Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  52 Véra Nabokov’s skills as a domestic: Schiff, 103; route for Jews to enter the country: This was understood to be true in both the U.S. and England, though the his torical analysis has been laid out more clearly in the case of England (see, for example Whitehall and the Jews by Louise London, in which London writes that “demand for women to undertake such work appeared inexhaustible”).

  53 BBRY, 486–9.

  54 Schiff, 104.

  55 SM, 192.

  56 Vasily Shishkov: Shishkov was the maiden name of Nabokov’s great-grand mother; “agreatpoet”: STOR, 667.

  57 BBRY, 511.

  58 For more on “Vasily Shishkov,” see Shrayer’s chapter devoted to it in The World of Nabokov’s Stories (1999).

  59 STOR, 497.

  60 themention of his rival’s name: Berberova, Nina, The Italics Are Mine (1999), 258.

  61 BBRY, 515.

  62 Ibid., 521–2.

  63 “France has been invaded a hundred times and never beaten”: Diamond, Hanna, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (2007), 8.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: AMERICA

  1 fired its guns at a whale: BBAY, 11; sailing into New York Harbor: “French Liner Champlain Here,” NYT, May 27, 1940, 25; ship’s records from the 1940 voyages of the S.S. Champlain.

  2 a note in New York’s Russian-language daily newspaper: BBAY, 13; Jewish pas sengers’ home cities: USCIS files and ship’s records from the S.S. Champlain. Nabokov’s USCIS file: C-6556567;Véra’s:C-6556566 and Véra visa file: 3027265.

  3 Though the U.S. was not yet in the war, the country had already begun jailing members of the Socialist Workers’ Party, a Trotskyite group that had pub licly taken an anti-war stance and made speeches against democracy. Baker, Human Smoke, 351.

  4 AFLP, 231; BBAY, 12

  5 They would arrive there two years before the movie Casablanca itself was made. Not only would the film tell the story of a reunion of another pair of star-crossed lovers, one of them married, it would also include a scene with Ilka Gruening, a head instructor from Sonia Slonim’s Berlin drama school.

  6 Reston, James B., “Arrests in Britain,” NYT, May 12, 1940, 1.

  7 Leysmith, W. F., “Britons in Dispute over Enemy Aliens,” NYT, April 7, 1940, 33.

  8 “Alien Arrests Net Women in Britain,” NYT, May 28, 1940, 7.

  9 Koch, Eric, Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder (1980), 17.

  10 ill-matched cargo: Auger, 23; their long-term fate: Auger, 52–3. Many pris oners went to Canada, but some were shipped to Australia and other remote locations.

  11 BBAY, 12.

  12 Schiff, 108.

  13 SO, 290.

  14 AFLP, 234.

  15 Ibid., 235; BBAY, 22.

  16 Schiff, 110.

  17 124 pounds: Vladimir Nabokov USCIS, C-File; commissions: NWL, 12.

  18 these first pieces: on a biography of Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev and an author named John Masefield BBAY, 18; delivery boy for Scribner’s: AFLP, 234; heavily accented Russian: AFLP, 247; BBAY, 44.

  19 BBAY, 18.

  20 doing a somersault: Meyers, Jeffrey, Edmund Wilson: A Biography (2003), 73; physical decline: Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, 4 and 141.

  21 “not had to save his soul”: Dabney, Edmund Wilson, 174.

  22 While the NAACP hesitated to come to the aid of the Scottsboro defendants, the Communist Party was more than happy to provide counsel and champion their cause. For More on Wilson’s reporting, see “Edmund Wilson: Letters to John Dos Passos,” NYRB, and Dabney, Edmund Wilson, 177.

  23 For a look at the similar pro-Soviet sympathies in England, see Koba the Dread, Martin Amis’ consideration of the fifteen-year devotion of his father, novelist Kingsley Amis, to the Communist Party.

  24 Wilson, To the Finland Station, 386.

  25 BBAY, 20.

  26 Wilson biographer Jeffrey Meyers would later suggest that it would have been more honest to end the story with the annexation (223).

  27 Wilson, To the Finland Station, 379.

  28 wrote his first real articles on Lepidoptera: BBAY, 24; his earlier story: Boyd called the original story Nabokov’s “first attack” on Nazi Germany. Over time and in translation, “Cloud, Castle, Lake” evolved to be even more specifi cally anti-Nazi. As Maxim D. Shrayer notes in The World of Nabokov’s Stories, during the translation process preparing it for publication, Nabokov shifted the song lyrics from disturbing forced camaraderie to overt calls for murder and destruction (136).

  eager to see more works: BBAY, 26.

