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AN inexperienced heraldist resembles a medieval traveler who brings back from the East the faunal fantasies influenced by the domestic bestiary he possessed all along rather than by the results of direct zoological exploration. Thus, in the first version of this chapter, when describing the Nabokovs’ coat of arms (carelessly glimpsed among some familial trivia many years before), I somehow managed to twist it into the fireside wonder of two bears posing with a great chessboard propped up between them. I have now looked it up, that blazon, and am disappointed to find that it boils down to a couple of lions—brownish and, perhaps, overshaggy beasts, but not really ursine—licking their chops, rampant, regardant, arrogantly demonstrating the unfortunate knight’s shield, which is only one sixteenth of a checkerboard, of alternate tinctures, azure & gules, with a botonee cross, argent, in each rectangle. Above it one sees what remains of the knight: his tough helmet and inedible gorget, as well as one brave arm coming out of a foliate ornament, gules and azure, and still brandishing a short sword. Za hrabrost’, “for valour,” says the scripture.
According to my father’s first cousin Vladimir Viktorovich Golubtsov, a lover of Russian antiquities, whom I consulted in 1930, the founder of our family was Nabok Murza (floruit 1380), a Russianized Tatar prince in Muscovy. My own first cousin, Sergey Sergeevich Nabokov, a learned genealogist, informs me that in the fifteenth century our ancestors owned land in the Moscow princedom. He refers me to a document (published by Yushkov in Acts of the XIII-XVII Centuries, Moscow, 1899) concerning a rural squabble which in the year 1494, under Ivan the Third, squire Kulyakin had with his neighbors, Filat, Evdokim, and Vlas, sons of Luka Nabokov. During the following centuries the Nabokovs were government officials and military men. My great-great-grandfather, General Aleksandr Ivanovich Nabokov (1749–1807), was, in the reign of Paul the First, chief of the Novgorod garrison regiment called “Nabokov’s Regiment” in official documents. The youngest of his sons, my great-grandfather Nikolay Aleksandrovich Nabokov, was a young naval officer in 1817, when he participated, with the future admirals Baron von Wrangel and Count Litke, under the leadership of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Vasiliy Mihaylovich Golovnin, in an expedition to map Nova Zembla (of all places) where “Nabokov’s River” is named after my ancestor. The memory of the leader of the expedition is preserved in quite a number of place names, one of them being Golovnin’s Lagoon, Seward Peninsula, W. Alaska, from where a butterfly, Parnassius phoebus golovinus (rating a big sic), has been described by Dr. Holland; but my great-grandfather has nothing to show except that very blue, almost indigo blue, even indignantly blue, little river winding between wet rocks; for he soon left the navy, n’ayant pas le pied marin (as says my cousin Sergey Sergeevich who informed me about him), and switched to the Moscow Guards. He married Anna Aleksandrovna Nazimov (sister of the Decembrist). I know nothing about his military career; whatever it was, he could not have competed with his brother, Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov (1787–1852), one of the heroes of the anti-Napoleon wars and, in his old age, commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where (in 1849) one of his prisoners was the writer Dostoevski, author of The Double, etc., to whom the kind general lent books. Considerably more interesting, however, is the fact that he was married to Ekaterina Pushchin, sister of Ivan Pushchin, Pushkin’s schoolmate and close friend. Careful, printers: two “chin” ’s and one “kin.”
The nephew of Ivan and the son of Nikolay was my paternal grandfather Dmitri Nabokov (1827–1904), Minister of Justice for eight years, under two Tsars. He married (September 24, 1859) Maria, the seventeen-year- old daughter of Baron Ferdinand Nicolaus Viktor von Korff (1805–1869), a German general in the Russian service.
In tenacious old families certain facial characteristics keep recurring as indicants and maker’s marks. The Nabokov nose (e.g. my grandfather’s) is of the Russian type with a soft round upturned tip and a gentle inslope in profile; the Korff nose (e.g. mine) is a handsome Germanic organ with a boldly boned bridge and a slightly tilted, distinctly grooved, fleshy end. The supercilious or surprised Nabokovs have rising eyebrows only proximally haired, thus fading toward the temples; the Korff eyebrow is more finely arched but likewise rather scanty. Otherwise the Nabokovs, as they recede through the picture gallery of time into the shadows, soon join the dim Rukavishnikovs of whom I knew only my mother and her brother Vasiliy, too small a sample for my present purpose. On the other hand, I see very clearly the women of the Korff line, beautiful, lily-and-rose girls, their high, flushed pommettes, pale blue eyes and that small beauty spot on one cheek, a patchlike mark, which my grandmother, my father, three or four of his siblings, some of my twenty-five cousins, my younger sister and my son Dmitri inherited in various stages of intensity as more or less distinct copies of the same print.
