Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  New candidates were found. In the months and years that followed, the killings continued, swelling the ranks of the dead. Stalin tried to consolidate his authority, resurrecting the national affection for the Tsars and forming a cult around himself that borrowed from their legacies, using the burgeoning Great Purge as an indiscriminate cudgel. In 1937 and 1938, the two deadliest years, more than 670,000 people would be executed and as many imprisoned, all sacrificed to the nightmare travesty of a workers’ paradise.

  The dead are not nameless. Maxim Gorky’s life ended in 1936 under mysterious circumstances. Secret police official Gleb Bokii, whose name graced the steamer that carried so many thousands to their doom on Solovki, was shot in November 1937 in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Alexander Tarasov-Rodionov, the Soviet novelist who met with Nabokov in Berlin to entice him back to Russia, was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp soon after. Osip Mandelstam, who had preceded Nabokov as a student at Tenishev School, mocked Stalin in a biting poem that led to his end in a transit camp in 1938. Arrested after one too many visits from Westerners, Russian historian D. S. Mirsky—alternately ridiculed and lionized by Nabokov—would die in the Gulag in 1939.

  And fate finally also caught up with those Socialist Revolutionaries whose executions had been halted in 1922—and whose show trial under Lenin provided the precedent for the tribunals of the current purges. Abram Gotz, the key defendant in that trial, was shot in 1937.

  Gotz outlived some of those responsible for his conviction. Lev Kamenev, to whom credit must be given for the notion of making the Socialist Revolutionaries permanent hostages, was executed in 1936. Judge Georgy Pyatakov, chief of the tribunal that sentenced them, was convicted of somehow flying to Oslo to confer with Trotsky and the Nazis; he was put to death in January 1937. Nikolai Bukharin, who had led the mob rioting against the Socialist Revolutionaries, was executed the following March. And that July, Nikolai Krylenko, the lead prosecutor so many years before, was given twenty minutes for his own trial before being found guilty and shot on the spot.45

  8

  Soon after the end of the 1936 Summer Olympics, Germany signed a pact with Italy, then just a few weeks later allied itself with Japan. International opinion shifted from talking about whether there would be war to predicting when it would start.

  The Nabokovs had debated leaving for France since at least 1930, with the reasons for staying or going pivoting on the very thing that Svetlana Siewert’s family had found unsettling about the young Vladimir: the uncertainty of a dependable income. In Germany, Véra had been a magnet for employment, with her skills in technical translation and her several languages. Nabokov had become Dmitri’s de facto babysitter during Véra’s work hours, delighting in the young son whom both parents loved to indulge.

  When Dmitri was less than a year old, Véra had managed to land a position with a manufacturing firm, taking care of their foreign correspondence. Within months, however, the Nazis had banned both the Jewish owners and Jewish employees from the firm, and the coveted paycheck vanished. Her work permit soon disappeared, too, the staggering loss offset only by a chance windfall from the estate settlement of one of Nabokov’s German ancestors.46

  They had been hesitant to leave reliable money for the fantasy dream of Paris, where, as émigrés, they would be denied legal employment. But by the end of 1936, their situation was dire. The Nazis placed more stringent restrictions on Jews and some foreigners. Sergei Taboritski, one of the assassins of Nabokov’s father, was named Hitler’s undersecretary of émigré affairs, with the expectation that he would ferret out Russian Jews. That September, the department began a census of all resident Russians.47 Life in Berlin had turned from unpleasant and bitter to ominous.

  Nabokov headed west for another series of literary readings and meetings, in an attempt to find a writing or teaching position that would allow his family to leave Germany forever. Perhaps Paris, which he had twice wowed that decade, would offer something they could not imagine. Or perhaps England or America would open some hidden door.

