Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008. One year later, excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago became required reading in Russian high schools, and the Moscow road formerly known as Big Communist Street was named after Russia’s most stalwart anti-Communist.92

  Today in St. Petersburg, a few memorials and museums have found a place in the cityscape. A slab of rock from Solovki sits on a pedestal in front of the House of Political Convicts. A memorial to the founder of the Cheka, that forerunner of Soviet secret police organizations, has become a museum on the history of all the political police in Russia across the centuries. Across the Neva River from Kresty Prison where Nabokov’s father was held (where others are held today) sits Mikhail Shemyakin’s monument to victims of political repression. A pair of sphinxes face each other, with a stone book and barbed-wire crown between them. Taking just a few steps around to view them from the perspective of Kresty Prison reveals half-skull faces and protruding ribs on the statues’ reverse sides.

  Germany has created many more memorials for the dead of its camps, though today no train runs from the Hamburg suburb of Bergedorf out to the stop on the grounds of the former concentration camp at Neuengamme, which remained a prison until 2003.

  Walking from the rebuilt section of track to the center of the camp, perhaps the most surprising thing is how the acres of the site stretch on and on—a single human being represents a very small presence. Fence posts remain, marking camp boundaries, but the barbed wire and even the fencing are gone. The memorial can be visited twenty-four hours a day. Vandalism happens, but camp staff reports that it is rare.93

  Taking the train from Germany to Prague in 2011, it is possible to find a car and driver and head into the countryside up and down the hills for hours with a translator who helps to locate a particular retirement home in the far eastern Czech town of Šumperk. On the upper level of the complex lives a man who was once a Gulag prisoner in the Arctic.

  A visit to the archives will reveal a copy of his NKVD file that will prove it, and then army records can confirm it, in case doubt lingers.94 Paperwork shows that the man spent nearly two years at Vorkuta before being released early for the war effort, as so many were, into the relative comfort of crossfire on the eastern front in World War II.

  Phoning ahead only leads him to say not to come, that no one wants to talk to such an old person. But pressed, he relents, and seems to like having guests. He introduces his wife as well, who will also soon turn ninety, and she talks about being deported to work in Germany during the war.

  Asked about his time in the Gulag, the man offers up stories, including a description of a stint mining ore for blacktop on Nova Zembla, where, he explains, prisoners were sometimes given an extra ration offish. He stops being at all reluctant. Offering homemade pickles and encouraging guests to stay and listen, he answers every question, sharing what he can about the camps, detailing his war service, spinning his own stories to replace whatever it is he cannot remember or cannot say, talking all about his time on Nova Zembla.

  Riding back to Prague with the translator, it is four hours to the heart of the Old Town and Charles University, where Vladimir Petkevič teaches. The great-grandson of V. D. Nabokov and grandson of Nabokov’s sister Olga, Petkevič is generous with his time, and talks about his beloved grandmother, whom nature or a privileged childhood had rendered incapable of performing even simple tasks, and his father, who died in despair in communist Czechoslovakia at the age of twenty-nine.

  Reminded that Nabokov had once written a scathing letter to Roman Jakobson, the linguist who visited the Soviet Union before its collapse, Petkevič will not defend Jakobson, though he admires the man’s work deeply. “I fully agree with Nabokov,” Petkevič says, still angry at the Western intelligentsia decades later. “I almost hated them. They didn’t understand anything. We did, we who lived here. We knew what it was like.”95

  Flying into Geneva, and taking the train around the lake to Montreux, the station sits just blocks up the hill from the Palace Hotel. It is possible to get a room in October, the time of year that Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were supposed to meet—though probably not the Nabokov Suite, which is generally booked well in advance by visiting Russians.

  One floor above the lobby, the doors stand open on the Salon de Musique, the room where Nabokov waited for Solzhenitsyn. Regulations for the preservation of historic buildings are strict, so not much has changed since Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn’s failed meeting. The present recalls the past.

