Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  After consulting with friends again in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn decided his time had come. He was forty-two years old, soon to be forty-three. The wife of a former fellow prisoner would deliver the story of Ivan Denisovich to Tvardovsky at the offices of Novy Mir. It was the first piece of fiction he sent out into the world.

  7

  After Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov no longer faced any uncertainty when it came to finding a home for his work. Putnam’s was waiting in the wings for Pale Fire; within five months his manuscript was proofed and printed.

  When the book arrived, Edmund Wilson had no comment on it, but in the pages of The New Republic Mary McCarthy called it “one of the very great works of art this century.” Others were less enthralled; one critic declared it “the most unreadable novel I’ve attempted this season.”42 Nabokov’s convoluted tale managed to hook on to the bottom of the bestseller lists, despite its opaque structure and baffling mysteries. How can a poem and its commentary be a novel? Who is the narrator? What is Zembla? What is the significance of the crown jewels?

  Scholars, fans, and other authors tried to find and dissect hidden codes in the book. Perhaps the poet invented the ex-king—or did the ex-king invent the poet? Readers were encouraged in their speculations and literary autopsies by the novel’s author, who coyly proclaimed to the New York Herald Tribune that the book was “full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find.”43

  If Nabokov wanted readers to do the hard work of finding a hidden message in Pale Fire, he was not above offering some clues. In the same interview, he told his interviewer that the narrator Charles Kinbote was not actually a king or an ex-king of Zembla, that he was in fact insane. Furthermore, he had committed suicide—at the age of forty-four, if readers trace the chronology—before completing the last entry in the Index, which is Zembla.

  Perhaps to give additional fodder to interpreters, Nabokov had anchored his fantastic tale in the real world. In addition to nuclear allusions and Cold War references, he had given The New York Times a prominent role in Pale Fire, spending a page and a half describing articles from the newspaper, some of which mention Zembla.44 The stories are actual articles taken from July 1959 editions of the newspaper, but as with so much of what Kinbote touches in the novel, the news has been bent and twisted to reflect his mania for his lost country. Kinbote imagines Zemblan children singing songs as part of an international youth exchange, and he inserts Zembla into a story of Khrushchev canceling a visit to Scandinavia.45

  The Times serves as a source for news about Zembla inside Pale Fire, but what the real-world Times had to offer on the real-world Nova Zembla—if the world had only looked—says more. In 1955, just two years before Nabokov began making his first notes toward his novel, a brief mention of the Arctic islands appeared in a story by an American named John Noble.

  Noble had lived through World War II in Germany with his family. When Soviet forces swept in at the end of the war, Noble had been sent to Buchenwald (which was under Russian control) before being deported more than three thousand miles northeast to the labor outpost of Vorkuta. Above the Arctic Circle, he mined coal with thousands of other prisoners, later participating in a prisoner revolt.46

  Mining coal in the Arctic seems a harsh enough fate, but among Vorkuta inmates it was understood that however bad things got, they could be worse. What they truly feared was the place Noble described as the destination of last resort for the worst offenders: Nova Zembla, the place “from which there is no return.”47 Noble’s three-day Times account of his experiences in Vorkuta became the book I Was a Slave in Russia, a bestseller in America that year.

  But the Times’ accounts of the islands’ forgotten history stretch back before Noble’s years in the camps. At the beginning of 1942, the Russian army badly needed reinforcements for the war effort, and turned to Polish forces. The Times reported on the contentious issues blocking a Soviet-Polish agreement. One question centered on tens of thousands of missing Polish officers (whose bodies would later be found in a mass grave in Katyn Forest); the other related to reports of Polish prisoners being deported to labor camps in horrific conditions on “the barren and desolate island of Nova Zembla.”48

  Yet Nova Zemblan history in the Times goes even further back, before the war, winding past stories of plans to build an Arctic resort there in 1934 and sightings of mysterious airplanes on it 1931,49 all the way back to 1922, where along with a story Walter Duranty had in the paper that day sits an August 28 account explaining that Socialist Revolutionary prisoners would, for the first time, be shipped to Nova Zembla.

