6
Having entered the public fray on behalf of those still being subjected to Soviet abuses, Nabokov wrote another missive near the end of the year. At the request of American friends who had built a publishing house specializing in Russian-language literature, he sent a telegram directly to Leningrad calling for the immediate release of dissident short story writer Vladimir Maramzin.67 Maramzin had been arrested, and his library containing a copy of Lolita, had been burned.
Worried that there had been no response, the Nabokovs attempted to add a little publicity for Maramzin’s cause by pointing out that a forthcoming piece in People magazine might advantageously make mention of the telegram, which it did.68
The rest of the People interview from the same year is a mishmash of truth and deliberate gamesmanship on Nabokov’s part. He claimed to loathe student activists and hippies, which was probably true—and he expressed regret that Véra never laughed, which was not. Before the interview, as with nearly every interview he did in Montreux, Nabokov had requested the right to review the story as planned for print and to make corrections.
He made these edits often, even after the fact. In collected interviews published as part of Strong Opinions late in Nabokov’s life, it is interesting to see what he chose to leave out. He redacted his own comments about the weight he had gained, his chatter about Tolstoy catching a sexually transmitted disease from a Swiss chambermaid, and insults directed at Pasternak and other writers. “I cannot be made to criticize contemporary writers,” he wrote in a note to his interviewer, as if he had somehow not already done it or not known he had been speaking to reporters when he did so.69
Asked about being a perverse or cruel author in another interview, he had responded, “Is a butcher cruel?” He followed up with an explanation: “If I was cruel, I suppose it was because I saw the world as cruel in those days.”
With the back and forth of choreographed answers and revisions, it becomes impossible to trace the thread back to discover which Nabokov is being discussed at any point in time—the public façade of the esteemed writer; the jocular, teasing host; or the magician who buried his past in his art and waited for readers to exhume it.70 As a result, in his People interview it is hard to know if it was the reporter or Nabokov himself who is responsible for a passage in which Nabokov is described as joining “the current of history not by rushing to take part in political actions or appearing in the news but by quietly working for decades, a lifetime, until his voice seems … almost as loud as the lies. Deprived of his own land, of his language, he has conquered something greater.… He has won.”71
What had he won? Fame, money, and artistic immortality, without a doubt. But the world consigned Nabokov to the artful prison he had built for himself, and his books, every one of which was meant to fight tyranny, were seen as arch games in a self-referential hall of mirrors.72
Nabokov did not live to see the fall of Soviet Russia. But in the autumn of the missed meeting with Solzhenitsyn, other Soviet exiles made their way to Montreux to visit with him. He spent long hours translating Ada into French; he entertained a representative from McGraw-Hill, his American publisher. He continued to plan new novels and started on The Original of Laura, which would be completed in his mind but never on the page.
He continued to argue over Andrew Field’s biography into 1976, by which point relations were fully adversarial. And no wonder Field struggled—the manuscript of the corrections running back and forth between the two parties had transformed into the literary equivalent of Dickens’s Bleak House. Nabokov was simultaneously doing useful things—clarifying details, making corrections, and editing things that referred to people behind the Iron Curtain—while also cutting out the kind of tidbits that he liked to retract from interviews, now with the intercession of lawyers.
Primed by combat with Field, Nabokov lashed out at critic John Leonard in the last weeks of his life, with just a hint of a threat of legal action over a line describing a legendary forger as “a liar on such an extravagant scale, a Nabokov of Peking.”73 Such matters were hardly worth his time, of which there was not much left. He was caught up in real or imagined slights against his personal honor as if he were still living in pre-Revolutionary Russia, which he nearly was—or at least as close to it as he could get.
