Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  24 ANL, 261.

  25 stamped on its stationery: ANL, 261; typically shorthand: Kendal, Diana Eliza beth, Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Process of Exclusion (2008), 59.

  26 Alfred Appel would be the first Nabokov reader to publicly note the hidden meaning of “near churches” in the novel.

  27 official complaint in the State of New York: “State Ban Asked against Ad ‘Bias,’” NYT, December 21, 1952, 52; if they happen to be Jewish: “Discrimination by Hotels Seen,” NYT, March 17, 1953, 28.

  28 “a certain strange strain”: ANL, 75. Lolita’s progressive schoolmistress also inquires about Humbert’s religion, only to be told to mind her own business (194); refused admission to a store: ANL, 268; “a Gentile’s house”: ANL, 297. In another wink from Nabokov, Quilty seems to think Humbert is German or “Australian” (297), likely a fumbling attempt on Quilty’s part to refer to him as Austrian. This slip becomes relevant again later, when Nabokov writes Look at the Harlequins! (see Chapter 14, section 2, of this book).

  29 the only Jew: ANL 363 (note 3 from page 53 of the novel); the word “kikes”: Shrayer, Maxim D., “Evreiskie voprosy v zhizni i tvorchestve Nabokova,” Weiner Slawistischer Almanach 43 (1999), 112.

  30 a half-dozen people: Two hotel clerks (years apart) at The Enchanted Hunters, Clare Quilty, Jean Farlow, the headmistress of Lolita’s school, and Charlotte Haze.

  31 BBAY, 363.

  32 Schiff, 26.

  33 “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” was the tag line for the film’s posters and the theme of the movie’s trailer.

  34 sold for $100,000: Schiff, 237; television skits: BBAY, 373; Schiff, 233; “for six years, till she’s eighteen”: BBAY, 376; bestselling novels of 1959: Prescott, Orville, “A Critic’s Holiday Toast,” November 29, 1959, NYT, BR3. The other was Léon Uris’s Exodus, also published the year before.

  35 “new variety of sexual sensationalism”: Prescott, Orville, “Books of the Times,” October 23, 1959, 27; “rotten mackerel in the moonlight”: Adams, J. Donald, “Speaking of Books,” NYT, October 26, 1958, BR2. “Yet (Nabokov) writes, in Lolita, of nothing of consequence, save as leprosy, let us say, is of consequence. Here is admirable art expended on human trivia. Mr. Nabokov rightly insists that his book is not pornographic. I found it revolting, nevertheless, and was reminded of John Randolph’s excoriation of Edward Livingston: ‘He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.’”

  36 Nabokov was not an admirer of such reverse emigration. Though he was not immune to the longing to return home, he could not imagine the existence of a true artist in the Soviet Union. Somehow, however, Pasternak skirted dictates and expectations, and the authorities tolerated a style and indepen dence from him that doomed other writers during the purges. In an effort to find a middle ground, he had pared his poetry down and written patriotic poems during the war, moving on to the relative safety of translation when his original work met with too much disapproval. It was rumored again and again that Stalin exempted him from the savagery of camps and trials. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 304–13.

  37 When someone proposed Nabokov as a candidate to translate the Zhivago poems, Pasternak objected. Barnes, vol. 2, 432n.

  38 Schiff, 244.

  39 Ibid., 243.

  40 Shrayer, Maxim D., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, 593.

  41 Schiff, 243, n2.

  42 “Olga Ivinskaya, 83: Pasternak Muse for ‘Zhivago,’” NYT obituary, September 13, 1995.

  43 Schiff, 233.

  44 Wilson, Edmund, “Doctor Life and His Guardian Angel,” New Yorker, November 15, 1958, 216 and 238.

  45 BBAY, 386.

  46 NWL, 320.

  47 wine, jewels, and silk: ANL, 9; All were not just professions permitted for centuries to European Jewry but fields where they were concentrated.

  48 Humbert at one point seeks to lose “a Protestant’s drab atheism” (his mother was the granddaughter of two English parsons) and turn to the Roman Catholic Church (282).

  49 See Nabokov’s foreword to the English-language translation of Despair. He explained that Humbert would be allowed out one evening a year to walk a green lane in Paradise—a parallel escape to that offered to Judas after his death, who was allowed to return to earth and wander in the polar regions as relief from Hell each Christmas Eve because he had once given his cloak to a leper. See Matthew Arnold’s poem “Saint Brandan.”

