A strange hybrid of ridicule and tenderness, The Gift represented another Nabokov story in which a character who has taken arms up against no one is crushed by banishment and imprisonment. As the threat of the modern camps loomed larger in the world, Nabokov ventured farther back in history, exploring their roots and historical foundations.
4
Despite his immersion in the past, pressing matters demanded Nabokov’s attention in the present. A visit by Joseph Hessen to Prague that February revealed that Elena Nabokov was seriously ill.23 Nabokov agonized over what to do—it was not just his mother he had to consider. Evgenia Hofeld was in Prague as well, along with both his sisters, now married. Olga had a toddler son, Rostislav—the first grandchild of V. D. Nabokov.
More than a decade after Nabokov had promised to bring his mother to Berlin, he was further from that prospect than ever. If he and Véra left Germany, which they had begun to realize was inevitable, it would add even more distance. The prior summer, he had looked into teaching at a Swiss university, which would have solved several problems at once, but no offer was forthcoming.24
Yet—even with his mother’s illness, the intensifying Nazi nightmare, and the lack of money, of which there was sometimes more and sometimes less but never enough, the spring was a joyful one. If fate’s most generous gesture had been introducing Nabokov to Véra, it now offered a close runner-up. Into a world of hardship and multiplying hatreds came a gift: on May 10, 1934, in one of Berlin’s private clinics, a healthy son was born.25 Nabokov walked home from the maternity clinic at five A.M.down a street half in sunlight, half in shadow, past windowshop portraits of Hitler and Hindenburg framed with flowers, measuring his newfound love against all the mortal threats arrayed against it.
In a deception that may have owed as much to privation as to skill, Véra had concealed her pregnancy from start to finish, surprising friends so greatly with the news of the birth that the announcement may have been taken for a prank.26 The couple wrote their friends and family in Paris, London, and Prague with news of the birth of their son Dmitri.
For all the delight his parents took in his arrival, Dmitri’s timing was not propitious. Jews were being forced out of public life in Germany; a Russian Jew was doubly suspect. And as a Semitic foreigner with a tendency to speak her mind, Véra’s associations might not have helped. She had once served as a translator at the home of Albert Einstein, whose pacifism and statements against the Nazis led to the revocation of his citizenship and a raid on his home in search of a hidden cache of weapons—a cache the authorities were sorely disappointed not to find. Reich propaganda cast Véra’s former client as the reviled face of Semitism, with his abstract, difficult theories used as examples of the idiocies of “liberalistic” German university education.27
Even Hitler’s allies had reason to be nervous. During late June and early July 1934, potential rivals were rounded up during the Night of the Long Knives and arrested or executed. More than eighty people were killed in the summer purge.
Véra kept up with the German papers, but news of the executions—which sailed around the world—might actually have escaped Nabokov’s notice. In the midst of The Gift, he had been struck by inspiration. Shifting gears to draft an entire novel in a two-week frenzy, he wrote through three days of arrests and assassinations that would seal Nazi power for more than a decade.
The result of that inspiration was Invitation to a Beheading, the story of Cincinnatus, sentenced to death for the crime of “gnostical turpitude” in a dislocated universe. Unfolding in the window between Cincinnatus’s sentencing and his execution, the book takes place in a fortress in which he is the first prisoner—a facility as changeable, incomplete, and improvised as a stage set. Cincinnatus’s individualism is set against the machinations of the prison staff, who conspire against him; his wife and family, from whom he feels alienated by his singular fate; and a strangely promiscuous little girl with a red and blue ball.
In a Kafkaesque punishment for corrupt thinking (an antecedent to George Orwell’s thoughtcrime), Cincinnatus remains perpetually uncertain of when he will be executed. Wondering if he might find a way to avoid his fate, he is told by a fellow prisoner that “only in fairy tales do people escape from prison.”28
The prison has a circus atmosphere—the same prisoner flips onto his hands and performs a trick upside down. His identity will soon be inverted, too, for he is actually Cincinnatus’s future executioner. Cincinnatus spends his remaining days in a revolving, unstable unreality, but just prior to his beheading realizes that it is possible to step out of the story, that his mind has the power to free him. Just as he is executed, he climbs down from the scaffold amid the outraged cries of his jailers, whose theater he is disrupting, and the universe begins to unravel.
Invitation to a Beheading, like Despair and The Gift, marked Nabokov’s third novel in a row with a key character imprisoned not for his deeds but his thoughts, his words, or his identity. The imprisoned characters’ stories ranged from pure history to pure invention, but refracting the madness of the police state, Nabokov was in the throes of a new theme, and he would spend many more years devoted to it.
5
Berlin in the 1930s hardly required a dystopian fairy tale—the monstrous comedy of a police state unfolded daily. But by writing his own version, Nabokov could shape the story to his own ends, retaining some kind of control over his circumstances, even if it were only imaginary.
The money from Nabokov’s books and stories was still insufficient, and work for Véra had become more complicated. She had taken Americans on guided tours of the city. She had been employed at the French Embassy in Berlin for a time, and had done translation to pay medical debts from her father’s final illness. And, as always, she was typing and revising Nabokov’s work for him. In the meantime, the family had expanded, and parental obligations pressed at her from one side, while restrictions under the Nazis hemmed her in on the other.
