Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  In the meantime, destitution and war still had to be managed. After pleas written to America the year before, Nabokov had received 2, 500 francs from composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and twenty dollars from the U.S. Russian Literary Fund.53 By the time war had broken out, he was receiving a thousand francs a month from a friend. He returned to old habits, advertising for students interested in learning English. He collected three pupils, including a businessman and a young harpist named Maria Marinel.

  It was not enough. Despite the Nabokovs’ efforts to shield him from their poverty, the five-year-old Dmitri felt the need to explain to Marinel that his family was living “a very hard life.”54

  Still Nabokov wrote on and on, embarking that fall on a story spun out from an aside in The Gift, in which an unsavory stepfather dreams up a novel about an older man marrying a widow to get at her daughter. The new story’s disturbing nature tilted toward the internal thoughts of the man, evoking the agony of his pedophilia.

  Nabokov’s unnamed main character is a central European jeweler, a traveler in France who fantasizes about young girls. After he marries the invalid mother of the roller-skating object of his obsession, the mother dies. Now a widower, he maneuvers the child into his clutches and promises to take her to the seashore. On the way there, he fails at first to get a room in which to act on his desires, but then claims a vacancy at a second hotel. Because of his suspicious name, the desk clerk calls the police on him, believing he is a wanted man. The police arrive and question him until he manages to convince them he is not the person they are looking for.

  Nabokov takes the protagonist, and the reader, right up to the brink of fulfilling his fantasy that night at the hotel. But the stepfather’s plan goes awry as the girl wakes up. He flees the room, seeking death, and his desires earn authorial retribution in the form of a large truck barreling down a nighttime street, killing him.

  “The Enchanter” carried many of the seeds of what would later become Lolita. The novella was read aloud to Fondaminsky and three other friends behind thick curtains in a dim room with the lamp wrapped with the regulation wartime sugarloaf paper to guard against German air raids.55 Rejected by Contemporary Annals, Nabokov offered the story to at least one other editor before surrendering to the disruptions in publishing brought on by the war.

  The start of the war also effectively closed the coffin on the émigré community. The linked webs that had stretched eastward into China and westward through Europe, maintained by the émigré presses in Berlin and Paris, slowly strained and then gave way.

  During its last days, Nabokov played an elaborate practical joke on Georgy Adamovich, the critic who had so consistently dismissed his verse. Writing poems under the name Vasily Shishkov, Nabokov managed to get them published in a leading journal. They were praised by Adamovich—who had no idea Nabokov had written them—as heralding the arrival of “a great poet.”56

  A Nabokov short story titled “Vasily Shishkov” appeared months later in the same publication, describing a retiring, gifted poet of the same name who meets with the narrator twice before vanishing. The pseudonymous poems combined with the story—which was signed by Nabokov—in such a way to make it apparent that the whole thing had been a ruse engineered to prove that Adamovich was unfairly prejudiced against Nabokov’s work.

  With characteristic irreverence, Nabokov was delighted with his trap, which had succeeded perfectly in revealing the critic’s bias against him. But Mark Aldanov chided Nabokov for his gamesmanship, pointing out that while he had been busy playing pranks, a war was underway.57

  “Vasily Shishkov” seems to represent Nabokov at his most mean-spirited and superficial. A tremendous amount of work and literary space were given over just to show someone up, and the story’s lone trick works only in combination with the pseudonymous poems.

  But Aldanov was wrong—even in apparent trifles, Nabokov was attending to the war. Each time the narrator ostensibly holds meetings with his invented poet in the foreground of the story, a group of German Jewish refugees appears in the background, discussing the challenges of French identity papers and expressing anxiety over problems with their passports. Behind the main story, Nabokov had folded in the imminent peril of the refugee Jews.58

  In the story, the imaginary Shishkov describes his literary technique for the narrator: a deliberate avoidance of boring approaches to “big, burning questions” addressed by everyone in favor of attention to tiny moments unnoticed by most—trivia that carries “embryos of the most obvious monsters.”59 The line was almost a literary mission statement from Nabokov, an explanation of what he had been doing in recent years with the historical concerns, camps, and prisons that haunted his work. But any subtle message in the story was overshadowed by its high-concept prank.

