Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  29 Lenin, Vladimir, “When You Hear the Judgement of a Fool,” pamphlet dated January 1907.

  30 They were tried under article 129, which set penalties for “inciting rebellion, ‘sowing hostilities between classes or specific groups of the population,’ or advocating the overthrow of the existing civil structure of the state.” Lennoe, Matthew Edward, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (2010).

  31 SM, 29; BBRY, 76.

  32 a treasured catch from his own childhood: SM, 75: Vladimir sent a butterfly: BBRY, 76.

  33 V.D. Nabokov’s mother had forbidden: BBRY, 77.

  34 SM, 68.

  35 SM, 188; BBRY, 98.

  36 even from those who liked him: SM, 74.

  37 SM, 160. The Jewish Zelenski’s family had at some point converted to Lutheranism—a path taken, as Maxim D. Shrayer notes, by many Russian Jews to avoid restrictions and quotas established in the 1880s. See his article “Jewish questions in Nabokov’s art and life” in Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives (1999).

  38 SM, 185.

  39 AFLP, 123.

  40 Nabokov helped edit: BBRY, 118.

  41 passages that clarified Sergei’s homosexuality: SM, 257–8; several distressing romances: BBRY, 106.

  42 his schoolmaster described him: Boyd, “New Light on Nabokov’s Russian Years.”

  43 begging on his knees: SM, 188.

  44 Geifman, Anna, ed., Russia Under the Last Tsar (1999).

  45 Geifman, Russia Under the Last Tsar, 161–3.

  46 “Russians Anxious over Beiliss Jury,” NYT, November 2, 1913, C4.

  47 Samuel, Maurice. Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case (1996), 230.

  48 enough Christians to go around: Samuel, 213; no Jews left to save: Samuel, 27.

  49 One trial chronicler: Maurice Samuel; groups clearly supporting Beilis’s prosecution: one French newspaperman helpfully put together a book of accounts of Jewish ritual murder from the last eight centuries; might be committing ritual murder: Samuel, 239.

  50 could not be kept aloft: The priest who had written on the dark rituals of the Talmud was found, upon cross-examination, to not know much about the Talmud at all. The police officer who had investigated the murder refused to participate in the sham trial and, after being fired from his job, went on to publicly identify the boy’s real killers. Hundreds of telegrams arrived to congratulate Beilis; telephone switchboard operators in Russia announced the word “Acquitted!” before they even asked callers which number to dial. No pogroms erupted in protest, but Beilis had to be taken back to his cell until the crowds dispersed. He left the following year for Palestine. Samuel, 249–254.

  51 Samuel, 26 (taken from Alexander Tager’s Decay of Tsarism).

  CHAPTER THREE: WAR

  1 composing verse for years: BBRY, 108.

  2 SM, 232.

  3 V. D. Nabokov was mobilized: BBRY, 111; could not bridge the deep-rooted subservience: SM, 47.

  4 Stibbe, Matthew, “The Internment of Civilians by Belligerent States during the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 41, no. 1, January 2006.

  5 exonerations did not take place as planned: In addition, civilian prisoners were often housed alongside soldiers or sailors captured in battle. Since the civilians were not actually prisoners of war (even when they were held in the same camps with them), civilian internees generally had fewer rights than the captured soldiers.

  languished near starvation for years: Tiepolo, Tiepolo, Serena, ed., “Reports of the delegates of the Embassy of the United States of America in St. Petersburg on the situation of the German prisoners of war and civil person in Russia,” (1916) gathered as extracts in DEP, no. 4 (2006), 2–3. The toll of civilian internment eventually got a political label when “barbed-wire syndrome” entered the diplomatic lexicon during the war (see Stibbe). From the first years of its existence, it was understood as a hysterical psychosis followed by depression, a disease with literary antecedents drawn from the real world: Napoleon’s incarceration at St. Helena, Dostoyevsky’s stories of Siberian convicts, and the diaries kept by polar explorers. See “Military Medicine” entry in Medical Record, November 30, 1918, 944. The stress of ongoing imprisonment for civilian and military prisoners alike led to a new kind of conflict casualty that was recognized during the war by both Britain and Germany as grounds for transfer to a neutral country. Yet the Red Cross and other brokers had great difficulty carrying out these transfers on the massive level that was required.

