This book would be a lesser thing without frank and generous manuscript readers. In addition those already noted above, I would like to thank Brian Snyder, Paul Lombardo, Mark Johnson, Christopher Goffard, Mary Newsom, John Ptak, and Beth Filiano.
I am tremendously grateful to the current and former staff of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, which made it possible for me to take the class that launched this project in 2008. Bob Giles, the curator of the Foundation through 2011, has been a supporter from the beginning.
Adrienne Mayor, who blazed a trail ahead of me as an independent researcher, helped make sure this book would see the light of day by introducing me to my agent, Katherine Boyle of Veritas Literary Agency. Katie has been a tireless champion of this project, a navigator in rough waters, and a source of boundless support.
I am grateful to Claiborne Hancock, Jessica Case, and Maia Larson at Pegasus Books, who have humbled me with their faith in this effort. Jessica, my editor, made many astute suggestions that shaped and refined this book. Maria Fernandez worked her design magic, while Phil Gaskill copy-edited the manuscript into shape.
On a personal level, this project has left a big footprint in my life. Without the support of friends and family, it could not have been written. For various late-night conversations, temporary takeovers of guest rooms, provision of meals, watching of children, and cheerleading, I would like to express my gratitude to Peter and Kathy Vergano, Bob and Patricia Pitzer, Sharon and Frank Mauzey, Rob Pitzer, Cecile Pratt, Gwynn Dujardin, Tom Schumacher, Karen Aldana, Matt Olson, Danielle Tezcan, Gaiutra Bahadur, Lisa Noone, Beth Macy, Kelly King, Kristina Cartwright, and Patricia Ricapa.
And finally, thanks are due to those who have contributed more than anyone else to this effort: my children, David and Kate, and my husband, Dan, who gave up many things, tangible and intangible, so that I could travel the world, research, and write. Across the last five years, Dan in particular has given me a tremendous gift, never wavering in his belief that this story had to be told.
While many institutions and individuals around the world are doing wonderful work, much more needs to be done to preserve the details of the past and consider its role in the present. Twenty percent of the author’s proceeds of this book will be donated to relevant charities, split evenly between Nabokov-related organizations and memorial groups focusing on the Holocaust and the Gulag. For more details, or to find out how to donate, please visit 3www.nabokovsecrethistory.com.
ABBREVIATIONS
The Works of Vladimir Nabokov
ADA
Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle
ANL
The Annotated Lolita
BEND
Bend Sinister
CE
Conclusive Evidence
DEFS
The Defense
DESP
Despair
EO
Eugene Onegin (1990)
GIFT
The Gift
ITAB
Invitation to a Beheading
KQK
King, Queen, Knave
LL
Lectures on Literature
LRL
Lectures on Russian Literature
LATH
Look at the Harlequins!
Mary
Mary
NG
Nikolai Gogol
PF
Pale Fire
PNIN
Pnin
RLSK
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
SM
Speak, Memory
SO
Strong Opinions
SP
Selected Poems, edited by Thomas Karshan
STOR
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
USSR
The Man from the U.S.S.R. & Other Plays
Abbreviations for Other Works and Sources
AFLA
Vladimir Nabokov: His Life in Art, by Andrew Field (1967)
AFLP
Vladimir Nabokov: His Life in Part, by Andrew Field (1978)
BBAY
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd (1991)
BBRY
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, by Brian Boyd (1990)
Berg
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature The New York Public Library
BFA
Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin
FBI
U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation
LC
Library of Congress
NYRB
The New York Review of Books
NWL
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, edited by Simon Karlinsky (2001)
NYT
The New York Times
Schiff
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff (2000)
USNA
United States National Archive
TWATD
The Twelve Who Are To Die: The Trial of the Socialists-Revolutionists, by the Delegation of the Party of the Socialists-Revolutionists (Berlin, 1922)
USHMM
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
USCIS
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
VNM
Vladimir Nabokov Museum
Wellesley
Wellesley College Archives
VNSL
Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940–1977, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Bruccoli (1991)
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 Chesme Palace’s House of Invalids sits next to Chesme Church in the southern part of St. Petersburg.
2 See “A Visit to the Museum” for a story in which a trip to a museum in France transports its narrator to a Russian police state.
