Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Realizing, only a week in, that their presence was meaningless, the foreign attorneys announced that they would no longer allow their involvement to support the charade of a fair trial. They withdrew from the proceedings and did not show up the next day.37

  An orchestrated mob made its way to the courtroom, where eight demonstrators spoke in favor of execution. It seemed for a moment that the defendants might be killed then and there. When the remaining defense attorney complained that allowing insults and harangues in the hall would prejudice the court against their clients, the tribunal declared that the “workers did not go through any law school and do not know the laws of etiquette.” Presiding judge Georgy Pyatakov again dismissed the idea that impartiality was the goal. A defense attorney who chided the court for its bias was jailed for his trouble. Newspaper headlines around the world began to announce that the death penalty was inevitable.

  The Socialist Revolutionaries had already lost their European attorneys; now they had lost their Russian counsel. But they remained defiant. They had come of age fighting and going to prison under the Tsar. If it was true that many had taken part in the Provisional Government or fought Bolshevik rule, they had also been steadfast radicals for years and were not easily intimidated.

  They had led hunger strikes; some among them had killed. Defendant Abram Gotz had already been sentenced to death once by a Tsarist court in 1907, launching a commuted sentence of exile in Siberia that had ended only with the Revolution. Yet this trial held one key distinction from the other, earlier proceedings: it was a trial by fellow revolutionaries.

  The writer Maxim Gorky appealed in print to Soviet leaders, begging them to take the message to Trotsky, writing, “If the trial of the Socialists-Revolutionists (sic) results in murder it will be preconceived contemptible murder.… I have pointed out repeatedly the crime and stupidity of rooting out the intelligentsia in our illiterate and uncultured country.”38

  During the last days of deliberations, in a clear bid to have an excuse to offer clemency, the defendants were presented with the opportunity to plead with the court a final time, to save their lives if they would repudiate their party. Not one of the twelve asked for mercy.

  Were the Russian people torn by the events taking place in their midst? Not if New York Times reporter Walter Duranty’s accounts of the 1922 trial are to be believed. The citizens of Moscow, Duranty wrote, were tired of politics and interested only in getting on with their lives. In his coverage of the trial from Moscow, well on his way to being the elder statesman of Western journalists in Moscow, Duranty suggested that while groups could be ginned up to riot in support of the death penalty, in truth, no one cared what happened to the defendants one way or the other: “Once the peasants followed the Social Revolutionary banner because the Socialist Revolutionaries promised them land. Now that they have it from the Bolsheviki they desire to enjoy its fruits in peace and prosperity. If the Soviets give them that, they may shoot a thousand revolutionary leaders, for all the peasants care.”39

  Yet perhaps Duranty missed something, as even the tribunal seemed conflicted in its last moments. On its way out to consider the verdict, the judges paused to ask once more if the prisoners’ intentions toward the government might change if they were freed. The defendants, again, did not budge.

  And so in a dramatic sentencing session, twelve of the thirty-four public defendants were given the death penalty. The sentence was sent to the Soviet for final review. Trotsky and Stalin pushed for signed oaths from the prisoners swearing to cease resistance against the government and to dissociate themselves from the party. If they signed, the defendants would receive reduced sentences—and if they did not, execution would follow.

  Others pressed for commuting the executions to permanent exile. A compromise emerged: the death penalty would be left in place, but the executions would be “postponed.” The prisoners would become permanent hostages. In the event of any action by the Socialist Revolutionary Party against the Soviet, the prisoners’ death sentences would immediately be carried out: “Let there be one attempt to burn a factory or one attempt at murder—and the Socialists-Revolutionists (sic) will be punished.”40

  On August 10, 1922, the assistant commander of the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow misled the defendants, telling them that their verdict had been confirmed, and they would be killed. They waited ten hours to be taken for execution. That night, the head of the prison came to explain their new status as hostages. Soon after, they were turned over to the secret police. And then they disappeared.41

  The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 split revolutionary from revolutionary, creating a rift that made it hard to imagine how global revolution could progress in the coming years. Alexander Blok’s poem “The Twelve,” already parodied by Nabokov, found another response in a book called “The Twelve Who Are To Die,” printed in Berlin and distributed in Europe and America that fall. It detailed the background for and events of the trial, and condemned the Bolsheviks for planning the murder of their revolutionary brethren.42

  Those who had supported the Russian revolutionaries in their long march to power balked at the idea of killing of fellow radicals. Denunciations rang out in the U.S. and Europe, with socialist groups from more than a dozen countries making public protests. Former head of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky volunteered to exchange himself for the defendants. H. G. Wells, who had previously supported the Bolsheviks in principle, now joined a declaration to the Soviet government calling on it to “abandon, in the name of humanity and universal reconciliation, what will otherwise be regarded by mankind as an act of vengeance.” Albert Einstein, then in Germany, also protested the verdict.

