Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

Nabokov had touched on American anti-Semitism in “Double Talk.” But in that story, it is principally the immigrants—the German doctor and the White Russian colonel—who are malicious, while their American audience plays the role of enthusiastic dupes. Nabokov’s travels, however, revealed home-grown prejudice.

  He had learned from his father the obligation to expose bigotry when it took root in a beloved country. And so he was already observing anti-Semitism on a new continent, testing the local strain for variations. It was a genus he knew well, but he had yet to classify the species. Taking events in and biding his time, he would soon find a way to use almost everything he had seen.

  4

  As the U.S. and U.S.S.R. settled into opposing camps, Nabokov’s family members shifted from wartime activities to peace; but for most of them, work remained political in nature. After a stint at the Department of Justice during the war and work as an analyst for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945, Nicholas Nabokov headed to Germany as a negotiations coordinator and cultural advisor. Sonia Slonim had stayed at La Voix de France for two years, then remained in New York doing freelance translation for the U.N. But the lack of steady work drove her to look outside the city, so she moved to northern Virginia, where she signed on with the U.S. Army as a cryptographer.24

  Her relationship with Junghans haunted her. A pro forma background check by military intelligence for a security clearance inspired an anonymous letter about her, with a laundry list of allegations. The note offered that she had “worked for several foreign governments AT THE SAME TIME (sic),” that money “talks with her,” that she was indiscreet, a showoff, and a “very sleek” blackmailer. In case agents had missed the point of the letter, it further noted that she was of “questionable morality.” A six-month internal investigation uncovered the 1941 telegram sent to the secretary of state accusing her of being a German spy. Army Intelligence got the FBI involved in a full-blown loyalty investigation.

  The FBI inquiry dragged on for more than a year and, due in part to Slonim’s long romance with Junghans, expanded into France and Germany. She had a reputation for being anti-Nazi, but she had been involved with a Nazi propagandist. She was reputed to be anti-Soviet, but Junghans was also believed to have been a Communist. Several of the men she had worked for during the war in New York and Hollywood were themselves being investigated as Communist sympathizers. Her claim to have worked with French intelligence—a claim she did not make to agents, but which was relayed to them by her acquaintances—would only have reinforced the letter accusing her of opportunism. As part of the process, Massachusetts agents looked into the reliability of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, whom investigators found not at all suspicious.

  No concrete evidence of wrongdoing on Sonia’s part ever appeared, but her associations were problematic. American anti-Semitism reared its head in her paperwork; particular attention was paid to who was and was not Jewish in the circles she frequented (often mistakenly identifying who was and who wasn’t in the process). One informant even insisted—not just incorrectly but nonsensically—that she had changed her original family name from Levin to Slonim, as a way to hide her Jewishness.25

  There were so many conflicting reports about Sonia, it was impossible to determine her loyalty. In the end, no final decision was made. The process dragged on, and Slonim eventually left her Army post for work at the United Nations in 1949 before the investigation was complete.

  Nabokov, too, briefly felt the tug of post-war geopolitics—as well as his own financial precariousness—and made moves toward heading up the programming for the State Department’s new Russian radio effort on the Voice of America. Edmund Wilson wrote him a stellar recommendation for the job, and he appeared to pass his background check, only to find out that Nicholas Nabokov, whom he had asked to be one of his references, had acquired the job for himself. Nabokov had Wilson as a reference, but Nicholas had three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Archibald MacLeish, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Bohlen, and George Kennan, who had become the influential director of State Department’s policy planning staff.26

  Nicholas beat out Vladimir for the job but, like Sonia Slonim, soon found himself under scrutiny. After eight months, Nicholas applied for a new job that required a new security clearance, only to find that the first years of the Cold War had redefined the meaning of loyalty to America. In the 1948 review of his application, Nicholas’s life was dissected to a much more disconcerting degree than Sonia’s had been. His psychiatric hospitalizations, his diagnosis as a manic-depressive, his divorces, his enmity with several former friends and co-workers, and his involvement with female students at multiple U.S. colleges were all investigated and appear to have been confirmed. Rumors of drug addiction, venereal disease, admiration for Stalin, membership in the French Communist Party, and efforts to move back to the Soviet Union in the 1930s were unsubstantiated. (Confidential informants notoriously swung for the fences in the wildness of their statements.)

