Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Solzhenitsyn set up meetings with government officials and experts to discuss these findings and call for mercy in the treatment of the prisoners: more food, permission for family visits, and a day a week free from work. His requests were met with quiet sympathy from like-minded people but also provoked accusations that he wanted to coddle prisoners and that he misunderstood the fundamentally punitive function of the camps.38

  Even Solzhenitsyn’s fans could be critical of him. In a meeting reviewing a new manuscript, one Novy Mir editor noted that not only was Solzhenitsyn perpetually stressing the negative aspects of the Soviet state, he seemed to question the value of the Revolution itself. He offered no answer to the question that Chernyshevsky had asked in the nineteenth century and Lenin had addressed again in the twentieth: “What is to be done?”39 Solzhenitsyn, like Nabokov, found himself rebuked for his focus on the dark side, his spotlight on hypocrisy, and the lack of redeeming elements in his stories.

  Novy Mir’s editor signed a contract for the excerpt under consideration, but then the board agonized (again) over whether they could actually print it. The publication of Ivan Denisovich had become a weapon in the fight over Russia’s future. Khrushchev had initially been so excited by Solzhenitsyn’s opus that he wanted a personal meeting with the author at his dacha, but by August 1964 he regretted championing the story.40 Two months later, he had been erased from Party leadership.

  It was too late to quash Ivan Denisovich, but once Khrushchev had fallen, Solzhenitsyn worried about future publication. He became caught up in a sophisticated game of proxies—his work would be attacked from one quarter, then defended from another, having more to do with disputes over upheaval in the Soviet political system than with any literary issue. Novy Mir seemed hesitant to push for publication, given the current atmosphere that re-chilled Khrushchev’s thaw. Solzhenitsyn began to circulate some work underground in samizdat, and to give travelers copies of his unpublished writings to smuggle to the West.

  The winter of Khrushchev’s disappearance from public life, Solzhenitsyn retired to the country, where he began work in earnest on his new project documenting the history of the camps through the testimony of those who had been there. For his title, he drew on the account of Dmitri Likhachev, who had spent more than two years on Solovki. Likhachev told Solzhenitsyn that the man responsible for executions there liked to call himself the “Commander of the Forces of the Solovetsky Archipelago.” Solzhenitsyn had seized on the image of an archipelago and paired it with GULAG to make a rhyme in Russian: Arkhipelag GULAG.’41

  Using his own experiences, and the accounts of more than two hundred informants who had provided him with their stories, he conveyed many events that had never been described. He noted that Maxim Gorky, who had paid tribute to the White Sea Canal project, had made a trip to Solovki, too, where a young boy had risked his life to let Gorky know the truth—the stories of mosquito torture, being forced to sit on poles for hours, and the still-living bodies thrown down hundreds of steps from the former chapel on Sekirka Hill.42 Gorky had nonetheless given his seal of approval to the camp, signing off that even Solovki’s punishment cells looked “excellent.” The boy, Solzhenitsyn recorded, was shot as soon as Gorky left for the mainland.

  Solzhenitsyn, wrote, too, of the nightmare of arrests, of the earliest roots of the camps, the first terrors under Lenin, and the far-flung sites to which people found themselves sent, the first group to each location often arriving with little food and no shelter.

  Across the two thousand miles between himself and Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn touched on the same history. From the isolation of rural Solotcha, a village three hours from Moscow, he described how the camps began to expand out from Solovki, carrying its methods and its madness out into the most desolate corners of the nation:

  There were also camps on Nova Zembla for many years, and the most terrible camps they were—people were confined in them “without right of correspondence.” Not a single prisoner ever returned from there. Today we still do not know what those wretched people mined and built, how they lived and how they died43

  Despite the silence from some of the most distant locations, Solzhenitsyn—who was called a pessimist but who saw himself as essentially optimistic—wrote that he hoped against hope one day to hear the story of those who were sent to Nova Zembla.44

  5

  After nearly a year of anxiety over whether de-Stalinization policies would be reversed or continued, it became clear that the news was not good. Liberalization was halted, and a call went out for Novy Mir editors to be investigated.45

  That September, Solzhenitsyn begged for the return of the four copies of his unpublished novel sitting in a safe at the magazine’s offices. After a long argument, he prevailed and delivered the copies to friends who were safeguarding his collected writing. Despite his best plans, however, a week later the KGB investigated those friends as the focus of a separate inquiry, and Solzhenitsyn’s archive was confiscated.

