Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  48 a mass grave in Katyn Forest: The missing Polish officers had disappeared from prisoner of war camps. A year later, many of the bodies would be unearthed in a mass grave at Katyn Forest in Russia, along with several other similar sites. The discovery by the German Army led to the fracture of the short lived Soviet-Polish alliance. In 1990, the Russian government would finally acknowledge Soviet responsibility for the massacre.

  “the barren and desolate island of Nova Zembla”: Post, Robert. “Nazi Spring Drive in Russia Expected,” NYT, January 10, 1942, 6.

  49 plans to build an Arctic resort: “An Arctic Resort for the Russians,” NYT, April, 22, 1934, XX12; sightings of mysterious airplanes: “Plane Shown Clearly in Arctic Photograph,” NYT, August 22, 1931, 5.

  50 “Exiled Russians To Leave This Week,” NYT, August 28, 1922, 10.

  51 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 411–4.

  52 Ibid., 416 and 418.

  53 Ibid., 422.

  54 it would be unforgiveable: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 425. The opinion quoted is that of Samuil Marshak, poet and celebrated children’s author.

  As many as five hundred bootleg copies: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 428.

  55 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Oak and the Calf (1980), 38.

  56 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 435.

  57 Salisbury, Harrison, “Books of the Times: Changes Perception Surviving Is a Triumph,” NYT, January 22, 1963, 7. The tide was already turning against Khrushchev, and by extension, Solzhenitsyn (Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 468–470).

  58 “frozen mud and horror”: PF, 258; “tale of torture”: PF, 289; and when he writes of the temptation to die, Kinbote recounts the story of a young boy who is told his family “is about to migrate to a distant colony where his father has been assigned to a lifetime post.” The trusting boy believes that the new land where his family will live forever will be even better than his current home (219).

  59 not Kinbote but Botkin: Nabokov would play many games in Pale Fire, several of which take place in the index of the novel, with its inclusion of things that have little or no presence in the rest of the book. Botkin, of course, is a scrambling of Kinbote, and one Botkin, V. shows up in the Index as a scholar of Russian descent. Botkin is mentioned in the body of the novel in absentia as a professor teaching in another department.

  a phrase stressing the “Nova” again: PF, 267.

  60 Dolbier, “Nabokov’s Plums.”

  61 Richard Rorty hypothesizes that after a reader becomes attentive to the suffering he previously failed to note in Nabokov’s novels, he is “suddenly revealed to himself as, if not hypocritical, at least cruelly incurious,” and recognizes “his semblable, his brother, in Humbert and Kinbote” (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 163). The interpretation of Pale Fire I am suggesting reconfigures that reading by adding another level to it. If we recognize Kinbote’s incuriosity in ourselves, we can apply a newfound attentiveness not only to events like the death of the poet Shade’s daughter (which Rorty specifically addresses), but also to Kinbote himself. Instead of settling for the stock character of a “monstrous parasite” (PF, 172), a lunatic, a homosexual, or a pedophile, persistent curiosity will be rewarded with a richer story.

  62 “unable to reproach himself”: GIFT, 228; ceases to resist even worse impulses: Humbert mentions at one point that his mind fought his body in the matter of nymphets (not always successfully, apparently) through his twenties and into his early thirties (ANL, 18). Again, after Lolita escapes from him, he seeks help from a Catholic priest.

  his fondness for faunlets: Nabokov clarified in SO that this was what the “Dear Jesus” line in Pale Fire meant (290).

  63 Robson, Solovki, 229. And even as a concentration camp, the Solovki monastery complex was well known for many of the elements Nabokov used to construct Kinbote’s escape—a castle prison, hidden tunnels, and a theater company.

  64 all sorts of games: The Crown Jewels entry leads to Hiding Place; Hiding place leads to potaynik; Potaynik links to taynik; Taynik has a definition of “Russ., secret place,” and then directs readers back to the Crown Jewels entry. Potaynik is merely an old form of taynik. See Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999), 124.

  in the ruins, sir, of some old barracks: SO, 92. Nabokov further mentioned that the ruins of the barracks were near Kobaltana. Kobaltana, which makes no appearance at all in the body of the book, is listed in the index as a mountain resort in a remote and desolate place that is still familiar to military families. It may have been a bid to clue readers in to the link between the imaginary Zembla and its real-world counterpart, Nova Zembla, which, like Kobaltana, had planned a resort, was remote and desolate, and did have a military presence, as well as barracks.

