Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
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sentenced to a mental hospital: Shabad, Theodore, “Soviet Said to Jail Writer Suspected of Criticism Abroad,” NYT, October 19, 1965, 1.
7 former leader himself might have been condemned: Sulzberger, C. L. “Foreign Affairs,” NYT, October 28, 1964, 44.; a group of Soviet mathematicians: It was not even the first time the state had institutionalized mathematician Alex ander Esenin-Volpin. For information on his 1968 institutionalization, see “Action on Dissident Protested in Soviet,” NYT, March 13, 1968, 6.
8 Schiff, 330.
9 BBAY, 569.
10 wanted to see butterflies there: For a full discussion of the plans of the trip to Israel, which was never made, see Yuri Leving’s “Phantom in Jerusalem,” The Nabokovian, Fall 1996, 30–44; French response to the Six-Day War: BBAY, 526.
11 BBAY, 582.
12 just wouldn’t talk about Vietnam: AFLP, 216; coaxing old friends to visit: Schiff, 343.
13 Fosburg, Lacey, “Art and Literary people urged to look inward,” NYT, May 22, 1969, 52.
14 In his “Lolita class list,” Gavriel Shapiro notes that when he translated Lolita into Russian, Nabokov changed Irving Flashman’s name to Moisei Fleishman, emphasizing his Jewishness. With the addition of the first part of the word “kike” to a slur earlier in the novel, it is another sign that given a chance to revisit the anti-Semitic theme for another audience, Nabokov emphasized it in more than one location. Cahiers du Monde Russe, XXXVII 3, July-September 1996, 317–335.
15 ANL, liii.; In Vladimir Nabokov: His Life in Art, Andrew Field also observed that Nabokov’s mature books had grown from seeds apparent in his works from the 1920s. Like Appel after him, he directly linked Nabokov’s Agasfer and its Wandering Jew roots to its future transformation into Lolita (79).
16 Levy, Alan, “Understanding Vladimir Nabokov: A Red Autumn Leaf Is a Red Autumn Leaf, Not a Deflowered Nymphet,” NYT Magazine, October 31, 1971, 20.
17 BBAY, 483.
18 AFLP, 8.
19 an international incident: “U.S. Student Held by Poland On Issue of Border Transit,” NYT, February 1, 1964, 3; ten days in jail: Field, Andrew. “Prime Exhibits,” NYT, September 18, 1966, 419; he stood trial: “Poles Free U.S. Stu dent after Prison Sentencing,” NYT, February 16, 1964, 16; had to wait two more weeks: “Poland Allowing Field To Go,” NYT, March 3, 1964, 5. In fact, he waited around even longer in the hopes of getting back the $3,000 bond his parents had posted, but finally left empty-handed. The bond money, minus court fees, was later returned to Field’s family after his conviction was thrown out that April.
20 Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, whose work had found widespread publica tion in the West.
21 AFLP, 201.
22 Ibid., 208.
23 Ibid., 135.
24 Ibid., 30. Nabokov noted that Adamovich’s only passions in life had been “Rus sian poetry and French sailors.”
25 AFLP, 30.
26 illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander II: AFLP, 13; wobbly on dates: BBAY, 619–20.
27 LATH, 95.
28 Ibid., 218.
29 Ibid.
30 LATH, 95.
31 LRL, 105.
32 AFLP, 25.
33 NWL, 372.
34 crimp relations between them: NWL, 373; his friends are in bad shape: Letter written days later to Helen Muchnic, quoted here from Meyers, 445.
35 Wilson, Edmund, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (1971), 162.
36 Wilson, Upstate, 219; SO, 218–9.
37 Dabney, Lewis, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, 510, from a December 22, 1971 letter to Edmund Wilson from Katharine White.
38 Dabney, 512.
39 Wilson took the position that Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading is not executed, but “simply gets up and walks away.” Wilson, Edmund, A Window on Russia (1972), 233.
40 Wilson, Edmund, To The Finland Station (2003), xxiii.
41 NWL, 2.
42 Ibid., 373.
43 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Oak and the Calf, 103.
44 Ibid., 104.
45 Solzhenitsyn, paradoxically, was critical of the two men for sending their works to the West, suggesting that they had “sought fame abroad.” Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, 557.