  In the wake of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, it was noted, the defendants had disappeared. Intellectuals and professors were being arrested, and many of them held in concentration camps at Archangel. But some prisoners, veterans of prison under Tsarist rule, had escaped from the mainland camps. As a result, the remaining prisoners would be “sent to Nova Zembla, two large islands in the Arctic Ocean, where even the former Czars never sent criminals.”50

  The story also ran in the Times of London. The news of prisoners sent to certain death had echoed and repeated in Europe and America, appearing two days later in the newspaper with the largest circulation of any Russian-language daily in Germany, a place where Nabokov had published so much of his work—Rul, the paper of Nabokov’s dead father. Within the camps, inside Russia, and across Europe and America, Nova Zembla had been feared as the cruelest outpost of the camp system, a place of terror for all of Vladimir Nabokov’s adult life.

  8

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of life in a labor camp did not immediately make it onto the desk of Alexander Tvardovsky, Novy Mir’s editor in chief. But it astounded the first person who read it, a copy editor at the magazine. Fearing it would be spiked by others or might fall into the wrong hands, she cagily bypassed the usual hierarchy and carried it to Tvardovsky herself.

  Taking it home from work that evening, he began reading and stayed up all night, going through it twice. Barely able to contain himself until dawn, he began calling around to discover who had written the treasure that had been delivered to him. He returned to Novy Mir offices and broke into a junior editor’s desk to find extra copies, which he carried to the house of a friend, calling for vodka and announcing, “A new genius is born!” The only goal he had left in life, he vowed, was to shepherd the story of Ivan Denisovich into print.51

  Solzhenitsyn was summoned to Moscow for a meeting with the magazine’s editorial board, which he attended in deliberately shabby clothes to underline his outsider status. Tvardovsky paid tribute to choice after choice that Solzhenitsyn had made in the story, quoting passages aloud to the group. It was on the level of Dostoyevsky, he said—perhaps better.

  Novy Mir signed a contract for what was now being called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. As an advance, the magazine paid Solzhenitsyn one thousand rubles, more than his teaching salary for the entire year.52

  Though Solzhenitsyn was ecstatic, he understood that the journal having acquired the story was no guarantee that the Party would allow its publication. The steps forward that Khrushchev had pointed to in his October speech had not entirely found support in the Congress. Even though the history Solzhenitsyn referred to in the book had taken place more than a decade before and had since been condemned at the highest levels, such a vivid depiction of human suffering imposed by the state still seemed too raw to appear as Soviet literature. Tvardovsky let the manuscript sit for more than four months without submitting it.53

  He did, however, begin to send the story around under the table to those whose opinions he valued, asking established writers to contribute assessments supporting its importance. Some of them simply thought he was wasting his time, because it would never be allowed to see the light of day. Others contributed enthusiastically, comparing Solzhenitsyn to Tolstoy and suggesting “it would be unforgivable to keep this from readers.” But the net effect of giving it to a few writers, for even the space of a few hours, was th
at those writers made and kept their own copies, and then passed them along to their friends. As many as five hundred bootleg copies of Ivan Denisovich circulated through unofficial channels; all of Moscow was talking about a novella that did not yet officially exist.54

  One of those copies ended up in the hands of Nikita Khrushchev’s private secretary, who admired the work and was willing to take it directly to his boss. A series of edits was asked for; some caused Solzhenitsyn to balk, declaring that he had waited one decade already, he could wait another.55 In the end, minor changes were agreed on, and the revised manuscript, accompanied by a cover letter from Tvardovsky, was forwarded to Khrushchev’s secretary.

  Khrushchev read it and wondered why it had not already been published. The Central Committee, however, was less inclined to move so quickly and demanded copies for all its members. The novel was discussed behind closed doors, where Khrushchev reportedly said, “There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even some of the Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”56

  In the end, Ivan Denisovich made its way past the editors, the opinions of the Moscow literati, Nikita Khrushchev, and even the Central Committee. People heard it was coming in the next issue of Novy Mir, they waited anxiously for it. Thousands of extra copies were printed, yet in the days after its release, Moscow bookstores ran out of the magazine. Pravda and Izvestia praised the story; Khrushchev told the plenary session of the Central Committee they should read it. The full run of 95,000 copies of the magazine had sold out entirely.

