While the degree to which the story was used to justify religious violence had waxed and waned, after more than seven centuries as a religious parable and two centuries as a literary trope, the theme had not lost its popularity. It had even moved to the stage in 1906. But the definitive script was Ernest Temple Thurston’s The Wandering Jew, which was produced in theaters across England—and even on Broadway, where it starred Tyrone Power—during Nabokov’s Cambridge years.15
By 1923, Thurston’s play had already been adapted into a feature film. In it, the man who becomes the Wandering Jew does, in fact, curse Christ on the way to the cross, believing Jesus has filled his dying wife’s head with a fantasy of a cure. He forbids her to follow Christ’s injunction and spits on the Messiah. After Christ condemns him to wander the earth, the man’s beloved dies.
More than a thousand years later, he becomes obsessed with another woman, whom he pursues across the globe in order to possess her, against her will if necessary. During his centuries on earth, he proceeds to take on different identities (a knight, a merchant of jewels). Witnessing the hatred and trauma of the world, he finally reforms and recognizes his sin, becoming holier than the people who, century after century, continue to condemn him—including, at last, the priests of the Inquisition.
The year The Wandering Jew debuted as a movie, Nabokov sat down with a collaborator to work on his own version. Agasfer opens as an extended monologue meant to accompany a “staged symphony.” Echoing the template of Thurston’s play, Nabokov gave the Wandering Jew many key roles across history. In Nabokov’s case, however, the identities were sometimes real historical figures: in the prologue, the Wandering Jew reveals that he exploded in Judas, who betrayed Christ, and later appeared again as the sexual swashbuckler Lord Byron, accused of incest and homosexuality. Several other eras are mentioned, from Greece and Medici-era Florence to the Inquisition. The Jew’s most recent incarnation was Jean-Paul Marat, a hero of the French Revolution who was also much beloved by the Soviets. In Nabokov’s verses, the Wandering Jew declares that he is learning how to love and that one day his love will fill the heavens, but in the world as it is, he sells the sky for sin.16
The identities Nabokov chose for Agasfer were rooted in betrayal, murder, sexual perversion, and anarchy. Though clearly an attempt at something more expansive, Nabokov’s portrayal of the Wandering Jew as a sick but remorseful merchant of corruption fell short, particularly when trotted out as the frame for a love story.
His approach incorporated a softer version of stereotypes about Jews that were part of a rising trend of political thought in Germany, where extremists were already drawing similar conclusions, minus Nabokov’s romanticism. Yet perhaps even vaguely human stereotypes were becoming passé by then; Agasfer was performed only once.
This early effort for the stage disappeared with little trace, leaving only the prologue for posterity, but it would influence Nabokov’s writing in profound ways for much of his life. A half-century later he would denounce his fledgling attempt at the story, declaring the work horrible and swearing that if he found an existing copy, he would destroy it himself.17
2
Vladimir’s romance with the twenty-one-year-old Véra Slonim blossomed. By the time Nabokov returned to Berlin that August, the pair had seen their work (his inventions and her translations) published simultaneously in Rul, and had already begun to know each other through their literary output.18
What more did Nabokov have to learn? Véra Evseevna Slonim had been born in 1902 in St. Petersburg. Growing up in much the same environment as Nabokov, she had her share of governesses, as well as math lessons and language instruction that led her to speak not only Russian, but also German, French, and English. Her father had given all three of his daughters—Lena, Véra, and Sonia—an education befitting an aristocratic family; but as a Jewish man facing vast occupational and residential restrictions under Nicholas II, he had leaped many more hurdles than the Nabokovs in order to do so.
