Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  The man who had survived “acute nervous exhaustion” from the strain of writing Bend Sinister was nearly defeated by the attempt to portray a nymphet and her jailer. During his first year in Ithaca, he was so worried about the challenges and dangers of the novel that he set a blaze going in a galvanized trash can behind the house and had begun to feed his papers into the fire before Véra intervened. He planned to destroy the book multiple times, in each instance relenting and returning to battle with his material. Writing to The New Yorker’s Katharine White, he said that he was struggling with the novel amid terrible misgivings. “This great and coily thing,” he wrote, “has had no precedent in literature.”33

  Lolita, Nabokov’s nymphet novel in its final form, offered up Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European divorcé sexually obsessed with young girls. In postwar New England, Humbert catches a glimpse of Lolita, a twelve-year-old girl who recalls and then replaces his childhood love, Annabel Leigh. The spark that ignited his obsession with young girls, Leigh had died of typhus in 1923, just four months after a summer spent with the then-teenage Humbert.

  Smitten with Lolita, Humbert Humbert moves into her home as a boarder, only to find the girl will be sent away to distant Camp Q for the summer. Humbert marries Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, the better to get at the girl, but weeks later Charlotte is hit by a car, bringing Lolita under Humbert’s control. Avoiding prying eyes that might eventually guess his secret, Humbert drives his stepdaughter across glorious, oblivious America, staying in the very roadside inns and motor lodges that Nabokov and Véra knew so well from their own cross-country voyages.

  While Humbert executes a plan to drug and fondle Lolita at a hotel, she wakes, only to shock him with her forwardness. She spends two years as his sexual captive before escaping with a mysterious pursuer, whom Humbert tracks down and kills. He realizes that he has destroyed Lolita’s childhood, and even later, that he loves her as she is, even though she is no longer a nymphet—none of which keeps him from trying to reunite with her and seeking revenge on his rival. Waiting in his cell on trial for murder, he writes a tribute to his love, meant to be published only after her death.

  Taking a brief break to send a poem to Burma-Shave for its roadside billboard campaign (they did not use his submission), Nabokov finished Lolita in December 1953. Véra wrote to Katharine White, honoring their commitment to give The New Yorker a first look at his work, though they realized that she was unlikely to find any part of the novel suitable for publication. Véra requested that White not let anyone else see it, or at least not to let others know who its author was.34

  Nabokov understood Lolita to be the best thing he had written in English; now it was up to America to receive it. But given his detailed descriptions of Humbert’s fantasies, and more than one scene in which they were realized, he wondered if his masterpiece would ever make it into print.

  6

  By the time Nabokov had finished the story of a traumatized girl and her articulate molester, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had served his sentence in the Gulag. He had been operated on for cancer, taken part in a lethal camp strike, and discovered that his wife Natalia had divorced him.35 A Christianity with roots in his childhood had sprouted again. Concentration camps had taught him more about the Soviet system in eight years than he had managed to absorb in the first twenty-six years of his existence.

  In February 1953, he was released into permanent exile. Condemned to live the rest of his life thousands of miles from Moscow, he rode trains with other prisoners, then marched, and, still wearing his battered Army greatcoat, finally caught a lorry into Kok-Terek, a desolate town in Kazakhstan, arriving two days before the death of Joseph Stalin.

  On their first night in the village, the new exiles lay down to rest in the yard of the police station. Solzhenitsyn, however, had no plans to sleep. Watching the shadows of horses stabled nearby and listening to the braying of donkeys in the warm air, he could hardly believe his good fortune. He passed the hours walking in wonder all night, free under the stars.36

  7

  As prospective publishers were reading about Humbert Humbert’s nighttime visions (“everything soiled, torn, dead”), Nabokov was already well into his next novel. Stepping away from the agony of crafting his tortured nymphet, he plotted a shorter, simpler tale—one that ought to run no risk of offending the censors, one that had already begun unfolding chapter by chapter in The New Yorker.

  The story of Professor Timofey Pnin introduces a bumbling Russian exile incapable of navigating everyday life. A comic mishap over a discussion of anarchy lands poor Pnin in detention at Ellis Island the moment he arrives in America. English defeats him. Inanimate objects seduce and betray him. His coffee maker explodes; his landlady forbids him access to the washing machine after he puts a pair of shoes in it.

