Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Many of the facts he had to offer were not new—by the 1970s the West had been hearing about Soviet camps in shouts or whispers for fifty years. It had been widely assumed that during the worst years of the Purges, millions of Soviet citizens had been imprisoned and a staggering number of them executed. But Solzhenitsyn’s account made the numbers human, revealing the suffering scattered across a country that had gone about its business while engineers, Orthodox priests, children, Old Bolshevik stalwarts, common criminals, toadies, accused Trotskyites, Ukrainians, Poles, physicists, thieves, delusional Emperors, embezzlers, spouses of the convicted, members of the intelligentsia, and writers like Solzhenitsyn himself lived out the drama of incarceration in a massive Underworld. He offered an extensive education in the geography of terror—the Lubyanka Prison perched dead-center in the heart of Moscow, the notorious Arctic camps of Vorkuta and Kolyma, and the network of trains, trucks, and boats that transferred people across the thousands of miles of facilities, punishments playing out in secret research sharashkas, brutal logging camps, and the mines that tried to extract clay, coal, and gold from unforgiving landscapes. Combining firsthand stories from hundreds of voices with his own years spent as a prisoner, Solzhenitsyn captured the system’s elephantine vastness and its existence as a parallel society in a way that surpassed the reach and authority of every other account.21

  Solzhenitsyn not only resembled a prophet, he acted the part, with a spiritual anxiety that weighed on his political crusade. Each city he visited, crowds gathered to see him at the dock or on the tarmac. A street in a northern suburb of Paris was named after him. Photographers stalked him in Germany, through Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland as he searched for a permanent home. Prime ministers and presidents around the world weighed in on his exile. Walter Cronkite interviewed him for his own CBS News special. He had become the conscience of the world.

  4

  Both Nabokov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s versions of fame reflected, in part, their life stories. In 1919, Nabokov had fled Russia by ship on the eve of his twentieth birthday, leaving behind what he called “the happiest childhood imaginable.” That fantasy childhood had unfolded in luxury, with devoted parents, a stable of fifty servants, multiple tutors, and visits to the French Riviera. His father had been at court under Nicholas II. His grandfather had been Minister of Justice under Tsars Alexander II and III. According to a cousin, the family name came from a fourteenth-century Tatar prince. Even Nabokov’s pets had a spectacular pedigree, with one family dog descended from Chekhov’s dachshund.

  Nabokov had been born to greatness, and he embraced it. Possessing a profound awareness of his own gifts, he named himself without apparent irony alongside Shakespeare and Pushkin in a trinity of his favorite writers. Yet he had also seen all the external signs of grace evaporate overnight—loved ones lost, an estate confiscated, his entire community turned into refugees, wandering through host countries subject to ridicule and resentment. Nabokov’s confidence in his art was electrified by the knowledge that everything except his imagination could be taken away.22

  If Nabokov’s life had descended from Eden into harsh reality, Solzhenitsyn’s childhood had spared him the disappointment of the fall. In the words of biographer Michael Scammell, “The Solzhenitsyn family was not special enough to have kept track of its ancestry.” The boy Alexander never knew his father, who died after a hunting injury six months before his birth. He had grown up in a hut without running water, surviving the famine of the 1930s with one set of clothes for years at a time. He mucked out stalls for the Russian Army and rose to first lieutenant on the battlefield during the war.23

  But he then encountered a tribulation that would savage every aspect of his life. Arrested on the thinnest of pretexts—jokes about Stalin—he was convicted and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag. Already a writer, he never stopped composing as he moved from camp to camp, even when there was no place to record his words except in his memory. But he knew he would tell the story of it all one day: Russia, her people, and their anguish.

