Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  8

  Moving from a pension into the Berlin apartment of Véra’s cousin in 1932, Nabokov plumbed a very different emigration in his next novel. Drafted in less than three months, Despair would deliver yet another madman for a central character, this one as lethal as the chess master Luzhin had been harmless. This time, however, Nabokov would turn the story over to his delusional narrator and let him portray that madness from the inside.58

  Despair is recounted by Hermann, a chocolatier living in Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s. On a trip to Prague, Hermann meets a tramp named Felix and is taken with their mirror resemblance. Over time, Hermann develops the idea of faking his own death by killing Felix. Dressing Felix as himself, Hermann believes he can murder his double and disappear to start a new life, his secret safe forever. He imagines his execution as a work of art, and hatches a convoluted plan that he seems to pull off. But after he commits murder, Hermann realizes that he has left a crucial piece of evidence behind—and, more disastrous for him, no one else seems to see any resemblance between him and Felix. Hermann flees to France, but is quickly identified as the killer.

  A tale from a madman with a twist that redefines the story—the same narrative arc was nearly a prerequisite in German films of the 1920s. Nabokov also overtly nods to, and mocks, Dostoyevksy’s fascination with doubles. But unlike Dostoyevksy’s books, there was no remorse for the crime and no apparent lesson to draw from it. Some reviewers—Jean-Paul Sartre among them—would later find the novel second-rate.59

  But no one pursued the history Nabokov had scattered throughout Despair. Dates, places, and facts dropped at odd intervals can be gathered to reveal what happened to the narrator before the beginning of the novel—before he envisioned that murder might allow him to start over. Hermann, we learn, had a German father and Russian mother, which made him German by law. As a teenager, he had begun to study in Russia at St. Petersburg University. When the Great War broke out in 1914, he was interned as a German subject and sent to a concentration camp in the southern reaches of Russia.

  He ended up living outside the city of Astrakhan, where reading was the only thing that helped him survive: two books every three days or so, a thousand eighteen books in all, across more than four years. Later, during the action of the novel—far from Russia and on his way to murder his imaginary double—Hermann has delusions that he is still in that camp, watching a man in an embroidered skullcap and a barefoot peasant girl outside his window, as dust scatters in the wind.60

  Concentration camps in the real world had been a global phenomenon during the First World War, but the plight of those interned near Astrakhan had been particularly hard. Civilians there were held in bitter conditions without money, and they could not find paying work or get food at all. By 1915, news from Russia relayed that not only the prisoners’ comfort but also their lives were at stake. They were starving to death.61

  The fact that Hermann’s confinement in Astrakhan stretches through the middle of 1919 reveals just as much. Russia had left the war in March of the prior year, but like the fictional Hermann, many real-world internees were trapped by the Civil War and could not escape. In the spring of 1919, a month before the Nabokovs fled Russia, Astrakhan fell into the hands of Bolshevik forces. Secret police units were sent en masse to the region to sow terror and force compliance. The people killed there were mostly starving Socialist Revolutionaries; they had been striking to restore reduced bread rations. Some were shot in the streets, while others were loaded with the bourgeoisie onto barges floated out into the Volga River. Like the dead of the Yalta pier who had haunted Nabokov the year before, their hands and feet were bound; some had stones tied to their feet. Across three days, dead or alive, resigned or pleading, thousands of people were sent to their own mute eternity at the bottom of the river.62

  Knowing that civilians were interned in starvation conditions for years by the Tsar and then liberated by the Bolsheviks amid mass murder lends a different frame to Hermann’s faith in Communism and his willingness to kill. Nabokov’s first truly loathsome narrator, a murderer without even the recklessness of passion, on examination turns out to have spent nearly five years in a concentration camp.63 He is undeniably a villain, but to condemn him without acknowledging the devastating events that he lived through is to miss half the story.

