Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Nabokov had insulted his most reliable benefactor at a time when he had few sources of income. But he wrote saying he would not bend. If Chapter Four were refused, he would not allow any more of The Gift to be published in the pages of Contemporary Annals. He was grieved by the decision; he had admired the journal for its independence and the range of political viewpoints and literary styles it had published. But he would not change a word; he would not cut a line.14

  Two weeks passed without surrender on either side. Nabokov’s stance was doomed; he could not afford his pride. Whether Véra or his own better judgment made the point clear to him, Nabokov capitulated in the end, mailing off Chapter Two. He had no job, he had lost his mistress, and he had savaged his marriage; now his masterpiece would be hollowed out by censorship. The overdue chapter arrived at the last possible moment to meet the printer’s deadline.15

  3

  While Nabokov rehashed nineteenth-century Russian history with his editors, twentieth-century Russia continued to writhe under Stalin’s purges. Foreign correspondents reporting what they could uncover about the trials got a surprising amount of accurate information directly from Soviet publications, which trumpeted each new set of tribunals as victories for the people—up to and including the purge of the Press Bureau itself. One New York Times reporter summarized the groups of people who had been eliminated in the prior year, starting with heroes of the 1917 Revolution and continuing through the generals of the Red Army, the leaders of the NKVD secret police, top staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Communist party leaders around the country, officials of the Young Communist League, agricultural managers, and thousands of railway administrators. The purges had become so widespread, the story claimed, that officials had to settle for cooks and nurses when hunting for new saboteurs. A wire report from October 1937 announced that the head keeper at the Moscow Zoo had been tried for connections to spies, playing loud music at the park, and for feeding badgers sausage stuffed with strychnine.16

  Prosecutors argued that in a complicated effort to sabotage the Revolution, doctors had injected their patients with syphilis, and people on the street had conspired with foreign assassins, spies, and snipers. Those who had seemed to be Communists to the core had been secretly working for decades to destroy Soviet Russia from the inside.

  Outsiders became confused. Stalin’s purges were so extensive that their legitimacy broke the back of credulity on a daily basis. But why would the accused confess publicly, as they had at trials of some of the most senior Soviet officials? Left-wing sympathizers and those who looked to Russia as a potential ally against the growing German threat hoped fervently that some truth existed that could excuse the burgeoning atrocities.

  Émigrés had a clearer idea than most of what was happening in Moscow, in part because not everyone who was arrested was shot or sent to the camps for life. Accused foreigners were sometimes released without being sentenced or after serving short terms. As they managed to leave the U.S.S.R., proof of trumped-up charges leaked out, along with more details on interrogations, confessions, and executions.17

  While Nabokov remained outside political activism, several in his circle did not. Alexander Kerensky in Paris continued to issue statements as a spokesman for anti-Soviet Russians. Responding to growing concerns about Russian stability and German aggression in 1938, Kerensky hit the lecture circuit in America. Sporting a tall crew cut and a gold-rimmed monocle, he talked about the essential sameness of the Soviet and Nazi dictatorships. Kerensky suggested that the way of the future was not a choice between fascism and communism, but a rededication to democracy. He predicted (as he had for more than a decade) that democracy would return to Russia. Asked for a specific date, Kerensky demurred that he was no prophet but offered that the Russian people might taste freedom in as little as four months or as long as four years. That November, Kerensky would also come out forcefully against Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest and radio personality in the U.S. who blamed the Russian Revolution on a conspiracy of Jewish activists and bankers.18

  Inside Russia, people knew both more and less than exiled Russians abroad. Critical analysis of conspiracies fabricated by Stalin and his secret police did not find its way into the Soviet press. But signs of the scope—and the absurdity—of the purges were everywhere. An official given honors in the afternoon could be arrested the same night. Not wanting to affiliate too closely with those targeted by the purges, Soviet citizens learned not to ask about friends or colleagues who had disappeared.19

  In the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, even the nineteen-year-old Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his compatriots—ardent Soviets all—knew enough to see through the show trials, laying the blame for the problems of the state at the feet of Joseph Stalin. If only the Revolution had followed the trail blazed by Lenin, the argument went, Russia’s suffering would never have been so enormous. It was an argument that could be made only quietly, among trusted friends.20

  Like the true believers inside Russia at the close of the 1930s, leftists in Europe and America who had cheered Soviet progress or been sympathetic to the Communist Party found themselves confronted with evidence of a system gone haywire. Edmund Wilson’s Travels in Two Democracies, based on his Russian trip, appeared in 1936. Its critical details did not endear him to the Soviet Union—and they embarrassed Walter Duranty—but Party officials should, perhaps, have been grateful. Wilson included unflattering observations but censored his realization that the U.S.S.R. had become a totalitarian state.

  A polarity emerged which seemed to offer Europe only Communist Russia or Nazi Germany as a political model (although for a time, Mussolini had his own shadow contingent). In June 1936, France feinted left and elected Léon Blum, its first socialist, and first Jewish, president.