  Within days, Kremlinologists were discussing the novel abroad, heralding a new openness in Soviet literature and wondering about the political implications. Weeks later, English-language translations appeared in the West, to great acclaim. The Soviet information minister felt compelled to ask aspiring Russian writers—so many of whom now seemed keen to address life in Stalin’s camps—to keep in mind that there were, in fact, other subjects available to them.57 In the pages of Western newspapers, comments like these sounded like a joke. In Moscow, they were understood to be a warning.

  9

  Ivan Denisovich won readers over with his plainspoken decency; Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote, monster that he is, captured them with his outrageous inventions. But for all their differences, the two characters may have something in common.

  In tiny asides scattered throughout the novel, Kinbote writes of the ghost toes of amputees and the “frozen mud and horror” in his heart. He compares the story of Zembla that he hoped Shade might tell to a “tale of torture written in the bruised and branded sky.” He is suicidal and morbidly fascinated with the spiritual joy that death would bring.58

  Late in Pale Fire, one reason for Kinbote’s despair becomes clearer, when a history professor seems to recognize him. The professor has heard a good deal about Kinbote from someone—that he is actually Russian, that his name is not Kinbote but Botkin. Kinbote denies everything, declaring that the professor seems to have mistaken him for someone else. He is, Kinbote insists, “confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla.” In case readers missed the only appearance of the words Nova Zembla in the novel, Kinbote adds a phrase stressing the “Nova” again in brackets in the same line, even as he rejects any link between himself and this other person the professor is thinking of, between his beautiful Zembla and the geography to which the professor would pin him.59

  In interviews after the book’s publication, Nabokov revealed that the history professor is right. Kinbote is not who he says he is; clues in the novel reveal that he is a Russian, and his name is Botkin.60 But in the first fifty years after Pale Fire’s appearance, no one recalled the stories that had leaked out about Nova Zembla. No one thought it possible for Kinbote to be a refugee not just from the Zembla he had invented, but the historical Nova Zembla as well. It was not understood what such a past would mean—the tragic story that it would imply for Kinbote.

  The madman’s fantasy carries a grain of truth. Kinbote is no ex-king, but he did escape from Zembla. Like the first king of Nova Zembla, his rule was born in ice and suffering, in a bid to imagine that it might be possible to triumph over death. Nabokov’s paranoid, broken narrator hails from a nightmare corner of the Gulag.61

  In Pnin, Timofey Pnin tries to forget the terrible loss of Mira Belochkin in a German camp, because only by pushing it out of his consciousness can he stay sane. Krug, the imprisoned hero of Bend Sinister, is touched with madness by the book’s narrator to spare him horror and grief in the wake of his son’s murder. Despair’s Hermann, driven mad in the camps, comes to believe in a resemblance between himself and his victim that does not exist. The Gift’s Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “half-crushed by years of penal servitude,” becomes an old man “unable to reproach himself for a single carnal thought.” Humbert, launched into depravity by the death of his childhood love amid the refugee camps of Corfu, lives with nightmares of women gassed in German camps, and ceases to resist even worse impulses. Pale Fire’s author mercifully gives refugee Kinbote the fantasy country of Zembla itself in which to lose his Nova Zemblan past, while he begs to be delivered from “his fondness for faunlets.”62 There is hardly a novel in Nabokov’s mature repertoire that does not have a major character shattered by his own imprisonment or haunted by memories of those who perished in the camps.

  10

  But what of Pale Fire’s crown jewels? If Zembla is some transformation of Nova Zembla, Kinbote’s attempt to transcend his real history, what kind of crown jewels could be found there? Kinbote, for one, is absolutely sure that the agents hunting on Zembla will never find them. The question dogged readers, though some discounted the jewels as merely a McGuffin intended to render the reader as insane as Kinbote.

