Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  “I have never been able to understand,” Edmund Wilson wrote to Nabokov in 1948, “how you … pretend that it is possible to write about human beings and leave out all account of society and environment. I have come to the conclusion that you simply took over in your youth the fin de siècle Art for Art’s sake slogan and have never thought it out. I shall soon be sending you a book of mine which may help you to straighten out these problems.”11

  Wilson was a brilliant, prescient reviewer—making his myopia on this point all the more baffling. Anti-Semitism had just led to the death of millions and redefined the capacity for human atrocity, and Nabokov had referenced it persistently in his English-language work, which Wilson read. But Nabokov was so indirect, and Wilson was so focused on other injustices—or on his own way of representing them—that the moral facet of Nabokov’s writing was as good as nonexistent.

  Anti-Semitism in the work of others preoccupied Nabokov as well. Despite her help in getting his family to America, Nabokov chastised Alexandra Tolstoy for what he read as anti-Semitism in one of her novels. He even began to admire Joyce’s Ulysses less, feeling its stream of consciousness overdone and Leopold “Bloom’s Jewishness too full of clichés.”12

  The year after his arrival at Cornell, Nabokov also reviewed Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea for The New York Times Book Review. Clocking at roughly 600 words, the review is a masterpiece of dismemberment. Spending the first section of his critique savaging the translator, whom he compared to a dentist repeatedly pulling the wrong tooth, Nabokov proceeded to skewer Sartre himself, taking particular offense at a passage that imagined a black-browed, ring-wearing Jewish songwriter at work in a Manhattan high-rise.13

  Nabokov’s attention to Jewish matters also found unlikely, even humorous outlets. While at Cornell, he worked on a translation and commentary for Eugene Onegin, the nineteenth-century jewel of Russian poetry. At one point in his commentary, he dives into a history of the Wandering Jew legend across four countries in three centuries. Referencing its role as Christian propaganda and detailing seventeen different versions of the tale, Nabokov himself points out that “there is no reason to drag in” most of them at all, as they are irrelevant to Eugene Onegin. Wandering-Jew entries nonetheless later appear throughout the commentary’s Index, where they connect to a playful, inexplicable cross-reference leading to a mention of Jewish blintzes.14

  3

  After his arrival at Cornell, Nabokov took to summer road trips again, spending his breaks crossing the country hunting for butterflies. Riding through Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Minnesota, Ontario, Alabama, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, and on, mile after mile, Vladimir played passenger as Véra drove their black 1946 Oldsmobile into the twilight. Collecting new species just as he had during his first transcontinental trip a decade before, Nabokov found many things to love about America. He had come to claim the country as his own, even as Véra remained more cautious in her interactions with the locals, more inclined to keep her guard up.

  Nabokov would capture those expansive vistas and import them wholesale into his next novel. But as he was taking in the American landscape, he turned to the past for Conclusive Evidence, his 1951 autobiography. Reaching back to the pre-war years in France and Germany, and further to his youth in Russia, he constructed a story in chapters that, while arranged in chronological order, sailed individually into their own convoluted chronographies. His “perfect” childhood was all there: his aristocratic background, peasants joyfully throwing his father into the air on their country estate, his mother’s jewels taken from a wall safe to serve as his playthings, their dozens of servants, a parade of tutors, his multimillion-dollar inheritance lost in the Revolution, and the summer romance with a bruised French love on the Riviera.

  Many of the autobiography’s chapters had been written separately for publication in The New Yorker—though one, on Nabokov’s childhood governess, Mademoiselle Cécile Miauton, was written in France, in French, before Nabokov had even arrived in America.15 This autobiography-by-installment approach may explain why Mademoiselle got an entire chapter to herself, and so many potentially more important people are pushed into the margins of the book.

