As Nabokov attended his classes at Tenishev and started down a long road of resisting political activism, other Russians got involved, but did so cautiously. Banned parties continued to meet furtively, producing vast archives of pamphlets and newspapers. Socialist parties had been forced underground; major unions had been outlawed. The Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist wing collapsed. Lenin and the Bolsheviks continued to squabble with Leon Trotsky’s Mensheviks, holding competing party conferences and jockeying for control of Marxism in the East. Russia settled into an ongoing state of suppressed instability.44
Six years on from what had seemed like a Revolution, joining together had only accomplished so much. The Kadets’ idealism began to falter amid the polarization of extremes, in which there appeared to be no room for politics like V. D. Nabokov’s. The Kadets continued to modify their platform in an attempt to expand support, but their effort to develop a broader coalition left them hamstrung. Their support of women’s suffrage riled the Tatar Muslims; their frank defense of Jews and other minorities alienated many on the right.45
Yet when the accusation of blood libel reared its head again, V. D. Nabokov would not give ground on anti-Semitism. The brutal murder of a thirteen-year-old boy in southwestern Russia led to the arrest of Mendel Beilis, a thirty-seven-year-old Jewish man. Beilis sat in jail for more than two years before being brought to trial, accused of ritually murdering a Christian boy to use his blood for religious purposes. Nabokov’s father reported on the case, sending telegrams from Kiev to St. Petersburg to update his accounts of the proceedings. His reporting on the dubious arguments and evidence of the trial was picked up by the Manchester Guardian and The New York Times, and drew a fine from the government.46
The disgust with anti-Semitism that would later make its way into Vladimir Nabokov’s work had its seeds in his father’s own writing on the issue. V. D. Nabokov described the wonder of finding a nearly illiterate jury in an educated city (the pool would later turn out to have been rigged far in advance), of the simultaneous accusations against Beilis and indictment of an entire religion, of the legal violations of the trial, these “ravings … from anti-Semitic literature of the lowest kind,” cloaked in the guise of scientific authority and admitted as evidence. Indicating the deterioration of justice in Russia, he wrote that staging the Beilis trial even a decade earlier “would have been impossible.”47
Workers struck and took up fund drives in Beilis’s support. But prosecutors played on the fear and prejudice of the jurors. A priest was brought in to describe Jewish practices, which he claimed required Christian blood for such a wide variety of purposes that a correspondent for the Times of London wondered mockingly how Jews had managed to find enough Christians to go around. American George Kennan (whose nephew of the same name would one day hail Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in the West) observed the Duma seriously debating the existence of a Jewish sect that ritually murdered Christians for religious purposes. The arguments were ominous; one deputy warned that if Russian liberals made it impossible for a Jew who murdered a Christian child to be tried, there would be no Jews left to save, because they would all be slaughtered by mobs.48
Outside Russia, Western public reaction formed a tidal wave of revulsion. But from certain corners, a more qualified disapproval appeared. One trial chronicler would later note that in between the groups clearly supporting Beilis’s prosecution and those who anguished over a Russia trapped in the Middle Ages lay a third, slippery faction. To that faction belonged many normally reasonable people, who warned Russia’s Jews against pursuing “their vendetta with Russia”—at a time when all the vengeance seemed to be running the other way. Advising against public protests, The Oxford and Cambridge Review suggested that while Judaism as a whole, even Orthodox Judaism, should not be held liable for the crimes laid at Beilis’s feet, it was entirely possible that some Jewish sect somewhere might be committing ritual murder.49
Despite the unwillingness of some observers to condemn prosecutors, the mythical horror story that they had fabricated was so ludicrous it could not be kept aloft. Many of the best lawyers in the country joined Beilis’s defense team, and they discredited lie after lie. After approximately two hours of deliberation, a jury of Russian Christians rendered a verdict of not guilty and freed Beilis.50
In 1903, Russia had shocked the world with the pogroms unleashed in Kishinev, followed by a disastrous war that strained patriotism and national unity. A decade later, as teachers prompted the teenage Nabokov to engage politically for the future of his country, the spiral of history wound its way full circle. The Beilis trial revisited the slur of blood libel, and one year later, the same incompetent government found itself again facing the threat of war.
The challenges of this new war would again eclipse the abilities of the Tsar. This time, however, Nicholas would have company: much of the known world would descend into madness with Russia. In the wake of the Beilis trial, one Russian newspaper commentator identified Jews as “an exclusively criminal species,” which led him to pray, “May Russia be saved from Jewish equality even more than from fire, sword, or open invasion by enemies.”51 As it turned out, he would have his wish, and its fulfillment would mark the beginning of the end of Nabokov’s childhood.