46 Ibid., 558.
47 Kunitz, Stanley, “The Other Country Inside Russia,” NYT Sunday Magazine, August 20, 1967, 24.
48 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 606.
49 Ibid., 574 and 558–9.
50 Ibid., 629.
51 Ibid., 675.
52 Salisbury, Harrison, “The World as a Prison,” NYT, September 15, 1968, BR1.
53 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 726.
54 Ibid., 740. The acquaintance was Alexander Gorlov. A year after Solzhenitsyn had been expelled, he emigrated to the United States.
55 An additional tragedy, as Michael Scammell notes, is that the copy whose location Voronyanskaya revealed was one Solzhenitsyn had repeatedly asked her to burn, but she had been worried that the other copies might be confiscated, and so she had preserved it. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 816.
56 VNSL, 528.
57 Two weeks later, Nabokov was invited by The New York Times Magazine to write an open letter to Solzhenitsyn, an offer he predictably refused. VNSL, 529.
58 Safire, William. “Solzhenitsyn without Tears,” NYT, February 18, 1974, 25.
59 American men who refused to serve in Vietnam: Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, “The Big Losers in the Third World War,” NYT, Jun 22, 1975, 193; if he might be mentally unstable: Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 917.
60 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, 263.
61 VNSL, 531.
62 BBRY, 316.
63 Kelly Oliver has explored the concept of the impossibility of witnessing in relation to atrocity, arguing that the effort to do so is nonetheless what gives rise to our very agency and humanity. She paraphrases Shoshana Felman’s arguments in a way that finds echoes in Kinbote’s dissociation:
What would it mean to bear witness to the Holocaust? asks Felman. To witness from the inside, from the experience of the victims? She argues that it would first mean bearing witness from inside the desire not to be inside. Also, it would mean testifying from inside the very binding of the secret that made victims feel as though they were part of a secret world. It would mean testifying from the inside of a radical deception by which one was separated from the truth of history even as one was living it. Moreover, it would mean testifying from inside otherness, bearing “witness from inside the living pathos of a tongue which nonetheless is bound to be heard as noise” (from Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, 2001, 90).
It is true that the Gulag is not the Holocaust, and that psychoanalyzing a fictional character can be a futile exercise. But it is possible to look at Nabokov’s fiction as embracing a similar notion of art serving as a way to acknowledge and explore what is beyond our ability to understand or express directly, no matter what recorded history we bring to bear.
64 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, 220; Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 906.
65 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 593–4.
66 In his letter, Nabokov referenced an appeal made by Viktor Fainberg. Fainberg, a dissident who had been released, had worked out of Amnesty International’s offices, helping to free Bukovsky. See William Burridge’s “How Amnesty Is Fulfilling Pope’s Holy Year Appeal,” Catholic Herald, March 7, 1975.
67 at the request of American friends: The friends, Carl and Ellendea Proffer, had named their publishing house Ardis, which is the name of the family estate in Nabokov’s Ada. The Proffers were responsible for a tremendous amount of Russian and Soviet literature getting into print (or staying there) in the United States, and became friends with the Nabokovs.
he sent a telegram: VNSL, 540.
68 The cable may well have helped, but the publicity for it came too late. The March 17 People profile ran after Maramzin had already been released. “Soviet Writer Gets Suspended Sentence,” NYT, February 22, 1975, 2.
69 VNSL, 359.
70 Michael Wood has most thoroughly considered the different façades Nabokov offered the world—and their effects on his art—in The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1997).
71 Salter, James, People profile of Vladimir Nabokov, March 17, 1975.
72 Ada had ridden in on the tails of Nabokov’s most stellar works and been treated with mercy. Coming on the heels of Ada, Nabokov’s next novel, Look at the Harlequins!, had been treated much more roughly by critics.
73 VNSL, 564.
74 SO, 193.
75 NG, 2.#8211;3.
76 BBAY, 663.
77 Brian Boyd would have his challenges, too. Véra would reject the use of statements she had made to him herself, and even of things she had written. Trying to discuss Nabokov’s affair with Irina Guadanini with Véra, Boyd would find that Véra maintained it had never happened right up until he mentioned that their letters still existed. Schiff, 344.
