Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  It must have seemed at times to Nabokov that he could not win. The New Yorker had balked at publishing portions of his work that were openly anti-Soviet. In academic America, he had been seen as a reactionary, with Wellesley friend Isabel Stephens later lamenting that people simply did not understand the degree to which he loathed Stalin and the depth of his passion for Russia.59

  Many émigrés, however, did not feel or notice that love in the same degree that Stephens observed it. Nabokov had mocked and chastised their community in The Gift, even as he preserved their literary universe. In Conclusive Evidence, he seemed to ignore them in favor of tsarist nostalgia. And in Lolita, he appeared to have lost his moral compass and any link to Russia at all.

  Even his dislike of Zhivago could be held against him. Gleb Struve—whose father had served with V. D. Nabokov, and whom Nabokov had known since his years at Cambridge—sent a letter to him asking about a rumor that Nabokov had condemned Doctor Zhivago as anti-Semitic. “I wish I knew what idiot could have told you that,” Nabokov replied, adding that he was surprised that the devout Struve was not put off by the novel’s “cheap, churchy-sugary reek.”60

  But the impression in the émigré community that Nabokov had somehow ceded his Russian-ness to Jewish concerns or international celebrity was too deep-rooted to be dispelled by one letter, particularly one that seemed to take offense at Orthodox piety. If he had written the book they wanted, immortalizing their Russia, perhaps they could have forgiven the arrogance, the distance, and the success.

  The émigrés, however, had their revenge. Just weeks after Lolita’s release, Zhivago earned its author the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pasternak was the second Russian ever to win—the first being Ivan Bunin, the only other literary rival Nabokov had ever acknowledged. Pasternak, still in the U.S.S.R., telegraphed his acceptance (“Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.”), and then, pressured by the Soviets, wrote five days later, refusing the prize and declining to attend the award ceremony.61 The Nobel Committee would hold its ceremony, but Pasternak would not be there. The world could have Zhivago, but it could not have Pasternak.

  The world, however, could also have Nabokov. With Lolita turning into a global sensation, Véra and Vladimir headed west to California for butterfly hunting and negotiations with Stanley Kubrick. The contortions required by censors threatened to undermine the production of any artistically acceptable movie of Lolita. As Nabokov weighed possible solutions, Vladimir and Véra left Los Angeles, meeting up with Dmitri in Lake Tahoe before returning to New York. Booking passage on a luxury liner to Europe for the fall, Nabokov exchanged letters with his sister Elena and brother Kirill, making plans to see them in Europe.

  As Nabokov began his fifth decade of exile, many émigrés were settled in the belief that Nabokov had turned his back on his country, and they were not shy about saying so. They had accepted the notion that he did not remember, or did not want to remember, and that the story of their vanished Russia would never be told by him.

  But as they surrendered Nabokov to the world, the past lingered, biding its time. The Soviet leaders, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Arctic camps, his own shattered family, and all the Russian dead—Nabokov had forgotten nothing.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Pale Fire

  1

  Sailing east for seven days, Vladimir and Véra Nabokov reversed their wartime migration and returned to Europe. The Old World, conquered in their absence, anxiously awaited their arrival.

  With fame came more obligations. Nabokov still pondered adapting Lolita for the screen. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which had been out of print, got a second life. Dmitri, long graduated from Harvard, had rendered Invitation to a Beheading into English. Plans for publishing Nabokov’s entire back catalog in England would soon be set. While many communities still banned Lolita, translations were negotiated around the world, from Japan to Sweden and Israel. Nabokov’s feud with Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press over rights to the novel would continue for years, but the French version published by Gallimard had gone off like a firecracker in Paris that spring.