  29 a secretarial position: Schiff, 111; denouncing Vichy policies: Cull, Nicholas John, Selling War: the British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (1996), 131; promoting U.S. entry into the war: White, Dorothy Shipley, Seeds of Discord: De Gaulle, Free France and the Allies (1964), 119–122; a job she loved: Schiff, 111.

  30 Sonia Slonim, FBI file No. 121-HQ-10141: “Telegram dated 27 January 1941 from Fort de France to the Secretary of State: ‘Suggest that Sofia Slonim, Russian, arriving New York aboard French vessel Guadeloupe about January 29 be observed due to unofficial report here that she may be a German spy.’” See also Department of the Army file on Sonia Sophia Slonim.

  31 Carl Junghans’s USCIS A-file 7595300 and ship records of the S.S. Carvalho Araujho.

  32 Ship records of the S.S. Carvalho Araujho.

  33 Carl Junghans’s internment file, USNA.

  34 Ibid.

  35 Ibid.

  36 enjoyed immensely: BBAY, 28; little houses: Schiff, 116.

  37 VNSL, 25 August 1940, 33.

  38 Rutkowski, Adam, “Le Campe de Royallieu à Compiègne, 1941–44,” Le Monde Juif 101(81), 124.

  39 CE, 205–6.

  40 Poznanski, Renée, Jews in France during World War II (2001), 202–3.

  41 Poznanski, 208.

  42 BBAY, 29.

  43 NWL, 53.

  44 catching butterflies: BBAY, 33; tragic farce: NWL, 53.

  45 Abraham, Richard, Alexander Kerensky (1990), 371.

  46 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 371. Kerensky had become a historical relic dreaming of a dead world, and, in the words of Nina Berberova, had himself died in 1917, but had somehow built up his armor—his beak, claws, and tusks—and continued to exist. See The Italics Are Mine, 301.

  47 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 109.

  48 Ibid., 112–3.

  49 Solzhenitsyn’s battery was scattered along listening posts strung together by telephone wire. The phone network required around-the-clock monitoring at each station. Securing a small collection of books from a library, Solzhenitsyn arranged for the operators to read stories and poems over the phone lines to help keep the artillerymen awake—Tolstoy, of course, and even contemporary Soviet poetry. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 124–5.

  50 Meyers, 36–7 and 244.

  51 continue to get work: NWL, 42; less reverence: Nabokov admired Tolstoy tremendously, but noted in a letter to Wilson how painful it was to watch the writer struggle to reunite Bolkonsky and Natasha in the novel War and Peace. NWL, 54.

  52 NWL, 54.

  53 Ibid., 56 and 34.

  54 Ibid., 56.

  55 BBAY, 47.

  56 months spent in a military hospital: Meyers, 39; “to save their own people”: Meyers, 247. Noting that on nearly every other topic Wilson resisted anti-Semitism, biographer Jeffrey Meyers characterizes Wilson’s later argument that American entry into the war was propelled by American Jews—and was in vain, because mass exterminations were already under way by the time of U.S. entry into the war—as “certainly the most foolish sentence (Wilson) ever wrote.”

  57 his mother had exposed him to: Dabney, 176; foreigners and Jews: Gordon, “America First: the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh, and the Second World War, 1940–1941,” presented at a joint meeting of the Historical Society and The New York Military Affairs Symposium on September 26, 2003.

  58 NWL, 53.

  59 Ibid., 57.

  60 BBAY, 37–38, 47.


  61 Letter to Roman Grynberg, December 1944, quoted by BBAY, 48.

  62 longed to write a book in Russian: AFLP, 250; submitted “Ultima Thule”: BBAY, 39.

  63 Nabokov, Vladimir, “Softest of Tongues,” SP, 158.

  64 NWL, 38.

  65 Ibid., 40.

  66 Ibid., 41.

  67 Ibid., 3.

  68 Nabokov, Vladimir, “The Refrigerator Awakes,” The New Yorker, June 6, 1942, 20.

  69 NWL, 59.

  70 “Textual Excerpts from the War Speech of Reichsfuehrer in the Reichstag,” NYT, December 12, 1941, 4.

  71 A small percentage were actually suspected as spies, but the vast majority were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing and had no interest in aiding America’s military foes.

  72 “Two Austrian Skiers at Sun Valley Are Seized,” NYT, January 8, 1942, 19; “Short-Wave Sets of Aliens Curbed,” NYT, December 21, 1941, 4.

  73 “Brief Overview of the World War II Enemy Alien Control Program,” USNA Web site: http://www.archives.gov/research/immigration/enemy-aliens-overview.html.

