Brooklyn, late 2010s. I finally found it. There it is, at the bottom of a dollar bin: Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel, Mashenka. Magenta cover, simple black type. I lift it by the edges, gingerly, as if it didn’t just spend God knows how many years crushed under stacks of People magazine from the 1970s.
I carry the book to the register. The cashier unfolds a plastic bag, clicks around on his computer. I hold out my credit card, impatient to go outside and examine it properly—the carriage-and-horseman logo, the photo of pince-nez’ed Nabokov inside, the delicate pre-Revolutionary orthography. The cashier keeps clicking. He frowns. The computer whirs, he clacks his teeth, all while my heart is in my feet. Finally, he says,
“This cannot be sold.”
I remember it because he said it like that. As if it was a law of nature.
“I found it in the dollar bin.” I say. “It was right there,” I point, as if the existence of the bin would strengthen my appeal.
The cashier nods, already stowing the book under the counter.
“I was about to buy it,” I say, knowing, by now, that nothing will change the outcome, still too furious to quit.
They would publish literature that wasn’t meant to exist. This longing is built into its name.
“It is collector edition,” he shakes his head. “Rare publishing.”
I want to say, I know, I want to say, That’s why I’m buying it! That’s why I’ve scoured the Earth for it. I want to give him the facts, the numbers: 1971—Ardis’s founding, 1972—Brodsky’s immigration, 1974—first Nabokov editions—to prove to him that I should be the rightful owner of the book, that my devotion and commitment entitle me to it. I’m embarrassed to be indignant; I know that the store is under no obligation to sell me anything. I’m indignant just the same.
“Cannot be sold.”
Ann Arbor, MI, 1969. A Nabokov scholar and a Bulgakov scholar walk into a bar—a love story for the ages. By the time they founded Ardis two years later, he was thirty-two and a full professor, already three scholarly books deep in just a year—two on Gogol, one on Nabokov. She, twenty-seven, was an assistant professor of Russian herself.
Ellendea and Carl Proffer both came to Russian sideways, almost by accident. Carl was good-natured, tall but unimposing, beloved in their small department. Ellendea was poised and assured: in her interviews she speaks in a calm unaccented Russian, the best I’ve heard a foreigner speak.
A year before founding Ardis, the couple spent six months in the Soviet Union, where they met poets, novelists, playwrights, widows of legendary dead writers. They met artists who worked as miners, night watchmen, boiler-room stokers by day, and by night sewed up their poems and plays, typed onto crumbling paper, into thin notebooks, bound by the string that held together kielbasa at the grocery store. The Proffers carried dozens of these manuscripts back to Michigan.
“By the end of the visit Carl turned to me and said that we should start a little magazine,” Ellendea recalls in her memoir. It would publish both the old Soviet writers who’d vanished under censorship and the contemporary ones who never got published at all. In 1971, Ardis published its first book: a pocket-sized facsimile of Osip Mandelstam’s Stone, reproduced from the original 1913 edition.
Once, leafing through a typographical pamphlet by the Soviet graphic artist Farsovsky, Ellendea spotted a drawing of an old-fashioned carriage and a horseman. She thought of Pushkin’s line about translators as “the post horses of Enlightenment.”
“This is our logo,” she said to Carl.
They would publish literature that wasn’t meant to exist. This longing is built into its name. Ardis is a reference to Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor, where it names the fictional family’s country estate, a kind of paradisial locale. In Greek, the word means a tip of an arrow.
All books were printed from their bedroom, in editions of a few hundred. I like thinking of what it meant for two American professors to start printing Russian books at their kitchen table, smack in the middle of the Cold War. How much courage that took. Ardis, from its founding, insisted on being apolitical, to be dedicated to literature only—though of course, politics caught up with them eventually, despite their best efforts. In the first few years they published a few small volumes of Mandelstam’s poems, Bulgakov’s plays that had never been staged.