  History finds echoes here as well. The Soviet quest to gather the Russian crown jewels after the Revolution was widely covered in Western papers; the Bolsheviks’ search was reported to have led to torture and murder. The Soviets had even formed a Commission for Excavations to hunt for hidden Imperial treasure on the islands of Solovki.63 But what treasure would Nabokov have been pointing to on Nova Zembla?

  Across time, readers noticed that Pale Fire’s index plays all sorts of games, one of which begins with the entry for Crown Jewels and leads the reader in a circle. Asked in an interview where the crown jewels were hidden, Nabokov made a reference to the index but also answered directly, explaining that they lay on Zembla “in the ruins, sir, of some old barracks.”64

  The possibility of actual barracks on an actual Zembla—or what kind of treasure might be concealed in their ruins—was not pursued. But a real-world New York Times editorial from 1922 had more or less taken up the idea.

  The week the world first learned of Russians being exiled to the desolate north, the story reported that the Bolsheviks were simultaneously hunting Imperial gems across the nation, “scrupulously guarding the crown jewels and other priceless treasures.” But the paper’s editors feared it would all end in tragedy. In their ignorance, Russian leaders were “throwing into the Arctic Sea or over Soviet borders a culture more precious than the wealth of these hoarded jewels.” The article warned that if Russia did not stop, all its genius would be in exile, prison, or the grave, and the nation would become one vast, “shut-off Nova Zembla.”65

  The crown jewels in Pale Fire will never be found by the Russians hunting them because for Kinbote’s author, the real treasure was the creators and inheritors of liberal Russian society, the people lost to the “torture house, the blood-bespattered wall,” the “bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin.”66 The real crown jewels of Zembla—of Russia—lay forgotten in the ruins of barracks in not just the distant, mysterious north, but in countless places across the Soviet Union: the dead exiles, the executed prisoners, a beautiful culture, annihilated.

  Solzhenitsyn had seen the camps and lived their terrors. Nabokov, however, could not speak to their daily realities with more than borrowed knowledge. How could he tell the story of a place of horror that could barely be imagined? By constru
cting a fantastic, unbelievable fairy tale on top of unknowable events—the kind of fairy tale Nabokov believed all great novels were at heart, the kind he fashioned to create Zembla, weaving history into his literary vision.

  Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote, imaginary king of an Arctic wasteland, stands tribute to the dead exiles and prisoners of the Soviet camps. A fictional escapee who longs to bear witness to what he has seen, he is too insane to tell his tale. Nabokov, like Solzhenitsyn, created a masterpiece memorializing the suffering of his homeland, but he buried the past so deep in madness that the elegy went entirely unnoticed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Speak, Memory

  1

  In the matter of countries, Nabokov loved most devotedly from a distance. And the longer he lived at the Palace Hotel in Montreux, the easier it was to maintain his support for America without having to navigate the things that troubled him.

  He had long realized where his vehement anti-Red stance landed him on the Western political spectrum—in the unwanted company of ultraconservative bigots. And so it was through literal distance that Nabokov could love a country but keep himself separate from the local species of the international fraternity he loathed—“ French policemen, the unmentionable German product, the good old church-going Russian or Polish pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher,” and the latest Soviet equivalent.1

  As his social circle diminished, his politics became more rigid: a blanket yes to Vietnam and no to student radicals. Living in relative isolation with Véra probably did nothing to soften the stances he had taken—she was even more strident than he was—and headlines about the social upheaval in 1960s America were enough to rattle both Nabokovs.

  In such a high-stakes game, Véra had become an advocate of hangings and life sentences, but when it came to the death penalty, Nabokov held fast to his father’s position against it.2 After the Kennedy assassination, Nabokov watched footage of the shooting and the newsreels of the just-captured Lee Harvey Oswald. Not yet twentyfive, a small figure in an old undershirt, Oswald was marched in to meet the press near midnight with a cut on his forehead and swelling over one eye. He seemed confused in his answers and quietly asked for legal assistance. (“How did you hurt your eye?” “A policeman hit me.”3) Dmitri Nabokov recalled later that his father’s sympathy in the moment was all for Oswald, fearing that the police had beaten an innocent man.4