Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Read online

  The Secret History of

  VLADIMIR

  NABOKOV

  ANDREA PITZER

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To the dead and the dreams

  of a lost century

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE: Waiting for Solzhenitsyn

  CHAPTER TWO: Childhood

  CHAPTER THREE: War

  CHAPTER FOUR: Exile

  CHAPTER FIVE: Aftermath

  CHAPTER SIX: Descent

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Purgatory

  CHAPTER EIGHT: America

  CHAPTER NINE: After the War

  CHAPTER TEN: Lolita

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Fame

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Pale Fire

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Speak, Memory

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Waiting for Solzhenitsyn

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  The Neva River flows from east to west, sweeping along a wide channel and into the canals of St. Petersburg, the former Imperial capital of Russia. Rounding a hairpin turn just before Kresty Prison, the current follows a more elegant arc past the Field of Mars and the Winter Palace, then slips toward the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, lapping at the far bank as it goes by, less than half a mile north of the childhood home of Vladimir Nabokov.

  Now a museum, the house where Nabokov was born sits on reclaimed swampland in the middle of an engineered island at the heart of an engineered city built by slaves and veiled in baroque magnificence. The same could be said of Nabokov’s writing.

  In 2011, during my fourth year of research for this book, I went to Nabokov’s home city to see what I might learn from it. Many buildings have been restored in recent years, and in twenty-first-century St. Petersburg it is impossible to go more than a block or two without being startled by spectacle, from the lights framing the long panorama of Palace Square at night to the rainbow-studded onion domes of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood.

  I immediately thought it the most beautiful city I had ever seen. And yet St. Petersburg still felt uncomfortably imperial, built on a scale that could only have been accomplished by a dynasty willing to spend lives and treasure without much regard for the cost.

  The director of the Nabokov Museum, Tatiana Ponomareva, was kind enough to be my guide during two days of the trip. She took me to the Tauride Palace, where Nabokov’s father had served in the First Duma, an experiment in constitutional monarchy that was terminated by the Tsar after just three months. We headed to the former site of Tenishev School, where the teenage Nabokov had been mocked as a foreigner for his lack of interest in Russian politics. She pointed out the park where he had walked in winter with his first love, Lyussya, who was later immortalized in the novel Mary. And we strolled by the childhood apartment of Véra Slonim, who, years into exile, met Nabokov in Berlin and became his wife.

  During other research trips to other countries, I was reminded of the ways in which the story of Nabokov’s life and family intersected again and again with not just political upheaval in his home city but also the collapse of democracy in every nation in which he lived until the age of forty-one. It is one thing to know this intellectually. It is quite another to leave St. Petersburg, to leave Berlin, to leave Paris, and to imagine Vladimir Nabokov abandoning the most magnificent cities of Europe one after the other, fleeing the instability that followed him like a plague.

  I came to Nabokov as a college student and found myself put off by the abuse he heaped on his characters, whom he described as “galley slaves.” I didn’t mind violence, or sex, or protagonists who were not nice—I didn’t even need them to reform—but I wanted the events and the people in his books to matter. I wanted some sense from Nabokov that he loved what he had created, and that, on closer inspection, his characters had something to offer beyond their unblinking submission to his stylistic gifts.

  Returning to him as an adult, I found the style more persuasive on its own terms. Can anyone who cares about writing fail to marvel at passages such as this one from Glory, the story of Martin, a young man bereft of his country and in love with Sonia, who does not love him in return?

  Martin could not restrain himself. He stepped out into the corridor and caught sight of Sonia hopping downstairs in a flamingo-colored frock, a fluffy fan in one hand and something bright encircling her black hair. She had left her door open and the light on. In her room there remained a cloudlet of powder, like the smoke following a shot; a stocking, killed outright, lay under a chair; and the motley innards of the wardrobe had spilled onto the carpet.

  Many writers, myself included, would weep with gratitude to have written those four sentences, just half a paragraph in a throw-away scene from one of Nabokov’s least famous books. The more Nabokov I read as an adult, the more I began to suspect that what I had longed for at eighteen was in there somewhere, but hiding. Later, when I became consumed with the idea of putting Nabokov’s writing into historical context, it turned out that many things were, in fact, hiding inside his novels—more, in fact, than I could have imagined.

  Even though I no longer believe him to be perpetually subjecting his characters to horrific events solely for his own amusement, I am not yet one who believes that Nabokov had a gentle soul. But fury and compassion reside together in his writing in ways that, more often than not, have gone unrecognized. He has taken an unprecedented approach to preserving all the grief of his lifetime—the world’s and his own—in his novels.

  For those who have read his elegant autobiography Speak, Memory, it is hardly a secret that Nabokov narrowly escaped Bolshevik Russia, the Holocaust, and Occupied France—or that friends and members of his family suffered terrible political violence and were rendered mute by history. But by losing the particulars of that violence and that history, the ways in which these events made their way into his stories have often also been lost. And a whole layer of meaning in his work has vanished.

