Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory

From Batovo, the old rutty road (which we have followed with Pushkin and now retrace) ran east for a couple of miles to Rozhestveno. Just before the main bridge, one could either turn north in open country toward our Vyra and its two parks on each side of the road, or else continue east, down a steep hill past an old cemetery choked with raspberry and racemosa and cross the bridge toward my uncle’s white-pillared house aloof on its hill.

The estate Rozhestveno, with a large village of the same name, extensive lands, and a manor house high above the Oredezh River, on the Luga (or Warsaw) highway, in the district of Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin), about fifty miles south from St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), had been known before the eighteenth century as the Kurovitz domain, in the old Koporsk district. Around 1715 it had been the property of Prince Aleksey, the unfortunate son of that archbully, Peter the First. Part of an escalier dérobé and something else I cannot recollect were preserved in the new anatomy of the building. I have touched that banister and have seen (or trod on?) the other, forgotten, detail. From that palace, along that highway leading to Poland and Austria, the prince had escaped only to be lured back from as far south as Naples to the paternal torture house by the Tsar’s agent, Count Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy, one-time ambassador in Constantinople (where he had obtained for his master the little blackamoor whose great-grandson was to be Pushkin). Rozhestveno later belonged, I believe, to a favorite of Alexander the First, and the manor had been partly rebuilt when my maternal grandfather acquired the domain around 1880, for his eldest son Vladimir who died at sixteen a few years later. His brother Vasiliy inherited it in 1901 and spent there ten summers out of the fifteen that still remained to him. I particularly remember the cool and sonorous quality of the place, the checkerboard flagstones of the hall, ten porcelain cats on a shelf, a sarcophagus and an organ, the skylights and the upper galleries, the colored dusk of mysterious rooms, and carnations and crucifixes everywhere.

In his youth Carl Heinrich Graun had a fine tenor voice; one night, having to sing in an opera written by Schurmann, chapel-master of Brunswick, he got so disgusted with some airs in it that he replaced them by others of his own composition. Here I feel the shock of gleeful kinship; yet I prefer two other ancestors of mine, the young explorer already mentioned and that great pathologist, my mother’s maternal grandfather, Nikolay Illarionovich Kozlov (1814–1889), first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine and author of such papers as “On the Development of the Idea of Disease” or “On the Coarctation of the Jugular Foramen in the Insane.” At this convenient point, I may as well mention my own scientific papers, and especially my three favorite ones, “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” ( Psyche , Vol. 52, Nos. 1–2 and 3–4, 1945), “A New Species of Cyclargus Nabokov” ( The Entomologist , December 1948), and “The Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides Hübner” ( Bulletin Mus. Comp. Zool. , Harvard Coll., 1949), after which year I found it no longer physically possible to combine scientific research with lectures, belles-lettres, and Lolita (for she was on her way—a painful birth, a difficult baby).

The Rukavishnikov blazon is more modest, but also less conventional than the Nabokov one. The escutcheon is a stylized version of a domna (primitive blast furnace), in allusion, no doubt, to the smelting of the Uralian ores that my adventurous ancestors discovered. I wish to note that these Rukavishnikovs—Siberian pioneers, gold prospectors and mining engineers—were not related, as some biographers have carelessly assumed, to the no less wealthy Moscow merchants of the same name. My Rukavishnikovs belonged (since the eighteenth century) to the landed gentry of Kazan Province. Their mines were situated at Alopaevsk near Nizhni-Tagilsk, Province of Perm, on the Siberian side of the Urals. My father had twice traveled there on the former Siberian Express, a beautiful train of the Nord-Express family, which I planned to take soon, though rather on an entomological than mineralogical trip, but the revolution interfered with that project.

