Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  2

  One year into their exile, Nabokov’s parents moved to Germany. The new home was far from their oldest sons, who still had two years to go at Cambridge, but postwar Berlin was a much more affordable city and ideal for re-entering the world of publishing. V. D. Nabokov planned to collaborate on the founding of a new newspaper. Moving quickly into a cultural leadership role in the community of Russian exiles in Berlin that autumn, V. D. Nabokov helped to launch Rul (The Rudder), which soon became Berlin’s largest Russian-language daily.

  Events in Russia led Nabokov in a new direction, inspiring him to tackle fiction. In January 1921, Rul published a story from him, in which fairy-tale woodland spirits of Russian legend collide with the new Bolshevik reality of fields of beheaded, rotting corpses and bodies floating downstream.14 All the enchanted fairies of Russia, one sprite laments, have been turned into exiles. The story is thin, and not long, but it makes plain the fact that from the first days of his career as a prose writer, Nabokov combined myth and fantasy with modern political horror.

  By the time “The Wood-Sprite” appeared in print, most White Army remnants had retreated across the Black Sea. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in combat. Even more had died from disease—the toll from typhus alone ran into the millions. The war would continue to play out in skirmishes and uprisings, but by 1921, military conflict no longer topped the list of Russia’s troubles.

  Other tragedies were waiting in the wings. Three years of scorched-earth tactics, combined with crop failures, led to starvation through the breadbasket of the country. By 1921, full-blown famine had spread across whole sections of Russia, adding to the death toll.

  Revolutionary Russian writer Maxim Gorky put out an international plea for assistance on behalf of the Bolsheviks. The situation became so dire that the Bolsheviks created an All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Hungry. The International Red Cross suddenly found itself back in the region, not to visit the concentration camps as they had during the war (the Russian camps were now closed to them), but to try to arrange relief. Global efforts followed, with Nabokov’s mother raising money for those starving to death in a homeland to which her family could not return.15

  Full-page appeals for money in British newspapers led to an outpouring of funds and a massive commitment from Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration. Even with the influx of foreign aid, the disaster eventually brought slow death to at least five million people.16

  Nabokov moved through his student years never far from news of the violence unfolding in his country but surrounded by socialists who considered the new Russian state just and admired it. His attempts to persuade his peers otherwise were ignored or ineffective. After committing one of his father’s articles to memory for a debate on Bolshevism during his first year at Cambridge, Nabokov found himself incapable of offering any points or rebuttal on his own and was easily defeated.17 He could parrot his father’s ideas, but in print and in person, he had not yet found the words to reflect events in his native land.

  It was 1922, and the world tilted on the verge of modernity. International leaders met to de-escalate a buildup of dreadnoughts that threatened to reignite an arms race. The head of the Indian National Congress, Mohandas Gandhi, went to jail for sedition over his nonviolent struggle for Indian independence. The film industry was in its infancy, with Nanook of the North appearing as the first narrative documentary. England was not yet ready to publish the frank sexual content of fames Joyce’s Ulysses, but pieces of it had seen the light of day in a small American review, and that February Sylvia Beach in Paris would take a chance on the book, making it the first title to be published by Shakespeare and Company.

  Germany faced widespread unrest. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the nation had gone through its own revolution and civil conflict, a fight that left more than 1, 200 dead and Berlin a very uneasy place.18 The establishment of the Weimar Republic led to a democracy, but the First World War had ended on bitter terms for Germany, fostering economic ruin and discontent across the political spectrum and fueling interest in a young speaker named Adolf Hitler.

  Hitler was already publicly labeling Bolsheviks as corrupt Jewish seducers threatening Germany. In 1922, however, the Nazis were merely a fringe group; it was, instead, the specter of assassination that haunted Europe. Targeted killings—by Socialist Revolutionaries, the Irish Republican Army, right-wing German reactionaries, or left-wing anarchists—remained a popular political tool. Ultra-right extremists in Germany used machine guns and a hand grenade to kill Jewish politician and industrialist Walter Rathenau that summer, triggering more political violence and ushering in massive economic instability.