  In the midst of it all, Nabokov wrote his British publisher, protesting the choice of a particular author for a history of Soviet Russia. Did he not know the man was a Communist? The least they might do, Nabokov noted, would be to let a “real scholar” annotate the “historical myth” the man was sure to create, in order to avoid furthering Soviet propaganda in England.1

  Articles about Nabokov had already run that year in any number of outlets, including the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Libèration, Arts, L’Express, L’Aurore, I’Observateur littéraire—and all those in just two weeks. One critic argued that Lolita did not qualify as erotic but was nonetheless “essentially sadistic.” Another suggested that Lolita was “in effect, America, her prejudices, her morals, her hypocrisy, her myths, seen by a completely cynical spirit.”2

  Europe, meanwhile, was anxious to see Mr. Nabokov in person. Paris could not get enough of him and his absolutely adult wife. On October 23, Véra and Vladimir made their debut at a celebration in Nabokov’s honor thrown by Gallimard. Véra reigned in silk, mink, and pearls. Nabokov, in gray flannel, charmed the crowd, first by hunting for his glasses, then a forgotten pen—the mere mention of which conjured several from the pockets of those in attendance. Two thousand people were present; there was champagne. Véra smiled, reveling in the acknowledgment of her husband, overdue but sweet on arrival. From a distance, Sonia Slonim imagined their triumphant return to Europe as a marvelous ball.3

  But the discord between Nabokov and Russian émigrés in Europe had not vanished in his absence.4 At the Paris reception, Nabokov came face-to-face with Zinaida Shakhovskoy, who had been an early believer in his work, helping him repeatedly in the 1930s when he had been desperately poor. He offered a formal hello, as if she were a stranger.

  Had Nabokov been overwhelmed by the crowd, or had he snubbed Shakhovskoy deliberately? Several people thought the latter. Véra had accused Shakhovskoy in 1939 of making an anti-Semitic comment, and Nabokov was slow to forgive such slights. But if he felt provoked to rudeness, it was equally likely to have been caused by an incendiary article she had just written under a pseudonym—an article he had seen—savaging his work and claiming everything in his stories was “nightmare and deceit.” She lamented the deep wounds of exile that led him to “forget the friends of his darkest days.”5

  Shakhovskoy was the sister of Nathalie Nabokov, and so a former sister-in-law of Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas. As such, she was a distant half-relation, but the Nabokovs’ interactions with immediate family members could be just as problematic.

  Véra’s sisters Lena and Sonia had not spoken to each other in decades. Véra still exchanged letters intermittently with her older sister, but they seemed locked in the binary states of outrage or icy recrimination. Véra continued to question Lena’s conversion from Judaism, a move that had alienated her profoundly. Lena, unwilling to be scolded, wrote of witnessing death and torture in Berlin and observed how “easy and simple” Véra’s life was compared to hers. She furthermore noted that she had heard that Véra was corresponding with a Russian Nazi in England.6

  Véra denied the charge, but it may have had a whisper of truth. The Nabokovs and Elena had been working to bring Nabokov’s nephew Rostislav out of Prague (too late, it would turn out; less than a year after the Gallimard reception, he would be dead). In their efforts to rescue Rostislav, Vladimir or Véra may well have written to Boris Petkevič, Rostislav’s Russian father, who had in fact collaborated with the Nazis before escaping to England.7

  Nabokov’s reunion with his sister Elena and brother Kirill in Geneva was considerably less fraught. Elena, a librarian for the United Nations, had kept up a warm exchange of letters with the Nabokovs as a pair, though she chided Vladimir for rarely writing her directly. Kirill, now a travel agent, had not seen his older brother for more than twenty years. What did they talk about? There was no shortage of mater
ial. Evgenia Hofeld was gone; Elena’s second husband had died the year before. The younger siblings saw fit to correct a few details in their brother’s autobiography.8 They may also have discussed their absent sister Olga, still in Prague behind the Iron Curtain. Nabokov had little contact with her but continued to send money for the care of her son, and he knew that she now had a grandson, also named Vladimir.

  We do not know if the conversation turned to the other absent sibling—Sergei. But just as the lost brother haunted Sebastian Knight even before Sergei’s death, he continued to wind his way through Nabokov’s writing long after his life ended at Neuengamme.

  At a party early in the decade, Nabokov had announced to dinner companions that he was planning to write a story about a pair of Siamese twins. (“You will not,” Véra had declared.9) Nabokov nonetheless worked out fragments of the tale of Floyd and Lloyd, two conjoined brothers living on the Black Sea.

