In Paris a French Jew named Alfred Dreyfus, who had been framed as a German spy and imprisoned years before in disease-ridden isolation on Devil’s Island, was brought back to the land of the living to stand trial again. New evidence was presented that spring, revealing the anti-Semitism responsible for his conviction. But evidence and public outrage would not be enough to defeat it, and he would once again be found guilty before being granted an extraordinary pardon.
In Cuba, a group of “re-concentration camps” established by the Spanish military had just been shut down amid outcry over the horrible conditions—conditions that helped earn their creator the nickname “the Butcher.” Despite the reports of widespread suffering, however, the concept had already caught on. As Nabokov crawled and walked and ran into the new century, concentration camps would be introduced in colonial territories by one Western nation after another: the U.S. in the Philippines, the British in South Africa, and the Germans in South-West Africa.3
In time, Vladimir Nabokov would have good reason to ponder Lenin, tsars, virulent anti-Semitism, and concentration camps. But opening his eyes on the second floor of an elegant pink granite house, the newborn child arriving auspiciously at daybreak, would, at most, find himself the first live child of Elena Nabokov. And if he could not yet appreciate that fact, he would still benefit tremendously from it.
During the child’s first weeks he was taken to a nearby church, where he was baptized and nearly christened Victor by mistake. If the Russian Orthodox archpriest followed the full traditional rite, the newly named Vladimir was immersed naked in a tub of holy water before losing four locks of hair (in the shape of a cross) and being anointed with oil over his entire body to help him slip from the grasp of evil forever. In the life he was to lead, he would need all the assistance he could get.4
The Nabokov home sat on the western half of Bolshaya Morskaya, an elegant street just around the corner from St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Commissioned by a Russian Tsar, designed by a French architect, the largest Orthodox cathedral in the city also contained Greek, Byzantine, and Russian elements. St. Isaac’s had an eclectic style that, given the magic required to escape, might have successfully emigrated to Paris, Berlin, or beyond.
St. Isaac’s was, however, firmly rooted in St. Petersburg, the capital city founded by Peter the Great two centuries before. And like so many buildings in the old city, whose beauty was shot through by a network of canals, St. Isaac’s foundations had been laid on reclaimed swampland. Because the terrain lacked the stability to support the weight of granite pillars and pediments, a forest of wooden timbers had to be driven into the ground as a base before construction began. That reclamation came at a price: tens of thousands of serfs died in the initial effort to create a modern European capital, and Peter’s unhappy wife had cursed it to become a “city built on bones,” a landscape of crumbling families.5
The cathedral had risen in sight of the Neva River and just a half-mile southwest from the Peter and Paul Fortress. The first building Peter had constructed in the city, the fortress was meant at first to ensure the security of the then-frontier town, but had quickly become the site of a political prison. In 1718 Peter’s own son paid a price for trying to flee the country, becoming one of the prison’s first occupants. Tortured on orders from his father, he died there at the age of twenty-eight.6
The fortress secured Peter’s capital, and the city that Peter raised had in turn lifted up the Nabokov family. More than a hundred years later, one of Nabokov’s great-great-uncles was appointed commander of the prison. During his tenure, he loaned books to the imprisoned Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then charged with plotting revolution and reading banned literature.7
2
At the time of Nabokov’s birth, his family’s affairs had been bound up with Russian Imperial politics for centuries, but from the beginning he belonged to both Russia and the world. His earliest memories were of the web of cotton cords padding his crib at home and a fleeting image of rain on a roof during a trip to his uncle’s chateau in southern France. He had a wet nurse who complained that he never slept. He had a daily bath. He was not spanked. At a time when his Russian literacy extended no further than the words for cocoa and Mama, he was already reading and writing in English. His British governess, Miss Norcott, fell in love with another woman. His Russian tutor, Ordyntsev, fell in love with his mother. He reorganized the cushions of the family sofa to create a dark tunnel behind it for adventuring.
