Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (46 page)

There was plenty to criticize honestly without resorting to their past correspondence. Nabokov’s four-volume set had been out for a year, and other critics had been mixed in their evaluations. Several strongly disapproved of Nabokov’s plodding literalism, while others acknowledged the brilliance of his massive commentary. But Wilson also attempted to question his friend’s Russian, an unfathomable choice—one he was warned against by friends.
²⁵

Nabokov defended his
Onegin
tactically, delving even deeper into personal matters once Wilson had struck the first blow. Revealing his years of attempts to correct Wilson’s errors during the latter’s “long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language,” Nabokov notes how as late as 1957, Wilson had him in hysterics with his complete inability to read
Eugene Onegin
aloud, then proceeds to dismantle some of Wilson’s “ghastly blunders.”
²⁶
The bulk of both men’s arguments lay in dull minutiae that were surely skimmed by most readers, who were riveted only by the spectacle of two living legends skewering each other.

Wilson countered by admitting that he might have made some errors, and had realized in retrospect that his original piece sounded “more damaging than I had meant it to be.”
²⁷
Nabokov responded again at length arguing that Wilson had misunderstood the whole motivation for the story, explaining the cause of a deadly duel in
Onegin
lay in Pushkin’s stress on the idea that some things,
amour propre
among them, are stronger than friendship.
²⁸

Having given permission in 1963 for his publisher to send copies of
Onegin
to Wilson, Nabokov believed that his friend had begun
plotting his attack before he visited Montreux. Wilson actually began reading the edition much later, but Nabokov did not know the truth, and believed that his friend had played at the charade of their 1964 reunion even as he was preparing to publicly savage their friendship.
²⁹

And so
Onegin
’s literary duel spurred another in which no lives were lost, but the closest friendship of Nabokov’s adult life was permanently broken. Wilson had somehow traveled a path from seeing Nabokov’s views as “neither White Russian nor Communist” in the first months of their friendship to adopting a kind of blindness that reduced Nabokov to a stereotype.
³⁰
Yet had Nabokov been less cryptic, or less publicly insistent on his fiction’s irrelevance to the real world, and had Wilson read
Pale Fire
with half the attention he had paid to
Eugene Onegin
, the latter might have found new ways to consider so much of what went to the heart of the distance between them.

Nabokov had taken the subjects of many of their conversations and debates and immortalized them.
Pale Fire
did not just bear witness to the imprisoned and the dead of Russia, it was also a chronicle of two decades of repartee between Wilson and Nabokov, an inadvertent elegy for a friendship that would soon be lost.

The
Onegin
Wars alternately subsided and staggered on for more than two years, during which Nabokov offered that “Pushkin had almost as much English in the 1830s as Mr. Edmund Wilson has Russian today.”
³¹
As if seeking to rewrite the disintegration of relations between them, Wilson drafted a piece—written under a pseudonym—in which he suggested the whole fight had been orchestrated, with his initial mistakes put in intentionally, and Nabokov’s biting response actually penned by him. To his credit, Wilson’s letter does not appear to have ever been submitted for publication.
³²

Nabokov did, however, send an interminable, point-by-point refutation of Wilson’s piece to
Encounter
magazine for publication in February 1966. And he could not resist strafing other would-be
translators with fire on the matter of
Onegin
. Nabokov was published again in
Encounter
that May, when poet Robert Lowell criticized his translation of Pushkin as a “spoof” on readers, and he, in return, asked Lowell to “stop mutilating defenceless dead poets.”
³³

For internationally minded Western intellectuals,
Encounter
was a hot forum in publishing well into the 1960s. The brainchild of poet Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, it regularly published work by notable writers, from E. M. Forster to Sylvia Plath and Jorge Luis Borges. Edmund Wilson had expanded on his early review of
Doctor Zhivago
in its pages; Mary McCarthy had written reviews for it.
Encounter
had even published Solzhenitsyn’s follow-up to
Ivan Denisovich
, “Matryona’s Home,” a story of a beleaguered peasant woman who sacrifices everything she has to an ungrateful and blind village.

By 1963, publication in a forum with some of the most famous names in modern literature was no fluke for Solzhenitsyn. Nearly a million copies of
Ivan Denisovich
had sold in the Soviet Union alone—clearing all the print runs off the shelves. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn kept a low media profile, maintaining a control even beyond that exerted by Nabokov. With few exceptions, he simply refused to speak to journalists.
³⁴

For someone who had grown up in isolation from much of the dynamic literature of his day, Solzhenitsyn was utterly uninterested in seeing what he had missed and was willing to reject more or less everything that he had not read.
³⁵
Whatever literary power Solzhenitsyn had acquired, it was gained in spite of his isolation. By contrast Nabokov had grown up in the embrace of centuries of culture from Russia, Europe, and America, rising to the pinnacle of an international literature that he had studied in depth. They both had read—and admired—Tolstoy and Chekhov. But Solzhenitsyn had less to build on, making it that much more extraordinary that he somehow adopted the emotional power of Tolstoy wholesale and applied it to a different kind of epic history.

