Kristallnacht was witnessed by the world, with foreign correspondents reporting from Berlin and other cities on the death and destruction, as well as recounting the enthusiasm shown by some Germans at the humiliation of their Jewish neighbors. The Nazi government assessed a billion-Reichsmark fine (roughly four hundred million dollars at the time) on German Jews for the damage done to the nation. And weeks later, Neuengamme, a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp complex, opened for business on the grounds of an old brick factory near Hamburg.37
5
The same month, Nabokov stepped away from the theme of camps, prisons, and murderous narrators to blaze through his first English-language novel. The story of two brothers who live their lives at an emotional remove from each other and their homeland, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight takes place in mid-1930s Western Europe. When the celebrated author Sebastian Knight dies at the age of thirty-six, his younger half-brother V. tries to bridge the distance post-mortem by diving into the relics of Sebastian’s life and writing a biography. Just as Nabokov was contemplating a move to England or America and trying his hand at a language in which he could build a future as an international writer, the fictional exile Sebastian had surrendered his native Russian for English in an effort to find an audience. Not surprisingly, V. delivers his brother (and his author) from culpability, insisting that Sebastian’s love for his lost language and native land was whole, and that Sebastian’s writing in English was no betrayal.
Written on luggage laid over a bidet in the bathroom of the Nabokovs’ Paris apartment, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight also incorporated the flotsam of Nabokov’s own relationships. Disconnected in childhood, mysteries to each other even as adults, V. and Sebastian are not entirely separate from Vladimir and Sergei Nabokov. Without fully mirroring himself or Sergei, Nabokov manages to tuck in fragments of each: Sebastian, too, attended Trinity College at Cambridge, where he wore Nabokov’s trademark canary yellow sweater. He betrayed his love for a woman who had been his creative muse and partner by having an affair. Sebastian, however, also recalls elements of Sergei: his awkwardness with sports and “feminine coquetry.” The book reads almost as if Nabokov wanted not so much to represent himself or Sergei directly in a character, but rather to bridge the distance between them by fusing their worlds.
Their real-life worlds did not merge so smoothly. Sergei spent the 1930s bouncing between Paris and the Austrian castle of his partner, Hermann. It was not uncommon for the brothers to see each other in Paris, and Sergei would sometimes drop by his brother’s apartment. But the essential awkwardness between them never vanished. Nabokov still saw his brother as indolent and ineffectual, squandering his talents. For his part, Sergei found Véra difficult and believed that marriage to her had damaged Vladimir. Had Sergei accepted the idea, put forward by some émigrés, that Véra’s Jewishness had changed Nabokov or his writing for the worse, or did he simply dislike her? Either way, Sergei reported relief that Véra and Dmitri had had made their way out of Germany, telling his sister Elena that they would have been in dire straits had they not escaped when they did.38
At the end of Nabokov’s novel about brothers, V. declares that he himself is Sebastian Knight, or Sebastian is him, or perhaps they are both a person who remains unknown to either of them. Nabokov’s story pivots on the necessity of recovering the past, our terrible inability to do so, and the invention of stories that preserve memory, even memories that we have spun in part ourselves. The narrator somehow succeeds in bridging the chasm inserted by death, fusing with his idea of his brother so completely that he ends up uncertain whose story he is telling.
As with The Gift, however, Nabokov had once again preserved political history sub rosa for posterity. In Sebastian Knight, a supporting character named Mr. Silbermann meets V. by chance on a train. A dealer in leather goods, he speaks English with a heavy accent (“Dat is not love! Ppah!”). He knows several other languages, and even spoke Russian long ago but has forgotten it. He pointedly asks V. if he is a traveller, too, and turns out to be an almost magical sidekick who offers to unearth crucial information on cue for the narrator. Silbermann turns up a few days later with the names and addresses of four women who might be the mystery lover responsible for the destruction of Sebastian’s life.