  Even before his shaming of Adamovich, Nabokov had intended to say good-bye to the Russian émigré community, with its literary Socialist Revolutionaries, scheming monarchists, and spy networks. Bunin, displaced by Nabokov, was now said to grow furious at the mention of his rival’s name, and there were others who would not regret his departure.60

  Whatever optimism had previously existed for the prospect of political change in the Soviet Union, there was no longer any anticipation among the exiles of a coming Russian democracy. They could not go home, and their shallow roots in Berlin and Paris would be exposed once more.

  With the audience for his Russian work cast to the wind again, Nabokov knew he had to try to reinvent himself in English, following the trail he started down with Sebastian Knight. But leaving Russian behind was another thing entirely. As soon as it became apparent that Stanford University would be willing to employ Mr. Nabokov for a summer course on Russian literature, he proceeded to keep writing furiously in his native tongue, as if to exorcise the impulse or as if waving a long good-bye. Along with “The Enchanter,” he launched himself into a new novel, Solus Rex, one more mystical than his other outings.

  Of the two surviving chapters which became short stories, the first is a monologue from a Russian émigré addressing his wife, who died pregnant with their child. The émigré wants an answer to the mystery of the universe and his wife’s fate. He seeks out a former acquaintance, a man who has become a kind of seer and claims to have solved the riddle of the universe. The mystic—who seems to have become part-madman, part-prophet—had a violent break from the rest of humanity just after hearing that his half-sister had died in a remote and awful country.

  By the second story, the émigré himself has gone insane and believes he is the ruler of a fantasy kingdom on the distant northern island of Ultima Thule. A neon sign flashes “Renault” outside his window, anchoring him to France, but he lives only inside the dark world of his imagination, a world filled with arrests, trials, plots, and false confessions. The émigré’s efforts to escape his reality just throw him back into a world steeped in the current events of a Russia he fled long ago. The horrors of the concentration camps, show trials, and Solovki—another bleak castle on another sad and distant northern island—hang over the story, as if Nabokov and the narrator could no more escape their lost homeland than the grieving widower can invent a life in which the things he loves are returned to him unbroken.

  That spring in Paris hinted at both hope and dread. Nabokov’s prior disappearing act had concluded with machine-gun fire chasing his boat. No longer a teenager shielded by his father, he was now responsible for a boy much younger and more vulnerable than he had been when he sailed away from Russia. How would they escape?

  A tense visit made by Véra to a prefecture revealed that their passports, submitted in the application for exit permits, were missing. A strategic 200-franc bribe spurred their rediscovery, but they turned up at another Ministry entirely. Despite her fears that they would be arrested for paying off an official, Véra sent Vladimir to pick up both passports and exit permits.61 The Nabokovs’ American visas were finally issued on April 23.

  Yet even with a visa, finding a means of departure remained problema
tic. Fares were prohibitive, and the Nabokovs had no money. But the memory of Nabokov’s father and his tireless work on behalf of Russian Jews lived on in the memory of Yakov Frumkin, the head of a Jewish aid association in New York. Frumkin managed to secure the Nabokovs three spaces on a ship scheduled to depart France in late May—and to slash the cost of the tickets. But even at half-fare, the $560 required was a kind of mythic treasure, one completely out of reach of a struggling refugee writer.