  An assistant professor at the fictional Waindell College, Pnin is beset midway through the book by the arrival of the narrator, who undermines Pnin’s place at the college. The new professor, one Vladimir Vladimirovich, also happens to be the narrator, a man remarkably like Vladimir Nabokov. The usurper even contradicts earlier accounts of Pnin’s life, leaving key scenes in the book permanently in doubt.37

  Behind Pnin’s efforts to transcend the hurdles of everyday existence lurks profound grief. Both his parents died in 1917 from typhus, but he is particularly oppressed by the loss of his first love, Mira Belochkin, a Jewish girl killed at Buchenwald. He talks with an investigator in Washington in an attempt to find out more about her last moments, but there are no answers. Over and over, he forbids himself consideration of her many possible deaths, which spin forever in an irresolvable quantum state: was she infected with tetanus, injected with phenol, set on fire alive, or gassed in a final, false, shower? It is, however, impossible for Pnin not to think of her. He remembers kissing her, and she dies and dies again.38

  A classic academic satire swirls on Pnin’s surface level, but underneath Nabokov again nods to the plight of Jews in the Holocaust, and in America. Nabokov creates a Jewish couple who decline attendance at a party once they realize a bigoted professor plans to attend. At Pnin’s party, the same unpleasant professor repeats an anti-Semitic story about the absent woman, which Pnin dismisses. The story, Pnin says, is a canard that circulated in Odessa decades before, and even in his youth, it was not funny.

  The narrator of Pnin directly links Germany to “another torture house”—Russia. And Pnin himself suggests he will one day teach a course titled “On Tyranny,” a ledger sheet of terror and cruelty, ranging from Tsar Nicholas the First to imperial horrors in Africa and the massacre of Armenians. “The history of man,” Pnin says, “is the history of pain.”39

  For all Nabokov’s stated intention of making Timofey Pnin ludicrous, he is a supremely likable main character and triggered exponentially less anxiety than that provoked by Humbert. Yet the book had its own challenges. If Nabokov’s nymphet was too unsettling for the pages of The New Yorker, Pnin’s adventures were sometimes perceived as too slight, or too political. Katharine White accepted several chapters of the novel as standalone pieces, but the magazine rejected Chapter Five, which contained the death of Mira Belochkin—the heart of the book—reportedly because of repeated references to Soviet oppression and torture, references Nabokov refused to remove.40

  Pnin struggled elsewhere, too. Pascal Covici at Viking paid an early advance on the book, but after long indecision reviewing the final manuscript, refused to publish it without changes. In a friendly letter, Nabokov countered Covici’s criticisms, insisting that book was not a series of sketches, and Timofey Pnin was not “a clown.”41

  Unwilling to make the demanded edits, Nabokov returned the advance. He was clearly frustrated at having to explain the novel, but in comparison to the moral posturing over Lolita, talking about Pnin must have been a relative relief. Still, finding a publisher dragged out several months; Pnin took a year and a half from completion to make its way into print.

  8

  Bringing Lolita to A
merica would take much longer. Small wonder that publishers were so hesitant—instead of the quasi-celibate, saintly figure of Timofey Pnin, Lolita delivered a monster whose monstrousness is a central aspect of the novel. Publishers could have, perhaps, forgiven Nabokov for creating Humbert Humbert if he had only made everything take place in another room, away from the reader, or if Lolita were only older, or “a boy, or a cow, or a bicycle.”42 But through a strange hybrid of refined language and sophistry, the reader is brought into Humbert’s orbit. His complex rationalizations alternate with frankness, and his unsettling euphemisms (“the scepter of my passion,” her “brown rose”) along with the comedy and dim sympathy he evokes, render the entire process of reading the book disturbing.

  If Nabokov was daring Americans to venture out of their comfort zone to tackle the novel, American publishers were not ready to meet that challenge. Viking rejected it in February 1954; Simon & Schuster declined it in March. After Nabokov offered his “timebomb” to James Laughlin, the publisher of Sebastian Knight, once more that fall, Laughlin responded that the book was “literature of the highest order” but agonized over the risks involved.43 Doubleday’s Jason Epstein and Roger Straus at Farrar, Straus & Young also politely declined.

