The Russian Professor

In the fall of 1942, Vladimir Nabokov, unable to secure a teaching position at Wellesley College, where he had held a creative-writing post the previous year, embarked on a two-month lecture tour that had been arranged for him by the Institute of International Education. The tour included stops at Coker College, in Hartsville, South Carolina; at Spelman College, in Atlanta, Georgia; at the Georgia State Womans College, in Valdosta; in Springfield, Illinois; and at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The following are excerpts from his letters to his wife, Véra Nabokov.

My sweetheart,

I had the vilest of trips. When I climbed into a sleeping car in New York, it turned out that my berth was occupied by another horizontal passenger, who had been sold the same place as I. He, however, took it meekly, and we had a friendly chat in the atrium of the lavatory while the conductors solved our little problem. At last he was sent to another car as I scrambled up to my legitimate place—it was already near midnight. Couldn’t sleep at all, since at the numerous stations the wild jolts and thunderings of the train cars’ copulations and unlatchings allowed no rest. By day, lovely landscapes skimmed past—huge trees in a profusion of forms—with their somehow oil-painted shade and iridescent greenery reminding me either of the image I have of Caucasian valleys or of the sublimated vegetation of Potter (with a dash of Corot). When I got off in Florence, I was immediately surprised by the heat and the sun, and the gaiety of the shadows—like what one feels upon reaching the Riviera from Paris. The train was an hour late, and of course the last bus had already left. I called Coker, and they replied that they would call me sometime later about a car. I waited an hour and a half, in a little restaurant, by the telephone booth, in a state of ever-increasing fatigue, unshavenness, and irritation. Finally a rich voice said to me on the phone that he was in Florence on business, that he was a professor (I didn’t catch his name) at the college, that they had informed him about the situation, and that around six he would return—with me—to Hartsville. The lecture was scheduled for eight. I asked, in what seemed a rather pale voice, how he imagined I would wait there (there were three hours to go till six), and then he merrily said that he would come over immediately and take me to a hotel, he didn’t say which, and I wasn’t even sure whether I had understood him correctly. I headed for the waiting room nearby and began to wait for him. After a while I got a feeling that a young taxi-driver, talking with someone on the taxi phone by the entrance (I had gone outside, bored by the hard benches and the stuffiness), had pronounced my name. I walked closer and asked whether it was my name he had said. It turned out to be a mistake—he had had a call from someone named Yellowater or something like that, remotely similar in sound. But then, being talkative, he informed me that his chum, who had been instructed by someone from some hotel to pick up someone from the railroad station, had wrecked his car when he hit a truck and asked him to take on the job. It sounded to me as if the name of the hotel was exactly the one mentioned by the rich voice, and I proposed, for his somewhat slow consideration, the question: perhaps I was the one he was supposed to pick up. It turned out that, indeed, the gentleman was to go to Hartsville, but his colleague had told him neither my name nor the name of the man who had sent him, and now he was unreachable. As no one was coming for me and as I had absolutely no idea what to do (well, I could certainly get a car for ten dollars and go to Coker—but I was afraid that the owner of the rich voice would search for me forever), I decided for some reason that I was the person in question. When I was delivered with my suitcase to the Salmon Hotel, it turned out that no one there knew anything. The last weak link with Hartsville, represented by the driver who had delivered me, disappeared (I had foolishly let him go), and I was sticking around the lobby with a nightmarish feeling that everything was an utter misunderstanding, that I had been brought here instead of someone else, and that the Voice had been looking for me hopelessly at the railroad station.

Thinking it over, I decided to call the college again, at least to find out the name of the Voice. When I was approaching the office for the requisite information, I heard one of the numerous people in the lobby saying to another that he could not understand what was the matter—why the taxi he had sent to the station hadn’t returned. I interfered and asked rather desperately whether it was me he was waiting for. “Oh, no,” he said, “I am waiting for a Russian professor.” “But I am the Russian professor!” “Well, you don’t look like one,” he said with a laugh, and here everything became clear, and we embraced. He turned out to be one Ingram, a professor of theology, very good-natured and just very nice. It was already around four, and he promised that having done what he had to he would pick me up shortly after five to drive me (fifty miles!) to Coker. Feeling that I wouldn’t have time to shave before the lecture (dinner was set for six-fifteen) I went in search of a barber. He shaved me horribly, leaving my Adam’s apple all bristly, and since in the next chair a wildly screaming five-year-old child was grappling with the barber who was trying to touch up the back of his head with the clippers, the old man shaving me was nervous, hushed the child, and finally cut me slightly under the nose.

