Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Neuengamme was not one of the death camps, where genocide was the overriding goal and efficient extermination an optimized process. But when the extermination of Jewish prisoners was set forth as policy in 1942, a contingent of Jewish prisoners had been called out with other groups for execution. Not until 1944 did other Jewish prisoners arrive at Neuengamme.

  Medical experiments had been conducted on homosexual prisoners elsewhere, but at Neuengamme, the clinical atrocities were limited to an experimental treatment for lice-born typhus and a fatal experiment infecting twenty Jewish children with tuberculosis near the end of the war.66 There were, however, many other death rituals. Guards shot prisoners after forcing them to try to escape. People committed suicide by throwing themselves on the electric fence. A gallows was part of the camp topography. And behind it all lurked the crematorium.

  Prisoners were assigned individual numbers, which were stamped on a small zinc tag and tied with string around their necks.67 Sergei was prisoner No. 28631.

  The duties he was assigned would have made all the difference in the world. For those assigned to tasks nearby, the horrific chore of digging in the clay pits had mostly given way to work in the small-arms factory, and then to offsite projects, working as slave labor in factories, digging anti-tank trenches to block Allied advances, and clearing rubble after bombing raids.68

  The statelessness that had plagued Nabokov in France may have benefitted Sergei in the camps. With no nationality on record (and thus not noted on his clothing), Sergei was likely spared the harshest work regimes and brutal measures reserved for Russians, more than four hundred of whom had been killed with Zyklon B in a gas chamber at the camp before his arrival.69 Being arrested a second time for an offense other than homosexual activity may have likewise liberated him from the additional abuse that often resulted from wearing the pink triangle that identified the homosexuals held at Neuengamme.

  A typical day would begin at 5:00 A.M. Prisoners had twenty minutes to wash and shave, if they could get to fresh water at all in the overcrowded facilities. But shaving was not optional, as failure to pass inspection could lead to punishment. The resourceful Sergei, who had once taken a bath with a single glass of water, was likely unable to brush his teeth.70

  Foods that were ghosts of coffee, bread, and marmalade were served in the barracks, and then prisoners lined up in blocks for roll call before being assigned to work parties. Daily work shifts were fourteen hours, with a midday meal to break up the monotony. Every prisoner had to carry his own tin and spoon, but not everyone got full rations, or even food.

  At the end of the day roll call was repeated. But with stragglers, some sick and some dying, evening roll call could take as long as three hours, and with it, any free time in the barracks before going to bed. In the earlier days of the camp, before Sergei’s arrival, the evening tally had been handled by the SS, who were sloppy and slow in accounting for their ten thousand charges, which meant regular misery for prisoners forced to wait at attention. But by 1944, a former businessman with prior experience accounting for personnel had taken charge and, mindful of the agony of the prisoners at the end of the day, did what he could to wrap up matters quickly.71

  In that strange calculus of the tiny accommodations made to prisoners, even those held in many Nazi camps were allowed to receive care packages, and Sergei did. After the war, people called the Nabokov cousins in Paris to tell the family that he had distributed clothes and food he received to his fellow prisoners.72

  Not much more can be known with certainty. At night, in the window that sometimes existed after roll call and before bed, there was one hour in which prisoners could clean their clothes and their equipment. They were not allowed to leave the barracks, but they could talk with some freedom. And as the prisoners had in the internment camps of the First World War, amid the horrors of Solovki, and in the fifty years since the first concentration camps had been built, they gathered and talked about the world that existed outside the camp, the things that were gone and yet could not be taken away. They talked about their favorite foods and exchanged recipes; they shared stories of home and loved ones; they offered up their fantasies and their memories.73

  More than a hundred thousand inmates were assigned a prisoner number at Neuengamme; only half survived. The average life expectancy of a prisoner on arrival was twelve weeks.74 Sergei Nabokov may have arrived healthier than most, or, with his multiple fluencies, he may have drawn administrative rather than more brutal general work duties. He lasted an extraordinary ten months. It cannot be said, however, whether those months were a curse or a mercy, because, in the end, they were not long enough. He died on January 10, 1945.75

  It was three impossible months before the American Army would liberate Buchenwald and Dachau to the south, moving with such speed that the camp staff at those places were not effectively able to ensure the destruction of the records that would so clearly indict them.76

  Neuengamme, however, was the very last camp to be liberated; the first British advance scouts would not arrive until May 2—which left several additional weeks for records to be destroyed. Much of the administrative minutiae that would have made it possible to pair a life outside the camp to a life inside it were burned in the Neuengamme crematorium.77

  But the surviving Neuengamme prisoners, who were anxious to tell the stories of what had happened, had known that they would need evidence. So they hid records where they could. Among the items saved were laboratory journals with results of tests on inmates’ bodily fluids—the only proof of the presence of thousands of prisoners who had died in the camp—and the Totenbuch, the book that recorded the death of Sergei Nabokov.

