Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  It remains a mystery exactly what Luzhin has seen in the interval between those two moments—his exterior life during wartime is glossed over in a single paragraph that covers more than a decade. This kind of literary ellipsis would become a mainstay of Nabokov’s style. The Defense, in fact, would set the pattern for many Nabokov novels that followed. Never again would he write a book without destabilizing a main character’s past or fate and turning the story into a puzzle.

  Despite a handful of critics who assailed Nabokov’s dark world-view, the stylistic achievements of The Defense astonished the literary community and sealed Nabokov’s reputation as the leading author of the emigration. Ivan Bunin himself acknowledged that Nabokov had “snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included.” Russian writer Nina Berberova later recalled the amazement of reading the first chapters of the novel in Paris and her sudden belief that everything the exiles had lost would live on in Nabokov’s work—his literary legacy would redeem their very existence.33

  4

  Nabokov heard the applause from Berberova and Bunin in France, where there were richer possibilities for émigré authors. And with the support of Véra, the breadwinner of the family, he built enough of a literary reputation that Paris came to court him in the form of Ilya Fondaminsky. An editor with the Socialist Revolutionary émigré journal Contemporary Annals, Fondaminsky was a patron saint of Russian émigré literature, known for paying good money to the best authors he could find. Contemporary Annals had published Nabokov’s fiction before, but Fondaminsky was hoping for more. To Nabokov’s delight, Fondaminsky agreed to buy his next project—soon to be called Glory—unfinished as it was, without conditions, intending to serialize it.34 It was Fondaminsky’s first extravagant acknowledgement of Nabokov’s genius, but it would not be the last.

  Months later, Nabokov finished drafting Glory (originally Podvig in Russian), the story of Martin, a young man who, like Nabokov, fled Russia in 1919, lost his father at a young age, and played goalkeeper for Trinity College at Cambridge. The young protagonist exists in a suspended netherworld, where émigré Russians are waiting for history to resolve, even as they are slowly left behind.

  Martin finds himself irritated by his maudlin Swiss uncle, who wonders if Russia needs a dictator to put things right. The uncle dramatically bemoans the execution of Martin’s former tutor by the Bolsheviks, only to be told that she is alive and well and living in Finland. At Cambridge, Martin meets a professor who fetishizes his own narrative about Russia in a different way, waxing nostalgic over it as others do Rome or Babylon—as an ancient, dead culture. Alienated by these men’s treatment of Russia as completely lost, Martin longs to engage it as a living force himself but lacks the creative gifts to do so.35

  Person after person in Glory (originally Podvig in Russian) fails to acknowledge the specificity of experience and human individuality. Even a Socialist Revolutionary, whose heroic border-crossing and espionage Martin admires, speaks of the devastation of Russia and its famines and executions; but at the end of an entire evening spent in Martin’s company mistakes him for someone else.

  Martin develops a romantic attachment to Sonia, a Russian girl who has a “half-witted” cousin, Irina. As a normal teenager fleeing Russia after the Revolution, Irina was molested and witnessed deserting soldiers or peasants shoving her father through the window of a moving train. The traumas of the trip and a severe typhus infection took away her ability to speak, leaving her, as one character notes, a “living symbol” of all that has happened. Irina’s survival and damaged state reflect the brutalization of Russia and Martin’s own muteness—his inability to transcend or express the events that have overtaken him. He hides briefly behind a Swiss passport, and on one trip pretends to be Swiss, in an attempt to relieve himself of his historical burden.

  With Sonia, who flirts with him for a time, Martin invents the fantastic country of Zoorland. They discuss the strange habits of residents in their imaginary land, riffing on its rules and customs in an absurdist take on the Soviet Union. The untalented and unlucky Martin fails to win Sonia’s love, and is likewise disappointed when he finds his only real stab at creation—the magical world of Zoorland—has been turned into a novella by a romantic rival to whom Sonia has described it in detail.

