words, nothing fully equal to Nabokov’s prose has ever appeared on the screen. We can only hope that Brian Boyd’s dream will come true and that we will one day see a TV series based on Ada. But, of course, that is hardly likely.

But now, at the end, let’s take a little break from interpreting and speculating about Nabokov’s intentions and simply listen to Nabokov reading the poem ‘To My Youth’.

The next item in our alphabet is not about the restaurant with the unforgettable name The Egg and We, patronized by the main character of Pnin. Instead, it is about the egg! On 18 November 1972, Nabokov wrote a commissioned humorous recipe for the Nabokov Eggs—Eggs à la Nabocoque—which reads:

Boil water in a saucepan (bubbles mean it is boiling!). Take two eggs (for one person) out of the refrigerator. Hold them under the hot tap water to make them ready for what awaits them.

Place each in the saucepan, one after the other, and let them slip soundlessly into the (boiling) water. Consult your wristwatch. Stand over them with a spoon preventing them (they are apt to roll) from knocking against the damned side of the pan.

If, however, an egg cracks in the water (now bubbling like mad) and starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an old-fashioned seance, fish it out and throw it away. Take another and be more careful.

After 200 seconds have passed, or, say, 240 (taking interruptions into account), start scooping the eggs out. Place them, the round end up, in two egg cups. With a small spoon, tap-tap in a circle and then pry open the lid of the shell. Keep some salt and buttered bread (white) ready. Eat.

The first part of the Vladimir Nabokov's ABCs you can read here.