The authorities were willing to overlook those restrictions for a time. Needing a stenographer, the Nazis invited her to take shorthand at an International wool congress held in Berlin, where she ended up transcribing the speeches of four ministers. After she made a point of explaining that she was Jewish, they claimed to be surprised she would think they cared.29
They did, of course, care deeply. Such work would become rarer, and Véra’s safety was less and less certain. The Nabokovs knew they would have to leave at some point—but where precisely they could go remained an unanswered question. Véra was wary of France, where, despite the experience of her sister Sonia, Russian emigrants faced challenges in getting identity papers and work permits. Where could they survive?
Nabokov headed to Brussels again. Doing three readings in quick succession, he saw his brother Kirill before heading on to France. In Paris he could no longer beg a room from his cousin Nicholas, who had already moved to America with his own wife and young son. Instead, he stayed again with Fondaminsky and ended up having dinner with Ivan Bunin, who both admired and disliked his literary usurper. Nabokov was resentful of having been collared for the meal, writing to his wife of the miserable evening he had.
Trying to bond over stereotypically Russian food, Bunin succeeded only in irritating Nabokov. The Nobel laureate waxed profane and wanted to discuss the end of history—which at that point surely must have seemed as if it had already come—but Nabokov refused to engage. As they left their table, Bunin said, “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation.”30
The night of February 8, Nabokov read again in Paris to enormous acclaim. Heading back to Brussels without a visa, he used a trick passed on by the Socialist Revolutionaries of Contemporary Annals—who had themselves made a number of furtive crossings—to switch trains underground and reenter Belgian territory on the sly.31
From there Nabokov made his way back to Berlin, whose Nuremberg Laws must have made Paris seem like a haven. Jews could not hold office or vote. Sex between Jews and Germanic “Aryans” was ille
gal. Jews were also forbidden from entering state hospitals, parks, libraries, and beaches. They could not be journalists or doctors. Jewish professors had been removed from University faculties.32
And in the background, always playing out or threatening to, were spasms of violence. Just weeks after Nabokov returned from France, they took on a more orchestrated feel. Hitler began to build up military forces in the Rhineland along the French border, and introduced a two-year draft. It became obvious that he was planning for war.
Censorship was so widespread, however, that it was difficult for those living in Europe and America to know exactly what was happening inside Germany. Terrifying anecdotes of killings and abuse emerged, but outside Germany many accounts were suspected of being hyperbole or written off as propaganda by pro-German Westerners.
6
Faced with dismal (if accurate) publicity, the German government began to foster a gentler international image, suggesting to reporters that the nascent concentration-camp system was being shuttered, and that policies against Jews had been eased. Nazi rhetoric cooled, and signs barring Jews from restaurants and other public places were removed.
It was, however, only a charade, put on with targeted coyness in the run up to the 1936 Summer Olympics. During the Weimar era, Germany had won the bid to host both the Winter and Summer Games. But with reports of political opponents in concentration camps and the increasing persecution of Jews appearing again and again in Western newspapers, Hitler feared Germany would lose its right to host, and thus a chance to show the triumphant face of the Third Reich.
A movement had already arisen urging the United States to boycott the Olympics in response to recent events. But Avery Brundage, the head of the United States National Olympic Committee, argued in favor of participation, publicly announcing his opinion that there should be a wall between sports and politics. Privately to friends, he blamed the boycott movement on Jewish special interest groups.33
In the end, Hitler not only hosted both Winter and Summer Olympics, but saw to it that they were commemorated by his favorite cinematographers. Leni Riefenstahl, who had created propaganda to rival Eisenstein’s with her 1934 movie Triumph of the Will, was invited to film the Summer games, using dramatic visuals that glorified the Nazi aesthetic and found endless beauty in physical power.
There was no question of whose overall agenda Riefenstahl would serve or which cause had her allegiance. But it was another matter entirely when it came to the director chosen for the Winter Olympics earlier in the year: Carl Junghans, Sonia Slonim’s old boyfriend.
Despite his Communist roots, filmmaker Carl Junghans had made his way from the Soviet Union back to Berlin. On his return to Germany, Junghans had denounced the Soviets and, a little over a year later, started making propaganda for the Nazis. He directed the Germans’ 1936 Winter Olympics documentary and, later that year, assisted Riefenstahl in filming the Summer Olympics.34
When the Olympics ended in mid-August, any German pretense at easing up on Reich opponents disappeared. Over the summer the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Death’s Head division of the SS, had quietly gained official designation as concentration-camp guards and administrators. By November, news stories began appearing in the U.S. and Europe describing the creation of labor camps in northwestern Germany. Six thousand prisoners were sent to reclaim 250,000 acres of marshland in land “deadly to every living being.” The Nazis claimed that the laborers were not political prisoners but common criminals; newspapers of the time noted that recent legislation had made it impossible to tell the difference. As on Russia’s White Sea Canal, the work done in the swampland by the prisoners was to be undertaken not using current engineering techniques, but through medieval methods, with spades used to dig drainage ditches and canals. Similar work, it was explained, was being done in camps across Germany.35
The inmates were housed in spare barracks without bars on the windows. Their food rations were said to be higher than in standard prisons, because of the workload, and prisoners interviewed in the camps (presumably in front of guards) told reporters that they were happier in labor camps than they would be in prisons.