  Before One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had been taken up as a cudgel for reform and de-Stalinization in 1962, he had published a lone article in a regional paper criticizing the Soviet postal system. His first book had circled the globe and catapulted him into comparisons with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. Solzhenitsyn had come to believe that his subsequent works might trigger even more change. He spent the next decade writing thinly veiled accounts drawing on Russian history. Even Solzhenitsyn’s ostensible fiction revealed the past, which had not been forgotten but could not be discussed without adopting the mask of invention.24

  Out of their distinct experiences, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn came to very different ways of being in the world. Both worked relentlessly, but Nabokov lived comfortably in a luxury hotel, while Solzhenitsyn longed for a remote and rustic cabin. If pride was a cardinal virtue for Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn feared it. “Pride grows in the human heart,” he wrote, “like lard on a pig.”25

  Yet their differences somehow led Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn to similar understandings of Russian history, loathing Communism in equal measure. Solzhenitsyn’s writing narrated his slow disillusionment first with Stalin, then with Lenin, eventually showing the roots of the Gulag stretching back to torture and mass murder in the first years after the Revolution. Attentive readers had been aware of Uncle Joe’s dark side for some time, but Solzhenitsyn made the case that terror and excess predated Stalin, originating instead under Lenin at the dawn of the Soviet state.

  Nabokov also despised Lenin, but had seen first-hand the esteem in which he was held by segments of the European and American literary establishment. Edmund Wilson, once Nabokov’s best friend in America, had penned a book-length tribute to revolution that culminated in Lenin’s 1917 return to Russia. From almost their first meeting, Wilson had written frankly of his hope to one day change Nabokov’s mind about Lenin. So perhaps it is not shocking that as Solzhenitsyn proceeded to savage the Soviet regime from its inception, Nabokov reveled in the vindication, noting with glee Solzhenitsyn’s success at “annihilating the smugness of old Leninists.”26

  But Nabokov had reservations about the newest Russian exile. Before Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, Nabokov had been sure that the former prisoner was somehow serving KGB ends. How else could his work appear in Russia and make its way to the West, while Solzhenitsyn himself remained free? Nabokov also disparaged Solzhenitsyn’s literary abilities, calling him an inferior writer in an interview for The New York Times and labeling his work “juicy journalese” in personal notes. Véra thought even less of Solzhenitsyn as a writer, calling his work “third-rate” and noting to a friend that he wrote like a shoemaker.27

  After Solzhenitsyn had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Nabokov spent summer evenings reading his novel August 1914 to Véra on the small balcony of their Montreux Palace suite. The New York Times Magazine reported their “cackles of laughter” over Solzhenitsyn’s “manly prose” and amusement that the former inmate refused to leave Russia to receive the Nobel for fear he would not be allowed to return. Who in his right mind would want to return to Soviet Russia? In a letter written days after the piece ran, Véra took exception to the word cackle and underlined her admiration for Solzhenitsyn’s bravery but admitted that the Nabokovs did not think much of Solzhenitsyn’s talent as a writer.28

  Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, deeply admired Nabokov’s style. Nobelists were encouraged to nominate candidates for consideration in future years, and in 1972 Solzhenitsyn, still in the Soviet Union, sent a note to the Academy to recommend Nabokov, whose works were banned in Russia, for the Prize. He wrote separately to Nabokov and forwarded a copy of the recommendation.

  Whether due to suspicions about Solzhenitsyn or out of fear of harming a dissident, Nabokov never responded to that letter. But on Solzhenitsyn’s first day as an exile, Nabokov did not hesitate to write a note welcoming the chronicler of the Gulag to the free world. Endorsing Solzhenitsyn’s crusade, Nabokov w
rote that “ever since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write.”29

  Solzhenitsyn, for all that he admired Nabokov’s talent, was less than convinced. He seems not to have agreed with Nabokov’s claim to unrelenting thunder against the Soviet state. In the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago—which Nabokov would read that summer—Solzhenitsyn had included the account of a Russian officer who wondered why Nabokov and other émigré authors ignored the “blood flowing from Russia’s living wounds,” suggesting that they “wrote as if there had been no Revolution in Russia, or as if it were too complex for them to explain.”

