Speak, Memory

IN 1919, by way of the Crimea and Greece, a flock of Nabokovs—three families in fact—fled from Russia to western Europe. It was arranged that my brother and I would go up to Cambridge, on a scholarship awarded more in atonement for political tribulations than in acknowledgement of intellectual merit. The rest of my family expected to stay for a while in London. Living expenses were to be paid by the handful of jewels which Natasha, a farsighted old chambermaid, just before my mother’s departure from St. Petersburg in November 1917, had swept off a dresser into a nécessaire and which for a brief spell had undergone interment or perhaps some kind of mysterious maturation in a Crimean garden. We had left our northern home for what we thought would be a brief wait, a prudent perching pause on the southern ledge of Russia; but the fury of the new regime had refused to blow over. In Greece, during two spring months, braving the constant resentment of intolerant shepherd dogs, I searched in vain for Gruner’s Orange-tip, Heldreich’s Sulphur, Krueper’s White: I was in the wrong part of the country. On the Cunard liner Pannonia which left Greece on May 18, 1919 (twenty-one years too soon as far as I was concerned) for New York, but let us off at Marseilles, I learned to foxtrot. France rattled by in the coal-black night. The pale Channel was still oscillating inside us, when the Dover-London train quietly came to a stop. Repetitive pictures of gray pears on the grimy walls of Victoria Station advertised the bath soap English governesses had used upon me in my childhood. A week later I was already shuffling cheek-to-cheek at a charity ball with my first English sweetheart, a wayward willowy girl five years my senior.

My father had visited London before—the last time in February 1916, when, with five other prominent representatives of the Russian press, he had been invited by the British Government to take a look at England’s war effort (which, it was hinted, did not meet with sufficient appreciation on the part of Russia’s public opinion). On the way there, being challenged by my father and Korney Chukovski to rhyme on Afrika, the poet and novelist Aleksey Tolstoy (no relation to Count Lyov Nikolaevich) had supplied, though seasick, the charming couplet

Vizhu pal’mu i Kafrika.

Eto—Afrika.

(I see a palm and a little Kaffir. That’s Afrika.)

In England the visitors had been shown the Fleet. Dinners and speeches had followed in noble succession. The timely capture of Erzerum by the Russians and the pending introduction of conscription in England (“Will you march too or wait till March 2?” as the punning posters put it) had provided the speakers with easy topics. There had been an official banquet presided over by Sir Edward Grey, and a funny interview with George V whom Chukovski, the enfant terrible of the group, insisted on asking if he liked the works of Oscar Wilde—“dze ooarks of OOald.” The king, who was baffled by his interrogator’s accent and who, anyway, had never been a voracious reader, neatly countered by inquiring how his guests liked the London fog (later Chukovski used to cite this triumphantly as an example of British cant—tabooing a writer because of his morals).

A recent visit to the Public Library in New York has revealed that the above incident does not appear in my father’s book Iz Voyuyushchey Anglii, Petrograd, 1916 (A Report on England at War)—and indeed there are not many samples therein of his habitual humor beyond, perhaps, a description of a game of badminton (or was it fives?) that he had with H. G. Wells, and an amusing account of a visit to some first-line trenches in Flanders, where hospitality went so far as to allow the explosion of a German grenade within a few feet of the visitors. Before publication in book form, this report appeared serially in a Russian daily. There, with a certain old-world naïveté, my father had mentioned making a present of his Swan fountain pen to Admiral Jellicoe, who at table had borrowed it to autograph a menu card and had praised its fluent and suave nib. This unfortunate disclosure of the pen’s make was promptly echoed in the London papers by a Mabie, Todd and Co., Ltd., advertisement, which quoted a translation of the passage and depicted my father handing the firm’s product to the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, under the chaotic sky of a sea battle.