Abstract
4 9 R T H E L E A R N E D J U D G E ( A P O R T R A I T ) N I C O L A S N A B O K O V With an introduction by Vincent Giroud The following reminiscences of Judge Learned Hand are part of the many sections left out by the editors of Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan , the autobiography of the American composer Nicolas Nabokov (1903–78), published in 1975. Nabokov (first cousin of the author of Lolita), was born in a small town now part of Belarus and fled from Soviet Russia with his family in 1919. After completing his musical studies in Stuttgart and Berlin, he moved to Paris, where his ballet-oratorio Ode was premiered by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1928. Five years later, he emigrated to the United States and in the spring of 1936 was appointed head of the music department at Wells College in Aurora, New York. Having su√ered from nervous exhaustion at the end of his first year, he spent the latter half of the summer of 1937 recuperating in the Hamptons at the weekend home of his New York patron and friend Marion Dougherty. It was through Dougherty’s sister Edith Fincke that he was introduced to Judge Hand, who was Edith’s brother-in-law. One of the great names in twentieth-century American judicial history, Billings Learned Hand (1872–1961) was born in Albany, New York. He graduated from Harvard College, where he majored in philosophy, and Harvard Law School. Appointed a federal district judge in Manhattan in 1909, he was promoted in 1924 to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, of which he became Chief Judge in 1939. In 1952, a collection of his papers and addresses was published under the title The Spirit of Liberty. 5 0 N A B O K O V Y Judge Learned Hand, whose name, when I first heard it, seemed strangely ancient to me – like the name of a Pharaonic scribe or biblical judge – was in the fullest sense of the adjective a great man. He was the first truly great American I met. As a child in Russia, I thought that all great Americans must perforce look like either Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Edison. But when I landed in New York in August 1933, I found the city and, later on, the backcountry, beardless. I had to wait for over twenty- five years and the rise of the hippie age to see new Lincolns, Jesuses, Peters, Pauls, and other apostles and prophets, and even graying Brahmses. As for Thomas Edison, I discovered him very early in America, but in a caricature form: Dr. Albert C. Barnes of Philadelphia, of clap cure and art-hoarding fame, who invited me to the United States in 1933, looked very much like a drunken replica of the inventor of the electric bulb. But I had never before in my life seen, or imagined, a face and a head like Judge Hand’s. It was one of those unrepeatable, granitehewn heads of a Puritan judge that have now become rare in America. There was nothing Latin or Germanic, Slavic or Sephardic about his head. It was the head of a thoroughbred Anglo-Saxon American. He had deep-seated dark eyes overcast by inordinately bushy eyebrows. Over those brows was a noble forehead topped by unruly, peppery, but still largely dark hair. His whole face, but especially his eyes, had a permanent expression of poise and serenity , and a strangely compassionate sadness. Yet when he smiled or laughed, as he often did, the expression of sadness and compassion gave way to an ironic twinkle in his eyes and a kind of childlike mischief. When he frowned, the contrary happened. His face grew stern and severe, but never cross or angry. When he raised his cloudlike brows, the expression on his face turned to what seemed to be total astonishment. He liked to ask questions and was an attentive listener. And when he listened, his eyes pierced those of his interlocutor with an intent gaze, as if...
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