  On January 18, 1937, Nabokov boarded a train to Belgium with everything still unsettled. Véra and Dmitri stayed behind with her cousin Anna Feigin in Berlin. Exchanging a torrent of letters with her husband, Véra evolved a vague plan to reunite that spring—perhaps in Belgium, or France, or England, or at his mother’s lodgings in Prague. Whatever escape route they could conjure, it was nearly time to outrun history again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Purgatory

  1

  From London and Paris, Nabokov wrote to Véra in Nazi Germany every day.He found that he had achieved a measure of fame abroad, but it was not yet clear if his celebrity was of an occupationally useful kind. At his readings, Nabokov drew crowds filled with familiar faces: Ivan Bunin, critic Mark Aldanov, and Nabokov’s Parisian champion Vladislav Khodasevich, all of whom acknowledged Sirin’s brilliance in one way or another.1

  Other faces were less familiar but not altogether unknown. A mother-daughter pair he had had tea with the year before reappeared, this time with a dinner invitation for him and Fondaminsky. Nabokov had clearly understood during the earlier trip that the mother was playing matchmaker, but knowing did not keep him from joining them.

  The daughter, Irina Guadanini, was a former St. Petersburg resident, six years younger than Nabokov and, in the words of Aldanov, a heartbreaker. As with so many White Russian émigrés, Irina belonged to a topsy-turvy social class—one that could contain her dual identities as a poodle trimmer and aspiring poet. Her family, like Nabokov’s, had been part of the educated set that had given its children over to Kadet ideals but found death or exile its only post-Revolutionary rewards.

  Irina was a divorcée with a reputation. Like Véra, she was beautiful and sophisticated and could speak multiple languages. Like Véra, she adored Sirin’s poetry. Unlike Véra, she was not at risk of arrest or assault. She was not trapped in a country gone mad. She had no young son whose fate hung on his father’s ability to transform words into money. Nabokov stopped in to see Irina three times in the week after his reading. They went to movies, they went to cafés, they became lovers.2

  From Berlin, Véra wrote reminding Nabokov that he had promised his mother they would bring Dmitri to Prague; more than three years after his birth, Elena Nabokov had yet to lay eyes on her newest grandson. But Nabokov refused to head east. He pleaded with Véra to meet him in southern France. He did not want, he wrote, to be trapped in Czechoslovakia. Véra balked at his alternate plans, becoming contrary at every turn.

  She mentioned the rumors she had heard about Irina. He mocked the comments as gossip. He gave Véra a second name that had also been circulated with his, as if widening the rumor pool would render it more shallow and inaccurate. He threatened to waste money—money he reminded her they did not have—on a trip to Berlin to see her. It is not clear who was paying for the movies and meals with Irina.3

  Nabokov could not resist describing the happiness of his marriage, even to his lover. But he did not change course. And that February, he developed a painful case of psoriasis, a skin condition that typically includes itching, dandruff, and scaly skin.4 It requires a certain confidence to conduct an illicit romance with any of those symptoms, but along with his disease and his bleak prospects, his infatuation for Irina tormented him for months. He was failing his wife, he was failing his son. At a private reading in Fondaminsky’s apartment, Irina sat next to him as he spoke about the deteriorating conditions in Germany. Perhaps it came as a relief to be adored by someone whose tragedy resided more safely in the past, who was not trapped in history’s maw—someone to whom he owed nothing.

  He now inhabited the split worlds that he had begun to write about in his fiction. On one level, his work was celebrated everywhere he went, and he continued his glad-handing socialization, trying to ingratiate himself in conversation at literary soirées and on the reading circuit. Substituting at the last minute for another novelist, he ended up addressing a tiny crowd th
at included former prime minister of the Russian Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky, a Hungarian soccer team, and James Joyce.5

  On another plane, a harsher reality lurked. Moving on to England, he gave Russian readings to raise money for the trip. Despite the help of friends, he could find no university position in England. His lack of involvement in émigré politics and religious observance alienated members of the anti-Bolshevik and Orthodox communities.6 Though his talent could not be denied, it could make enemies as easily as it won friends, and his caustic wit did not always endear him to others.

  While his travels did not deliver economic salvation, they were not entirely in vain. He helped to finalize preparations for the English-language version of Despair. He visited Cambridge and saw his old tutor. Readings were more popular than he had expected, and, as a result, he went back to France with some extra money.