  In addition to its utter failure to address Revolutionary trauma, Lolita was also not Solzhenitsyn’s idea of literature. Where Nabokov experimented and provoked, shocking and baffling his readers, Solzhenitsyn dreamed of writing a War and Peace for twentieth-century Russia. He was, he admitted, a traditionalist at heart.30

  In novels he wrote in Russian and then in English, Nabokov had accosted readers with pedophiles’ sexual pursuits and the gleeful malice of murderers, not to mention the grotesque comedy of a child tortured and killed by mistake. He celebrated the power of human imagination by creating worlds that relentlessly kicked his characters in the teeth: Lolita, molested by Humbert Humbert day after day; Pale Fire’s poet John Shade shot dead within moments of expressing his faith in the universe. He himself claimed in his autobiography to be more interested as a writer in thematic elegance than the life or death of a character—even when that character was a real person in his autobiography.31

  While Solzhenitsyn also agonized over language, trying to create a writing voice that was innovative yet rooted in tradition, he felt a patriotic obligation to point directly to the brutality of the Soviet enterprise from start to finish. Going so far as to disparage those who had voluntarily left Russia—even to flee persecution—he noted repeatedly that he had had no choice in his expulsion. He believed that the artist’s responsibility lay in staying to defend the ideals of his native land.

  Solzhenitsyn longed for Nabokov’s “genius” to address the same issues, telling an interviewer that the Russian émigré could have placed his “colossal, I repeat colossal, talent at the service of his homeland,” and “could have written marvellously about our Revolution. But he didn’t do it.”32

  What Solzhenitsyn—and the world—didn’t realize was that Nabokov had spent decades burying some of history’s darkest moments within the framework of his fiction. Global history predating his most famous books had driven and shaped his work, and Nabokov had found a way to integrate the past into his exacting literary vision. But the events he memorialized had fallen so completely out of public memory that they went unnoticed. Widely regarded as only literary experiments or parodies, his writing had become so closely identified with his artistic stance that readers missed the horrific history that haunted even his most famous novels. By the time Solzhenitsyn drove into Montreux to pay his respects to the literary giant, Nabokov had been making enigmatic hints to readers about this history for decades, to no avail.

  So perhaps it is no surprise that by 1974, Nabokov was eager to welcome his fellow writer to the West and to freedom, extending an open invitation to visit. Solzhenitsyn responded with an unusual literary humility, telling Nabokov that fate had delivered them both to Switzerland so that they could finally meet.

  Yet that fall, when the Solzhenitsyns wrote to say they would come to the Palace Hotel on October 6, they received no reply. Trying repeatedly to reach the Nabokovs by phone and post, the Solzhenitsyns heard nothing.

  Despite the silence, they took a chance and headed to Montreux. Their destination, a seven-story Belle Époque building in a cosmopolitan town of music festivals, was home to celebrated actors and writers. When Nabokov moved in, the staff had put him at ease, making him comfortable enough to keep him as a guest for the rest of his life. But the fifty-five-year-old Solzhenitsyn, newly exiled, hounded by the press and rattled by an alien culture, was an outsider looking in. Was he expected? Was he welcome? Pulling up to the hotel driveway, Solzhenitsyn wondered.

  A stone’s throw away, Vladimir and Véra Nabokov sat waiting in the hotel’s Salon de Musique, which had been reserved for the event. A clock face somewhere registered the hour; it was not yet noon. Through the trio of French windows, each one three times as tall as a man of average height—and Nabokov was a little taller than average—the sky could be seen. Overcast as it was, daylight still poured in, forming three reflecting pools on the zigzag parquet. A half-moon swag of drapery hung from a bar above each window, mirroring the crystal swag of the beaded chandelier. An octet of gilt letters, all M for “Montreux,” hovered like angels of aristocracy near the corners of the ceiling, nestled among laurel wreaths, monsters, and winged maidens carrying garlands.

  A table for four was ready. The Palace was a luxury hotel, its restaurant surely capable of providing Solzhenitsyn one of the finest meals of his life. As the hosts waited for their guests, Véra was probably wearing, as was her habit, something simple against her white halo of hair and blue eyes. Nabokov might have dressed for the occasion, too, at least a little more formally than the long shorts and knee socks in which he typically climbed hillsides hunting for butterflies (and still out-hiked reporters half his age).