  More help was solicited from Jewish families, whose giving had been the anchor of so many Nabokov-related causes in the past. A final reading was organized. Other members of the émigré community chipped in until enough was found to cover the fare.62

  But as the Nabokovs prepared to go, the Germans began to advance in earnest, driving through the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium before invading France at Sedan. After a three-day battle, devastated Allied forces retreated, and the German army rolled all the way to the English Channel. French propaganda dismissed the German victories, encouraging civilians to stay put (“France has been invaded a hundred times and never beaten”), but tides of refugees streaming in from neighboring countries, and even northern France, triggered an exodus. The “phony war”—in which England and France were technically fighting Germany but not waging visible battles—suddenly became real.63

  Given German territorial gains, the Nabokovs’ original departure site of Le Havre had become unreliable. They were told to embark hundreds of miles southwest on the coast at St. Nazaire. Preparations that had stretched across months dwindled to a series of last-minute arrangements. Nabokov compiled his papers and butterfly collection, dropping them off at the apartment of Ilya Fondaminsky. He went to visit Kerensky, where he also saw Bunin and Zinaida Hippius, the poet who had told his father that Vladimir Nabokov would never, never be a writer. Sergei Nabokov, who was not in Paris at the time, had no idea his brother was already leaving, or that he would be gone before they had a chance to say good-bye.

  Just before departure, Dmitri came down with a blistering fever. It was not clear whether or not he could travel, or would be permitted to. After a visit with their doctor, the Nabokovs got sulfa tablets to treat Dmitri’s symptoms and boarded their train. By the time they finished the six-hour ride to the harbor in a sleeping car, he had recovered.

  The Champlain pulled away from the dock on May 19, 1940, leaving a continent behind. Two weeks later, bombs would fall on Paris. The following month, France would surrender and Luftwaffe planes flying over St. Nazaire would kill more than four thousand British soldiers in the midst of evacuating.

  But the Nabokovs managed to outrun the havoc of war. On the ship’s roster, Nabokov was listed as Russian, Véra as Hebrew, and Dmitri as Russian, distinctions that would have become relevant if they had missed their ship. But they did not miss their ship, and could revel for a moment in the possibilities of what the New World might bring. None of them had seen it before, though surely it would have more to offer than the mossy corner of his mother’s property in Russia that her family had once nicknamed America.

  What did he imagine? Nabokov could not, of course, know the specifics of his future. But in preparing for it, he left part of his work behind with Fondaminsky. Shipboard, he carried the story of a Central European refugee with a passion for young girls and a tale of a Russian émigré crushed by tragedy, along with a novel of two brothers and the distance between them that is fixed by death.

  By the time the passengers on the Champlain lost sight of Europe, the first building of the Auschwitz concentration-camp complex had opened a thousand miles away in Poland. Three weeks later, the first trainload of Polish and Jewish prisoners would arrive there. In fleeing the continent that had been his home for the first forty-one years of his life, Nabokov had pulled off another vanishing act just in time. But the past had a geography not so easily dismissed and, for the second time, Nabokov would carry with him the weight of an entire world dissolving into ghosts.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  America

  1

  Aboard the Champlain, the crew fired its guns at a whale, mistaking it for an enemy submarine, while Nabokov sailed more than three thousand miles across the Atlantic in a first-class cabin. The elegance of the trip contrasted sharply with the passengers’ desperation. Germany and Russia marched deeper into chaos; Paris wobbled at their departure. Arriving on May 26, the ship anchored off Quarantine for a day before sailing into New York Harbor.1

  The leading novelist of the Russian emigration met with little suspicion and no public acknowledgment, save for a note in New York’s Russian-language daily newspaper that “Vladimir Sirin” had come to America. The Nabokovs, along with most of their shipmates, filled out their declarations of intent to become permanent residents of the United States. The decision was likely not complicated for anyone present—the Jewish passengers’ home cities read like a map of brutality from the first decades of the century: St. Petersburg, Vienna, Lvov, Krakow, Berlin.2

  On the forms, Nabokov listed himself as an author and Véra as a housewife. Immigrants also had to answer a standard battery of questions about polygamous tendencies, physical defects, and mental health problems, and were required to assert repeatedly that they were not anarchists and had no intent to overthrow the government. The United States was not at war, but was very much worried about Communists and revolutionaries entering the country.3

  After they finished with immigration, the Nabokovs’ luggage still had to clear customs, but Véra could not find the key to their trunk. Waiting for a locksmith, Nabokov asked where to find a newspaper, and was given The New York Times by a porter. With the persuasion of an iron bar, the lock yielded to the locksmith, who promptly relocked it by mistake. When the trunk had finally been opened for good, customs officials remarked on the dead butterflies Nabokov had packed, and began to spar with the boxing gloves they found inside.4 Vladimir Nabokov was on his way to becoming an American.

