Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Yet, like Pnin, Kinbote is more than a comic figure. Everything readers learn about him seems to have an off-kilter or freakish aspect: his fondness for table tennis, his left-handedness, his star-crossed relations with young men at the college where he teaches, his predilection for even younger boys—a predilection from which, like Humbert with girls, he longs to be delivered. But beneath his self-aggrandizing melodrama, his royal fantasies are laced with grief. He dreams of suicide and absolution from the horror he carries. He writes of the temptation to end his life with a handgun, but manages to keep himself alive long enough to make sure the tale of Zembla is recorded for posterity.17

  Kinbote’s mad take on his dead friend’s poem parallels Nabokov’s struggle to interpret Eugene Onegin. And his despair over exile from a country devastated by revolution directly echoes Nabokov’s grief about Russia. Yet the reality of Zembla is more baffling to deconstruct, and Nabokov seems to have wanted it that way. When he was distraught over plans for Pale Fire’s pre-release publicity, Véra sent a seven-point list to his publisher on his behalf, directing exactly how the fantasy land should be presented. The Nabokovs particularly balked at labeling Zembla as “non-existent,” insisting that “Nobody knows, nobody should know—even Kinbote hardly knows—if Zembla really exists.”18

  What is Zembla? Readers found themselves trying to make sense of the place: was it meant to be real in the novel, or only a figment of Kinbote’s fierce longing? In one of the first reviews of the book, New Republic critic Mary McCarthy noted the existence of “an actual Nova Zembla, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, north of Archangel.” The link was not a stretch—McCarthy also noted that Zembla had been used centuries before by Alexander Pope in reference to the islands as a metaphor for the strange and distant North.19

  But in the dissection of the book that would obsess readers for the next fifty years, the world did not realize that Pale Fire’s mad narrator was not the first king of Zembla. Centuries before Charles Kinbote was a wild spark in Nabokov’s eye, a real person had held that title, and he had had a harrowing escape of his own—one that Nabokov seems to have known about for decades—from a kingdom at once real and imaginary.20

  4

  Of the three voyages that intrepid Dutch sailors made to Nova Zembla at the end of the sixteenth century, the first found luck, the second misfortune, and the third an equal measure of both. All three were piloted by William Barents, who dreamed of finding a Northeast trade route from Europe to China. On the first voyage, the sailors had managed to venture into the great unknown and land near the islands’ northern tip. On the second trip, one sailor had been seized unawares and devoured by a polar bear before the fleet was blocked by ice on Zembla’s southern end.21

  And in May 1596, the third time Barents set out from Amsterdam, an initial attempt to find open Polar Sea met only icepack. The sailors looked up into the sky and saw three suns bracketed by a triple rainbow.22 The optical illusion in the sky was new and strange, but the situation on the water was terrifyingly familiar: more and more ice, and again, polar bears. After nearly a month of disputes over which direction to proceed, the expedition’s two ships went their separate ways. As they sailed on, the bears would scale the ice floating near the ship again and again to try to climb aboard, or swim around the boat in search of food.

  Following the rocky shore, they rounded the northern tip of Nova Zembla. But ice set in early that season. It soon broke the tiller and the rudder, shattering their smaller boat against the ship. After five days of struggling against the frozen sea, Barents was locked in place.

  Amid thunderous booming, ice floes tipped the boat. The ship itself seemed to be coming apart; it was lifted higher and higher out of the water, while even larger icebergs drove in from the sea. After two weeks in fear for the destruction of his ship but holding on to a faint hope of escape, Barents realized that they would have to spend the winter on Nova Zembla.

  With a six-month freeze ahead of them, the men knew they needed a cabin. No trees grew on the islands, yet if they were to dismantle their boats entirely, they could never sail home. Searching for driftwood that might suffice, they stumbled onto a gift: whole trees that had been swept from the mainland to Nova Zembla. The trees lay miles away from the ship; the men built sleds to haul them back.

