Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Anti-Communist anxieties played out across the political spectrum—from radical leftists who felt that the Revolution had been hijacked to xenophobic fringe groups, who feared U.N. invasion and vaccination conspiracies. But it was Senator Joseph McCarthy who would become the public face of the anti-Communist movement in America, holding hearings in which he made headlines with accusations about spies infiltrating the U.S. government. McCarthy attacked Communist influence wherever he saw (or imagined) it.

  Among his targets were Edmund Wilson’s book The Memoirs of Hecate County, which he later labeled “pro-Communist pornography.” McCarthy was not the first to attack the book as a political danger. In 1947, titillating excerpts from it had been the focus of a hearing in which a congressman had berated librarians at the State Department for choosing Hecate County to promote American culture abroad.50 And even before that, police in New York acted on a complaint from an anti-vice society and seized copies of it in Manhattan. In 1948, the public debates finally took a financial toll on Wilson, when Hecate County was declared obscene by the New York Supreme Court and also banned in Boston and Los Angeles.51

  Despite the documented excesses of the anti-Communist movement—harassment, firings, blacklisting, and the treatment of Wilson—Nabokov was not inclined to publicly criticize McCarthy. Véra, too, when the subject came up, gave no quarter to his opponents, recognizing McCarthy as extremist but refusing to condemn him.52 After five decades in three countries where Communism had a hand in destabilizing countries that had been around much longer than the U.S., the Nabokovs were already convinced that Bolshevik spies were capable of digging tunnels into the hearts and minds of a naïve America. At a time when the FBI had requested that their field offices generate reports on the presence of Communist agents at major U.S. universities and colleges, Nabokov and Véra stayed quiet on the topic of academic freedom and befriended Ithaca’s resident G-man.53

  Véra was particularly attentive to potential Communist spies, writing a letter to the Cornell Daily Sun attacking Owen Lattimore, whom McCarthy had named as the U.S.S.R.’s top agent in America. Lattimore would eventually be hounded out of his consultancies with the State Department and charged with perjury—though the charges would later be dropped.54

  While there was no basis for describing Lattimore as a Soviet agent, it’s not hard to see what might have enraged Véra. In addition to his work on China during the war, he had gone on a mission with the U.S. vice president to the labor camps of Kolyma in Siberia, where both men had admired the pioneering mining projects of the Dalstroy Corporation. Kolyma was home to some the harshest camps of the hundreds that then stretched across the entirety of Soviet territory, and the Dalstroy Corporation, which ran the effort, was nothing more than an arm of the NKVD, a front for Russia’s secret police.

  Describing Lattimore’s trip in The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild notes how guard towers were temporarily dismantled and prisoners were kept in their barracks for three days so the visitors would not see them: “The Soviets worked hard to give the Wallace group the impression that they were visiting a cheerful Russian Klondike full of happy gold miners, and they were wildly successful.”

  A few years after Lattimore’s 1944 trip, books by former prisoners began to be published in English, detailing the horrific conditions at Kolyma—the starvation and sadism, rapes, and harrowing work. The camp’s prisoners who had witnessed the visit could not understand how the Americans had been so easily duped.55

  Against this background of American naïveté, Véra and Vladimir refused to condemn McCarthy. After a childhood amid Tsarist double agents in St. Petersburg, more than a decade in a Berlin teeming with informers, and a postwar landscape in which the Nabokovs’ siblings and cousins all seemed to have ties to intelligence work, it seemed more than plausible that not just Washington, D.C., but also the residents of Ithaca, New York, should be on guard against spies and traitors. At Cornell, it was rumored that Véra carried a pistol with her on campus for use in the event of Communist incursion.56

  7

  Nabokov did not find Hecate County Communist, but he did find the sex scenes repellent. Faced with the unappealing array of encounters with which Wilson had provided the protagonist, Nabokov wrote, “I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis.”57

  Wilson by this time counted Nabokov among his closest friends, though the two were as inclined to disagree as much about literature in general as they were each other’s writing. By dismissing Hecate County, Nabokov had now roundly criticized two of Wilson’s books while getting a rave blurb from him for Sebastian Knight. It is a rare friendship that can stand such an imbalance.