  Inspired by the Socialist Revolutionaries he knows, Martin eventually sets out to sneak back into the Soviet Union alone for twenty-four hours, though he suspects his exploit will end badly. One of the anti-Bolshevik activists in the novel is said to have escaped the Soviet Union wrapped in a shroud; Martin, too, plays at death in his attempt to live.

  Unlike the professionals, he does not go in the service of any larger cause. No actual mission or agenda burdens his trip with exterior meaning. He is a pure spy, an unaffiliated intruder, harming no one, entering a world clandestinely with no possibility of political repercussions against anyone but himself. He understands the risks—he has already imagined his execution. Like Nabokov himself, Martin tries to use longing to create an artistic experience from historical exigencies, refusing to serve or engage on anyone’s terms but his own. The end of the book takes place among his friends and family after he has disappeared, leaving Martin’s fate unknown forever.36

  5

  In Mary, Nabokov had nodded toward an absent love living through “years of horror” in the Soviet Union. In The Defense, he had mentioned penal servitude, torture, and hard labor camps, but without specifics. In Glory, he has Martin briefly imagine himself escaping from labor camps, but only in passing. Concentration camps had started to cast a pall over Nabokov’s novels, just as they were continuing to expand into his century, but they had only begun to shadow his own life.

  In the beginning Nabokov no doubt found it easier to write from the point of view of émigrés who had, like him, escaped the worst of Russia’s fate. But his initial silence may have been due in part to how few specifics were known early on about the camps. There were trials, of course—and not just of the Socialist Revolutionaries, but also priests and intellectuals. After the trials came the rumors of people being sent north and east en masse, but for a time, much of what followed was touched with mystery.

  Some facts, however, were known. By 1923, Russian exiles in the West understood that katorga, the hard labor in exile first established under the Tsars, had a new face and a new home. The heart of the Soviet penal system had moved onto the Solovetsky Islands—to a monastery familiarly known as Solovki.

  Perched northeast of the Russian mainland, Solovki had been established five hundred years before as an outpost of the Russian Orthodox Church. As early as the sixteenth century, the first religious prisoner had been sent there by the Tsar. Others had followed, with the monastery of Solovki becoming a jail for the Empire’s religious dissidents.37

  The Bolshevik takeover, however, quickly changed Solovki’s identity. Initially, post-Revolutionary Russian concentration camps had been run on an ad hoc basis, but in June of 1923, more than a hundred inmates were sent to the islands, followed by additional waves of prisoners. That fall, Solovetsky monastery grounds were officially turned over to the secret police. In November of the same year, Lenin named Solovki a “northern camp of special significance.”38

  Lenin died just months later; but for Nabokov, Solovki would become a symbol of the country’s suffering and shorthand for Bolshevik cruelty under Lenin. Newspaper readers in Europe and even America soon learned its name, as reports of suicide and executions on Solovki trickled out, offering little hope to those whose family members had been sent there. By 1926, it was internationally known as “the most feared prison in Soviet Russia.”39

  The struggle for succession after Lenin’s death was eventually won by Joseph Stalin, but those hoping the camps would play a diminished role under his rule were disappointed. The number of prisoners held at Solovki increased exponentially, and Western newspapers carried a Soviet announcement detailing the inauguration of airline service between the port city of Kem a
nd Solovki, to speed up incarceration and free prisoner transport from seasonal restrictions of ice and winter.40

  Meanwhile, conditions on Solovki deteriorated. Whispers of bizarre abuse in the camps made their way into print outside Russia. The Soviet use of a “mosquito torture,” in which inmates were stripped naked and left to the mercies of swarms of biting insects, was noted in English-language newspapers for the first time.41

  Prisoners soon emerged to tell their own tales of torture and starvation. Some inmates served out their sentences or were released because of their shattered health, returning to the mainland. Others managed to escape into exile, and got their stories published in newspapers across Europe and America. The first fulllength accounts from former prisoners appeared in the mid-1920s; by 1931 several more had arrived.