CHAPTER ONE: WAITING FOR SOLZHENITSYN
1 Assessments of Lolita: “funny,” William Styron; “the only convincing love story of our century,” Vanity Fair; and “the filthiest book I have ever read” by John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express.
2 John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe: BBAY, 407–8.
3 a stable of stories: See the Lolita-related dissection of period films in Graham Vickers’ Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again (2008), 76–83.
4 cried herself to sleep each night: Humbert himself notes Lolita’s nightly tears (176).
5 Oates, Joyce Carol, “A Personal View of Nabokov,” Saturday Review, January 6, 1973, 36–7. See Phyllis Roth’s Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov (1984) for the original, as well as a postscript Oates later added to her essay.
6 The Updike quote is from “Van Loves Ada; Ada Loves Van,” The New Yorker, August 2, 1969, 70; Amis’s description comes from “Martin Amis on Lolita,” an essay published by Random House for the 100th anniversary of Nabo kov’s birth; for forty years: From Karlinsky’s “Nabokov and Chekhov: the lesser Russian tradition,” Triquarterly, Winter 1970, 7–16. This history is also discussed by Leland de la Durantaye in “The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in Vladimir Nabokov,” The Cambridge Quarterly (October 2006), 301–326.
7 Eliot: NWL, 263; Dostoyevsky: LRL, 104; Faulkner: NWL, 239; Pasternak: SO, 57. The Pasternak reference is to Doctor Zhivago, a novel Nabokov abhorred, though he found Pasternak’s early poetry remarkable. When it came to women novelists, Nabokov would make an exception for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and occasionally offered kind words privately about books written by women, such as his praise of some of Mary McCarthy’s fiction. In SM (177), Nabokov mentions his dislike of Stendhal, Balzac, and Zola. Malraux and James are dismissed on NWL (19).
8 the highest human virtues: “What is the best?” “To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.” (SO, 152); bloody nose: BBRY, 267.
9 “admirable work”: VNSL, 378; could not, at any rate, be compared to Stalin’s: SO, 50.
10 Excerpt from Khrushchev’s speech as quoted by Alexander Tv
ardovsky in the foreword to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (2008), vii.
11 Mikhail Sholokhov on Solzhenitsyn: See Grose, Peter, “Moscow Unrelenting in Blackout on Solzhenitsyn,” NYT, December 12, 1968, 4.
12 Nabokov receiving only two votes: Slonim, Marc, “European Notebook,” NYT, November 8, 1970, 316.
13 Gwertzman, Bernard, “Solzhenitsyn Shuns Nobel Trip,” NYT, November 28, 1970, 1.
14 Lewis, Anthony, “Solzhenitsyn Hailed Despite Absence at Presentation of 1970 Nobel Awards,” NYT, December 11, 1970, 3.
15 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, “Excerpts from Nobel Lecture by Solzhenitsyn,” NYT, 25 August 1972, 2.
16 CBS Evening News, “Solzhenitsyn Arrested,” Tuesday, February 14, 1974.
17 Scammell, Michael, Solzhenitsyn (1984), 857; Shabad, Theodore, “Expulsion by Soviet Highly Unusual Step,” NYT, February 14, 1974, 16. It was not lost on readers at the time that expulsion had been only the first tactic used against Trotsky, whose name became synonymous with hysteria over supposed anti-Soviet sabotage and whose life ended with a lurid assassination in Mexico.
18 Olof Palme: “Three Nations to Welcome Author,” The New York Times, February 14, 1974, 1; Kissinger: “U.S., Britain and Germany Offer To Welcome Author,” NYT, February 14, 1974, 85.
19 suggesting that he had been an informer: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 952.
20 Former prisoner Michael Romanenko had written about GULAG as the acronym for Soviet camp administration in a survey of the Russian penal system publicized in the West as early as 1948, and The New York Times men tioned and explained the title of Solzhenitsyn’s “The Archipelago of Gulag” as early as November 1969. But it was The Gulag Archipelago that gave the word its current meaning of a prison camp system in which forced labor played the lead punitive role for a totalitarian police state.