  For his part, Wilson’s view of Nabokov’s politics seemed to be narrowing, leaving little room for the niche he had once let his friend occupy. The very first weeks of their friendship, Wilson had identified Nabokov as “neither White Russian nor Communist.”58 But as the years progressed, he increasingly seemed to want to shoehorn Nabokov into a reactionary identity that he had not initially assigned to his friend.

  Nabokov struggled not to let the shoe fit. In January 1947 Wilson wrote to Nabokov about meeting his Trinity College roommate, Mikhail Kalashnikov, at a Christmas party. Nabokov responded at length, explaining that Wilson had found another “dead fish” from his past, in this case one who was a fascist, anti-Semitic idiot—they had only roomed together one term. Wilson, he added preemptively, should not say anything about it to their friend Nina Chavchavadze, who was somehow under the misapprehension that Nabokov and Kalashnikov had been close. It was, as Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd would later describe it, hardly an accurate characterization of Nabokov’s two-year friendship with Kalashnikov.59

  Along with the refutation of Kalashnikov, Nabokov enclosed a copy of Bend Sinister, which was about to be published. Given the opportunity to criticize his friend’s writing in kind, Wilson read the book and went into great detail listing his disappointments. Nabokov doing politics left Wilson cold—especially politics in a world abstracted from the precise reality that Nabokov excelled at depicting. Wilson admired Nabokov, but he found that Nabokov taking on the easy work of demonizing a cardboard cut-out dictator was a poor use of his magic.

  Reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight years before, Wilson had felt certain Nabokov had constructed some game beneath the story that he was always on the verge of uncovering; but with Bend Sinister, he did not seem to make the effort to hunt for it. His assessment was not without insight—deliberately nor not, Nabokov had failed to generate a convincing human villain. But for his part, Wilson had missed the play between the narrator and the reader—the very dance transpiring around the story itself that he had noted in Sebastian Knight.

  Wilson had focused instead on Nabokov’s grotesque burlesque of a totalitarian state. “You aren’t good at this kind of subject, which involves questions of politics and social change,” he wrote to Nabokov, “because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them.”60 Their mutual criticisms drove new cracks into the friendship, but Wilson’s remarks were telling. After building a comic story focusing directly on the horrors of a police state, Nabokov would never write an overtly topical novel again.

  Across that year, they continued to discuss each other’s work, and Nabokov praised Wilson’s dissection of Hemingway, Kafka, and Sartre. But they slowly grew increasingly deaf to each other. In a 1948 letter to Wilson that was more devastating than anything in Bend Sinister, Nabokov took exception to a comparison of pre-Revolutionary Russian liberals to Confederate loyalists nursing a failed cause after the U.S. Civil War. For Nabokov, the work of his father, the Kadets, and other anti-Bolshevik political parties represented the only chance for democracy and freedom that Russia had ever had. Implying that these men and women were slave-owners willing to destroy the country to salvage their own cultural and economic power was too much.

  It was all well and good, Nabokov wrote, that Wilson and his friends had t
aken note of the murders in Soviet Union in the late 1930s when people who had been cronies of Lenin were put on trial and killed under Stalin. But where had those tender-hearted people been when the whole system had been established under Lenin? They had not heard the moans of those tortured in Solovki or by the secret police in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison in the first Red Terrors. They had not heard them, he suggested, because they were too wedded to their own romantic notions of how the Revolution had happened and what it meant. He did not criticize their misunderstanding of what was happening when they first learned of it, but to be clear, the problem was not a historical nostalgia on the part of Russian exiles; it was a historical nostalgia on the part of the American Left, which could not look back on its youthful infatuation for “St. Lenin” and see it for the sham and the shame that it was.

