NABOKOV, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH. 1899-1977.


Stikhi. [Poems.] Petrograd: Union [for the author], 1916. 8vo (189 x 156 mm). Publisher's cream-colored wrappers. Wrappers with some soiling, and wear along edges. EXTREMELY RARE FIRST AND ONLY EDITION OF THE FIRST BOOK BY THE AUTHOR OF LOLITA, NUMBER 252 OF 5000 COPIES. This collection of 68 love poems published when Nabokov was just 17 years old were inspired by the first true love affair of the author's life. Valentina Shulgina was 15 when they met in 1915 at Vyra, the Nabokov family's summer estate near St. Petersburg. He presented her with his love poems in the spring of 1916 and they reunited at Vyra that summer. But by season's end he knew their affair was over. According to biographer Brian Boyd, Nabokov recalled their relationship in his first novel Mashenka [Mary] (1926); he also mentioned her in the final chapter of Speak, Memory (1966) under the name "Tamara." The poet paid for the edition himself and issued it with his own name on the title page as he had not yet adopted his pseudonym "M. Siren." Whether the majority of the 500 copies of Stikhi was confiscated, lost or destroyed is not known, but bibliographer Michael Juliar has located no more than 8 to 10 copies worldwide. Upon reading these poems, influential critic Cornei Chukovsky wrote Nabokov a letter of guarded praise, but enclosed a rough draft with a much franker assessment by mistake. The important symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius (and cousin of the boy's Russian literature teacher) instructed Nabokov's father: "Please tell your son that he will never, never be a writer" (See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p 121).