Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Biography can be either plain or fancy, straight or crooked: it can follow the life from start to finish, or it can choose its own sweet course. Nabokov had already overturned biographical expectations so thoroughly that to try to outdo or even match him seemed futile. Besides, if I had tried to zigzag, someone else would have come along to serve all those who crave the straight sequential line. Why invite competition?

  On the other hand, a biography needs a little more shape than mere sequence. I would like now to trace some of the shape I built into the two volumes of the biography and to illustrate the interplay between the different kinds of material available—the comparatively reliable, enormously copious, but still inevitably gappy archival evidence; the dangerously indirect evidence of the published fiction; the unreliable or perhaps unforthcoming oral evidence of witnesses—and the interplay between what can be found and what can’t.

  One way to provide shape was to link the life and the art in the right way—not in the manner of the Shakespearean scholar Nabokov refers to “who deduced Shakespeare’s mother from the plays and then discovered allusions to her in the very passages he had twisted to manufacture the lady” (SO 218).

  Another was to establish my biography’s relationship to Nabokov’s splendid autobiography, Speak, Memory, not by trying either to undermine or to ignore it but by deliberately beaming onto it and bouncing off it. And, of course, I also had to define the very different relationship between my biography (or Speak, Memory, for that matter) and the work of Andrew Field, which had cost Nabokov so much vexation in his last years.

  A third way was to build a second spotlight into each of the two volumes, one, Nabokov’s father, growing dimmer through volume 1 as Nabokov himself steps to center stage, the other, Nabokov’s wife, glowing brighter throughout volume 2 as they move toward the final long embrace.

  So let me describe first a few ways in which materials in the Archive pertinent to Nabokov’s father allowed me to establish in volume 1 certain relationships between Nabokov’s art and his life and between Speak, Memory and The Russian Years.

  A 1949 letter in the Archive reveals that Nabokov would have liked to travel down from Ithaca to the Library of Congress to carry out research into his father’s public career for the first version of his autobiography, but he ran out of money and time (SL 95). That letter certainly encouraged my own inclination to feature V. D. Nabokov, especially since I had also found in the Archive a host of family papers relating to Nabokov’s father that reached Nabokov from Prague only in 1961. Some of these he used when he revised Speak, Memory in 1966, but by this stage he did not want to tamper with the original structure of the book and so said less about his father than the material warranted.

  By focusing on V. D. Nabokov, I could not only fill in the gaps his son had left in Speak, Memory but could also describe the cultural and political background of later imperial Russia—a world shrouded in myth in the English-speaking world—in a way that would still be intensely personal and that would show how the Nabokovs lived right at the center of Petersburg’s swankest street, its artistic animation, its turbulent times. There is other valuable material on V. D. Nabokov in archives and libraries in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Columbia, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford and, of course, historical minutiae in newspapers and journals of the time in research libraries all over the world, but if I had not found in the Archive V. D. Nabokov’s memoirs about the St. Petersburg theater of his youth or about the oppressiveness of the state school system, despite his own personal success within it, I would never have been able to paint such a vivid and personalized backdrop of what was, at the time of Nabokov’s birth, Russia’s immediate past.

  All the same, even though V. D. Nabokov filled roles such as parliamentary leader of the largest party in the first Russian Duma, president of Russia’s Literary Fund, and drafter of the abdication manifesto that sealed the end of the Romanov dynasty, I would not have been able to justify his having such prominence early in The Russian Years unless I could also convey what father and son were like together. But the Archive also provided that: the diary V. D. Nabokov kept all through 1918, when he and his family were taking refuge in a villa on the Black Sea shore, as first Bolshevik, then German, then French, and finally liberal and Tatar nationalist forces took over the Crimea in that tumultuous year. The Archive contains a complete record of young Vladimir’s creative output for this year: an album of his manuscript poems, two small albums of his analysis of classical Russian poems, their meter analyzed according to the diagrams Andrey Bely devised and the poet Maximilian Voloshin had just introduced him to, and then another album with his own new poems late in the year, each composed with a view to the kind of metrical diagram it would yield. Invaluable for me as an archivist, a bibliographer, and a critic, but as a biographer I could do far more with the images in V. D. Nabokov’s diary: playing chess with his son, even winning a local tournament with him; hiking up the steep slopes overlooking the Black Sea; standing on guard duty with him through the moonlit Crimean nights; hearing his son read his most ambitious new work and commenting with a connoisseur’s taste and a father’s pride on the nineteen-year-old Volodya’s promise as a writer.

  Another reason that Nabokov’s father has to loom so large and that his image dims slowly even after his life was switched off so suddenly by an assassin’s bullet can be found in the precious stack of letters Nabokov wrote his mother. In some of the letters, for instance, Nabokov makes explicit his conviction that he and his mother will both someday in some inexplicable beyond be reunited with his father. Or he hints at his sense that his dead father may have somehow helped him in the strain of a Cambridge examination room. Nabokov never allows himself to drop the guard of skepticism in his fiction, but at the same time his work never abandons his fascination with the possibility of a life beyond this one. In the light of letters like these, the possibility sketched in The Gift that Fyodor’s lucky fate and the very idea for his greatest books have been somehow guided by his dead father takes on a new and deeply personal turn (VNRY 193, 194, 239, 333–39, 471–72).