He had one eye on eternity, and for all those who dismissed him as a gamesman or chastised him for tormenting his characters, he predicted that another view would prevail in the end: “I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.”74
The immortality Nabokov had achieved for his writing could not add a single day to his life. He woke one night, thinking he was dying, and screamed for Véra, who did not hear him. That evening was only a dress rehearsal, but it was no secret that death was coming. He had fallen while hiking the year before, and from there slowly began to slide into the world of intermittent illness. It was as if he were returning to his childhood quinsy and pneumonia, but with sleeping-pill-induced hallucinations instead of his own wild imaginings. Fever and urinary tract infection had their way with him. After sentencing characters to die into their stories, leaving the narrative permanently incomplete, he was slowly expiring without any prospect of finishing his last tale.
In the end, there were none of the grotesque details he loved to recount from Gogol’s demise—the alternating warm and frigid baths, the invalid’s convex belly, the leeches bleeding him, hanging from his nose, slipping into his mouth.75 Nabokov died the plainest of deaths, with recurrent fever, bronchial congestion, and fluid in his lungs, all of which refused to give ground.76
He had planned to go to Israel the May before, but postponed the trip; he had hoped to get to America again. And although he did not believe it would ever happen, he had dreamed of returning to Russia. But Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, who loved small jars of fruit jellies; who resented Pasternak’s success as if it could annihilate his own; who was rumored to have wanted to challenge his father’s killers to a duel; who had mocked people who ended up dying terrible, unimaginable deaths; who had once referenced the current plotline of the comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D., to an astonished scholar; who stitched more than a century of camps and prisons—real and invented—into his writing, died a distinctly un-Nabokovian death. It was perhaps as good an end as a modern writer can have, short of not dying: before nightfall, with attention to his comfort, in the company of his wife and son, with no question that his works would survive him.
7
Nabokov’s life had been surrounded by politics and intrigue from birth, and was bound up in many of the major events of his century, which he preserved through magical flight and escapes that he knew were not the norm but a gift. In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that so many people in his world managed to survive, chief among them his wife and son.
Dmitri Nabokov spent his early adulthood on two things his father had studiously avoided—driving and music. In addition to becoming an opera singer and a race car driver, he was also the preferred Russian-to-English translator of his father’s Russian works. He would later become the shepherd of his father’s literary estate, defending Nabokov’s work and personal reputation fiercely, arguing for a fundamental gentleness and kindness that did not always show up in others’ depictions of the man.
Véra Nabokov, who had made herself as invisible as possible to the public during her husband’s lifetime, survived more than a decade after his death, carrying on Nabokov’s literary legacy, supervising translations, working hand-in-hand with a new biographer to establish a life story for Nabokov that might erase Field’s.77 She kept a grueling schedule but survived to the age of eighty-nine and would eventually earn her own biographer. She died in 1991, living just long enough to witness the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
8
When
the U.S.S.R. imploded, the doors to history opened. Closely guarded records became available, and a broader view of twentieth-century Russian history emerged. If the portrait of 1917 and 1918 became more complicated than Nabokov might have liked, he would have been heartened by documents establishing Lenin’s ruthlessness from the beginning.
Open archives also made it possible to match prisoner files to existing oral accounts, and to begin to fill in the landscape sketched by The Gulag Archipelago and individual memoirs. The files, of course, were unreliable in their own way—charges were often trumped up; confessions were often not confessions at all. History, it turns out, is complex. But it is not entirely opaque.
Wanting to preserve the enigma of Pale Fire, the Nabokovs had made clear to their publisher in 1962 that nobody should know if Zembla really exists. But what of Nova Zembla—the Arctic destination of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1922? What about the camp from which Solzhenitsyn, too, had dreamed of hearing a story, the place to which Gulag memoirists said a thousand prisoners were sent each year, but none returned?
