Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Ukrainian separatists were similarly brutal. Under the drive for independence led by Simon Petliura, tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. Even the Red Army allies of the Bolsheviks, who publicly embraced Jews and denounced the brutality of White forces, committed more than a hundred pogroms. In the end, despite some innovative efforts at collaborative government and Jewish militias formed for self-defense, an estimated fifty to one hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered in the Ukraine during the Civil War.35

  The virulence of the identification of Revolution with Jewry in that time and place was such that it found reflection even in the writings of V. D. Nabokov. As he prepared a highly critical but fair account of Kerensky and other actors in the Provisional Government, a strange note sounds again and again in his story. “Jewish-looking young men” bar the doors to the Duma building after the Revolution. For no apparent reason, he notes that there were so many Jews on Russia’s Council of Elders in 1917 that it could “have been called the Sanhedrin.” Jews are singled out for their secretive or “servile” behavior—writing documents behind V. D. Nabokov’s back or hiding a Jewish identity behind a more elegant adopted name. In another aside, V. D. Nabokov describes the “impudent Jewish face” belonging to “the repulsive figure” of a Bolshevik revolutionary.36

  V. D. Nabokov had Jewish men among his closest friends. He had risked his career defying official anti-Semitism, and had dedicated himself to covering the injustice of the Beilis trial. But the climate of Russian anti-Semitism was such that even he could not entirely refrain from saddling Jews with ugly clichés, on some level holding his enemies responsible, not just as Bolsheviks but as Jews, for the bitter reality of the Revolution.37

  One of Nabokov’s closest companions at Tenishev School, Samuil Rosov, was Jewish. Rosov would later recall his friend’s indifference to race and creed. In 1919, however, the general sense of opposition between those seen as true Russians and Jews had infected every level of the debate about the Revolution. The young Nabokov would soon find himself affiliated with a wave of Russian émigrés which was seen—often correctly so—as hateful and bigoted.

  6

  While pogroms flared in the Ukraine, a new kind of cruelty simultaneously took root in Russia. Trotsky’s 1917 internment in a concentration camp had left him with a “burning hatred of the English,” but his loathing did not keep him from adopting their measures. In his third month commanding Red Army forces, Trotsky called for a contingent of problematic prisoners of war to be put in a concentration camp.38

  Those prisoners were the sort of people who had been put in camps by England, Germany, and Russia since 1914. But just days later, Trotsky wrote a memo in which he theorized that the bourgeoisie, too, might be placed in similar concentration camps, doing “menial work (cleaning barracks, camps, streets, digging trenches, etc.).” The kinds of projects recommended were similar to those that prisoners in Canadian camps had been required to do—tasks that the Central Powers and Allies alike had demanded of their civilian and military prisoners. Trotsky himself elsewhere recalled his stint in Amherst “sweeping floors, peeling potatoes, washing crockery, and cleaning the common lavatory.”39

  Lenin likewise turned his attention to concentration camps as a revolutionary tool later that summer. In a telegram sent to the site of an anti-Bolshevik uprising, he called for mass terror against his opponents and for suspect individuals to be “locked up in a concentration camp outside town.”40

  After Russia’s exit from the war, many prisoners of war and enemy aliens were in the process of being released. The concentration camp facilities, with their communal living, their extrajudicial status, and their history of forced labor, were handed over to the new secret police, the Cheka, which had been actively assigned the task of sowing terror across the country.41

  Brutal measures were already under way but had proved insufficient to quell the unrest. Lenin unleashed the first of several waves of strategically applied Red Terror that fall. Widespread executions and detentions in concentration camps, known as “special camps,” quickly took on a key role.