  65 “Russian Academic Freedom,” NYT, September 1, 1922, 9.

  66 SM, 262.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SPEAK, MEMORY

  1 SM, 264.

  2 Schiff notes that Véra “was all for civil rights, but ‘hooligans’ should be put away—for good” (336). Unlike her husband, Véra favored the death penalty. See Alan Levy’s “Understanding Vladimir Nabokov.”

  3 CBS News, “Oswald Midnight Press Conference,” recorded November 22/23, 1963.

  4 Dmitri Nabokov later reported his father watching the newsreel and saying, “If they have worked over this poor little guy needlessly.…” (BBRY, 22).

  5 Presumably Invitation to a Beheading. BBRY, 35.

  6 AFLP, 278–9.

  7 international apology to Ghana: Smith, Hedrick, “U.S. Apologizes to Ghana,” NYT, September 11, 1963, 33; “The Negro Revolt”: “News Notes: Classroom and Campus,” NYT, April 19, 1964, E7.

  8 BBAY, 50.

  9 VNSL, 378.

  10 who had managed to infiltrate and destroy: Schiff, 336; would have deserted little Anne Frank: Buckley called the protesters “young slobs” and condemned their “mincing ranks” as well as their “epicene resentment.” Burks, Edward, “Buckley Assails Vietnam Protest,” NYT, October 22, 1965, 1.

  11 Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, 453–4.

  12 Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography, 417.

  13 U.S. involvement in Vietnam a disgrace: Dabney, 486; infuriated the president. Another invitee to the Festival, poet Robert Lowell, had his refusal printed in full on the front page of The New York Times, expressing his support for Johnson’s civil rights policies but offering only “dismay and distrust” over current U.S. foreign policy (See “Robert Lowell Rebuffs Johnson As Protest Over Foreign Policy,” NYT, June 3, 1965, 1).

  “close to traitors”: Goldman, Eric, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (1974), 529.

  14 Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, 404.

  15 “a great grievance”: Dabney, 401. Wilson mentioned this to their mutual friend Roman Grynberg; “You have quite forgotten me”: NWL, 366.

  16 BBAY, 496.

  17 Schiff, 330; From a letter from Rowohlt to Véra Nabokov, BBAY, 480.

  18 did not lodge in his: NWL, 360; most obscure words: PF, 46; “constantly quoting Housman”: PF, 25. Wilson’s Housman essay was also in The Triple Thinkers. There are many more such points of common interest, such as Proust, whose place among American readers had been secured by Wilson’s landmark work on modernism, Axel’s Castle. In Pale Fire, Kinbote says that he had not originally believed that Proust’s masterpiece had any connection to its time and place, or to real people, but that he had since realized that he was wrong. For more on Nabokov/Wilson/Housman, see Rorty, Contingency, 149, n10.

  19 shadow of Robert Frost: PF, 48; Nabokov’s admiration of Shade: SO, 119. See also Socher’s “Shades of Frost: a Hidden Source for Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 2005. Boyd further notes that Nabokov had also rented Frost’s house through a third party in Cambridge in 1952. BBAY, 222.

  “third-rate”: Meyers, Edmund Wilson, 464; “fraud” and “self-promoter”: These latter two are from a Wilson letter to Lionel Trilling, referenced in Colm Tóibín’s “Edmund Wils
on: American Critic,” NYT, September 4, 2005, F1.

  20 Wilson, Edmund, Night Thoughts (1961), 233–45. Matthew Roth found Wilson’s poem “The Pickerel Pond: A Double Pastoral” paired with the letters between the two men, and linked it to the language in Pale Fire.

  21 PF, 45 and 193.

  22 “The White Heart” is a sentimental story about the excesses of the First World War and Revolutionary period, and the true heart of a Russian grandmother who passes on her piety and strength in the face of suffering to those she meets. It was written by Alexey Remizov, whom James Joyce had admired but whom Nabokov disliked intensely. A translation had appeared in 1921 in The Dial, a publication for which Edmund Wilson had written his landmark essay on T. S. Eliot. Though it’s hard to believe Nabokov would have admired any of the story’s literary technique, it demonstrates the existence of a widely recognized symbolism of the “white heart” of Nabokov’s poem, not unlike the later reference in the poem to “edelweiss” (which translates as “noble white”).