78 Pennsylvania’s Tyrone Daily: “Gold in Arctic,” from the Tyrone (Pa.) Daily Herald, February 4, 1933; Popular Science: Armagnac, Armand, “New Cities in the Arctic,” Popular Science, May 1937, 25–6 (text and map); American Fed eration of Labor Gulag map: Mike Adler, author of Dreaded Island: A History ofNovaya Zemlya (2011) unearthed this map and also pointed out to me the existence of Andrey Stotski’s memoir in Polish and English.
a Routledge atlas: Gilbert, Martin, The Routledge Atlas of Russian History, Fourth Edition (2007), 111–2. First published 1972; his own experiences on Nova Zembla: The English-language version of Stotski’s story ran in the Plain Talk anthology, Don Levine, Isaac, ed. (1976), and was originally published in the magazine of the same name from May to August 1947.
“virtually unrecorded ‘death camps’”: Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (2007), 330.
79 Larkov, S. and F. Romanenko. “The Northernmost Island of The Gulag Archi pelago,” from the Memorial Web site: www.memorial.krsk.ru/Articles/2007Larkov2.htm.
80 Kizny, Tomasz. Gulag: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps (2004), 186. See also Applebaum’s Gulag, 82.
81 rebellion sprang up: Figes, The Whisperers, 212; small brass band: Kizny, 186.
82 Even today with warmer temperatures and a reduced ice pack, most routine trips to Solovki end in September.
83 Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History (2003), 21.
84 “Russians Said to Get Coal from New Arctic Mines,” February 14, 1947, 3.
85 who reported terror: “… we heard a terrifying rumour that the camp was to be closed down and we were to be sent to Novaya Zemlya on the Polar Sea—a place from which there would be no return.” Buca, 325–6; were shipped off each year: See Noble’s I Was a Slave In Russia (1960) and Joseph Scholmer’s Vorkuta; no records of functioning mines: Mineshafts were dug on Nova Zembla later, when it became a nuclear testing ground. But there is no record of prisoner transports used as manpower for them. (There are, however, records of non-prisoner military personnel, engineers, and miners brought to the island to do the work of constructing test site facilities and mineshafts for underground explosions.)
Which leaves Polish Gulag prisoner Andrey Stotski’s account of having worked mines on Nova Zembla. To its credit, Stotski’s story was written just after his release to fight in the war, rendering it more reliable than hearsay accounts recorded decades later. It is also incredibly detailed. But the vast network of mines and sophisticated equipment like pneumatic drills that Stotski describes would demand organizational planning and transportation sufficient to administer a true mining enterprise, which would also require the kind of massive resources that would show up in multiple records. It is possible that these mines existed, and all paperwork related to them was destroyed before it could be collected by Gulag archivists. It may be more likely that Stotski was somehow misled that he was on Nova Zembla, or that his story, as with those of many former prisoners, somehow encapsulated the terror of Nova Zembla, which was felt so deeply that it became bound up with Gulag experiences, even for those who were never sent there.
86 This fusion of the extremes of horror and geography echoes Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, part of which Kinbote quotes in Pale Fire, and another part of which also makes reference to Zembla:
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
But where th’extreme of Vice was ne’er agreed:
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.
No creature owns it in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he;
E’vn those who dwell beneath its very zone,
Or never feel the rage or never own;
What happier natures shrink at with affright,
The hard inhabitant contends is right.
87 BBAY, 662.
88 NABOKV-L, the Nabokov Listserv, Archives from October 2, 1999: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910&L=nabokv-l&F=&S=&P=1464. The discussions reportedly fell apart when the mayor lost his reelection bid.
89 Kramer, Hilton, “A Talk with Solzhenitsyn,” NYT Book Review, May 11, 1980, BR1.
90 Solzhenitsyn biographer Michael Scammell suggests that some of the criti cism that has been leveled against Solzhenitsyn’s skill as a writer is a result of translations that fail to fully deliver on the richness of the original text (author interview with Scammell, February 2012).
91 He neglected to point out that the extraordinary measures had been futile, and that V. D. Nabokov had returned to his original stance shortly afterward.
92 Not everyone was happy with the renaming. See Harding, Luke, “Signs of dispute on Moscow’s Solzhenitsyn Street,” The Guardian, December 12, 2008.
