Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter

In both translation and commentary I have tried hard to stick to the Nabokov rules: precision, artistic fidelity, no padding, no ascribing. Any conjecture beyond what I have ventured would violate those rules.

The translation itself reflects my intent to be faithful to VN in both the general and the specific, textual, senses. Many years of translating for and with Father instilled in me those categorical requirements of his. The only cases where he considered departures admissable were untranslatable expressions and revisions of the text itself, in the translated version, by the original author. It is possible that VN, were he alive, might have exercised his authorial license to change certain details of The Enchanter; I believe, though, that he would have chosen to leave intact this model of conciseness and multilevel meaning. The rare instances where I have taken the liberty of making minor adjustments occur precisely where the technique—as in the telescoped Little Red Riding Hood wordplays ( this page; this page) or the high-speed imagery of the finale—would have made a totally literal rendering meaningless in English. Elsewhere, on occasion, the English may seem simply a bit unorthodox. But so, in such cases, is the Russian.

Other possible translations of the Russian word volshebnik are “magician” or “conjuror,” but I have respected Nabokov’s express intention that, in this case, it be rendered as “enchanter.” Volshebnik was written during October and November of 1939. It was signed “V. Sirin,” a pseudonym that VN used for his Russian writings from his early youth on so that they would not be confused with those of his father, who had the same given name. Sirin in Russian is both a species of owl and a bird of ancient fable, but most probably has no connection, as some have suggested, with the word siren .

The original text was dictated to and typed by Father’s first reader, Vera Nabokov. According to Nabokov’s letters, he showed it shortly thereafter to four other people, literary friends of his (see Author’s Note One).

At some point, apparently, a typescript was also shown to the émigré critic Vladimir Weidle, in Paris. It could not have been later than May 1940, when we sailed for New York. Andrew Field, who, it seems, read an article written nearly forty years after the fact by a very old Weidle not long before his death, claims [11]the piece shown to Weidle differed in several respects from The Enchanter (of which Field has a very sketchy idea at best, having seen only two pages and one or perhaps both of Nabokov’s references presented at the beginning of this volume).

Presumably that version was called “The Satyr,” the girl “was no more than ten,” and the concluding scene was set not on the French Riviera but “in a remote little hotel in Switzerland.” Field also attributes the name Arthur to the protagonist. It is unclear whether he got that from Weidle too, but more likely he simply gleaned it from Father’s recollection in his postface to Lolita . I have suggested that Nabokov had thought of his protagonist as “Arthur,” or perhaps even used that name in a preliminary draft. It is highly unlikely, however, that the name appeared in a manuscript “already marked with instructions for the printer,” as Field has Weidle affirm.

As for the three differences Field cites, if his paraphrase of the Weidle article is accurate, then Weidle’s memory of that distant event must have been a bit hazy (Field does admit, in fact, that Weidle “could not remember whether the girl is named in the story”). The fact is that there never was a version called “The Satyr”; indeed, such a title would seem most implausible to anyone with a sensitive ear for Nabokov’s use of language. And I would attribute the same degree of credibility to the rest of Weidle’s assertions.

I was five when The Enchanter was being written and was, if anything, a disruptive influence in our Paris apartment and our Riviera pensions. I recall that, between generous periods of play with me, Father would sometimes withdraw into the bathroom of our meager quarters to work in peace, although not, as John Shade does for shaving purposes in Pale Fire , on a board placed across the tub. While I was already aware that my father was a “writer,” I had no idea of what was being written, and my parents certainly made no attempt to familiarize me with the story of Volshebnik (I think the only work of Father’s I knew at the time was his Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland and the little tales and ditties he would improvise for me). It is possible that, when Father was writing Volshebnik , I had already been bundled off to Deauville with a cousin of Mother’s, since it was feared that the rumble of Hitler’s bombs might reach Paris. (It did, but only after our departure for America, and I think one of the few bombs actually dropped on the city did hit our building as we were crossing on the Champlain . The vessel, too, was destined to be destroyed after having safely delivered us with no more than the spout of an occasional whale to alarm a couple of trigger-happy gunners; on its next voyage, for which we had originally held passage, it was sunk with all aboard by a German submarine.)

Other than what already is or will now become publicly available, neither Mother nor I can reconstruct much about the birth of the idea in VN’s mind, but can only alert the reader to some of the inane hypotheses that have been propounded, especially of late. As for the link with Lolita , the theme had probably lain dormant (as Nabokov suggests in “On a Book Entitled Lolita” ) until the new novel began germinating, somewhat as in the case of the interrupted Solus Rex and the later, very different, but nonetheless related Pale Fire .

It is clear from Nabokov’s postface to Lolita , originally written in 1956, that, at the time, he believed whatever copies had existed of the Volshebnik typescript had been destroyed, and his recollection of the novella was somewhat blurred, partly by the passing of time, but mainly by his rejection of it as “a dead scrap,” superseded by Lolita . The surviving text probably turned up not long before he proposed it, with reborn enthusiasm, to G. P. Putnam’s Sons (see Author’s Note Two).

I became aware of the work’s existence quite late and in rather a vague way, and had occasion to read it only in the early eighties, when our voluminous archives were finally organized by Brian Boyd (the author of a proper literary biography of VN, to be published in 1988). It was then that Volshebnik , which had been consulted by Father in the sixties before it submerged anew among the jumble of belongings that had been shipped to Switzerland from an Ithaca warehouse, resurfaced.

I completed a more or less final draft of the translation in September of 1985.

For the initial impetus to attack what was not an easy job I must give heartfelt thanks to Matthew Bruccoli, who had envisioned a very limited edition of the work, as Nabokov had originally suggested to Walter Minton, then president of Putnam.

The timing of this public debut of The Enchanter is not without an amusing and instructive coincidental sidelight. In 1985, in Paris, there began an energetic one-man campaign to attribute to Vladimir Nabokov a pseudonymous, quite un-Nabokovian book from the mid-thirties entitled Novel with Cocaine .

Falling as it does within the very limited realm of rediscovered Nabokoviana, The Enchanter is a most appropriate example of the strikingly original prose Nabokov-Sirin produced in his most mature—and final—years as a novelist in his mother tongue (not long before writing The Enchanter in 1939, in fact, he had completed his first major English work, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , and 1940 was to be the year of our transplantation to the United States).