  Spies were everywhere. Frank Foley, British Passport Control officer by day, was Berlin station chief of the British intelligence organization MI6 by night. Willi Lehmann, tasked with counterespionage for the Berlin police force, would turn into a paid informer for the Soviet secret police. A Russian intelligence memo from the era refers to Berlin as the Soviet “central office for espionage abroad,” listing among its priorities the infiltration of the many anti-Bolshevik organizations that populated the city, the recruitment of formerly Tsarist officers, and luring émigrés back east.19 If the danger often felt veiled or vague, intermittent murders underlined the stakes of political gamesmanship.

  Newspapers and propaganda were likewise omnipresent, and it was not always easy to tell the difference. Every organization, every cause, and every party, it seemed, had its own newspaper, running the political gamut from soft promotion of ideology to strident calls to anarchy.

  From his new post as an editor in Paris, fellow Kadet Paul Milyukov openly bickered with Nabokov’s father over the best strategy to wrest Russia from Bolshevik hands. The dispute between the men continued for months, becoming more contentious.20 Their differences lay in their interpretations of history, with Milyukov backing the Socialist Revolutionaries and some Marxism, and Nabokov’s father still unconvinced of the merits of revolution.

  Yet possible alliances with outside parties or governments were sometimes all the exiles, powerless and removed as they were, had to dream of. In truth, for all they could effect change in that moment, their debates over the future of Russia might as well have taken place on another planet.

  The community of exiles in which Nabokov’s family lived was just as spiritually distant—and physically distinct—from its Berlin setting. Wilmersdorf, the neighborhood around the City Zoo, served as the social center for Russian émigrés, the place where they rented rooms from formerly well-to-do military families. But for the most part, the Russians kept to themselves and had no interest in assimilating. Their real interest was in leaving as soon as possible. The exiles in Berlin built an island of Russian anti-Bolshevik resistance, but had no front on which to resist. And so they fretted over next steps and waited for some new cataclysm to destroy them or call them home. With each year, the likelihood of return would grow smaller and smaller, but who could blame them for expecting the known universe to reverse itself before their eyes? It had already happened once.

  3

  During his last year at Cambridge, Vladimir Nabokov continued to accumulate police attention and university rebukes for his social activities (smashing streetlights, setting off rockets), provoking lectures from his tutor about time better spent in the library. On a bet, Nabokov had also begun a French translation for his father, who likewise had to goad him to get results. He nonetheless managed to win a prize for his performance on the first set of exams required for his undergraduate degree.21

  V. D. Nabokov hounded his son to keep him accountable, but cherished his company. Their spirited conversations ranged from writerly humor to chess, tennis, and boxing. V. D. Nabokov also promoted his son’s artistic emergence, continuing to publish Vladimir’s fiction and poetry in Rul and commissioning work from him for Slovo, the new Russian-language publishing house he helped to establish in Berlin.

  When Nabokov returned to Germany in 1922 for
his month-long Easter break, father and son had just finished preparing the next set of Nabokov’s poems for publication under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. A half-human bird of paradise dangerous to mortals, the sirin was a creature of Russian legends that serenaded saints and gods. Nabokov imagined it as a firebird that embodied the soul of Russian art.22

  On the last Thursday in March, V. D. Nabokov got home from Rul in time to have dinner with his son. The two men sparred playfully afterward, as Nabokov showed his father a boxing technique. Changing for bed, they called to each other from their separate rooms, then came together to try to recall the details of an elusive scene in the opera Boris Godunov. They discussed Sergei and the “abnormal inclinations” of his homosexuality.23 Nabokov’s father cleaned a pair of shoes, then helped to press his son’s pants. Heading to bed, V. D. Nabokov slipped some newspapers to his son through the slit between two barely open doors. Later, Nabokov would recall the strange sensation of not seeing his father’s face or even his hands in that moment.