  6 The hereditary nobility often escaped such measures, but as rhetoric escalated, there were dramatic detentions of high-ranking civilians in camps (Stibbe, 10).

  7 tools of Imperial justice for centuries: Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin had all been sentenced to exile—though Trotsky and Stalin had escaped. See Robert Service’s Stalin: a biography (68) and Trotsky: a biography (67–69). See also Chapter 15 of Trotsky’s autobiography My Life (1930).

  8 savaged in the minor press: SM, 238; Hessen expressed his dismay: BBRY, 118; under no circumstances: SM, 238.

  9 SM, 199–200.

  10 made him a millionaire: SM, 71; less than pleased: BBRY, 121.

  11 SM, 240.

  12 Service, Lenin, 253.

  13 a red flag was hung: “Revolution in Russia; Czar Abdicates,” NYT, March 16, 1917, 1; the first corpse he had seen: SM, 89.

  14 Realizing he would likely be forced into exile, Nicholas was reluctant to leave his adolescent, hemophiliac son at the helm of their collapsing nation.

  15 Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Young Stalin (2008), 309.

  16 Service, Lenin, 256.

  17 Medlin, Virgin and Steven Parsons, V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government (2006), 119.

  18 For Trotsky’s account of his time in a concentration camp, see Chapter 23 of his autobiography.

  19 Buchanan, George, My Mission to Russia (1923), 120–1.

  20 Anne Applebaum notes that “kontslager first appeared in Russian as a transla tion from the English, probably through Trotsky’s familiarity with the history of the Boer War” (Gulag, xxxiv). His first-hand experience of a British camp further underlines the British connection Applebaum mentions and offers an even more direct route.

  21 Medlin and Parsons, V. D. Nabokov, 149.

  22 supporting the imposition of the death penalty: Gavriel Shapiro mentions this incident in his forthcoming book The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father. His source is Ariadna Tyrkova, “V. D. Nabokov i pervaia duma,” Russkaia mysl´ 6–7 (1922): 272–83.

  buttons … should be banned: Medlin and Parsons, 134.

  23 sophisticated older Jewish girl: Eva Lubrzynska. BBRY, 123.

  24 machine-gun fire in the streets: BBRY, 133; armed street fighters: SM, 181–2.

  25 taking his exams weeks early: BBRY, 133; AFLP, 137. Nabokov’s marks would fall just shy of Lenin’s perfect exam record from two decades earlier.

  26 SM, 243.

  27 staying … would merely return him to prison: Medlin and Parsons, V. D. Nabokov, 173–77.

  28 the Bolsheviks demanded to be recognized as the majority: Their argument was that a November split in the Socialist Revolutionary Party invalidated the election results. They claimed that the S.R. faction that now allied itself with the Bolsheviks made the Bolshevik Party the majority.

  29 “Bolsheviki Drowned Victims in Masses,” NYT, June 4, 1918, 5.

  30 an estate that Tolstoy had visited years before: They stayed at the home of Countess Sofia Panin (BBRY, 136). Panin was detained in Petrograd at the time, in prison. After decades of work establishing and funding workers’ facilities, Panin would find herself the first person tried by the Bolshevik Revolutionary tribunals. “Farcical Trial of Countess Panin,” NYT, December 26, 1917, 2.

  31 when Kaiser Wilhelm’s divers swept the harbor: Brian Boyd first noted Count Obolensky’s memoir and the poem, “Yalta Pier,” that Nabokov composed that summer (BBRY, 148). Additional reports appear in German and even
American newspapers of bodies washing up on the shore en masse in the months after the executions.

  32 BBRY, 157.

  33 “Strike at the Jews”: Fishman, Lala and Steve Weingartner, Lala’s Story: a memoir of the Holocaust (1998), 28; hundreds of pogroms: Pipes, A Concise History, 262.

  34 Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews (2008), 32. Regrettably, the Protocols that had fanned the flames of prejudice made their way back from the war, in English translations passed to European and American officials who believed them, and tucked into the rucksacks of doughboys who had served in several the aters of war.

