The Enchanter (8 page)

For an instant, in the hiatus of a syncope, he also saw how it appeared to her: some monstrosity, some ghastly disease—or else she already knew, or it was all of that together. She was looking and screaming, but the enchanter did not yet hear her screams; he was deafened by his own horror, kneeling, catching at the folds, snatching at the drawstring, trying to stop it, hide it, snapping with his oblique spasm, as senseless as pounding in place of music, senselessly discharging molten wax, too late to stop it or conceal it. How she rolled from the bed, how she was shrieking now, how the lamp scampered off in its red cowl, what a thundering came from outside the window, shattering, destroying the night, demolishing everything, everything.…“Be quiet, it’s nothing bad, it’s just a kind of game, it happens sometimes, just be quiet,” he implored, middle-aged and sweaty, covering himself with a raincoat he had glimpsed in passing, shuddering, donning it, missing the armhole. Like a child in a screen drama, she shielded herself with her sharp little elbow, tearing from his grasp and still yelling senselessly, and
somebody was pounding on the wall, demanding inconceivable silence. She tried to run out of the room, could not unlock the door, he could not catch hold of anything or anyone, she was growing lighter, becoming slippery as a purple-buttocked foundling, with a distorted infant’s face, scuttling from the threshold to the crib and crawling backward from the crib into the womb of a tempestuously resurrected mother. “I’ll make you quiet down!” he was shouting (to a spasm, to the dotlike final drop, to nothingness). “All right, I’ll leave, I’ll make you—” He overcame the door, rushed out, deafeningly locked it behind him, and, still listening, gripping the key in his palm, barefoot and with a cold smear beneath his raincoat, stood where he was, gradually sinking.

But from a nearby room there had already appeared two robed old women; one of them—thickset, resembling a white-haired negro, wearing azure pajama bottoms, with the breathless, jerky cadence of a distant continent, suggesting animal defense leagues and women’s clubs—was giving orders (at-once,
eröffnen, et-tout-de-suite!
) and, clawing at the palm of his hand, nimbly knocked the key to the floor. For several elastic seconds he and she had a hip-shoving match, but in any event it was all over; heads emerged from every direction, a bell was clanging somewhere, behind a door a melodious voice seemed to be
finishing a nursery tale (Mr. White-Tooth in the bed, the hoodlum brothers with their little red rifles), the old woman
conquered the key, he gave her a quick swat on the cheek, and, with his whole body ringing, went running down the sticky steps. Toward him briskly clambered a dark-haired fellow with a goatee, clad only in underpants; after him wriggled a puny harlot. He rushed past them. Farther down came a specter in tan shoes, farther still the old man climbed bow-legged, followed by the avid gendarme. Past them. Leaving behind a multitude of synchronized arms extended over the banister in a splashlike gesture of invitation, he pirouetted into the street, for all was over, and it was imperative, by any stratagem, by any spasm, to get rid of the no-longer-needed, already-looked-at, idiotic world, on whose final page stood a lonely streetlamp with a shaded-out cat at its base. Already interpreting his sensation of barefootedness as a plunge into another element, he rushed off along the ashen sidewalk, pursued by the pounding footfalls of his already outdistanced heart. His desperate need for a torrent, a precipice, a railroad track—no matter what, but instantly—made him appeal for the very last time to the topography of his past. And when, in front of him, a grinding whine came from behind the hump of the side street, swelling to full growth when it had overcome the grade, distending the night, already illuminating the descent with two ovals of yellowish light, about to hurtle downward—then, as if it were a dance, as if the ripple of that dance had carried him to stage center, under this growing, grinning, megathundering
mass, his partner in a crashing cracovienne, this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment—that’s it, drag me under, tear at my frailty—I’m traveling flattened, on my smacked-down face—hey, you’re spinning me, don’t rip me to pieces—you’re shredding me, I’ve had enough.… Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt’s split seconds—and the film of life had burst.

