Read Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Online
Authors: Andrea Pitzer
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History of
VLADIMIR
NABOKOV
ANDREA PITZER
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
To the dead and the dreams
of a lost century
C
ONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
: Waiting for Solzhenitsyn
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
:
Speak, Memory
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
: Waiting for Solzhenitsyn
I
NTRODUCTION
The Neva River flows from east to west, sweeping along a wide channel and into the canals of St. Petersburg, the former Imperial capital of Russia. Rounding a hairpin turn just before Kresty Prison, the current follows a more elegant arc past the Field of Mars and the Winter Palace, then slips toward the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, lapping at the far bank as it goes by, less than half a mile north of the childhood home of Vladimir Nabokov.
Now a museum, the house where Nabokov was born sits on reclaimed swampland in the middle of an engineered island at the heart of an engineered city built by slaves and veiled in baroque magnificence. The same could be said of Nabokov’s writing.
In 2011, during my fourth year of research for this book, I went to Nabokov’s home city to see what I might learn from it. Many buildings have been restored in recent years, and in twenty-first-century St. Petersburg it is impossible to go more than a block or two without being startled by spectacle, from the lights framing the long panorama of Palace Square at night to the rainbow-studded onion domes of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood.
I immediately thought it the most beautiful city I had ever seen. And yet St. Petersburg still felt uncomfortably imperial, built on a
scale that could only have been accomplished by a dynasty willing to spend lives and treasure without much regard for the cost.
The director of the Nabokov Museum, Tatiana Ponomareva, was kind enough to be my guide during two days of the trip. She took me to the Tauride Palace, where Nabokov’s father had served in the First Duma, an experiment in constitutional monarchy that was terminated by the Tsar after just three months. We headed to the former site of Tenishev School, where the teenage Nabokov had been mocked as a foreigner for his lack of interest in Russian politics. She pointed out the park where he had walked in winter with his first love, Lyussya, who was later immortalized in the novel
Mary
. And we strolled by the childhood apartment of Véra Slonim, who, years into exile, met Nabokov in Berlin and became his wife.
During other research trips to other countries, I was reminded of the ways in which the story of Nabokov’s life and family intersected again and again with not just political upheaval in his home city but also the collapse of democracy in every nation in which he lived until the age of forty-one. It is one thing to know this intellectually. It is quite another to leave St. Petersburg, to leave Berlin, to leave Paris, and to imagine Vladimir Nabokov abandoning the most magnificent cities of Europe one after the other, fleeing the instability that followed him like a plague.
I came to Nabokov as a college student and found myself put off by the abuse he heaped on his characters, whom he described as “galley slaves.” I didn’t mind violence, or sex, or protagonists who were not
nice
—I didn’t even need them to reform—but I wanted the events and the people in his books to matter. I wanted some sense from Nabokov that he loved what he had created, and that, on closer inspection, his characters had something to offer beyond their unblinking submission to his stylistic gifts.
Returning to him as an adult, I found the style more persuasive on its own terms. Can anyone who cares about writing fail to marvel at passages such as this one from
Glory
, the story of Martin, a young man bereft of his country and in love with Sonia, who does not love him in return?
Martin could not restrain himself. He stepped out into the corridor and caught sight of Sonia hopping downstairs in a flamingo-colored frock, a fluffy fan in one hand and something bright encircling her black hair. She had left her door open and the light on. In her room there remained a cloudlet of powder, like the smoke following a shot; a stocking, killed outright, lay under a chair; and the motley innards of the wardrobe had spilled onto the carpet.
Many writers, myself included, would weep with gratitude to have written those four sentences, just half a paragraph in a throw-away scene from one of Nabokov’s least famous books. The more Nabokov I read as an adult, the more I began to suspect that what I had longed for at eighteen was in there somewhere, but hiding. Later, when I became consumed with the idea of putting Nabokov’s writing into historical context, it turned out that many things were, in fact, hiding inside his novels—more, in fact, than I could have imagined.
Even though I no longer believe him to be perpetually subjecting his characters to horrific events solely for his own amusement, I am not yet one who believes that Nabokov had a gentle soul. But fury and compassion reside together in his writing in ways that, more often than not, have gone unrecognized. He has taken an unprecedented approach to preserving all the grief of his lifetime—the world’s and his own—in his novels.