  Back in Berlin, Rul, too, continued to report on the trial. The day the verdict was announced, thousands marched in the streets of Prague. The suspended sentence was called nothing but “a slow torturous death.” Rul reported that the Russian defense attorneys for the twelve had also been convicted by the tribunal and sent to concentration camps.43

  The Socialist Revolutionaries stayed hidden from view, with no announcement as to their location. Hundreds more intellectuals were arrested, exiled, or sentenced. Days later, a wire story explained that, given the recent escapes from the concentration camps at the port city of Archangel, some of the convicted intellectuals and Socialist Revolutionaries would be shipped north of the Russian mainland to Arctic islands more likely to hold them securely. The prisoners, it was reported across Europe, would be exiled to Nova Zembla, a place so desolate and inhospitable that even the Tsar had never sent prisoners there.

  The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the humiliating defeat of the White Army together ended the notion that Bolshevik rule might collapse at any moment—and with it the fantasy that Russian democracy was just around the corner. Three months later, on December 30, 1922, the Bolsheviks convened the All-Union Congress of Soviets at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Delegates from the Russian, Ukrainian, Transcaucasian, and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics came together to create a revolutionary state and sign the treaty marking the official formation of the Soviet Union.

  Vladimir Nabokov’s bitter Berlin spring gave way to a fall and winter that redeemed nothing. The year Nabokov lost his father was the year he lost his country.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Aftermath

  1

  V. D. Nabokov’s murder devastated his family’s world. After just three weeks in which to mourn, Nabokov returned to Cambridge to finish his degree. Sergei stayed in Berlin during his final term to care for their bereft mother, going back to Cambridge only for exams.1

  In his anguish, Nabokov immediately sought solace in words. For the pages of Rul, he crafted “Easter,” a poem commemorating the loss of his father. Its narrator, immersed in grief, sees new life emerging everywhere in spring. Death—so incongruous in the natural world during a season of birth—cannot be denied. But if spring’s beauty and rebirth is not just “bedazzling lies,” he writes, perhaps it carries
some promise of resurrection in nature and in the very poem the author is writing, where love and memory bring the dead to life.2

  “Easter” sings with hope, but in the real world, Nabokov was staggered by the loss of his father. During his last weeks in England, Vladimir wrote in despair to his mother saying, “At times it’s all so oppressive I could go out of my mind—but I have to hide. There are things and feelings no one will ever find out.”3

  By the middle of 1922, Vladimir Nabokov had returned to Berlin a young man with a university degree living in a city he would come to loathe, the oldest son of a widow with little and diminishing prospects of regaining his home or wealth. At the moment of his entry into adulthood, his future still floated in the ether. His mother was one of thousands of educated aristocrats thrown back on whatever could be conjured from thin air. Yet she was still responsible for three of her children; that summer Nabokov’s sister Olga was nineteen, Elena was sixteen, and Kirill turned eleven.

  Grieving for his father and not yet knowing how the family would manage, Nabokov picked an unsettled time to propose to his current girlfriend, seventeen-year-old Svetlana Siewert. The girl’s family was not opposed to the engagement but was worried enough about the charismatic Vladimir to make the marriage conditional on the acquisition of a steady job. While there may have been some whiff of propriety behind the demand, the Siewerts were not alone in their concerns. Russian girls in emigration who supported their parents and husbands had become a stereotype among exiles, furthering the popular judgment offered by one observer that “if (Russian) men, on the average, had been as good as the women, Bolshevism would never have succeeded.”4

  Newspapers in Europe and America were filled with tales of down-at-heel Russian aristocrats. At a New York City hotel, a count who had taken the post of head waiter was struck by a patron after he accidentally spilled wine on a customer. The count calmly removed his jacket and laid it over a chair with a striking delicacy before bloodying the customer, who required the assistance of several policemen in fighting off his opponent. After witnessing such elegance in responding to the insult as a matter of honor, the other patrons took up a collection to pay his fine and send him to Paris, where he hoped to find more suitable work.5

  Countless just-so stories proliferated from China to New York. An actress who had lost her own servants and theater in Russia was dancing in a Broadway café and down to one meal a day. Princesses were seen working in Riga as typists. Some of the well-born, like Nabokov’s family, had escaped with at least a few of their treasures. Many others, believing they would return in short order, had not. Their abandoned necklaces and tiaras stoked the fever for hidden jewels that raged in Russia during the first years of Bolshevik rule.6

  The riches-to-rags stories of Russia’s ruined aristocracy thrilled reporters, who did not have so far to fall and could appreciate the humbling of the mighty. But the vague Schadenfreude of the humorous stories was offset by other accounts of the refugees’ plight. Headlines such as “Dying Refugees Crawl into Brest-Litovsk” had also become commonplace.7 Scattered to London, Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Harbin, Stockholm, Berlin, and beyond, many were now in their third or fourth year of exile and simply had no money left and no way of earning any.

  By this time, the shattered remnants of the White Army were holed up in a barracks in Constantinople, dependent on the Red Cross for insubstantial daily rations of tea, soup, and sometimes bread. A leaky loft housed tubercular patients, including row after row of families in stagnant quarters divided only by hanging rugs and blankets. More than one outsider suggested that the White Russians were a dead class in flight from a dead society, imagining their resurrection and return while the rest of the world understood that they were doomed to exile and starvation. And if they did not have the means for survival, one reporter noted, they at least had mastered the “unusually difficult art of dying with a slow grace.”8

  Small wonder that Svetlana’s parents were keeping an eye on the ability of their daughter’s fiancé to find a job. And whether Nabokov felt desire to win his girl’s hand, distaste at appearing the indolent aristocrat, or pressure to provide for his family, when the time came to go to work, Vladimir Vladimirovich complied.

