Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  4

  Wilson’s indictment is striking, because Solzhenitsyn was wrestling so directly with the intersection between literature and history, and Wilson had committed himself to the creation of a calculus that could describe that region. But his words had little effect; by the time he dismissed Solzhenitsyn, Wilson was no longer a kingmaker in American literary circles, and Stockholm had awarded the novelist of the camps the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  It had been a long five years for Solzhenitsyn between the loss of his archive to the KGB and the capture of the Nobel Prize. He had spent months stunned and depressed over what he felt to be this “greatest misfortune” of his life—a more significant blow than even his years in the camps.43 He chastised himself for losing all the survival skills that had preserved him through so much danger. When he was ready to unleash all the history he had collected all on the world, he reasoned, it would be different, but to be caught now, after so many had risked so much to tell him their stories, and then to know that perhaps those stories would never be told, and his countrymen would never be forced to come to terms with “the millions whose last whisper, last moan, had been cut short on some hut floor in some prison camp” was devastating. For a time, he had considered suicide.44

  In the end, Solzhenitsyn had decided to adopt as public a profile as possible, in the hopes that high visibility would make it more difficult to silence him. At the same time, however, he refused to associate himself with any movement that might jeopardize his historic and literary missions. Like Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn was not a joiner. Even in the case of two dissidents convicted for the statements of their fictional characters—writers who had been arrested just as his archive had been seized—Solzhenitsyn would not sign a letter calling for the men’s release.45

  He similarly turned down a request from Jean-Paul Sartre to meet in Russia, on the basis that as a constrained Soviet writer, he would not be able to talk freely or on equal terms (Sartre’s companion, author Simone de Beauvoir, believed it was pride and shyness on Solzhenitsyn’s part that were to blame).46

  Though Solzhenitsyn would not sign on to others’ causes, in advance of the 1967 Writers’ Congress in 1967 he circulated a letter of his own. Condemning oppression, Solzhenitsyn called for the abolition of literary censorship. He wrote with characteristic drama about the high-stakes game in which he was now upping the ante: “I am, of course, confident that I will fulfill my duty as a writer under all circumstances, from the grave even more successfully and unobstructedly than in my lifetime.”47 The letter circulated at the Congress hand-to-hand, creating a buzz that none of the sessions could match. Solzhenitsyn received the written support of nearly a hundred writers. The story made newspapers worldwide.

  Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn’s unpublished manuscripts spurred debates and denunciations—he was a tool of the West, he was the hope of Russian writers. His own Novy Mir editors were still torn about what to do with his work.

  He was summoned to assemblies of secretariats and committees, at which he presented himself unapologetically and denounced the KGB (indirectly but clearly) for its plots against him. Summoned for yet another meeting to ensure the publication of the first chapters of a new novel, he was on his way to the train station, headed to Moscow, when he inexplicably turned around and came home.48 They could debate the matter with among themselves, he said. They could ask questions of his wife, whom he sent in his stead. He would stay alone and as isolated as possible, and write.

  Solzhenitsyn’s public statements guaranteed that no new work would appear from him; but when no new work appeared, it only magnified his prominence. A Pravda editor suggested ominously that he was suffering from mental illness; other sources circulated rumors that he had collaborated with the Germans during the war. The situation could not go on indefinitely. He had only one theme to write about; it was the very theme the authorities did not want addressed. (Nabokov, on the other hand, wrote about the same theme with absolute freedom, but did it so cryptically that it was hardly recognizable.)

  Solzhenitsyn’s celebrity was starting to change him; he began to imagine himself capable not just of recording history but influencing it. He had acquired a stature and power few outside the system could claim. But some friends and acquaintances felt that he had paid a price for his rise—that he had begun to lose his endearing humility, and had somehow had become distant and imperious.49

  His forty-ninth birthday passed. He finished The Gulag Archipelago with Natalia in a frenzy of typing. They prepared microfilms, which were smuggled out by a courier who ran a small but real risk of being caught. Waiting day after day without knowing if his work had been intercepted was agony, but eventually news came that everything had arrived safely, bringing with it profound relief.50 Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and The Gulag Archipelago had been safely deposited outside Soviet borders. Whatever role history assigned to him, even if he were killed, Solzhenitsyn’s writing would survive. His voice could not be silenced.