In addition to the Times of London and New York Times articles, the mines of Nova Zembla are mentioned in dozens of publications of the 1930s, from Pennsylvania’s Tyrone Daily to Popular Science. An American Federation of Labor Gulag map from 1951 shows two camps on the southern island; a Routledge atlas from 1972 shows just one camp at the top of the northern island. In 1943 a Polish officer named Andrey Stotski recounted his own experiences on Nova Zembla in a memoir excerpted and translated into English under the title “I Dwelt with Death.” Classified CIA reports from the 1950s include pictures from Nova Zembla and testimony gathered from POWs after the war, who described in detail the kinds of mining done there, from a copper-pyrite quarry down to the ore-processing plant on the northern island. Robert Conquest references the “virtually unrecorded ‘death camps’” of Nova Zembla in his 1990 book The Great Terror: A Reassessment78
Yet after years of access to Soviet archives, the human rights organization Memorial began pulling camp records together to create a master listing of Gulag sites. It became clear that the Nova Zemblan accounts from prisoners of war were problematic. Despite the tidal wave of anecdotal evidence that circulated inside and outside Russia in the Soviet era, no wartime files on camps and mines on Nova Zembla have been found. A paper published by Memorial indicates that the details of mining from the prisoner-of-war accounts of the 1940s also do not match up with geological information about Nova Zembla, and suggests that these accounts must be considered with skepticism.79
Records do show that in 1925, a Nova Zemblan (Novozemelskaya) geological expedition tested ore at a number of places north of the mainland. Five years later, OGPU officers brought in prisoners to begin mining. The expedition landed not on Nova Zembla proper, but on Vaigach Island, the southernmost island of the Nova Zemblan archipelago.
Conditions were miserable, especially during the first winter of 1930–31, when the prisoners had to set up camp on an inlet. Mines were established on the other side of the bay, and altogether almost 1, 500 prisoners were ferried over from the mainland. In winter, a series of posts connected with rope ran across the bay from the settlement to the mines, so that prisoners could find their way in poor visibility. In bad conditions, those who lost their way simply died.
The main benefit to the hard work on Vaigach was that every day served on the Nova Zemblan archipelago counted for two days off a prisoner’s sentence. Due to the polar bears, prisoners were sometimes given rifles to protect themselves.80
One minor rebellion sprang up, but it was put down quickly; there was no question of escape. The climate was brutal, but treatment was often better than prisoners would receive at other camps. In the evenings chess and performances were permitted. A small brass band composed of prisoners once played the “Internationale” for a meeting of the local indigenous Nenets.81
In the fourth year of operations, water flooded the mine. By 1936, the Vaigach experiment had come to an end. All the prisoners were pulled away to work more promising deposits or to help build rail lines to new Arctic camps. The Vaigach Expedition may well have been responsible for decades of legends about the severity of Nova Zembla, but it never set foot on Zembla proper.
The 1922 stories about Socialist Revolutionary prisoners sent there are also likely mistaken. Lining up the Nova Zembla camp stories with news accounts turns up another piece of the puzzle. The 1922 stories relayed that because too many prisoners were escaping from the mainland camps around Archangel, the Socialist Revolutionaries would be shipped en masse to Nova Zembla. The announcement of the prisoners’ deadly fate was made on the cusp of autumn, but by that point the climate likely made transportation north problematic.82 Heading north of the mainland would have been ill-advised, so prisoners would likely have been held until spring.
But despite the stories that ran in The New York Times, The Times of London and the accounts of Berlin’s own Rul, no camp records unearthed to date indicate that any prisoners were sent to Nova Zembla the following year either. Where did they go?
The question dovetails with a piece of history that is already on the books. In June 1923, just as the seas cleared enough for navigation, Solovki received its first large batch of Socialist Revolutionary prisoners.83 In retrospect, it seems likely that rumors of a Nova Zemblan destination for the prisoners who had disappeared the previous fall were just that—rumors. The stories were true in spirit—prisoners were, in fact, being sent to a desolate northern island, and it was a place that would soon become a nightmare of horrors—but it was in all probability not Zembla they went to but Solovki.
