'How Can You Waste Your Time on Such Trifles?'

France and Britain on Sept. 3, 1939, in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, declared war on Germany. Vladimir Nabokov, his wife and son were living in Paris. This least political of men, whose life had been scrambled by politics, was issued a gas mask and waited for the German bombing of the city to begin. In the first volume of his biography of the novelist (1990), Brian Boyd writes:

“Nabokov looked around him at the changed city and wrote in English a brief sketch—now lost—of Paris at war. He submitted it to leading British and American magazines such as the Spectator and the Atlantic. Esquire thought it ‘poised, frequently distinguished writing—but a prose poem,’ and like other journals, declined to publish.”

   

One would love to read this prose poem, likely a document of literary and historical importance. That year in Paris, Nabokov had written his final Russian short story, “Vasily Shishkov.” He sent it to Mark Aldanov, who worked at Poslednie novosti (Latest News) and was the other Russian émigré in Paris trying to support himself exclusively through literary work. Aldanov replied: “It’s war! War! How can you waste your time on such trifles?” He did, however, put Nabokov in contact with Stanford University, which sought an instructor for a summer course in Russian literature in 1940 or 1941. That lead to the Nabokovs sailing from St. Nazaire on May 19, 1940. They arrived in New York City eight days later. Paris fell to the Nazis on June 14. On June 17, the Champlain, the ship that had carried the family to the U.S., was sunk by a German torpedo on her way back to Europe.

In an interview he gave to Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian Word) in New York (collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, 2019), published on June 23, 1940, Nabokov says:

“A few days ago I got a letter from friends in Paris. They write that the house where I had been living with my wife and son before we left had been hit by a bomb from a German plane and was completely destroyed.”