When the time had come to flee Russia after the Revolution, the three Slonim girls had traveled separately from their father, who left ahead of them to avoid arrest. Lena was twenty years old, Véra was seventeen, and Sonia just ten. Heading south by train, they had ridden through territory where Ukrainian troops were rampaging and pogroms were legion. The train had been filled with Ukrainian separatists, who were likewise fleeing the Bolsheviks but had little affection for Jews. Sleeping on the floor that night, Véra had been awakened by a confrontation between another passenger—a Jew—and a separatist threatening to throw him from the train. Véra had spoken in the passenger’s defense, and the Ukrainian backed down. But more than simply backing down, he and his friends had become enthusiastic escorts for the Slonim girls, warning them not to get off in Kiev, where battle was imminent, delivering a message to their father, and keeping them safe in a region rife with anti-Semitism.19
Véra was a regal blue-eyed blonde who looked every inch the indomitable spirit she was. If her childhood had been similar to Nabokov’s, her response to Russia’s political turmoil had been more proactive. At the start of the Revolution, she had considered herself a socialist. While Nabokov fantasized about revenge, Véra had apparently plotted hers. Classes with a marksman in Berlin had left her a crack shot, and it was known that she carried a pistol in her purse. She told more than one person of her involvement in an anti-Bolshevik assassination plot in the early 1920s—one said to have targeted Trotsky, or perhaps the Soviet ambassador.20
Véra, like her father, was proud of her Jewish identity. Fiercely intelligent, she turned out to be more than capable of quoting Sirin’s poetry to him from memory. Before long, she began transcribing his work and quickly became his staunchest defender.
Their romance had all the makings of a happy ending; but that fall, hyperinflation savaged Germany, hitting the already-destitute émigré community especially hard. The Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi coup put down the same season, did little to promote German stability. Sliding from being the least expensive refugee hub to a financial catastrophe, Berlin’s cost of living suddenly broke the backs of its many publishing houses and cast bankrupt Russians to the wind, scattering them once more.
By Christmas, Nabokov’s mother could no longer survive in Germany. Elena Nabokov left with her younger daughter for Czechoslovakia, where a government pension was offered to her and other prominent refugees. Olga followed, and, soon after, Nabokov escorted Evgenia Hofeld, a maid, and his brother Kirill as they relocated to Prague.21
Nabokov intended to return alone to Berlin once everyone was settled. Véra was not the only attraction that made Germany seem more congenial for the moment; the Prague apartment was cold, squalid, and bug-infested. Back in Berlin, Nabokov wrote to his mother soon after her move, describing how in two months, or “as soon as possible I shall have you come here.”22
Material circumstances were hard enough, but Elena Nabokov was less battered by them than by the loss of her husband, playing down her financial deprivation as a comfort. In Russia, she explained, she sometimes had woken up anxious about which among her fifty hats to choose on any given day, while the benefit of having only one reduced the choice to simply whether to wear it or not.23
However bad things were in Germany or Prague, it was understood that those still in Russia had it worse. Typhus had become so widespread that letters leaving the country were thought to have infected postal workers in Estonia. All Russian mail was stopped and left untouched by German postal employees, who demanded disinfection measures. Berlin newspapers carried stories of mass starvation, of wolves, dogs, and cats all eaten, of towns where two thirds of the residents were dead, of people buried naked because their clothes were desperately needed by the living, of others buried in shallow graves and dug up by dogs, of dogs and wolves hunted by humans until there was nothing left to eat.24
While the remaining Nabokovs were not yet starving, they were also not together. Nabokov stayed in Berlin, and Sergei went to Paris, even farth
er from their mother and younger siblings in Czechoslovakia. Both brothers made ends meet by giving English and Russian lessons.25
Nabokov earned enough money to visit his mother that summer, but if she had any hope of being invited to return to Berlin with him, she was disappointed. What was likely the biggest announcement of that trip was of a very different order: he was engaged to Véra. Elena still dreamed of visiting her husband’s grave, but by this point, Nabokov supporting even himself had become a dubious proposition. After another visit to Prague, he found his coat had been confiscated by his landlady, who suspected he might run out on his rent tab.26
Vowing to make more money to bring his mother back, Nabokov imagined taking on more students, or even doing manual labor breaking rocks.27 But the possibility of a traditional job, such as his brief stint in banking, had disappeared with the rest of the German economy. Even if one might have been found, a conventional career, which started out as an already improbable fate for Vladimir Nabokov, had become almost unimaginable.