On a Book Entitled
The Enchanter
by Dmitri Nabokov

T
HE TITLE FOR THE FOLLOWING
brief notes, which may interest the reader and perhaps answer a few questions, was chosen with the half-serious thought that a small echo of Father’s postface to
Lolita
may amuse his shade wherever it may be.

In both translation and commentary I have tried hard to stick to the Nabokov rules: precision, artistic fidelity, no padding, no ascribing. Any conjecture beyond what I have ventured would violate those rules.

The translation itself reflects my intent to be faithful to VN in both the general and the specific, textual, senses.
Many years of translating for and with Father instilled in me those categorical requirements of his. The only cases where he considered departures admissable were untranslatable expressions and revisions of the text itself, in the translated version, by the original author. It is possible that VN, were he alive, might have exercised his authorial license to change certain details of
The Enchanter;
I believe, though, that he would have chosen to leave intact this model of conciseness and multilevel meaning. The rare instances where I have taken the liberty of making minor adjustments occur precisely where the technique—as in the telescoped Little Red Riding Hood wordplays (
this page
;
this page
) or the high-speed imagery of the finale—would have made a totally literal rendering meaningless in English. Elsewhere, on occasion, the English may seem simply a bit unorthodox. But so, in such cases, is the Russian.

Other possible translations of the Russian word
volshebnik
are “magician” or “conjuror,” but I have respected Nabokov’s express intention that, in this case, it be rendered as “enchanter.”
Volshebnik
was written during October and November of 1939. It was signed “V. Sirin,” a pseudonym that VN used for his Russian writings from his early youth on so that they would not be confused with those of his father, who had the same given name.
Sirin
in Russian is both a species of owl and a bird of ancient fable, but most probably has no connection, as some have suggested, with the word
siren
.

The original text was dictated to and typed by Father’s first reader, Vera Nabokov. According to Nabokov’s letters, he showed it shortly thereafter to four other people, literary friends of his (see
Author’s Note One
).

At some point, apparently, a typescript was also shown to the émigré critic Vladimir Weidle, in Paris. It could not have been later than May 1940, when we sailed for New York. Andrew Field, who, it seems, read an article written nearly forty years after the fact by a very old Weidle not long before his death, claims
¹
the piece shown to Weidle differed in several respects from
The Enchanter
(of which Field has a very sketchy idea at best, having seen only two pages and one or perhaps both of Nabokov’s references presented at the beginning of this volume).

Presumably that version was called “The Satyr,” the girl “was no more than ten,” and the concluding scene was set not on the French Riviera but “in a remote little hotel in Switzerland.”
Field also attributes the name Arthur to the protagonist. It is unclear whether he got that from Weidle too, but more likely he simply gleaned it from Father’s recollection in his postface to
Lolita
. I have suggested that Nabokov had thought of his protagonist as “Arthur,” or perhaps even used that name in a preliminary draft. It is highly unlikely, however, that the name
appeared in a manuscript “already marked with instructions for the printer,” as Field has Weidle affirm.

As for the three differences Field cites, if his paraphrase of the Weidle article is accurate, then Weidle’s memory of that distant event must have been a bit hazy (Field does admit, in fact, that Weidle “could not remember whether the girl is named in the story”). The fact is that there never was a version called “The Satyr”; indeed, such a title would seem most implausible to anyone with a sensitive ear for Nabokov’s use of language. And I would attribute the same degree of credibility to the rest of Weidle’s assertions.

