'A Heap of Peasant Caps in a Corner'

“You will arrive in Europe к шапочному разбору (a term based on the шапки [caps] which people разбираться i.e. sort out, when leaving church in Russia—a heap of peasant caps in a corner, that sort of thing. We use the term in the sense of ‘pour la curée’ [for the priest], ‘to the end of the show’), otherwise I would probably not let you go.”

The passage reads like a preview of Nabokov’s trilingual punning and other wordplay in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). He is writing a letter to his sometime-friend Edmund Wilson on this date, Feb, 13, in 1945. Translated from Nabokovese, he means the end of the war in Europe is imminent. The New Yorker was sending Wilson to Europe. He would remain there for five months, writing articles for the magazine that would eventually be collected in Europe Without Baedeker (1947). He was no war correspondent. Most memorable in the book and in his posthumously published The Forties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (1984) are his accounts of meetings with Evelyn Waugh and George Santayana.

In February 1945, however, the German surrender was three months in the future. Coincidentally, on the evening of Feb. 13, seventy-five years ago today, when Nabokov was writing his letter, the Allied firebombing raids on Dresden destroyed the “Florence of the Elbe” and killed some 135,000 people, mostly civilians. Two days earlier, on Feb. 11, the Yalta Conference (where the Soviet agent Alger Hiss was an American negotiator) had concluded, resulting in Stalin having his way with Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Unlike Roosevelt and Churchill – and Wilson – Nabokov was not naïve about Stalin and his intentions, nor willing to look the other way. More than two years earlier, on Dec. 10, 1943, Nabokov had written in a letter to Wilson regarding the Teheran Conference:

“I think some of the details of the Teheran meeting are delightful, for instance: ‘Stalin talked freely to his guests through an interpreter,’ or ‘Stalin raised his glass and looked soberly around.’ Judging by the photographs it is quite obvious that this is not the real Stalin, but one of his many duplicates—a stroke of genius on the part of the Soviets. I am not even sure this tussaudesque figure is real at all since the so-called interpreter, a Mr. Pavlovsk (?), who appears in all the pictures as a kind of Puppenmeister [puppeteer], is obviously the man responsible for the uniformed doll’s movements. Note the crease of the false Joe’s trousers in exhibit No. 3. Only wax figures have that kind of trouser leg. I am thinking of writing a full account of the business, because it was really beautifully ingenious—especially when the dummy circulated and jerkily drank 34 toasts. Mr. Pavlovsk is a great conjuror.”

And so was Nabokov. His farcical treatment of Stalin in Teheran recalls the novelist’s Invitation to a Beheading (1938; trans. 1959) and, even more, Bend Sinister (1947), which he had started writing in 1942.

[The letters quoted above are from Dear Bunny/Dear Volodya: the Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971 (University of California Press, 2001).]