  The next evening, V. D. Nabokov went out to a meeting at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall for a speech by Paul Milyukov. After nearly a year of public disputes, they had still not reconciled. An overture in that morning’s paper made by Nabokov’s father announced Milyukov’s speech and called for the remembrance of the shared goals that had bound them together in the past. But there was no response.

  Speaking to more than 1, 500 people seated in the elegant symphony hall, Milyukov described the role America could play in Russian liberation. After an hour, he called a brief break. As he headed toward the exit, confusion erupted.

  A man sitting in the front row stood up, pulled out a revolver, and fired shots toward the retreating Milyukov. A man in the crowd shouted, “For the Tsar’s family and Russia.” Milyukov threw himself to the ground or was pushed down. V. D. Nabokov raced toward the gunman to grab his arm. Nabokov’s father and a friend pinned the gunman. As the friend went to check on Milyukov, V. D. Nabokov continued to hold the assailant.

  A second man stepped onstage amid the chaos and shot Nabokov’s father three times. He hit V. D. Nabokov twice in the spine and once with a bullet that pierced his left lung and his heart. In all, twelve shots were fired, killing or injuring eight people. “Curiously,” one paper mistakenly reported, “all were struck in the knees or ankles.”24 The body of the unconscious V. D. Nabokov was carried into a nearby room.

  Five plainclothes police officers present in the auditorium tried to arrest the first gunman. But they ended up fighting with the crowd, who were convinced they were part of the assassination plot and refused to turn him over. The plainclothesmen called in uniformed policemen to whom the Russians finally surrendered the captive.25

  Both assailants were arrested, but only by luck. The crowd had been so intent on apprehending the first shooter that the second had almost escaped, edging toward the exit until someone in the crowd noticed him. The first shooter, who had been caught by the journalists, launched into a vitriolic harangue against Jews.26 Beaten bloody by the crowd as he was led across the hall, he was nearly lynched.

  A car was sent immediately to fetch family members, but before the twenty-two-year-old Nabokov and his mother could arrive, the police surgeon announced that V. D. Nabokov was dead.

  The Berlin Police Murder Commission interrogated the two assailants in the hall and, determining that it was a premeditated assassination, called in the political police. The prisoners, Peter Shabelski-Bork and Sergei Taboritski, turned out to be Tsarist cavalry officers. The gunmen had been living in poverty and working as interpreters at a publishing house in Munich. They had traveled to Berlin with few possessions, including a photograph of the late Russian Empress, and had taken up residence in a modest hotel.27

  Shabelski-Bork, undersized and wild-eyed, blamed Milyukov for all Russia’s troubles and admitted to stalking him for years. Without Milyukov, he believed the Tsar would surely have concluded a separate peace with Germany and forestalled the Revolution.28

  The day after the assassination, the Congress of Constitutional Monarchists met in Berlin. It opened with a speech in honor of V. D. Nabokov, after which the audience rose to pay tribute to the fallen Kadet. The murder was condemned and a resolution offering condolences to Nabokov’s mother passed, at which point, the police—perhaps not recognizing the distinctions between reactionary assassins and democratically inclined mourners—showed up and arrested thirty Russians as suspects. Attendees were taken in for questioning but quickly released.29

  On March 30 a memorial service attended by hundreds took place in the chapel of the former Russian Embassy in Berlin’s Unter den Linden. The church could not hold everyone, and an overflow crowd formed in the embassy courtyard. Twenty-two-year-old Vladimir Nabokov was there with his mother, Sergei, and the rest of the children. Also in attendance were the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, ambassadors, professors, doctors, journalists, as well as members of the Russian Red Cross, the German Red Cross, and the aid organization for Russian refugees that V. D. Nabokov had chaired and whose latest financial report was published in Rul the morning after his death.30

  A final service was held on April Fool’s Day at the St. Constantine and Helena Russian Orthodox Church on the outskirts of the city. Inside the narrow stone building with its three onion domes lofting their three lighter crosses skyward, pale flowers crowded the open casket in which V. D. Nabokov lay, his face turned sharp and strange, its boyish plumpness surrendered in death.

