Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  20 Milyukov continued to see the Socialist Revolutionaries as the vital link, but V. D. Nabokov resisted the notion of playing to class concerns or joining an international revolutionary front. As unlikely as V. D. Nabokov’s interventionist strategies were, Milyukov’s current approach represented equally wishful thinking. By the end of 1921, the Socialist Revolutionaries certainly had no interest in a Kadet alliance. They were undercut from the Left by Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed farmers to retain control over much of their crops, wiping out a source of farmer and peasant affection for the S.R.s. After months of Milyukov’s efforts to build bridges, the Russian S.R. leadership openly rejected his courting, repeating descriptions of him as “a pittiful (sic) fragment of the Kadet party” and saying that he “represented nobody.” The S.R.s were not playing hard to get—they had had enough of the Bolsheviks trying to link them to monarchists and anti-revolutionary forces, and they were not about to help their opponents make the case.

  21 BBRY, 189.

  22 Ibid., 180–1.

  23 Ibid., 192.

  24 “Czarist Officers Shot at Milukov,” NYT, March 30, 1922, 3.

  25 Ibid.

  26 “The Death of V. D. Nabokov,” Rul, March 30, 1922, LC.

  27 “Anti-Milukov Plot Under Munich Inquiry,” NYT, March 31, 1922, 3.

  28 Shabelski-Bork also held Milyukov responsible for the hardships suffered by the Russian émigré community, and claimed to have written repeatedly to demand the return of letters belonging to the Tsarina which Milyukov had in his possession. Taboritski, who at first claimed not to be involved in the plot, later confessed to a part in the conspiracy but claimed he had not shot anyone. “Czarist Officers Shot at Milukov,” NYT, March 30, 1922, 3.

  29 The police, however, made clear that they could not guarantee the mon archists’ safety and demanded the cancellation of the conference. Trains heading south from the city were monitored for any collaborators who might have been planning to flee. “Czarist Officers Shot at Milukov,” NYT, March 30, 1922, 3.

  30 “Anti-Milukov Plot Under Munich Inquiry,” NYT, March 31, 1922, 3; Rul, March 29, 1922, LC.

  31 BBRY, 198.

  32 Milyukov’s tribute to V. D. Nabokov in the pages of Rul, March 30, 1922, LC.

  33 Taken from a March 19, 1922 letter from Lenin to Molotov on the Black Hundreds’ anti-clerical campaign. The Bolsheviks had already revoked the amnesty extended years earlier to the S.R.s who had opposed them in the Civil War. When new waves of arrests unfolded in early 1922, the number of targeted groups expanded to include additional S.R. leaders, priests, academics, and intellectuals.

  34 Nabokov would reference decades later: EO, Commentary, Part2, 121–2; above the table hung a red banner: Early film footage exists from the trial and the public holiday/pro-death penalty events occurring surrounding it.

  35 Chief among the foreign attorneys was Belgian Emile Vandervelde, former chair of the Second Internationale, a collective of socialist and labor organizations to which Lenin and Trotsky had previously belonged for nearly a decade.

  36 The defendants were divided into three groups: those who had committed lesser offenses, those who had become witnesses for the prosecution, and twelve prisoners who pleaded not guilty. The group of twelve represented the heart of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia. “Thirty-four Persons on Trial,” NYT, June 10, 1922, 5.

  37 foreign attorneys announced: Shub, David, “The Trial of the SRs,” Russian Review, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct 1964), 366. News reports appeared suggesting that Vandervelde had been assassinated, but in truth, the attorneys had only been detained. They were refused exit visas and had to go on a hunger strike before they were permitted to leave Russia.

  38 TWATD, 22; Yedlin, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography, 162.

  39 Duranty, Walter, “Soviet Chiefs Stage Anti-Treason Show,” NYT, June 22, 1922, 3.

  40 TWATD, 84.

  41 waited ten hours: TWATD, 86.

  42 Nabokov liked Blok’s poetry in general but loathed “The Twelve,” which he described as having a “pink cardboard Jesus” stuck onto its end (Gold, Herbert, “The Art of Fiction, No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov,” interview from The Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1967). In TWATD, Karl Kautsky, a German Marxist who had fallen out with Lenin and Trotsky, writes: “There is no material difference between the rule of a ‘legal’ Czar and a clique that accidentally established itself in power. There is no difference between a tyrant who lives in a palace and a despot who misused the revolution of the workers and peasants to ascend into the Kremlin.”

