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From Otchaianie to Despair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Carl R. Proffer
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Extract

It is difficult to think of any writer of any century who has displayed such a wide range of verbal talent as Vladimir Nabokov. His flashing prose has earned him an important place both in American and in Russian literature. Original prose and poetry, translations of prose and poetry, meticulous scholarly criticism and commentary, devastating literary polemic—everything seems within his range. But Nabokov’s chameleonic transformations from Russian into English and English into Russian are particularly fascinating to watch. He has translated (or helped translate) his own Russian novels, including Priglashenie na kazn’, Zashchita Luzhina, and Dar, into English; he has translated English works including Pnin, Speak, Memory, and, most recently, Lolita into Russian. The metamorphosis of Otchaianie into Despair is a special case, because while translating the novel Nabokov made certain revisions.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1968 , pp. 258 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1968

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References

1 Nabokov has also written a few things in French—criticism, memoirs, and translations.

2 He translated parts of Speak, Memory into Russian, and then retranslated certain additions back into English.

3 Nabokov points this out in his Foreword to the translation. See Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (New York, 1966), pp. 7-8. It should also be noted that Nabokov did a translation of Despair in 1937. It was published in England, but so far as Nabokov knows he owns the only surviving copy.

4 The page numbers in parentheses refer to Vladimir Nabokov, “Otchaianie,” Sovremennye Zapiski (1934), No. 54, pp. 108-61; No. 55, pp. 70-116; No. 56, pp. 5-70. Otchaianie was also published in book form (Berlin, 1936).

5 The page numbers in parentheses refer to the 1966 edition.

6 This is the English version of a punning riddle: “Guess: my first is that sound, my second is an exclamation, my third will be prefixed to me when I'm no more” (60). The answer is “choc” (the sound of a cane knocking on lampposts outside), “o,” “late“— chocolate being Hermann's profession.

7 Compare the Russian pp. 157-58 with the English pp. 76-77.

8 In his Russian translation of Lolita, Nabokov changes the name of Humbert's blue car from Melmoth (the Wanderer) to Icarus. In the Foreword to Despair he says, “Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other.“

9 Possibly an allusion to Pushkin's Anna Kern.

10 Despair, pp. 36-89; “Otchaianie,” p. 128.

11 Nabokov's first translation of Despair (1937), the 1966 translation, and the Russian original.

12 The name of the Muse of songs for the gods.

13 uIntroducing the maid in Russian, he says only zhena Lida i gornichnaia El'za, while in English it is: “Lydia, my thirty year-old wife, and Elsie, our seventeen year-old maid“ (29)-

14 These additions are very similar to the remarks murderous Humbert makes in Lolita when he lumbers off, fingering the trigger of his automatic, to find Clare Quilty and “Dick Skiller.“

15 Despair, pp. 44, 45, 46, 47, 62 ff., 128, 129, 130, 173, 212, 219.

16 Some critics are fascinated by the subject of doubles, and when examining Nabokov's works they use the theme as an excuse for all kinds of pseudophilosophical nonsense. See, for example, C. Rosenfeld, “Despair and the Lust for Immortality,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII, No. 2 (1967), 174-93. Nabokov himself says: “The Doppelga'nger subject is a frightful bore.” “There are no ‘real’ doubles in my novels.” See “An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” ibid., p. 145.

17 The English version's flutter from “branch to brook” also shows Nabokov's love of phonetic doubles.

18 A phonetic parody of the repeated ending (-ie, -ie) in the Russian title. Incidentally, Nabokov gave up the title Priglashenie na otsechenie golovy for that reason.

19 Turgenev and Dostoevski.

20 The novel ends on April 1, Gogol's birthday.

21 Compare Bal'mont's: Chuzhdyi charam chernyi cheln.

22 Five years before Despair, Thomas Wolfe wrote: “He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her ol being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never” (Look Homeward Angel [New York: Scribner's Library, n. d.], p. 31).

23 There are also allusions to Malherbe (a hotel name), Maupassant, Leblanc, and Oscar Wilde.