  Churchill himself, however, was caught up in the same framework for discussing Jewry that so often hampered useful discussions, citing an openly anti-Semitic historian in 1920 to support the idea of a “sinister confederacy” of “International Jews” that had threatened the world for more than a century and calling on Jews to stand against it. (“Zionism versus Bolshevism,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, 5.)

  35 tens of thousands of Jews were massacred: The degree to which Petliura himself advocated, permitted, or discouraged these murders is, a century later, still a matter of widespread and heated debate. Petliura’s forces fought both the Bolsheviks and the White Army in the drive for Ukrainian independence.

  more than a hundred pogroms: For more on the atrocities, read Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Babel witnessed the violence of the region firsthand in 1920, as a traveling journalist embedded with a cavalry unit.

  fifty to one hundred thousand Jews: Pipes, A Concise History, 264. Just as White Army forces had associates like V. D. Nabokov, who were horrified by the targeting of Jews and the attacks on civilians, a segment of actors on all sides urged restraint. In some regions, activists of different religions and cultural identities tried to band together to organize democratic rule locally. The independent Ukrainian state even created a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. Their efforts, however, met the same fate as V. D. Nabokov’s idealism. In addition, Jewish civil defense leagues united and occasionally fought off marauding forces, but their successes were overshadowed by the militant anti-Semitism arrayed against them. For more detailed attention to the complexity of the region, see Henry Abramson’s A Prayer for the Government, Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (1999).

  36 “Jewish-looking young men”: Medlin and Parsons, 43; could “have been called the Sanhedrin”: Medlin and Parsons, 151. The latter is a strange aside for a formal political account—and Nabokov’s father quickly notes that the Jewish Council Member sitting next to him pointed it out first.

  “servile”: Medlin and Parsons, 128; “impudentJewish face” and belonging to “the repulsive figure”: Medlin and Parsons, 177. The face belongs to Moisei Uritskii.

  37 Virgil Medlin and Stephen Parsons, the translators of V. D. Nabokov’s memoir, found “the apparent evidences of anti-Semitism” troublesome and asked Vladimir Nabokov directly about them. Nabokov replied that his father had believed himself so beyond accusations of anti-Semitism that he “used to make it a point—and go out of his way to make it—of being as plainspoken about Jew and Gentile as were his Jewish colleagues …” (10).

  38 “burning hatred of the English”: Zeman, Zbyněk A. B., Germany and the Revolution in Russia: documents from the archives of the German Foreign Ministry (1958), 82. Trotsky had immortalized his Nova Scotian detour in one of the earliest documents in the widely circulated Red Army traveling library col lection. Trotsky’s pamphlet on his incarceration appeared before Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto on the list of documents prioritized for inclusion in front-line traveling libraries.

  a concentration camp: Applebaum, Gulag, 8.

  39 the sort of people: Some POWs and enemy aliens had been released after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which ended Russia’s participation in the war, but many in the south sheltered in place amid the turbulent back-and-forth of the Civil War, lacking money, food, or a safe path to try to get home.

  Trotsky wrote a memo: Applebaum, Gulag, 8.

  “sweeping floors,” etc.: Trotsky, Leon, “A Prisoner of the English,” a Red Army pamphlet dated May 17, 1917.

  40 Applebaum, Gulag, 8.

  41 Ibid.

  42 Nabokov himself would make this distinction later in Bend Sinister: “While the system of holding people in hostage is as old as the oldest war, a fresher note is introduced when a tyrannic state is at war with its own subjects and may hold any citizen in hostage with no law to restrain it” (xiii).

  43 “regime of bloodshed, concentration camps, and hostages”: CE, 176.

  44 Nabokov must have been persuasive enough—Boyd notes that the soldiers ended up bringing butterflies to him soon after (BBRY, 142).

  45 make his stage debut: AFLP, 131.

  46 godforsaken: AFLP, 131; Medlin and Parsons, 35; make use of the libraries: BBRY, 149–150.

  47 The nineteen-year-old Vladimir would remember that V. D. Nabokov referred to his title as minister “of minimal justice,” and in truth, with the regional government dependent upon the Volunteer Army for protection, justice was ill-served in the south. V. D. Nabokov found himself badly positioned to prosecute military abuses, and was distrusted as part of a government led by both Jewish and Tatar elements. He managed to transform the local judiciary but could not do much more (BBRY, 155 and 158; SM, 177). Dana Dragunoiu writes of a case in which known Bolsheviks had killed Army officers. Army officers demanded the death penalty, but the regional government had outlawed it. The proceedings were moved to another location that was more stable, and on the way, the soldiers responsible for transporting them shot the defendants. Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (2011), 123.