  But as the chapter on Mademoiselle reveals, the inversion of significant and insignificant things is a key aspect of Nabokov’s storytelling. As portrayed by Nabokov across the chapter devoted to her, Mademoiselle is helpless in the face of her young charges’ schemes. Her hands have brown spots; she is fat, self-absorbed, self-important, easily offended, and prone to melodrama—an easy mark. But small refinements along the way—the whisper of a failed love affair, a picture of her as a graceful young woman which bears no resemblance to her mature self, her beautiful French—culminate in a reversal during a visit near the end of the chapter in which Nabokov reveals her to be more humane in her treatment of him than he has been to her.

  This kind of about-face was becoming Nabokov’s special trick. The setup, the long arc of mordant observation or ornate beauty, gets undercut at the last moment by a phrase reframing everything that has just happened, indicting the narrator’s callousness and the reader’s collaboration with it.16 After spending pages entertainingly mocking Mademoiselle, Nabokov pays homage to “the radiant deceit” with which she had attempted, at the end, to convince him that he had been kind to her.

  Nabokov loved to destabilize his own stories, so that things are not what they seem at first to the characters or the readers—the stories may not even be about what they seem to be about. Even the chapter that is entirely given to Mademoiselle ends with an acknowledgement of the staggering loss of his father and the realization that he had learned to recognize suffering only “after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood, had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart.”17

  Conclusive Evidence presents illusion as an art by which people treat each other humanely, but the role of deception in survival is also a theme of the book. Nabokov relates how as children, he and his brother Sergei had opened the presents in their Christmas stockings early. After rewrapping the gifts, they opened them again later and pretended to be surprised—but they failed to fool their mother, who had asked them to wait. Such shattered illusions “took on for her the dimensions of a major disaster.”18

  By the time they are teenagers fleeing St. Petersburg on a train, when a real disaster is in motion, their safety depends on their ability to deceive, and they are more skilled than before: Sergei’s pretense of typhus keeps the raucous deserting soldiers who break into their compartment at bay.19 Weeks after the boys’ departure and their father’s flight south, V. D. Nabokov lives openly in the Crimea under the name Nabokov but pretends to be a doctor.

  Deceit is not the only theme of the book, however. Escaping Petrograd disguised as a peasant, a man asks Nabokov’s father for a light. He turns out to be the general who had once pulled out matches to do a trick for a four-year-old Vladimir Nabokov on the living room sofa of the house on Bolshaya Morskaya.

  Nabokov argues for the recurrent figure of the matches, the thematic linking of elements in a story, as the very basis of art. But in Conclusive Evidence, the art that Nabokov creates is built out of lives and moments that elliptically retell the story of Revolutionary Russia. The reader’s full attention reveals the debacle of Russia’s 1904 defeat by Japan and the details of other events that set the stage for Russia’s loss. V. D. Nabokov’s involvement with the early Russian parliament, as well as his arrest and imprisonment, get their due, as does his stand against the pogrom at Kishinev and his coverage of the trial of Mendel Beilis. Nabokov seems well aware that the story of his family is the story of his country.

  The autobiography, in fact, includes more references to history than may be initially apparent. An era is ended as Lenin’s “regime of bloodshed, concentration camps, and hostages” begins. Nabokov further laments the fate of an early radical village schoolmaster tutor who, he explains, was later executed with “members of the Social-Revolutionary P
arty.”20 But for all his striking summations and nods toward catastrophe on the outskirts of his story—the pillars of St. Isaac’s cathedral that were “polished by slaves” and the “children shot down at random” from trees in front of them in 1905—he was just beginning to make the turn toward the bitterest moments of the history he had left behind.

  Despite all the lush details from Nabokov’s aristocratic youth, Edmund Wilson declared Conclusive Evidence a “wonderful production,” though he was baffled by its title. What kind of evidence, he wondered, was Nabokov presenting? Sticking with the odds based on a decade of experience, he wondered if the proof was somehow against the Bolsheviks.21 Basking in Wilson’s praise, admitting it pleased him despite himself, Nabokov did not take umbrage at the question. Small kindnesses were enough to kindle the low-banked fire of their friendship, and their letters would continue on for the next few years in a generous exchange of personal news and ideas, even as they understood each other less and less.