  Reports of millions held in prison and labor camps inside the Soviet Union had spread worldwide by 1931. And yet Nabokov chose not to write about the Soviet camps, but to look back in history and make use of a camp founded under the Tsar before the Revolution. Perhaps he wanted to thumb his nose at Russian émigré readers, many of whom were already romanticizing the bygone days of Empire.64 Perhaps he was not quite ready to tackle more recent history. In either case, he was just getting started.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Descent

  1

  By the time Nabokov slipped a camp from the Great War into Despair, the Soviet penal system had mushroomed into a network of rehabilitative perversity, an economic engine of modernization with brutal methods and unrealizable goals. Corrective labor camps had been implemented nationwide, spreading across Russia’s vastness from the Finnish border eastward almost to Alaska. Using prisoners to harvest lumber and cultivate land had been a tradition dating back centuries under the Tsars, and even to the Roman era. But when it came to strategic use of prison labor, Stalin’s Five-Year Plans surpassed the Tsar’s greatest ambitions.

  The first major work project using the labor of camp prisoners to build Soviet infrastructure was the construction of a canal linking the White and Baltic Seas. From 1931 to 1933, for twenty months, political prisoners were brought in—many from Solovki. They were put to work in the swamps and marshes of the Russian northwest with only crude tools—axes, saws, hammers, and improvised wheelbarrows jokingly referred to as “Fords.”1

  An estimated 25,000 prisoners died building the White Sea Canal in just the first winter of the project, under conditions of disease and torture that recreated the experience at Solovki. Corpses that season were so ubiquitous that some were never carted away from where they had frozen to death, and their bones still lay in the open the following summer.2

  Those who had not actually visited the canal worksite found it easy to sing the praises of the enterprise. The New York Times’s Walter Duranty noted that the new Soviet effort was longer than the Panama and Suez Canals and likely to surpass both in importance to the shipping industry. After prison amnesties were awarded upon the timely completion of the project, Duranty announced in a frontpage story that “Soviet power can be merciful as well as merciless.” He was sure the U.S.S.R. had turned a corner, with police reforms in place and a bumper crop on the way.3

  Duranty, who had covered the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries a decade before, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his posts from Russia on the first Five-Year Plan. The award helped establish him as Russia’s interpreter in the West.4

  Not everyone, however, was so sanguine about Duranty’s reporting. The notion of the Soviet state as merciful seemed rich to journalists with other sources. Duranty’s regular stories about the bumper crops of 1933 also began to be contradicted by coverage of starvation in the south. Two things became apparent: not only was there a famine of historic proportions under way, but the catastrophe was due in large part to deliberate decisions by government officials. Millions were dying preventable deaths while Duranty labeled stories of famine “bunk” and responded viciously to journalists who questioned his reporting.5

  Duranty was not the only one touting progress in the Soviet state. Maxim Gorky, who had challenged Lenin over the fate of the Socialist Revolutionaries, took on a very different role with the White Sea Canal project, spearheading a tribute to it. He was joined in the effort by a number of writers and artists, some of whom had likewise returned to Russia. Aleksey Tolstoy, who had once traveled with V. D. Nabokov to England and was celebrated in the Nabokov family apartment in Berlin, joined with many other contemporary writers
in surveying the gem of Stalin’s progress. Viktor Shklovsky, who had captured the anguish of Russian exiles in Berlin’s Zoo district, made his own trip to the canal site, participating in the project in an attempt to secure the release of his brother. The group’s propaganda volume, The Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal, put its literary skills at the service of not just the state but a fabrication, one that did not acknowledge the price paid by the dead for a waterway so shoddy and shallow that it was incapable of serving most of the vessels that it had been designed to accommodate.6

  But Gorky’s service to the U.S.S.R. assured his place for the moment as its literary don. He had become the person to whom parents or grandparents wrote, submitting copies of their offspring’s literary efforts in the hopes that their children might grow up to become state-sanctioned authors. One such letter sent during the construction of the White Sea Canal was mailed by the aunt and uncle of the teenage Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had begun to write. The couple included their nephew’s travelogue of a trip with the Young Pioneers. A response from one of Gorky’s secretaries assured Solzhenitsyn’s relatives that the boy surely had what it took to be a Soviet author.7

  An eye toward writers who would carry the torch for Communism in the coming years led not just to the encouragement of rising Soviet youth but also to another round of attempts to bring prominent exiles home. And so in the first weeks of the White Sea Canal project, Soviet novelist Alexander Tarasov-Rodionov traveled to a Berlin bookstore frequented by Vladimir Nabokov and left a note for him.