  But the Soviets could try. In November 1969, the local chapter of the Writers’ Union summoned him to an afternoon meeting and voted to expel him on the grounds of “anti-social behavior,” truncating his official career as a writer in his homeland.51 The decision would have real effects, but it is hard to imagine what the Union thought they would accomplish. By then, Cancer Ward and The First Circle had been published in the West, to monstrous acclaim. He had been hailed as a towering talent, “a major 19th century writer suddenly appearing in the last half of the 20th century.”52 Rumors began to circulate abroad that Solzhenitsyn had something else waiting to come out, something reported in English as “The Archipelago of Gulag.”

  The following year, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize. After publicly planning to go to Stockholm, he then reversed his plans for fear he would not be allowed to return to Russia. Though he did not leave the country, the Nobel spurred hope in Solzhenitsyn that his situation might change. It did not, although the prize may have made him almost untouchable. His star had certainly risen high in the West—several biographers were sniffing around. But he issued a public warning to make clear that these people had not talked to him and did not know his life. Their stories were their own.

  Not knowing what to do about The Gulag Archipelago for the time being, Solzhenitsyn did nothing. Privately, he worked on his own memoir, which careered between judgment and generosity, and would in time shock many friends. He had also started a series of novels, set in the early twentieth century, which aimed to explain what exactly had gone wrong in Russia before the Revolution.

  The Writers’ Union decision was not the only new stress in his life. He was also caught up in the detritus of his marriage. At fifty-two, he had gotten his mistress pregnant, and his wife was reluctant to be left by a man for whom she had risked so much, a man she still loved.53

  There were, in fact, many possible reasons behind his hesitation to release The Gulag Archipelago, his biggest weapon. Publication might harm the people who had shared their stories with him. He was anxious to finish his novels on the Revolution before he might be arrested or otherwise kept from writing. And, of course, he realized that publishing The Gulag Archipelago would change everything.

  In the end, the question was taken out of his hands. He was spied on, shadowed, wiretapped, and bugged. An acquaintance retrieving Solzhenitsyn’s car for him one afternoon stumbled into the midst of a KGB raid and was brutally beaten.54

  The police harassment intensified. Solzhenitsyn’s typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, was picked up by the KGB, who surely knew (if only from the many articles that had by then appeared in the West) the title and character of the documents they were looking for. Voronyanskaya was taken to Leningrad and interrogated night and day for most of a week, until she revealed the location of Solzhenitsyn’s hidden manuscript. Returned to her home under house arrest, she was kept from notifying Solzhenitsyn. Two weeks later, she died in vague circumstances said to involve suicide.55

  The KGB took its time but eventua
lly picked up the manuscript from its hiding place. And Solzhenitsyn finally tripped the wire, signaling for The Gulag Archipelago to be published in Paris.

  Six weeks after it appeared, the KGB came for him. He imagined being taken to a dramatic confrontation with Party leaders, but after a brief, unnerving prison stay, the Soviets disposed of the thorn in their side by deporting him to Germany and hoping that would be that.

  5

  The day Solzhenitsyn left Russia, Vladimir Nabokov sat down to write a note welcoming him to a life of freedom. Apologizing for not answering an earlier letter, Nabokov explained that he had a policy of not writing anyone in the Soviet Union, for fear of endangering his correspondents. “I am, after all, some kind of scaly devil to the Bolshevik authorities—something that not everyone in Russia realizes.” He thought it unlikely that Solzhenitsyn had seen his work, but he assured him that “since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write.”56

  He explained that he would not make any political statement about the matter—he never made such statements—but privately wanted to extend a warm welcome to the newest Russian exile.57 If Solzhenitsyn were ever in Switzerland, he would be most welcome to visit. Settling soon after in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn wrote to say that fate had brought him to the same country so that the two men might meet.