Later, when stories leaked out in the 1930s and 1940s of people sent to hardship posts in the Arctic to build new mines, confusion reigned again. The name Vorkuta circulated, but until the 1931 expedition of prisoners sent to create it, the Arctic city of Vorkuta had not existed. People did not know where it was. Western sources from the Tribune de Genève to The New York Times accurately relayed that new mines were being worked by tens of thousands of prisoners at a place called Vorkuta. But they mistakenly located Vorkuta on Nova Zembla.84 And so Nova Zembla—which even before the Revolution had been a setting for expeditions, fairy tales, and starvation—continued in its legendary half-real, half-imagined status.
But what about those who were actually prisoners at Vorkuta, who reported terror at the prospect of being sent further north to Nova Zembla, the site to which as many as a thousand rogue thieves were shipped off each year? While it is possible that they were taken to Nova Zembla and left there, there are no records of functioning mines or prisoner transports sent to them. Those condemned thieves may have been exported to other penal labor sites or simply executed.85
But the stories in and outside the camps proliferated. And so Nova Zembla entered the gulag lexicon as the place that allowed prisoners to imagine that no matter how bad things got—and conditions were atrocious at Vorkuta—there was always someplace farther north that was worse.86
Revisiting stories of starvation and cannibalism in the fishing villages of Nova Zembla during Nabokov’s childhood and the accounts of the apocalyptic Tsar Bomba in his later years, even Nova Zembla’s undisputed history has attained mythic stature. No wonder the islands intrigued Nabokov for decades, from his 1941 poem mentioning Nova Zembla to the Nabokov River he references there in Speak, Memory, and Pale Fire’s very idea of a refugee hailing from its desolate shores.
Nabokov had told his classes that all great stories were fairy tales, but he also knew, as well as anyone, that their horrors were real. How fitting that in the history of the Russian camps, the islands were for a time the false double of two of the system’s most notorious and lethal outposts, Solovki and Vorkuta.
9
By the time of Véra Nabokov’s death, her husband had been rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, and many of his works had legally entered the country.87 Dmitri Likhachev, who had reported to Solzhenitsyn about his time on Solovki for The Gulag Archipela
go, was instrumental in bringing Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin to Russia.
He likewise brokered discussions about returning the family home on Bolshaya Morskaya to Nabokov’s son Dmitri.88 But in the end the first floor of the house became a museum dedicated to Nabokov’s life and writing. Visitors can see first editions of Nabokov novels, his Russian Scrabble game, and his butterfly net. Battered samizdat copies of Nabokov works that once circulated underground are kept under glass. A copy of the century-old architectural plans for the house is posted; a seminar room with a film projector shows documentaries, including one in which Solzhenitsyn comments mildly on Nabokov. Solzhenitsyn’s remarks are brief, stressing how unexpected Nabokov’s work was, coming as it did on the heels of his nineteenth-century Russian predecessors. Solzhenitsyn does not add, as he did elsewhere, that to reach Western readers, Nabokov had broken with the past and lost his Russian roots.89
Not long after the aborted meeting with Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn retreated to the hills of Vermont, ranting against the spiritual wasteland of the West and writing about the past, eventually outliving the political regime he despised. In 1994 he returned to Russia in triumph, knowing his writing had changed the course of history. He had engaged the enemy, and he had won.
But engagement had a price. His strident opinions on America, on Western governments, and global history he did not know well permanently dented his international reputation. Compelled by unfolding events to rush translations of his most important works, he was unable to take the time and attention that Nabokov had lavished on his works in other languages. Despite the Nobel Prize that Solzhenitsyn had won—and Nabokov had not—the political aspects of his writing seem destined to overshadow its literary merits.90
Westerners who saw Solzhenitsyn as committed to freedom were dismayed to watch him embrace Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official who has held on to nostalgia for aspects of the Soviet past. Solzhenitsyn went on to represent a Russian nationalism that made many squirm. Making a public stand in favor of reinstituting the death penalty in 2001, he pointed out that even Vladimir Nabokov’s father, an anti-death-penalty activist, had reversed himself on the issue in 1917 when Russia had been in jeopardy.91
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 37