93 Interview with Reimer Möller, November 2011.
94 NKVD and Soviet Army Records obtained with the assistance of Adam Hradilek, head of the Oral History Group of the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Prague, the Czech Republic.
95 Interview with Vladimir Petkevič, November 2011.
96 A line from “Signs and Symbols” explaining the world view taken on by the Jewish-Russian refugee mother of the boy who has gone mad (STOR, 601).
CODA
1 Stringer-Hye, Suellen, “Laura Is Not Even the Original’s Name,” an interview with Dmitri Nabokov, The Goalkeeper (2010), 177.
2 Pflaum, H. G., “Film Director Carl Junghans at 75,” Süddeutsche Zeitung München, October 9, 1972.
3 Boris Petkevič death certificate, County Borough of Halifax, General Registry Office, England, August 29, 1963.
4 Dieter Zimmer’s Nabokov Family Web: http://dezimmer.net/NabokovFamilyWeb/nfw01/nfw01_042.htm
Index
A
Ada: Or Ardor, 5, 313–316, 322, 326, 337
Adamovich, Georgy, 142, 157, 158, 320
Adams, Donald, 252
Agasfer, 89–91, 143, 257
Aldanov, Mark, 130, 152, 155, 157, 163, 228
Alexander II, Tsar, 14, 29
Alexander III, Tsar, 14, 29, 117
Alice in Wonderland, 87
Allen, Steve, 252
Amis, Martin, 5
Andersen, Hans Christian, 89
Angell, Norman, 164
Anna Karenina, 220, 313
Appel, Alfred, 317–318, 396, 401, 404
“Art—for Man’s Sake,” 10
Arts, 263
Atlantic, The, 167, 170, 180
Auden, W. H., 351
August 1914, 16
Austen, Jane, 220, 237
B
Bakhrakh, Alexander, 190
Ballets Russes, 68, 106
Balzac, Honoré de, 6
Barents, William, 182, 271–273
Battleship Potemkin, 105
B
each, Sylvia, 72
Beckett, Samuel, 238
Beilis, Mendel, 42–44, 61, 226
Belloc, Hilaire, 69
Bely, Andrei, 97
Bend Sinister, 207–210, 215, 220, 231, 267, 285, 305, 325, 333
Berberova, Nina, 99
Berkman, Sylvia, 248
Berle, Milton, 252
Berlstein, Max, 134, 175, 189, 194
Biddle, Francis, 183
Bishop, Morris, 211, 238, 254
Bleak House, 337
Blok, Alexander, 59, 82
“Blood Bath of Kishinev, The,” 30
Bloom, Leopold, 222
Blum, Léon, 140, 149
Bohlen, George, 204
Bokii, Gleb, 127
Bond, Alice Dixon, 247
Borges, Jorge Luis, 9, 297
Boris Godunov, 75
Boston Herald, The, 247
Boyd, Brian, 214, 306, 388, 394, 419
Brecht, Bertolt, 115
Brezhnev, Leonid, 2
Brundage, Avery, 123
Buckley, William, 291
Bukharin, Nikolai, 128
Bukovsky, Vladimir, 333
Bunin, Ivan, 98–99, 116, 122, 130, 152–155, 158, 160, 163, 190, 227–228, 260, 332
Byron, Lord, 90
C
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 104
Camera Obscura, 105, 201, 244
Cancer Ward, 329
Chaplin, Charlie, 153, 185
Chekhov, Anton, 14–15, 78, 218, 239
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 117, 136–137, 142, 285, 298, 320
Chocolate, 113
Churchill, Winston, 60, 164, 201
Civil Rights Act, 7, 290–291
“Cloud, Castle, Lake,” 143–144, 170
Cocteau, Jean, 106, 206, 319
Cold War, 12, 205, 274, 280, 291, 301, 303, 316
Collier’s, 211
concentration camps
creation of, 23, 114–115, 124
expansion of, 187–190, 213
in novels, 8–10, 15, 108–111, 143–144, 278, 281–284, 297–298
Sergei Nabokov in, 187, 195, 306–310
Solzhenitsyn in, 3, 12–15
World War I, 47–48, 109–110
Conclusive Evidence, 223–226, 259, 265–266, 304–305
Congress for Cultural Freedom, 206–207, 301, 350