  But the trip did not unfold seamlessly. To compound the anxieties of looming war, Véra and Dmitri’s predicament in Germany, a rampaging skin disease, and his half-hidden life with a mistress, Nabokov also had passport difficulties. He was not a citizen of the Soviet Union; he was not a citizen of Germany. He was technically stateless. ÉmigréS had only disreputable green Nansen refugee passports to vouch for their former status as Russian citizens. These passports had been issued to Russian exiles in the wake of the Revolution, as well as to the hundreds of thousands of displaced Armenians who faced slaughter or forced relocation by the Turkish government after 1915. Most Nansens had to be renewed annually, and though they did not automatically confer the right to work or anything beyond temporary residency, refugees could be deported without them.

  So Nabokov found himself in Paris with an expired Nansen, whose renewal might require his return to Germany, which he wanted to avoid at all costs. A French official who had lost Nabokov’s application for new documentation joked about throwing the old passport out the window. The Nabokov who had meted out justice with his fists in a café brawl years earlier could also manage his rage. Being stateless not only meant losing a homeland; his status put him at the mercy of every petty bureaucrat.

  2

  Nabokov was indiscreet about his involvement with Irina, and the émigré community in Paris knew well enough what he was up to. In April, Véra had a direct answer to the suspicions her husband had tried to dismiss—a four-page letter anonymously outlining Guadanini’s entire relationship with Nabokov. Seeing her husband’s affair laid out on paper and knowing that he had lied to her week after week could not have made life in Berlin less miserable. But she had to focus on the immediate task of escaping from Germany with Dmitri.

  In the midst of her preparations for departure, Véra received a visit from John Shakhovskoy, Nicholas Nabokov’s brother-in-law. He noted that the Nabokovs seemed to be leaving the country. When she mentioned the dangers confronting Jews as inspiration for relocation, she would later recall that Shakhovskoy, an Orthodox priest, suggested that perhaps they should stay and suffer.7

  Such calls to embrace suffering would find traction elsewhere in Nabokov’s circle, but the Véra Nabokov who had flirted with political assassination years before was no longer inclined to be a martyr to history, or to surrender her son to its crueler whims. With violence on the rise in Berlin and her husband’s adultery in France, she stopped delaying. She wrote Nabokov, saying that she would go to Paris immediately. So as not to burden Ilya Fondaminsky, she and Dmitri could stay with her sister Sonia. It was as good as decided.

  Véra could not have expected such an arrangement to be pleasant. While Sonia had been in Paris for several years and would know the ropes better than either Nabokov, neither Véra nor Vladimir adored her sister. Sonia had an overdeveloped sense of her own worth and could be just as stubborn as Véra.

  It was a bitter truth that none of the Slonim girls’ marriage choices looked particularly wise at that moment. Nabokov had no job, no prospects, and was in another country with another woman. Lena’s husband, a Russian prince, had made the newspapers even before their marriage with a history of jail time for writing bad checks. She would soon leave him. Sonia’s 1932 marriage to Max Berlstein, an Austrian Jew, had fallen apart after just eight months and was about to end in divorce. In the meantime, she was living in a hotel and seemed to have plenty of companions.8 Other than the fact that Sonia had not renounced her Jewish identity—Lena had converted to Catholicism, much to Véra’s dismay—it was hard to imagine an aspect of her sister’s life that Véra Nabokov might actually endorse. The plan to stay with Sonia seems to indicate Véra’s desperation in the moment.

  But at the prospect of his wife and his mistress in the same city, Nabokov balked. They continued to write letters about where they would meet in the short run and live in the long run, their exchanges becoming tense. Véra asked again about Irina, wondering why he did not turn his biting sarcasm on her, as he did everyone else in his daily reportage from Paris.

  Véra finally bolted Germany with Dmitri, leaving for Prague the first week of May. Nabokov obtained the necessary papers and made his way to meet her two weeks later, avoiding Germany by traveling through Switzerland and Austria. The reunion was complicated. Véra was unhappy and afflicted with rheumatism. Nabokov’s mother was in decline. He kept writing Irina, and gave her a clandestine postal address at which to write him back.

  After a little more than a month in Czechoslovakia, the family left for France. Nabokov’s mother stayed behind with Evgenia Hofeld, his sisters Elena and Olga, their husbands, and the six-year-old Rostislav. When Nabokov left Prague this time, it did not need to be said that his mother would never go back to Berlin.