For those who have read his elegant autobiography
Speak, Memory
, it is hardly a secret that Nabokov narrowly escaped Bolshevik Russia, the Holocaust, and Occupied France—or that friends and members of his family suffered terrible political violence and
were rendered mute by history. But by losing the particulars of that violence and that history, the ways in which these events made their way into his stories have often also been lost. And a whole layer of meaning in his work has vanished.
This lost, forgotten, and sometimes secret history suggests that behind the art-for-art’s-sake façade that Nabokov both cultivated and rejected, he was busy detailing the horrors of his era and attending to the destructive power of the Gulag and the Holocaust in one way or another across four decades of his career.
On a local level, this means that court cases, FBI files, and Nazi propaganda shed light on subtle references in
Lolita
. Red Cross records recall Revolutionary trauma hidden in
Despair. New York Times
articles suggest a radically different reading of
Pale Fire
. On a global level, it becomes apparent that Nabokov, who was so reluctant to engage in politics in any public forum, was responding to and weaving in the details of the events that he had witnessed or remembered, as if preserving them before they could be forgotten.
Yet as readers focused on Nabokov’s shocking subjects and linguistic pyrotechnics, those details
were
forgotten. This book is an attempt to retrieve them.
What if
Lolita
is the story of global anti-Semitism as much as it is Humbert Humbert’s molestation of a twelve-year-old girl? What if
Pale Fire
is a love letter to the dead of the Russian Gulag? What if forty years of Nabokov’s writing carries an elegy for those who resisted the prisons and camps that devastated his world?
Nabokov presents different faces to different people, and so this book seeks to draw out one particular story. It is not an attempt to replicate the prodigious feats of the biographers of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, which could hardly be surpassed. It is not a study of butterflies, or an account of Nabokov’s views on the afterlife—though both topics were undeniably important to him. This is a story as much about the world around the writer as the writer himself, and a look at how epic events and family history made their way, unseen, into extraordinary literature.
This book covers a lot of territory, from biography to history and criticism. After the first chapter, Nabokov’s life unfolds from birth to death. In the beginning, the story of Nabokov’s youth is almost eclipsed by the whirlwind events of the new century. As race hatred and concentration camps begin to swamp Europe, they wind their way closer and closer to his world—and his work. The relevance of many events recounted in the early chapters only becomes apparent once Nabokov begins to write in English, fusing the past and everything that has been lost with spectacular invention, creating terrifying fairy tales out of magic and dust.
Not all those he loves escape, and so it hardly comes as a surprise that Nabokov makes use of that history. Personal and political tragedies intertwine as he crafts his greatest novels.
If this history is relevant, it shows Nabokov reinventing the reader’s role in literature, creating books with brilliant narratives which have whole
other
stories folded inside them. This interior Nabokov is more vulnerable to the past than he publicly led the world to believe, yet has no interest in comforting us. His hidden stories have something profound to teach us about being human and our very way of interacting with art.
Much of the story of Nabokov’s life unspools here in a series of juxtapositions with his contemporaries. Ivan Bunin reigned over the Russian literary emigration until Nabokov replaced him and refused to write about Russia on anyone’s terms but his own. Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas also went from Russia and Western Europe to America, and likewise faced a life crisis in 1937, but made very different choices in its wake. Walter Duranty, whose reporting from Russia on the fledgling Soviet state deeply influenced the opinions of educated Americans for more than two decades, laid the foundation for a kind of blindness about the U.S.S.R. that drove Nabokov to despair. Critic Edmund Wilson, who was devoted to literature but had a very different way of interpreting it—and indeed of understanding history itself—forced Nabokov to define himself explicitly.
Among Nabokov’s other contemporaries were filmmakers and writers who, for reasons honorable or selfish, put their gifts wholly at the service of politics. And capping the beginning and end of these comparisons is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that other Russian exile whose books horrified and unnerved twentieth-century readers, a man with whom Vladimir Nabokov has more in common than has ever been imagined.
My first full day in St. Petersburg in 2011, I was accompanied by Fedor, the son of a professor at St. Petersburg State University. He took me to see the major sites, and at the top of my wish list were prisons.