CHAPTER THREE
War
1
In the summer of 1914, the world went to war, and Vladimir Nabokov became a poet. He had already been composing verse for years, but in the season of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a fever took hold of him that never left. The metamorphosis would be linked later in his mind with a pavilion that sat over a small bridge on the family’s summer estate, its jewel-colored glass with some panes shattered and “Down with Austria!” graffiti providing a premonition of everything that would follow.1
In truth, however, the fifteen-year-old Nabokov was cocooned enough from the currents of history that he was spared much of the reality of the First World War. The six years that elapsed between the births of Wilfred Owen, the British martyr poet of the war, and Vladimir Nabokov set a generation gap between their respective fates. In a few short years, Nabokov would turn his literary attention to those whose lives had been shattered by conflict, but he would never become a war writer.
Instead, he wrote Romantic poetry, caught up for the first time in creation and inspiration that threatened to slip away but could sometimes be recovered. He would remember fashioning and refashioning his first real poem in his mind, waiting until it was polished and ready before reciting it to his mother, who, as he hoped (and expected), wept at the performance.
Cousin Yuri visited that June, and reported that he had, at sixteen, taken up with a married countess and a general’s wife. The following summer, Nabokov found his own romance in the countryside with Lyussya Shulgin, a fifteen-year-old Petrograd girl staying for the summer at a dacha in the village. They met alone in the pavilion with the panes of colored glass, and Nabokov spent August 1915 in a state of rapture, escaping for trysts, eating the fruit his mother had a servant leave out for his late-night returns. His mother copied the love poems he recited to her into a special album but, perhaps fearing to break his illusion or hers, asked no other questions. His father, more practical or more suspicious, subjected his teenage son to pesky interrogations aimed at preventing premature fatherhood.2
While the composition of romantic verse and the passion of first love occupied Nabokov, Europe had exploded. As country after country entered the war, V. D. Nabokov was mobilized with an infantry regiment. Elena Nabokov organized a private hospital for soldiers, where she volunteered, but she found the services she offered bitterly insufficient for the needs of the wounded veterans she encountered. Furthermore, she felt that her efforts failed in the breach: her kindnesses could not bridge the deep-rooted subservience of the injured peasants she had hoped to help.3
At the start of hostilities Russia had initially responded with the kind of patriotism Nicholas II had been dreaming of for decades. St. Petersburg was ren
amed Petrograd, in order to seem less German. V. D. Nabokov suspended his political activities in light of the conflict.
Across Europe, paranoia set in. The British Parliament discussed completely impossible numbers of German spy networks and saboteurs. The Germans feared that fellow countrymen deported by Russia were engaged in espionage against their homeland. Across the continent, these suspicions provided the impetus to import concentration camps from far-flung colonies into Europe itself. Facilities were constructed from London to Petrograd and built even more widely abroad, from Canada to Australia.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—both men and women—were labeled as “enemy aliens” and subject to arrest and internment. A year into the war, Britain had locked up more than 32,000 German, Hungarian, and Austrian civilians of military age. German facilities housed more than 100,000 French, British, and Russian prisoners. And in Russia, more than 300,000 civilians from Germany and other Central Power nations were placed into camps by 1917. Civilians were also held in prisons or concentration camps in France, the United States, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Egypt, Togoland, the Cameroons, Singapore, India, Palestine, the Habsburg lands, Bulgaria, Siam, Brazil, Panama, Haiti, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. From the handful of camps that had existed in Cuba before Nabokov’s birth, concentration camps had expanded to circle the globe.4
The initial strategy for these camps was that detainees would be arrested, then investigated, with the clearly innocent being freed. And occasional waves of releases did happen, but continuous or widespread exonerations did not take place as planned. Many cross-border families had no idea where their relations were and so could not contact them. In some countries, civilian prisoners—many of whom were loyal to the countries that had imprisoned them—languished near starvation for years.5
When it came to selecting internees, being of military age and a subject or citizen of an enemy country were the most common determinants, but criteria for arrest could be arbitrary and inconsistent. If, instead of a German mother and a Russian father, V. D. Nabokov had been born to a Russian mother and German father, he himself might have been a candidate for a concentration camp.6
The camps of the Great War provided a stepping-stone to darker incarnations that would directly impact the Nabokov family, yet the concept of prison camp itself was not new to Russia. The country had a long history of punitive measures against political activists, and Siberian exile and hard labor had been regular tools of Imperial justice for centuries. But the phenomenon of the concentration camp—in which people were arrested and imprisoned for years without trial, without rights of correspondence, and often without judicial review of any kind, simply on the basis that they might represent a threat—was new.7
Absorbed in his first love and protected from the war by his parents, Nabokov nonetheless noticed the arrival of Russia’s first concentration camps. He would later make use of one in a novel, but even then, his attention to history would largely be in vain. His narrator’s past would remain an enigma to readers because less than two decades after their creation, the camps from the First World War would be as good as forgotten.
2
Nabokov’s affair with Lyussya survived the bitter winter of 1915–16 in Petrograd, sustained by furtive meetings in which the lovers had little privacy. He continued composing poetry in tribute to their passion, and in the spring she cheered him on at a soccer match. The following summer, romance returned when they met again in the more idyllic, more permissive countryside.