  48 SM, 200; AFLP, 134; BBRY, 158.

  49 westward to Sebastopol in a car and misappropriated government funds: BBRY, 159.

  CHAPTER FOUR: EXILE

  1 lice-ridden quarters: AFLP, 135. Lice were more than unpleasant—they were a vehicle for the transmission of typhus, which killed more people in the Russian Civil War than died in combat. See Evan Mawdsley’s The Russian Civil War (2007), 287.

  a single glass of water: AFLP, 135.

  2 BBRY, 163.

  3 Ibid., 164.

  4 Nabokov, V. D. “A Distressing Problem,” February 7, 1920, from Struggling Russia, Volume 2, Arkady Joseph Sack, ed., 737. My thanks to Matthew Roth for passing along this piece.

  5 New Russia: Rul eulogies of V. D. Nabokov, March and April 1922, LC; jewels were sold: BBRY, 165.

  6 transcript of Samuil Rosov: Nabokov was apparently showing it to them to explain that he and Rosov had received nearly identical marks, but college admissions staff members seem to have thought it was Nabokov’s own. AFLP, 137.

  changed to literature: BBRY, 170.

  7 Lucie Leon’s reminiscences, Triquarterly, Winter 1970, 212.

  8 AFLP, 139–40; BBRY, 168. The count, Robert de Calry, had a Russian mother but had not grown up in Russia.

  9 threatened with fines: BBRY, 167; got into fistfights: BBRY, 181; smeared food, etc.: BBRY, 175.

  10 did not see eye to eye: SM, 261; whom V. D. Nabokov had hosted: SO, 104; praised Bolshevik ideals: Wells did make a point of finding some Bolshevik methods problematic but regrettably necessary—which given his general support, was a finer point that would not likely have impressed either V. D. Nabokov or his son. “H. G. Wells Lost in the Russian Shadow,” NYT, December 5, 1920, 102.

  “Kill the Yids!”: BBRY, 179.

  11 amusing and regrettable: BBRY, 179; AFLP, 139.

  Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Those Protocols had made their way west in the luggage or pockets of more than one Russian exile, and had become instantly popular abroad. They would in short order be translated, printed, and distributed across five continents. But they received what may have been their biggest boost a year after Nabokov’s arrival in England, when American inventor Henry Ford incorporated them into a series of articles for The Dearborn Independent, which had a vast circulation. The same year, F
ord also published The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a book drawn from the first installments of the series. It purported to make a clear link between Bolshevism and a Jewish plot for world hegemony. The book alone was translated into more than a dozen languages, and soon made its way back to Russia (see USHMM Web site, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007244).

  By 1921 the Protocols had been definitively debunked as a hoax in the Times of London, which outed the original stories and novels from which they had been cribbed (originally denunciations not of Jews, but of Napoleon and freemasons). They would nonetheless continue to proliferate worldwide.

  12 “Jewish revolution”: Belloc, Hilaire, The Jews (1922), 182; “provoked and promoted by Jewish interests”: Belloc, 50; “a monopoly of Jewish international news agents”: Belloc, 48; proportional representation: Belloc, 48.

  13 longing letters: BBRY, 177; “composing verse”: 167; SM, 268.

  14 BBRY, 180; STOR, 4–5.

  15 BBRY, 189.

  16 Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration: Once Hoover had signed on, the Soviets disbanded their own domestic relief committee and arrested several of its members. Yedlin, Tova, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography (1999), 135–6.

  five million people: Lynch, Allen, How Russia Is Not Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development (2005), 67.

  17 SM, 179.

  18 Lutz, Ralph Haswell, The German Revolution, vol. 1 (1922), 129.

  19 Frank Foley: “Address given at the unveiling of a plaque commemorating Foley’s service,” British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, February 11, 2011; Willi Lehmann: Siddiqi, Asif, The Rockets’ Red Glare (2010), 171; “central office for espionage abroad”: Lukes, Igor, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s (1996), 20.