  This lost, forgotten, and sometimes secret history suggests that behind the art-for-art’s-sake façade that Nabokov both cultivated and rejected, he was busy detailing the horrors of his era and attending to the destructive power of the Gulag and the Holocaust in one way or another across four decades of his career.

  On a local level, this means that court cases, FBI files, and Nazi propaganda shed light on subtle references in Lolita. Red Cross records recall Revolutionary trauma hidden in Despair. New York Times articles suggest a radically different reading of Pale Fire. On a global level, it becomes apparent that Nabokov, who was so reluctant to engage in politics in any public forum, was responding to and weaving in the details of the events that he had witnessed or remembered, as if preserving them before they could be forgotten.

  Yet as readers focused on Nabokov’s shocking subjects and linguistic pyrotechnics, those details were forgotten. This book is an attempt to retrieve them.

  What if Lolita is the story of global anti-Semitism as much as it is Humbert Humbert’s molestation of a twelve-year-old girl? What if Pale Fire is a love letter to the dead of the Russian Gulag? What if forty years of Nabokov’s writing carries an elegy for those who resisted the prisons and camps that devastated his world?

  Nabokov presents different faces to different people, and so this book seeks to draw out one particular story. It is not an attempt to replicate the prodigious feats of the biographers of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, which could hardly be surpassed. It is not a study of butterflies, or an account of Nabokov’s views on the afterlife—though both topics were undeniably important to him. This is a story as much about
the world around the writer as the writer himself, and a look at how epic events and family history made their way, unseen, into extraordinary literature.

  This book covers a lot of territory, from biography to history and criticism. After the first chapter, Nabokov’s life unfolds from birth to death. In the beginning, the story of Nabokov’s youth is almost eclipsed by the whirlwind events of the new century. As race hatred and concentration camps begin to swamp Europe, they wind their way closer and closer to his world—and his work. The relevance of many events recounted in the early chapters only becomes apparent once Nabokov begins to write in English, fusing the past and everything that has been lost with spectacular invention, creating terrifying fairy tales out of magic and dust.

  Not all those he loves escape, and so it hardly comes as a surprise that Nabokov makes use of that history. Personal and political tragedies intertwine as he crafts his greatest novels.

  If this history is relevant, it shows Nabokov reinventing the reader’s role in literature, creating books with brilliant narratives which have whole other stories folded inside them. This interior Nabokov is more vulnerable to the past than he publicly led the world to believe, yet has no interest in comforting us. His hidden stories have something profound to teach us about being human and our very way of interacting with art.

  Much of the story of Nabokov’s life unspools here in a series of juxtapositions with his contemporaries. Ivan Bunin reigned over the Russian literary emigration until Nabokov replaced him and refused to write about Russia on anyone’s terms but his own. Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas also went from Russia and Western Europe to America, and likewise faced a life crisis in 1937, but made very different choices in its wake. Walter Duranty, whose reporting from Russia on the fledgling Soviet state deeply influenced the opinions of educated Americans for more than two decades, laid the foundation for a kind of blindness about the U.S.S.R. that drove Nabokov to despair. Critic Edmund Wilson, who was devoted to literature but had a very different way of interpreting it—and indeed of understanding history itself—forced Nabokov to define himself explicitly.

  Among Nabokov’s other contemporaries were filmmakers and writers who, for reasons honorable or selfish, put their gifts wholly at the service of politics. And capping the beginning and end of these comparisons is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that other Russian exile whose books horrified and unnerved twentieth-century readers, a man with whom Vladimir Nabokov has more in common than has ever been imagined.

  My first full day in St. Petersburg in 2011, I was accompanied by Fedor, the son of a professor at St. Petersburg State University. He took me to see the major sites, and at the top of my wish list were prisons.

  We met at Vladimir Nabokov’s house and began to work our way up the Neva, heading first to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where so many writers and revolutionaries had been incarcerated. A Nabokov had once been its commander. Standing in a pitch-black cell, Fedor dug in his pocket for a lighter and talked about history. He was young enough not to remember life in the Soviet Union.

  We walked back out into the sunlight and made our way farther along the river. My guidebook also listed a penal museum at Kresty Prison, where Nabokov’s father had been sentenced to solitary confinement in 1908 under Tsar Nicholas II.

  Fedor seemed uncertain about going at first—he had never heard of a museum there—but agreed to take me anyway. As we talked on the way, I realized he was trying to explain that Kresty was still a prison, an operational prison, and, as such, was someplace that most people would rather not go.

  He was still game, however, so we kept walking until we came to Kresty’s red brick perimeter walls and buildings. When Nabokov’s father had served his sentence, the facility’s innovative design was celebrated for its modern approach to incarceration; but by 2010 its buildings looked like factories or tenements in the heart of any mid-size American city, with some ornate brick flourishes added. It is today the largest functioning prison in Europe.

  We had trouble finding a main door, but in time we stumbled on an unlocked entrance to a side building. The door opened onto a stairwell that made up in graffiti what it lacked in plaster. We went up. After one or two floors, a smell of cooking food drifted by. The building was strangely silent. We were hardly in danger, but I was struck by the feeling that we had wandered into someplace we were not supposed to be—that we were trespassing.