  Nabokov took standard page-turning genre conventions—detective stories, travelogues, romances—and shot each one point-blank, delivering the most corrupt love affair in American literature. The whodunit is transformed into a who’ll-get-it. The traditional travelogue becomes an extended kidnapping. But for all the lofty strains of the violin sonata that Humbert concocts to serenade suspicious readers into complacency, he cannot create romance from rape.44

  Nabokov had no illusions about what an explosion the novel would make, or the dilemma it would present to readers. If we sympathize with Humbert in any meaningful way, we are monsters. If we read the book as a catalogue of perversity, we are voyeurs. Woven throughout are innumerable comic moments, juxtaposed against the handful of sober scenes in which we see Lolita clearly, as when she delights in trying on new clothes or when she walks down the street talking with a friend about the worst part of death being that you die alone.45

  With Pnin, readers would quickly recognize that Timofey Pnin’s drama unfolded over a tapestry of the recent past. Even the humorously mistaken detention of Pnin as an anarchist at Ellis Island knits the war into his story, without ever letting it dominate the action. His memories of Mira Belochkin are suppressed into the margins, forced there not just by the narrator but by Pnin himself, who cannot imagine how he will stay sane unless he distances himself from his past and the suffering of the dead. Epic tragedy—in this case the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust—is made real only in tiny, discrete glimpses.

  The past cannot be escaped; the past shapes the present. In Sebastian Knight, V. pursues his brother and seeks to close the gap between them before it is too late, indirectly memorializing a beautiful family in Berlin before the lives of all Jews in Berlin will be changed forever. (In Nabokov’s life, of course, the book became a double memorial; Sergei died outside the story just as Sebastian did inside it.)

  Again and again, Nabokov made use of real-world history that illuminated the lives of his invented characters via events whose repercussions continued to lay out in the very world in which his readers lived. Despite his insistence as a professor that students should not expect to gain historical information from the work of Austen or other brilliant authors, he had pointed out this very history in his own teaching, referencing Austen’s nod to the slave plantations of Antigua in Mansfield Park and quizzing students about the specific details that anchored a given book in its time and place.46 In Nabokov’s world, history that undergirded the surface story and preserved the past for future discovery was an inextricable part of transcendent literature.

  History lurked in Lolita, too, shedding light on the most pressing matters of Nabokov’s day and going to the heart of the principles that were his father’s legacy. But almost all of that history, the moral center of Lolita, went unnoticed.

  9

  American publishers would not touch Lolita. Not only had Edmund Wilson’s Hecate County been banned in New York, but during Nabokov’s first year at Cornell, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the decision. Publishers were not seeking the losses that would come from printing books only for them to be seized and destroyed.

  Nabokov began to realize that he might have to send Lolita out into the world under his own name. If it were not pornographic, one editor argued, why would he need to hide—especially when hiding would only advance the argument that it should be banned? Nabokov began to despair, but Edmund Wilson’s newest wife Elena felt certain that Lolita would find a publisher if Nabokov would look for one in Europe, where houses would not have to contend with censorship and U.S. Supreme Court cases.47

  Elena Wilson turned out to be prescient. When Nabokov’s agent in France met Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press that April, the publisher had just brought out work by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Girodias had shown a willingness to print literature in English that other houses deemed too illicit or pornographic, despite the high quality of the writing. Lolita seemed a good fit, and weeks later Girodias made an offer, which Nabokov quickly accepted, despite his family’s warnings about the terms of the contract and his new publisher’s apparently sympathetic response to Humbert’s pedophilia.48

  Fearing for his job, Nabokov didn’t tell Morris Bishop about the book’s subject matter until negotiations with Olympia were well underway. Presented with a copy of Lolita, Bishop was horrified—he couldn’t even finish the novel. Instead, he found himself imagining the scenarios in which outraged parents fretted over their daughters’ morals, endowments were withdrawn, and his prize professor removed from his position for loose morals.49