Kennan: “Speaking Truth To Power,” The Economist, August 7, 2008; a public firestorm in French politics: The Italian CP broke with Moscow, but the French CP attacked Solzhenitsyn, sealing a doom that had (for other reasons) long been approaching. Kritzman, Lawrence et al., The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (2007), 193; Scott, Michael, et al., French Intellectuals Against the Left (2004), 89–94.
21 a staggering number: Once records were available, it became possible to assemble a ballpark figure for executions during the Great Purge, though no definitive number exists. In his biography of Stalin, Robert Service estimates that approxi mately a thousand people a day were shot during the two worst years of Stalin’s purges, and another thousand expired on average each week in the camps (356).
every other account: Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) had attempted to comprehensively document Stalin’s Purges, but had to do so without access to many of the personal accounts that Solzhenitsyn was able to review.
22 his favorite writers: A statement made by Nabokov to the Wellesley College News, mentioned in BBAY, 122.
23 not special enough: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 25.
24 lone article in a regional paper: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 381.
25 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation: 1918–1956 (1974), vol. 1, 163.
26 BBAY, 648.
27 an interview for The New York Times: Shenker, “The Old Magician at Home,” BR2; “juicy journalese”: BBAY, 648; Véra on Solzhenitsyn: Schiff, 343 and428n.
28 “cackles of laughter” and “manly prose”: Levy, Alan, “Understanding Vladimir Nabokov: A Red Autumn Leaf Is a Red Autumn Leaf, Not a Deflowered Nymphet,” NYT Magazine, October 31, 1971, 20; In a letter: VNSL, 496.
29 VNSL, 528.
30 Kramer, Hilton, “A Talk with Solzhenitsyn,” NYT Book Review, May 11, 1980, BR1.
31 SeeSM, 27.
32 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 906.
33 Interview for BBC Bookstand program, 1962.
CHAPTER TWO: CHILDHOOD
1 a sensitive woman: BBRY, 32.
2 Joseph Hessen, one of V. D. Nabokov’s closest friends: “For his part, V. D. Nabokov loved to speak about his children, particularly his oldest son whom, I repeat, he literally idolized, and his wife and her parents did this even more so than he …” AFLP, 92.
3 “The Butcher”: General Valeriano Weyler. See Stuart Creighton Miller’s Benevo lent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines 1898–1903, 3.
4 nearly christened Victor: SM, 21; Russian Orthodox archpriest: Father Konstantin Vetvenitski. SM, 21. See “New Light on Nabokov’s Russian Years” (Cycnos, Volume 10, No. 1) for Boyd’s corrections to the baptism story in BBRY.
5 Monas, Silas, “Across the Threshold: The Idiot as a Petersburg tale,” from New Essays on Dostoyevsky (2010), 68.
6 Another prisoner at the Fortress was Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother who was tried and executed for his bomb-making role in the attempted assas sination of Tsar Alexander III.
7 SM, 53.
8 AFLP, 92. During her St. Petersburg days, Olga would become good friends with Alyssa Rosenbaum, who later gained fame in exile under her adopted name, Ayn Rand. For more on Rand and Nabokov, see D. Barton Johnson’s “Nabokov, Ayn Rand, and Russian-American Literature or, the Odd Couple,” Cycnos, vol. 12, no. 2, 1995:100–108.
9 boys were permitted: The girls, by contrast, had to settle for books that were chosen for them. AFLP, 94; never friends: “‘They were never friends,’ says Sikorski. ‘There was always an aversion.’” See Lev Grossman’s “The Gay Nabokov,” Salon, May 17, 2001. Much of the rest of the description of Nabokov’s childhood relationship with Sergei is taken from SM.
10 terrorized his son: SM, 72; BBRY, 30.
11 nervous, brittle woman: Nabokov, Nicolas, Bagazh: Memoirs of a Russian Cos mopolitan (1975), 108; letters and numbers in color: Nabokov would describe the synesthesia he shared with his mother in detail in SM.
12 moldy and remote little kingdom: SM, 45.
13 SM, 58.#8211;9.
14 While agreeing that measures needed to be taken against what was seen at that time as rising Jewish economic power, Nabokov’s grandfather resisted the ad hoc implementation of the May Laws, new anti-Semitic measures. See Klier, John, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–82 (2011), 216.