  Nabokov met Tarasov-Rodionov at a café, where the latter expounded on life in modern Russia and invited Nabokov to return. Tarasov-Rodionov had built his reputation on a novel called Chocolate, a romantic treatment of martyrdom in a revolutionary dictatorship in which innocence is irrelevant. Nabokov broached the question of artistic freedom, a condition completely impossible for Tarasov-Rodionov to guarantee. At some point, the Soviet visitor grew alarmed, fearing he had been set up. Nabokov seems never to have considered the offer seriously. He let his characters dream helplessly of Russia, but he would not go to the Soviet Union.8

  2

  As if the spiral of history were winding its way around to repeat Nabokov’s last years in Russia, Germany edged closer and closer to civil war. Laws banning Nazi paramilitary groups passed and were repealed; street violence escalated. German Communists, losing political ground, took up their own extreme tactics. Strikes, beatings, and crossfire dominated news stories in and outside Germany, with one Anglo-German expatriate mourning his country’s emergence as a “sinister and dangerous character” that had eclipsed even Russia on the world stage.9

  Political compromise led to Hitler’s installation as Chancellor in January 1933 and Nazi control over German police forces. With the Reichstag fire in February and new elections in March, support for the Nazi party skyrocketed. Legislation passed later that month effectively sealed Hitler’s role as dictator.

  The Nazis had left little doubt what their priorities would be, and they did not wait to begin delivering on them. Two days before Hitler secured power over Germany, Heinrich Himmler announced in a press release the creation of a concentration camp at Dachau. The camp, it was explained, could accommodate five thousand people and was built to house “all Communists” as well as Social Democrats “who endanger state security.” Within months, Dachau had become a byword for brutality in Europe and America, and “an ogre” haunting stories and lullabies in Germany.10

  As the Nazis moved to establish other labor camps and prisons to hold their left-wing political opponents, newspaper accounts were quick to label some of the more distant sites as “‘Siberias’ of the German revolution.” Augsburg police arrested leading members of the Social Democratic Party, even as they admitted that there were no charges against them. Radicals were, officials explained, being taken into “preventive custody.”11

  With measures underway to eliminate armed political opposition, Nazis turned their attention toward other targets. Jews became subject to home invasions, forced resignations, random beatings, and assault without recourse. Dead bodies recovered on the outskirts of cities were listed by the police as unidentified suicides.12

  On her way home from work that May, Véra Nabokov witnessed just one of the bonfires held nationwide to burn works by Jewish and other “decadent” authors. Books destroyed that evening in Berlin included the writing of Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and the archives of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish advocate for decriminalizing homosexuality—to whose journals V. D. Nabokov had once contributed an article on the subject.13

  Closure of gay and lesbian social clubs and cultural organizations had already begun, and Hirschfeld, in America at the time of the inferno, never returned to Germany. At the bonfire, seeing the early signs of what was to come—the singing crowd, the celebratory dancing, and the delight in hatred—Véra moved on.14

  Nabokov, too, had an early introduction to life under the Nazis, finding the Sportpalast where he and George Hessen went to watch boxing matches decked out in Nazi banners and ringed with flags. It was the same arena in which Hitler would make his most important speeches, where the crowds would salute and shout “Heil!” for the movie cameras that captured history while Joseph Goebbels egged them on.

  After one fight night at the Sportpalast, Nabokov, Hessen (who was Jewish), and another friend rode the tram home next to a Nazi couple. Hessen would later claim that during the ride, Nabokov had toyed with the woman’s hat, intentionally rattling him and delighting in his anxiety. Nabokov denied being the responsible member of their party, but it is tempting to give credence to Hessen’s account. At a time when political radicals were already being sent to concentration camps, and the Red Cross was reporting on the brutality there, Hessen also remembered Nabokov prank-calling him to ask when their Communist cell would meet.15 Nabokov’s sense of humor included a dash of heartlessness, because the danger was real.