  43 “a slow torturous death”: Rul, August 15, 1922, LC; sent to concentration camps: Rul, August 25, 1922, LC.

  CHAPTER FIVE: AFTERMATH

  1 BBRY, 194.

  2 SP, 7.

  3 BBRY, 194.

  4 the acquisition of a steady job: BBRY, 196; as good as the women: “Hives of Russian Refugees,” NYT, Jan 8, 1922, 84.

  5 De Bogory, Nathalie, “The New Russian Exile and the Old,” NYT, April 24, 1921, BRM4.

  6 down to one meal a day: “The New Russian Exile and the Old,” NYT, April 24, 1921, BRM4; “Princesses Work as Riga Typists,” NYT, May 3, 1921, 8; fever for hidden jewels: Stories of men and women being tortured to death in the hunt for concealed treasure leaked out from Russia in the first years after the Revolu tion. See, for example, “Streams of Jewels Out of Russia,” NYT, June 11, 1922, 91.

  7 “Dying Refugees Crawl into Brest-Litovsk,” NYT, August 9, 1921, 3.

  8 stagnant quarters: “Constantinople’s Russians,” NYT, April 23, 1922, 105; dying with a slow grace: “Hives of Russian Refugees,” 84.

  9 AFLP, 147.

  10 Alice in Wonderland, whose heroine Nabokov transformed into Anna, became Anya v Stranye Chudes in Russian.

  11 Nabokov worked in the orchards of Solomon Krym, who had headed up the Crimean regional government in which Nabokov’s father had been Minister of Justice.

  12 “awaited one”: BBRY, 207; lost permission to practice: As Maxim D. Shrayer notes in “Jewish Questions in Nabokov’s Art and Life,” Véra’s father had refused to solve the problem, by converting to Christianity, as so many others had (75). See also AFLP, 177.

  13 Nabokov had grown up with tales of explorers and adventures from childhood, and the rough outline of events and language he chose hew surprisingly close to those of the real Scott’s journal. But Nabokov also bent his story to his own needs. He renames the last surviving expedition members, and more strangely, as the characters are freezing to death miles from the South Pole with no prospect for rescue or return, his invented Scott records seeing the northern lights (USSR, 280). The real Scott had mentioned the lights generically in his diary, but Nabokov transformed the plain aurora into their northern variety. The move further dislocates the story and recalls others then facing starvation in a desolate, snowbound landscape—the Russian exiles of the far north.

  14 Jewish wandering was diagnosed as “a racial, pathological disorder” at Jean- Martin Charcot’s Paris hospital in the 1890s. See Henry Meige’s “The Wandering Jew in the Clinic: a Study in Neurotic Pathology,” in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, Hasan-Rokemand Dundes, 190–194. The account was also published in the U.S. in Popular Science, vol. 44 (February 1894). Nabokov was familiar with some of Charcot’s work and mocked it in passing in his book on Gogol.

  15 The Wandering Jew debuted in Manchester in August 1920 and London a month later, moving on to the Knickerbocker Theater in New York the following year.

  16 “staged symphony”: USSR, 28—only Agasfer’s prologue survives; Jean-Paul Marat: Marat had coined the phrase “enemy of the people,” a phrase that gained a new life in post-Revolutionary Russia. By 1922, Marat was so lauded by the Soviets that they had named multiple ships after him.

  17 AFLP, 163.

  18 Schiff, 8.

  19 Ibid., 30.

  20 considered herself a socialist: AFLP, 177; anti-Bolshevik assassination plot: Schiff, 55.

  21 BBRY, 22
0; SM, 48.

  22 unaware that he intended: Schiff, 10; “I shall have you come here”: AFLP, 174.

  23 AFLP, 87.

  24 “Shun Russian Mail in Fear of Typhus,” NYT, March 18, 1922, 2.

  25 Lucie Leon in Triquarterly, Winter 1970, 214.

  26 BBRY, 234.

  27 Ibid., 233.

  28 Ibid., 239.

  29 SM, 249; BBRY, 146.

  30 BBRY, 271.

  31 fairly talented: Nabokov would in the next sentence describe Pasternak’s verse as “convex, goitrous, and goggle-eyed” but remained a fan of him as a poet, if not as a novelist. Barnes, Christopher and Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: 1928–1960, A Literary Biography (1989), 308.

