Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Lolita had started her long reign over the American bestseller lists in 1958, by which point Nabokov had been garnering critical attention on both sides of the Atlantic for decades. But it was his nymphet novel—and the risqué film Stanley Kubrick made from it—that launched him into notoriety, then celebrity. Banned in Australia, Buenos Aires, and at the Cincinnati Public Library, Nabokov’s novel had managed to sell more copies in its first three weeks in America than any book since Gone with the Wind.

  And just as Solzhenitsyn mapped a uniquely Soviet geography in The Gulag Archipelago, Nabokov laid out the landscape of postwar America in Lolita. It was an entirely different archipelago—one of roadside motels, sanatoriums, hotel conferences, pop psychology, immigrant drifters, a Kansas barber, a one-armed veteran, Safe-ways and drugstores, sanctimonious book clubs, and an unnerving religiosity. It was a glorious, expansive, intolerant, and amnesiac backdrop, one that revealed just as much as Solzhenitsyn’s opus about the country in which it was set, a stage perfectly suited for a story of betrayal and corruption.

  After Lolita’s phenomenal launch, Nabokov had sold the film and paperback rights for six figures each. Traveling to Hollywood, he rubbed shoulders with John Wayne, whom he did not recognize, and Marilyn Monroe, whom he did. He left his career as an American college professor, becoming the subject of New Yorker cartoons and late-night television comedy. On overseas trips, he was accosted by the press and written up in a half-dozen languages across the continent.2

  His morals were called into question (“utterly corrupt,” raged one New York Times critic), but over time his detractors tended to be mocked as puritans and killjoys. The sexually swinging era that followed Lolita’s creation was not of Nabokov’s making, but its mores helped influence the perception of the book in subsequent years. By the time Solzhenitsyn arrived in Germany, Lolita had become part of a stable of stories about older men with an itch for underage, promiscuous partners. Webster’s, Nabokov’s favorite dictionary, would eventually add Lolita’s name to its pages, offering up the off-kilter definition of “a precociously seductive girl.”3

  The book’s linguistic richness and power vaulted it into an existence in which it took on meanings independent of its creator. In vain would Nabokov describe how his nymphet was one of the most innocent and pure among the gallery of slaves he had created as characters; to no avail would Véra remind reporters of how a captive Lolita cried herself to sleep each night.4

  Setting aside those who thought Lolita a tease and her author an arted-up dirty-books writer, Nabokov had many admirers among the literary set. But it was a peculiar fan club. Despite their cool reverence for Lolita, her most famous fans were prone to calling her author cruel. Bestselling novelist Joyce Carol Oates checked Nabokov for having “the most amazing capacity for loathing” and “a genius for dehumanizing”—and this from someone who liked the book.5

  Oates’s 1973 comment was not even the first shot across the bow. Many others, before and after, took up the same cry, from John Updike, who acknowledged the difficulty of distinguishing the callousness of Nabokov’s characters from their author’s “zest for describing deformity and pain,” to Martin Amis, who would be even more direct decades later: “Lolita is a cruel book about cruelty.” Whether they were meant to praise or damn, such comments had a long history. By the time Oates’s article on Lolita appeared, Nabokov’s fellow writers had been describing his work as inhuman or dehumanizing for forty years.6

  2

  After the celebrity of Lolita, Nabokov moved to Europe but continued to spark the American imagination. He followed up with Pale Fire, an academic satire starring Charles Kinbote, yet another tormented pedophile, along with a dead poet named John Shade. It was hailed by Mary McCarthy in the pages of The New Republic as “one of the very great works of art of this century.” Profiled in LIFE and Esquire (“The Man Who Scandalized the World”), Nabokov had become so popular that his fifteenth novel, Ada, a convoluted narrative smorgasbord of brother-sister incest, won him the cover of Time magazine—a portrait of the writer as an enigma. Before it was even published, one Hollywood mogul after another flew to Switzerland to be permitted a few hours with the manuscript.