When he was small, his mother read him tales of knights and damsels, and stories of the button-eyed blackface Golliwogg doll. Later, he himself read Dickens and Daudet, Punch and H. G. Wells. He was exquisitely well-read, even as a child. Sherlock Holmes, Conrad, and Kipling all caught his fancy for a time.
Vladimir grew up alongside Sergei, a brother born less than a year after him, an almost-twin and companion in early childhood. As has been the lot of so many younger siblings since the dawn of family life, less time and attention were bestowed on the second-born. Each subsequent child—Olga in 1903, Elena in 1906, and Kirill in 1911—would be provided for magnificently. But unlike their oldest brother, they would learn to live more or less in the arms of governesses.8
Standing closest to the dazzling Vladimir, Sergei was, often as not, cast into shadow. The brothers had little in common. Vladimir inherited his father’s fondness for boxing and butterfly hunting; Sergei, a love of opera. Vladimir was charismatic and extroverted, while Sergei possessed a severe stutter and no physical grace. The boys nonetheless had to serve as playmates for one another, and under Vladimir’s leadership, they eluded their guardians more than once. At the ages of four and five, they managed to lose their governess on a visit to Germany, boarding a steamboat and traveling down the Rhine from Wiesbaden. Two years later, to escape the equally chafing rule of their French tutor, they fled the family’s country estate on foot in their parents’ absence, striking out with Turka, the family’s Great Dane. Vladimir led the way as they tramped through the snow to the main road. When Sergei became tired and cold, he was assigned to ride the dog. Heading out into the moonlit night, with Sergei occasionally falling off Turka, they were miles from home before they were retrieved.
Vladimir and Sergei shared a nursery for the first decade of their lives, sleeping on either side of a Japanned screen. Both boys were permitted to browse their father’s massive library. Physically slight but athletically confident, Vladimir liked to lap his brother at the roller rink, or to sneak up on him as he practiced piano, vulnerable to attack. Sergei acquired a fondness for Napoleon, and slept cradling a little bronze bust of the foreign emperor. Unlike many grade school stutterers, his affliction stuck with him, and his poor vision required the additional indignity of spectacles. The boys were never friends. Frequently subject to Vladimir’s teasing as well as his brilliance, Sergei played the moon to his brother’s bright sun.9
3
Vladimir remained his parents’ favorite, but he was also a sickly child, afflicted by quinsy, scarlet fever, and pneumonia in turn. In the winter when he was ill, his mother Elena had a driver take her in a sled to the busy international shops on Nevsky Prospect, where she bought her invalid a new present each day. It was a life of crimson crystal eggs for Easter, and his mother’s tiaras and necklaces from a wall safe to play with before bed.
The Nabokovs’ wealth came from Elena’s side of the family—her millionaire father had been born into a mining family. He had loved the theater and devoted himself to philanthropic projects, but was also given to legendary rages in which he intimidated his daughter and terrorized his son. He had died when Nabokov was a toddler, leaving behind the St. Petersburg house and a country estate at Vyra, forty-five miles south of the city.10
When in the country, Elena Nabokov painted watercolor landscapes and picked mushrooms. In town, she stayed out until three in the morning playing poker. She was emotional and expressive with her children; but with those outside the immediate family, she could be guarded and slow to friendship. She remain
ed a nervous, brittle woman all her life. As a Lent-and-Easter-Sunday churchgoer, she leaned toward signs and portents: furtive knocks and apparitions populated her personal belief system in such a way that she was spiritual without being religious. Seeing letters and numbers in color, just as her son Vladimir did, she believed in second sight.11
She was also her son’s formative instructor in matters of deception, the first practitioner to model what would become the defining feature of his literary style. He would pay tribute to her cunning later in life, recounting two incidents from childhood in his autobiography.
In the first, Nabokov describes his mother’s anxiety over a longtime servant. Like most women of her class, Elena Nabokov did not work. She also had little interest in running the household, leaving the task to her childhood nurse, a woman in her seventies who had been born a serf. Slipping into dementia, the former nurse hoarded scraps and jealously guarded the family food, parceling it out reluctantly even to the Nabokovs themselves.