  8

  From Hermann to Kinbote, in Nabokov’s writing it is often the madman, the murderer, life’s losers, or those regarded as freaks who have seen the most. (“Let us bless the freak,” Nabokov once told his students.) Attempting to escape history, they tumble into insanity, yet cannot elude their pasts.

  Pale Fire’s narrator is melodramatic and self-centered, and is often seen as the villain of the book. He is no mirror copy of Sergei, but his presence in the novel becomes a rebuke against readers who judge without divining the full story, as well as a plea for a kind of tolerance that Nabokov struggled and failed to offer to his own brother. Sergei’s life, Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory, “hopelessly claim(s) a belated something—compassion, understanding, no matter what—which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem.”78

  By revising his autobiography to include details on Sergei’s life years after Pale Fire’s publication, Nabokov made it possible for yet another understanding of his most innovative book to emerge. In his own lectures, Nabokov had said that all “great novels are great fairy tales.” The executioner in Invitation to a Beheading announces, “Only in fairy tales do people escape from prison.”79 And so Nabokov created a fairy tale in which a problematic, fictionalized version of his flamboyant dead brother could escape a continent littered with camps. A resurrected sibling could parachute into America to deliver a litany not of his own suffering but the wild fantasies and poetry with which he had consoled himself in a place of horror, as if it were possible (four months too late, twenty years too late) to peek into his diary again and unearth his private imaginings. Part elegy for the victims of the Gulag, Pale Fire also shimmers as a memorial to the dead of Nabokov’s own life.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Waiting for Solzhenitsyn

  1

  After revising Speak, Memory, Nabokov would spend his last decade moving further away from the world, falling deeper into his created universes. His relative isolation in his “portable Winter Palace” at Montreux separated him from many of the mundane settings and human interactions that had provided a compelling present within which he could conceal the past.1 As a result, the past and the present wrestled for control of his work, and the coherence, often as not, was lost.

  He had not yet finished remi
nding readers of the forgotten past and hypocrisies of the present, but he would do so less and less vibrantly. His last years were split between novels that wandered through decades without the discipline that had focused his best writing and books that addressed death and its aftermath.

  Nabokov, like his mother, acknowledged signs and portents, and paid particular attention to his dreams. He had always had nightmares—one from his last years included guillotines set up in his bedroom for Véra and himself. But in the decade after revising Speak, Memory, his nights were also full of reveries that crossed unbridgeable gaps. He dreamed of Sergei. He imagined Edmund Wilson coming up behind him and surprising him, triggering a happy reunion. Another night, Nabokov’s father came to visit, sitting pale and glum on an imaginary beach.2

  In between dreams, he completed Ada, Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a novel sprung out of concepts of time and distance that he had been thinking about for years. Beginning with a reversal of the start of Anna Karenina—“ All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike”—Nabokov portrayed an inverted take on family life.

  Keeping with his penchant for shocking sexual situations, he moved from the mock-incest scenario of stepfather Humbert in Lolita to a simpler brother-sister pairing. The sibling lovers of the novel, Van and Ada, are two difficult people living in an alternate reality caught up in an intermittent but lifelong affair, their existences studded with bits of lost and reinvented literature and history.

  The book, Nabokov’s longest novel, skitters through a maze of puns, wordplay, subplots, and winking references to everything from Chekhov to the book of Genesis. With a loose narrative of the lovers’ grievous separation and joyful reunion stringing it all together, Ada is by far Nabokov’s most rambling work. But as with nearly all Nabokov’s mature writing, a sense of a menacing history operates in the background, hinting that Van and Ada have concealed something in their complex reminiscences. Oblique and unconnected nods to blood-filled mosquitoes in a secret location, capital “T” Terror, the grotesque rape of a young boy by Van, and a “first prison term” at a putative school further destabilize the landscape.3

  Van and Ada’s home world, Demonia, is an amalgam of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Earthlike settings. On Demonia, the empire of Tartary rules in the East, and Russians, including Van and Ada’s forebears, were transported years before to settle in North America. Legends persist of another, or real, world named Terra, but belief in Terra is viewed a form of mental illness, and as a psychiatrist-psychologist, Van studies patients who have such delusions. In his youth, Van writes the book Letters from Terra under a pseudonym, recounting these patients’ beliefs, but it is read by only a handful of people.

  Yet it is the strange world of Demonia—which Van at times navigates upside down, walking on his hands—that may be nothing more than a figment of Van and Ada’s imagination. As they begin to detail their family’s life on Demonia early in the book, Ada wonders in a parenthetical note if they should describe with such enthusiasm a place which may not have existed outside of the study of dreams. Midway through the novel, Van wonders if he is merely dreaming inside another dream. Elsewhere, Ada says to him excitedly, “You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra?” saying she knows he wants to prove the reality of the other world.4

  Decades later, a famous director uses old documentary films to turn Van’s book about Terra into a wildly popular movie. In the last pages of the book, however, after recounting the craze for stories from Terra that briefly promotes Van to fame, our narrators describe all the letters Van receives from thousands of believers who are convinced that their government has hidden the truth from its people. The ideas of those believers bleed into Van’s description of events until it sounds as if it is him talking, and the story that Van and Ada have so carefully constructed across more than five hundred pages unravels: “Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported … ages ago—they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary.”5

  Nabokov once again provided, or allowed his characters to construct, a delusion which protects them from reality, even as the epic events of Nabokov’s lifetime—the existence of the Holocaust and the Gulag—cannot be excised from the book. Van and Ada seek refuge in each other and reassemble the last centuries of history in a distorted world in which the apparently mentally ill are the ones most aware of reality, and those who know the truth are subjects for psychiatric study.

