My thanks, too, to Victor Fet for calling
Mr. Dickstein to task and to the Editors for calling attention to Mr.
Dickstein's assessment of my father's Onegin. Everyone,
of course, has a right to his opinion, and I am certainly not a censor.
But "perverse" seemed such a bizarre epithet that I was sure, at first,
that Mr. Dickstein's tongue was in his cheek. And what exponential
increment was intended by "altogether"? I once had the pleasure of
playing Nabokov to Mr. Dabney's Wilson in Dear Bunny, Dear
Volodya. Dabney, dedicated biographer of Edmund Wilson that he is,
might have been allowed some partiality. Yet, both in the nuances of
his interpretation and in friendly offstage discussion, he bent over
backwards to be objective, and to make it clear that he understood why
Nabokov translated Onegin the way he did -- as a comfortable
"pony" to be ridden between the way stations of Pushkin's poetic
masterpiece, a rendering so literal that at no time should
the trappings of poesy obscure implacable sense. The rest could be
introduced ex post facto and was, alas, by numerous poetasters, to the
detriment of the verse novel's essence. I may be wrong, but my
conclusion is that Mr. Dickstein knows neither Onegin, nor
Nabokov's translation of it, nor, indeed, the Russian language, all
three of which would seem prerequisites for passing any kind
of judgement on the VN version.