Here Nabokov writes to Edmund Wilson (“Bunny”), a fellow author, literary critic, and one of his closest friends in the United States, about his own health and the timing of Wilson’s visit to America in February of 1945. He teaches Wilson a Russian phrase meaning “at the finish,” which, translated literally, means “at the time when the caps are sorted,” referring to the end of the war.
Dear Bunny,
that was a very nice evening we spent. I limped back to Cambridge in the throes of a hideous neuralgia intercostalis on a background of ‘flu, and have spent a week in bed. The effect produced by the pain is a cross between pneumonia and heart trouble with the addition of an iron finger prodding you in the ribs all the time. It is a rare illness, as is everything about me, and I have had it already twice in my life. I am quite well now. You will arrive in Europe к шапочному разбору (a term based on the шапки which people разбираться i.e. sort out, when leaving church in Russia—a heap of peasant caps in a corner, that sort of thing. We use the term in the sense of “pour la curée,” “to the end of the show”), otherwise I would probably not let you go.
À propos of dollars, did you say anything to the New Yorker as you so very kindly suggested? Do, if it is quite convenient.
First class—the Sherlock Holmes article.
Yours
V.
From Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.