I was five when
The Enchanter
was being written and was, if anything, a disruptive influence in our Paris apartment and our Riviera pensions. I recall that, between generous periods of play with me, Father would sometimes withdraw into the bathroom of our meager quarters to work in peace, although not, as John Shade does for shaving purposes in
Pale Fire
, on a board placed across the tub. While I was already aware that my father was a “writer,” I had no idea of what was being written, and my parents certainly made no attempt to familiarize me with the story of
Volshebnik
(I think the only work of Father’s I knew at the time was his Russian translation of
Alice in Wonderland
and the little tales and ditties he would improvise for me). It is possible that, when Father was writing
Volshebnik
, I had already been bundled off
to Deauville with a cousin of Mother’s, since it was feared that the rumble of Hitler’s bombs might reach Paris. (It did, but only after our departure for America, and I think one of the few bombs actually dropped on the city did hit our building as we were crossing on the
Champlain
. The vessel, too, was destined to be destroyed after having safely delivered us with no more than the spout of an occasional whale to alarm a couple of trigger-happy gunners; on its next voyage, for which we had originally held passage, it was sunk with all aboard by a German submarine.)

Other than what already is or will now become publicly available, neither Mother nor I can reconstruct much about the birth of the idea in VN’s mind, but can only alert the reader to some of the inane hypotheses that have been propounded, especially of late. As for the link with
Lolita
, the theme had probably lain dormant (as Nabokov suggests in “On a Book Entitled
Lolita”
) until the new novel began germinating, somewhat as in the case of the interrupted
Solus Rex
and the later, very different, but nonetheless related
Pale Fire
.

It is clear from Nabokov’s postface to
Lolita
, originally written in 1956, that, at the time, he believed whatever copies had existed of the
Volshebnik
typescript had been destroyed, and his recollection of the novella was somewhat blurred, partly by the passing of time, but mainly by his rejection of it as “a dead scrap,” superseded by
Lolita
. The surviving text probably turned up not long before he proposed it, with reborn enthusiasm, to G. P. Putnam’s Sons (see
Author’s Note Two
).

I became aware of the work’s existence quite late and in rather a vague way, and had occasion to read it only in the early eighties, when our voluminous archives were finally organized by Brian Boyd (the author of a proper literary biography of VN, to be published in 1988). It was then that
Volshebnik
, which had been consulted by Father in the sixties before it submerged anew among the jumble of belongings that had been shipped to Switzerland from an Ithaca warehouse, resurfaced.

I completed a more or less final draft of the translation in September of 1985.

For the initial impetus to attack what was not an easy job I must give heartfelt thanks to Matthew Bruccoli, who had envisioned a very limited edition of the work, as Nabokov had originally suggested to Walter Minton, then president of Putnam.

The timing of this public debut of
The Enchanter
is not without an amusing and instructive coincidental sidelight. In 1985, in Paris, there began an energetic one-man campaign to attribute to Vladimir Nabokov a pseudonymous, quite un-Nabokovian book from the mid-thirties entitled
Novel with Cocaine
.

Falling as it does within the very limited realm of
rediscovered Nabokoviana,
The Enchanter
is a most appropriate example of the strikingly original prose Nabokov-Sirin produced in his most mature—and final—years as a novelist in his mother tongue (not long before writing
The Enchanter
in 1939, in fact, he had completed his first major English work,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, and 1940 was to be the year of our transplantation to the United States).

For anyone who may harbor lingering doubts about the authorship of the other book, a quick comparison of its substance and style with those of
The Enchanter
should suffice to put the final round of shot into this moribund canard.

A brief account of the bizarre affair is, nevertheless, perhaps in order. Early in 1985, in the Paris-based
Messenger of the Russian Christian Movement
, Professor Nikita Struve of the Sorbonne affirmed with great conviction that
Novel with Cocaine
, by one “M. Agheyev,” written in the early thirties in Istanbul and published soon thereafter in the Paris émigré review
Numbers
, was in fact the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

To support this thesis, Struve adduced sentences from
Novel with Cocaine
that, according to him, are “typical of Nabokov.” Struve’s assertions were taken up in a letter to the (London)
Times Literary Supplement
, 9 August 1985, from Julian Graffy of the University of London, who referred to Struve’s “detailed analysis of the secondary
themes, structural devices, semantic fields [whatever those may be] and metaphors of
N with C
, all of which are found, on the basis of repeated quotation and comparison … to be quintessentially Nabokovian.”