  Perhaps the most priceless pages in the whole Archive are not in Nabokov’s own hand, although they transcribe a fragment from his diary: his account of the night his father was assassinated (VNRY 191–93). It was these poignant pages that convinced me I could make V. D. Nabokov’s death as handled in one sentence of Speak, Memory into the focus of my introduction to volume 1 without robbing the assassination itself of its drama when the story reached that inalterable date.

  (To digress for a moment: that diary fragment has its own drama, its own lesson. It is the only evidence we have that Nabokov ever kept any kind of diary before 1943. It covers four pages, two sheets torn from an exercise book, a long transcription in his mother’s hand. Whether she asked him to record his impressions of that night or whether he volunteered to show her, perhaps a year later, what he had written after that fateful night, we will never know. It is the only instance in the entire biography where it has been possible to present the kind of running inside view of Nabokov’s thoughts that we are used to in following the life of a fictional character. And it survived against the odds because Elena Nabokov saw it, transcribed it, tore the transcription out of the exercise book in which she had written it; because his sister did not destroy this particular fragment; and because decades later it found its way from Prague to Montreux. History’s juiciest plums can so easily fall and sink without trace into the ground; thank heavens that this one, at least, was preserved.)

  As I realized that the biography would take two volumes, not the one I had naively allowed for, I saw that the ideal point to end volume 1 would be at the very moment Speak, Memory ends, as the family steps down toward the boat that will take them from the advancing German armies to a safe refuge in America. I could then at the beginning of volume 2 look back at that moment in Speak, Memory and ask why Nabokov ended his autobiography’s last chapter there, just as I began volume 1 by asking why he
picked a foreshadowing of his father’s death as the place to end the first chapter of Speak, Memory.

  In both cases, he wanted to show that despite the horrors of history, even in the horrors of history, he could find evidence of the harmony and the generosity he still felt behind life. That conviction, which permeates his fiction, also gave him the confidence and the buoyancy to remake himself twice: as a fledgling writer, ejected from the cozy nest of an aristocratic home, cut off from comfort and country and natural audience, he would turn himself by sheer effort and talent into someone who could make Russian soar; then, when even Europe’s tiny Russian émigré community had been shattered by Hitler’s ambitions and there was no one left to write for, he had to renounce the language he had mastered and restart from scratch as an American writer.

  The art and the life are linked, all right, but the links have to be fashioned with the utmost care.

  Since this is the year of The American Years and of Véra Nabokov’s death, I will focus a little longer on the light that the Archive casts on Véra in ways that helped me shape volume 2.

  If Nabokov planned to write a chapter on his father in Speak, Memory, he had no plans to write a chapter on his wife. Véra once told me: “He had the decency to keep me out of his books.” But although he doesn’t describe Véra in Speak, Memory, he nevertheless makes her central: he makes the last chapter an address to Véra, a tribute to her, but only so as to stress how inaccessible their life together would remain to outsiders: “They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—to use a soul-rending Horatian inflection. The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know” (SM 295).

  In fact, Nabokov designs the structure of Speak, Memory to position Véra as a culmination of one of his life’s key patterns. The whole book has seen a succession of women in his life: mother, pretty governesses, first childhood love, first adolescent love, and a rapid blur of amatory partners in the prime of his youth. Then, as the implicit crown of the series, Véra enters—and suddenly the shutters come down. For she steps into the book only by being addressed as “You,” and that is all the glimpse we get.

  Nabokov’s last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, published in 1974, takes the form of an autobiography by a Russo-American writer called Vadim Vadimych N———, whose life is a bleak, barren parody of Nabokov’s own until at the end of the book a woman never given any name but “You” steps into his life and turns it from rancor to radiance. Obviously it parodies, among a great deal else, not only Nabokov’s life but his own account of his life in Speak, Memory.

  For a long time after I realized this much about the novel, it still puzzled me. Its self-referentiality seemed sterile and sour. But as I began to sift through the Archive, I came across a fact here and a riddle there that in eventual retrospect added up to a long series of small revelations. In Nabokov’s diary for 1971, four years before he died, he recorded on January 28 that he had begun to read the typescript of Field’s biography, Nabokov: His Life in Part, for which Field wanted feedback within a month. He began reading intensely, and by February 6 he noted: “Have corrected 95 pages of Field’s 680 page work. The number of absurd errors, impossible statements, vulgarities and inventions is appalling.” (Nabokov’s nearly 200 pages of corrections to Field are also in the Archive and a revelation in themselves.) The very day he made that exasperated entry in his diary, he began to write Look at the Harlequins!. Still vexed months later, he wrote to his lawyer: “I cannot tell you how upset I am by the whole matter. It was not worth living a far from negligible life…only to have a blundering ass reinvent it” (VNAY 616).