  When camps had been in the colonies of imperial powers, the native populations of those outposts had been the target populations. When camps had come to the heart of Europe, with few exceptions, foreign civilians and prisoners of war served as inmates. Now, Russia had opened a new chapter in concentration camp history—the government in power’s own citizens had become the target population that had to be preemptively incarcerated.42

  As an adult, Nabokov would refer to the “regime of bloodshed, concentration camps, and hostages” that followed on the heels of the Bolshevik takeover. He would consistently lay responsibility for the first post-Revolutionary camps at the feet of Lenin, and in one form or another they would haunt his writing for the next five decades.43

  7

  In the small window of time before the Civil War consumed Russia, and before the Bolsheviks repurposed Russia’s system of wartime camps, Vladimir Nabokov took to the hills above the Black Sea to catch butterflies. As he walked between the bushes looking for prize specimens, a Bolshevik sentry suspected that his purported hunt for beauty masked some political purpose—surely he was signaling the British with his net. But the skinny boy, all head and legs, managed to extricate himself and his butterfly net from military arrest, avoiding the fate of the dead of Yalta.44

  With an occasional turn from affairs of the heart toward the history unfolding all around him, Nabokov’s verse began to find publication in local newspapers. But as dark as news across the country had become, life still offered some shelter from the worst events underway. With plenty of romance and endless diversions, Nabokov had time to make his stage debut in the lively regional theater.45 He imagined himself in spiritual communion with Alexander Pushkin, who had also been exiled to the Crimea a century before. Nabokov sent letters to Lyussya, not knowing she had already left Petrograd. She wrote him, wondering why he did not write back. As letters slowly made their way to him, he toyed with joining the White Army in order to head inland to where she was now living, somewhere in the Ukraine.

  V. D. Nabokov described the corner of the Crimea they had come to occupy as godforsaken, but conditions could have been worse. In the fall of 1919, the family moved into a former Tsarist villa closer to town, so that the younger children could attend school and Nabokov could make use of the libraries at the house and in Yalta.46

  German occupation, or the threat of it, kept the Red Army out of Yalta and extended Vladimir Nabokov’s innocence one more year. But once the First World War ended in November 1918, Germany withdrew, and a Regional Government was formed, with Nabokov’s father holding a political portfolio once again, as Minister of Justice. The state survived a few months before the tensions of foreign intervention, a dispirited army, and an unsustainable fledgling democracy replayed the collapse of the Provisional Government on a smaller scale.47

  The terrain had all the beauty and trappings of the Arabian Nights for Nabokov, but the romance was stretched so thin over the yawning abyss of the future that at times it became transparent. His family was running out of ways to protect him; the violence of the world and the search to escape it would soon become a theme in Nabokov’s life and a dominant feature of his work.

  The theaters and cafés of Crimean Russia became the shelters of ever-dwindling White Army power. A surging Red Army soon began to dislodge the refugees from their tentative hold on even this foreign piece of home and to disperse them across the globe, from China and Europe to America.

  The less fortunate would never leave. Near the end of winter, Nabokov’s cousin Yuri Traubenberg rode ahead of a cavalry charge into a nest of Bolshevik machine gunners in northern Crimea, ending his short life. The war had finally managed to lay a finger on the nineteen-year-old Nabokov. He served as a pallbearer for his closest friend, who was laid to rest in the alien terrain of Yalta.48

  Nabokov’s hedging on whether to enlist finally outlasted White Army control over the Crimea. Whi
te forces still had a series of improbable victories and dramatic defeats to go before they would be completely crushed, but the children born in the forge of that winter—Alexander Solzhenitsyn among them—would grow up with no memories of life under the Tsar or the Russian Empire.

  The situation disintegrated quickly, and all the Nabokovs crossed westward to Sebastopol in a car winding up and down mountainsides, with Sergei throwing up on one side of the car, Elena on the other. After two days in the port city, they managed to board a vessel with other ministers of the regional government, only to be kicked off due to (incorrect) suspicions about misappropriated government funds. By the time the family set sail aboard a cargo ship named Nadezhda (“Hope”), the Bolsheviks had already retaken the harbor. But they escaped together: V. D. and Elena Nabokov, Vladimir and Sergei, Olga, Elena, Kirill, and their servant and companion Evgenia Hofeld, who had run the household since 1914.49

  They possessed little more than a handful of valuables grabbed by a chambermaid from a dresser as the family fled Petrograd. The jewels that had been the playthings of the infant Volodya had so far been hidden in a bottle of talcum powder and buried in the ground. They now lay tucked into the small pigskin valise that had been part of Elena’s honeymoon trousseau.