  But in the cavalcade of real or imagined offenses, only one matter seems to have truly troubled the FBI: they wanted to know if Nicholas Nabokov was homosexual. They had heard about his association with ballet queen Diaghilev in Paris, and with other friends who were known to be “perverts.” Could they establish definitively that he was not? As they interviewed co-worker after co-worker, former roommates, employers, and ex-wives, this was the question they came to focus on. They visited Sergei’s former roommate Pavel Tchelitchew, to ask him what he knew about Nicholas. From the report, it is impossible to know whether the agent realized that Tchelitchew himself was gay. An informant with experience interviewing more than five hundred applicants suspected of being gay weighed in—the topic seemed to be his expertise—and he believed that Nicholas was, in fact, homosexual.27

  The Department was torn—Nicholas’s services were very much wanted, but the issue of his sexuality could not be resolved with enough clarity. The question was put to Nicholas himself by a State Department employee. Later George Kennan, then in the process of constructing postwar U.S. covert operations overseas, brought it up to Nicholas, too.

  Nicholas seemed frightened and annoyed by the relentlessness of the investigators. They had it wrong, Nicholas told Kennan. Of course he knew homosexuals—he had worked in the ballet in Paris—but he was not one. Perhaps they had heard stories that confused him with a relative in Paris, Sergei Nabokov, who had also socialized with Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau. It was not he but Sergei who was homosexual. According to Kennan, Nicholas acknowledged that Sergei’s sexual activities had certainly brought shame on the Nabokov family name, but that shame should not be laid at Nicholas’s feet.28

  A year into the investigation, Kennan wrote Nicholas with profound regrets, saying that it looked as if the matter could not be cleared up to the investigators’ satisfaction. Though Kennan was embarrassed by the government’s response, he suggested that it would probably be best to formally withdraw the application—which Nicholas did.29

  Other postwar transitions would prove less rocky. Princess Lena Slonim Massalsky settled in Sweden, where she found work as a translator.30 Zinaida Shakhovskoy, Nicholas’s former sister-in-law, who had been a longtime supporter of Nabokov’s writing, was celebrated for her work with the French resistance. Shakhovskoy went on to cover the Nuremberg Trials and, like Edmund Wilson, traveled to Greece to report on the violence that exploded in the aftermath of the Second World War.31

  Even Nicholas Nabokov would land on his feet, declaring at the June 1950 Congress for Cultural Freedom in Germany that moving forward, “we must build an organization for war.” Academy Award-winning actor and veteran Robert Montgomery, also in attendance, sounded the same drumbeat, arguing that, “No artist who has the right to bear that title can be neutral in the battles of our time.”32

  The call for democratic counterpropaganda against the Soviet cultural onslaught seemed eminently justified when Soviet-occupied North Korea invaded American-occupied South Korea the day before the conference beg
an. Which helped make it even simpler to execute what had been in the planning for some months—the establishment of the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a permanent entity. In short order, Nicholas Nabokov was elected Secretary-General of the newest anti-Communist propaganda effort.33

  5

  With the exception of his lone bid for a job at the Voice of America, Vladimir Nabokov staked a path on a road that would keep him far from the activism in which so many in his life engaged. Politics, albeit in a refracted form, nonetheless managed to dominate the first novel he wrote in America.

  Started mid-war and finished a year and a month after the last German forces made their unconditional surrender, Bend Sinister tells of the fate of independent philosopher Adam Krug under the tyranny of a ruler nicknamed the Toad. The story takes place in an alternate world—albeit one filled with reflections of Nabokov’s own.