  Nabokov had moved to France in the midst of Blum’s one-year tenure, which included battles over bitterly contested workers’ rights. French conservatives played to racial and political anxieties with the slogan “Better Hitler Than Blum.” Though Blum had been born in Paris, one National Assembly member suggested he was not really a Frenchman but “a subtle Talmudist.” In turn, Trotsky, in Mexico after being expelled by Stalin, condemned Blum for not being revolutionary enough. Blum was, Trotsky claimed in a statement echoed by others, the Kerensky of France.21

  By the time Nabokov said a final good-bye to his mistress on the French Riviera, Léon Blum had resigned under economic and political pressure. Writers on the left throughout Europe had finally begun to openly denounce the Soviet system. André Gide detailed Soviet human-rights abuses in 1936 with Return from the U.S.S.R. A year after his statement that the Soviet Union represented the moral top of the world, Edmund Wilson, too, acknowledged that Soviet justice was a sham. He joined a group of writers with Communist sympathies who labeled Stalin a liar and a villain.22

  John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings may have rethought their sympathies after visiting the Soviet state, but never having offered a kind word about Soviet rule, Vladimir Nabokov had nothing to recant. In two decades of exile he had not given an inch on the question of Bolshevik legitimacy, and he had never subordinated his writing to any political party. He admired his father’s ideals; but unlike V. D. Nabokov, he stood apart from the fray.

  During his trip in England at the beginning of 1937, he had visited his alma mater to have lunch with an old Cambridge classmate, who in his student days had supported the Bolsheviks. Nabokov braced himself for the rationalization he knew would follow: the surgical attempt to separate Stalin from Lenin, the willingness to mourn the victims of the current purges, without any acknowledgment, as Nabokov would later put it, of “the groans coming from the Solovki forced labor camp or the Lubyanka dungeon” under Lenin.23

  If, arbitrarily, the world of writers were reduced to just two camps—those who dreamed of reinventing literature and those devoted to reforming society—Nabokov would not have hesitated to choose the former. But in The Gift, he managed to sidestep the choice. Pulling off a spectacular litera
ry invention, he also addressed the roots of Russian revolutionary history, pointing to the fruit of that legacy in the twentieth century—the very reason for the existence of the émigré community.

  He also immortalized the world of Berlin’s Russian émigrés, who had largely surrendered that city by the time the book was finished. The émigrés, however, were offended by his transparent portrait of their world, and by his lionization of the genius protagonist who seemed like a stand-in for Nabokov himself.

  Even under a pseudonym, the condemnation of Georgy Adamovich, a critic particularly loathed by Nabokov, was recognizable in The Gift. Charged with malicious insult of a fellow writer, Nabokov responded that in creating immortal literature, if it became necessary to “take along for the ride, free of charge” contemporaries who would otherwise be forgotten by history, those he had selected should not complain.24

  Nabokov was doing for, or to, his literary compatriots what his character Fyodor had done to Chernyshevsky. He had immortalized the human eccentricities and the tiny world of the Berlin exiles before their lives could be reduced to sentiment and hagiography. He would not wax nostalgic about them, but neither would he let them vanish into the past.

  4

  In September 1937, Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini paraded their alliance in front of a million people in Berlin. Two months later, an exhibit opened in Munich called “The Eternal Jew.” The title, the German name for the Wandering Jew legend, reinforced the idea of the dislocated, immortal Jew, morally and politically depraved, at the helm of a Bolshevik revolutionary tide threatening the world. The exhibit was developed in direct response to a New York exhibition called “The Eternal Road,” which recorded the persecution of Jews throughout history.25

  A book (also called “The Eternal Jew”) put out the same year by the Nazi Party showed images of ghetto Jews purportedly carrying out “criminal activities” amid their “bad smells and piles of filth,” while employing “the glittering world of perversion as a way of unnerving and enslaving” others. The Nazis had moved from mass propaganda projects extolling the virtues of Aryans to trying to create a groundswell of anti-Semitism solid enough to act on. The exhibition was condemned in newspapers in Europe and America, but was visited by hundreds of thousands of Germans before it began a tour of Germany and Austria.26

  Details of the exhibit and book’s Wandering Jew theme echoed Agasfer, Nabokov’s own literary treatment of the legend from fourteen years before, but drew the stereotype in a cruder fashion, characterizing the representative Jew as the harbinger of political instability and a sexually perverted merchant of corruption for more than a millennium. But where the twenty-three-year-old Nabokov had held out the possibility of redemption and love for his broken traveler, the Nazis framed the myth to argue that Jews were congenitally defective, beyond salvation, and a threat to the entire world.

  Whatever use the young Nabokov had made of cultural stereotypes floating in the ether in the 1920s, many things in his life had changed by the fall of 1937. In The Gift, Fyodor notes how Zina, at first irritatingly but then more persuasively, slowly shifted his callousness about anti-Semitism into a deep sensitivity, leading him to regret that he had previously ignored hateful comments from friends and associates.27 Nabokov had undergone a parallel transformation. He had been married to the proudly Jewish Véra Nabokov more than a decade, and he had a three-year-old son who had been sitting at the center of a public campaign of hate, becoming a potential target of an apparently bottomless reservoir of malice.