  Conclusive Evidence did not, however, endear Nabokov to his fellow émigrés. He gave up roughly three percent of his text to the Russian literary exiles with whom he had spent almost twenty years—and in that three percent, he mocked their obsessions with “soul-saving” and “logrolling” and excoriated their treatment of his friend, fellow writer Vladislav Khodasevich. Stuffed with stories of privilege and a childish love of excess, was this book really written by the genius of their generation, the voice of a Russia that had refused to surrender to the Soviets? Ivan Bunin, stung by a passage about himself, denounced the “Tsar’s crown” that perched above Nabokov’s name on the cover of the book and the “wild lying” his literary rival had done about him.22 Nabokov, of course, still had Russian friends, but the émigré community only became more confident that he was already lost to them, that he was somehow no longer truly Russian.

  4

  Sitting in a jail cell in Moscow, Alexander Solzhenitsyn for the first time had his own reasons to doubt Vladimir Nabokov’s commitment to his homeland.

  After his arrest at the front, Solzhenitsyn had remained confident that he was a good Soviet citizen, that a mistake had been made. He had held on to his faith in the system despite the obvious incompetence of his captors, who had nearly driven him into an enemy camp, finally turning the map over to Solzhenitsyn as shells exploded around them. Still, Solzhenitsyn remained obedient, from Germany into Poland through the ruins of Brodnica and Bialystok, on the platform at Minsk station, all the way back to Russia, leading the inexperienced, confused counterespionage officers (who had never been to Moscow) through the city and onto the glorious metro—riding with the citizen commuters down and up the escalators, the officers lugging suitcases full of booty stolen from the defeated Germans, Solzhenitsyn carrying his own briefcase stuffed with his diaries and writings—delivering himself without question to the doors of Lubyanka Prison, whose four-decade legacy of sorrows haunted Nabokov half a world away.23

  The Lubyanka had been the headquarters of the secret police since the Revolution, when its five stories of ornate parquet floors, pale green walls, and plush décor had first been claimed by the Cheka. A series of renovations had made it a more severe place inside and out, but the large clock face mounted on the yellow brick exterior remained, making it clear who administered the days and hours remaining to those who entered. A tired joke declared that it was the tallest building in all Moscow, because from its basement one could see Siberia.

  Descending into the corridors and cells of the Soviet penal system, Solzhenitsyn learned about cavity searches, sleep deprivation, and interrogation. He was charged with disseminating propaganda and founding an anti-Soviet organization under the sweeping provisions of Article 58, a magician’s bag of counterrevolutionary activity. He agonized over how to protect his wife and friends from arrest. He worried, too, about the briefcase full of papers that had been confiscated from him and was now in the hands of his investigators. The satchel held his treasury of stories and material for future use, but the anecdotes and events from the war he had written down included real names, putting every person he had identified at risk.

  After an initial stint in solitary confinement, he was thrown into a cell with other prisoners. An Old Bolshevik, a pro-democracy lawyer, and a stool pigeon began his first formal education about the netherworld in which he had landed.24

  More cellmates followed. One innocent visionary believed that he was destined to restore the monarchy in 1953 and be hailed as the new Tsar. Equally startling to Solzhenitsyn was a man he called Yuri, who arrived in the cell weeks later. A Soviet officer captured by the Germans, Yuri had spent two years in a Nazi camp, and over time had been turned against the Soviet cause. Now a virulent anti-Communist, he had become a German officer and had returned to the war to fight the Red Army. Solzhenitsyn could not fathom the man’s willingness to take up arms against his own country.

  In his time abroad, Yuri had traveled Germany and read the work of Russian émigrés in Berlin, including stories by Bunin, Aldanov, and Vladimir Nabokov. The tales Yuri read were a wonder. He had been sure that the free Russian émigrés would write about “the blood flowing from Russia’s living wounds,” but they had not. Yuri did not have kind words for them: “To what did they devote their unutterably precious freedom? To the female body, to ecstasy, to sunsets, the beauty of noble brows, to anecdotes going back to dusty years. They wrote as if there had been no Revolution in Russia, or as if it were too complex to explain.”25 The most important events of their lifetime had gone unrecorded. They had ignored the suffering of their own people. Nothing they had written would save Russia.