  Hoping that publication by Olympia would confer a literary sheen on Lolita without sullying her name, Nabokov did not yet realize that Girodias had just launched a line of titles including White Thighs, Rape, and The Whip Angels. His anxiety in the summer before Lolita’s arrival in France was nonetheless immense, his letters vibrating with tension. As Girodias planned publicity copy, Nabokov tried to get him to avoid any direct connection to Cornell, and to downplay his status as a university professor. He still hoped to keep his name off the novel, but in the end, he gave in. He underlined that he saw the project as an artistic endeavor. “A succès de scandale,” he wrote to Girodias, “would distress me.”50

  Nabokov eventually discovered the salacious company Lolita was keeping at Olympia Press. Similarly taken by surprise the same year, fellow Olympia author J. P. Donleavy was so horrified at being included in a pornographer’s stable that he vowed revenge on Girodias, powerless as he was to do anything in the moment.51 Nabokov, however, expressed less outrage at the company he had to keep, believing that Olympia was the only way to get Lolita into print.

  Yet the novel arrived in France that fall to little fanfare—for some time Nabokov was not even sure if it had been published. In addition, a plan to print excerpts from the book in the Partisan Review as a way to pave the road for publication in America fell through over anxieties about obscenity charges.52 It seemed as if the drama for which Nabokov had braced himself would fail to develop.

  10

  Edmund Wilson did not incline toward censorship; across the years of his exchanges with Nabokov, he would, in fact, loan or give his friend a copy of more than one Olympia title. But he started to read the manuscript of Lolita and found it distasteful: “I like it less than anything else of yours I have read.” After loaning it out to Mary McCarthy and his wife Elena, he was quick to add that latter believed it would be an important book.53

  Nabokov, however, would not be put off so easily by Wilson. Even as he criticized his friend’s class-oriented introduction to a new translation of Chekhov, Nabokov wrote that he hoped Wilson would note that Lolita “is a highly moral affair.” (In typically Nabokovian fashion, months later he would assert to readers that Lolita ha
d “no moral in tow.”)54

  Nabokov often revisited and reworked elements of prior stories. He had initially tried an older man/younger girl pairing in his fiction in 1930 when Carl Junghans first dated Véra’s sister Sonia in Berlin. A few years later he had tipped his hand to the idea of a novel about a man who fantasizes about his stepdaughter in The Gift. He had later realized the story as a full novella with “The Enchanter.”

  Across time, the age gap became larger and the girls’ innocence more pronounced. Despite the interpretations of Lolita which suggest she is the agent of Humbert’s corruption, Nabokov rarely missed a public opportunity to condemn Humbert for his treatment of Lolita, calling him a “vain and cruel wretch”; Véra was even more protective of Lolita, reminding readers about the girl’s nightly tears and expressing admiration for the life she built after escaping from Humbert.55

  But if Humbert deserves any pity at all, Nabokov leaves one focal point for sympathy: Annabel Leigh, Humbert’s first love, who died of typhus in Corfu in 1923 when Humbert was just thirteen. Real history lurks here, too, though Nabokov never explained it.

  The sunny, delightful haven that readers likely imagined stood in sharp contrast to the reality of Corfu in 1923. The island was at that moment a hellish place where multiple real-world epidemics were underway when the fictional Annabel Leigh died. Thousands of refugees had taken shelter on Corfu in camps, dislocated by war and the Armenian genocide. Relief agencies opened orphanages for those whose parents had been executed or who had died in transit. Typhus and smallpox raged the entire year in what was then called the greatest humanitarian crisis in history. The suffering was exacerbated when, in retaliation for the assassination of an Italian general, Italy directly bombed the Corfu refugees that fall, sparking fears of another world war.

  After her death on Corfu, Annabel Leigh haunted Humbert for twenty-four years, until he “broke her spell” by reincarnating her in Lolita. The loss that triggered Humbert’s perversion was rooted in a tragedy the world had forgotten. Like Pnin describing his course on tyranny, recalling the Armenian tragedy and the brutality of European colonial powers in Africa, Humbert was revealing the boundless atrocities of his century—sometimes in ways that reached far beyond Nabokov’s lived experience. But that nod to the dead of Corfu was only the beginning of the lost history Nabokov had folded into Lolita.56