Ingram arrived on time and just as we made it to our first corner a slender lady called to us from the sidewalk. When we stopped, she was all embarrassed and said that she had mistaken our car for a taxi and (as everyone here is very talkative) added that she was trying to get to Coker College—where her daughter was a student—and was afraid to be late for a Russian writer’s lecture. The day was obviously a day of whimsical coincidences, and so here were the three of us rolling along the highway, talking about Christianity and war—a very good but somewhat tiresome conversation, which lasted right to Hartsville. At six on the dot I was driven into a magnificent estate, to the magnificent multi-pillared mansion of Mrs. Coker (the belle-fille of the college’s founder, Major Coker), and here I remain as a guest till Tuesday. As soon as I barged in she told me that in ten minutes the guests invited in my honor would arrive, and at breakneck speed I began to bathe and tug at my dinner-jacket armor. I love you. The shirt came out so starched that the cufflinks would not go through the cuffs and it ended with one of them rolling under the bed (to be discovered only today). Finally, seeing that it was already twenty past six, I shrugged off the cuffs and appeared downstairs “without a trace of underwear.” Intuition prompted me to demonstrate the lack of cufflinks then and there and someone else’s cufflinks appeared at once and, to everyone’s approval, one of the ladies (but not the prettiest) attached them to my cardboard wrists. From that minute everything went smoothly and successfully.

The photograph had not been sent here, so it’s no surprise that the college was expecting a gentleman with Dostoyevsky’s beard, Stalin’s mustache, Chekhov’s pince-nez, and a Tolstoyan blouse. The books hadn’t got here yet, either (they came on Friday—I have been writing this letter for two days, my sweetheart—it’s now 10 P.M. Saturday). For that reason President Green introduced me to the large audience in rather smoky fashion. I spoke on “common sense” and it turned out—well, even better than I normally expect.

After lunch [the next day] the college biologist drove me in her car to the woods—or, rather, the coppices by the lake, where I took some remarkable hesperids and various kinds of pierids. It is hard to convey the bliss of roaming through this strange bluish grass, between blossoming bushes (one bush here is full of bright berries, as if colored in a cheap Easter purple—an utterly shocking chemical hue, but the principal tree in the area is some very delicate pine). To the west, cotton plantations, and the prosperity of the numerous Cokers, who seem to own half of Hartsville, is founded on this very cotton industry. It is picking time now, and the “darkies” (an expression that jars me, reminding me distantly of the patriarchal “Zhidok” [Yid] of western Russian landowners) pick in the fields, getting a dollar for a hundred “bushels”—I am reporting these interesting facts because they stuck mechanically in my ears. Today, after the “Tragedy of Tragedy,” I went collecting again—and again it was marvellous, and after lunch a Presbyterian minister, Smyth, turned up, a passionate butterfly collector and son of the famous lepidopterologist Smyth, about whom I know a lot (he worked on sphingids). Both with nets, the minister and I headed for a new locality a few miles away and collected till half past four. At five, the college’s best tennis player, a botanist, picked me up, and we had a very pleasant game (the white shorts came in handy) till six, after which there was dinner (have had a dinner jacket on for three days in a row) and then the usual kind of academic reception at the college. By the way, the last visiting lecturer was the rather spooky Charles Morgan.

I am already madly impatient to return to you and the museum, and only when I fight my way through the bushes for some Thecla do I feel that it was worthwhile coming here. One of the Cokers told me that when he was seeing off his wife, who was leaving for Europe on the Bremen, some German next to him was waving a kerchief with his last bit of strength and shouting to his wife, who was waving back from the deck, “Geh zu deine Kabine: ich bin müde!” [“Go to your cabin: I am tired.”] In the evenings, those who have children rarely go out because (despite their wealth) they have no one to leave the kids with; Negro servants never sleep over in the whites’ homes—it is not allowed—and they cannot have white servants because they cannot work with blacks. There are Uncle Toms sitting on every corner here.