  Nabokov looked on his father for the last time. Mixed with the tragedy was a terrible irony: three years after outrunning arrest and certain execution by the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov had been shot dead in another country by an assassin intent on killing someone else.

  A large photo of V. D. Nabokov, the flower of St. Petersburg culture, ran on the front page in the April 5 edition of Rul and was sent out around the globe to more than thirty countries.31 Condolences poured in from Berlin, Paris, and Prague, calling Nabokov’s father “a bright paladin of freedom.” The Union of Russian Jews held a special meeting to pay tribute to the loss of V. D. Nabokov and to request permission to send a delegation to the funeral.

  Nabokov’s father was eulogized in sanctuaries and in print by what seems like half the Russian community living in Berlin, from Russian literary titan Ivan Bunin to former ambassadors and German cabinet ministers. Anton Chekhov’s widow sent condolences.

  On the day of his murder, V. D. Nabokov had extended the hand of friendship to Paul Milyukov. After his death, Milyukov had remained with the body all night. The next day, in mourning, Milyukov described V. D. Nabokov in generous terms. The murderers, he wrote, acting on deluded nationalism, had “killed a Russian patriot, who is eternally above their tiny horizon.”32

  The murder of V. D. Nabokov ended his dispute with Milyukov. And in the way that history has of making vital questions moot, their fight over the Socialist Revolutionary Party would also be sidelined. Milyukov did not yet know that Vladimir Lenin had just declared a new wave of terror, designed in part to crush any internal support for the Socialist Revolutionaries and “Milyukovites.”33

  Rumors circulated in European and American newspapers that the Socialist Revolutionaries who had been rounded up would all be executed in secret. But just days before V. D. Nabokov’s death, under pressure to make international gestures of goodwill, the Politburo had surprised the world by announcing that the Bolsheviks would put their political enemies on trial in sessions open to the public. Those proceedings would rattle Russian exiles around the globe, holding the gaze of the entire world. And the fate of the defendants would linger in Nabokov’s mind for forty years.

  4

  The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries opened in Moscow on June 8. The proceedings took place in the converted ballroom of the Noble Assembly, the Great Hall of Columns where Pushkin had fallen in love a century before, a place Nabokov would reference decades later in his commentary on the masterpiece Eugene Onegin. Towerin
g pillars and crystal chandeliers stood as reminders of a lost world, one that was receding into the past at an accelerating rate. A table hoisted onto a red-carpeted stage sat facing hundreds of chairs, and above the table hung a red banner with gold letters stating that the people’s court would safeguard the people’s revolution.34

  The trial had ongoing coverage by wire services and European correspondents, with all the information filtered and summarized in the pages of the Russian émigré papers in Berlin. Soldiers stood at the door of the courtroom, granting admission to more than a thousand ticketholders who had been selected in advance. Some of the most famous socialists in the world had come to Moscow to represent the accused.35

  The outcome of the trial had already been arranged with these socialists. In exchange for a united front that set aside the animosity the Bolsheviks had generated among revolutionaries in Europe, the twelve key defendants would have the right to choose their own attorneys and would not be given the death penalty.

  But Russian delegates in Germany who had negotiated those terms had not cleared them with Lenin, who publicly rebuked the representatives in the pages of Pravda. The international panic triggered by Lenin’s displeasure quieted when European attorneys were permitted to come to the aid of the accused as promised.

  On the opening day of the trial, one of the defendants rose to deny the legitimacy of the court. After hours of arguing, which one reporter suggested threatened to re-enact the entire Russian Revolution, the charges were finally read.36 The members of the tribunal announced that while they could not be impartial, bias would not create a problem as long as their partiality “was in the interests of the revolution.” Defendants and defense attorneys alike were given leeway to criticize the current government, but they were not allowed to call witnesses. The tribunal refused to grant them the right even to introduce evidence into the court record.