  The Toad’s political philosophy, Ekwilism, promotes a conformist erasure of identity. Krug is prodded to demonstrate that intellectuals are “happy and proud to march with the masses.” Presiding over a government in which viciousness vies with dim-wittedness, the Toad wants Krug to support his reign and give it intellectual legitimacy. But the Toad’s need to triumph over Krug goes deeper. In passing, we learn that Krug, who has other moral failings, was a classmate of the Toad as a child, and bullied him every day at school for five years. The comic, sadistic, homosexual villain of Bend Sinister is in part a product of the childhood cruelty of its hero.34

  After trying unsuccessfully to cajole and intimidate Krug into joining him, the Toad arrests the philosopher and his young son. Krug is ready to comply to save his son, but officials, who are too incompetent even to brutalize with accuracy, confuse Krug’s son with another child and end up killing him by accident.

  The horror of the death is too much for the father to bear, leading the narrator to have mercy on Krug and give him the gift of insanity, allowing him to see that he is a character in a story. Hostages are gathered from among Krug’s acquaintances and friends, and they explain that they will be shot if Krug does not do the bidding of the Toad. Krug, however, is too mad to understand what is happening. Delusional, he believes he has returned to the apex of his childhood power, when he caught and humiliated his classmate at will. He runs to tackle the Toad and is shot, even as the world seems to reveal itself as illusion. The perspective of the story then pulls away from Krug to give us a view of a narrator very much like Vladimir Nabokov, catching moths in a net by his window at night.

  In his earlier novel Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov had weighed in more abstractly and with more hope. Cincinnatus seemed to be executed but simultaneously triumphed over his executioners, whereas the narrator of Bend Sinister frankly admits that the immortality he has given to Krug is only “a play on words.” Between Invitation and Bend Sinister lay the Soviet purges and the Holocaust, making faith in art and the power of an individual mind in the face of tyranny that much harder to maintain.

  Near the beginning of the book, Krug is forced to shuttle back and forth over a river between two guard stations for lack of correct papers, echoing the experiences of countless refugees. Later, in prison, he hears fellow inmates practicing their English grammar (“My aunt has a visa, Uncle Saul wants to see Uncle Samuel. The child is bold.”)35—mirroring the Jewish immigrants in the background of “Vasily Shishkov.”36

  Nabokov’s foreword directly links the world of Bend Sinister with the totalitarian states that he had lived in, those “worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons.” Using snippets of Lenin’s speeches and the Soviet constitution, he also nodded to the “gobs of Nazist pseudoefficiency” he had imported to build his nightmare world.37

  Bend Sinister winks at Soviet labor camps and nods to Nazi mythologizingrun rampant. Hamlet is distorted into a play in which the villain becomes that “Judeo-Latin Claudius.” Echoing Hitler’s complaints, Fortinbras has been subjugated by the machinations of “Shylocks of high finance” but aims to recover the ancestral lands stolen by Hamlet’s father.38 In Nabokov’s rendering, tyranny not only warps worldviews, it can destroy art.

  Why does a dictator like the Toad need Krug? Perhaps for the same reason that Lenin and Stalin needed Gorky, for a time at least—as a fig leaf, as someone to bless what was happening or to pretend it was not happening at all. Nabokov’s first novel written in America presented the problem of tyranny as a personal question, a moral dilemma to which his hero responds not by joining any opposition but by resisting joining the deluded—by refusing to fall in line or speak the lie.39

  Bend Sinister landed in the midst of an America trying to make sense of the danger presented by the Soviet Union. Richard Watts, writing for The New Republic, reviewed its indictment of familiar totalitarian regimes with mixed feelings, noting the self-indulgent literary acrobatics of a single 211-word sentence yet praising the story as “considerably more than the warmed over Arthur Koestler it occasionally seems on the verge of becoming.”40

  The comparison to Koestler reveals how topical the novel appeared in the moment, despite its refracted fantasy setting. Koestler, after being held prisoner under Franco and sentenced to death as a spy during the Spanish Civil War, had shed his revolutionary identity and had become an anti-Communist crusader. As a Hungarian Jew, he had faced an even more desperate flight from Europe than Nabokov. During the war he had been imprisoned as an enemy alien by both the French and the British, sitting in solitary confinement in London even as Darkness at Noon, his magnum opus and diatribe against Communist tyranny, was published.41 Unlike Nabokov’s public refusal to submit art to ideology, Koestler had dedicated himself to a literature in the service of human freedom, although which ideology to choose had proved a perpetual challenge.