The first articles on these camps portray a veneer of austere wholesomeness undergirded by vague unease. Escapes were rare, reporters were told, because of the deadly swamp conditions that lay between prisoners and the Dutch border. The barbed-wire fences surrounding the camps, “dotted with watchtowers that are equipped with searchlights and machine-guns,” no doubt also deterred escape. Visually, the labor camps reminded one reporter distinctly of the camps from the Great War.36
By 1936, the Germans had three decades of their own camp history to draw on, from the murderous forced-labor camps of Southwest Africa to internment camps from the war—not to mention the more recent experiments at Dachau and Oranienburg. Nonetheless, for a little while longer Germany would remain a relative beginner in the machinery of atrocity.37
7
By the early 1930s, in contrast to the increasing tone of dread in coverage of Nazi Germany, news stories on the Soviet Union ran curiously hot and cold. Horror stories continued to leak out, but tales of Russian economic miracles and a resolute march into the future still abounded in the popular press.
Nabokov had no faith in the new society that was being built on the ruins of the Russian Empire. He had already parodied Soviet dreams of progress in his writing, from a commissar teaching sociology to Leningrad schoolchildren in The Defense, to the new world Hermann imagines in Despair, in which one worker falls dead at his machine only to be replaced by his double.
But in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, faith in capitalism had declined precipitously, and many Americans were hoping that Communism might offer an alternative.38 Stories crept westward of the new industrial centers springing up throughout Russia—mining at Vorkuta in the Arctic, oil extraction on Nova Zembla, and gold at Magadan in the Kolyma region. Vladimir Nabokov might refuse to set foot in the Soviet Union, but bevies of American intellectuals, students, and reporters were willing to make their way east in his stead, eager to see the Soviet experiment in progress.
During the summer of 1935, American literary critic Edmund Wilson went on a Guggenheim fellowship to Russia, a place he had dreamed might hold answers he had not seen in his reporting on the unraveling of capitalism in the United States. Walter Duranty was known for welcoming visitors from the West to his Moscow rooms, and after special efforts to get his visa, including an appeal for Gorky’s assistance, Wilson visited Duranty and then stayed at his apartment while the latter went on vacation.39
Some who traveled to Moscow with less of an agenda ended up profoundly disappointed. After his own visit to the U.S.S.R., seeing the sadness and surveillance of a police state, writer E. E. Cummings lost his sympathy for the fledgling state.40 But Wilson, like Duranty, seemed to note the hardships, anxiety, and even despondency of the population without being ready to shift his essential outlook as a consequence. Wilson, who understood the failures of American capitalism, still seemed to find aspects of Communist society enthralling.
Ignorant of the extent of the suffering around him, Wilson attended a Red Army banquet and theater performances. In Leningrad—formerly St. Petersburg—he passed, unknowing, near Nabokov’s old home, visiting St. Isaac’s Cathedral and then the Peter and Paul Fortress.41
Wilson understood on some level that conditions were repressive; when he met with critic D. S. Mirsky, he confided that the country felt like a prison. In other places, however, Wilson’s Soviet diary caught the spirit of Duranty himself. He wrote of finding himself sitting in Moscow at the “moral top of the world where the light never really goes out.” On his return to the U.S., Wilson played down the authoritarian feel of the Soviet Union and puffed up the romance of the historic moment.42
Wilson should have known better. By the time of his visit, new repression had already begun to bare its teeth. Stalin lieutenant Sergei Kirov had been assassinated on December
1, 1934, and his death had served as the pretext to launch a new wave of trials and executions. While Kirov’s body lay in state—in the same room where the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries had taken place—sixty-six people had been rounded up, tried by troika tribunals resurrected from a dozen years before, and immediately executed.
From the first days of the purges in Russia, émigrés drew parallels between Stalin’s handiwork and the Night of the Long Knives in Germany. Even before Wilson had left the U.S. on his way to visit Russia, novelist John Dos Passos had suggested to him that the Soviet response was out of control. Wilson had countered that such brutality was a legacy inherited from the Imperial era and might fade over time.43
But in the days and weeks that followed, additional trials and dozens more executions were reported. Those who had calmly accepted the admiring characterizations of Stalin along with Duranty’s genial aphorism that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” began to wonder how far the Russian leader would go to eliminate dissent. Official Soviet accounts framed those executed as operatives in a massive conspiracy, saying the “chief instigator and ringleader of this gang of assassins and spies was Judas Trotsky.” But interviewed in New York at the Soviet Consulate in 1934, a Soviet official reassured reporters that no new reign of terror would begin, because “there is no one left to purge.”44
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 14