  What did Nabokov imagine the two writers would talk about—one whose Russian existence was born with the Revolution, and the other whose died with it? If asked, Nabokov could have detailed his defiance, in life and in fiction: the invitation to return as a guest of the state, an invitation refused despite his longing to see his homeland; the friends he had cut off or rebuked for their perceived sympathies with Soviet rule; the conversations about the Vietnam War that upset some friends but which would have found a sympathetic listener in Solzhenitsyn.

  A visit with the newly minted exile was a chance to meet his distorted Soviet double, someone who had attained his own measure of celebrity, someone who understood the corruption of the Soviet state from Lenin’s first Terrors and had rejected the romance of the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn had managed to expose the system publicly, to chronicle its crimes, and he had survived to tell the story.

  But for half a century—for all of Solzhenitsyn’s life—Nabokov had lived that defiance from across the border. While Solzhenitsyn could imagine returning, longed to return, Nabokov’s Russia had been obliterated; his Russia could only exist in his books and the hidden corners of his heart. In 1962 he had explained, “All the Russia I need is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian childhood. I will never return. I will never surrender.”33

  Solzhenitsyn believed that in order to survive, Nabokov had turned his back on Russia and the human suffering he had seen. But the Nabokov who sat waiting for Solzhenitsyn had done things in his stories that had never been noticed. He had crafted an exquisite chronicle of his own, in which his modernist pyrotechnics and linguistic acrobatics cloaked a devotion to the very mission Solzhenitsyn had taken on.

  Inside the stories that earned him the label cruel, Nabokov had folded other narratives that had gone undetected, documenting intolerance and atrocity. The names, dates, and places he had woven into his poetry, plays, and fiction decade after decade created his own private map, revealing the most profound losses of his life and the forgotten traumas of his age. As the story of his family became the story of not just St. Petersburg or Russia but twentieth-century Europe and America, Nabokov had bound together the beauty and the horror of all of it inside his art. A ledger recording the forgotten and dead had been exquisitely preserved in Nabokov’s stories for more than thirty years—even in Lolita. And readers had missed almost all of it.

  The lost history inside the stories had been sitting there for so long—including Russian tragedy that Solzhenitsyn himself had referenced. Had he seen through Nabokov’s mask to the denunciation of injustice and the tenderness in the work, a tenderne
ss not always apparent in the public face of the man? Did he know the story of Nabokov’s life beyond the obvious theme of flight and exile? What would they say to each other? One floor above the street where Solzhenitsyn approached in his car, Nabokov sat and waited.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Childhood

  1

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov entered the world during the last spring of a dying century on April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The date was not yet notable for also being the birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a twenty-nine-year-old radical exiled to Siberia and three years away from immortality as Lenin.

  Nabokov’s mother had already given birth to one stillborn child, and her second pregnancy had no doubt worried her—Elena Ivanovna was a sensitive woman given to fretting. But if the care she had in reserve to lavish on her newborn could make the difference, he would be among the most fortunate souls on the planet.1

  Along with love, money and culture were also in plentiful supply. The house at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya had been Elena’s dowry, and Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, came from a family that had been in the service of the Tsar for decades. A legal scholar with a taste for opera and literature, V. D. Nabokov not only had a magnificent library, he had a librarian to go with it. A passion for luxury, a fascination with butterflies, and a rebellious streak characterized the father, who from the beginning “idolized” his first-born son.2

  As always in the world, the moment held harbingers of hope and despair. History has little regard for clean breaks, and so the best and worst of the passing century found no barrier to entering the new. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II was in his fifth year of rule over the largest contiguous nation in the world. His work toward the Hague Convention of 1899, which created a court to settle international disputes and sought to eliminate aerial bombing, would soon garner him a nomination for the first Nobel Peace Prize. The conference would be remembered as one of Nicholas’s few shining moments.