  The three Nabokovs made their way to Paris, where Vladimir lodged again with Fondaminsky, and Véra took Dmitri to stay with a friend of the family. Early in July they headed south to Cannes, where the affair exploded. Nabokov confessed everything and promised to stop writing Irina. Véra later claimed that she told her husband if he were in love with Irina, he should leave. They appear to have argued bitterly over his infidelity.9 Despite his promise, Nabokov continued to write to his lover, who took a train to Cannes and ran up to him on the beach.

  The agony of the situation no doubt felt singular enough, though the storyline was repeating elsewhere. Across the Atlantic, Nabokov’s cousin, the composer Nicholas Nabokov, played out a similar drama: the charming artist with a lost country and a wandering eye, his wife, his son, and his mistress. It was a plot so trite, it would have needed some ghastly addition (murder, madness, a winged creature) to be a plausible storyline in Nabokov’s literary universe. But Nicholas’s wife Nathalie—who, like Véra, knew well enough what her husband had been up to—had enough that summer. She filed for divorce, leaving Nicholas to the attentions of the students for whom he had traded his marriage. Nicholas had a nervous breakdown, committing himself to a psychiatric hospital.10 The mental illness that was on its way to being a dominant feature of Nabokov’s fiction had found its way into his family.

  Unwilling to leave Véra, unable to forget Irina, Vladimir Nabokov also struggled to stay sane. Working through the worst point in his life after his father’s murder—this crisis, unlike the prior one, completely of his own making—he ended his affair and returned to writing The Gift.11

  The first installment of the novel, in which a young Russian poet searches for his place in 1920s Berlin, had already appeared in Fondaminsky’s magazine. In subsequent chapters, the writer Fyodor contemplates writing a biography of his lost father, who disappeared in Siberia in 1919. But he finds himself daunted by the monumental story of his father’s life.

  After several false starts, he finally meets Zina, a beautiful half-Jewish émigré who admires his work. Realizing that what he wants to write is the life story of Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Fyodor throws himself into an innovative biography—the biography that Nabokov had researched and composed years earlier.

  Having taken on the saint of Russia’s revolutionary movement, Fyodor finds himself castigated
when the biography comes out. In Nabokov’s world—our world—Chernyshevsky had faced mock execution, followed by hard labor and exile. But in the fictional world of The Gift, Chernyshevsky had been subjected not to mock execution but the real thing. Fyodor has added more than two decades onto his cramped and miserable life.

  What Fyodor invents as fiction in the novel is historical truth in our world. He imagines what Nabokov knows: the rest of Chernyshevsky’s life has much to offer readers who are willing to see him as a human being subjected to political oppression rather than an idealized political symbol.

  Through Fyodor’s experiences, Nabokov recreated the small world of the emigration and its critics. And in a gesture of charity to the Russian émigré community, despite the widespread condemnation of Fyodor in the novel, his talent does not go unnoticed. But even those who denounce Fyodor can no longer touch him—he has Zina, and he has delivered on his gift.

  Chapter Two of The Gift was nearly due by the time the Nabokovs got to Cannes that July, but Nabokov was not finished revising it. He improvised, and instead sent Chapter Four—the biography of Chernyshevsky—north to Paris.12

  A colleague of Fondaminsky’s received the chapter and refused to publish the novel out of sequence. First he demanded Chapter Two. Then he read the chapter Nabokov had sent and responded in horror. Not only would they not run the chapters out of order, the magazine would not run the biography of Chernyshevsky at all.13

  What was Nabokov thinking? For the editors of Contemporary Annals, Chernyshevsky was a martyr whose life had been stolen, a legend who had given everything for his ideals and his country. He had fought for the emancipation of the serfs, helped promote many of the most gifted writers in Russian history, and faced arrest, mock execution, labor camps, and exile for his ideals. Nabokov, it would have been glaringly apparent to the editors, had been born with great talent and privilege and, unlike Chernyshevsky, in the face of the brutality afflicting his homeland, had risked nothing for his country, refusing to take a political stand or even to engage in any literary movement beyond socializing in writers’ groups that located themselves farther and farther from the tempestuous politics of the day. While the facts from his life of Chernyshevsky were scrupulously accurate, Nabokov’s attention to the revolutionary’s failings, the author’s unforgiving checklist of a hero’s pettiness and pathetic aspects, smacked of mockery.