  The story was meant to be a three-part tragedy, in which the brothers were to maintain their separate identities—even avoid each other—as much as they could, despite the forced intimacy of their condition. In the first section, Floyd dreams of being severed from the twin with whom he has so little communion. When he imagines the aftermath of the separation in nightmares, he is healthy and complete, escaping alone, holding some token object (a crab, a kitten) to his left side where his missing brother should be.10 But in his dreams, the other brother has not managed to get free—Lloyd staggers along, still somehow hobbled by a twin.

  In the remaining parts of Nabokov’s triptych, the brothers were to find love and undergo a separation from each other which would result in Lloyd’s death. But Nabokov composed only the first part of the story. Having lived through the separation from and death of Sergei in real life, he seems not to have wanted, or not to have been able, to revisit them in fiction. Nabokov never finished his story of the surviving brother and his dead twin. The part he did write, “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” was rejected by The New Yorker and remained unpublished for eight years, until Lolita transformed even his dross into gold.11

  Nabokov had folded Sergei more overtly into his autobiography years before. Conclusive Evidence casts Sergei as “my brother” dozens of times in childhood and in early adolescence, and Nabokov occasionally gave his sibling a reflected primacy. “My brother and I,” he wrote, “were born in St. Petersburg, in the capital of Imperial Russia.”

  Sergei appears again and again, fleeing governesses and enduring tutors with Volodya, escaping Petrograd with him after the Revolution. But as with “Double Monster,” Nabokov had not finished the story. Like a Soviet-era photo edited to alter the past, Sergei slowly disappears from Conclusive Evidence. My brother heads to Cambridge and enrolls at Christ College. My brother tags along with Vladimir to see their parents in Berlin late in their college career. And then, nothing. The death that had not been a charade was reduced to a passing reference early in Conclusive Evidence (“a brother of mine … who is now also dead”), the separation as erased as it could be without being completely denied.

  By the time Nabokov had finished his autobiography, he had accomplished what he had not been able to do in fiction—to shape and control the story of the brothers so that the loss of one could be contained. The boys’ time together at Cambridge, Sergei’s years in Paris, and the events at Neuengamme that had permanently divided them were nowhere to be found in Nabokov’s account of his own life. After 1919, it was as if Sergei had vanished.

  2

  Having conquered Milan and London—which included dinner with Graham Greene—the Nabokovs returned to America in February 1960. They had settled on terms to write a screenplay for Lolita and were due in California in mid-March.

  Working their way across the country, they stopped in Utah to collect butterflies. Arriving in California, Nabokov spent six months in back-and-forth writing and revising, with Kubrick continually emphasizing the need to cut. Only shards of Nabokov’s effort would make it into the final movie; the dismemberment of his work had begun almost as soon as he delivered the script.12

  And so the crowning moment of the 1960 return to the U.S. happened not in California at all, but back in New York that October in a hotel overlooking Central Park, where Nabokov hit on a clear idea of how to construct his next novel. He had been wrestling with the project for years, and the roots of the story stretched even further back, to the first months of World War II. His aborted 1940 project Solus Rex, with its madman who imagines himself a king, had been Nabokov’s last Russian-language fiction. He had already borrowed its grieving widower and dystopian framework for Bend Sinister, but he was not yet through with the idea of the distant northern kingdom in the earlier work.

  In 1957 Nabokov had written to Jason Epstein, his editor at Doubleday, proposing a novel in which a northern king flees to the U.S., creating political headaches for President Kennedy.13 After being deposed by a coup—whose plotters would have help from nearby Nova Zembla—and then a transatlantic escape, the king was to go on a spiritual quest while an assassin circled the globe, closing in on him.