  Nazi anti-Semitism mirrored sentiment among the more reactionary Russian exiles. When Ivan Bunin received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, the first literary Nobel ever awarded to a Russian, a banquet was held in his honor that December by the Union of Russian Writers. Bunin was living in a run-down house in southern France at the time, but serendipitously was in Berlin for the festivities. Before the banquet, a Russian businessman and publisher announced that his staff had decided that Joseph Hessen and Nabokov—the “kike and the half-kike”—should not speak at the dinner.16 Nabokov and Hessen disregarded the threat and presented anyway.

  In an anti-Semitic dig only slightly more subtle, émigrés critical of Sirin’s writing suggested that all of the work Nabokov had been doing with the Jewish editors at Contemporary Annals had ruined him: “Educated among monkeys, he has become one himself.” And in the wake of his marriage to Véra, it was not just strangers who assigned a Jewish identity to Nabokov. Criticism among his acquaintances about becoming “completely Jewified” after his marriage to Véra had enough momentum to roll on for decades.17

  Nabokov, for his part, wore his philosemitism proudly. He made a point of entering Jewish-owned businesses with a friend the day after the Nazis first imposed a boycott on them, despite the fact that coming to the attention of the regime was a more and more unpleasant prospect.18

  Early on, Hitler made a pretense of asking his followers to refrain from street violence, but the half-hearted messages were at odds with official actions. The Nazis had based their campaign on a repudiation of fifteen years of German shame since the loss of the war, but as a New York Times editorial noted, one might more appropriately have to return to the Dark Ages—or Tsarist Russia—to find a comparable complicity in generating race hatred on the part of a government.19

  3

  As the rising tide of stories about prison, exile, forced labor, camps, and executions in both Russia and Germany found their way into newspapers, Nabokov contemplated his next novel. The Gift would become a book within a book: the fictional story of
a Russian émigré in Berlin who reveals his genius by writing a biography of another writer, revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky. A real-world hero of the political left for almost a century, Chernyshevsky had inspired generation after generation—not only Lenin but also the Socialist Revolutionaries who were publishing so much of Nabokov’s work in Paris.20

  Spending more than a year researching Chernyshevsky’s life, Nabokov planned to tuck a nonfiction biography into a single chapter at the heart of his novel. From Despair’s nod to real-world concentration camps during the Great War, Nabokov moved on to tackle one of the most legendary incarcerations in Russian history.

  The broad facts of Chernyshevsky’s life were already well-known to Nabokov’s readers. Arrested for political activity under Tsar Alexander II, Chernyshevsky had been sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1862, where he wrote What Is To Be Done?—a novel that served as the template for revolutionary idealism right up to the Revolution itself. After more than a year of imprisonment and a cruel mock execution, Chernyshevsky had spent the rest of his life working in mines on the Chinese border more than four thousand miles from St. Petersburg, then living in exile in Siberia and Astrakhan.

  Rather than simply relaying the familiar story, however, Nabokov collected details that had been forgotten by most readers. He traced the improbable path of the manuscript for Chernyshevsky’s famous novel, which was smuggled out of the Peter and Paul Fortress by a doctor but slid off a sleigh into the snow, only to be found by a clerk (who did not hear Nabokov’s small voice crying from the future to destroy it).21

  Nabokov extracted Chernyshevsky’s humanity from the legend—his freckles, his nearsightedness, his failed attempts to follow What Is To Be Done? with anything memorable—treating his subject not as a revolutionary juggernaut but as an accident of history, someone “half-crushed by years of penal servitude,” living out his last decades an old man “unable to reproach himself for a single carnal thought.” Parodying Chernyshevsky’s account of a fictional revolutionary who slept on a bed of nails to prepare for the rigors of arrest and imprisonment, Nabokov focused on the frailty and foibles of a real human being, arrested and imprisoned. Fighting despair and helplessness, Chernyshevsky writes to his wife about the wonderful stories he is making up. And his guards relay that at night, their prisoner “sometimes sings, sometimes dances, and sometimes weeps and sobs.”22