  Joining his brother Sergei at positions arranged for them at a German bank, he showed up for his first day of work in a sweater. Reinforcing the stereotype of the shiftless Russian aristocrat, he managed to hold the job for three hours. Sergei, attire unknown, stayed the course for a week.9

  Nabokov did not care for Germany’s Teutonic face or commercial character. But in 1922 it was a mercifully cheap place for a writer without employment, or for one who had assembled just enough freelance tutoring and coaching to hold a day job at bay. Sessions teaching children and adults everything from English to boxing allowed Nabokov to get by.

  What Nabokov did do enthusiastically was write, and years of prior effort came to fruition all at once. Beginning late in 1922, he saw four books published under his Sirin pseudonym in as many months, including a Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland.10 Following on the tentative start he had made during his Cambridge years, he also began to write short fiction in earnest, turning out fifteen stories in 1923 and 1924.

  “Russian Spoken Here,” one of the first, was written not long after the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries. The son of a White Russian émigré in Berlin punches out a Soviet visitor in the middle of his father’s tobacco shop. They determine from the contents of his pockets that the visitor is with the GPU, the successors to the Cheka secret police who had imprisoned the father years before. Father and son hold a sham trial in which the defendant is given the nominal last word. The two debate what sentence to impose—and whether to execute the man for the sins of all the secret police. They reject the death penalty and prepare a cell for their prisoner, whom they hide from the world. The kidnapped man is supplied with food, books, and daily walks, but is informed that he will be kept in a locked bathroom as a permanent hostage until the Bolsheviks fall from power. When they entrust their secret to the narrator of the story, they explain that if the father dies before the end of the Bolshevik era, the son will inherit the captive. This prisoner, the shopkeeper explains, has become a family jewel.

  If the least sophisticated kind of storytelling deals in wish fulfillment, the young Nabokov laid bare a fantasy, using fiction to wield power over the GPU from a thousand miles away. A son with fast fists and the father he loves—a father who, like V. D. Nabokov, was once captured by the Bolsheviks but survived—collaborate on redemptive justice, providing a service to their homeland. Six months later, they remain happy and decidedly more humane than their Soviet counterparts. No complications ensue; no moral dilemmas exist. In the last line, the father wonders how long they will hold their prisoner. The question would outlive its author.

  Far from being able to feed a hidden GPU officer himself, Nabokov could not even support his mother. Dubious of his prospects, Svetlana’s parents ended the engagement. The sudden separation from his fiancee released a torrent of grief-stricken poetry but did not long keep Nabokov from other women. Before leaving for a summer job picking cherries and peaches in the orchards of southern France, Nabokov managed romances with at least two women, both Jewish, and met a third at a costume ball.11 This last prospect, an elegant Russian with fair hair wearing a wolf’s-head mask, quoted his poetry back to him but didn’t reveal her face, even as he followed her out of the ballroom.

  Her name, he would discover, was Véra. And in France, just weeks later, he would write a poem, speculating on whether she might be the “awaited one.” Learning her last name, he realized that he already knew her father, Evsei Slonim, whom he had called on as a potential publisher. A law-school graduate, Slonim had lost permission to practice law in Russia after the occupation had been closed to Jews. He had moved on to forestry, and found great success as a businessman. But having surrendered his land with his country, he was now in Berlin trying to build a career yet again. Véra was t
he second of his three multilingual daughters. She often sat in the office that Vladimir had visited, yet somehow they had never run into each other.12

  Véra was on Nabokov’s mind that summer, but thoughts of her did not keep him from mailing an aching missive to Svetlana. And it did not in the least dam up the continuing stream of poetry, fiction, and now plays, which he drafted in the room on the farm where he stayed up at night to write. One drama, The Pole, fictionalized the final hours of delirium and death faced by Captain Robert Scott’s 1910 polar expedition.13 Another script deviated from reality even further in telling of a determined executioner going after his escaped prey years after the French Revolution.

  On his return to Germany that fall, Nabokov also dipped his pen into a universe more familiar to his fellow Russians—one populated with angels and Biblical themes. To that universe belongs Agasfer, his retelling of the story of the Wandering Jew.

  The story was well known to any religious or literate European of the day. In the Christian legend, a Jewish cobbler chided Jesus on his way to the cross. Because of his cruelty, he was condemned to travel the earth learning repentance and love until Christ’s return. Pushkin, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Hans Christian Andersen, among a host of others, had already done their own versions of the tale before Nabokov’s birth. Even before their efforts, the story had become perhaps the most common way for Christians to explore the global predicament of the Jewish people—the idea being that they had sinned against God by being responsible for the death of Christ, were guilty of rejecting him, or both. As a result, the entire race was said to be doomed to suffer and roam the face of the earth.14