  Except for some tables and chairs, and a massive chandelier, the Salon de Musique is empty in the offseason. For all the temptation to imagine literary ghosts, no spectral breeze lifts the sheer curtains. Nabokov no longer sits believing that Solzhenitsyn will come, or wonders what they will say to each other, two fiercely independent Russians with incendiary subjects, proud, suspicious, and opposed to Revolution. People book the Nabokov Suite, but no one expects to see Nabokov wander through, and no one thinks that Solzhenitsyn will arrive, young and still feigning humility, or old and hemmed in at the end by as much pride as Nabokov.

  Suggesting to Nabokov that Solzhenitsyn had nothing to write about but imprisonment, Edmund Wilson never realized how thoroughly Nabokov had mined the same theme. Solzhenitsyn recorded the suffering of prisoners; Nabokov imagined the ways they had tried to escape.

  In the end, both recorded the toll of political oppression on the human spirit. From The Gift’s immersion in penal labor under the tsars to Despair’s nods to internment camps from World War I, the death camps of Pnin and Lolita, and, always, “the torture house, the blood-bespattered wall” of the Soviet Gulag, Nabokov had tucked a record of the inhumanity of concentration camps into work after work, chronicling their crushing effects on those savaged by history.

  He had used his mother’s arts to carry on his father’s legacy, indicting anti-Semitism and condemning repression. He had subjected his characters to cruelty and mockery and violent ends, but preserved their dreams and their veiled pasts, which continued to levy a terrible toll in the present. The roots of nearly every Nabokov story lie in “the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world,” a tenderness that “is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness.”96 Teaching readers a new way of interacting with a story, speaking to them over the heads of the characters, Nabokov ridiculed social novels that aimed to transform whole societies, but he believed it possible to awaken a single reader to the collateral damage of real events—the human lives fractured and forgotten.

  Only the long view reveals Nabokov’s strategy. As a casualty of history who found a way to escape, magically, again and again, he let his most famous characters find a parallel refuge in insanity. And he, too, hid his own treasures and grief inside his stories, with their created worlds cobbled out of the brittle past: the dead of the camps, the prisoners’ wild tales, the tenderness for those he had mocked, the reflections of a world steeped in cruelty, his sorrow at everything that had been lost. Whatever tales Nabokov wished to tell, whatever history he hoped we would remember, must be earned. It is inside his stories that he sits and waits.

  CODA

  Dmitri Nabokov, who served as his father’s literary executor after the death of his mother, had his own larger-than-life experiences and mysteries. In addition to a career as an opera singer and a race car driver, he also acted in an Italian heist film and performed as his father in public readings of the Nabokov-Wilson letters. He survived a car crash in 1980 that resulted in a fractured neck and third-degree burns over almost half his body.

  In later years, he spoke to journalists and acquaintances of clandestine work he had done for the United States government, sometimes mentioning being a CIA agent, at other times making vague references to a “noble cause” to which he had been assigned on a “distant shore,” but which he had abandoned to be at his father’s bedside in the last months of Nabokov’s life.

  Dmitri Nabokov remained a devoted steward of his father’s artistic reputation and
legacy for his entire life but does not appear to have wrestled with his father’s political doubts. Reminded that Nabokov had once listed torture among the worst things humans can do, Dmitri publicly defended it as a legitimate tool in the face of suicide bombers willing to level the World Trade Center.1 He died in Vevey, Switzerland, just outside Montreux on February 2012.

  Véra Nabokov’s sister Sonia appears never to have met up with Carl Junghans again. She worked in New York as a translator at the United Nations for years, eventually moving to Geneva. Difficult as they both could be, Sonia and Véra continued to commiserate over the third, even more difficult Slonim sister, Lena, whose conversion Véra found so galling.