  Solzhenitsyn, however, was already thinking of what he himself might do on that score. He had a novel of his own he wanted to write, one whose fragments lay like a bomb in his briefcase sitting in the hands of the investigators. The stories and names he had written down could be used to make a narrative that would consider everything that had gone wrong. But they were just as liable to lead to the arrest and conviction of Solzhenitsyn’s acquaintances.

  Fortunately for his friends, four months into his interrogation all those notes and papers were thrown into the fire of the Lubyanka furnace, flying away from the highest chimney of the prison as “black butterflies of soot.” He would not inadvertently bear witness against those whose stories he had recorded. But the destruction of evidence from his briefcase took with it the raw material of his epic Russian novel.26

  He dreamed, however, of writing again. He would remember for decades Yuri’s indictment of Nabokov and the other émigrés, and would one day use Yuri’s words to express his own grief and anger at those who seemed to have abandoned Russia. He did not intend for his work to suffer from their callousness. He would not avoid addressing the Revolution or the Russian people directly. His would be a literature fully dedicated to history. He would tell the story of the Revolution, the millions upon millions of his countrymen and their beautiful, lost cause.

  At the conclusion of the investigation, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. He would serve those years in their entirety, spending three of them in the relative oasis of a scientific research sharashka analyzing acoustics and the human voice. The rest of the time he spent moving timber, digging clay in wet misery, angling for a good bunk, in agonies of desire for a cigarette, casting a homemade spoon out of aluminum and hiding it in his shoe so as not to have to eat soup with his fingers. Working in the smoke-filled inferno of a foundry, he learned to look out for himself as he slowly began to doubt nearly everything he had believed in.27

  And when written words were not only illegal but too dangerous to contemplate, he began composing entirely in his head. His prodigious feats of recall astounded his fellow prisoners, one of whom noted that Solzhenitsyn had created—and remembered—an epic poem twice as long as Eugene Onegin.28 Memorizing twelve thousand lines using a rosary strung with beads made from clumps of soaked, dried bread, he formed a section of words for each bead, tying together the stor
y of Russia and her people.

  5

  Any émigrés still hoping Vladimir Nabokov would address Russian history in his next book were profoundly disappointed. The first Nabokov novel of the 1950s would offer a story as un-Russian as anything he had written.29

  In a letter to Pascal Covici of Viking Press, Nabokov had summed up his current project as dealing “with the problems of a very moral middle-aged gentleman who falls very immorally in love with his stepdaughter, a girl of thirteen.”30 An extraordinary one-sentence summary, Nabokov would build it into much more.

  What he had first titled as The Kingdom by the Sea would inhabit a very different landscape than Nabokov’s earlier look at a child molester. For his new story, Nabokov would invent America itself as seen by a foreigner and explore the notion of timeless love as understood by a pedophile.

  He had many sources of inspiration. Since his 1939 story “The Enchanter,” Nabokov and Wilson had discussed the memoirs of a Ukrainian man undone by his compulsion for sexual encounters with children. Added to this were newspaper stories of young girls kidnapped, raped, and taken on road trips through America—one of which Nabokov himself would directly reference in his book. A colleague at Stanford had turned out to be obsessed with nymphets. Nabokov rounded out his research with bus rides eavesdropping on pre-pubescents, literary acquisition of various limbs of Dmitri’s young friends, and details from textbooks on current theories about the sexual development of girls.31

  Nabokov did not want the book to be published under his name, knowing that readers (particularly Americans, as Véra noted) would likely interpret the narrator as representing Nabokov himself. Such an assumption would hardly be surprising, given that he had lovingly fostered just such confusion in the two English-language novels he had already written.32