by Stacy Schiff
A few years before the Revolution my father bought up the greater part of a small town in Southern Russia which he had planned to develop into a model little city, complete with modern canalisation and streetcar transportation, and somehow that plan so enchanted me that I was promised I would be allowed to take a hand at it when I grew up.
As precarious as the world may have been around them, Evsei Slonim had a taste for adventure, one he fostered in his daughters. He wrote off a neighbor’s child with the remark that the child was “calm, but uninteresting.” When slandered in a newspaper—during the war he was cited by name as an exploitative apartment owner, after he had actually waived his rent for soldiers’ wives—he lost no time in challenging the paper’s editor to a duel. He received an apology instead.
“As a little bit of musk fills an entire house, so the least influence of Judaism overflows all of one’s life,” observed the poet Osip Mandelstam, who had already embarked on his literary career in Petersburg when Véra Slonim was a child, but whose background was in many respects similar. Véra Evseevna remained as areligious all her life as her family appeared to be in Russia, but knew well that her existence was predicated on a hard-won—and flimsy—right. She offered only one view of her distant ancestors, asserting that her father “traced his descent in direct line from a celebrated though abstruse commentator of the Talmud who flourished in Spain in the XVII century, and who traced his descent in direct line from the Ancient Judean Kings.” None of this can be documented, though Véra Nabokov’s was neither an unlikely nor an unusual claim. The most telling thing about it may be her simple assertion of the fact. It is what she believed, or what she wanted believed, or—at best—both. It is also not something she might have asserted in quite the same way in Petersburg. It was possible to feel affluent, even, to an extent, acculturated, but never entirely at ease. Mandelstam wrote of the Jewish tutor who first introduced him to the concept of Jewish pride and whom he failed to believe, as he could see the tutor put that pride away as soon as he set foot again in the street.
This vulnerability turned, on steely principle, to a point of honor, which Véra Evseevna handled decades later with show-stopping directness. In mid-conversation—in the south of France, in Switzerland, in New York—she would ask her interlocuter, often someone she had known for years, if he was aware that she was Jewish. She tossed this query out as if throwing down a glove. It was as if she needed the air-clearing before the conversation could proceed; honesty very nearly constituted a religious principle for her.* She believed in full candor, which was not the same as full disclosure. At one tender point she warned her sister Lena that her religious identity had better be made perfectly clear, “since for me no relationship would be possible unless based on complete truth and sincerity.” The pro-Semitism of her future husband and his father is well documented (it could be termed philo-Semitism in the case of Vladimir Nabokov, whose previous conquests included a disproportionate number of Jewish girlfriends), but the matter was clearly much more personal for Véra. Great numbers of inaccurate things were written about her over the years but the single one she found it incumbent upon herself to correct was a line in the New York Post that made her a Russian aristocrat. “In your article you describe me as an émigré of the Russian aristocratic class. I am very proud of my ancestry which actually is Jewish,” she alerted the paper in 1958. Asked if she was Russian her reply was simple, “Yes, Russian and Jewish.”
There were lessons in deportment as well to be drawn from the years in a booby-trapped world. Evsei Slonim appears not to have dignified the obstacles by acknowledging their existence, a quality he shared with his daughter. Calmly, quietly, he went his own way. His name shows up nowhere among the lists of those who were lobbying for reform, for Jewish emancipation. It was Nabokov’s father who—in a speech condemning the 1903 pogroms—made the point that the Jews of Russia amounted to a caste of pariahs. In a notebook she could not have expected anyone ever to read, fifty-six-year-old Véra Nabokov remonstrated: “I loathe people who push themselves and to see Jews do this disgusts me even more—for we owe it to our honor not to give support to the slander that this is a Jewish trait. God knows, I have seen many, many Jews who were dignified, and proud, and modest—but who takes notice of them?” At no point in her life would she make an entrance that could be described as anything other than “gliding across glass.”
4
The Petersburg of Véra Slonim’s childhood was a mythical city, and like all mythical cities this shimmering, culturally prodigious metropolis had an obligation to melt away. It began to do so in 1914, when its name changed to Petrograd; “St. Petersburg” disappeared from maps for the next seventy-seven years. The first rumblings of revolution had made themselves felt in those same newspapers Véra had been reading as a three-year-old. January 1905 brought the greatest strike Russia had yet witnessed; life in Petersburg essentially came to a standstill. The situation deteriorated as the year wore on; the government manifesto issued in response to the unrest provoked violence and pogroms throughout the Empire. A sense of dislocation and apprehension accompanied the next years, years in which the Slonim girls learned to hold fiercely to their own opinions, something in which few Russians stand in need of supplementary coaching. There was already about Véra Slonim the kind of “intellectual arrogance” of which Diana Trilling wrote in her autobiography, linking it back to her father’s deep confidence in her. Discontent hung heavily in the air, and certain precautions were taken: If Véra Slonim learned about the French Revolution, she did so at home, not at school, where it vanished from the curriculum after 1914.