  As the Nadezhda pulled out into the Black Sea, Bolshevik machine-gun fire crossing its wake, Nabokov sat down to a game of chess with his father. He had already seen first-hand the disappointments that roared up from the gap between an ideal and its execution, and the choices between bad and worse that so often accompanied political action. But the future was not yet set.

  Just days before his twentieth birthday, Nabokov surrendered his homeland to the sorrows that had come into the century with him: the fury of Lenin, the blight of the concentration camps, the rabid anti-Semitism that could lay waste to a whole universe. But these things—and the memory of the dead—had only begun to shape his world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Exile

  1

  A short trip across the Black Sea was all it took to turn Vladimir Nabokov into an exile. While almost any kind of voyage was preferable to the reception the Bolsheviks were offering in Sebastopol, the passengers on the Nadezhda were left with only the things they had carried aboard, including food and water. In an instant, beds and mattresses became luxuries. Nabokov made use of a bench, while his thirteen-year-old sister Elena camped on a door taken off its hinges. They slept in lice-ridden quarters and ate dog biscuits. Nabokov took turns with his father using a collapsible rubber bathtub like the one that had accompanied V. D. Nabokov to prison eleven years before. Sergei, even more fastidious, had a second tub to himself, and won a bet that he could bathe using a single glass of water.1

  Constantinople was already swamped with refugees and had no use for more Russians. After waiting two days for permission to land, the passengers on the Nadezhda were refused entry. The boat sailed on to Athens. Detained shipboard in quarantine with all the passengers for two more days at the Port of Piraeus, Nabokov finally stepped onto a foreign shore on his twentieth birthday.2

  The family regrouped in Athens, where Nabokov found time for three romances in as many weeks. Then it was on to Marseilles, where they caught a train north to Paris. The city did not block their entry on arrival, but, as in Constantinople, Nabokov suddenly found himself a member of an undesirable class. He had been preceded in emigration by any number of anti-Bolshevik Russians, many of whom had fled their homeland a year or more earlier. The earlier arrivals had not made a particularly good impression on their hosts, who had begun to fear that the Russians might not leave any time soon.

  Nabokov’s new status was underlined for him when he went to the Cartier boutique on Rue de la Paix with family servant Evgenia Hofeld. He had intended to sell his mother’s jewelry to raise cash for the family to live on. But by May 1919 Russian refugees were a suspect class, and Cartier’s staff called the police. It may have been the magnificence of Elena Nabokov’s pearls in combination with her son’s “unbelievable” attire which were to blame, but fortunately Nabokov and Hofeld managed to persuade the staff to release them before officers arrived.3 The pearls would eventually finance the first half of Nabokov’s college career.

  Crossing the Channel to England, V. D. Nabokov began to consider how to counter Lenin’s and Trotsky’s successes—and how best to persuade the English to expand Allied intervention in Russia. He wrote an essay on the pogroms of southern Russia, claiming, perhaps wishfully, that they were occurring despite the Volunteer Army’s best efforts. The rest of his argument was designed to refute the very equation of Bolshevism with Jewry that had crept sub rosa into the fringes of his memoir. Acknowledging the number of Jewish leaders in the Bolshevik movement, he absolutely rejected the idea that the Bolsheviks were representative of all Jews and called on the Russian Jewish majority to join the fight for Russian democracy.4

  Partnering with fellow Kadet Paul Milyukov in London, V. D. Nabokov also began to work on the English-language journal New Russia. More jewels were sold to pay rent, and Nabokov’s parents settled in London.5

  That fall, Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, showing administrators the transcript of Samuil Rosov, his former Tenishev classmate, in order to avoid taking qualifying exams. Sergei started at Oxford, but quickly became unhappy there and after just one semester joined his brother at Cambridge. Nabokov began by studying natural sciences, and Sergei French literature; but as Sergei moved from Oxford to Cambridge, Nabokov, who identified more and more strongly as a writer, changed to literature, too.6