  Solzhenitsyn got a hero’s welcome in Europe, but some commentators questioned whether it would last. William Safire wondered if, “Now that he is out of the Soviet Union … his martyrdom shrewdly denied, cracks will appear in the pedestal we have built for him.” Seeing his writing judged as literature rather than propaganda, learning more about his religious fervor, “(p)oliticians who praise him now for his opposition to oppression may discover, to their dismay, that their chosen symbol does not share their appreciation for democratic principles.”58

  Safire’s words soon hit the mark. Solzhenitsyn quickly startled his supporters by establishing himself as a proponent of a kind of Russian nationalist religiosity. The West, Solzhenitsyn argued, was in “a state of collapse” due to a moral crisis created by the Renaissance and exacerbated by the Enlightenment. American government was so weak, it could not even protect itself from a rogue reporter, Daniel Ellsberg, who had stolen and published government documents. Britain could not handle her own Irish terrorists. The West did not hold the answers to Russia’s problems. Solzhenitsyn would soon predict that the young American men who refused to serve in Vietnam would one day find themselves fighting in a war to defend American territory. Presidential aides began to wonder if he might be mentally unstable after all.59

  He was damaging his own reputation, but the harm done to the Soviets by The Gulag Archipelago was greater. Nabokov, who read the first volume that summer, would have seen the stories of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the terrors of Solovki, and the details of Lubyanka Prison. He would have read about people whose fates he had mourned, couched in the rhetoric of outrage and offering all the details of their suffering.

  He would also have seen that Solzhenitsyn had chronicled the Russian émigré culture of which the Soviet people had known next to nothing. Solzhenitsyn had written about the emergence of “the incredible writer Sirin-Nabokov,” as well as the fact that Ivan Bunin had continued to write for decades in exile.60 Elsewhere, in a less laudatory mention, one of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag witnesses names Nabokov and other émigré authors. After reading their works, he wonders, “What was wrong with them?” How could the brilliant inheritors of Russian culture waste their “unutterably precious freedom” and forget their countrymen?

  By the time he read The Gulag Archipelago, Nabokov appears to have surrendered his suspicions that Solzhenitsyn was collaborating in any way with KGB schemes. And the changes wrought by Solzhenitsyn’s arrival seem to have broken Nabokov’s half-century paralysis of public inaction on Soviet matters. Nabokov finally felt that perhaps his speaking out might do more good than harm to those he championed.

  Three months after Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in Germany, Nabokov took up the cause of Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident who he noted had been held for years in a psychiatric hospital before recently being sent on to Perm. Bukovsky, who had spent years in medical detention, had most recently been sentenced for turning over case files to the West, offering incontrovertible proof of Soviet psychiatric abuses. Nabokov sent a letter to Britain’s Observer, urging “all persons and organizations that have more contact with Russia than I have to do whatever can be done to help that courageous and precious man.”61

  In Bend Sinister nearly thirty years before, Nabokov had mentioned the camps to which Bukovsky would later be sent, calling them “the ghoul-haunted Province of Perm.” But even there his veiled reference to the labor camps had been so oblique that Véra Nabokov had felt the need to make it explicit in a note for the book’s translator.62 Nabokov did not want to recapitulate the miseries of the dying and the dead with the kind of “juicy journalese” used by Solzhenitsyn, but in building something transcendent to memorialize their suffering, the question remains whether he memorialized it or obscured it.63

  As Solzhenitsyn headed into Montreux on the morning of October 6 to visit Nabokov, it is not clear if he knew that Nabokov had mocked his work in interviews and dismissed him as an inferior author. Neither is it clear if he knew about Nabokov’s recent overtures on the behalf of Bukovsky—dozens of luminaries had publicly supported that cause, and Solzhenitsyn was focused on his own mission. Given that Nabokov had written to Solzhenitsyn that he had never stopped thundering against the Soviets, it remains unknown what weight Solzhenitsyn would have given to small overtures on behalf of dissidents nearly sixty years after the Revolution.