  50 ANL, 265.

  51 Olga Skonechnaya has looked at Nabokov’s use of the Wandering Jew in his Russian and French work, linking Agasfer, The Gift, and his essay “Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisembable,” all of which retell or refract the Wandering Jew story in ways large or small.

  In addition to the representative Silbermann character in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the Wandering Jew is more explicitly mentioned as a stock character in a book read by the protagonist in Invitation to a Beheading. In King, Queen, Knave, the inventor of automannequins is newly arrived in Germany, a “nondescript stranger with a cosmopolitan name,” and the narrator mentions that he might be Czech, Jewish, Bavarian, or Irish.

  There are, of course, classic narrative reasons to use roving protagonists who act out taboo and forbidden behaviors. And a wandering, anguished figure clearly evokes a kind of distorted, winking self-portrait of Nabokov himself. But he is also explicitly looking at the meaning of the Wandering Jew figure across the length of his career, simultaneously attending to Jewish culture and suffering as he does so. Nabokov was not the only person to try to invert the traditional Wandering Jew character. Jewish-Russian exile Marc Chagall adopted the same character and strove to reclaim it through art, as have other later artists, including R. B. Kitaj. Nabokov did not care for Chagall’s later work, though he expressed admiration for his early “Jew in Green,” a portrait of a battered Wandering Jew-type character painted before the Revolution. See SO, 170 and Richard Cohen’s “The Wandering Jew: from Medieval Legend to Modern Metaphor” in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2008).

  52 In Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov claimed Dostoyevsky mistakenly thought that “physical suffering and humiliation improve the moral man” (115). In Nabokov’s description, Dostoyevsky had refused to believe that prison in Siberia had damaged him, insisting that that nothing had been lost, and he had survived as “a better man.”

  53 If Humbert is Jewish, it is no accident that he is Swiss. During the war, the Swiss government deliberately and publicly revoked any responsibility to protect its own Jewish citizens in France. By 1942, stories of Swiss Jews interned in France circulated, and newspaper articles noted how the Swiss had ceded any demands that their Jewish citizens be afforded any special treatment distinguishing them from other foreign Jews. A Jewish Humbert still in France could have faced the same fate as Raisa Blokh—whom Nabokov had mocked so cruelly and who was turned back at the border—and ended up in Drancy or Gurs.

  54 ANL, 316. From Nabokov’s afterword to the novel “On a Book Entitled Lolita.”

  55 Juanita Dark: ANL, 312.

  56 Nabokov once told Alfred Appel that “Humbert identifies with the persecuted.” ANL, 363.

  57 Pnin, 174. Michael Maar discusses the speck of coal dust in terms of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” in Speak, Nabokov (19).

  58 AFLP, 250.

  59 Nabokov’s heart, Stephens suggested, was with the Russian people, not just the “liberal gentry” that had nourished him. Letter from Isabel Stephens to Barbara Breasted, February 25, 1971, 3, Faculty files, Wellesley.

  60 On closer inspection, given Nabokov’s sensitivity to Jewish historical persecution, it might seem more surprising if he had not found sections of Zhivago disappointing. Pasternak, part Jewish by birth, wholly identified as a Russian and with the Russian Orthodox Church. In his most celebrated novel, he put words in the mouth of a Jewish character criticizing Jewish intellectual leaders’ thinking as “facile,” seeming to fall
prey to the auto matic conflation of the Revolution and Jews that dominated worldwide. Pasternak mentions the suffering of the Jews multiple times, but permits a character an extended monologue to argue that for all the tragedies and persecution Jews have faced across the millennia, they had refused the miracle that Christ had delivered in their midst. They had not assimilated; they had not converted; they had chosen their martyrdom. For all his own efforts to draw a hard line between the protagonist and the author of Lolita, it is hard to imagine Nabokov swallowing this passage without choking. Yet Pasternak was himself vilified—part of the campaign against him after Zhivago came out was framed in frankly anti-Semitic terms. For more on this issue with Pasternak, and a comparison with Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky, see John Bayley’s introduction to the Everyman’s Library hardcover of Doctor Zhivago and Maxim D. Shrayer’s Anthology of Jewish-Russian literature.

  61 telegraphed his acceptance: Barnes, Boris Pasternak: 1928–1960, A Literary Biography, vol. 2, 342; declining to attend: Barnes, vol. 2, 346.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: PALE FIRE

  1 VNSL, 302. On this count, Nabokov was not mistaken. Louis Aragon was then a member of the central committee of the French Communist Party and, despite occasional public contravention of the Party line, would remain so for decades.