  32 Klein, Sandy, “Nabokov’s Inspiration for The Defense,” note on NABOKV-L, the Nabokov Listserv, May 28, 2011. The German chess master was Count Curt von Bardeleben. See Daniel Johnson’s White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard (2008), 68.

  33 “snatched a gun”: BBRY, 343, quoting Lev Lyubimov in the March 1957 Novy Mir; redeem their very existence: Berberova, Nina, The Italics Are Mine (1999), 315.

  34 BBRY, 355.

  35 Nabokov specifically noted later that he had made Martin (Martyn in the original Russian) singularly untalented. For more on why, see Leona Toker’s Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989).

  36 Nabokov had real-life examples of such exploits (the original Russian title of the book, Podvig, translates as Deed or Exploit). As Maxim D. Shrayer has noted, Glory recalls Boris Savinkov, who was part of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s political assassination wing with Abram Gotz and Ilya Fondaminsky before the Revolution, and an anti-Bolshevik provocateur after it, sneaking over the border to meet with conspirators in the Soviet Union. He was lured inside the Soviet Union in 1924, captured and put on trial, dying in captivity soon afterward. See Shrayer’s “The Perfect Glory of Nabokov’s Exploit,” Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 35, no. 4, 29–41.

  37 The beautiful castle complex built across the centuries came to play an intermittent role in Russian history. The monks of Solovki ran their distant outpost in quasi-independence from Moscow in its first three hundred years, then were more closely monitored from St. Petersburg in the next two centuries. As early as the sixteenth century, a first lone religious prisoner was sent there by the Tsar. For a full history of the islands, see Roy Robson’s Solovki (2004).

  38 Applebaum, Gulag, 20.

  39 shorthand for Bolshevik cruelty: CE, 202; NWL, 222; suicides and executions: “Emma Goldman Denounces Rule of Soviets,” NYT, April 5, 1925, XX4; “Russian Arrests Drop,” NYT, February 17, 1924, 56; “most feared prison”: Emery, Steuart, “Soviet Sends Exiles to Jail by Airplane,” NYT, March 21, 1926, XX24.

  40 “Soviet Will Start Prisoners’ Air Service To Take Exiles to Lonely Solovetsky Island,” NYT, January 24, 1926, E1.

  41 The first reference I found to the mosquito torture in the Western press came from Emma Goldman in 1925. She discussed the terrors of Solovki but mentioned the mosquito torture in connection with other camps. Soon after, the two would be linked. Goldman, Emma, “Emma Goldman Denounces Rule of Soviet,” NYT, April 5, 1925, XX4.

  42 beaten by guards: “British Tory Fights Reds’ Forced Labor,” NYT, February 8, 1931, 15; chopping off their own hands, feet, or fingers: “House Committee To Press Embargo on Soviet Products,” NYT, February 1, 1931, 1; international boycott: Toker, Leona, Return from the Archipelago (2000), 16.

  43 Gregory, Paul and Valerii Lazarev, The Economics of Forced Labor, Hoover Press (2003), 45.

  44 Nabokov’s story “A Matter of Chance” has a protagonist who is a cocaine user; as does a Russian novel Cocaine Romance (or Novel with Cocaine), written by an anonymous émigré, whom some believed to be Nabokov, though this was later disproven.

  45 BBRY, 353.

  46 Ibid., 376; AFLP, 160.

  47 two years training at a Berlin drama school: Sonia Slonim studied at the city’s celebrated Hoeflich-Gruening School (see Slonim’s application for work with the U.S. Army in her FBI file); once found himself chosen as an extra: AFLP, 159.

  48 “The cinema must reflect social reality”: Clara Zetkin, quoted in Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung 1918–1932, vol. 2, (1975), 55; responded to Zetkin’s appeal: Zetkin, meanwhile, proved herself a master of political theater of another kind by serving on the prosecuting team at the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries.

  49 In later years, Nabokov liked to mangle Eisenstein’s name and refer to him as Eisenstadt—and believed that his experiments with montage had given the false impression that the arts were flourishing in the Soviet Union. Nabokov mentions him repeatedly in his letters to Edmund Wilson. NWL, 222.

  50 A friend of Junghans and Sonia Slonim in touch with both of them later recalled first meeting Slonim as Junghans’s girlfriend in Berlin in 1930. Carl Junghans’s internment file, USNA.

  51 Sonia Slonim worked at Houbigant Cheramy Perfume. Nabokov would refer ence Houbigant in his play “The Man from the U.S.S.R.,” USSR, 70.

