EdNote--Without double-checking things, I'd bet that this "intelligent" should have been printed "intelligent", as in Russian интеллигент--a member of the Russian intelligentsia--a complex concept that refers much more to progressive politics than to "intelligence" in the Anglo-American sense. I'm pretty sure that elsewhere he discusses the Russian intelligent in detail.  ~SB

Ah, Stephen HERO! The memory jolt I needed.

Seeing the noun ‘интеллигент’ in Cyrillic, I recall the obvious false-friend (adj. intelligent!) and read it as ‘intellectual, or member of the intelligentsia.’ Similarly, ‘intelligentny’ = ‘intellectual,’ the masc. adjective.

Where does this leave us when reading VN’s apparently-English text:

“These two men* are experimenters in form, sometimes difficult to understand even for a Russian intelligent reader, and hopelessly mutilated in English versions. In other words, it would be prodigiously difficult for you to tackle these two without knowing the language.”

* Alexandr Blok and Andrey Bely, picked out to represent the “flourishing” years 1900-17 (in contrast to the barren 1920-57).
 
Semantically, the English adjectives ‘intelligent’ and ‘intellectual’ would both convey VN’s obvious sense. SB’s suggestion is that VN wanted to convey something stronger: интеллигент, as ‘member-of-the-intelligentsia,’ but here using the noun adjectively (which works in English but not in Russian!) As you know, Cyrillics are not used in his Lectures on Russian Literature, much to my personal chagrin. So, we must endure unreadable italicized transliterations as in

Yah pom-new chewed-no-ay mg-no-vain-yay (p. 320)

(VN apologizes for uglifying one of Pushkin’s greatest line!)

Whether using italics, as in “... even for a Russian intelligent reader” would be understood as интеллигент is a moot point to which we may never know the answer. At this point, VN is addressing and commiserating with Anglophones.  
But I accept SB’s suggestion as highly plausible ... In which case, VN passes the Paikeday test as a Native Speaker of English!

BTW: I did catch Paikeday writing of a “Finnish young girl ...” where the Native instinct prefers “young Finnish girl ...”
The mystery remains: is there an apodictic ordering of English adjectives? Or do we take votes among soi-disant Native Speakers? The following sound right to me:
“Intelligent Russian readers.” “Intellectual Russian readers.” “Readers of the Russian intelligentsia.”
 
Finally, I am very much aware of Fredson Bowers’s Editorial Notes, esp. p. xii. The essays have been nursed together from handwritten (sometimes incomplete) lecture notes and “they cannot be regarded as a finished literary product ...”
We are forever grateful that so much has been lovingly restored and preserved for us.

Stan Kelly-Bootle

Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] k chertyam sobach'im  
  From: Stan Kelly-Bootle <stan@bootle.biz> <mailto:stan@bootle.biz>   
  Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:37:33 +0100    
  To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu> <mailto:NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>   

//snip
PS: “ ... even for a Russian intelligent reader.” (p 324, L’Envoi, Lectures on Russian Literature, Harvest/Harcourt, 1981)

Have others noticed a rather arcane aspect of English grammar here? Without knowing why, most native Anglophobes sense an incorrect adjectival inversion, preferring “an intelligent Russian reader.” In his “The Native Speaker Dead,” Tom Paikeday argues that there’s no satisfactory definition of Native Speaker, although the concept plays a key role in Chomsky’s theories. Tom objected to adverts for teachers that demanded Native Speakers in a specified language. How does this requirement compare with highly-fluent competence? Are there oral/written tests to distinguish Native Speakers from highly-fluent ones. Both classes are likely to make mistakes in tests, yet competent languages users were being turned for not having the right parents. Whence the interest in obscure grammatical rules, possibly nowhere documented, and known only to Native Speakers via some innate and unique capacity. Here we might be catching Nabokov making a rare non-Native slip?
http://www.paikeday.net/speaker.pdf

Stan Kelly-Bootle

 
 

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.