  The world that Van and Ada spin out of their fantastic imaginings turns inevitably back to the camps—which may have been in the background all along. It seems relevant to note that as Nabokov worked on Ada, newspapers and magazines were busy detailing the ways in which psychiatric analysis was used to punish Soviet dissidents. The practice was hardly new—for decades, the noncompliant had been consigned to mental hospitals. But such psychiatric abuses became common knowledge in the 1960s as Russia resorted again to high-profile trials. Russian writer Valery Tarsis was sentenced to a mental hospital for publishing his material abroad, and his case became a cause célèbre in the West until he was given permission to emigrate.6

  Soviet psychiatric “treatment” was ubiquitous enough that it could provide material for comedy. One 1964 editorial on Khrushchev’s invisibility in the weeks after his fall from grace suggested that the former leader himself might have been condemned to the involuntary hospitalization inflicted on so many others during his years in power. During Nabokov’s final year working on Ada, newspapers worldwide reported on a group of Soviet mathematicians who had made a public statement against the institutionalization of their colleague in a psychiatric hospital after he protested the trial of dissident intellectuals.7

  But upon publication, Nabokov’s Ada was not viewed as a commentary on modern Russia, and was instead embraced, or loathed, for its fantastic elements, the ways in which it seemed to scramble reality, rather than the ways it echoed bleak current events. A gaggle of studio heads with Lolita on their minds made their way to Montreux, where each took his turn with the manuscript and was given a chance to bid on its film rights.8

  As Nabokov’s characters invented an alternate Russia, his sister Elena made plans to visit to see its real-world counterpart. Beginning in 1969, she started making trips to the Soviet Union nearly every year.9 Nabokov, who had cut off collaborating with Roman Jakobson over his visit, seems not to have begrudged his sister her travels.

  Nabokov did not go to the Soviet Union, but made plans to visit Israel instead. He had been invited late in 1970 and wanted to see butterflies there; however, the Nabokovs’ interest was an extension of Nabokov’s politics, too. Supporting Israel as an anti-Soviet, democratic state, Vladimir and Véra had cancelled a French vacation in 1967 in protest over the French response to the Six-Day War.10

  After anti-Israeli attacks, Nabokov tagged her neighbors as Bolshevik stooges and sent money to the Israeli Embassy in Berne noting as much. No fan of religious restrictions, however, he also contributed to the cause of a former Tenishev classmate in Israel, who was promoting greater freedoms for non-Orthodox Jews in Israel. And he continued to send money to the organizations that had directly helped him: the Russian Literary Fund and the Union of Russian Jews.11

  He had only a single note to sound with friends on the international threat of Communism, but for all his stridency, he sometimes did sit silent. Nabokov told a visitor to Montreux that among their left-leaning acquaintances in Montreux, he “just wouldn’t talk about Vietnam.” Véra, coaxing old friends to visit, promised not to “discuss Viet Nam or anything political.”12

  But Cold War dynamics lapped at the borders of everything, as politics had for Nabokov’s entire life. Just weeks after Ada’s publication in the spring of 1969, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn were both honored by the Academy of Arts and Le
tters, under the direction of George Kennan, who had been elected president of the Academy.

  Nabokov had planned to attend the ceremony, but Véra developed an eye condition, which prohibited travel. Solzhenitsyn was likewise absent, sitting in Moscow, where he had just turned learned that the Writers’ Union was toying with the notion of expelling him.

  Kennan gave prepared remarks, promoting the value of the arts in a troubled era. “What is essential,” he said, “is the will to self-expression with grace and subtlety and power.”13 Though one of the writers he was referencing got credit only for his grace, and the other only for his power, two more self-expressive authors can hardly be imagined.

  2

  In the wake of Lolita, a field of Nabokovians emerged to quiz and take down the words of the master and puzzle over his cryptic phrases. By then deeply committed to a public façade he had created for himself—the genteel, charming cosmopolitan, incapable of being dented or diminished by history—Nabokov lived long enough to monitor the first wave of chroniclers.

  Alfred Appel, a former student of Nabokov’s from Cornell, had by 1970 assembled an annotated version of Lolita, which bracketed the novel with more than 200 pages of literary references, translations of foreign phrases, and attention to recurring themes. Appel had noticed a number of things in the novel that had escaped most readers, and he had the good luck of having a complicit Vladimir Nabokov to point out several more.