Message

Subject:	FW: "The Word" in The New Yorker
Date:	Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:31:44 +0100
From:	Dmitri Nabokov
To:	'Vladimir Nabokov Forum' <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

"The Word" was my father's second short story, and the first published after the assassination of his father in 1922. It was composed in Berlin and first appeared in the January 7, 1923, issue of Rul, the Russian-language periodical that the elder Nabokov had co-published in Berlin. "The Word" is so startlingly emotional and so direct compared to VN's other youthful stories, such as the recently re-discovered "Easter Rain", that, before I translated it, I had to quell some doubts regarding its authenticity. Like "Ultima Thule" it contains an all-explaining secret whose solution we never learn. Like "The Wood-Sprite" and the early poem "Revolution" (just published for the first time in English in The Paris Review, no. 175), "The Word" projects an idyllic, kindly world against stark, barbarous reality, ominously silhoutted by its pagination in the newpaper next to an unfinished fragment by VDN (VN's father).

"The Word" is also one of the very few VN stories in which angels take part. They are, of course, a very personal embodiment, much more closely related to angels of fable, fantasy and fresco than to the standard angels of Greek Orthodox religion (whose aura had left a certain imprint on my father's youth). It is also true that symbols of religious faith -- such as angels with a slightly Dickensian air -- appeared ever less frequently in Nabokov's fiction after his father's death (see "Wingstroke" for a very different kind of angel).

The ingenuous rapture of "The Word" surfaces in my father's later works, but only fleetingly, in an otherworld Nabokov could only hint at. He explained, however, that he would be unable to say as much as he did, had he not known more than he said.

There are still fragments and uncompleted stories that Nabokov did not want to publish, and to which he could not or would not give final form. There are poems and letters that will be published in Russian and in translation.

I hope your interest in my father's writing thrives. It is more gratifying and nobler to explore the crannies of creation and seek the keys to Nabokov through original thought, than to peep through the keyholes of hackneyed psycho-scholarship. But, oddly, that is what some Nabokov-bashers -- for reasons of their own -- will always prefer to do.