  Carl Junghans, Sonia’s paramour on three continents, became a gardener for Kurt Weill in Hollywood and did minor documentary work in America.2 At the end of the war, he became a witness in a high-profile U.S. trial of a suspected German spy in California. Junghans returned to Berlin years later, where he won the top German film honor, a Deutschen Filmpreis, for lifetime achievement. He died in 1984.

  Another gifted opportunist, Walter Duranty, whose accounts of life in the U.S.S.R. shaped so much of the perception of Soviet rule that Nabokov tried in vain to counter in America, fell into disgrace as history revealed the degree to which he had tilted his reporting to favor his hosts, lauding the progress of Gulag projects and denying the existence of one of the worst famines in history. Two different Pulitzer committees spent months considering whether his flawed reporting merited revocation of the Prize he had been awarded in 1932, ultimately leaving it in place but noting how far short he had fallen of the standards of journalism.

  Olga Nabokov, Nabokov’s sister in Prague, left the world a year after he did in May 1978, dying behind the Iron Curtain, receiving money from her brother’s estate each month for as long as she lived. Olga’s ex-husband Boris, for whom the Soviet Army had searched in vain on its first day in Prague during the war, died in the town of Halifax in England in 1963, working as an oiler in a textile factory.3

  Nicholas Nabokov, who seemed to live out an alternative Nabokovian life of political engagement and intrigue, died one year after his literary cousin. After the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s funding sources had been revealed, Nicholas went on to write the score for the ballet Don Quixote and collaborated with W. H. Auden on transforming Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost into an opera.

  Elena Sikorski, Nabokov’s youngest sister, outlived her brother by more than two decades. Surviving into the first months of the new century, still promoting her brother’s legacy, she was the last link to Nabokov’s family life in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Elena died in Geneva at the age of ninety-four.4

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Authors describe the writing life as one of solitude, but the time I have spent on this book has been spent in the virtual or flesh-and-blood company of many people whose intelligence and insights I have come to treasure. One of the greatest pleasures of finishing the book is having the opportunity to thank them publicly.

  The community of Nabokov scholars has been more than generous with feedback, cautionary tales, and encouragement. I would particularly like to thank Tatiana Ponomareva, the Director of the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, for her thoughts on Nabokov and her discussions of Russian history. Steven Belletto, whose focus is Cold War literature, and Matthew Roth, whose particular interest is Pale Fire, have been giving advice and assistance to me almost since I began my research. Maxim Shrayer has been thoughtful and forthcoming in conversations on Nabokov and Jewish matters for nearly as long.

  Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, who has spent years thinking about the relationship between Vladimir and Sergei Nabokov, was kind enough to include me on a Modern Language Association panel in 2009 and to give me feedback on a paper that resulted from it. That paper was submitted to a journal, where Zoran Kuzmanovich and anonymous readers improved it immeasurably before it was accepted. Gavriel Shapiro, whom I met briefly at that same MLA, was wonderfully open-minded about new approaches to Nabokov’s work. He later saw part of my research and gave me sound advice, as well as generously sharing a key detail from his own forthcoming book about Nabokov’s relationship with his father.

  Leland de la Durantaye was kind enough to let me sit in on his Nabokov seminar at the beginning of 2008, in the middle of a year I spent at Harvard as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Brian Boyd was likewise responsive when I wrote him in my first months of research with a haphazard pile of questions about Nabokov and the Gulag. He put me in touch with Leona Toker, whose expertise in both areas and thoughtful e-mail exchanges over a Pale Fire essay I had drafted spurred me to dive deeper into the history in question.

  As an academic paper turned into a book for a general audience, Stacy Schiff brought up the perils of declassified materials and generously discussed Véra Nabokov’s family with me. Michael Maar understood immediately the story I hoped to tell and made intelligent suggestions on ways to improve this book.

  In the world of Gulag and Holocaust experts, Michael Scammell provided a sounding board and kindly answered many questions about his own encounters with Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Soviet-era politics; he later also gave invaluable feedback on part of this manuscript. Reimer Möller, archivist at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, spent many hours with me, during which he recreated a typical day in the life of Neuengamme prisoners at the time Sergei Nabokov was a prisoner there.