I kiss you, my dear sweetheart—and please do not imagine that I am running after Creole girls here. Here they’re more the Miss Perkins type, and the younger women have fiery husbands; I barely see any girl students. They eat heartily here.

My love,

I am writing you from a black Wellesley—a college for Negresses, where Fisher [Edgar Fisher, Nabokov’s contact at the I.I.E.] chased me on because there’s a military blackout in Richmond and the lecture there’s postponed. I am writing to him today that no matter how much these breaks are justified by the general situation and no matter what kind of hospitality I meet, I want to cut short the tour to be home by mid-November and not mid-December. I stay here till Tuesday, giving lectures for bed and board. The apartment’s lovely and the woman president very nice indeed—and tomorrow I am going with a biologist to collect butterflies in the vicinity—but ultimately my having a good time means wasting my time. I miss you, my darling, and my Mityushen’ka [his son, Dmitri].

Monday I spent among Cokers and butterflies, but my head was already aching a little, and on Tuesday it was unbearable, with chills. It was hell to pack my suitcases, but I had some aspirin and took a sleeping car. After an hour by Greyhound I reached the Florence railroad station around seven, completely done in, and waited for a train there until half past ten. Overnight a crying baby kept me awake (by the morning, he split in two—it turned out there had been two crying, one on the opposite berth and one on the berth next to mine), but by morning I was quite better and I arrived at college completely fresh. Lunch with Miss President and dazzling sun. A tour of campus. At six-thirty there will be dinner with the faculty. Before that, I’d like a nap. Kisses, my love.

My dear love,

Too few butterflies here (about a thousand feet above sea level), hope that in [Valdosta] there will be more. As before, I haven’t been spending a cent. My lecture about Pushkin (Negro blood!) was greeted with almost comical enthusiasm. I decided to end it with a reading of “Mozart and Salieri,” and since here not only Pushkin but also music is held in high regard I had the somewhat mischievous idea of sandwiching the violin and later the piano into those three places where Mozart (and the beggar musician) produces music. The desired effect—again, a rather comical one—was achieved with the help of a gramophone disk and a woman pianist. Apart from that I have been to a biology class, talked about mimicry, and two days ago rode with a woman professor and a group of very black young ladies, very intensely chewing mint gum, in a wooden charabanc-cum-automobile to collect insects about twenty miles from here. Miss Read, the college head, is very pleasant, round, with a wart by her nostril, but very ideological: every morning I breakfast at her place (with conversations about the Negro problem and telepathy) and every morning at nine I have to attend chapel with her and sit with her onstage in an academic cloak facing four hundred girls singing hymns amid the storm from the organ. I asked for mercy—saying that I am a heretic, that I detest any kind of singing and music—but she answered firmly, “Never mind, you’ll love them here.” In my honor they choose a prayer to thank God “for poetry and the little things of nature; for a train thundering in the night; for craftsmen and poets; for those who take delight in making things and who make them well,” as well as Lvov’s music—God save the Tsar—set to an English hymn. This is all rather touching but hard to bear. Every evening there are dinners with various leading Negro figures—but no alcohol. I have two large rooms, and it is very strange to wake up around eight in the semi-darkness—for geographically here we are already in the West, but the time is Atlantic, so really it is not half past seven but rather 5 A.M. A couple of times I played tennis with a local woman professional. Am working on Gogol. Cloudless hot weather, and when I go after butterflies my pants and shirt get covered with a green armor: clingy seeds like tiny burdocks. Sad to have no letters from you, my darling.

My love,

Arrived here, on the Florida border, yesterday around 7 P.M. and leave for Tennessee on Monday morning.