  2 “Le triomphe de Lolita,” an excerpt from Maurice Couturier’s Nabokov ou la tentation française (2011). See NABOKV-L, January 2011, for this excerpt. The first quotation is from Madeleine Chapsal in the May 8, 1959 issue of l’Express, the second from Jean Mistler in L’Aurore, on May 12.

  3 a celebration in Nabokov’s honor: BBAY, 294; Couturier, Nabokov ou la tentation française. These recollections are from then-newly-minted Figaro literary critic Bernard Pivot, who would do a legendary interview with Nabokov much later in his career.

  a marvelous ball: Schiff, 254.

  4 Nor had things improved with Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia contract Nabokov had been declaring void for more than two years. Girodias appeared at the reception, and later claimed to have been snubbed by Nabokov, who declared that he had not seen Girodias at all, let alone talked with him. Given Girodias’s conduct, Nabokov’s propensity to snub, and his equal tendency to be completely unaware of others in social settings, it can only be said with confidence that 1) both men were in the room that night, and 2) they did not leave as friends. (See Boyd’s, Schiff’s, and Girodias’s account.)

  5 slow to forgive such slights: BBAY, 396; “nightmare and deceit” and “friends of his darkest days”: BBAY, 396.

  6 Schiff, 265.

  7 he would be dead: Nabokov’s nephew Rostislav, for whom he had written an affidavit in the hopes of getting him into the West (BBAY, 126), would die in 1960 behind the Iron Curtain at the age of 29, from what his son would later describe as a combination of several factors bound up with profound despair.

  had collaborated with the Nazis: November 2011 Interview with Vladimir Petkevič.

  8 BBAY, 394.

  9 Ibid., 171.

  10 a crab, a kitten: STOR, 616. For more on Nabokov and Sergei in “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” see Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s essay “The Small Furious Devil” in A Small Alpine Form (1993). Sweeney suggests that in his Siamese twin tragedy, Nabokov was working with something so troubling that it resulted in one of his few failures to transform his own emotional struggles into “transcendent fiction” (198).

  11 BBAY, 185.

  12 Ibid., 415.

  13 VNSL, 212. President Kennedy: Oddly enough, President Kennedy had yet to be elected when Nabokov composed the letter.

  14 VNSL, 297.

  15 halfway done with the book: BBAY, 421.

  16 Duck Soup. See SO, 165.

  17 longs to be delivered: Watching a child fly a model plane, Kinbote begs, “Dear Jesus, do something” (PF, 93); absolution from the horror: PF, 258; end his life with a handgun: PF, 220; alive long enough: Dolbier, Maurice, “Nabokov’s Plums,” interview with Vladimir Nabokov, New York Herald Tribune, June 17, 1962, B2; also mentioned in Nabokov’s diary—see BBAY, 709 n6.

  18 BBAY, 463–4.

  19 group of islands: McCarthy, Mary, “A Bolt from the Blue,” The New Republic, June 4, 1962, 21; Zembla had been used centuries before: In “An Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope drew on Nova Zembla’s northern location as an analogy for corruption and vice that always seems relative to those engaged in it, and always apparently more extreme in some location farther along:

  Ask where’s the north?—at York ‘tis on the Tweed;

  In Scotland at the Orcades; and there

  At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.

  See Chapter 14, note 128 for a longer excerpt from Pope’s verse.

  20 had known about for decades: In his poem “The Refrigerator Awakes,” written in 1941, Nabokov makes several polar references to real and imagined explorers, and includes a nod to Nova Zembla, “with that B in her bonnet.” That B, William Barents, spent the winter of 1596–7 trapped on the northern tip of Nova Zembla. The legendary story of the expedition’s survival was printed by the Hakluyt Society, whose accounts of voyages Nabokov and Véra had both read and admired.

  21 This account of Barents’s voyage is taken from Gerrit de Veer’s The Three Voy ages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions (1594, 1595, and 1596).

  22 saw three suns: Interestingly, on the very first page of Pale Fire, narrator Charles Kinbote talks of parhelia, known as sun dogs or mock suns.

  23 Khalturin, Vitaly et al., “A Review of Nuclear Testing by the Soviet Union at Novaya Zemlya 1955–1990,” Science and Global Security: 13 (2005), 1–42; “Parameters of 340 UNTs Carried Out at the Semipalatinsk Test Site,” LamontDoherty Earth Observatory web site, Columbia University: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~richards/340STS.html.

