The preserved drafts of some of his proclamations (beginning
“Grazhdane!”, meaning “Citoyens!”) and editorials are penned in a
copybook-slanted, beautifully sleek, unbelievably regular hand, almost free of
corrections, a purity, a certainty, a mind-and-matter cofunction that I find
amusing to compare to my own mousy hand and messy drafts, to the massacrous
revisions and rewritings, and new revisions, of the very lines in which I am
taking two hours now to describe a two-minute run of his flawless handwriting.
His drafts were the fair copies of immediate thought.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An
Autobiography Revisited (Vintage International, 2011), pp. 165-166.