  Former political prisoners at Solovki recounted torture and executions. Non-political prisoners reported harvesting lumber in grueling conditions. Testimony from a member of a lumber crew detailed how those who failed to complete a daily quota by evening would be beaten by guards and kept working far into the night. Forced laborers resorted to chopping off their own hands, feet, or fingers in a search for relief from the endless work. Conditions in the camps entered the public debate on Capitol Hill in the U.S. and the British Parliament, resulting in an international boycott of some Soviet exports, including lumber.42

  Solovki horror stories and testimony continued to spread internationally, spurring an internal investigation. But the outrage did not shake Soviet faith in the rehabilitative possibilities of concentration camps. Solovki-style camps soon became the template for incarcerating and rehabilitating political opponents. A 1929 Politburo resolution called for the creation of a network of camps to build on the Solovki model, using prison labor to develop the nation’s natural resources.43

  In the beginning the word GULag was merely an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, meaning “Main Administration of Camps.” Convicts might unlearn their opposition to the Bolsheviks; and in the meantime, their work would help to build the Soviet state.

  6

  With a burgeoning prison culture back home, few economic prospects in Europe, and nowhere to turn, some émigrés immolated themselves via suicide, alcohol, or the oblivion of cocaine.44 In Germany, Nazi Party brownshirts skirmished with Communists in street fights that echoed a clash of extremes that émigrés had lived through more than a decade before. More Russians left Berlin for Paris or America. Others trudged on. And some chose Luzhin’s end.

  For those who remained, a less lethal escape was available through cinema, which blossomed in Germany through the 1920s and 1930s. Filmmakers came from around the world to work in Berlin in the postwar years. Germany, like Nabokov, had begun to produce harrowing stories of madmen and monsters, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligah to Nosferatu. But the Nabokovs, who went to the movies regularly, had a wide range of films from which to choose. French, British, and American movies made the rounds, including comedy from the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton—two of Nabokov’s favorites.45

  Like her husband, Véra had played an extra in Berlin productions. More than acting, however, Nabokov had an interest in developing scenarios—screenwriting promised more money than poetry or fiction could provide. And at one point Hollywood beckoned—a Russian-American director took an interest in Nabokov’s “The Potato Elf,” a story about a dwarf who falls in love. There was talk of bringing Nabokov to California, but as he sent additional material along, interest declined.46

  Véra’s younger sister Sonia was also serious about a cinematic vocation, and spent two years training at a Berlin drama school in hopes of becoming an actress. Nabokov, in contrast, seems to have approached acting more recreationally—he once found himself chosen as an extra simply because the evening clothes he showed up in fit that day’s scene.47

  Perhaps he enjoyed the creative hubbub, watching the dirty work of making art. Or maybe there was some satisfaction in the de facto deception inherent in all film. Cartier staff had called the police on Nabokov in Paris when his attire had made him seem something he was not; why not use his dinner jacket to create the illusion of an identity that no longer existed?

  Along with big-budget German projects and smaller émigré productions, Berlin was also home to a large group of Communist filmmakers. In the early 1920s, German Marxist Clara Zetkin had called for a new kind of Revolutionary art, saying, “The cinema must reflect social reality, instead of the lies and fairy tales with which the bourgeois cinema enchants and deceives the working man.” As an artistic statement, it was the loose antithesis of Nabokov, who had begun to rework fairy tales and fashion new worlds from the husks of history, making enchantment and deception the very basis of his art. But talented filmmakers responded to Zetkin’s appeal and began to produce movies that focused on the harsh realities of poverty and oppression.48

  Sergei Eisenstein in Russia had already created powerful narratives about the Revolution with movies like Strike and Battleship Potemkin. His breathtaking work straddled the line between art and propaganda, and profoundly influenced his Communist counterparts in Berlin.49 By 1928 German documentarians such as Carl Junghans were already unveiling montage-style films in tribute to Lenin and the Revolution.

  Lenin’s death had not increased Nabokov’s appreciation for the Communists, and, if such a thing were possible, Véra held them in even lower esteem. And so it seems unlikely to have garnered the approval of either Nabokov when Véra’s gregarious sister Sonia became involved with Junghans, a freewheeling Communist filmmaker more than a decade her senior.50 Others knew the fashion-forward Sonia as Junghans’s girlfriend, and the affair was public as early as 1930—likely a particular embarrassment for Véra in the small world of Russian emigration.

