Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (2 page)

We met at Vladimir Nabokov’s house and began to work our way up the Neva, heading first to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where so many writers and revolutionaries had been incarcerated. A Nabokov had once been its commander. Standing in a pitch-black cell, Fedor dug in his pocket for a lighter and talked about history. He was young enough not to remember life in the Soviet Union.

We walked back out into the sunlight and made our way farther along the river. My guidebook also listed a penal museum at Kresty Prison, where Nabokov’s father had been sentenced to solitary confinement in 1908 under Tsar Nicholas II.

Fedor seemed uncertain about going at first—he had never heard of a museum there—but agreed to take me anyway. As we talked on the way, I realized he was trying to explain that Kresty was still a prison, an operational prison, and, as such, was someplace that most people would rather not go.

He was still game, however, so we kept walking until we came to Kresty’s red brick perimeter walls and buildings. When Nabokov’s father had served his sentence, the facility’s innovative design was celebrated for its modern approach to incarceration; but by 2010 its buildings looked like factories or tenements in the heart of any
mid-size American city, with some ornate brick flourishes added. It is today the largest functioning prison in Europe.

We had trouble finding a main door, but in time we stumbled on an unlocked entrance to a side building. The door opened onto a stairwell that made up in graffiti what it lacked in plaster. We went up. After one or two floors, a smell of cooking food drifted by. The building was strangely silent. We were hardly in danger, but I was struck by the feeling that we had wandered into someplace we were not supposed to be—that we were trespassing.

Back outside, a handful of people stood at a door across the way near a sign listing hours—a grown man and a child among them, looking as if they were waiting to pay a visit, but not to a museum. I had realized that there were prisoners inside the facility, but seeing friends or family waiting to go in somehow crashed the present into the past. We decided to leave.

The museum stayed hidden that day, and I did not go back to Kresty. In a place so bound up with history, the cityscape preserves enough of the past; it is its own museum.

My last day in Russia, I walked a little over twelve miles, trying in vain to check off all the places I could not bear to leave without seeing. I especially wanted to visit a pink-and-white candy-cane-striped church located next to one of the first concentration camp sites in St. Petersburg. The bloody history of the city does not exist in opposition to its monumental beauty; they sit side by side, part and parcel of the same thing.
¹

That afternoon, caught in the rain again, this time with blistered feet, it occurred to me that, intentionally or not, Nabokov had used the architectural presence of his home city as a model for a unique kind of literature—a place where a walk to a museum could transport you to a jailer’s doorstep.
²
The exquisite form and baroque inventions appear in direct proportion to the history they have to hide.

C
HAPTER
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Waiting for Solzhenitsyn

On October 6, 1974, Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Véra sat in a private dining room of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, waiting for Alexander Solzhenitsyn to join them for lunch. The two men had never met.

By then the Nabokovs had been living in the opulent Palace Hotel, tucked along the eastern shore of Lake Geneva, for thirteen years. During those years, literary pilgrims had traveled to Montreux in hopes of an audience with the master. When they were lucky enough to meet with him, Nabokov had fielded their questions and returned biting, playful answers. They had sipped coffee, tea, or grappa at lunchtime with one of the most celebrated wordsmiths in the world, and plumbed his cryptic statements for meaning. Pursuing him as he pursued butterflies, they had climbed the Alpine slopes that vaulted up behind the hotel.

The seventy-five-year-old Nabokov saw himself as Russian and American, yet lived in rented rooms in neither country, continuing
to work on new books and translations at an exhausting pace that
Lolita
’s breakthrough more than a decade before had rendered financially unnecessary. He had grown accustomed to being courted, and to delighting his guests. But a visit from Solzhenitsyn was something different.

The morning of October 6 revealed itself early on as a rainy day, but in truth, the weather on the drive south from Zurich may not have mattered to Solzhenitsyn. Only eight months earlier, Solzhenitsyn had been sitting in a cell at Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, charged with treason against the Soviet Union. The deportation that followed his arrest had been bitter, but there were, he knew, more permanent penalties than exile.

Solzhenitsyn had dreamed of face-to-face confrontation with Soviet leaders, believing that pressure at the right moment by the right person might topple the whole system of repression, or at least begin its destruction. Instead, expulsion had delivered him into Frankfurt, Germany, and an uncharted life. And so he was not in prison, not shouting his defiance to the Politburo or meeting privately with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. After a spring and summer spent making his way in the new world, he instead found himself cruising the Swiss countryside with his wife Natalia, circling Lake Geneva, traveling Montreux’s elegant Grand Rue on his way to see one of the most celebrated authors in the world—a man he himself had nominated for the Nobel Prize just two years earlier. Yet Solzhenitsyn was nervous.

At that moment, it would have been hard to find two bigger literary superstars than the man who had written
The Gulag Archipelago
and the author of
Lolita
. They were both Russian, but the nineteen years between their births had destined them to grow up in separate universes. Nabokov had come of age in the last days of the Tsar and Empire, ceding Russia to the Bolsheviks, sailing away under machine-gun fire before the infant Solzhenitsyn had learned to
walk. Solzhenitsyn had grown up in the Soviet state, spending years inside its concentration camps and prisons before emerging from behind the Iron Curtain on a mission to reveal a reign of terror and end it forever.