And still he wrote. In 1924 he began a novel with the title Happiness. The cost of living continued to rise, forcing him to load up on clients. Offering boxing, tennis, French, and English several days a week, he careered across the city from student to student, staying up late at night to write. He could not bring his mother to Berlin, but he managed to earn enough to send money to her each month.
Nabokov failed to finish Happiness, which was aborted for the time being. But he produced short stories at a steady clip, and thought about how they might be turned into movies. He collaborated on comedy sketches for the Bluebird Theater; he worked as an extra in Berlin film productions. And in the town hall of Berlin on April 15, 1925, he married the twenty-three-year-old Véra Slonim.28
Marriage provided a more auspicious start to his efforts as a novelist. Yet as he began to work on the first novel he would actually complete, Mary (Mashenka), it was Nabokov’s childhood love Lyussya who gave him a road back to Russia through his writing. With Mary, he folded his past and his present into a love song for his native land.
In a very recognizable grim Berlin filled with Russian refugees, the protagonist, Ganin, is a former White Army soldier injured in the Crimea and now living in Germany. The sad minor characters of the Russian emigration surround him—among them a dying poet trying desperately to get to Paris, a young woman surviving by working in a German office, and two giggling male ballet dancers.
Ganin discovers that his childhood love, Mary, whom he has not seen in years, is married to his neighbor in the same Berlin pension. She has been trapped in the Soviet Union but will soon come to join her husband in Germany. Ganin is caught up in his recollections of their time together, their meeting in a gazebo on the family estate, and the jewel-colored panes of glass there. He recalls the sorrow at the end of summer when they parted, and their frustrating reunion in St. Petersburg, with no place to meet alone.
The night before Mary’s return, Ganin encourages her husband to get thoroughly drunk and leaves the man passed out with an alarm clock set for the wrong hour. He abandons his old apartment for good, planning to meet Mary at the train station himself.
Nabokov had marshaled more than enough coincidences to put a bow on his tale. But just before meeting Mary, his young protagonist takes flight, realizing that he has his love and his memory of her in his heart, and these memories suffice and transcend all the shortcomings of reality. Implicit in the book’s end is that Mary, who has lived the drudgery—and horror—of daily life under the Bolsheviks, will stand waiting at the train station utterly alone, met by no one. The narrator, who cherishes the memory of her, imagines that he needs from her only what he already possesses, and apparently owes her nothing. She no longer exists for him except as a figment of his past, where she remains vibrant and untouchable.
Like Ganin, Nabokov would come to be defined by his departures. Having already left Russia to the Bolsheviks and his mother in Prague, his writing now acknowledged the punishing gap between longing and reality. Nabokov was still working to seduce readers with the tenderness or nostalgia that had characterized his early poetry, but he had begun to resist the temptations of sentiment. If Mary showed Nabokov looking to the East wondering if everything that had been lost might be recovered, he was suggesting it could happen, but only through art and memory—never in life.
Nabokov described his main character as “not a very likeable person” but was delighted he had been able to slip five love letters Lyussya had written to him into the book.29 Folding the details of his life into the story in such a way that no one but Lyussya and himself (and perhaps Véra) would recognize them, he wrote a letter sharing the secret with his mother.
His self-absorbed protagonist had served as the fulcrum for magic. By tucking Lyussya’s words in with his own inventions, Nabokov did in fact immortalize a sliver of that time, their love, and their lost country forever.
3
In his second published novel, King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov crafted a more overtly unpleasant group of characters. The callow, self-absorbed Franz arrives center stage in Berlin and proceeds to have an affair with his aunt and take part in a plot to kill his uncle. The novel marks Nabokov’s first use of principally German characters and contains only a shadow of the tenderness shown in Mary—offering a faint, oblique indictment of Germany that would become more pronounced over time.