  Back outside, a handful of people stood at a door across the way near a sign listing hours—a grown man and a child among them, looking as if they were waiting to pay a visit, but not to a museum. I had realized that there were prisoners inside the facility, but seeing friends or family waiting to go in somehow crashed the present into the past. We decided to leave.

  The museum stayed hidden that day, and I did not go back to Kresty. In a place so bound up with history, the cityscape preserves enough of the past; it is its own museum.

  My last day in Russia, I walked a little over twelve miles, trying in vain to check off all the places I could not bear to leave without seeing. I especially wanted to visit a pink-and-white candy-cane-striped church located next to one of the first concentration camp sites in St. Petersburg. The bloody history of the city does not exist in opposition to its monumental beauty; they sit side by side, part and parcel of the same thing.1

  That afternoon, caught in the rain again, this time with blistered feet, it occurred to me that, intentionally or not, Nabokov had used the architectural presence of his home city as a model for a unique kind of literature—a place where a walk to a museum could transport you to a jailer’s doorstep.2 The exquisite form and baroque inventions appear in direct proportion to the history they have to hide.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Waiting for Solzhenitsyn

  1

  On October 6, 1974, Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Véra sat in a private dining room of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, waiting for Alexander Solzhenitsyn to join them for lunch. The two men had never met.

  By then the Nabokovs had been living in the opulent Palace Hotel, tucked along the eastern shore of Lake Geneva, for thirteen years. During those years, literary pilgrims had traveled to Montreux in hopes of an audience with the master. When they were lucky enough to meet with him, Nabokov had fielded their questions and returned biting, playful answers. They had sipped coffee, tea, or grappa at lunchtime with one of the most celebrated wordsmiths in the world, and plumbed his cryptic statements for meaning. Pursuing him as he pursued butterflies, they had climbed the Alpine slopes that vaulted up behind the hotel.

  The seventy-five-year-old Nabokov saw himself as Russian and American, yet lived in rented rooms in neither country, continuing to work on new books and translations at an exhausting pace that Lolita’s breakthrough more than a decade before had rendered financially unnecessary. He had grown accustomed to being courted, and to delighting his guests. But a visit from Solzhenitsyn was something different.

  The morning of October 6 revealed itself early on as a rainy day, but in truth, the weather on the drive south from Zurich may not have mattered to Solzhenitsyn. Only eight months earlier, Solzhenitsyn had been sitting in a cell at Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, charged with treason against the Soviet Union. The deportation that followed his arrest had been bitter, but there were, he knew, more permanent penalties than exile.

  Solzhenitsyn had dreamed of face-to-face confrontation with Soviet leaders, believing that pressure at the right moment by the right person might topple the whole system of repression, or at least begin its destruction. Instead, expulsion had delivered him into Frankfurt, Germany, and an uncharted life. And so he was not in prison, not shouting his defiance to the Politburo or meeting privately with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. After a spring and summer spent making his way in the new world, he instead found himself cruising the Swiss countryside with his wife Natalia, circling Lake Geneva, traveling Montreux’s elegant Grand Rue on his way to see one of the most celebrated authors in the world—a man
he himself had nominated for the Nobel Prize just two years earlier. Yet Solzhenitsyn was nervous.

  At that moment, it would have been hard to find two bigger literary superstars than the man who had written The Gulag Archipelago and the author of Lolita. They were both Russian, but the nineteen years between their births had destined them to grow up in separate universes. Nabokov had come of age in the last days of the Tsar and Empire, ceding Russia to the Bolsheviks, sailing away under machine-gun fire before the infant Solzhenitsyn had learned to walk. Solzhenitsyn had grown up in the Soviet state, spending years inside its concentration camps and prisons before emerging from behind the Iron Curtain on a mission to reveal a reign of terror and end it forever.

  Physically, the men were as dissimilar as their histories. With Nabokov, molasses candy and modern dentures had created a plump, mild professor from a gaunt émigré, while Solzhenitsyn’s scarred forehead, wild hair, and prophet’s beard marked him as a more volatile presence. Their writing voices, too, stood distinct one from the other, Nabokov’s exquisite language and baroque experiments contrasting with Solzhenitsyn’s open fury and direct appeals to emotion.

  Even their most famous books seem opposite in nature. The Gulag Archipelago chronicles the entire history of the Soviet concentration camp system, bluntly cataloguing the abuse of power on an epic scale, while Nabokov’s Lolita maps a more individual horror: the willful savaging of one human being by another. A microscopically detailed account of a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a young girl, Lolita has been variously described as “funny,” “the only convincing love story of our century,” and “the filthiest book I have ever read.” Humbert Humbert’s tale of the two-year molestation of his stepdaughter describes their relationship, her escape with another man, and Humbert’s revenge on his romantic rival in merciless, vivid language. The narrator’s frankness about his desire for and relations with a child destined the book to pass through scandal on its way to immortality.1