  23 Nabokov, Vladimir, “On Translating Pushkin Pounding the Clavichord,” NYRB, April 30, 1964.

  24 Wilson writes that “his speaking of the eclogues of ‘the overrated Virgil’ as ‘stale imitations of the idyls of Theocritus’ would seem to demonstrate that he cannot have had any very close acquaintance with this poet in the original”; and later “which the author, in a letter, once described to me.…” From “Let ters: The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” NYRB, July 15, 1965.

  25 Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, 406.

  26 Nabokov, Vladimir, “Letters: The Strange Case of Nabokov and Wilson,” NYRB Letters, August 26, 1965.

  27 Both Nabokov’s and Wilson’s responses are from the August 26, 1965 issue of NYRB.

  28 Amour propre: self-love, one’s self-esteem. SO, 264.

  29 BBAY, 496.

  30 Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography, 259–60. Wilson wrote this description of Nabokov in a November 1940 letter to his mentor at Princeton, Christian Gauss.

  31 VNSL, 424.

  32 Barabtarlo, Gennady. “Nabokov in the Wilson Archive,” Cycnos, Volume 10 n°1, posted online June 13, 2008.

  33 Nabokov, Vladimir, Encounter, Letters to the editor, May 1966, 91.

  34 Nabokov, Encounter, May 1966, 458.

  35 Ibid., 477.

  36 Ibid., 511.

  37 Ibid., 486.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, 83–4.

  40 a personal meeting: Taubman, William, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2004), 527; regretted championing: Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, 86.

  41 Scammell, Michael, “Circles of Hell,” NYRB, April 28, 2011.

  42 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2 (1997), 62.

  43 An excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s 1918–1956 Volume 2 68; English translation of the passage has been adapted from page 343 of Vladimir Abarinov’s The Murderers of Katyn (1993).

  44 This passage would not make the editing cut for the version that appeared in Paris and was translated into English and became the definitive document. It would find publication only in some later Russian-language versions and collected writings of Solzhenitsyn.

  45 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 524.

  46 “Electronic Prying Grows: CIA Is Spying from 100 Miles Up,” NYT, April 27, 1966, 1.

  47 a letter to the editor: “Record of Congress for Cultural Freedom,” NYT letters to the editor, May 9, 1966, 38; current and former Encounter editors: “Freedom of Encounter Magazine,” NYT letters to the editor, May 10, 1966, 44; Nicholas Nabokov himself wrote: “Group Denies C.I.A. Influence,” NYT letters to the editor, May 16, 1966, 46.

  48 Braden, Thomas, “Speaking Out: I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’” The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967, 10–14.

  49 active in American intelligence work: Josselson himself described his history and clearances in a draft memoir (Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 42).

  Strangely enough, the declassified portions of Nicholas Nabokov’s very thick FBI file do not include any pages from 1948, when he ostensibly left government employment, up until April 1967, two weeks’ before the effective dissolution of the Congress.

  50 a former intelligence operative argued: Stonor Saunders, Frances. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999), 402; “They’re all the same”: Stonor Saunders, 401.

  51 The critical volume they were preparing was about another classic of Rus sian literature, The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Nabokov and Jakobson had been working with a third person, Marc Szeftel. For a fuller account of the Nabokov/ Jakobson/Szeftel collaboration, see Diment’s Pniniad.

  52 “little trips”: VNSL, 216; “Bolshevist agent”: Diment, 40; had belonged to the Kadets: Meyer, Priscilla, “Nabokov’s Critics: A Review Article,” Modern Phi lology 91.3 (1994), 336; Jakobson had torpedoed Nabokov’s chances: Diment, 40 and 167.

  53 “A Look Back…,” U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Web site: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2007-featured-story-archive/a-look-back.html.

  54 VNSL, 431–2. Letter from Véra Nabokov to Lauren Leighton.

  55 VNSL, 431.

  56 Slavic scholar Lauren Leighton sent a postscript to NABOKV-L, the Nabokov Listserv, detailing what had happened to the young Leningrad writers after he had exchanged letters with Véra Nabokov (Leighton, Lauren, note to NABOKV- L, the Nabokov Listserv, July 14, 1995: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/ wa?A2=nabokv-l;54cd537.950y). Mikhail Meylakh was the writer arrested in 1983 for having a copy of Speak, Memory.

