2

Since 1925 I had written and published four novels; by the beginning of 1934 I was on the point of completing my fifth, Krasnyy Tsilindr (The Red Top Hat), the story of a beheading. None of those books exceeded ninety thousand words but my method of choosing and blending them could hardly be called a timesaving expedient.

A first draft, made in pencil, filled several blue cahiers of the kind used in schools, and upon reaching the saturation point of revision presented a chaos of smudges and scriggles. To this corresponded the disorder of the text which followed a regular sequence only for a few pages, being then interrupted by some chunky passage that belonged to a later, or earlier, part of the story. After sorting out and repaginating all this, I applied myself to the next stage: the fair copy. It was tidily written with a fountain pen in a fat and sturdy exercise book or ledger. Then an orgy of new corrections would blot out by degrees all the pleasure of specious perfection. A third phase started where legibility stopped. Poking with slow and rigid fingers at the keys of my trusty old mashinka (“machine”), Count Starov’s wedding present, I would be able to type some three hundred words in one hour instead of the round thousand with which some popular novelist of the previous century could cram it in longhand.

In the case of The Red Top Hat, however, the neuralgic aches which had been spreading through my frame like an inner person of pain, all angles and claws, for the last three years, had now attained my extremities, and made the task of typing a fortunate impossibility. By economizing on my favorite nutriments, such as foie gras and Scotch whisky, and postponing the making of a new suit, I calculated that my modest income allowed me to hire an expert typist, to whom I would dictate my corrected manuscript during, say, thirty carefully planned afternoons. I therefore inserted a prominent wanter, with name and telephone, in the Novosti.

Among the three or four typists who offered their services, I chose Lyubov Serafimovna Savich, the granddaughter of a country priest and the daughter of a famous SR (Social Revolutionist) who had recently died in Meudon upon completing his biography of Alexander the First (a tedious work in two volumes entitled The Monarch and the Mystic, now available to American students in an indifferent translation, Harvard, 1970).

Lyuba Savich started working for me on February 1, 1934. She came as often as necessary and was willing to stay any number of hours (the record she set on an especially memorable occasion was from one to eight). Had there been a Miss Russia and had the age of prize misses been prolonged to just under thirty, beautiful Lyuba would have won the title. She was a tall woman with slim ankles, big breasts, broad shoulders, and a pair of gay blue eyes in a round rosy face. Her auburn hair must have always felt as being in a state of imminent disarray for she constantly stroked its side wave, in a graceful elbow-raised gesture, when talking to me. Zdraste, and once more zdraste, Lyubov Serafimovna—and, oh, what a delightful amalgam that was, with lyubov meaning “love,” and Serafim (“seraph”) being the Christian name of a reformed terrorist!

As a typist L.S. was magnificent. Hardly had I finished dictating one sentence, as I paced back and forth, than it had reached her furrow like a handful of grain, and with one eyebrow raised she was already looking at me, waiting for the next strewing. If a sudden alteration for the better occurred to me in mid session, I preferred not to spoil the wonderful give-and-take rhythm of our joint work by introducing painful pauses of word weighing—especially enervating and sterile when a self-conscious author is aware that the bright lady at the waiting typewriter is longing to come up with a helpful suggestion; I contented myself therefore with marking the passage in my manuscript so as later to desecrate with my scrawl her immaculate creation; but she was only glad, of course, to retype the page at her leisure.

We usually had a ten-minute break around four—or four-thirty if I could not rein in snorting Pegasus on the dot. She would retire for a minute, closing one door after another with a really unearthly gentleness, to the humble toilettes across the corridor, and would reappear, just as silently, with a repowdered nose and a repainted smile, and I would have ready for her a glass of vin ordinaire and a pink gaufrette. It was during those innocent intervals that there began a certain thematic movement on the part of fate.

Would I like to know something? (Dilatory sip and lip lick.) Well, at all my five public readings since the first on September 3, 1928, in the Salle Planiol, she had been present, she had applauded till her palms (showing palms) ached, and had made up her mind that next time she’d be smart and plucky enough to push her way through the crowd (yes, crowd—no need to smile ironically) with the firm intention of clasping my hand and pouring out her soul in a single word, which, however, she could never find—and that’s why, inexorably, she would always be left standing and beaming like a fool in the middle of the vacated hall. Would I despise her for having an album with reviews of my books pasted in—Morozov’s and Yablokov’s lovely essays as well as the trash of such hacks as Boris Nyet, and Boyarski? Did I know it was she who had left that mysterious bunch of irises on the spot where the urn with my wife’s ashes had been interred four years ago? Could I imagine that she could recite by heart every poem I had published in the émigré press of half-a-dozen countries? Or that she remembered thousands of enchanting minutiae scattered through all my novels such as the mallard’s quack-quack (in Tamara) “which to the end of one’s life would taste of Russian black bread because one had shared it with ducks in one’s childhood,” or the chess set (in Pawn Takes Queen) with a missing Knight “replaced by some sort of counter, a little orphan from another, unknown, game?”

All this was spread over several sessions and distilled very cunningly, and already by the end of February when a copy of The Red Top Hat, an impeccable typescript, lapped in an opulent envelope, had been delivered by hand (hers again) to the offices of Patria (the foremost Russian magazine in Paris), I felt enmeshed in a bothersome web.

Not only had I never experienced the faintest twinge of desire in regard to beautiful Lyuba, but the indifference of my senses was turning to positive repulsion. The softer her glances fluttered, the more ungentlemanly my reaction became. Her very refinement had a dainty edge of vulgarity that infested with the sweetness of decay her entire personality. I began to notice with growing irritation such pathetic things as her odor, a quite respectable perfume (Adoration, I think) precariously overlaying the natural smell of a Russian maiden’s seldom bathed body: for an hour or so Adoration still held, but after that the underground would start to conduct more and more frequent forays, and when she raised her arms to put on her hat—but never mind, she was a well-meaning creature, and I hope she is a happy grandmother today.

I would be a cad to describe our last meeting (March 1 of the same year). Suffice it to say that in the middle of typing a rhymed Russian translation that I had made of Keats’ To Autumn (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”) she broke down, and tormented me till at least eight P.M. with her confessions and tears. When at last she left, I lost another hour composing a detailed letter asking her never to come back. Incidentally, it was the first time that an unfinished leaf was left by her in my typewriter. I removed it and rediscovered it several weeks later among my papers, and then deliberately preserved it because it was Annette who completed the job, with a couple of typos and an x-ed erasure in the last lines—and something about the juxtaposition appealed to my combinational slant.