  In the mid-1970s, with perhaps not too many years to live, Nabokov felt that his life had been betrayed. In reply, he served up a deliberately grotesque version of his life that would laugh any unwitting travesty like Field’s right out of court. He was painfully aware that this could well be the last book he would ever write. Over the previous thirty years, he had settled into the habit of composing his novels in pencil on index cards. The box of cards containing the manuscript of Look at the Harlequins!, now in the Archive, has inside its lid Nabokov’s instruction: “To be destroyed unread if unfinished.”

  But even the knowledge that Nabokov feared this novel might be a parting shot that he might barely have time to fire still did not redeem it for me. A novel apparently conceived in a spirit of urgent exasperation and corrective contempt seemed no better than the narcissistic parody it had first appeared. As I became more familiar with the Archive, however, I came to discover more about Look at the Harlequins! The novel begins:

  I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of the plot.

  (LATH 3)

  “Three or four successive wives,” as if Vadim cannot quite remember how many he has had: an offhand joke within the novel’s first lines. (Let me confess that I had overlooked the joke until Nabokov’s one wife recalled it with a laugh of appreciative pleasure.) As the passage progresses, with its image of fate trying to bring two lovers together after not quite succeeding at first, a keen reader of Nabokov hears an echo of the entire structure of The Gift. There Fyodor retrospectively construes what seem to him like repeated, inept moves by fate to bring Zina and himself together as proof that fate persisted until it found the right combination, as if convinced that only Zina would do for him. That theme Nabokov uncharacteristically echoed twice more, in his next two novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister.

  That much could be gleaned without the help of the Archive. I also discovered from interviews and elsewhere that Nabokov liked to tell others about the various ways fate had tried to introduce him to Véra before they were finally brought together and that he insisted that even had there been no revolution they would have somehow met.

  In the Archive, in a 1975 letter to his German publisher and friend, Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt, Nabokov jokingly calls his new novel “Look at the Masks!” (letter of May 1, 1975, VNA). That nickname immediately coalesced in my mind with other facts I had amassed. I had asked Véra if she could tell me anything about her first meeting with Nabokov beyond the one detail he had dropped in an interview, that they met at an émigré charity ball (SO 127). “No,” she said, firm as a fortress. That did not stop me asking once more and hearing the portcullis again crash down (VNRY 558, n. 37). But Nabokov’s sister Elena Sikorski told me that her brother had hinted to her that his poem “Vstrecha” (“The Meeting”) reflected his first meeting with Véra.

  I knew by then that every year in his late diaries Nabokov scribbled a word or two under May 8, and that one could deduce, by collocating all these entries, that he was reminding himself to buy Véra something to commemorate the date they met in 1923. One year, the diary reminder was simply the phrase “profil’ volchiy,” “wolf’s profile” (1969 diary, VNA), a phrase from the poem “Vstrecha,” that refers to a wolf’s profile mask.2 The woman in the poem wears a mask throughout and seems to have stepped out from some masquerade into the starry night. The manuscript of this intensely romantic poem, also in the Archive, shows that it was written three weeks after Nabokov and Véra first met. Elena Sikorski’s explanation lies behind the summary I give in the biography of the event behind the poem:

  During the course of the ball, he encountered a woman in a black mask with a wolf’s profile. She had never met him before, and knew him only through watching over the growth of his poetic talent, in print and at public readings. She would not lower her mask, as if she rejected the appeal of her looks and wished him instead to respond only to the force of her conversation. He followed her
out into the night air. Her name was Véra Evseevna Slonim.

  (VNRY 206–07)

  The moment I read that Nabokov had assigned Look at the Harlequins! The private nickname “Look at the Masks!” I realized that he was alluding to his meeting with Véra; that the real title of the novel (also, with its imperative verb, an echo of Speak, Memory)3 was a private allusion to the Harlequin mask Véra wore when he first met her; and that in all likelihood the whole novel was a tribute to the kind fate that united them.

  All sorts of hints in Look at the Harlequins! and throughout the Archive pointed to the possibility that the novel might be an inversion not only of Nabokov’s life and of Speak, Memory but also specifically of his relationship to Véra. As I examined the novel once more, it became evident that each of the unlovable women Vadim marries was indeed in a different way a pointed inversion of certain of Véra’s characteristics, while the “You” who redeems his life distills in a few traits the essential Véra.

  Early in the novel, an old aunt tells Vadim, “Stop moping! Look at the harlequins!” “What harlequins? Where?” “Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” (LATH 8–9)

  As I write in the biography, we see almost nothing of You, Vadim’s fourth wife. She appears shortly before the end of the novel. Vadim describes the scene of their meeting: As he emerges from his office at Quirn University, the string around a batch of his letters and drafts breaks. Coming from the library along the same path, You crouches down to help him collect his papers. “No, you don’t,” she says to a yellow sheet that threatens to glide away in the wind. After helping Vadim to cram everything back into his folder she notices a yellow butterfly settle on a clover head before it wheels away in the same wind. “Metamorphoza,” she says, in her “lovely elegant Russian.”