Vladimir Nabokov was extraordinarily careful when making any statements that might provide the casual reader with details about his life as a writer. In the English-language period of his work, he deliberately created a mythologized and
somewhat eccentric picture of his laboratory--index cards kept in shoe boxes.
As is well known, Nabokov was skeptical about the possibility of gaining insight into an author’s intentions by analyzing his manuscripts. In the introduction to his translation of Eugene Onegin, he writes: “An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying cancelled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count” (Nabokov 1:15). Nevertheless, this conviction did not hinder the author himself (or those close to him) from solicitously preserving his own rough drafts and sketches (for example, for some of his short stories and poems). The accumulated manuscript corpus is fertile soil for studying the creative history of Nabokov’s works, his artistic logic and his techniques.
Among the texts that have been preserved, the materials for The Gift occupy a special place in the legacy of the author, who considered this novel the culmination and literary peak of his Russian-language career. It is diffi cult to say at what stage of the novel’s development the text available to researchers was written. Nabokov was clearly guided by a defi nite principle when choosing the materials (of which a signifi cant portion was lost during the German occupation of Paris) to hand over to the state depository for archiving. In several cases, both the rough draft and fair copy of the published work have survived (for example, the drafts of the short story “A Busy Man”). Study and comparison of the different versions make it possible to trace the evolution of the text and the manner in which Nabokov wrote it, supplementing evidence from biographical sources and memoirs.
Iosif Gessen, who knew Nabokov quite well, said of the latter’s professional habits (which did change over the course of his life) that he “rewrites his works several times, introducing more and more corrections or changes, and only after this, from his dictation, is the fi nal text hammered out” (Gessen 181). Véra Nabokov, the author’s full-time editor, secretary, and archivist throughout his life, typed up his compositions. Nabokov’s own numerous statements about his ability to envision the plan of a novel at once and as a whole are famous; this capacity allowed him afterward to gradually implement on paper the plan that he held in his consciousness, as if he were developing camera fi lm. It was just this technique, as Nabokov said, that made it possible for him to start work on any part of the novel, even chronologically nonconsecutive ones, because of the precision with which he had imagined the subject, plot, and composition of the work in process. At the same time, the texts of Nabokov’s Russian-period works, in the form in which they have come down to us (in the present instance, we have in mind the conventional linear method of writing them down — that is, with pen on paper, and not in pencil on cards for indexing, as was the case from the mid-1940s onward), form a coherent narrative written from the fi rst to the last line
without any substantial gaps or insertions made at later stages. From the very beginning of his literary career, Nabokov also had the habit, like clockwork, of dating a fi nished work, and the majority of the Russian-period manuscripts in his archive are just such defi nitive texts with the date on the last page.
As mentioned above, it is known about The Gift that the Chernyshevski chapter and the poems that the author planned to attribute to his main character, Godunov-Cherdyntsev, were written earlier than the rest of the novel. As distinct from an interviewer, a textologist can and should verify the author’s version of events by studying the manuscripts. In fact, the archival sources I have examined do not contain any of Nabokov’s sketches or outlines for even a single work that contained any kind of preliminary working notes (lists of names for possible characters, plot outlines, and so on). This fact alone, however, should not lead one to conclude that such groundwork for complex plot constructions (with which it must be said that the multilayered novel The Gift is assembled) simply did not exist, but only that Nabokov, in keeping with his declared philosophy of creative work, was in fact able to destroy these early materials. In the assessment of Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s archival legacy for the most part consists of either fair copies of the works or else very advanced-stage rough copies (Boyd, “Manuscripts”
345). The palimpsestic nature of the heavily revised manuscripts of some of the Russian novels will yield a great deal, although the English-language scholars of the American Nabokov are less fortunate: the erased and heavily crossed out text on the index-card manuscripts, written with a pencil equipped with an eraser (the writer’s favorite feature of this tool), are not easily decipherable. In general, Nabokov’s manuscripts appear to be quite accommodating: as opposed to those of Alexander Pushkin, there are practically no sketches or vignettes in the margins.
Nabokov’s work produces the impression of concentrated literary labor — of an artistic plan logically brought to life.
Description of an Archival Copy
The safety of the rough draft is the statute assuring preservation of the power behind the literary work.
Osip Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante
The manuscript of Nabokov’s last Russian novel is a part of the “Papers of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov” collection at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Nabokov began donating various documents and manuscripts to the state depository in 1958, and the papers pertaining to The Gift were among them.
According to the terms of the Instrument of Gift signed by Nabokov and by the Librarian of Congress (June 23, 1959), the author or his wife or son had control of both access and copyright for fi fty years. After that point, the collection was
to be opened, and the as yet unpublished writings by Nabokov were transferred into the public domain as of July 2009.3
The incomplete materials relating to The Gift are distributed among eight folders (Box 2, folders 3-10). The condition of the manuscript is on the whole satisfactory — the text of the fi rst chapter is written in blue and black ink, on one side of pages of yellowish rice paper;4 the pagination (sometimes doubled) is in the upper right corner. Nabokov’s handwriting is, as a rule, quite legible. The main diffi culty for the textologist when deciphering Nabokov’s hand is that in the rough drafts, the author had the habit of drawing a line through the original text and inserting corrections in minute handwriting, both between lines and above the basic text; it would be fair to say that they are written anywhere there is blank space, and thus the added text is often arranged vertically on the page.
As a result of numerous layers of palimpsest and the thick lines used to mark out the text, the manuscript is almost illegible in places. The contents of the manuscript corpus of The Gift in the Library of Congress are as follows (in passing, I will provide additional information about the format of the text in the documents):
Folder 3. Chapter One of the novel. Advanced draft, holograph, heavy revisions and edits by the author, pages numbered 1-83; A4 paper, writing in ink.
Folder 4. Chapter Four (“The Life of Chernyshevski”). A typescript (blue ribbon) with handwritten revisions, pages numbered 1-54.
Folder 5. Continuation of the Chapter Four, pages numbered 55-108.
Folder 6. The Pink Notebook — an exercise book containing unpublished drafts and notes for a continuation of the novel.
Folder 7. Second Addendum to The Gift. On the fi rst page there is a bracketed note in Nabokov’s hand: “First: a short story ‘Circle’ (Posled[nie] novosti, 1934) — omit this title.”
3 Additions were acquired by purchase in 1971 and 1991 and in gifts from Peter Pertzoff in 1964 and Jay Wilson in 1991. The papers of Nabokov were organized and described in 1969. They were reorganized in 2000 when additional material was integrated into the collection, with further processing and description completed in 2003. Until recently, Dmitri Nabokov was responding separately to each detailed application for access submitted through the Manuscript Division; presently it is still the prerogative of the Nabokov Estate to grant the rights for publication of any material cited from this and other Nabokov-related archives. Those items acquired by the Library from persons other than the author, which are located at the end of the collection, have no access restrictions.
4 I have provided this physical description because the Nabokov Papers in the Library of Congress, including the manuscript of The Gift, have recently been microfi lmed (2008–
2009). For conservation purposes, the originals in a collection that has been microfi lmed are usually withdrawn from general circulation.
[Ill. 1-1] Page 5 of the manuscript of Th e Gift . Courtesy of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Reprinted by arrangement with Th e Estate of
Vladimir Nabokov
Folder 8. Typescript of an excerpt from the handwritten text in Folder 7 — fi ve pages total (ends with the phrase “as the Russian headlines were making witticisms . . . ”).
Folder 9. The journal publication of the novel as printed in Sovremennye zapiski (1937), with minor edits by the author. Chapters One through Three.
Folder 10. Continuation of the journal publication, ending of Chapter Three, Chapter Five.