  Doubleday bit, but after just three months of research, Nabokov had put the new novel aside. Two years later, still unsure on how to proceed and wondering if the contractual obligation of the advance were interfering with the story’s evolution, he had returned the money and said of the novel, “I am not sure I shall ever write it.”14

  But surrendering the commitment led to a breakthrough. He had spent two full years assembling his 1, 300-page treatment of Eugene Onegin, caught up in his dizzying, obsessive commentary on Pushkin’s verse. A flash of insight led him to imagine a novel in which a whole life was somehow tucked into a commentary on a poem. He fused the story of his ex-king to the afterglow of his Onegin project, and once inspiration struck, he was consumed. Nabokov left for France days later, and settling in Nice, began to write a 999-line poem that would serve as the launch pad for his novel. He blazed through it in ten weeks, and headed on to Geneva to spend Easter with Elena.

  Leaving Nice with spring underway, Véra and Vladimir went to northern Italy to see Dmitri’s opera debut in La Bohème. Afterward, they made their way to Stresa, closer to the Swiss border, where Nabokov dove back into work on his poem-novel, which would in time acquire the title Pale Fire. Scribbling away on three-by-five-inch index cards, he erased words, revised, and crossed out whole sections. By June the Nabokovs had made their way into Switzerland; by mid-July Nabokov thought himself halfway done with the book; by August 7 they were driving into Montreux.15

  They got a room away from the shores of Lake Geneva, and started looking for a place where he could settle and finish the novel. Russian actor Peter Ustinov—who had just won an Academy Award for his role in Spartacus—recommended over dinner that the Nabokovs join him at the Montreux Palace Hotel. They visited the place and found that the lakeside resort suited them. By the beginning of September, they had signed a contract for rooms at the Palace, and Nabokov prepared to finish his most inventive novel yet.

  3

  In its completed form, Pale Fire would tell the story of two men: John Shade, an American poet who is murdered, and Charles Kinbote, who steals Shade’s verse as he lies dying. Shade’s magnum opus, the 999-line rhymed poem that Nabokov had written before starting the rest of the book, appears in the novel in its entirety. The rest of the story unfolds through Charles Kinbote’s increasingly eccentric commentary on the poem, which establishes him as a narrator who cannot be trusted with facts or young boys.

  Along with the two main characters in Pale Fire, Nabokov also gave a starring role to a mystery land called Zembla. While the characters inhabit a mundane campus very similar to Nabokov’s Cornell, the narrator Kinbote believes he is actually the exiled ruler of the fantasy land of Zembla, a king who has escaped from a guarded prison and made his way to America. Kinbote cares only for what he imagines will be Shade’s masterpiece—the story of lost Zembla and its hidden crown jewels, which are so well concealed
that Kinbote thinks they will never be found, even though Soviet-style agents have been tearing apart the Zemblan royal castle in search of them.

  Kinbote’s stories of his homeland include a Communist-style revolution that shattered his happy reign—along with a kitchen-sink hodgepodge of scenes borrowed from real-world literature, history, and even a Marx Brothers movie.16 Highlights include royal genealogy, murder, and Kinbote’s homosexual longings and pedophilia, as well as his prowess at ping-pong. A dramatic account of his escape from Zembla takes up some thirteen pages of the novel and leads him through a tunnel, backstage at a theater, into a racecar, across mountains, and onto a boat before his arrival in Paris.

  Despite being a fellow professor at the university where Shade teaches, Kinbote exists in a fantasy world. He hears voices, imagines conspiracies, and his misunderstanding of Shade’s poem distorts it into something unrecognizable. Shade’s story of love for his wife and the suicide of his daughter are twisted by Kinbote into a chronicle of Zemblan history.

  People in the campus town tell stories about Kinbote behind his back and call him a lunatic to his face, though he hardly seems to need their encouragement to gin up paranoia. He reads a confusing note pointing out his halitosis and thinks someone has realized he has hallucinations. Kinbote is the kind of person who wishes Shade would have a heart attack to provide him with an opportunity to comfort his ailing friend.

  Shade is the only one who seems to have any sympathy for Kinbote; even Shade’s wife avoids Kinbote or shoos him away. Across the course of the book, the ex-king’s affairs go awry and his young tenants leave him. The other characters in the book realize Kinbote is ludicrous, and readers easily see how pathetic he is, but he remains oblivious.