  In clear weather, they made progress, but when visibility was poor, they did not venture far, mindful that the bears that could smell the sailors long before the men could see them coming. The ship’s carpenter died before a cabin was even begun. A cleft in a hill had to serve for a tomb, as the ground was too hard to dig a grave.

  After two weeks of labor, they raised the main beams of a shelter. They continued work on the house for another seven days, and were trailed by the bears as they carried goods from the ship to the crude structure. As if the hungry bears were not enough to manage, a barrel of beer left overnight froze in the arctic air and burst its bottom. For the former, there were noise and bullets; for the latter, there was no harm sustained: it was so cold that the beer had frozen as it ran out of the barrel, and they were able to pick it up and save it. In the house, they set up a clock and a lamp, which they fed with melted polar bear fat.

  In the cabin, nominally sheltered from blizzards, they peeked out at a polar moon that rode the sky day and night. A layer of ice more than an inch thick formed on the walls inside the house. Once the two-month polar night set in and their clock froze, they could not tell day from night without tracking the tally of the twelve-hour sandglass they had brought from the ship.

  By mid-December, they ran out of kindling, but managed to dig around outside the house for wood they had left there. Christmas came and went, bringing with it foul weather that trapped the men inside and piled snow higher than their house. Their shoes froze solid and became useless, forcing them to wear several pairs of socks under loose clogs they crafted from sheepskins. Running out of wood again, they began burning non-essential possessions. The only way to see outside was to look up the chimney.

  Once the weather calmed, they cleaned their filth from the cabin and gathered as much wood as possible. They then recalled that it was January 5th, Twelfth Night, when Dutch tradition held that the world turned upside down and the normal order of life would be reversed.

  Celebrating with wine they had left, the men made pancakes and were given some of the captain’s biscuit, which they soaked in the wine. Pretending that they were back home, they imagined themselves at a royal feast. Following the holiday tradition, they drew lots. And so it happened that on January 5, 1597, for the hours up until the stroke of midnight—a span remembered for four hundred years even as his name was lost to history—the gunner on William Barents’s third expedition drew the winning lot and reigned as the first king of Nova Zembla, an imaginary monarch in a land of ice and death, a ruler over hope and despair, a king of nothing.

  5

  As Vladimir and Véra Nabokov moved into the Palace Hotel on October 1, 1961, apocalyptic fears rattled the West, and a different kind of history was being made on Nova Zembla.

  A series of highly publicized nuclear weapons tests was under way in the Soviet Union, and in the weeks between the Nabokovs signing their contract and moving onto the third floor of the old wing of the hotel, ten explosions had already taken place, with more than a dozen to follow in the next two months.23

  Competitive series of tests had taken place regularly from 1951 to 1958, in which the Americans and Soviets traded bomb blasts, with an occasional contribution made by the British. But in the fall of 1961 the Soviets began using their tests as a kind of propaganda to intimidate the U.S. and appear to rival its arsenal, which far outstripped the four lonely Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles then in existence.24

  Radiation clouds from the test blasts drifted with the wind over neighbors to the west and south, raising fears about the long-term effects of fallout on humans, livestock, and agriculture. Concerns about the tests were raised at the United Nations, where countrie
s’ responses tended to fall along the Cold War divide between U.S. allies and the Soviet sphere of influence, with non-member states refraining from taking sides.25

  If the Swiss government was officially neutral, Switzerland’s newest resident was not. Nabokov’s guiding principle was to choose “that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.”26 The fact that Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had launched a thaw and attacked Stalinist myths did nothing to warm Nabokov to him or the Soviet government. Nabokov appears to have been likewise unimpressed by the nuclear drama.

  The thermonuclear tests were just one in a series of crises that year. The Berlin Wall had begun to rise in August, and late that October Soviet and U.S. tanks rolled up to the line dividing the city, facing each other for sixteen hours in a standoff that caught the world’s attention.27 Against this backdrop, every few days in September and October a new bomb detonated; sometimes tests were conducted daily.