  As for his being part of a retrograde aristocracy feeling sorry for itself, Nabokov pointed to the similarly anti-Bolshevist views that had been held by all sorts of unmourned radicals—including, he noted specifically, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Ilya Fondaminsky. But then again, he could not expect anyone who read Trotsky to get information on Russia to know very much at all.61

  Nabokov’s letter is a precise, careful statement of his political stance, and a devastating indictment of Wilson’s lingering affection for the Revolution. The strain of Nabokov’s anguish for his country and anger at Wilson is evident, as is his bafflement over everything his normally astute, intelligent friend seems unable to grasp.

  For a quarter of a century, newspapers had carried stories of Russian concentration camps, and the camps had become a fixed part of the landscape behind the Iron Curtain. But the reactionary nature of some of those shouting about what was known sometimes reduced the camps to a talking point, one trotted out alongside purported fluoridated-water conspiracies and the Communist takeover of elementary schools. A lack of understanding of Russia’s past further poisoned any understanding of its present.

  Nabokov himself understood better than most that the tragedy of the Holocaust had eclipsed Russia’s calamity; he had added his voice to the chorus calling for Stalin to defeat Hitler. But if the circumstances and the details were not the same, the grief and frustration at not being believed or understood—at not even understanding himself—were as profound. His people were dying, were already forgotten, and he was alive.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lolita

  1

  Embarking on the teaching career he had coveted for so long, Vladimir Nabokov gained a financial stability he had not had since 1917. Though he remained acutely aware of financial pressures—Dmitri was now attending an expensive boarding school in New Hampshire—the three-decade specter of the destitute, displaced refugee had been banished.

  With Dmitri away, Nabokov’s courses were transformed into team productions. Initially Véra served as a combination T.A. and magician’s assistant—sitting nearby, handing her husband notecards, writing on the board, running to get missing items, delivering lectures when he was sick, and grading exams. Both prepared exquisitely for classes, with Nabokov fully scripting lectures, including jokes, and delivering them dramatically. One former student described how on one snowy day, Nabokov completely darkened the classroom without explanation. Flipping on one light after another, he announced “This is Pushkin! This is Gogol! This is Chekhov!” Heading to the back of the room, he released a roller blind to let the sun stream in: “And that is Tolstoy!”1

  Even before his first lectures at Wellesley, Nabokov had bet on a future filled with teaching, spending his first fall and winter in America creating as many as a hundred lectures. In the intervening years of classes and speeches, he had been able to hone his theory and presentation. By the time he got to Cornell, he had thoroughly organized his approach to discussing writers.

  Literature Nabokov-style was an exciting enterprise. Authors could be analyzed, he explained, as storytellers, teachers, or enchanters. The best ones, of course, had elements of all three, and geniuses distinguished themselves especially as enchanters. In case there were any flaws in his audience’s reasoning on these matters, Nabokov’s students were expected to memorize a hierarchy of writers and the letter grades Nabokov assigned each one. Turgenev rated an A minus, Dostoyevsky a C minus, or perhaps a D plus.2 The latter had the temerity to imagine that suffering enhanced morality, an argument that left Nabokov cold.

  Comparing writing novels to composing diabolical chess problems, Nabokov meant reading literature to be hard work. He claimed that in the best novels “the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world.” He saw literature as space in which the novelist invents a universe, a planet, a landscape—and the reader struggles to find a path through it. Literature of genius does not settle for repeating traditional truths or parroting lifelike details that come to hand, he argued—it reconfigures them to create things that have never been expressed, in a way that has never before been done. The ideal outcome is to have the exhausted, joyful reader and author meet atop the invented mountain of the novel and embrace, “linked forever if the book lasts forever.”3

  Designing his classes as a detective investigation, Nabokov was a fan of the kind of reading that required a microscope. He relentlessly brought to bear the finer points of biology, history, and politics that could illuminate the tiniest moments in a book. Maps made regular appearances: the sleeping car on the train in Anna Karenina, the house from Austen’s Mansfield Park, and Dublin itself for Joyce’s Ulysses. For an exam on Madame Bovary, he asked students to address Flaubert’s use of the word and. He announced that anatomical details in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” showed that Gregor Samsa became not a cockroach but a beetle that had wings and could have flown.4

  Edmund Wilson was responsible for Nabokov including Austen in his lectures, having taken exception to Nabokov’s claim to be “prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers.”5 As bullheaded as they both were, the two men could, and did, make concessio! ns on small points. And despite his dislike for Bend Sinister, Wilson continued to offer Nabokov advice on editors and to recommend him to publishers.