Silbermann’s arrival marks Sebastian Knight’s turn toward history. With his big nose, past travels, and forgotten languages, like some saintly version of the Wandering Jew, Silbermann’s mystic presence redirects the novel to larger matters.39 Using one of the names provided by Silbermann, V. makes a trip to Berlin, where he meets a young Jewish-Russian woman and her family in Nazi Germany in 1936. The family is in mourning. Her brother-in-law has just died; we are not told why. The narrator realizes immediately that the woman is clearly not Sebastian’s cruel paramour; rather, she is unimaginably beautiful, graceful, and generous. From his post-Kristallnacht vantage point, Nabokov presents a loving, idealized Jewish family from two years earlier, a portrait clearly defying the real-world German propaganda of the day. The family cannot know, as Nabokov did, what lies ahead, any more than Nabokov in 1938 could imagine everything that would follow Kristallnacht. But by putting them in his story, he has immortalized them and denied the Nazis the last word on their lives.
V. never returns to close that loop, so we can only imagine the family’s fate. They sit in the novel in plain sight, but, as with Despair, Nabokov stitched real-world tragedy into the margins of his tale in such a way that the past becomes an invisible rider on a story ostensibly about something else.
In a scene near the end of the book, graffiti in a phone booth catches the eye of the narrator, providing a quick glimpse into the French political inferno of the day. Someone has posted a slogan for Léon Blum’s coalition (“Vive le front populaire”) and a response is there, too: “Death to the Jews.” Written in a white heat in two months after Poland and Austria and Germany had savaged their Jewish communities, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight carries in its corners the shadow of expanding persecution.
If Nabokov was casting that shadow, in English, for an English-language audience to see, larger signals of the approaching apocalypse were already being successfully ignored. The British government, which had promised to take in fifty thousand refugee children, stalled on its pledge mid-process. A bill introduced that February in the United States would have allowed twenty thousand refugee children into the country, but an opinion poll revealed that more than sixty percent of Americans were opposed to the measure, and it was defeated in committee without ever receiving a full vote.40 Soon after, the British, facing the third year of an Arab revolt in Palestine, would limit Jewish immigration to the Middle East as well. With few exceptions, Jews had nowhere to go.
The world continued to watch and not do much. Almost a year to the day after Austria had been subsumed into the Third Reich, the German army entered Prague. Hitler went to Prague Castle, a thousand-year symbol of Czech heritage, and watched his honor guard march in with their heavy boots and helmets, carrying long guns and forming a rectangle of crisp perpendicular rows, facing inward on their jubilant leader. Hitler entered the castle and waved from a third-story window; he stood on the steps of the castle; he announced the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now under German control. He was just a little over a mile away from the apartment of Nabokov’s mother.
The annexation marked an end to the modest pension the Czechs had provided, meaning that Elena Nabokov, now burdened with pleurisy, no longer had any income of her own. Her health continued to decline.
Looking ever more desperately for a job, Nabokov headed to London again. Asking his friend Gleb Struve for a letter of recommendation (along with any other acquaintance he thought might deliver), Nabokov declared that getting a position outside France had become “a life and death question.”41
Going to London was like crossing into another world. Nabokov stayed again in the home of a former Russian diplomat, where the familiar comforts of childhood—spacious lod
gings, a butler, tennis outings, visits to the British Museum, and butterflies—occupied his free time.
He enjoyed these things immensely, but probably did not need Véra to remind him of the urgency of his mission or just what was at stake—though letters prodding him arrived regularly, just in case. Trying to ingratiate himself through an endless round of social engagements, readings, and small talk in an effort to find a position teaching Russian literature did not play to Nabokov’s strengths, and he left at the end of the month with few prospects.