  As time went on, the world came more and more to Nabokov, and he went less and less into the world. Despite occasional thoughts of moving elsewhere, he ended up settling with Véra into a protected existence in Montreux. He welcomed visitors for what he called interviews, giving written answers to questions submitted in advance, and trying to restrain the untamed journalists who preferred to use words he had actually spoken aloud.

  When he could, he worked to script his television appearances just as completely, hiding note cards among the potted plants and tea cups of a studio set. Collecting his interviews with The New York Times, the BBC, and other organizations, he revised them to be more to his liking and published the Nabokov-approved versions in a separate book. He was a man in almost perfect control of his public persona, and the persona he created was that of the reserved, jolly genius who was both a master and a devotee of his art.

  His genius may have been beyond judgment at that point, but Nabokov was himself more than willing to judge. He had a lifetime habit of mocking other authors, calling T. S. Eliot “a fraud and a fake” and despising the moral lectures of Dostoyevsky (whose characters were “sinning their way to Jesus”), Faulkner (filled with “skeletonized triteness” and “biblical rumblings”), and Pasternak (“melodramatic and vilely written”). He likewise dismissed Hemingway, Henry James, Balzac, Ezra Pound, Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, André Gide, Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and women novelists as a group. While he sometimes disapproved of the phrase, Nabokov had become an avatar of art for art’s sake: a playful experimenter for whom the stylistic needs of a story trumped all moral consideration.7

  He ranked pride between kindness and fearlessness on his list of the highest human virtues, and he wielded that pride like a surgeon’s knife in literary exchanges and mocking repartee that, in his younger days, had earned him at least one bloody nose. More often, however, Nabokov was gracious when met on his own terms. And since Lolita’s success, he had more and more often been able to impose those terms.8

  In the heyday of political activism, he was inclined to abstain. He had never made a secret of his loathing for the Soviet system, which came up even more frequently than his disdain for Freud (which came up often). But he never voted, he never put a yard sign out for a candidate, he never signed a petition. He did, however, coyly send a congratulatory telegram to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, praising his “admirable work.” Were the accolades for sending troops to Vietnam to fight the Communist menace, or for the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Most likely it was both. And he equally coyly avoided criticizing Joseph McCarthy’s tactics by saying they could not, at any rate, be compared to Stalin’s. It was his habit not to run for office, endorse candidates, or otherwise enter the political fray. He had settled, in fact, in an entirely neutral country, which was itself occasionally criticized as mercenary and uncaring—one which had, at the time of Nabokov’s arrival, not fought in a war for a hundred and forty-six years.9

  His suite of rooms on the sixth floor of the Palace Hotel were more professorial than palatial. He had an ancient, battered lectern on loan from the hotel, which the staff said had once been used by Flaubert—a writer Nabokov did admire. The unabridged Webster’s dictionary lay open as he worked, with his shorts and casual shoes and books and butterfly nets bundled into a private corner of a hotel, the temporary shelter turned permanent, his long residence there serving as conclusive evidence of his own exile.

  Exile had been a theme in Nabokov’s life since childhood. He had left Russia with his family in the aftermath of the Revolution. He later escaped Hitler’s Berlin and Occupied France, though people he loved had not. He had gone hungry with much of Europe during the war, but knew better than to call that suffering. He had not been broken by history; instead, he had in many ways defied it. His
Jewish wife and son, a boy who had entered the world in the crucible of Nazi Germany, were still alive. And as if simply living through two wars and a Revolution were not enough, he had also somehow managed to reinvent himself in another language, astounding the world with playfulness, unreliable narrators, and the narrow ledge between coherence and coincidence. He had become both an artist and a symbol of an artist. By writing exactly the kind of books he wanted to, he had reached an iconic level of celebrity, the kind recognized by the pre-teen girl who knocked at his door one Halloween dressed as Lolita.