15 choosing to stay with his fellow detainees: BBRY, 27.
16 more attention than his wife’s: AFLP, 87.
17 “massacre these vile Jews”: The Bessarabetz, whose translated article appears in James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard’s Readings in Modern European History, vol. 2 (1909), 371–372.
18 Facing a rising tide of intolerance and seeing their legal status worsen year after year, more than two million Jews left Russia between 1881 (the year Alexander II was assassinated) and 1914. Obolensky-Ossinski’s work from 1928 is quoted from Demography: Analysis and Synthesis (426).
19 SM, 188.
20 “Chinese for Jews: Benefits for Kishineff Sufferers in Doyers Street Theater,” NYT, May 12, 1903, 3.
21 the same publisher: Pavel Krushevan later also represented Kishinev in the Second Duma; complete forgeries: purporting to be an account of a meeting of rabbis that occurred once a century to plot world domination, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a Russian stew cooked out of existing European novels and stories. The original tales had nothing to do with Jews, rising instead out of rants against Freemasons, political condemnations of Napoleon III, and the fictional melodramas of French writer Eugene Sue, author of The Wandering Jew, whose literary sins were many in the eyes of Vladimir Nabokov and included undue influence on Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
22 off the low bridges: “Russian Tells Story of Sunday’s Massacre,” NYT, January 25, 1905, 1; breaking windows and taking fruit: “Civil War Threatened,” NYT, January 23, 1905, 1; were picked off by soldiers: SM, 184. Nabokov was not in St. Petersburg at the time. BBRY, 54.
23 Peter and Paul Fortress: Revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky was also arrested and imprisoned at this time. See Simon Oscar Pollock’s The Russian Bastille (1908), 1
2.
fighting Japanese sailors: “Russian Tells Story of Sunday’s Massacre,” NYT, January 25, 1905, 1.
24 stripped of his court title: BBRY, 57; “dark forces”: SM, 155.
25 unanimous passage: BBRY, 34; preparation of a petition: Pipes, Richard, A Concise History of The Russian Revolution (1996), 47; “lounging … and openly smirking”: Morrison, John, “The State Duma: A Political Experiment,” from Russia Under the Last Tsar, Anna Geifman, ed. (1999), 146.
26 Stockdale, Melissa, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia (1996), 162.
27 a leading Kadet: Mikhail Gertsenshtein—see Hoffman, Stefani and Ezra Men delsohn, The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews (2008), 63; friends convinced him of the wisdom: BBRY, 67.
28 Holdups and burglaries: The S.R.s officially repudiated their extremist members and cousins, but on a local level they often accommodated the violent deeds, resorting to theft and extortion themselves. As parts of Russia fell into gangster anarchy, the economic terrorism provided cover for the Tsar to further restrict liberties and establish martial law. See Geifman, Anna, Thou Shalt Kill (1995), 75–77.
Lenin: While it may not be possible to pinpoint the first time V. D. Nabokov first heard of Lenin as Lenin, a strong guess can be made as to when he first encountered the family name of Ulyanov. Lenin’s older brother Alexander had come to the capital in 1883 to study at St. Petersburg University, where he joined the terrorist wing of a revolutionary group. When two would-be bombers were arrested on Nevsky Prospect in an assassination attempt on the life of the Tsar, the trail led back to Alexander. He confessed, claiming responsibility for the plot, for building the bomb, for everything—far more responsibility, in all likelihood, than he actually had. But he refused to express remorse and was executed by hanging on May 8, 1887.
Since the name Lenin was not even a whisper in history’s mind at that point, it is possible to feel a profound sympathy for the sixteen-year-old Vladimir Ulyanov, sitting in his progressive home at Simbirsk in southern Russia in the last days of studying with his sister Olga for his gymnasium (roughly the equivalent of high school) exams. News of their brother’s death arrived in the first days of the month-long testing. In a testament to their education, intelligence, or resoluteness, both Vladimir and Olga received the highest marks available in all ten subjects. His teacher, headmaster Fyodor Kerensky, would write with pity to recommend the young Vladimir for university study, explaining his brilliance and preemptively defending his moral development, while acknowledging that he was highly antisocial. See Robert Service’s Lenin: A Biography (2002), 59–62.
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