Physically, the men were as dissimilar as their histories. With Nabokov, molasses candy and modern dentures had created a plump, mild professor from a gaunt émigré, while Solzhenitsyn’s scarred forehead, wild hair, and prophet’s beard marked him as a more volatile presence. Their writing voices, too, stood distinct one from the other, Nabokov’s exquisite language and baroque experiments contrasting with Solzhenitsyn’s open fury and direct appeals to emotion.

Even their most famous books seem opposite in nature.
The Gulag Archipelago
chronicles the entire history of the Soviet concentration camp system, bluntly cataloguing the abuse of power on an epic scale, while Nabokov’s
Lolita
maps a more individual horror: the willful savaging of one human being by another. A microscopically detailed account of a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a young girl,
Lolita
has been variously described as “funny,” “the only convincing love story of our century,” and “the filthiest book I have ever read.” Humbert Humbert’s tale of the two-year molestation of his stepdaughter describes their relationship, her escape with another man, and Humbert’s revenge on his romantic rival in merciless, vivid language. The narrator’s frankness about his desire for and relations with a child destined the book to pass through scandal on its way to immortality.
¹

Lolita
had started her long reign over the American bestseller lists in 1958, by which point Nabokov had been garnering critical attention on both sides of the Atlantic for decades. But it was his nymphet novel—and the risqué film Stanley Kubrick made from it—that launched him into notoriety, then celebrity. Banned in Australia, Buenos Aires, and at the Cincinnati Public Library, Nabokov’s novel had managed to sell more copies in its first three weeks in America than any book since
Gone with the Wind
.

And just as Solzhenitsyn mapped a uniquely Soviet geography in
The Gulag Archipelago
, Nabokov laid out the landscape of postwar America in
Lolita
. It was an entirely different archipelago—one of roadside motels, sanatoriums, hotel conferences, pop psychology, immigrant drifters, a Kansas barber, a one-armed veteran, Safe-ways and drugstores, sanctimonious book clubs, and an unnerving religiosity. It was a glorious, expansive, intolerant, and amnesiac backdrop, one that revealed just as much as Solzhenitsyn’s opus about the country in which it was set, a stage perfectly suited for a story of betrayal and corruption.

After
Lolita
’s phenomenal launch, Nabokov had sold the film and paperback rights for six figures each. Traveling to Hollywood, he rubbed shoulders with John Wayne, whom he did not recognize, and Marilyn Monroe, whom he did. He left his career as an American college professor, becoming the subject of
New Yorker
cartoons and late-night television comedy. On overseas trips, he was accosted by the press and written up in a half-dozen languages across the continent.
²

His morals were called into question (“utterly corrupt,” raged one
New York Times
critic), but over time his detractors tended to be mocked as puritans and killjoys. The sexually swinging era that followed
Lolita
’s creation was not of Nabokov’s making, but its mores helped influence the perception of the book in subsequent years. By the time Solzhenitsyn arrived in Germany,
Lolita
had become part of a stable of stories about older men with an itch for underage, promiscuous partners. Webster’s, Nabokov’s favorite dictionary, would eventually add Lolita’s name to its pages, offering up the off-kilter definition of “a precociously seductive girl.”
³

The book’s linguistic richness and power vaulted it into an existence in which it took on meanings independent of its creator. In vain would Nabokov describe how his nymphet was one of the most innocent and pure among the gallery of slaves he had created as characters; to no avail would Véra remind reporters of how a captive
Lolita
cried herself to sleep each night.
⁴

Setting aside those who thought
Lolita
a tease and her author an arted-up dirty-books writer, Nabokov had many admirers among the literary set. But it was a peculiar fan club. Despite their cool reverence for
Lolita
, her most famous fans were prone to calling her author cruel. Bestselling novelist Joyce Carol Oates checked Nabokov for having “the most amazing capacity for loathing” and “a genius for dehumanizing”—and this from someone who
liked
the book.
⁵

Oates’s 1973 comment was not even the first shot across the bow. Many others, before and after, took up the same cry, from John Updike, who acknowledged the difficulty of distinguishing the callousness of Nabokov’s characters from their author’s “zest for describing deformity and pain,” to Martin Amis, who would be even more direct decades later: “
Lolita
is a cruel book about cruelty.” Whether they were meant to praise or damn, such comments had a long history. By the time Oates’s article on
Lolita
appeared, Nabokov’s fellow writers had been describing his work as inhuman or dehumanizing for forty years.
⁶

After the celebrity of
Lolita
, Nabokov moved to Europe but continued to spark the American imagination. He followed up with
Pale Fire
, an academic satire starring Charles Kinbote, yet another tormented pedophile, along with a dead poet named John Shade. It was hailed by Mary McCarthy in the pages of
The New Republic
as “one of the very great works of art of this century.” Profiled in
LIFE
and
Esquire
(“The Man Who Scandalized the World”), Nabokov had become so popular that his fifteenth novel,
Ada
, a convoluted narrative smorgasbord of brother-sister incest, won him the cover of
Time
magazine—a portrait of the writer as an enigma. Before it was even published, one Hollywood mogul after another flew to Switzerland to be permitted a few hours with the manuscript.

As time went on, the world came more and more to Nabokov, and he went less and less into the world. Despite occasional thoughts of
moving elsewhere, he ended up settling with Véra into a protected existence in Montreux. He welcomed visitors for what he called interviews, giving written answers to questions submitted in advance, and trying to restrain the untamed journalists who preferred to use words he had actually spoken aloud.