  While Solzhenitsyn agonized over whether and when the KGB would arrest him, another kind of literary intrigue shook the West. In April 1966, editors of the anti-Communist but fairly liberal Encounter—in which the work of both Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov had appeared—woke up to find themselves and their longtime funder, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, accused by The New York Times of receiving financial support from the CIA.46

  The suggestion that some of the most liberal thinkers in the West had, wittingly or not, been supported by the CIA as potential pawns in the Cold War created a firestorm in European and American newspapers. Direct support for Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas, still Secretary-General of the Congress, came quickly in the form of a letter to the editor cosigned by George Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur Schlesinger. It was followed the next day by an assertion of editorial independence by current and former Encounter editors. A week later, Nicholas Nabokov himself wrote to The New York Times to say that suggestions “that the Congress has been an instrument of the C.I.A. are deeply unfair to intellectuals around the world who have found in the Congress and its associated activities a chance to write and talk without constraint on the urgent issues and hopes of our age.”47

  But no one quite denied the accusation of CIA funding itself, and so the facts remained uncertain. The following May, former CIA agent Tom Braden wrote a public letter asserting that of course all those organizations had been funded by the CIA through dummy foundations. And not only that, but the CIA had placed agents in an editorial position at Encounter and among the staff of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Why? Because to ignore Communism’s cultural assault and cede the entire European political left to the Soviets was foolishness. Those who suggested that all the money should be run through Congress, he argued, were naive. Socialism was a dirty word on Capitol Hill, he wrote, but it was in fact the anti-Communist left that was deemed most vital to support in the European theater. In his view, the CIA had a vested interest in using money to promote intellectual and cultural alternatives to Communism everywhere it could, including Encounter.48

  Unsettled by the furor and emerging proof that the accusations were true, one of Encounter’s editors resigned. The Congress, which had stopped taking CIA funds even before the scheme had been discovered, was effectively blown up and reconstituted. In May of 1967, Nicholas Nabokov delivered the organization’s statement of judgment against its executive director (and fellow émigré) Michael Josselson, who had, in fact, been active in American intelligence work in various ways for more than a decade. Nicholas Nabokov had known Josselson since the 1920s, and had worked with him in one way or another for nearly twenty years, but maintained publicly that he had been just as surprised as everyone else to learn about the real funding sources of the Congress.49

  In the aftermath of the revelations, a former intelligence operative argued in the National Review that the truly flawed idea was that there was any value to supporting the non-Communist Left in the first place, as being anti-Communist di
d not necessarily indicate an affinity with American interests. The point of view was one that President Johnson, who had also had his fill of intellectuals, could sympathize with—as far as he was concerned, when it came to liberals and Communists, “They’re all the same.”50

  Though Nabokov had long held up the Socialist Revolutionaries to Edmund Wilson as an example of anti-Bolshevik radicals committed to overthrowing the Tsar, he had likewise become less inclined to make distinctions. After several years of partnership with Harvard linguist Roman Jakobson in the 1950s, Nabokov had withdrawn from the literary project they had been working on.51 Jakobson had returned to the Soviet Union the year before for a conference, and Nabokov wrote to say that he would not tolerate such “little trips to totalitarian countries.” Nabokov was also reported to have begun calling Jakobson “a Bolshevist agent,” though he had belonged to the Kadets, the party of Nabokov’s father, before the Revolution. The real reason for Nabokov’s denunciation may, like Lyndon Johnson’s rage, have had more to do with his plans being foiled than anything else—Jakobson had torpedoed Nabokov’s chances when his name had been put forward for a post at Harvard.52

  If Nabokov never wavered on his stand against visiting the Soviet Union himself, he was keen for his novels to make the trip without him. Contacted by Radio Liberty, Nabokov enthusiastically supported a plan to distribute his novels inside Russia, packaged in editions cloaking their origins. Given that his own brother, Kirill, had worked with Radio Liberty in the 1950s, it is not clear whether Nabokov knew that it, too, had been created and funded as part of the culture war brainstormed by George Kennan and executed by the CIA.53 But he was more than pleased with the goals of the mission, regretting only that Lolita would not be its first emissary.