  Anne Applebaum generously let me rifle through her mental store of Gulag history by phone and suggested several invaluable sources for this book. Steven Barnes sat down over lunch to talk about Lenin, Stalin, and recordkeeping in the Gulag. Adam Hochschild offered helpful suggestions on Crimea during the Russian Civil War. Guillaume de Syon helped me to understand the intricate restrictions faced by Jewish passport holders in France and Germany during World War II.

  Vladimir Petkevič, the grandson of Nabokov’s sister Olga, talked with me in Prague and proceeded to help with this project from a distance—I am grateful for his time, his patience, and the use of several of his family photos. Lev Grossman kindly shared archival materials with me related to the life of Sergei Nabokov.

  Translators played a key role in my research. King among them is Azat Oganesian, my research assistant, who poured through and translated interminable numbers of articles I sent him from Rul, the Russian-language newspaper in Berlin, as well as making trips to various libraries on his own to help with this project. Christine Keck and Valia Lestou generously translated German-language articles and correspondence. Ted Whang prepared letters for me in Czech. Adam Hradilek of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes led to a connection with a Gulag survivor and translated various Gulag-related Czech records that ended up being extraordinarily useful. A number of people came through with tidbits of timely translation assistance or advice—Maria Balinska (Polish), Anna Badkhen (Russian), David Hertzel (German), and Chris König (German)—for which I am grateful.

  Interpreters and guides were indispensible at various points during my travels, particularly Fedor Timofeev in St. Petersburg, and Helena Šípková-Safari in the Czech Republic, who drove far into the countryside on what would surely have been a fool’s errand had it not been for her intelligence and enthusiasm.

  The librarians and archival staff who helped with this book are legion: Peter Armenti and Travis Westly at the Library of Congress; Isaac Gewirtz, Anne Garner, and Rebecca Filner at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; Ann L. Hudak in Special Collections of the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland; M. Kiel at Berlin’s Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv; Jane A. Callahan at the Wellesley College Archives; Charles Rhéaume of the Directorate of History and Heritage at Canada’s National Defence Headquarters; Demetrius Marshall at U.S. Citizenship & Immigration genealogical research; and various staff members of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, Memory of Nations, Vassar College Library, Memorial in Russia, the Hoov
er Institution, the U.S. National Archives, Harvard’s Widener Library, the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, George Mason University’s Fenwick Library, various branches of the Arlington County and Fairfax County libraries in Virginia, and the municipal library of Montreux, Switzerland. I would also like to acknowledge the gracious assistance of the staff of the Montreux Palace Hotel.

  In terms of the work of other authors, I am deeply indebted to Stacy Schiff, Brian Boyd, and Andrew Field, the biographers of Véra and Vladimir Nabokov; Maxim Shrayer, who has been investigating the importance of Jewish themes in Nabokov’s work for many years; and, again, Michael Scammell, who was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s biographer and the translator of two of Nabokov’s Russian-language novels. I would also like to acknowledge Dieter Zimmer’s online list of residences and genealogical tables for Nabokov and his family, which saved me a good deal of time when I sat down to create my own chronology of Nabokov’s life in the context of world events.

  My gratitude for being alive in an era of electronic research is immeasurable. The digital collections of the Russian history and human rights organization Memorial, the central Yad Vashem database of Shoah victims, and The New York Times searchable archives provided invaluable information. I accessed electronic databases thousands of times to useful ends. Without digital resources, this book would have taken decades to write.

  Research that Mike Adler shared, particularly a series of concentration camp maps, was also very helpful, as were various forms of encouragement, feedback, or assistance from Peter Davis, Justin Kaplan, Anne Bernays, Rose Moss, Thorne Anderson, Marcela Valdes, Alicia Anstead, and Vasil Derd’uk.