'Here Are Letters, All Yours'

I received a letter – a real letter, hand-written -- from a friend I haven’t see in almost fifty years. Ours was friendship, not romance, which, of course, can be tricky. She had read something I’d written and wanted to tell me she liked it. She remembered me “always talking about books” half a century ago. Our pasts live on in the memories of others and might turn out endearing, embarrassing or dangerous. Letters from others I knew long ago would likely be less forgiving. She briefed me on her life, job, husband and kids – the usual highlights of a mercifully happy life, and I did the same. 

A century ago today, in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov wrote this poem in Russian, “Pis’ma,” translated as “Letters” by Brian Boyd and the poet’s son, Dmitri Nabokov:  

 

“Here are letters, all yours (already on the folds

their traces of jerky pencil are fading). By day,

folded up, they sleep, amid dried flowers, in my

fragrant drawer, but at night they fly out,

semitransparent and weak, they glide

and flutter over me, like butterflies: one

I may catch in my fingers, and at the night blue

I look through it, and in it the stars shine through.”

 

A young man’s poem, of course. Nabokov was not yet twenty-four. Love letters. I remember writing every day over the summer to a girlfriend who lived elsewhere in Ohio. She did the same. I have trouble believing I was once so young. Nabokov’s poem may be addressed to the girl he calls “Tamara” in Speak, Memory. He had met her in 1916, two years before the Bolshevik Revolution and the start of his family’s exile. Some of the letters show up excerpted and edited in Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1925; trans. 1970). In Speak, Memory he writes:

 

“Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. I wish I had kept the whole of our correspondence that way.”

 

[The poem can be found in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (eds. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]