Unwilling to humiliate the woman by relieving her of her duties, Nabokov’s mother encouraged the former nurse in a convoluted fantasy that she ruled over the pantry, when in fact, she controlled only a “moldy and remote little kingdom” maintained to reinforce her delusion. Everyone else knew what was happening and mocked the nurse behind her back—she herself had suspicions about the arrangement from time to time. But the pity Nabokov’s mother felt kept her from ever divulging the truth. He would remember his mother’s guile for decades, and would mention the former nurse in Speak, Memory, along with an even more intricate ploy.12
By the time Nabokov was four, his paternal grandfather, Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, had begun to lose his mind. The former Minister to the Tsar put rocks in his mouth. He pounded the floor with his cane for attention. He swore. He confused his attendant for nobility and the Queen of Belgium for a troublemaker. He became convinced that he was only safe in his apartment at Nice, on the French Riviera. The presence of Nabokov’s mother there soothed him, but his condition worsened, and doctors recommended moving him to a northern climate.
During one insensible spell, the old man was brought to live in St. Petersburg, where Elena Nabokov recreated his room in Nice. Someone gathered furnishings recalling his old apartment, and some of his possessions were brought in by special messenger. Mediterranean flowers were obtained for his room.
It was not just a question of making him comfortable—Elena Nabokov fostered the illusion that he had never moved at all. She had the side of the house that was visible from his window painted Riviera white. He lived out his few remaining days under the happy delusion that he was safe in Nice and nowhere near a Russia that had just embarked on a catastrophic conflict with Japan.13
That same winter, Nabokov watched General Kuropatkin, a friend of the family, begin to demonstrate a trick with matches on the living room sofa, only to be interrupted by the call to war. Four years later, Vladimir would watch the boys’ Ukrainian tutor make a coin disappear right before their eyes. A pre-teen Nabokov would sit through yet another tutor’s magic lantern slides—glass plates in which large stories were reduced to a handful of images, and tiny moments became epic. But for all the inversion, sleight of hand, and trickery Nabokov would hoard and deploy in his writing across his lifetime, it was his mother who first blended reality and illusion, veiling hard truths in fantasy, and offering comforting lies with a deception born from power and pity.
4
The young Nabokov was so shielded by his parents from the violence of history that to review the political traumas that surrounded his family from his birth is also to note their absence from his daily life, to register that he somehow lived his first decades as a bystander to a cultural maelstrom.
This simultaneous immersion in and distance from social upheaval would eventually find a mirror in his writing. Like his family, Nabokov’s characters would be shaped by history, though their invented pasts would often be less lordly than his own. The grandfather dying in St. Petersburg but imagining himself on the Riviera had once owned 390 human beings. At the height of his influence he had been Minister of Justice under Tsars Alexander II and III—the first a reform-minded ruler who freed the serfs and established independent courts, and the second a regressive one who began to roll back the liberties bestowed by his predecessor.
As a result of that political career, Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, had been born at Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar’s country estate. He had grown up in St. Petersburg in the political beehive of the Winter Palace. As a child, V. D. Nabokov had lived through assassination of Alexander II and the anti-Semitic pogroms that had convulsed the country in its wake. He had witnessed his own father’s struggle to preserve at least some of Russia’s reforms.14
Surrounded by political turmoil, Nabokov’s father had chosen to make a life in it. Establishing himself early on as a liberal, V. D. Nabokov had been a student protester facing arrest, choosing to stay with his fellow detainees rather than take advantage of his father’s influence. He had grown up to become a legal scholar with a strong sense of justice.15
His democratic inclinations, however, stopped short of material possessions: he had lived among finery from birth and loved elegant things. He owned two automobiles—a Benz sedan and a black limousine—and a wardrobe that attracted more attention than his wife’s. His house was filled with soap and books imported from England, while his mind was filled with dreams of a British parliamentary system that he hoped to import as well. His fastidiousness was severe, his intelligence was fierce, and he had dedicated himself to promoting civil rights for everyone.16
Nabokov’s father would be the formative influence on him from childhood until death. And when Vladimir, nicknamed Volodya, was about to turn four—still a small boy delighting in riding sleeper cars to the Riviera and finding bits of colored glass on the beach—V. D. Nabokov made a choice that would define his legacy.