  3

  Solzhenitsyn possessed another kind of fame—the kind reserved for David fighting Goliath: the fame of the crusader. His 1962 novel about the stark reality of a Soviet labor camp, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, had shocked the West and received praise from unexpected sources—including Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had used the book to underline the abuse of power under Joseph Stalin: “So long as we work we can and must clear up many points and tell the truth.… This we must do so that such things never happen again.”10

  Just two years after championing Solzhenitsyn’s novel, however, Khrushchev had been forced out of power, replaced by others less interested in addressing the crimes of the past. The Party reversed itself and began to censor and confiscate Solzhenitsyn’s writing. His hidden archive was raided. He began to be slandered in meetings. In a plot worthy of Nabokov, a fake double showed up to impersonate Solzhenitsyn, drinking and harassing women in public until the author’s friends caught the impostor and turned him over to authorities, who released him.

  As long as Solzhenitsyn insisted on writing about Russian history—which was the only thing he wanted to do—it was inevitable that official trouble would follow. In 1968, his works were banned. The Union of Soviet Writers, which had welcomed and praised him when Khrushchev had done the same, became nervous. What should they do about this unpredictable, difficult man? Nobel Prize-winning Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who had always been a harsh critic of his fellow novelist, advocated not just banning Solzhenitsyn’s work but keeping him from writing altogether. And indeed, a year later, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. Expulsion made it impossible for him to publish in the Soviet Union or to hire anyone to help him with his work. He had no legal occupation, reducing him to a state of existence beyond precarious in the U.S.S.R. He was ripe for arrest.11

  In protest, Solzhenitsyn wrote open letters for Russian and foreign distribution. He met with friends and supporters, seeking their aid. He directed the smuggling of microfilms of his manuscripts to the West, where they would be ready to publish if he could not publish at home.

  The world’s response was massive. Arthur Miller, John Updike, Jean-Paul Sartre, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, and Kurt Vonnegut spoke out with hundreds of other writers for Solzhenitsyn, condemning the decision of the Writers’ Union. The outcry drew attention to his plight and his work.

  The following year, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Public letters had been written to the Swedish Academy by prior winners on his behalf. A poll of literary critics that year had Jorge Luis Borges and Solzhenitsyn as the clear leaders among possible contenders, with Vladimir Nabokov receiving only two votes. By selecting Solzhenitsyn, the awards committee publicly announced its recognition of “the ethical force of literature,” and its choice was understood immediately to have many political consequences (which likely helped a rumor persist for years that the CIA had prepared Solzhenitsyn’s materials for submission).12

  After the announcement, Solzhenitsyn cabled Stockholm with his thanks, confirming that he would attend the award ceremony that December. But the Soviet Union quickly denounced the award as “deplorable,” and weeks later Solzhenitsyn announced he would not ask for permission to leave the country after all. He feared that if he left, he would never be allowed to return, and would find himself forced into exile.13

  The secretary of the Nobel committee, mindful of the absent Solzhenitsyn’s safety, read only the words of the Soviet newspaper Pravda at the awards ceremony, quoting its 1962 review of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: “Why is it that our heart contracts with pain as we read this remarkable story at the same time as we feel our spirit soar? The explanation lies in its profound humanity, in the quality of mankind even in the hour of degradation.”14

  The speech Solzhenitsyn had planned to give that night explained that throughout history, debates had raged over the artist’s obligation either to live for himself or to serve society. “For me,” he said, “there is no dilemma.” Baldly refuting the idea of art for art’s sake, he titled his lecture “Art—for Man’s Sake.” In it, he described how “in the midst of exhausting prison camp relocations, marching in a column of prisoners in the gloom of bitterly cold evenings, with strings of camp lights glimmering through the darkness, we would often feel rising in our breast what we would have wanted to shout out to the whole world—if only the whole world could have heard us.”15

  The Nobel drama over Solzhenitsyn offered only a hint of what was to come. By 1974, Solzhenitsyn had long nursed a great scheme to call authorities to account for the dead of the camps, the prisoners broken by a police state, and the ongoing crippled society that was their legacy. But after the winning of the Nobel Prize, his scheme was thrown off-balance. Had the award raised his profile enough that he might be allowed to write again? Could political pressure from the world guarantee his status to take on history unfettered? He had long ago finished The Gulag Archipelago, but held back from publishing it, perhaps cautious about making a move which he knew would completely change the game. Here was a book that could not be “lightened” or tailored to sneak its way through open channels. Its very premise—a four-decade summary of government injustice—was a condemnation of the Soviet state. Once released, the genie would not be contained. So Solzhenitsyn waited for the right moment.