  Friends and family, however, remained at the mercy of history. The Marinel sisters, who had helped their tutor leave France, were very much on the Nabokovs’ minds. Véra’s cousin Anna Feigin had not initially planned to leave, but she would soon be headed to Nice with her own thoughts of America. For the time being, Ivan Bunin, Ilya Fondaminsky, and Sergei Nabokov intended to remain in Europe. The Hessens were still there, too, though Mark Aldanov, to whom Nabokov owed his deliverance, was likely already rethinking the wisdom of staying in Paris. Some of them would find a way to escape.

  Back in Paris, Véra’s sister Sonia had stayed on with Carl Junghans, but the city held out less than a month after Vladimir and Véra’s departure. By the time German tanks clanked over the bridges of the Seine and down the silent Champs-Élysées on June 14, Carl and Sonia had left just ahead of the victors. They headed south, making their way to Casablanca, a temporary haven for many fleeing the German advance.5

  Other refugees would soon set sail under more distressing conditions. In the face of blistering military setbacks, Britain had become obsessed with the threat of invasion and worry over Nazi spies hiding on its territory. Enemy aliens had already been required to register when war had broken out. And just one week before Nabokov’s boat sailed from St. Nazaire—Churchill’s second full day as Prime Minister—the order was given to arrest all the refugees.6

  Weeks of dramatic debate followed. Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Angell denounced the arrests.7 The majority of enemy aliens were known to be harmless, he noted, and many had already been persecuted by the Nazis. But the invasion of France stoked fears, and arrests continued. Amid a blaze of media coverage, aliens from all walks of life were sent to British concentration camps.

  Inmates included the future Nobelist Max Perutz, celebrated Jewish conductor Peter Gellhorn, who had fled the Nazis five years before, and even the son and grandson of Sigmund Freud. By the time Nabokov set foot in America, more than eleven thousand civilians had been interned, including thousands of refugee women, many of whom had been working i
n England as maids.8

  A significant percentage of these prisoners were Jewish, but in the midst of paranoia and war, confusion reigned over exactly which prisoners were which. At Huyton near Liverpool, a camp adjutant reviewed the arrival of men he thought were captured German soldiers but who were really civilian refugees. Noting the distinctive clothing of his new charges, he was reported to say, “I never knew so many Jews were Nazis.”9

  With fear of invasion high, the British began to move the prisoners off the continent to places where they could be of no assistance to Germany. And so almost a month to the day after Nabokov departed France, ships left England carrying an ill-matched cargo. Civilian refugees, including some Jews who had once been prisoners in German concentration camps, found themselves berthed in the same quarters as Nazi officers and soldiers, sailing together to North America for internment. Anxiety over a handful of deaths in the crossing and occasional suicide attempts on arrival amplified the prisoners’ lingering confusion over their long-term fate. They would soon be scattered across Canada from New Brunswick to Alberta, held in old concentration camps and prisons or housed in new facilities still under construction as they arrived.10

  Compared to the Canadian welcome the refugees got, the Nabokovs’ arrival in America had been a delight. Schedules had gone awry—they were not met by Nathalie Nabokov, the ex-wife of cousin Nicholas, but the family took a taxi to her apartment.11 They had somewhere to go; they knew people who could give them the names of others who might help them. Gifted with unfettered liberty (so long, apparently, as they did not promote anarchy), Vladimir and Véra made their way into Manhattan with a $100 bill and hope for better prospects.

  For all the thrill of arrival on a new continent, Nabokov’s routine in the first few weeks must have seemed dispiritingly familiar.12 Living in a succession of temporary quarters, he once again tried to sell himself and his literary talents—the thing in which he had the most confidence in the world—to a public ignorant of their value.