The news back in Paris was even worse. Elena Nabokov had died in Prague on May 2. Nabokov did not take a chance on returning to Czechoslovakia, which was now German territory, for the funeral. There was not just Taboritski to worry about; the pro-Nazi Russian newspaper New Word in Berlin had called for Nabokov’s placement alongside Jewish artists in the “boiling pots” so that a true Russian literature might flourish.42
Nabokov’s brother Sergei, a less famous target, requested permission from the Gestapo to travel. He made his way to Prague in time for the funeral, but it was a risky move. Sergei was known in Berlin’s gay community and had associated with activist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose library had been incinerated six years before.43 He and his partner, Hermann, had both been straightforward about their relationship with their families. With a past full of capes and canes and makeup, Sergei had never truly been closeted. He had had gay roommates; he had publicly moved in Parisian circles known for their extravagant homosexuality.
When the Nuremberg Laws were put in place, the Nazis had updated the legal code that covered homosexual crimes. In the past, some evidence had been required in order to arrest someone suspected of homosexual activity; under the new measures, gossip, a letter from a gay friend, or even thought or intention could be introduced as evidence.44
Since the persecutions of homosexuals in German had first stepped-up five years before, several gay men had been castrated—some against their will, while others were offered a choice between an operation and a longer prison sentence. By the time of Elena Nabokov’s funeral, arrests of homosexuals were at their peak, with offenders often sentenced to regular prisons, but also to Dachau and Neuengamme. Foreign homosexuals were not targeted as often, but Sergei’s statelessness made him more vulnerable, and his long involvement with Hermann, a once-Austrian and now-German national, heightened the risk for both of them.45 Yet Sergei went to Prague that May, writing to Vladimir afterward to describe the funeral.
6
Nabokov spent July and August of 1939 with Véra and Dmitri in a pension on the Riviera, which was cheaper than staying in Paris. But a bleak and sudden end to that summer came when war erupted on the first of September, 1939.
The day after the German invasion of Poland, the Nabokovs returned to Paris. On September 3, England and France declared war on Germany. Two weeks later, Russia invaded Poland from the east, effectively splitting the country between German and Russian control. Vladimir and Véra wanted to get out of Europe as quickly as possible. Horrified at the prospect of being drafted into the French army, the forty-year-old Nabokov stepped up his efforts to get visas to America.
Other émigrés, however, felt less pressure to leave. Critic Mark Aldanov intended to stay in Paris; Ivan Bunin had no plans to go. Sonia Slonim was in no rush to depart either. Unlike Véra and Vladimir, she had held French papers for almost a decade, and had found steady employment. As part of her translation career, she had been working on screen treatments for refugee filmmakers in Paris. She also claimed to be working for French intelligence.
In that capacity, she explained to friends, she had been asked to keep an eye on a German refugee who had arrived in Paris not long before, carrying forged papers. The story must have come as a surprise to those who recognized her new companion: the former Communist propagandist turned Nazi filmmaker Carl Junghans.
In addition to his work on the Olympic films, Junghans had done several other pictures for a Nazi-Fascist film collaborative, as well as two tributes to Nazi leadership.46 But Junghans apparently had a dispute with Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda over a film script. He had become so fearful for his safety that he had obtained false papers to escape Germany via Switzerland.
Junghans had picked a good time to leave. He abandoned Nazi propaganda at the very moment that Goebbels began to use movies to redefine the way that people thought about Jews and Judaism, fust as the Nazis had used the “Eternal few” exhibition two years before in Munich to counter the influence of an exhibition in New York, Goebbels would remake and recast three British movies from recent years that had offered sympathetic portrayals of Jews. One of the three, a new 1933 version of The Wandering Jew, was based on the English play that had been on stage and in movie theaters during Nabokov’s years at Cambridge.47
Goebbels intended to make his own Wandering Jew—in German, Der Ewige Jude, portraying a Judaism more in line with the Nazi vision. He would take an obsessive interest in his “documentary” film project for more than two years, writing about it in his diary and discussing it with Hitler. His plan was to use the movie to awaken the public’s latent distrust of Jews, understanding that the more alien and disturbing they appeared, the more inhuman the policies that could be applied against them.