  By the end of 1937, the Nazis had begun to show that malice in new ways, expanding their network of concentration camps. The 4, 800-person facility at Dachau was demolished, and a larger complex erected in its place. In 1937, Buchenwald opened in the forested hills just northwest of Weimar. On the outskirts of Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen concentration camp was receiving prisoners too.28

  Nabokov, who had already referenced Russian camps and prisons in his stories, began to weave the German nightmare into his work. The specter of violence turns to actual bloodshed in “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” a short story written that summer. A Russian man who wins a vacation at a charity ball ends up traveling in the countryside with a group of Germans. Even though his companions turn out to be unpleasant and crude, he believes that the trip holds great promise for him, that something wondrous will be revealed. Though the Germans force him to sing along on their strident songs about tramping along fearlessly through the countryside, the Russian manages to see the world through his own eyes. He finds the transcendent landscape of the story’s title and a room with a view of it where he makes plans to stay.

  But the Germans refuse to leave him to his own future. They force him back onto the train, where they kick him with their heavy boots and then torture him with a corkscrew and a Soviet-inspired improvised whip. The man survives, but returns to the author of the story, unwilling or unable to continue the narrative. He begs to be released from humanity, and the author lets him go.

  Nabokov had written “Cloud, Castle, Lake” in 1937 while he was with Véra and Dmitri at Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. Despite the proximity to Germany—they were just a few miles away—the Nabokovs had been out of harm’s way. But how long the rest of Europe would remain safe had become a real question; German anti-Semitism and political upheaval had already crossed the border. Under pressure from Hitler, a March political coup in Vienna ushered in the German annexation of Austria and the creation of as many as 185,000 new refugees, including Sigmund Freud.

  Within days, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for a world conference on the question of Jewish refugees. That July, representatives of thirty-two nations met in Evian-les-Bains, France, to consider the fate of the Jews. Hitler cannily expressed hope that those who had been expressing “such deep sympathy for these criminals” might finally take action. He was, he said, more than happy to send Germany’s Jews to them, on luxury liners if need be.29

  Some observers, at least, understood how vital the meeting was. On July 4, Independence Day—two days before the Evian conference—New York Times correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick called on Americans and the American delegation to see clearly what was happening. “Can America live with itself,” she wrote, “if it lets Germany get away with this policy of extermination, allows the fanaticism of one man to triumph over reason, refuses to take up this gage of battle against barbarism?” She noted that willingness to fight a war was not even required to do the right thing in this case—only a commitment to provide shelter for persecuted people so obviously in need. It was, she argued, “a test of civilization.”30

  As the conference unfolded, civilization would fail that test. America, for a brief time, would fill her annual quota of bringing in more than 25,000 German Jews. But the State Department, which controlled the visa process and worried about incoming anarchists, would soon reduce immigration of German Jews to just a fraction of the number permitted under U.S. law.31

  At Evian, Swiss representative Heinrich Rothmund explained that Switzerland feared being swamped by Jewish refugees it did not want. Argentina’s representative spoke glowingly of the benefits that refugees bring—and then right after the conference, his country passed a new law limiting immigration and giving preference to “assimilable immigrants.” While countries tossed the hot potato of sheltering the refugees from one to another, a group of fleeing Austrian Jews languished in the middle of the Danube River, with both Czechoslovakia and Hungary refusing to admit them. Only the Dominican Republic proclaimed its shores open to the refugees.32

  As Germany pointed out with glee and Machiavellian accuracy, the rest of the world wanted to criticize Germany without having to address its own anxieties over Jewish refugees. Instead of improving the situation, the Evian Conference seemed to worsen it.33

  This willful hedging of the world’s democracies in the face of Third Reich cruelty had consequences in Germany and abroad. Shortly after the Nabokovs returned to Paris after a year in southern
France, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jew, shot German Embassy staffer Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Within hours, anti-Semitic lectures were advertised in public flyers on the streets of France, accompanying the already-active sticker campaign calling for the removal of Jews. Germany’s official news service immediately suggested that German Jews would be punished in retaliation.34

  German newspapers trumpeted news of the shooting the next morning, attributing it to a conspiracy of “International Jewry.” Vom Rath died two days later, and the country exploded in orchestrated rage against Jews. On November 9 and 10, during what would come to be called Kristallnacht, Germans and Austrians smashed windows, burned more than two hundred synagogues, and looted thousands of Jewish businesses. Nearly a hundred Jews were killed outright; thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps en masse.35

  Véra had escaped Germany with Dmitri in time, pulling out her cousin Anna Feigin in their wake. Sonia Slonim had left long ago for Paris. But Véra’s other sister, Lena Massalsky, remained in Germany.

  In an official capacity, or perhaps for old times’ sake, friends of Taboritski, V. D. Nabokov’s assassin, began sniffing around. Lena had converted to Catholicism, but it would have been no secret to Taboritski that she was Jewish. The Nabokovs wrote to friends, asking for assistance getting her out. But outside help was not forthcoming or had become impossible, and Lena stayed in Germany.36