Arts and Letters

It is, as you know, my task to say a few words on this occasion about the late Nicholas Nabokov. I approach this task with hesitation, almost with apology. I was indeed a friend of Nicholas Nabokov—a friend, that is, in the terms of that international-cosmopolitan world to which each of us, though in different ways, belonged. And yet I wonder whether others of you have not also had, upon the death of a friend, the feeling I have now: the sudden realization of how little you have really known that friend—how much you have taken for granted—how content you have been to accept the outward personality, what Freud called the persona, in place of the real person.

Nicholas was of course a composer of distinction. I cannot, as a layman, speak with any authority about his music. His membership in this Institute stands as the judgment upon it of people more competent than myself to judge. From my layman's standpoint, I found it full-bodied, a bit romantic, dramatic, and enthusiastic, like Nicholas himself, and not unaffected by his old-Russian background. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I am sure that many other laymen, including the thousands who attended ballet and opera performances for which he supplied the music, or who heard it in other ways, reacted in a similar fashion.

The formative influences of his life—childhood, early environment, atmosphere, education—were ones with which it would not be easy for most of us to identify. He was born into a family of the landed gentry living along the western border of Russia proper—at the corner where Lithuania, Poland, and what is now known as Byelorussia meet. All of this area then belonged formally to the Russian Empire; but none of it was entirely typical of Russia. And this relationship to Russia of the locus of birth—near it but not entirely of it—seems to me symbolic of his own relationship to that country throughout his life: both of the sense of belonging to it (for he remained essentially a Russian to his death) and yet also of the relative detachment which permitted him to see it from outside.

The family was one in which there was a variety of national strains: Russian, German, Tatar, I don't know what else. It was a scattered sort of a family: fragmentized by divorces, separations, and family squabbles of one sort or another. And Nicholas was brought up in a somewhat peripatetic mode of existence, flitting from one to another of the great country properties of his relatives, attended at all times by a cloud of servants, governesses, tutors, and other retainers, not to mention flocks of siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, etc. These childhood peregrinations were prophetic of his later life. It was not for nothing that he was to name his autobiography Bagazh.

At the time of the Russian civil war, following the Revolution, Nicholas, still an adolescent, was obliged to flee with his family across the Black Sea to Constantinople. Then, like his cousin Vladimir, he was introduced to adult life in the Russian emigré community and the feverish cultural world of the Berlin of the 1920s. It was here that he first seriously studied music. From Berlin he moved out into the Europe of the years between the wars—into the exciting world of Paris and Monte Carlo and the ballets and operas of the time. And then, during World War II, driven out like so many others by the Nazis, he plunged himself into our American world, which he was to inhabit one way or another over most of the rest of his life: teaching, composing, directing festivals (for he was a gifted impresario), founding the Russian-language programs of the Voice of America, running the Congress of Cultural Freedom, God knows what else.

An intensely gregarious man, delighting, basking even, in the company of a host of friends and acquaintances, knowing everyone worth knowing, speaking all the languages, familiar with every great city of the West, Nicholas was the epitome of the cultured cosmopolitan of our age: at home everywhere, and at home nowhere, unless it be in the companionship and affections of his friends. His was a life of packing and unpacking, of ocean liners and airplanes, of hotel rooms, rented flats, and guest rooms of friends. He enjoyed people immensely. He lived by their warmth; he reflected it. He had an unerring eye for their failings: their pretensions, their ridiculousness. He was a superb mimic, in at least four languages. Yet the criticism implied in this mimicry was seldom, if ever, cruel. It was his way of understanding others. He took life as he found it, not caring to inquire into its philosophic implications; and he loved every bit of it. He loved the whole wonder and absurdity of our contemporary western civilization: the music, the poetry, the drama, good food, good humor, beautiful women, and above all the amusing spectacle of the impact of colorful individuals upon one another. This was all his dish. He enjoyed it to the end.

Did he spread himself too thin by living this life? Of course he did. It could not have been otherwise. I don't think he ever liked or enjoyed solitude. How much this affected his work as a composer, I cannot say. It may have had something to do with his inclination to the composing of music for ballet and opera; for this involved him with other people—threw him into relationships of collaboration with others. He sometimes complained about it, but I think he loved this sort of involvement. He loved even those frantic scenes of excitement and despair and last-minute improvisation which seem to attend the first nights of every ballet or opera, and which he described so well in his writings. Even in his art he looked for sociability.

Music aside, Nicholas fragmentized, of course, himself and what he had to offer, and he did so without stint or regret. He went through life tossing off to every side bits and pieces of himself: of his wit, his enthusiasms, his friendships, his loves—tossing them off generously, recklessly, without reflection and without remorse. Each of us who thought of ourselves as his friends (and there were a great many of us) had a small part in this lavishly-dispensed bounty. The result was that, aside from his music and his books, the whole of him was probably not left in any single place. But he was not the first man to express himself in such a manner; and who is to say, after all, that the sum total of these contributions, entering like everything else into that great stream of time and forgetfulness that sooner or later embraces and absorbs all that any of us has to offer, was any the less significant for the open-handed and joyous manner in which its component parts were flung to the winds of sociability, of friendship, and of affection?