My mother, Elena Ivanovna (August 29, 1876—May 2, 1939), was the daughter of Ivan Vasilievich Rukavishnikov (1841–1901), landowner, justice of the peace, and philanthropist, son of a millionaire industrialist, and Olga Nikolaevna (1845–1901), daughter of Dr. Kozlov. My mother’s parents both died of cancer within the same year, he in March, she in June. Of her seven siblings, five died in infancy, and of her two older brothers, Vladimir died at sixteen at Davos, in the eighteen-eighties, and Vasiliy in Paris, in 1916. Ivan Rukavishnikov had a terrible temper and my mother feared him. In my childhood all I knew about him were his portraits (his beard, the magisterial chain around his neck) and such attributes of his main hobby as decoy ducks and elk heads. A pair of especially large bears he had shot stood upright with redoubtably raised front paws in the iron-barred vestibule of our country house. Every summer I gauged my height by the ability to reach their fascinating claws—first those of the lower forelimbs, then those of the upper. Their bellies proved disappointingly hard, once your fingers (accustomed to palpate live dogs or toy animals) had sunk in their rough brown fur. Now and then they used to be taken out into a corner of the garden to be thoroughly whacked and aired, and poor Mademoiselle, approaching from the direction of the park, would utter a cry of alarm as she caught sight of two savage beasts waiting for her in the mobile shade of the trees. My father cared nothing for the shooting of game, greatly differing in this respect from his brother Sergey, a passionate sportsman who since 1908 was Master of the Hounds to His Majesty the Tsar.

One of my mother’s happier girlhood recollections was having traveled one summer with her aunt Praskovia to the Crimea, where her paternal grandfather had an estate near Feodosia. Her aunt and she went for a walk with him and another old gentleman, the well-known seascape painter Ayvazovski. She remembered the painter saying (as he had said no doubt many times) that in 1836, at an exhibition of pictures in St. Petersburg, he had seen Pushkin, “an ugly little fellow with a tall handsome wife.” That was more than half a century before, when Ayvazovski was an art student, and less than a year before Pushkin’s death. She also remembered the touch nature added from its own palette—the white mark a bird left on the painter’s gray top hat. The aunt Praskovia, walking beside her, was her mother’s sister, who had married the celebrated syphilologist V. M. Tarnovski (1839–1906) and who herself was a doctor, the author of works on psychiatry, anthropology and social welfare. One evening at Ayvazovski’s villa near Feodosia, Aunt Praskovia met at dinner the twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Anton Chekhov whom she somehow offended in the course of a medical conversation. She was a very learned, very kind, very elegant lady, and it is hard to imagine how exactly she could have provoked the incredibly coarse outburst Chekhov permits himself in a published letter of August 3, 1888, to his sister. Aunt Praskovia, or Aunt Pasha, as we called her, often visited us at Vyra. She had an enchanting way of greeting us, as she swept into the nursery with a sonorous “Bonjour, les enfants!” She died in 1910. My mother was at her bedside, and Aunt Pasha’s last words were: “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo—voda.”

My mother’s brother Vasiliy was in the diplomatic service, which he treated, however, far more lightly than my uncle Konstantin did. For Vasiliy Ivanovich it was not a career, but a more or less plausible setting. French and Italian friends, being unable to pronounce his long Russian surname, had boiled it down to “Ruka” (with the accent on the last syllable), and this suited him far better than did his Christian name. Uncle Ruka appeared to me in my childhood to belong to a world of toys, gay picture books, and cherry trees laden with glossy black fruit: he had glass-housed a whole orchard in a corner of his country estate, which was separated from ours by the winding river. During the summer, almost every day at lunchtime his carriage might be seen crossing the bridge and then speeding toward our house along a hedge of young firs. When I was eight or nine, he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments, and I felt embarrassed for my uncle by the presence of the servants and relieved when my father called him from the veranda: “Basile, on vous attend.” Once, when I went to meet him at the station (I must have been eleven or twelve then) and watched him descend from the long international sleeping car, he gave me one look and said: “How sallow and plain [ jaune et laid ] you have become, my poor boy.” On my fifteenth nameday, he took me aside and in his brusque, precise and somewhat old-fashioned French informed me that he was making me his heir. “And now you may go,” he added, “l’audience est finie. Je n’ai plus rien à vous dire.”