In 1916, as she was sitting for her Obolensky A levels, the inflation that had set in the previous year rose to crisis levels. The war with Germany had ruined the Russian economy. Already the breadlines stretched the lengths of streets. By the fall prices had quadrupled, and Petrograd—the city at the greatest remove from the food-growing areas—braced itself for a miserable winter. The blizzards came but the supplies did not; only about a quarter of the trains that normally serviced the city arrived. Lines formed everywhere, for everything. Laid-off workers scuffled in the streets. The hunger quickly transformed itself into discontent with the monarchy; the frustrating course of the war did not help, nor did an especially savage winter. The rest of the country continued calmly on its way, but in the cities, and in Petrograd in particular, the feel of violence was palpable. The trouble exploded a little over a mile from Furstadtskaya Street, when the weather broke in February. Within days what had begun as a large-scale hunger riot billowed into a full-blown revolution. On February 27 the troops that had been sent in to quell the violence mutinied; the bark of machine guns could be heard through the night. By early March Tsar Nicholas II had been convinced to abdicate. He was replaced by a liberal Provisional Government, in which Nabokov’s father was named Minister of Justice, and of which he wrote probably the most succinct epithet: “I primarily remember an atmosphere in which everything seemed unreal.” Too hastily, this transfer of power was heralded as the Great Bloodless Revolution. The stage was set for the arrival of Lenin, whom the Germans covertly returned to Russia with the hope that he would topple the new democracy, thereby extracting it from the war. Lenin emerged from his train at the Finland Station on April 16 to the tune of “La Marseillaise,” an anthem that must have rung uneasily in Véra Evseevna’s ears; it had been sung by demonstrators all spring. The Slonims were for the most part on Furstadtskaya Street, where they appear to have stayed through the coup d’état of October, when Lenin’s troops stormed the Winter Palace, overturning the aptly named Provisional Government, and into 1918, when Petrograd looked less like the legendary Venice of the North than like an armed encampment. Anything that could vaguely be construed as edible was consumed. No one bothered to clear the snow that winter, when groups of Red Guards huddled around bonfires in the streets, interrogating anyone who passed. By the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks had instituted a one-party system. What had begun as
an idealistic, liberal uprising had ended in totalitarianism. Véra Slonim’s nineteen-year-old husband-to-be, whom she had yet to meet, had fled with his family to the Crimea the previous November, where he was carrying on a succession of romances, and denouncing the work of Dostoyevsky for the first recorded time.
Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as “the spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility.” As such he was probably not greatly sympathetic to the Tsar, said to pronounce the word “intelligentsia” in much the same humor he pronounced the word “syphilis.” (Most professionals and academics belonged to the Kadet party, the party of Nabokov’s father, a center faction that had been striving toward a truly constitutional monarchy. The party of the Rodziankos—or at least of Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko—was the Octobrist party, to the right of the Kadets.) Véra Nabokov could not object strenuously enough to the assertion that the intelligentsia had failed to oppose the Bolsheviks at the outset of the Revolution. This had not been the case in her household, or later, in the emigration, when a number of White officers figured among family friends. We know little of her active sympathies during this crucial year, a year when all was dangerous, when public transportation and electricity functioned sporadically, when looting and murder were the order of the day, but we know a certain amount of the disorder she witnessed. Upon seizing power in October the Bolsheviks made their first victims the liberals who had preceded them; the terror spread quickly and indiscriminately. Any well-to-do citizen of any political stripe was at risk. Iosef Hessen, the esteemed writer and publisher who was friendly with both the Slonims and the Nabokovs, recalled that every move, every decision, was made with heightened consciousness. A wrong step in the street could result in an ambush. More than seventy years later, Véra Nabokov wrote to a member of the Rodzianko family, a few years older than she: “I remember vividly how we waited in line in front of the prison when we were trying to find where M. P. [Rodzianko] had been jailed. I also remember that, there being no candy, you had in your pocket several lumps of sugar, several of which you offered me.” For Jews matters were more complicated yet. The Revolution brought with it a new wave of pogroms, far more extensive than anything of the tsarist years. By late 1919 even the liberal parties would be infected by anti-Semitism, as the Jews were credited with having turned Russia upside down. Through these events an equation was forged between Communism and Jewry, an equation that explained Véra Slonim’s future politics more than she herself ever would. After the escape from Bolshevik Russia, there remained always something revolutionary in her spirit, never in her fiercely held political views. She would rather cancel a vacation than spend one in a country whose foreign policy she deemed pro-Communist. A mail strike was enough to send her running in the opposite direction.
Along with nearly all else, her schooling was interrupted by the civil war. For at least six months after the October Revolution the Slonims lived in Moscow, where Véra did not attend class. She was back at the Obolensky Academy for a month or so before leaving Petrograd for good, a departure the family made in haste. The differing personalities of the three Slonim girls are neatly displayed in their depictions of the events that preceded their exodus, events that took place at a time when everyone had come to fear the squeal of automobile tires beneath his windows, all the cars in Russia having been requisitioned by the Bolshevik authorities. Sonia Slonim, who would have been about eight, reported that her father was arrested, then sentenced to death, from which sentence he was narrowly saved.* Lena Slonim, then about eighteen, and who at least in the eyes of her sisters would adopt an indifference bordering on ambivalence about her background, made no reference whatever to any such events, dramatic or otherwise. Véra, a year younger and afflicted with a pathological addiction to literalism, often at the expense of truth, recalled that the family “not so much decided to flee as had to do so after a long nocturnal search by a band of soldiers who had come to arrest my father (who was not sleeping at home in anticipation of arrest).”