  52 BBRY, 395.

  53 Schiff, 99.

  54 Yet he could recite poetry flawlessly in four languages. See Grossman’s “The Gay Nabokov.”

  55 he wanted to address the distance: BBRY, 396; handsome and charismatic: Grossman, “The Gay Nabokov.”

  56 BBRY, 396.

  57 The Soviets had invited him to collaborate on a film about American racism with Langston Hughes. See Arnold Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1 (2002), 247–9.

  58 Anna Feigin: Feigin was Véra’s cousin but had moved in with Véra’s father (who was not a blood relation to Feigin) after Véra’s parents had separated. Schiff, 42–3.

  turn the story over to his delusional narrator: Nabokov had already been practicing with disturbing first-person narration, having finished “The Eye,” a novella with a dislocated Russian émigré as narrator who dies at the beginning of the novel.

  59 German films of the nineteen-twenties: People have long seen resemblances between Nabokov’s work and Dr. Caligari—see Norman Page’s Vladimir Nabokov (1982), 21.

  fascination with doubles: The references to Dostoyevsky would be underlined when the book was translated into English. See Dolinin, Alexander, “The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair,” originally in Cycnos, vol. 12, no. 2, 1995, 43–54, expanded and posted online at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/doli1.htm.

  60 When Despair was published in English, Nabokov would underline the Astrakhan setting for readers by including a reference to the Caspian Sea as Hermann has a flashback to his internment.

  61 Tiepolo, “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,” 3.

  62 The historic murders echo through Despair. “Dead water” and its reflections abound. In an interior story in the novel, evidence is tied to a stone and sunk in water (144). After the murder, a bag and a gun are submerged in the Rhine (174). And Hermann himself wanders by his own lakeside murder scene with “stone-heavy shoes” (172). For an account of the executions at Astrakhan, see Thomas Remington’s Building Socialism in Socialist Russia (1984), 109.

  63 When Despair was translated into English, Nabokov had Hermann express his “belief in the impending sameness of us all” as rationale for his faith in Communism, more explicitly linking his politics with his own murder plot. DESP, 20.

  Nabokov worked not just the early camps but a whole tapestry of Russian history into Despair. At the height of Stalin’s drive toward collective farms, with its mass executions and the founding of the Gulag, Hermann’s wife declares that Russian peasants have become extinct (23). We learn that his wife’s cousin, Innocent, was executed by a firing squad just after Hermann and his bride escaped Russia (47). And her other cousin, Ardalion, bears a huge scar from his time with the White Army (39).

  64 Nabokov later suggeste
d in the intro to the English translation that the book had less appeal to White Russians than his previous novels.

  CHAPTER SIX: DESCENT

  1 See Michael Morukov’s piece from Gregory and Lazarev, The Economics of Forced Labor, Hoover Press (2003), 160.

  2 Figes, Orlando, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2008), 114–115.

  3 longer than the Panama and Suez Canals: Duranty, Walter, “Soviet Hopes High as Industry Gains,” NYT, July 3, 1933, 3; “merciful as well as merciless”: Duranty, Walter, “Soviet Releases 12, 484 in Record Amnesty,” NYT, August 5, 1933, 1.

  4 In advance of FDR’s first campaign for the White House, Roosevelt publicly consulted with Duranty about Russia. After Roosevelt won, he sent representa tives to Moscow to open discussions on normalizing relations. That November, Walter Duranty traveled with Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to the U.S., where formal diplomatic relations were established between the two coun tries. At the banquet given in Litvinov’s honor at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, Duranty received a standing ovation. He would come to refer to Litvinov’s visit as the “ten days that steadied the world.” See S. J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’ Man in Moscow (1990), 190–91.

  5 Taylor, 208.

  6 celebrated in the Nabokov family apartment in Berlin: BBRY, 117; the release of his brother: Figes, The Whisperers, 194.

  7 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 81–2.

  8 a novel called Chocolate: Despair, the next novel Nabokov wrote after meeting Tarasov-Rodionov, would be narrated by a man who makes chocolate but has utterly lost his moral compass; grew alarmed: BBRY, 375.

  9 Kessler, Harry and Charles Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918–1937 (2001), 428.

  10 “who endanger state security”: “Ein Konzentrationslager für politische Gefangene in der Nähe von Dachau” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (from The Holocaust History Project), March 21, 1933: “The Munich Chief of Police, Himmler, has issued the following press announcement: On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 persons. ‘All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.’”