Happiness in Short Pants

Yolanda Delgado Batista

All unhappy men are more or less the same; all happy men are more or less different (with
Tolstoys permission). Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov belonged to the second group.

A New York Times journalist travelled to the Swiss city of Montreaux to interview Nabokov in the
hotel where he had lived with his wife Vra since they left the United States, where he was a
naturalized citizen and spent more than 20 years of his life. At the time, the writer was 72 years
old. Lolita (1955) had brought him success, but had also closed the doors on him to the Nobel
Prize. In Switzerland, Nabokov was reunited with the Russian paradise of his infancy. The lakes, the
mountains, his adored Vra (his loyal collaborator) and his son Dmitri, who at the time lived in
Milan, were all he needed to devote himself to his two passions: writing and collecting butterflies.
In that interview, Aldem Whitman asked him if his life at all resembled what he had imagined it
would be like when he was young. My life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of
boyhood and youth, he remarked, adding: In the first decade of our dwindling century, during
trips with my family to southern Europe, I imagined in bedtime reveries what it would be like to
become an exile who longed for a remote, sad and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia
under the eucalipti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization
of that fantasy. At the age of 12, my fondest dream was a visit to the Karakorum range in search of
butterflies. Twenty-five years later, I successfully sent myself, in the part of my hero's father (see
my novel The Gift), to explore, net in hand, the mountains of Central Asia. At 15, I visualized myself
as a world-famous author of 70 with a many of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald.
(Strong Opinions, 1973).
Yolanda
Delgado Batista
Firmado digitalmente por Yolanda
Delgado Batista
Nombre de reconocimiento (DN):
cn=Yolanda Delgado Batista, o, ou,
email=ydelgado@telefonica.net, c=<n
Fecha: 2014.10.12 21:50:21 +02'00'

Nabokov would preserve the happiness that he experienced in his early childhood like a treasure,
projecting it over and again in the mirrors of his novels. In them we find the simple delights of life
that his mother, Elena Ivanovna, taught him to appreciate, as if she feared that that Eden would
vanish someday, as it ultimately did. At the age of 20, Vladimir left Russia and said goodbye to his
first love. That hurried exile and the loss of "Tamara" were his wound and the leitmotiv of his
literature. In 1919, part of the Nabokov family settled in Berlin, while Vladimir and his brother
Sergei travelled to England to study Russian and French at Cambridge University. Their father,
Vladimir Dmietrievich Nabokov, was an intellectual and one of the founders of the Constitutional
Democratic Party, which was against the 1917 Revolution. In exile in Berlin, he ran a liberal
newspaper, Rul, in which his son published his poems and short stories. First in Berlin, and later in
Paris, the author of Laughter in the Dark (1933) produced eight novels that were written in
Russian and set in the German city; Mary, published in1926, was the lone exception. Vladimir
wrote constantly and earned a bit of money as a film extra, a ball boy and the author of a Russian
grammar book whose first exercise contained the following sentence: Madame, the doctor has
arrived. Here is a banana.

To understand the personality and work of an exceptional writer, it is necessary to go back in time.
Vladimir Nabokov, the oldest of five children, was born into an upper-class St. Petersburg family
the same day as Shakespeare, April 23
rd
, in the year 1899. He was educated by foreign
governesses, who over time were replaced by other male tutors. The Nabokovs enjoyed summers
in Vyra, a few kilometers from the capital of the empire, in a large house with numerous privies.
Vladimir recounts in Speak, Memory (1951) that he wrote poems while holed up in one of the
privies. Those poems were read by the poetess Zinaida Gippius, who through Nabokovs father
sent him a terrifying message: Tell your son that he will never be a writer. Autumns were spent
on the beaches of the Adriatic Sea, Nice or Biarritz, and winters at his home in St. Petersburg.
Vladimir was a spoiled child. His father taught him how to use a foil, play tennis and throw hard
rights with boxing gloves. Vladimir inherited his interest in chess from him, and above all his love
of literature and lepidoptera. In short pants, Vladimir learned all the nouns and verbs in three
languages (English, Russian and French), words that as a writer he would play with in his style to
construct ambitious perfect lies that still bewitch the reader who falls under their spell.

His individualistic character was incompatible with any group, even during his school years. The
child that wrote compositions sprinkled with foreign words and did not take part in games could
not have charmed either his classmates or his teachers at the Tenishev School. At the age of 11,
Vladimir Nabokov realized it would be difficult for him to fit in in any setting, but instead of
dramatizing it, he converted his isolation into a positive value. As an adult, he continued to be a
gentle loner with hardly any contact with other writers. We will never know how much truth
there was behind that pride of his that made journalists suffer. He demanded them to send
interview questions to him in writing. Vivian Darkbloom (that was his anagram) promised that he
didnt give a damn about criticism, but his wrath could be heard from the top of Swiss mountains
when some critic did not correctly interpret his work. Nabakov was as outspoken as the
proboscis of the cyan-winged butterfly, one of many he discovered and which bears his name. In
the United States, university students at Wellesley and Cornell listened in amazement and delight
to professor Nabokovs sharp remarks (his lessons are published) about the work of Dostoyevsky,
Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner and Pasternak. To be fair, the author of Ada and Pale Fire
had several lay saints on his altar: Tolstoy, Chekov, Bely, Proust, Joyce and Kafka.

There is a lot to say about this extraordinary character who reached the age of 78 with short
pants, had memorized entire dialogues from the Marx Brothers, despised Freud, didnt drive, and
wrote standing up with a pencil. There is a lot to say about someone who enjoyed his aperitif with
a glass of To Pepe (never vodka) and some almonds. In the afternoons, he would play chess and
Russian Scrabble with Vra. His biggest dilemma at eleven oclock at night was whether or not to
take a sleeping pill. There is a lot to say about that big boy who spoke with the insecurity of a child,
but I invite you to read his novels and laugh with them. Nabokov emphasized laughter over pain.
He wanted his readers to exercise the muscles of laughter, the laughter that is born in the belly
and supplies oxygen to the brain. And although sadness cannot be avoided, for Vladimir Nabokov,
life was a slice of fresh bread with butter and mountain honey that had to be enjoyed. He did
that until the end, July 2
nd
, 1977.