Slonim traveled immediately to Kiev. The women in the family, along with a servant, escaped aboard a freight train to Véra’s maternal uncle’s home in Byelorussia, then held—it was the end of World War I—by the Germans. This was easier said than done. The trains had no fixed destinations; they might stop for a day or more without warning. When they did no one knew where they were, much less in whose territory they stood politically. Although the Slonims’ papers were perfectly valid, they were stopped and held at the Byelorussian border. They could do nothing but sit in the car and avoid attracting attention, which they did, nervously, well into the night. Finally the train began moving, slowly at first; it was unclear whether they were heading forward or back. After a mile or two they looked out with relief to see German helmets, then an emblem of order. A German officer befriended Véra and Lena and saw to it that their papers were properly stamped, for which service he was rewarded with a hugely welcome bar of soap. When the Bolsheviks arrived the women again fled south, to Odessa.
The nightmarish journey to Odessa represented one moment of her life in which Véra Slonim cast herself as the heroine of the tale. This was a story she could be persuaded to tell. The Slonim women and their forty-three suitcases boarded what she described as one of the last trains for the Crimea; certainly none followed directly behind it, as both Véra and Lena remembered the rail ties being pulled up for fuel. In their freight car they were joined by followers of Simon Petliura, the Ukrainian nationalist leader and a notorious anti-Semite. The pogroms of 1919 were at their height in the Ukraine that fall, claiming somewhere between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand fatalities, for which Petliura’s troops—who did not distinguish between Bolsheviks and Jews—have generally received credit. Asleep on her bags on the floor, Véra was awoken by the sound of a militiaman roundly insulting a Jew, whom he threatened to throw from the train. When the delicate seventeen-year-old girl spoke up in her fellow traveler’s defense, the separatists were so taken aback they changed their approach completely. Politely they escorted the Slonim women through their next series of adventures. Along the way through the Ukraine the train stopped at an inn run by a Jewish family, the bar of which was overrun by returning White troops, uneasy allies of the Petliurists. Concerned that the travelers would be disturbed in the expected ruckus, the innkeeper sent his thirteen-year-old son to a brothel to secure some legitimate distraction for the men. At dawn the hotel porter threw sand at their windows to wake the Slonims, who escaped with their friends the Ukrainian separatists. It was the soldiers as well who advised the women to avoid Kiev, where they had hoped to rejoin Evsei Slonim; the separatists knew the city was about to be taken. While Véra and her family traveled on to Odessa, Petliura’s men delivered word of the detour to Slonim. On the train through the Ukraine the soldiers broke into song; when one noticed that Véra took an interest in their music, he sang her what sounded like a ballad several times over. Véra Nabokov had the words in her head all her life. She could sing the ballad still in her eighties, in Ukrainian.*
Evsei Slonim rejoined his family in Odessa, a city in which chaos reigned well before the arrival of the Bolsheviks. “No one knew who would be arrested tomorrow, whose portrait it was best to hang on the wall and whose to hide, which currency to accept and which to try to pass on to some simpleton” was one appraisal of the situation. At the end of 1919 the family managed to move on toward the Crimea, where they spent more than six months in a villa in Yalta, the last piece of Russian soil to be held by the Whites. Probably in November, at the bitter end of the civil war, the Slonims fled, on a Canadian boat whose captain agreed to ferry passengers across the Black Sea. (He accepted passengers when he discovered there were no valuables to be acquired cheaply in Yalta, the war�
�s victims having lost virtually everything by the time they reached the southern port.) One photo survives from the journey; in it Véra looks like a character from Oliver Twist—a stylish one, but a Dickensian waif all the same. Her eyes are enormous and meet the photographer’s with great weariness; the rest of the face is as much that of an eight-year-old as of an eighteen-year-old. The reality of Véra’s departure from Russia is embedded in Martin’s departure in Glory, a turbulent crossing to Istanbul. Certainly the description of the bewildered passengers “sailing as if by chance” fit the actual picture; the “rashly chartered” Canadian freighter proved more salubrious than the filthy vessel on which the Nabokovs had crossed the same sea a year earlier. On board ship the captain befriended Véra and Lena, allowing the girls the use of his cabin while he was on deck, a great luxury in the overcrowded vessel. (For a woman who was to be remembered for being unapproachable and fiercely independent, this first escape was one unremitting proof of the kindness of strangers.) In a novelized version of the life, the unsteady trip across the Black Sea would creak like a heavy-handed piece of foreshadowing. To Véra it could have felt like nothing of the kind. The fictional Martin could not grasp the danger of his situation. Véra Slonim—who since 1918 would have been accustomed to danger on all sides—could not have grasped the finality of hers.