  74 Japanese as animals: Dabney, 304; registered for the draft: BBAY, 43; started a new novel: BBAY, 40.

  75 Nicholas Nabokov FBI file No. 77–2199.

  76 But after 1941, the war effort took precedence over the more intimate and subtle kinds of films that Ophüls hoped to make. It would be years before he would have the opportunity to direct a studio film in America. See Lutz Bacher’s Max Ophüls in the Hollywood Studios (1996), 29.

  77 He had looked up William Dieterle, an Oscar-winning director who had been sending him money in New York. Junghans also reestablished ties with Jan Lustig, a screenwriter who had just finished a project for rising star Rita Hayworth. Junghans’s internment file, USNA.

  78 “a thorough-going Nazi”: Hans Kafka covered film and the exile community in Hollywood for the New York newspaper Aufbau. Copies of his articles of December 19, 1941 and January 9, 1942 and his testimony appear in Junghans’ USCIS A-file No: 7595300.

  Anti-Defamation League: Letter dated May 12, 1941. Carl Junghans’s USCIS file.

  FBI case file: Junghans admitted that he had visited Russia in the early 1930s to make a film for the Soviet government. Acquaintances interviewed by Bureau agents reported that Junghans was completely unreliable and liked to brag about his work for the French secret police and his connections to Hitler, as well as claiming that he was working for the U.S. government. His file reveals that he had lagged Sonia Slonim in departing New York City by several weeks because his New York landlord managed to hold his bus ticket to keep him from skipping out on his unpaid rent. He was, in the words of one acquaintance, “a real four-flusher.”

  Under questioning, Junghans denied ever being a Communist or a Nazi, and stressed his service to France Forever, his work with the French secret police in Paris, and intelligence he said he had turned over to U.S. agencies when he was in Europe, as well as contacts he had with the FBI since his arrival in America. In his statements, Junghans clearly misrepresented his Communist and Nazi connections.

  His stories of work for French intelligence seem to have been exaggerated, too. He did make propaganda for the government, but at least two acquaintances believed that in terms of intelligence, he was nothing more than a low-level informant, helping the French round up people for internment in concentration camps. Junghans’s internment file, USNA.

  79 Junghans claimed these agents were trained in the dialects of Odessa and Warsaw, and had even been placed in German concentration camps to provide better cover before they were into the West with their passports stamped “J” to do Hitler’s bidding.

  80 200,000 paying visitors: Poznanski, Renée, Jews in France during World War II, 211; “the Communist, a Jewish product”: Poznanski, 211–2.

  81 Poznanski, 209 and 212.

  82 Ship’s passenger records.

  83 Transit records. Frumkin is listed as their U.S. contact—the person who will vouch for them in America.

  84 Plant, Richard, The Pink Triangle: the Nazi war against homosexuals (1988), 149.

  85 NWL, 174; Grossman, “The Gay Nabokov”; November 2011 interview with Reimer Möller, archivist of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial.

  86 “Nazis Blame Jews for Big Bombings,” (via United Press) NYT, June 13, 1942, 7.

  87 “national health and hygiene”: Poznanski, 255–6; for being sympathetic to the Jews:”Anti-Jewish Move Is Harming Laval,” NYT, September 6, 1942, 14.

  88 Poznanski, 265.

  89 USHMM Web site: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005215.

  90 “French Jews Sent to a Nazi Oblivion,” NYT, April 1, 1943, 2.

  91 Yad Vashem central database of Shoah victims; Klarsfeld, Beate et Serge. Le Memorial de la deportation des juifs de France, Paris 1978.

  92 Rashke, Richard, Escape from Sobibor (1995), 79–80; Patenaude, Bertrand. A Wealth of Ideas: revelations from the Hoover Institution Archive (2006), 156.

  93 aided the French Resistance: Schakovskoy Family Papers, Amherst College Center for Russian Culture; working with the Jesuits in Berlin: Schiff, 265; despite having an infant son: Schiff, 100. Lena had left her husband before the start of the war.

  94 Bunin, Ivan. The Liberation of Tolstoy: a tale of two writers (2001), 21 and related note on 160.

  95 Interview with Vladimir Petkevič, grandson of Olga Nabokov, Prague, November 2011.

  96 November 2011 interview with Vladimir Petkevič; see also earlier interview in Russian of Petkevič by Ivan Tolstoy, “110th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s Birth,” Myths and Reputations, Radio Svoboda, April 2009.

  97 BBAY, 48; Belletto, Steven, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2011), 4.

  98 BBAY, 69.

  99 Ibid., 68.

  100 taking her turn at France Forever and only to be turned away: Sonia Slonim’s FBI file.