  But the KGB had no reason to wait, and agents discovered the hiding place of the manuscript by interrogating his typist, a woman in her sixties named Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, for five days and nights. Released under house arrest and unable to warn Solzhenitsyn, she died two weeks later. But another copy of Solzhenitsyn’s manuscript had already been smuggled out of the country, and three months after her death, The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris.

  KGB agents eventually came for Solzhenitsyn, too. News of his arrest made it to network television in the U.S. that night in a four-minute segment on the CBS Evening News. A harrowing twenty-four-hour period followed, where it was not clear exactly what would happen. In his cell at Lefortovo Prison he played out potential confrontations and conversations in his mind again and again before being hauled out, bundled onto a plane, and deported.16

  At a moment in history with no shortage of dramatic events—Watergate had exploded, there was talk of impeachment, and ransom negotiations were underway for a kidnapped heiress named Patty Hearst—Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in Frankfurt on Valentine’s Day dominated the news. Journalists gleefully noted that no Soviet citizen had been forcibly expelled since Léon Trotsky in 1929.17

  The New York Times alone ran dozens of articles about the latest Russian deportee in the first week of his post-Soviet life, poking into everything from his conversations with his wife to a gift of flowers he received. His attire was dissected, and speculation in the press about his every action was rampant, leading to outraged harangues from the new exile, who was accustomed to an entirely different kind of harassment from the press back home.

  Solzhenitsyn’s presence in Germany rattled the careful choreography of détente. In light of the media attention, Bonn felt a chill in its relations with Russia and was glad to see Solzhenitsyn off its soil. Others welcomed him more defiantly: Swedish premier Olof Palme—still a dozen years ahead of the anonymous assassin’s bullet that would end his life—condemned Soviet treatment of Solzhenitsyn as a “frightening example of brutality and persecution.” The same day, U.S. Secretary of State H
enry Kissinger, trying to maintain a delicate balance in U.S.-Soviet relations, hastened to make clear that Solzhenitsyn would be welcome in the U.S., but America in no way condemned Soviet domestic policy.18

  In the weeks that followed, Soviet representatives tried to discredit Solzhenitsyn with formal charges of treason and salacious poetry mocking him. Later they would produce forged records suggesting that he had been an informer in the camps. He countered by calling out by name a list of the people in the Soviet Union who had helped him, or whose safety he feared for: a young assistant, people institutionalized in Soviet psychiatric hospitals, and others expelled from literary institutes because of their association with him. He established a fund to help Russian political prisoners and their families, into which he funneled money from sales of his books.19

  Solzhenitsyn’s presence in the West on the heels of the publication of his latest book combined to generate a global Shock wave, as the world came to understand the meaning of the word gulag. When the American translation finally came out that summer, its stories about mind-numbing forced labor, torture, executions, and a deliberate dehumanization of prisoners on a scale too vast to comprehend stunned the world. With a singular ability to deliver testimony, the book piled on decade after decade of horror with a righteous fury. George Kennan, the de facto architect of U.S. Cold War policy, immediately recognized its importance, calling it “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.” Its global impact led the Italian Communist Party to open dissent with the Soviet Union, boosted anti-Communist conservatives in America, and triggered a public firestorm in French politics.20

  The subject of Solzhenitsyn’s latest book had come as a surprise to no one. Advance rumors about the project—as well as its mysterious title—had floated into Europe and America years ahead of the work itself. But no one other than its author could have predicted its explosiveness.