  The brothers’ years at Cambridge meant more time together and more cordial relations. They often played tennis. Nabokov was the more gifted athlete, but left-handed Sergei, despite his weak serve and nonexistent backhand, had a relentless ability to return the ball. A friend from those years contrasted the two young men, describing Vladimir as a charmer with a hint “of malice at the back of his voice” and Sergei as a towheaded dandy with a curl over his eye, attending the Diaghilev Ballets Russes premieres “wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.”7

  Nabokov boxed and played goalkeeper for the Trinity men’s soccer team, which brought him into the orbit of British students. But his chosen topics for poetry were still women and Russia. His main companions were aristocratic Russians, too, including not just Sergei, but a count, an exiled prince, and roommate Mikhail Kalashnikov.8

  Nabokov’s letters to his mother were filled with mentions of family, home, and politics—but he also found time for misbehavior. He was threatened with fines on campus for walking on the grass. He got into fistfights with those who disparaged Russian speakers. In the kind of antics undertaken by students for centuries, he broke two of his landlady’s chairs, he neglected to pay his tailor, and he smeared food on the walls.9

  If Nabokov still delighted in playing the child, he was also finding that one by one, the indulgences of childhood were being scraped away. He and his Russian friends did not see eye to eye with progressive British students. While Nabokov was at Cambridge, H. G. Wells—whom V. D. Nabokov had hosted at his home in 1914—visited Lenin and praised Bolshevik ideals before the Petrograd Soviet. Wells’s son George, who had made the trip too, got into a dormitory dispute with Nabokov in which each son defended his father’s views. Their disagreement escalated into a shouting match, with Nabokov condemning all socialists, and Kalashnikov chiming in with “Kill the Yids!”10

  In a letter to his mother, Nabokov found his roommate’s comment amusing and regrettable, but the argument cannot be counted as a shining moment for any of the participants. Kalashnikov handily confirmed at least one stereotype Wells likely had about White Russian émigrés, which was fair enough, as Nabokov’s roommate was not known as a rigorous thinker. During their two years together, Kalashnikov threatened to burn Nabokov’s books and expounded on the mysteries of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion11

  Anti-Semitism, Nabokov quickly learned, was not limited to R
ussia; Kalashnikov’s vicious conflation of Jews and Bolsheviks found a reflection in more elegant generalizations by others. In The Jews, written during Nabokov’s years at Cambridge, the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc—a former member of Parliament and one of the leading historians of his day—tried to tackle what he termed “the Jewish problem.” His ideas reveal the state of British thought in that era on the rising global tide of anti-Semitism.

  Explaining the causes and effects of the 1917 “Jewish revolution,” Belloc explained that during the prior decade, the Boer War in South Africa had been “provoked and promoted by Jewish interests.” Over time, he believed “a monopoly of Jewish international news agents” developed, as well as a Jewish presence in “the governing institutions of Western Europe” at a rate of fifty to one hundred times any proportional representation.12 Belloc concluded that the Jews were in part to blame for the animosity they faced, because they acted superior to others, behaved in deceptive and secretive ways, and refused to acknowledge the evidence of Jewish conspiracy marshaled against them.

  Such arguments were mixed in with more measured thinking but rank among the best that the nation received at the time from an ostensibly careful thinker who was by and large sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. Similar ideas would become less subtle and more consequential in the coming years.

  But for the twenty-year-old Vladimir Nabokov at Cambridge, if a choice had to be made between Bolshevik sympathizers and Kalashnikov’s kind, he was sticking with the Russians. Nabokov headed back to Berlin that June with Sergei and Kalashnikov, and over the summer began dating Kalashnikov’s cousin Svetlana.

  Like Lyussya before her, Svetlana received her romantic due in poems, but the love for which Nabokov pined most was much farther away. Nostalgia for his own Russian geography overwhelmed him. If he had been called a foreigner in St. Petersburg, he was painfully Russian in London. He clung to Russian things. He found a copy of Dahl’s Russian dictionary and did exercises in it, so as not to lose his native language. He wrote his mother longing letters about the details of Vyra, as if the act of remembering might itself create some road for return, though he had begun to suspect that that road might not exist. He wrote poem after poem, expressing fidelity by “composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew.”13