  Nabokov and Wilson would continue to praise and criticize each other’s literary opinions, but they became blunter and more combative on points of disagreement. Nabokov lauded Wilson’s discussion of Keats and Pushkin, and noted other remarks in his writing that were brilliant, but he also chided his friend for letting socioeconomic angles rule his stories—“ Keep it down, keep it down (the (ideological content)) for God’s sake,” he wrote, elsewhere telling Wilson “your sociological forays are perfunctory and superficial.”6

  Russian politics continued to be an issue. Interviewed in 1951 by the FBI, Wilson was more than willing to admit to agents that the Revolution had failed. But he was still not yet ready to give up on the romance of the Revolution’s beginnings, or to surrender his admiration for Lenin. As Wilson’s ex-wife Mary McCarthy would later explain, “It was a mistake for Edmund to like Lenin, but that was the only way he could believe in the Russian Revolution.”7

  Despite everything, Nabokov and Wilson continued down their rocky path with affection. “I don’t know what you mean when you say I am not one of your fans,” Wilson wrote to Nabokov in May 1950, just before their correspondence erupted in a lively argument over stresses in the word automobile.8

  2

  With his immersion in butterfly research and his efforts to find a steady teaching position in the U.S., Nabokov’s fiction output had diminished precipitously. Not only did he have just one new novel to show for the eight years between his arrival in America and the beginning of his Cornell years, he had written just a handful of short stories.

  But what he had written carried traces of its explosive place and time, relentlessly recording the anti-Semitism he had witnessed. A Russian narrator trying to escape France ahead of Hitler’s arrival hears his Jewish countrymen speak of “their doomed kinsmen crammed into hellbound trains.” “Double Talk” records European-style an
ti-Semitism making itself at home in America, in what Maxim D. Shrayer would eventually note as perhaps the first fictional representation of Holocaust denial—written before the war was even over.9

  “Signs and Symbols,” published by The New Yorker in May 1948, portrays the fate of Jewish Russian refugees in America. A couple frets over their son and debates whether they should remove him from the institution to which he has been committed. The young man was a child when his family escaped Germany, where he had learned to fear even the wallpaper (perhaps not without reason). Soon after, his terrors grew and closed him off from humanity entirely. From the tragedy of the Revolution to the loss of the family’s Aunt Rosa, whom the Germans had killed along with “all the people she had worried about,” his parents managed to find a way to navigate the grief of the century, but they are unable to inoculate their son against the sense of doom emanating from even clouds and coats. In counterpoint to the relentless anxiety of the story, the couple has chosen a gift for him: ten tiny jars of fruit jellies—quince, apricot, crab apple. As they talk of bringing him home and worry that he will kill himself before they can, the father admires with pleasure the beauty of the jewel-like jars—grape, beech plum—and recites their names.

  Nabokov plucked the details of what would stand as his most celebrated short story from the shards his own experience. A vulnerable son is threatened by an apparently malevolent and anti-Semitic universe convulsed by the Holocaust; as a gift his parents buy the same jars of jelly that Vladimir and Véra had shared with friends and babysitters. Nabokov deliberately crafted lush, unforgettable images and dramatic plots to allow his stories to function on a surface level as literature independent of the time and place in which they were set. And that is how many readers, sometimes even careful readers, read them, rarely noticing the other stories waiting underneath, or the supporting role Nabokov gave history in sparking madness and violence in his characters.10