My German great-grandfather, Baron Ferdinand von Korff, who married Nina Aleksandrovna Shishkov (1819– 1895), was born in Konigsberg in 1805 and after a successful military career, died in 1869 in his wife’s Volgan domain near Saratov. He was the grandson of Wilhelm Carl, Baron von Korff (1739–1799) and Eleonore Margarethe, Baroness von der Osten-Sacken (1731–1786), and the son of Nicolaus von Korff (d. 1812), a major in the Prussian army, and Antoinette Theodora Graun (d. 1859), who was the granddaughter of Carl Heinrich Graun, the composer.
Antoinette’s mother, Elisabeth nee Fischer (born 1760), was the daughter of Regina born Hartung (1732– 1805), daughter of Johann Heinrich Hartung (1699–1765), head of a well-known publishing house in Konigsberg. Elisabeth was a celebrated beauty. After divorcing her first husband, Justizrat Graun, the composer’s son, in 1795, she married the minor poet Christian August von Stagemann, and was the “motherly friend,” as my German source puts it, of a much better-known writer, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with her twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie (later von Olfers). He is said to have called on the family, to say adieu before traveling to Wannsee—for the carrying out of an enthusiastic suicide pact with a sick lady—but was not admitted, it being laundry day in the Stagemann household. The number and diversity of contacts that my ancestors had with the world of letters are truly remarkable.
Carl Heinrich Graun, the great-grandfather of Ferdinand von Korff, my great- grandfather, was born in 1701, at Wahrenbruck, Saxony. His father, August Graun (born 1670), an exciseman (“Koniglicher Polnischer und Kurfurstlicher Sachsischer Akziseneinnehmer”—the elector in question being his namesake, August II, King of Poland) came from a long line of parsons. His great-great- grandfather, Wolfgang Graun, was, in 1575, organist at Plauen (near Wahrenbruck), where a statue of his descendant, the composer, graces a public garden. Carl Heinrich Graun died at the age of fifty-eight, in 1759, in Berlin, where seventeen years earlier, the new opera house had opened with his Caesar and Cleopatra. He was one of the most eminent composers of his time, and even the greatest, according to local necrologists touched by his royal patron’s grief. Graun is shown (posthumously) standing somewhat aloof, with folded arms, in Menzel’s picture of Frederick the Great playing Graun’s composition on the flute; reproductions of this kept following me through all the German lodgings I stayed in during my years of exile. I am told there is at the Sans-Souci Palace in Potsdam a contemporary painting representing Graun and his wife, Dorothea Rehkopp, sitting at the same clavecin. Musical encyclopedias often reproduce the portrait in the Berlin opera house where he looks very much like the composer Nikolay Dmitrievich Nabokov, my first cousin. An amusing little echo, to the tune of 250 dollars, from all those concerts under the painted ceilings of a guilded past, blandly reached me in heil- hitlering Berlin, in 1936, when the Graun family entail, basically a collection of pretty snuffboxes and other precious knick-knacks, whose value after passing through many avatars in the Prussian state bank had dwindled to 43,000 reichsmarks (about 10,000 dollars), was distributed among the provident composer’s descendants, the von Korff, von Wissmann and Nabokov clans (a fourth line, the Counts Asinari di San Marzano, had died out).
Two Baronesses von Korff have left their trace in the police records of Paris. One, born Anna-Christina Stegelman, daughter of a Swedish banker, was the widow of Baron Fromhold Christian von Korff, colonel in the Russian army, a great-granduncle of my grandmother. Anna-Christina was also the cousin or the sweetheart, or both, of another soldier, the famous Count Axel von Fersen; and it was she who, in Paris, in 1791, lent her passport and her brand-new custom-made traveling coach (a sumptuous affair on high red wheels, upholstered in white Utrecht velvet, with dark green curtains and all kinds of gadgets, then modern, such as a vase de voyage) to the royal family for their escape to Varennes, the Queen impersonating her, and the King, the tutor of the two children. The other police story involves a less dramatic masquerade.
With Carnival week nearing, in Paris, more than a century ago, the Count de Morny invited to a fancy ball at his house “une noble dame que la Russie a pretee cet hiver a la France” (as reported by Henrys in the Gazette du Palais section of the Illustration, 1859, p. 251). This was Nina, Baroness von Korff, whom I have already mentioned; the eldest of her five daughters, Maria (1842–1926), was to marry in September of the same year, 1859, Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov (1827–1904), a