A woman professor who met me at the station drove me to the hotel, where the college has booked a beautiful room for me as well as paid for all my meals, so that here, too, I won’t be spending anything before I go. They gave me a car as well, but I only look at it, not daring to drive it. The college, with a charming campus among pines and palms, is a mile out of town. It is very Southern here. I took a walk down the only big street, in the velvet of the twilight and the azure of neon lamps, and came back, overcome by a Southern yawn. Some gent, in the room next door, having climbed the stairs with me, suggested that I stop by for a cognac. He turned out to be a sugar producer from Florida, and the conversation fit the bill. Completely by accident, looking for matches, I took out the box I carry with me in case of moths. Breaking off in mid-word (the conversation had been about the difficulties of finding workers—imagine how cross I was with myself for having accepted the invitation), he remarked that when he’s out on excursions he puts into boxes like this . . . butterflies. In short, he turned out to be a passionate entomologist, a correspondent of Comstock’s [the lepidopterologist William Comstock], and so on. It’s the second time this has happened to me.

In the morning they came for me and drove me to the lecture. I talked on “common sense.” The usual result. At one they drove me to lunch at the Rotary Club, where I also spoke (about the war novel). After lunch I asked the president to drive me into the countryside, which he did. I collected charming butterflies for an hour and a half, and then he picked me up and brought me back to the hotel. I changed in a hurry and at four o’clock was delivered to a very funny and very vulgar ladies’ club, where I read several verse translations. I’m just back; on the bed; have asked a boy to extract numerous burrs from my pants; I love you very much.

My love,

At the station in Springfield I was met (and then on the next day taken to see Lincoln’s house and grave) by the club secretary, a creepily silent melancholic of somewhat clerical cast with a small stock of automatic questions, which he quickly exhausted. He is an elderly bachelor, and his profession consists of doing secretarial work for several Springfield clubs. He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time—got awfully nervous, having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one. It turned out that his hobby—or, rather, the passion of his life—is flagpoles. He sighed with relief when a watchman gave him the exact information—seventy feet—because the pole in his own garden is still ten feet taller. He was also greatly comforted when I said that in my opinion the top of the pole inclined from the vertical. He fingered it for a long time, looked up anxiously, and finally came to the conviction that even seventy feet was too much and that the distortion was not optical illusion but fact. He’s saving money for a hundred-foot flagpole. Shponka [a character in Gogol’s story “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”], judging by his dream, had the same complex, and Dr. Freud could have said something interesting on that subject, too.

My dear sweetheart,

The very charming President Turck met me and drove me to the best (indeed very fancy) hotel. Yesterday (Sunday) I lunched with him and his elderly mother, and then he drove me out of the city to show me the countryside: a large lake looking somewhat like Annecy. The city of St. Paul is big, cold, with a cathedral in the style of St. Peter’s in Rome on the hill, with a stark view of the Mississippi (behind which is the other Twin City—Minneapolis). Today I spent the whole day at the university, looking around, talking and lunching with the faculty. To my horror it turned out that I had not brought along my lecture on the novel, which they wanted from me at ten-thirty—but I decided to speak without any notes and it came out very smoothly and well. Yesterday after the trip into the country I went, having got awfully bored, to the cinema and came back on foot—I walked for more than an hour and went to bed around eight. On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me—a passionate desire to write, and to write in Russian. And yet I can’t. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t experienced this feeling can really understand its torment, its tragedy. English in this sense is an illusion and an ersatz. In my usual condition, i.e. busy with butterflies, translations, or academic writing, I myself don’t fully register the whole grief and bitterness of my situation.

I am healthy, eating plenty, taking my vitamins, and read newspapers more than usual now that the news is getting rosier. St. Paul is a stupefyingly boring city, only owls at the hotel, a bar girl who looks like Dasha; but my apartment is charming.

I love you, my sweetheart. Try to be cheery when I come back (but I love you when you’re low, too). If it weren’t for the two of you—I have felt this perfectly clearly—I would’ve gone to Morocco as a soldier. By the way, there’s a heavenly lycaenid in the mountains there—vogelii Oberthür. But much more than this I’d like to write a book in Russian now. Cotton woolly hotel, rain outside the window, a Bible and a telephone book in my room: for the convenience of communication with the Heavens and the office. ♦

(Translated, from the Russian, by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd, with Dmitri Nabokov.)