The uncle, a flawed, failed dreamer, offers financial backing to an inventor who is crafting more and more realistic mobile mannequins. Discovering how to rattle his audience, Nabokov, like the inventor, was learning to make readers engage with increasingly more lifelike creatures, some of them corrupt and repellent.
Outside of fiction, however, Nabokov could summon more gallant human responses. In 1927 the wife of a Romanian violinist committed suicide, seeking relief from her husband’s abuse. The violinist evaded German legal penalties, but news of his violence spread. Hearing the story, Nabokov and a friend went to a restaurant to find the musician, and drew straws for the privilege of taking the first swing at him. Nabokov won, and chaos ensued. At some point after the whole orchestra joined in, Nabokov, his co-conspirator, and the violinist were briefly taken to the police station.30 Nabokov had accommodated himself to creating fictional cads, but in dealing with real-life cruelty he retained his father’s longing for justice.
He remained bitterly homesick for Russia. “The University Poem,” written between his two first novels, is a long account by a Russian exile attending college in England. It is a litany of absences and departures: a spring that is not like the Russian spring, the smell of a bird cherry tree that becomes painful to recall; a girl ripe for spinsterhood who now expects to be abandoned each year by departing students; the Russian narrator who tells himself that return to his homeland will one day be possible, but who may not himself believe it.
A more literal return was, of course, already available to Nabokov. The U.S.S.R. regularly tried to lure cultural figures back, leaning heavily on the exiles’ nostalgia for their homeland and the fact that the collapse of the Soviet government hoped for by so many had failed to transpire. Major émigrés had already heeded the call. The “fairly talented” (in Nabokov’s words) poet Boris Pasternak, novelist Aleksey Tolstoy (a distant relation of Leo Tolstoy), and Andrei Bely (whose novel Petersburg Nabokov believed one of the best books of the twentieth century) had all gone home, or at least to live in closer proximity to its ghost.31 Maxim Gorky, who had been living in Europe during the 1920s, made a triumphant return in 1928 to his homeland in time for a massive public celebration of his sixtieth birthday. He would return for good in 1933.
But a literal return to the Soviet Union was not what Nabokov wanted. His fiction—dark enough to begin with—took on a bleaker edge. Nineteen twenty-nine found him creating his first novel with a protagonist tortured by madness. The Defense tells the story of Luzhin, a Russian chess grandmaster who succumbs to despair, eventually becoming trapped inside a game that is both chess and li
fe, a game he cannot finish. The narrative mimics events surrounding the death of a chess master whom Nabokov had known who, like Luzhin, had abandoned a championship match, later jumping to his death from a bathroom window in Berlin.32
A few chapters into the book, Luzhin’s father, a writer of books for boys, plans to create a melodramatic tale of his son’s rise to celebrity as a prodigy. But contemplating his structure, he agonizes over the degree to which the war and the Revolution hover in the background of his story. Like Nabokov, the young Luzhin had not been directly involved in Russia’s upheaval. Unlike Nabokov, he had been turned over to a Svengali who managed his career in Europe. Still, the intrusion of history on the father’s tale—his own memories of starvation, arrest, and exile; the story he does not want to tell—frustrates his attempt to clear the way for a simple, sentimental narrative.
Nabokov already knew by this point that such a story, one stripped of history, was not the kind of art he wanted to make. His first two novels had reflected the Russian past and 1920s Berlin in a traditional way—history and geography provide a backdrop which informs the plots and helps to sketch the characters. But by The Defense, Nabokov had begun to think strategically about the intersection of world events and the creation of art, and a more innovative relationship between the two.
The protagonist of Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, was a wounded soldier, but with The Defense, Nabokov began to move his characters onto the periphery of history’s epic violence, showing how even bystander status cannot protect them from madness or keep them from being hobbled by the past. As a child, Luzhin fears being overtaken by the glass-rattling explosions of the cannon at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. By 1917, the threat has become real, as he stares at windows in fear that shooting will break out.
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 11