“This is Tuesday,” the Torah reader announces in the film, speaking in Hebrew to indicate that German officers are forcing him to perform on the wrong day, noting the fraud for posterity.48 Disturbing footage of kosher slaughter, pictures of Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin (both deemed dangerous by the Nazi leadership), as well as fraudulent statistics and ominous narration, round out a film meant to convince Germans once and for all of the perfidy of the Jewish people.
Half the cinematographers for The Eternal Jew had previously assisted Carl Junghans on his Olympic documentary.49 If Junghans had not left Berlin, it is entirely possible that he would have been expected to work on it. Junghans had served the Nazi cause as he had served that of the Soviets. But it was a big step between fetishization of German glory and the demonization of an entire people. Junghans ended up leaving before it became clear whether or not he would be willing to cross that divide.
Junghans’s reunion with Sonia Slonim in Paris was brimming with irony: he had managed to ally himself with both the totalitarian regimes that had threatened her family. The road Junghans had chosen ran in direct opposition to the path taken by Nabokov. Both were gifted artists—Junghans’s 1929 independent film Such Is Life was one of the last great silent movies—but Nabokov refused public engagement in the political realm, while Junghans had repeatedly put his art entirely at the service of extreme ideology.
It is certainly possible that Sonia had been assigned by French intelligence to keep an eye on Junghans, but if so, she seems to have taken on her task happily and at particularly close quarters. Declassified documents, however, do make clear that French intelligence worked very hard to keep track of Junghans. Communists, and even ex-Communists, were not popular in France at the time. As soon as war was declared, the French Communist Party, following the Soviet lead, denounced the French entry into the conflict as imperialist. As a result, the party was outlawed, and forty-four Communist deputies had been sent to prison.
Nazi collaborators, not surprisingly, were also in bad odor in Paris. As a former Communist and former Nazi filmmaker, Junghans was a rare bird indeed. Before the reunion with Sonia, French secret police had been hunting for him, interviewing friends and associates in a desperate effort to find him. By the end of the month, he had begun producing propaganda for the French government.50
His cooperation earned his liberty, and, according to him, money. But he was told to stay in Paris. If he tried to leave, he understood that he would be shot. He had a letter he showed to acquaintances everywhere he went, which appeared to be a police document giving him asylum and acknowledging his work for the department. But the French intended to keep him on a short leash.
7
Nabokov had his own collection
of letters that he hoped would grant him a broader freedom. One from Bunin drafted by Nabokov himself suggested that Mr. Vladimir Nabokoff was “a novelist of quite exceptional talent” and would make “a teacher … of quite exceptional quality at any English or American University.” Bunin had elsewhere called Nabokov a “monster” and would refer to him as a “circus clown,” but he admitted to a certain affection for circus clowns. And in matters of survival, Bunin was willing to help.51
Nabokov was lucky that his dreams of teaching in England had not borne fruit in the lean days of 1939, because the British cancelled all visas upon entry into the war. But via a serendipitous chain of events, a very different hope for deliverance appeared out of nowhere. Through fellow émigré Mark Aldanov—who had written at length on the role of chance in history—Nabokov learned about an opening teaching a summer course in Russian literature at Stanford University in California. Aldanov had been invited to teach himself, but at that time had no plans to leave Europe.
Perhaps Stanford would be interested in Nabokov? Nabokov was certainly interested in Stanford. The thorny path to a visa suddenly became straight and paved, and the still-imaginary future turned its face toward a distant campus more than five thousand miles away in America.
A job offer in America was the first step, but even with a destination, Nabokov faced months of preparation. Exit permits had to be obtained along with American visas, and there were more affidavits to collect from the American side. Alexandra Tolstoy (daughter of the Russian literary titan) shepherded one letter of support from the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She even suggested within the community of refugee-aid groups that she could obtain a testimonial for Véra Nabokov’s skills as a domestic. With ever-stricter immigration quotas weighing against those who wanted to emigrate, willingness to fulfill demand for cheap domestic work in England and America (or at least to pretend that one would do so) was frequently the fastest, sometimes the only, route for Jews to enter the country.52
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 17