  Solzhenitsyn, like Nabokov, had been attacked for taking help from others while giving only a cold shoulder in return. But he interpreted what he saw as Nabokov’s literary reticence on matters of Russian history as possibly beyond his fellow exile’s control, later speculating that perhaps “the circumstances of his life” had kept Nabokov from being able to serve his country by writing about its destruction.64

  Rolling up to the driveway of the Palace Hotel on their way to meet the Nabokovs, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his second wife (also named Natalia) were not clear on whether or not they were welcome. Nabokov had invited them—of that they were sure. And they had sent the date they would stop by, and had made their plans. But they had received no confirmation, and their subsequent phone calls trying to get in touch had not been answered.

  For a stemwinding prophet, Solzhenitsyn had an uncharacteristic delicacy in the matter of visits. Years before, he had heard from a former schoolmate who had been threatened with arrest based in part on comments made by Solzhenitsyn. The friend blamed Solzhenitsyn for his close call with prison, but when the latter had risen to fame, the two exchanged letters. Though they realized they had profound differences, they made a plan to meet in person.

  Goingto his friend’s apartment, Solzhenitsyn rangthebell, but there was no answer. After an hour spent waiting in the lobby, he wrote a note and started to slip it through a lidded mail slot in the door. As he did, he glimpsed the slippers on his friend’s feet through the slot as the former classmate stood motionless on the other side of the door, unwilling or unable to open it. Solzhenitsyn let down the cover and left.65 He had chosen a different road for himself, but the pain of addressing the past directly was something that he understood.

  As he neared the hotel, Solzhenitsyn did not know that Nabokov was waiting with Véra in the private dining room they had reserved for lunch. Any small harm their mutually critical comments had done was surely irrelevant in comparison to the things that admired about each other. But something made Solzhenitsyn pause.

  He acknowledged Nabokov’s genius, even as he regretted that his fellow Russian had not used his art to do anything for their homeland. Solzhenitsyn surely wanted to visit. Such a meeting, however, would be
complicated. His fondest wish was to move to a rustic cabin somewhere. Did he feel awkward in the face of the luxury setting? Was he concerned that Nabokov, who was not a young man, was ill or indisposed?

  Whatever his worries, Solzhenitsyn did not stop. He did not get out of the car. He did not go with Natalia into the private dining room of the hotel restaurant reserved for them and find the seventy-five-year-old Nabokov, who sat waiting for Solzhenitsyn.

  Instead, Solzhenitsyn—with the same sensitivity he had shown to his old friend, or perhaps with the same anxiety over the past that had kept his friend from opening the door—drove away on the Grand Rue of Montreux, heading north just a tenth of a mile to a bend in the road that was Rue du Lac. Another mile to go and they were already out of Montreux.

  Nabokov was a thoroughly modern writer, yet somehow he himself had become an anachronism. Embarking on a new existence, Solzhenitsyn was as free to leave his fellow Russian behind as the soldier in Nabokov’s first novel had been when he abandoned his childhood love at the train station and sailed into the future on his own terms.

  Vladimir and Véra Nabokov sat in the room that they had reserved, where they had hoped to talk with the man whose writing they did not admire but whose bravery they did not dispute, the man who might have understood what Nabokov had done with all those books, if Solzhenitsyn had only known that every one of them was meant to stand against totalitarianism, the man whose exile had somehow persuaded Nabokov to write a public letter during a campaign by Amnesty International in an effort to save a single “precious” life.66

  The person best equipped to see through Nabokov’s elaborate games missed his cue, defying the fate he claimed had brought them together. The Nabokovs waited at the table for more than an hour before rising to go. The two men never met.