  As a literary-political hybrid, Bend Sinister was the first book Nabokov had written that overtly belonged as much in the latter camp as the former. Perhaps for that reason, it was also his most uneven. Nabokov deliberately intended the book to be the “vehement incrimination of a dictatorship” with both Nazi and Communist elements.42 But his efforts to blend righteous vehemence, bawdy dialogue, his trademark wit, and ornate language with the murder of a child rendered the book clumsy, particularly in comparison to the power of works similarly addressing the horrors of a totalitarian state. Koestler’s latest, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We from two decades earlier, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four all worked better as both indictments and as narratives than Bend Sinister. At times it was as if Nabokov was too embarrassed to be forthright, or still struggling with how to fuse politics and art.

  In his own life, however, Nabokov clearly felt a sense of urgency about events in the political realm. His stridency expanded along with his sense of crisis, revealing itself in a suspicious streak that sometimes let the political trump the personal.

  In the last months of the war, Nabokov had deliberately snubbed Marc Slonim, a former friend (and distant cousin of Véra’s) at a party. Nabokov’s rude behavior had baffled his hostess, who had apparently expected her guest to be delighted over finding the Jewish critic, with whom he had been on good terms in Paris, alive and well. Nabokov explained the reason for his dismissal later in a letter to Edmund Wilson, writing that Slonim “gets 250 dollars from the Stalinists per month, which is not much, but he is not worth even that.”43

  While Nabokov had Stalin’s number, he was less astute at unearthing spies. Not only was Marc Slonim not an informer, he was anti-Soviet. But the rumors flying around had a real impact on Slonim, who was on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. A quarter of the College’s professors came under suspicion after relentless attacks by the American Legion. Tremendous pressure was exerted to fire faculty members who had been marked for persecution as potential Communists. Denunciations continued for years against several universities, culminating in hearings conducted by the Jenner Committee on Capitol Hill, where Slonim was eventually forced to testify. Sarah Lawrence resisted public
pressure and refused to fire him.44

  Nabokov, who thought he had Slonim’s salary pegged to the dollar, was still in anxiety over his own financial situation. In the postwar period, Nabokov’s anti-Soviet stance was no longer an obstacle to employment. He nonetheless wrote to Wilson to voice his “low spirits” at Wellesley’s offer of $3,000 for ten hours a week of work.45 (He did not note it, but it was less per year than Slonim’s putative salary from the Soviets.)

  Despite his reign over exile literature, despite a body of work comprising a dozen novels and novellas, plays, poems, and criticism, as well as years of service at world-class institutions of higher learning and publication in some of the best magazines in America, he was a man approaching fifty still cobbling together year-to-year contracts. Even an earlier bid to head to Hollywood to be a screenwriter had come to nothing.46

  Unbeknownst to Nabokov, his chronic problem was about to be solved. Cornell University needed a professor of Russian literature, and search committee chairman Morris Bishop wrote to ask if Nabokov would be interested.47

  Nabokov had been hoping to get an offer he could use as a stick to bludgeon Wellesley into offering him a permanent position. But Wellesley declined to make a counter-offer. Eight years into his American adventure, Nabokov left his hodgepodge of part-time work to take the first full-time job he had held since his three-hour stint at a Berlin bank twenty-six years before.48

  6

  Like Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell too had been drawn into the debate over professors seen as Soviet sympathizers. Before the war had even ended, when the U.S. was still allied with the U.S.S.R., New York’s World-Telegraph had run an article titled “Cornell Goes Bolshevist.” Professors suspected of affection for post-Revolutionary Russia, a stance that had been lauded during the war, were called on the carpet in due course. University trustees, the Catholic Information Society, and even Collier’s magazine named names of Cornell Reds and their allies, polarizing the campus into those who saw themselves as defenders of intellectual thought and those who saw themselves preventing the Communist infiltration of America.49