  The earliest Soviet explosions had taken place in eastern Kazakhstan, not far from where Solzhenitsyn had been sent into exile. But in 1958, a year after Nabokov started collecting “bits of straw and fluff” for Pale Fire, newspapers announced that the Soviets had inaugurated a new testing ground just north of the Russian mainland.28 For the entire time that Nabokov had worked on drafting his next novel, the primary Soviet test site had been located on Nova Zembla.

  Nabokov, however, had been thinking about Nova Zembla in the context of his new novel even before the nuclear tests began there—he had mentioned it in the pitch letter he sent to Doubleday in 1957. And two years after sending that letter, he had acquired an additional reason to ponder the islands’ historic role: he had learned of a personal connection to the place. A cousin had researched family genealogy and sent a letter mentioning their great-grandfather, whom he believed to have taken part in a nineteenth-century expedition that resulted in the naming of the Nabokov River there. Nabokov had written his cousin back, delighted at what felt like the “mystical significance” of the existence of such a river in Nova Zembla.29

  But during his first weeks in Montreux, Nabokov would have learned that the world was now very much aware of those islands, too. Given the daily news in the last three months of his work on Pale Fire, it is hardly surprising to find Nabokov seeding nuclear signs and symbols through the pages of his novel. Pale Fire mocks Albert Schweitzer, a peace activist despised by Nabokov, and offers a cutting comment about left-wing professors who fret over “Fallouts occasioned solely by US-made bombs,” as if Russia had not been busy testing her own arsenal. While the poet Shade writes of an “antiatomic chat” on television, Nabokov (or Kinbote, or Shade—it is not clear) ridicules anyone impressed by nuclear stunts, “when any jackass can rig up the stuff.” Describing the news during a period in which the real-world U.S.S.R. had played a game of brinksmanship with nuclear tests in Nova Zembla, the novel’s poem tells how “Mars glowed,” a reference to the Roman god of war.30

  While Nabokov polished his draft, he was inundated with nuclear news from Nova Zembla. During his daily reading of the New York Herald Tribune in Switzerland, he would have seen more than a dozen front-page stories mentioning Nova Zembla. Nova Zembla appeared on maps in newspapers around the globe, with fall-out patterns noted. Debates over safe radiation levels continued. Milk was tested to see if children should still drink it, and at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow Khrushchev announced plans to detonate a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb. The UN took up the issue, and after long debates, finally passed a resolution imploring the Soviets not to explode the monster device.31

  Nevertheless, on October 30, the Tsar Bomba, the biggest bomb in history, exploded over Nova Zembla. The casing was too large to even fit in the bomb bay of the airplane assigned to drop it. Pieces of the plane’s fuselage had to be cut away to accommodate its cargo, which was suspended underneath, hanging more than halfway out of the plane. When the bomb was released, an enormous parachute trailed behind it, one so large that its assembly was rumored to have triggered shortages in the production of Soviet hosiery.32

  The blast happened in mid-air, leveling buildings in a seventy-five-mile radius and cracking windows more than five hundred miles away; it was ten times more powerful than the combined total of all the explosives used in World War II. Pregnant women on the other side of the world drank iodine in an effort to stave off birth defects. Front-page stories around the globe announced the blast. Trace levels of radiation crossed the continent to the Nabokovs’ suite in Montreux.33

  Within a week, diplomatic initiatives intensified, and political pressure from the world mounted. And then the frenzied bombing at Nova Zembla stopped. A month later in Montreux, Nabokov mailed his publisher the manuscript for a magical novel about a northern kingdom called Zembla. Pale Fire appeared the following spring.

  By a quirk of history, the Soviets shifted for a time to another testing ground in southern Russia, and no bombs fell on Nova Zembla in the months before and after Pale Fire’s publication. Reminders of real-world tests at Nova Zembla, which might have been obvious in the fall of 1961, sat in the book unnoticed by critics for decades.34 A straightforward path connecting the Zembla of the novel to the real-world Nova Zembla was lost. And readers puzzling over Pale Fire never thought to explore the islands’ twentieth-century history, where they would have found that in addition to being a Soviet nuclear test site, Nova Zembla had long been notorious for a very different reason.