  57 a foreword and an index: For those inclined to go down the ubiquitous rabbit holes in the field of Nabokovian interpretation, it may be worth noting that Nabokov closed his foreword with a mention of the index: “through the window of that index climbs a rose” (SM, 16). In addition to the English and Russian versions of Nova Zembla that are listed in the index, Nova Zembla is in fact a rose variety—a hardy strain, widely cultivated, and more than a century old.

  “of all places”: SM, 52.

  58 SM, 256.

  59 Ibid., 248.

  60 Ibid., 257.

  61 GIFT, 355.

  62 BBAY, 456.

  63 These Pale Fire parallels bring a certain tragic note to the repeated appear ances of the word “Hamburg” in Lolita, which ostensibly occur in the book as a play on Humbert’s name (see pages 109, 261, and 262) but also echo Sergei’s fate. If Humbert is recalling forgotten world history, he may also be carrying water for his author. For more on Sergei in Pale Fire, see Maar, Speak, Nabokov, 40–41.

  64 Neuengamme Camp archives.

  65 “Le céremonial esttoujours le même…”Neuengamme, Camp de Concentration Nazi (2010), 185.

  66 an experimental treatment for lice-born typhus: Neuengamme entry, USHMM Website, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005539; a fatal experiment: 20 Jewish children were chosen by Dr. Heissmeyer to have tubercular infection blown into their lungs through rubber tubes inserted in their noses. When the Allies were advancing, the children were taken offsite, injected with morphine, and hanged. Their remains were destroyed for fear of anyone learning about the experiment. The doctor conducting the experi ment remained in practice in East Germany (which was desperate for trained medical professionals) for twenty years after the war, when he crossed paths with a local Party Official and was put on trial, after which we was sent to prison for the rest of his life.

  67 Neuengamme, Camp de Concentration Nazi, 197–8.

  68 November 2011 interview with Reimer Möller.

  69 Russians formed the largest contingent of the camp population during Sergei’s months at Neuengamme. Other significant population groups of prisoners included Poles, French, and Norwegians, in that order, though there were many other countries represented. “Death, Neuengamme Concentration Camp.” Neuengamme Web site: http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de/index.php?id=990

  70 November 2011 interview with Reimer Möller.


  71 Ibid.

  72 Grossman, “The Gay Nabokov,” Salon.

  73 November 2011 interview with Reimer Möller.

  74 Ibid.

  75 The Neuengamme book of the dead and hospital records seem to be at odds on whether Sergei died January 9 or 10; but the camp archivist Reimer Möller determined January 10th as the correct date.

  76 November 2011 interview with Reimer Möller.

  77 Ibid.

  78 SM, 258.

  79 fairy tales: LL, 2; escape from prison: ITAB, 114.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WAITING FOR SOLZHENITSYN

  1 portable Winter Palace: a reference to Nabokov later made by John Leonard in his piece on Isaac Babel, “The Jewish Cossack” in The Nation, November 26, 2001.

  2 always had nightmares: SM, 108–9; Boyd’s “New Light on Nabokov’s Russian Years”; guillotines set up: Schiff, 347; dreamed of Sergei: Vladimir Nabokov diary, 1967, Berg; a happy reunion: BBAY, 499; father came to visit: Vladimir Nabokov diary, 1973, Berg Collection.

  3 blood-filled mosquitoes: Literary mosquito tropes appear throughout Ada (this one on 108), but the reference to sated insects in a secret habitat car ries echoes of one of the most notorious tortures of Solovki and other camps, which was written about in American and European newspapers as early as 1925. Prisoners were sent or tied naked outside to be tortured by mosquitoes. Robson, Solovki, 238.

  first prison term: ADA, 81; rape ofayoung boy: ADA, 355.

  4 outside the study of dreams: ADA, 15; the existence of Terra: ADA, 264.

  5 ADA, 582.

  6 high-profile trials: Stories of Yuli Daniel’s and Alexander Esenin-Volpin’s involuntary institutionalizations became widespread during the 1960s, in the wake of Daniel’s public trial and Esenin-Volpin’s re-institutionalization by the state. No public stance was taken on the issue by the World Psychiatric Association until records of actual case histories were smuggled into the West in 1971. Even then, it took six years for the Association to officially condemn the Soviet practice. “Soviets finally condemned for psychiatric malpractice,” New Scientist, September 8, 1977, 571.