Part 42 (2/2)

THE THUNDERSTORM.

Thunder is grom in Russian, storm is burya, and thunderstorm is groza, a grand little word, with that blue zigzag in the middle.

”Groza,” written in Berlin sometime in the summer of 1924, was published in August 1924 in the emigre daily Rul' and collected in the Vozvrashchenie Chorba volume, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.

V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976

LA VENEZIANA.

”La Veneziana” (Venetsianka) was written mainly in September 1924; the ma.n.u.script is dated October 5 of that year. The story remained unpublished and untranslated until the current collections, becoming the t.i.tle story for the French and Italian volumes. The recently completed English version was printed separately in a special edition celebrating the sixtieth birthday of Penguin, England, in 1995.

The painting by Sebastiano (Luciani) del Piombo (ca. 14851547) that almost certainly inspired the canvas described in the story is Giovane romana detta Dorotea, ca. 1512. Nabokov may have seen it at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum (now the Staatliche Museen) in Berlin. Possibly the painter's birthplace-Venice-induced Nabokov to transform the lady from ”Romana” to ”Veneziana.” And it is almost certainly the same artist's Ritratto di donna, which is in the Earl of Rador's collection at Longford Castle, to which Nabokov alludes in his brief mention of ”Lord Northwick from London, the owner ... of another painting by the same del Piombo.”

D.N.

BACHMANN.

”Bakhman” was written in Berlin in October 1924. It was serialized in Rul', November 2 and 4 of that year, and included in my Vozvrashchenie Chorba collection of short stories, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. I am told that a pianist existed with some of my invented musician's peculiar traits. In certain other respects he is related to Luzhin, the chess player of The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina, 1930), G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1964.

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

THE DRAGON.

”The Dragon” (Drakon), written in November 1924, was published in a French translation by Vladimir Sikorsky, and now in the current collections.

D.N.

CHRISTMAS.

”Rozhdestvo” was written in Berlin at the end of 1924, published in Rul' in two installments, January 6 and 8, 1925, and collected in Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. It oddly resembles the type of chess problem called ”selfmate.”

V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976

A LETTER THAT NEVER REACHED RUSSIA.

Sometime in 1924, in emigre Berlin, I had begun a novel tentatively ent.i.tled Happiness (Schastie), some important elements of which were to be reslanted in Mashen'ka, written in the spring of 1925 (published by Slovo, Berlin, in 1926, translated into English under the t.i.tle of Mary in 1970, McGraw-Hill, New York, and reprinted in Russian from the original text, by Ardis and McGraw-Hill, in 1974). Around Christmas 1924, I had two chapters of Schastie ready but then, for some forgotten but no doubt excellent reason, I sc.r.a.pped chapter 1 and most of 2. What I kept was a fragment representing a letter written in Berlin to my heroine who had remained in Russia. This appeared in Rul' (Berlin, January 29, 1925) as ”Pis'mo (Letter) v Rossiyu,” and was collected in Vozvrashchenie Chorba, in Berlin, 1930. A literal rendering of the t.i.tle would have been ambiguous and therefore had to be changed.

V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976

THE FIGHT.

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