  6

  Five days after the Tsar Bomba set fire to the sky over Nova Zembla, Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a train to Moscow, with a dream of submitting his own short novel for publication. Along with millions of people in and outside Russia, he had listened to the October speeches of the Twenty-Second Party Congress and had been surprised by what he had heard.

  It was not, however, Khrushchev’s threat to explode a monster bomb that had shaken him. The words that stayed in his mind were those from a speech by Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of Novy Mir, the most candid of contemporary Soviet magazines. Tvardovsky declared at the Congress that Soviet literature had praised the victories of the people but had yet to deliver work that also reflected their suffering. Tvardovsky said that he was still waiting for a literature “totally truthful and faithful to life.”35

  Solzhenitsyn had spent almost a decade outside the camps preparing himself for this moment; it was more than long enough to agonize over the possibility of being sent back. No longer even in remote exile, he had built a good life—he was living in Ryazan, a provincial town an afternoon train ride away from Moscow. His wife Natalia had remarried him. His cancer had reappeared, but it had been successfully treated. More miraculously, as part of Khrushchev’s thaw he had been rehabilitated by the State.36

  Many others had been freed or welcomed back by society, but Solzhenitsyn was still aware of those who were not so lucky. He had noticed the spot near Ryazan’s railway station where prisoners were still offloaded away from other passengers. He had given a lecture on physics at a local correctional facility, where he found himself thinking of those who would go back to their cells after his talk.37

  In his life as a free man, he had written several short stories and miniatures. He had tried his hand at a play on personality modification. He had done three revisions of a novel, The First Circle, which was based on his years in a scientific research sharashka. He had submitted one essay arguing against autobiography to Literary Gazette, the official publication of the Union of Soviet Writers—only to see it immediately rejected.38

  He longed to see his work published, and he had one story about a labor camp that seemed like a good candidate. His readers thought it the best thing he had written; it had made a friend cry. After reading the story, another friend is said to have told Solzhenitsyn that three atom bombs had made their way into the world: “Kennedy has one, Khrushchev has another, and you have the third.”39

  The story that had so moved his friends possessed the ungainly title of Shch-854, a referenc
e to the prisoner number of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. In it, Solzhenitsyn did little more than recount the events in one man’s life across a single day in a labor camp. Ivan Denisovich does not suffer the most harrowing events of camp life—torture, rape, or execution—but the depiction of subsistence-level existence and bitter cruelty in which the average prisoner had to find a way to survive was powerful in its restraint. The complicated strategies required to navigate every moment of the day, from reveille to the mess hall, give way to an awareness of the transcendence of Ivan Denisovich, who manages not just to survive but to retain his humanity.

  As an unknown writer who had been rehabilitated, Solzhenitsyn could create freely in secrecy. Freely, of course, is hardly the right word. After a fair copy of any given work had been written out, it had to be concealed. Any remaining drafts had to be gathered, and after all the neighbors had gone to sleep, burned one page at a time in the communal kitchen.40

  If Solzhenitsyn sent out his real work—not just a criticism of something written by someone else, but a story that went to the heart of what he had seen and wanted to say—he knew he would be publicly identified as a writer with an agenda. If the Soviet leaders chose to, they could keep him from writing in the future.

  An idea had come to him in 1958 to write a vast account of the Soviet labor camp system, based on what he had seen himself and the experiences of others. If he moved forward with trying to publish his story about a single prisoner, it was entirely possible he would jeopardize the larger project. Unbeknownst to Solzhenitsyn, the camp theme was already percolating among some of the most gifted Russian writers of the day, but it had not yet found officially sanctioned publication.41 Had Tvardovsky been serious in his speech—were Soviet leaders ready to hear the truth about the suffering of the Russian people?