Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (28 page)

He could have included a pony and the crown jewels, for all the difference it would have made. Kerensky received no answer from Stalin, and efforts to reach the Soviet ambassador to America met with similar silence.
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Nabokov felt conflicted, but many Soviet Russians felt a simpler patriotism. Traveling to Moscow to sit for graduate exams in the summer of 1941, Alexander Solzhenitsyn arrived just as the invasion began, and found that his tests were cancelled—the nation was going to war. He tried to enlist on the spot but was told to return to Rostov. After the train trip home, his physical examination disqualified him from service for the time being. He was told to wait until he was called up, but he bridled at the delay.
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Meanwhile, the German army advanced into Soviet territory at an alarming rate. By the time Nabokov had finished the summer at Stanford and moved back East to start teaching at Wellesley, all Russia’s reserve forces had been fully mobilized—and more were needed. Anxious to defend his homeland and to take part in history, Alexander Solzhenitsyn succeeded on his third try. He would be allowed to go to war.

Solzhenitsyn reported for duty with a briefcase in hand and began his military career mucking stables and tending to horses. A greenhorn in equine matters, he was mocked by Cossacks, who lived their lives on horseback, and humiliated by his incompetence at even the basic duties he was given. He slowly learned his assigned tasks and earned a measure of respect, but wrote to his wife in despair about shoveling manure, later claiming that “One cannot become a great Russian writer, living in the Russia of 1941–43, without having been at the front.”
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Via enthusiasm and trickery—and a crash training course—he managed to get transferred to an artillery unit. Tolstoy himself had been in the artillery during the Crimean War almost a century before, and Solzhenitsyn longed for nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of the master. Tolstoy’s experience had provided the basis for writing
War and Peace
, a novel Solzhenitsyn admired and envied. He felt certain that history and military service would combine to make a true Russian writer of him, too.
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Edmund “Bunny” Wilson had considerably less enthusiasm for the war than Solzhenitsyn, or even Nabokov. In 1940 when
The New Republic
had adopted a position advocating that America join Great Britain in her struggle, Wilson quit in protest and never wrote for the magazine again.
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Despite his dramatic resignation, Wilson coordinated with the head of the magazine’s editorial board to make sure that Nabokov would continue to get work in his absence. And even after the end of that professional relationship, Wilson and Nabokov continued to write to each other. While Solzhenitsyn dreamed of emulating Tolstoy on the battlefield, Nabokov wrote to Wilson on the finer points of
War and Peace
from a safer vantage point and with less reverence.
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Reading Russian literature in the original was Wilson’s latest enthusiasm, and he used Nabokov as a sounding board for his literary hypotheses about Russian verse. Nabokov, who had never been shy about his opinions, seemed to admire his effort, writing dismissively but affectionately to Wilson in response. (“I am afraid that the Russians who told you
comes from
cheval
are donkeys.”
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)

As an influential critic in America, Wilson was accustomed to being a literary kingmaker. He had set in stone the reputations of Hemingway and Fitzgerald as top-notch twentieth-century writers; he had made the careers of luminaries both timeless and middling. Wilson fell naturally into his traditional role with Nabokov,
recommending him for work and offering him advice on how to wade into the cold waters of American publishing. Wilson felt comfortable enough to chide Nabokov repeatedly for his “lamentable weakness for punning,” which he maintained was “pretty much excluded from serious journalism.”
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Connecting Nabokov to a publisher who agreed to acquire
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, he weighed in with praise for the book as Nabokov headed to his new position at Wellesley that October. “It has,” he wrote, “delighted me and stimulated me more than any new book I have read since I don’t know what.” In the same letter, Wilson invited the Nabokov family to Thanksgiving at his house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
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By the time Nabokov went alone to Wellfleet for the holiday, the two friends had exchanged dozens of letters. In person, the voluble, argumentative Wilson, who after three drinks “collapsed like a bag of potatoes,” contrasted sharply with Nabokov’s mocking reserve.
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They had developed a rare, close friendship in the year since their first meeting; yet they continued to differ on issues about which both of them felt strongly.