  Nabokov allowed others to send his novels out as weapons in the Cold War, but even an appeal from anti-Soviet dissidents could not spur him to direct engagement. In the midst of tumultuous times in Russia, a group of students from Leningrad managed to smuggle a message out to him via a visiting scholar. But Nabokov’s policy was straightforward: he did not engage with people inside the Soviet Union under any circumstances, for fear of the danger contact would represent for them.54 In addition, it was explained in a letter sent back to the intermediary that, while those who wished to contact Nabokov might be genuine in their dissidence, it was not at all clear what their objectives were, and whether they were truly committed to freedom as it was understood in the West. It was a demanding litmus test for a generation born decades after the Revolution.

  Véra answered the letter, as she did almost all Nabokov’s correspondence, and wrote that “every book by VN is a blow against tyranny.”55 Nabokov knew any number of people in the anti-Communist political realm who might have connected with the young dissidents if he were not prepared to play at Cold War intrigue himself, or if he were worried that the overture was a KGB trick. But in the end, he seems to have meant his books to do that work on his behalf. No one would be arrested, or die, because of anything he had done. The enormous political and intellectual talents of Nabokov’s father and his allies had ultimately proved insufficient to save his country. By not engaging directly, Nabokov could be certain he would do no harm and could never be history’s fool.

  Nabokov’s name was not on the tip of everyone’s tongue in Russia, as was Solzhenitsyn’s. But just as he feared, those students who had reached out to him but to whom he did not respond were later rounded up, for other reasons, by the KGB. In subsequent years members of the group were arrested, put in prison, or sent to military service. Others were effectively exiled to desolate places in the Ural Mountains or Kolyma—one of them for possessing the stories of Vladimir Nabokov.56

  6

  After Pale Fire, Nabokov returned to his autobiography. He had translated it into Russian years before, and now he worked from that version to revisit the first four decades of his life again. Incorporating photos and additional genealogical history into Speak, Memory, he corrected errors he had noticed or that had been pointed out by others. And as if still caught up in the cross-referential mania of Pale Fire, he added a foreword and an index, which had its own wide-ranging, cross-linked entry for Jewels. He winked again toward Pale Fire with the inclusion of both Nova Zembla (“of all places,” as he notes), and its Russian name, Novaya Zemlya, in the index.57

  Nabokov also spent two paragraphs honoring his youngest brother Kirill, who had died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1964. Speaking kindly of his brother’s writing and his love for Russian poetry, Nabokov acknowledged that they had lived separate lives for most of four decades before being happily reunited in the last years of Kirill’s life.58

  But the most significant change Nabokov made related to his other brother, Sergei. Left more or less unchanged were the thirty-one references made to him in Conclusive Evidence. But where Nabokov had tapered off sixteen years before with stories about his brother, he became more expansive. After fleeing St. Petersburg with Vladimir by train in 1917, Sergei appears where he had not earlier, in the Crimea, remaining with his brother for their last months in Russia. A “well-known painter” and a “male ballet artist” have been added to the Crimean scenes, too, as if to provide Sergei his own companions in Yalta.59

  Nabokov also inserted two entirely new pages about Sergei. In a passage that begins, “For various reasons, I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother,” he details the many ways in which the second-born Sergei was relegated to a shadow existence. Less coddled by their parents, Sergei practices piano only to be poked in the ribs by Vladimir, who describes himself as “something of a bully.”60 Nabokov goes on to describe his discovery of Sergei’s homosexuality—though that word never appears—through reading his diary. Because he gave the diary to their tutor, he explains, his parents eventually saw the entries, too.