  101 Interview with Petkevič, Prague, November 2011; also, Tolstoy, 2009.

  102 Brigham, Daniel, “Inquiries Confirm Nazi Death Camps,” NYT, July 3, 1944, 3.

  103 Koestler, Arthur, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” NYT, January 9, 1944, SM5.

  104 Karski, Jan, The Story of a Secret State (1944), 322.

  105 VNSL, 47–8.

  106 AFLP, 235.

  107 STOR, 593.

  108 Currivan, Gene, “Nazi Death Factory Shocks Germans on a Forced Tour,” April 16, 1944, 1.

  109 AFLP, 29. Shrayer, Maxim D., “Saving Jewish-Russian Émigrés,” International Nabokov Conference in Kyoto, Japan, March 2010: http://fmwww.bc.edu/SL-V/ShrayerSavingJRE.pdf.

  110 Shrayer, Maxim D., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature (2007), 462–3.

  CHAPTER NINE: AFTER THE WAR

  1 BBAY, 88.

  2 VNSL, 63.

  3 Ibid., 60–64; the poet he mentioned was Alexei Apukhtin.

  4 NWL, 173.

  5 “human life”: NWL, 175; “destroying whole Japanese towns”: Dabney, 304.

  6 NWL, 173.

  7 Ibid., 174. As Dabney notes, even Mary McCarthy returned to friendly terms with Wilson later (296); BBAY, 78.

  8 NWL, 175.

  9 VNSL, 63.

  10 a terrible price: In “Conversation Piece” (originally “Double Talk”), Nabokov has a very unsympathetic Russian insist that when the Red Army came into Germany, no one was harmed. The group discusses its anxieties over the Soviets sending “intellectuals and civilians—to work like convicts in the vast area of the East,” STOR, 594.

  to strip bare the countries they occupy: McCormick, Anne O’Hare, “Abroad: When the Policemen Want to Go Home,” NYT, January 14, 1946, 18; Hill, Gladwin, “Flow of Displaced Tangled in Europe,” NYT, May 30, 1945, 12. The Russian émigré community in New York, many of them now American citizens, protested the agreement at Yalta that forced Soviet citizens to return to Russia. See “Russian Exiles in U.S. Censure the Soviet,” NYT, August 1, 1945, 9.

  rather than heading home: Clark, Delbert, “Sovi
et Deserters Said To Be Hiding to Avoid Forced Return To Russia,” NYT, March 26, 1947, 12.

  11 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 140.

  12 Ibid., 132.

  13 It is a request Nabokov likely never made of Véra. While Natalia was there, Solzhenitsyn taught her to shoot a pistol (Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 130), a skill Véra had acquired decades before (Schiff, 55).

  14 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 136.

  15 Ibid., 142.

  16 Schiff, 137.

  17 NWL, 173; VNSL, 66–7.

  18 “Mr. Churchill’s Address Calling for United Effort for World Peace,” NYT, March 6, 1946, 4.

  19 BBAY, 126.

  20 NWL, 144.

  21 Ibid., 97–8.

  22 Ibid., 171.

  23 BBAY, 107; Schiff, 134; ANL, 436.

  24 Information from Sonia Slonim’s U.S. Army Military Intelligence file.

  25 Information from Sonia Slonim’s FBI file.

  26 VNSL, 72–3. In what seems to be an argument for either the ineffectiveness of the program or Nicholas Nabokov himself, a composition student of Nicholas Nabokov’s would later recall his claim about the post that his “most significant contribution was unmasking the radio theme song for ‘The FBI in Peace and War’ as the work of a Communist.” See Argento, Dominick, Catalogue raisonné as memoir (2004), 2–3.

  but Nicholas had: Nicholas Nabokov’s references are listed in his FBI file.

  27 All material on Nicholas Nabokov here is taken from his FBI file (No. 77–2199), including a summary of a 1948 interview of George Kennan by the FBI.

  28 Nicholas Nabokov FBI file.

  29 Stonor Saunders, Frances, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000), 43.

  30 Schiff, 332.

  31 Schakovskoy Family Papers, Amherst College Center for Russian Culture.

  32 “we must build an organization for war”: Stonor Saunders, 93; “no artist … can be neutral”: “Atomic Physicist Scraps Defense of Reds at Cultural Talk as Result of Korea Attack,” NYT, June 28, 1950, 9.

  33 Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 93.

  34 other moral failings: Krug is on the verge of molesting “a very young girl” a third his age when he and his son are arrested (137 and 197); for five years: Krug related that as a child, he had tripped the Toad and sat on his face every day (50–1).