Nabokov immortalized his first love by publishing a collection of his own poems about her. Printed in the second year of the war, the book was a fearless stab at establishing an identity in the world. It was also a vanity project. Many teenagers might have fantasized about becoming the next Alexander Pushkin, but few had the wherewithal to pay a publisher to further the dream.
At Tenishev, such presumption may have seemed less than democratic. In what can only have been a nightmare for even the most self-assured child, Nabokov’s literature professor, Vladimir Hippius (a poet himself), obtained a copy of the book and brought it in to mock the most intimate lines out loud in front of Vladimir and his classmates. Nabokov would later recall the book being savaged in the minor press. In case the reviews had not provided a clear response to V. D. Nabokov, his friend Joseph Hessen expressed his dismay over the book. Hippius’s cousin, a poet of some distinction, told Nabokov’s father that Vladimir would under no circumstances make it as a writer.8
During that summer at Vyra, Nabokov saw not only Lyussya but also Yuri, who took leave from officer training school to spend a week with his cousin. The teenagers improvised a game with a rope swing in the garden. Each taking turns standing on a board that, at its lowest point, passed just barely above where the other one lay on the ground, they learned not to move as the swing moved at greater speeds from higher distances, despite every indication of disaster.9
They went for their usual stroll in the village. On a lark this time, the young men exchanged clothes before setting out, Yuri wearing white flannels and a striped tie, and Vladimir buttoned into his cousin’s military uniform, with its dark pants, gray jacket, and white leather belt. They went to the village and came back, then traded clothes again, the boy poet and boy soldier, protected offspring of one of the most cosmopolitan cultures in the world, each seeking his own inimitable destiny and dreaming of different kinds of glory.
3
As the war entered its third year, Uncle Ruka died in Paris. With him went his declarations of heart trouble (which proved to be prescient), as well as his foppish canes, his stutter, his high-heeled shoes, his father’s legendary cruelty to him, and his attention to his nephew Vladimir. The young Nabokov inherited Ruka’s two-thousand-acre country house at Rozhdestveno, along with a fortune that made him a millionaire. The inheritance had long been planned, with other properties from Elena’s side of the family slated for Sergei and Olga, but V. D. Nabokov was less than pleased about his brash son’s new, independent wealth.10
In clear contravention of the rules of romance, by the time Nabokov got the money, he had lost the girl. The end of summer had already begun to seal a distance between Nabokov and Lyussya. He would not remember their final encounter that season at Vyra, but it seems likely that they were dogged by their different, irreconcilable futures. Lyussya had promised her mother she would look for a job that fall; Vladimir returned to Tenishev. The marriage he had promised, which she seemed to have believed in far less than he did, never materialized. He would move on to a series of affairs, from one-night stands to more earnest associations, the two sometimes overlapping.11
In the meantime, life for many Russians was on a downward trajectory as steep as Nabokov’s enchanted ascent. Fielding the biggest army in the war, with more than twelve million soldiers mobilized, Russia paid a proportionate price. In all, the war would take nearly two million Russian lives, a total only Germany would surpass. With such staggering losses, the reflexive patriotism from the war’s early months had faded.
By the end of 1916, political discontent was still fragmented but rising dramatically. As the New Year rolled in, strikes erupted continuously. In mid-February, female textile workers in Petrograd protested war shortages and called for increased bread rations. Munitions factory workers reprised the role they had played in 1905 and joined the demonstrations. When the police failed to re-establish order, guards regiments were called out, to no avail. Soldiers who initially followed orders to fire on demonstrators began to mutiny.
Protesters took over Nevsky Prospect. A dozen years after Trotsky had been arrested as leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet, the Mensheviks resurrected the banned organization and began to advocate for a republic.12
If the war had been happening somewhere off-stage for Vladimir Nabokov, the Revolution would take place at closer range. Children had been shot from the trees in front of St. Isaac’s in 1905, but by March 1917, grown men had taken their place, and they were ready
to shed more blood on St. Isaac’s Square for the prize that had been lost a dozen years before.
Nabokov’s neighborhood—which included the cathedral, the War Office, the Admiralty Building, and the Military Hotel—was the last holdout against revolutionary forces. Besieged officials sent frenzied dispatches to the front, seeking some kind of military support greater than the last regiments still loyal to the Tsar packed around St. Issac’s.
No help, however, was forthcoming. Gun battles raged on Bolshaya Morskaya. Russian officers were herded in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and executed, and a red flag was hung from the pole outside the Admiralty. In the street shootings and violence that erupted and subsided in that year of Revolution, Nabokov sat suspended over Morskaya Street, looking from his mother’s bay window at two soldiers trying to bear away a man on a stretcher at a run while they kept an interloper from stealing the dead man’s boots. Russia was in her third year of war, but he would remember it as the first corpse he had seen.13
In time that war, along with its food shortages and repressions, triggered what had been avoided more than a decade before. As Petrograd rose in revolt, the Tsar was away, but it became clear that his reign was over. Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, abdicated in favor of his son, then reversed himself to turn the throne over to his brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail.14
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 6