  24 Day, Duane. “Of myths and missiles: the Truth about John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap,” The Space Review, January 3, 2006.

  25 The U.S. would face similar attention in the wake of injuries and increased rates of cancers and deformities after its test blasts in the Pacific at Bikini and Rongelap Atolls. (See 2009 Newsday project Fallout).

  26 Meaning Bertrand Russell, noted philosopher of logic and peace activist whose leftist politics Nabokov disliked. See Herbert Gold’s interview “The Art of Fiction, No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov,” in The Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1967.

  27 Gruson, Sidney. “U.S. and Russians Pull Back Tanks from Berlin Line,” NYT, October 29, 1961, 1.

  28 “bits of straw and fluff”: SO, 31 as first noted in BBAY, 306; a new testing ground: “Arctic Called Soviet Test Site,” NYT, March 9, 1958, 41.

  29 From a March 1959 letter cited in BBRY, 17.

  30 “Fall-outs … by US-made bombs,” PF, 266; “antiatomic chat”: PF, 49.

  “any jackass can rig up the stuff”: PF, 270. The uncertainty with regard to who is speaking is deliberate. The poem has sections of discarded lines—variants—that Kinbote includes in his commentary. Several have clearly been tampered with (Kinbote goes so far as to claim some of his contributions), and the authorship for the rest must remain in doubt, with Kinbote as the most likely suspect.

  “Mars glowed”: PF, 58.

  31 50-megaton hydrogen bomb: Topping, Seymour, “Policies Outlined,” a summary of Khrushchev’s speech to the Twenty-Second Party Congress, NYT, October 18, 1961, 1; resolution imploring the Soviets: Telsch, Kathleen, “U.N., 87–11, Appeals To Soviet on Test,” NYT, October 28, 1961, 1.

  32 DeGroot, Gerard, The Bomb: A Life (2005), 254.

  33 five hundred miles away: Khalturin etal., 18; all the explosives used in World War II: DeGroot, 254; an effort to stave off birth defects: Sullivan, Walter, “Bomb’s Fall-Out Moving To Urals,” NYT, October 31, 1961, 14; trace levels of radiation: Khalturin et al., 19.

  34 Steven Belletto would be the first to point out the strength of Pale Fire’s Cold War references and note that Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya in Russian), was a key nuclear test site a
t the time of the book’s composition. See “The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold,” ELH, vol. 73, no. 3, 755–80.

  35 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 407.

  36 Ivan Bunin, too, had been rehabilitated, but just a little too late to see his work return to the Soviet Union—he died in 1953 (Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 401).

  37 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 378.

  38 Ibid., 390.

  39 Ibid., 400. Apparently, Solzhenitsyn’s arsenal eclipsed the French and the British atomic capabilities.

  40 an unknown writer: It is unlikely his lone, irritable article about the Soviet postal system had brought him to anyone’s attention.

  one page at a time: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 377 and 385.

  41 a vast account: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 379; the camp theme was already per colating: Scammell, 410–1.

  42 Mary McCarthy: “A Bolt from the Blue”; Macdonald, Dwight: review of Pale Fire, Partisan Review, vol. 39, no. 3 (summer 1962), 437–42.

  43 Dolbier, Maurice, “Nabokov’s Plums,” New York Herald Tribune, June 17, 1962, B2.

  44 There are many Cold War references, from a mention of Soviet generals arriving in Zembla, and passing mention of BIC (215), which was used in contemporary politics to indicate a country or region Behind the Iron Curtain which separated the Soviet sphere of influence from the West.

  45 an international youth exchange: The actual article is “30 Children Join Picnic of Nations,” NYT, July 20, 1959, 12; Khrushchev canceling a visit: “Khrushchev Calls Off Plan for Visit to Scandinavia,” NYT, July 21, 1959, 1.

  46 Noble managed to get word of his fate to Germany via a postcard smuggled out by a barber, and was freed after President Eisenhower made public calls for his release. See Adam Bernstein’s obituary “John H. Noble Survived, Denounced Soviet Captivity,” from The Washington Post, November 17, 2007.

  47 they could be worse: Joseph Scholmer and Edward Buca also wrote memoirs of their time in Vorkuta. See Buca’s Vorkuta (1976) and Scholmer’s Vorkuta (1954).

  “from which there is no return”: Noble, John, “Varied Groups Found in Vorkuta, Arctic Slave Camp of the Soviet,” NYT, April 5, 1955, 12. For nearly mirror descriptions of Nova Zembla, see Buca (325–6) and Scholmer (82).