'The Line I Am Writing Seems to Slip Into Mist'

As a reporter I wrote hundreds of obituaries. The first thing I ever wrote for my first newspaper was the obituary of a farmer named “Miller.” I don’t remember his first name or anything else about him. Newspapers often leave obituary-writing to clerks. Obits are deemed essential but formulaic and somehow déclassé. I was editor of that small town weekly in Northwestern Ohio and we had no clerks. My assistant editor and I wrote everything, except for a freelancer, a high-school teacher, who handled sports. I’ve written a dozen obituaries for the university where I work and even more for Anecdotal Evidence. It’s a privilege never undertaken casually. You’re honoring the memory of the departed and his family and friends. 

Yuli Isaevich Aykhenvald (1872-1928) was a Russian literary critic described by Nabokov in Speak, Memory as “a Russian version of Walter Pater.” After the Bolsheviks took power, Aykhenvald was attacked by Trotsky and, in 1922, exiled to Germany. On December 15, 1928, while returning from a party at the Nabokovs’ in Berlin, he was hit by a tram and died from his injuries two days later. On December 23, Nabokov published an obituary of Aykhenvald in Rul’ (The Rudder), a Russian language journal in Berlin. It is less a conventional “death notice” than a brief essay on mortality and immortality. One hears themes Nabokov would revisit in fiction throughout his life, most definitively in his greatest novel, Pale Fire.

 

“To get to know a person,” he begins, “is to create the person: his traits and signs accumulate in our soul, his image grows, develops, and gains color, and each new encounter with him enriches our soul; and the more harmony and truth there is in this creation, the more we love that person.”

 

This rings true to my experience, especially among people I'm fond of. It reminds me of processing a photograph in the dark room and watching the latent image become visible.

 

“For me, as for many who knew him well, he is as alive today as he was on that Saturday, half an hour before the tragedy, when, as I locked the front door, I could see his slightly stooped back moving away through the glass.”

 

Nabokov isn’t writing a perfunctory just-the-facts-ma’am recitation of names and dates. His final paragraph describes how the dead live on in memory until only the name survives, like my anonymous Miller. “And I feel so sorry for him, I feel so sorry for this tender man,” Nabokov writes, “that suddenly the line I am writing seems to slip into mist.”

 

[The obituary is collected in Nabokov’s Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]