  What else did he have to say that he had not in Conclusive Evidence? Sergei was left-handed; he played tennis; he had a profound, lifelong stammer. They were in different colleges at Cambridge but shared some friends and graduated with the same degree. They both tutored students in English and Russian—Sergei in Paris, Nabokov in Berlin. The two and a half years before Nabokov fled the country, they saw each other in France on “quite amiable” terms. Nabokov departed for St. Nazaire and America without saying good-bye. During the war, “frank and fearless” Sergei became a translator in Berlin, Nabokov wrote, and criticized the Nazis in front of co-workers, for which he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Hamburg, where he died in January 1945.

  In Vladimir Nabokov’s worlds, characters’ lives crescendo in grotesque events—Lolita’s mother is killed by a car, Bend Sinister’s Mariette is gang-raped by soldiers, Hazel Shade and Kinbote commit suicide, Lolita dies in childbirth. Perhaps it is no wonder, given that Nabokov’s real life dead met such bitter ends.

  As with so many of the striking events of his life, Nabokov found ways to memorialize the dead in his fiction. In The Gift, the beloved larger-than-life father of the writer Fyodor goes missing on an expedition to Central Asia. Fyodor and his mother manage to go on with their lives, but continue, a decade later, to collaborate in preserving their shared memories. And in sleep, he cannot keep away a vivid dream of restoration of all that has been lost and the suffocating joy of his father’s embrace.61 Nabokov, too, dreamed of his lost father.

  In Pale Fire, the gentle, generous John Shade expresses his faith in the universe only to be shot moments later by a madman who has mistaken him for someone else. Like V. D. Nabokov, another casualty of a botched assassination attempt, he is killed by a bullet that pierces his heart. Biographer Brian Boyd has noted that along with the obvious similarities, John Shade is shot on V. D. Nabokov’s birthday, placing “the most grotesquely tragic moment of Nabokov’s life” at the heart of the book.62

  But Vladimir Nabokov’s expanded autobiography reveals another chamber of Pale Fire’s trembling, strange heart. If Kinbote’s crazy Zembla is a fantasy take on the real-world Nova Zembla, t
hen Charles Kinbote is likewise a fantastic distortion of Sergei Nabokov, another left-handed, imprisoned, homosexual, tennis-playing Russian exile who speaks out against tyranny and dies at the age of forty-four.63

  7

  In 1945, Nabokov had asked his cousin Nicholas to find out what he could about Sergei’s final months. A decade later, he had the fictional Timofey Pnin travel to Washington, D.C., to see what he could discover about the death of Mira Belochkin. Pnin unearthed some information, as did Nabokov, but there are many things that will never be known.

  Here is the little that can be said: Sergei Vladimirovich Nabokov (listed in camp records as Sergej Nabokoff) had been arrested once before, on charges of homosexual activity. But it was his second arrest, for making subversive statements, that made the fatal difference, delivering him to Neuengamme Concentration Camp in the spring of 1944.64

  By the time Sergei arrived at Neuengamme, track had been laid to allow trains to carry prisoners directly to the camp itself. The move toward efficiency had not been made in the prisoners’ interest, but it allowed them to avoid the five-mile march from the next closest station, in the Hamburg suburb of Bergedorf.

  Coming off the packed train cars on the grounds of the camp, the arrival ceremony was unchanging. Dogs bayed, the SS cracked whips to roust stragglers, and as prisoners launched themselves out onto the gravel or the ground (there was no actual platform), the officers barked orders in German without attention to whether the prisoners understood.65 Lined up in rows of five and marched from the southern end of the camp up toward the parade ground, the prisoners had time to survey the barbed wire, the devastated landscape, the thatched roofs of the distant houses like some illustration from the Brothers Grimm, and the rural fields stretching away into nothing.

  Prisoners were marched to the center of camp for their first roll call, at which those who had died or been executed en route were accounted for. Herded down into the cellars of one of the large buildings, the newcomers were soon relieved of any personal possessions they had brought with them. Stripped, shaved, and deloused, they were issued clothing cobbled together out of a motley assortment gathered from different nationalities—a Hungarian blouse here, a Soviet hat still sporting its red star there—all finished off with rectangular sections of cloth nicknamed “Russian socks.” Wooden-soled clogs rounded out their ensembles; they would be given striped prisoners’ uniforms later if they were sent to work offsite.