Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel

Introduction

Introduction Whether because I have known Nabokov at close hand or because of my interest in his creative process, he seems to fascinate me as a person and as a writer, although his writing leaves me cold, in spite of all its virtuosity and even beauty. -Marc Szeftel This is a book about two very different people whose paths might never have crossed had not tumultuous revolutions and wars redirected and reshaped their lives. The name ofMarc Szeftel, a Russian historian and Nabokov 's longtime colleague at Cornell University, is familiar to many Nabokov specialists because he is often cited as the prototype for one of Nabokov's most memorable protagonists, Timofey Pnin. Both Andrew Field and Brian Boyd in their biographies make direct connections between Pnin and Szeftel, Andrew Field claiming that the writer actually confessed to him ("while riding in the elevator ofthe Montreux Palace") that Szeftel had served as the source for the character, and Boyd simply stating that "[mlanyhave identified Marc Szeftel ... as Nabokov's model for Pnin."l When Szeftel left Cornell in 1961, he went directly to the University of Washington and thereafter spent the rest ofhis life in Seattle. Upon Szeftel's death in 1985, his widow, Kitty Szeftel, gave his archive, including numerous diaries and letters, to the university's Suzzallo Library. Pniniad draws heavily on previously unpublished materials found in the archive, as well as on personal interviews with Nabokov's and Szeftel's colleagues, family, and friends. My purpose in this book is twofold. First, I intend a study of Pnin, its origins, and its sources, for it is my strong opinion that Marc Szeftel had a serious impact on the novel. Second, and even more important, I also believe that much can be gained from exploring Szeftel's and Nabokov's relationship, from examining their lives as they intersected, for between the two of them, Nabokov and Szeftel embodied immeasurably more than one literary work. They personified the complexity and variety ofRussian emigre experience in Europe and the United States, its ethnic, social and religious diversity, its triumphs and its failures. Pniniad is, in many ways, my attempt 3 INTRODUCTION 4 to use Pnin's emigre creator and Pnin's emigre model as a vehicle to illuminate at least some dark corners of this fascinating cultural terrain. Nabokov's and Szeftel's were clearly contrasting personalities: Szeftel was anything but playful and fun loving. Though history and literature were his first loves (he studied law in Poland and Belgium mainly to oblige his father, who wanted him to be a "practical" man), he lacked Nabokov's literary sophistication, sensitivity, and fanciful imagination? He also came from a markedly different social background than either Nabokov, the heir to Russian aristocrats and statesmen, or even Nabokov's wife, who, like Szeftel, was Jewish. Unlike Vera, who was born into a prosperous bourgeois St. Petersburg family, Marc Szeftel spent his childhood in small Jewish towns within the Pale of Settlement, where his father worked as a photographer and the family's income was very modest. As Szeftel himself remarked in his diary, he and Nabokov were in no way intimate friends. Szeftel admired and envied Nabokov, whose Russian novels he had read when still in Europe (unlike Nabokov, who settled in Berlin, Szeftel spent the European part of his exile in Poland and Belgium). He joined the faculty of Cornell in 1945, three years before Nabokov did. Nabokov was familiar with Szeftel's work on The Lay ofIgor's Campaign, in which Szeftel collaborated with Roman Jakobson, his former colleague at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York. "It is on the whole an admirable work," Nabokov wrote to Wilson in 1948, commenting on La Geste Du Prince Igor, "Szeftel's and Jakobson's studies being especially brilliant."3 In the early fifties, Szeftel, Nabokov, and Jakobson attempted to collaborate on an English-language study of the epic, but the project eventually fell through. Szeftel tried to get close to Nabokov but sensed that the writer was deliberately creating an insurmountable distance between them. Their mutual colleagues sometimes felt that Nabokov's attitude towards his fellow emigre was "patronizing ... even dismissive."4 Nabokov probably viewed Szeftel as, in many ways, a caricature of himself . Nabokov's command of English was vastly superior to Szeftel's, yet, to those close to him, Nabokov often complained that he spoke merely "imitation " and "pidgin" English5 which was "stiffish" and "artificial."6 While he...