  And in the way that so much of Nabokov’s life seeped into his art, his next book told the story of a self-absorbed and mercenary young woman who dreams of being an actress and the older married German whose marriage and life she destroys. The cinematically structured Camera Obscura marked Nabokov’s first book about a sexually charged younger woman and a reprehensible older man helpless in the face of his obsession.

  7

  Véra’s sister Sonia, however, was not destined to stay in Berlin much longer. In 1931, she left not just Junghans but also her job at a perfume company and Germany itself, heading for Paris to make a new start.51

  A year later, Nabokov followed, on a different mission. He planned to do a public reading, and hoped to find out if his reputation had grown enough for Paris to support him as a writer. Staying first with his cousin Nicholas, who had become a composer for the ballet, Nabokov went every day to the house of Ilya Fondaminsky, where he saw all the living literary and political figures of the emigration. In mid-November, Nabokov moved from Nicholas’s rooms to stay with the Fondaminskys, where his hosts enjoyed his brilliance and tolerated his smoking.

  Preparing for Nabokov’s Parisian debut, an unofficial committee came together to dress him on the night of his reading. Wearing a shirt and tuxedo borrowed from a former Tenishev classmate, armbands improvised by Fondaminsky’s wife, and suspenders borrowed from a Socialist Revolutionary (whose pants threatened to fall down all evening), Nabokov was simultaneously himself and a product of the Russian emigration.52 He read several poems, a short story, and two chapters from the forthcoming novel Despair. Staged and promoted by Fondaminsky, the program took place in front of a sold-out audience, which responded enthusiastically.

  Paris also provided Nabokov a chance to see his brother. Sergei had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926—the city, apparently, was still worth a Mass.53 But whatever piety he had acquired had not curbed his sense of style. Partnered with his ever-present bow tie, the dramatic cane and cape of his university years found their match in the full makeup in which Sergei was said to attend services. Still living in the difficult circumstances that afflicted Russian émigrés every where, he had nonetheless conquered the cultural ramparts of the city. With his cousin Nichol
as, he had entered the social circles of some of Paris’s most prominent artists, including Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev, novelist and rising filmmaker Jean Cocteau, Edith Sitwell, and Gertrude Stein. Sergei had also become involved with an Austrian heir named Hermann Thieme.

  The brothers’ reunion went badly. Despite possessing gifts of his own, Sergei was achieving nothing on the scale of his brother Vladimir, the newly crowned literary king of the Parisian émigrés. There was their childhood history to navigate, and Nabokov was still unsettled by Sergei’s homosexuality, by then a public part of his identity. Sergei’s stutter also made conversation tricky—the more urgent and important the words, the less able he was to get them out quickly.54

  Sergei longed for a more meaningful connection to his brother. He made another overture during Vladimir’s Paris visit, saying that he wanted to address the distance between them. They met for lunch at a restaurant, and Sergei brought the handsome and charismatic Hermann along.55

  Vladimir and Sergei’s conversation that day hinted at the possibility of bridging the gulf that had separated them since childhood. But Nabokov was still who he was: writing to Véra after the meeting, he had been surprised that Sergei’s “husband” was so congenial and “not at all the pederast type.” And he acknowledged being uncomfortable during the conversation, the more so when a friend of Sergei’s came over to talk.56

  After five weeks in Paris, Nabokov continued on to Belgium, where he pulled off another successful reading. From a literary standpoint, Nabokov’s trip was a roaring success. He wrote to Véra, convinced that they should move to France at the beginning of the New Year.

  By December, Nabokov had returned to Berlin. In elections held during his absence, the Nazi Party had won a third or more of the German vote for the second time that year. Communist paramilitary groups were banned—it was not hard to see that the Party itself would be the next to go. Communist filmmaker Carl funghans, already abandoned by Véra’s sister Sonia, divorced his wife and fled to Moscow.57