In 1903 at Kishinev, in the far southwest corner of the Russian Empire, a local newspaper printed stories about the centuries-old slur of blood libel—Jews murdering Christians to collect blood for religious rites. The paper called for Christians “inspired by the love of Christ” and affection for the Tsar to band together to “massacre these vile Jews.” Sparked to action on Easter weekend, a mob went on a rampage. And once the pogrom erupted, it ran unimpeded. The destruction continued for almost three days. By the time it was over, 49 Jews had been killed outright, with hundreds injured, businesses broken into, and more than a thousand people homeless.17
At a time when it was forbidden for members of the Russian court to take a public stand on any matter without Imperial approval, Nabokov’s father wrote about the massacre directly and without permission. In “The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” he attacked the madness of anti-Semitism, noting the damage it did not only to the Jews who were its victims but also to a society crippled by blind hatred. He condemned the government for tacitly permitting the pogrom and the police for not stopping it.
Anti-Semitism was woven deeply into the national culture, and Russia’s Jews were blamed for nearly every revolutionary tendency and economic disenfranchisement in the country.18 Gentiles who sympathized with their plight were portrayed as treasonous by reactionary groups. Elena Nabokov kept a collection of political cartoons that attacked her husband for his political stances, including one image in which Nabokov recalled his father “handing over Saint Russia on a plate to World Jewry.”19
Pogroms had taken place intermittently for centuries, but widespread use of the telegraph made it possible for news of the carnage at Kishinev to travel in hours rather than days. Russian brutality instantly made headlines around the globe. Community organizations and newspapers from Warsaw to London and Texas condemned the assaults. They were a matter of such international outrage that Chinese immigrants in New York banded together to raise money for the victims of Kishinev.20
Less attention was paid in that moment to another series of articles that would profoundly af
fect the lives of millions in subsequent decades. A newspaper in Nabokov’s hometown circulated what it trumpeted as the discovery of the records of a secret plan of Jews to take over the world. The fictional material had been lifted from unrelated sources written across centuries, imported into Germany and Prussia, and stitched together into its final form in all probability by the Tsar’s secret police. The plan appeared first in stories printed by the same publisher whose newspaper had called for the pogrom in Kishinev. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, complete forgeries, began to make their way across Russia, where they played to existing prejudice and fears.21
As anti-Semitism wore new masks, denouncing bigotry in every form became a key facet of V. D. Nabokov’s politics, one that his son would embrace with equal fervor as an adult. Nabokov’s father particularly despised the government strategy of encouraging prejudice by manipulating uneducated peasants. Yet it was not just government-fostered anti-Semitism that moved him to protest the tsarist regime. He argued vehemently against the death penalty, and, despite his belief that homosexuality was abnormal, he criticized Imperial laws against sodomy.
Nabokov’s father had been active in the St. Petersburg congress that demanded a constitution, a legislative body, and permanent civil rights. And he was far from alone—liberal and socialist ideals had been actively pursued during the nineteenth century by whole communities of Russian writers and thinkers, from anarchist pacifists like Leo Tolstoy to radicals more inclined toward violence.
In the face of such activism, repressive laws and calls to patriotism in the midst of the war with Japan did not have the desired effect. Momentum gained from civil rights granted in the nineteenth century could not be indefinitely stalled in the twentieth. As the old year gave way to 1905, strikes erupted across St. Petersburg. Protesters who went to the Winter Palace that January to deliver a petition to the Tsar asking for reforms found cavalry units charging them with swords drawn. When the crowd refused to disperse, the shooting began.
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 4