On the question of the war raging in Europe, experience led Wilson and Nabokov to very different positions. Wilson had entered World War I as a private in France and had seen the wounded and dying up close during his months spent in a military hospital. Embracing a pacifism that supported American isolationism, at least in military matters, Wilson was profoundly skeptical of what he would later describe as Jewish-Americans pushing the U.S. to enter the war in an attempt “to save their own people.”
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While Wilson had made conscious efforts to reject the anti-Semitism his mother had exposed him to in childhood, his position on the war was held by other Americans who were less prone to thinking twice about the issue. That fall, the U.S. Senate convened a special subcommittee to investigate the presence of pro-war propaganda in America’s motion-picture industry, expressing particular alarm over the number of foreigners running Hollywood studios. Not blind
to their implicit message, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted that the Bible, too, had been written almost entirely by foreigners and Jews. U.S. pacifist or isolationist impulses of the day seemed chronically bound up with anti-Semitism.
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With his love for his family, his sympathy for Jewish refugees as a group, and his eyewitness perspective on how Nazi policies had evolved from exclusion to extermination, Nabokov felt an acute sensitivity to the casual bigotry of mid-century America, but cheered its entry into the war. Despite his hatred for Stalin, he went so far as to offer conditional, transitory support to his homeland, calling for “Russia, in spite of everything, (to) defeat or rather utterly abolish Germany—so that not a German be left in the world.”
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Nabokov’s comment represented the kind of sweeping demonization of the opposing side that infuriated Wilson, and which he saw as surrendering to the mania for war without regard to its costs. Despite their differences, however, Nabokov sometimes took Wilson’s advice to heart. After receiving his friend’s corrections to the draft of
Sebastian Knight
, Nabokov wrote Wilson to say, “You are right, quite right about the slips,” and incorporated several suggested changes.
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For all Nabokov’s war sympathy, he was nearly as removed from the war effort as it was possible to get. His writing and occasional lectures at Wellesley were interspersed with time spent at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. As Europe itself continued to disintegrate into chaos, he brought structure and order to the Museum’s European butterfly collection. As if in sympathy, Wilson adopted an ephemeral interest in entomology.
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Though they differed in matters of literature, war, and history, the two men admired each other. But even in the early stage of their relationship, Russia was already the sore point between them—and they could not seem to refrain from poking the wound that deepened as their friendship grew. In a letter to a mutual friend Nabokov expressed his affection for Wilson but noted that Russian attachments had a dimension missing in their American counterparts. There
were many consolations to the relationship, he wrote, but he did not feel that he could truly unburden himself with Wilson.
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Small wonder that Nabokov could not open his heart fully. Russia and Russian literature weighed heavily on him, and he had spent the fall homesick for both. He told Véra that if it were not for her, he would enlist and fight the Germans in Morocco—then he corrected the statement to say that more than fighting Germany, he longed to write a book in Russian. As if there were still some Russian back road on which he could detour from his commitment to write in English, Nabokov submitted “Ultima Thule,” a story written in his last year in France, for publication in a new Russian-language journal.
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When it came to new material, however, Nabokov soldiered on in English. His first poem in the language of his adopted land would make its way into the pages of
The Atlantic
before the end of the year. But even that poem relays the anguish of perpetual exile (“an endless line of land receding endlessly”) and grieves the loss of his native tongue.
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Wilson soon dove deep into Russian verse, launching an exploration of meter that Nabokov felt was profoundly wrongheaded. In response, Nabokov created a series of charts and graphics laying out a calculus of Russian poetics via metrics, phonetics, and accents rendered in symbols. These were the weapons of their disagreement, but the heart of the matter can be seen in the degree to which Lenin continued to figure in their early correspondence.

After reading
To the Finland Station
, Nabokov felt compelled to praise his friend’s treatment of Marx, but criticized the portrait of Lenin provided by Wilson. Mentioning a heartwarming anecdote in which Lenin once refrained from shooting a beautiful fox, Nabokov speculated it was a “pity that Russia was homely.” Nabokov mourned the millions of lives destroyed in the pursuit of a social experiment, saving special disdain for the portrayal of Lenin as jolly—seeming disappointed that Wilson had not seen through the “pail of milk of human kindness” to note the “dead rat at the bottom.”
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For his part, Wilson had so thoroughly identified with the oppressed in Imperial Russia that he found it hard to believe that Lenin might not have been their deliverer. He appeared to be largely unfamiliar with whole facets of Revolutionary history. First thinking that Nabokov was questioning his nascent Russian skills, Wilson conceded that he might have made some errors. But he heartily protested the criticism of his sources. “I don’t believe that Gorky, differing as he did so seriously in matters of opinion from Lenin, could ever have been on such close terms with a man such as you imagine.”
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Nabokov’s affection for or dependence on Wilson was great enough to restrain his response. In a follow up letter, he wrote only that perhaps his own inclination was to portray all of Russia’s rulers as “more inhuman and ridiculous than they were.” Wilson acknowledged that it must be grating to see an outsider interpret Russian history, understanding just “how peculiarly uncomfortable it is to read books about one’s own country by people who have got the subject up but don’t really know much about it at first hand.”
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Yet when it came to Russia, the stakes were too high, and the emotional attachment each man had to his own narrative blocked any real discussion of the issue. Nabokov’s political arguments relied on history that was largely unknown in the West. But his lack of admiration for even Soviet ideals and his utter disinterest in questions of class and workers as a group led Wilson to dig in his heels and refuse to acknowledge the facts that Nabokov put on the table. While a ruined aristocrat had romantic potential as literature, Wilson also had a profound dislike for entitled behavior in general, and as difficult as his circumstances had become, Nabokov was never shy about his sense of self.
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Given Wilson’s eagerness to discuss all things Russian, and the frequency with which disagreements over Russian history and literature cropped up in their earliest letters, it is difficult to imagine Russia
not
coming up during Nabokov’s Thanksgiving visit. Neither made a journal record of their holiday or quoted from conversations that transpired there, but a literary relic of the visit—a poem—survives.

“The Refrigerator Awakes” begins with
Crash!
and a noisy icebox straining to do its duty as coils boil volatile chemicals (“dichloridisomethingmethane”), revealing the gargantuan effort required to keep its cool. But the overheating refrigerator, on the verge of collapse, struggles on. Behind the ham, fruit, and milk, Nabokov weaves in more disturbing imagery of survival and preservation: a torture house, bodies frozen in blue ice for fifty years, “a trembling white heart,” and a story that must be told. He mentions the Russian Arctic islands of Nova Zembla and Ernest Shackleton, who went there, and winks at the story of William Barents, an explorer trapped in 1596 for one desperate winter near the islands’ northern tip. And he ends with a cycle of references to polar adventurers whose (not always successful) attempts to survive became the stuff of legends.
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