Later came the English translations, often the Proffers’ own, including the first unabridged translation of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (the earlier non-Ardis editions worked from the censored Soviet text). Later still came facsimiles of Nabokov’s novels—like the one I’d tried hunting down in the dollar bin—each novel in a different color with a simple large type, their covers since then becoming iconic to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Then came the originals. Joseph Brodsky’s first published poetry collections, volumes of criticism, Sasha Sokolov’s first novel A School for Fools, which was praised even by the curmudgeonly Nabokov as “an enchanting, tragic, touching book.”
The Proffers met Joseph Brodsky during one of their annual trips to the Soviet Union, in his now infamous Leningrad living quarters, the room and a half in a communal apartment he shared with his parents. He was charming and pompous, gracious and curt, generous and unbearable. In her memoir, Ellendea recalls that the first night they met Brodsky, they sat in his room while he talked on the phone with a friend. “I’m just sitting here, sucking dick,” he said in Russian, squinting at the Proffers to see if they understood more than the formal Russian.
Ardis lives on less through its corporate afterlife and more through the people still hunting it down.
The Proffers were in Brodsky’s room again, in 1972, only a few months after founding Ardis, when the Soviet government called the poet and, in preparation for President Nixon’s visit, kicked him out of the country. A model Soviet city, like Plato’s Republic, had no place for “parasitical” poets. Carl promised Brodsky a position as a poet-in-residence at Michigan on the spot. And so began the most famous literary migration of the century: Venice, Vienna, London, then years on the Proffers’ couch in Ann Arbor, then New York, a story ending, eventually, with coat tails, in Stockholm, receiving the Nobel Prize.
The Proffers continued to travel to the Soviet Union every year, each time returning with suitcases’ worth of manuscripts. Ellendea recalls the rule from those early years: “no blood on the final copy.” Since the Varityper machine they used only had five Cyrillic typefaces, Ellendea frequently had to cut each individual letter from Farsovsky’s graphic design pamphlet by hand, one at a time, and glue them down. Corrections needed a razor blade, to physically scrape out the letter, which meant cut fingers and spilled blood. Since there was never money for a designer, the iconic Ardis covers were all designed by Ellendea herself.
The suitcase-to-printer pipeline ran for eight more years, with the Proffers diligently making their annual Soviet pilgrimage, until 1979, when they published Metropol, a smuggled uncensored anthology of Soviet poets, and the Kremlin finally banned them. Carl would never see Moscow again, dying from colon cancer only three years later, at forty-six.
Every story comes to an end, but the end comes quicker for small publishers. Ellendea continued running Ardis for eighteen more years—at first alone, later with her second husband, Ross Teasley—but most of the editions collectors now chase, “rare publishing,” came from those thirteen years the Proffers ran it together.
Most of Ardis’s life, in other words, has been its aftermath; the collectors—the old Russian men and me—hunting down the few copies that survive. I’ve seen Ardis paperbacks behind glass in Wilmington, DE, I’d seen them in Macon, GA, Northfield, VT.
In 2002 an indie publisher, Overlook Press, bought the rights to a few of Ardis’s books in English. Ellendea sold her own library of Ardis books even earlier, in the nineties.
Despite the efforts of Overlook Press, Ardis lives on less through its corporate afterlife and more through the people still hunting it down. I see it every day in my inbox. A new eBay listing for an Ardis paperback: most often one of Nabokov’s books (high three-figures), once every few weeks a Brodsky (low-to-mid four-figures), or occasionally some loose, unloved copies of the lesser known poets too obscure even for Ardis collectors. For those of us who can’t spend a month’s salary on a paperback (despite how much one might want to), the only hope is a chance encounter. I remain hopeful that one day, in a used bookstore in Fairview, Ohio or Lewisburg, West Virginia, I’ll find it: a copy of Nabokov’s Mashenka I’m actually allowed to buy.
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Seagulls by Nina Chayka is available from Black Lawrence Press.