After the publication of
Ivan Denisovich
, he began to hear from people who responded to that power, receiving piles of letters from
those who had been in camps, who had seen their lives destroyed by the system. He wrote many of them back, asking for more detail on their stories and sending follow-up questions.
³⁶

His mail included scraps of notes that he recognized as having been smuggled out of the camps, which led him to the realization that despite Khrushchev’s promises, the system still existed. Not only did it still exist, but Solzhenitsyn learned that Khrushchev had implemented an even more draconian regime of food restriction.
³⁷

Solzhenitsyn set up meetings with government officials and experts to discuss these findings and call for mercy in the treatment of the prisoners: more food, permission for family visits, and a day a week free from work. His requests were met with quiet sympathy from like-minded people but also provoked accusations that he wanted to coddle prisoners and that he misunderstood the fundamentally punitive function of the camps.
³⁸

Even Solzhenitsyn’s fans could be critical of him. In a meeting reviewing a new manuscript, one
Novy Mir
editor noted that not only was Solzhenitsyn perpetually stressing the negative aspects of the Soviet state, he seemed to question the value of the Revolution itself. He offered no answer to the question that Chernyshevsky had asked in the nineteenth century and Lenin had addressed again in the twentieth: “What is to be done?”
³⁹
Solzhenitsyn, like Nabokov, found himself rebuked for his focus on the dark side, his spotlight on hypocrisy, and the lack of redeeming elements in his stories.

Novy Mir
’s editor signed a contract for the excerpt under consideration, but then the board agonized (again) over whether they could actually print it. The publication of
Ivan Denisovich
had become a weapon in the fight over Russia’s future. Khrushchev had initially been so excited by Solzhenitsyn’s opus that he wanted a personal meeting with the author at his dacha, but by August 1964 he regretted championing the story.
⁴⁰
Two months later, he had been erased from Party leadership.

It was too late to quash
Ivan Denisovich
, but once Khrushchev had fallen, Solzhenitsyn worried about future publication. He became
caught up in a sophisticated game of proxies—his work would be attacked from one quarter, then defended from another, having more to do with disputes over upheaval in the Soviet political system than with any literary issue.
Novy Mir
seemed hesitant to push for publication, given the current atmosphere that re-chilled Khrushchev’s thaw. Solzhenitsyn began to circulate some work underground in
samizdat
, and to give travelers copies of his unpublished writings to smuggle to the West.

The winter of Khrushchev’s disappearance from public life, Solzhenitsyn retired to the country, where he began work in earnest on his new project documenting the history of the camps through the testimony of those who had been there. For his title, he drew on the account of Dmitri Likhachev, who had spent more than two years on Solovki. Likhachev told Solzhenitsyn that the man responsible for executions there liked to call himself the “Commander of the Forces of the Solovetsky Archipelago.” Solzhenitsyn had seized on the image of an archipelago and paired it with
GULAG
to make a rhyme in Russian:
Arkhipelag GULAG.’
⁴¹

Using his own experiences, and the accounts of more than two hundred informants who had provided him with their stories, he conveyed many events that had never been described. He noted that Maxim Gorky, who had paid tribute to the White Sea Canal project, had made a trip to Solovki, too, where a young boy had risked his life to let Gorky know the truth—the stories of mosquito torture, being forced to sit on poles for hours, and the still-living bodies thrown down hundreds of steps from the former chapel on Sekirka Hill.
⁴²
Gorky had nonetheless given his seal of approval to the camp, signing off that even Solovki’s punishment cells looked “excellent.” The boy, Solzhenitsyn recorded, was shot as soon as Gorky left for the mainland.

Solzhenitsyn, wrote, too, of the nightmare of arrests, of the earliest roots of the camps, the first terrors under Lenin, and the far-flung sites to which people found themselves sent, the first group to each location often arriving with little food and no shelter.

Across the two thousand miles between himself and Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn touched on the same history. From the isolation of rural Solotcha, a village three hours from Moscow, he described how the camps began to expand out from Solovki, carrying its methods and its madness out into the most desolate corners of the nation:

There were also camps on Nova Zembla for many years, and the most terrible camps they were
—
people were confined in them “without right of correspondence.” Not a single prisoner ever returned from there. Today we still do not know what those wretched people mined and built, how they lived and how they died
⁴³

Despite the silence from some of the most distant locations, Solzhenitsyn—who was called a pessimist but who saw himself as essentially optimistic—wrote that he hoped against hope one day to hear the story of those who were sent to Nova Zembla.
⁴⁴

After nearly a year of anxiety over whether de-Stalinization policies would be reversed or continued, it became clear that the news was not good. Liberalization was halted, and a call went out for
Novy Mir
editors to be investigated.
⁴⁵

That September, Solzhenitsyn begged for the return of the four copies of his unpublished novel sitting in a safe at the magazine’s offices. After a long argument, he prevailed and delivered the copies to friends who were safeguarding his collected writing. Despite his best plans, however, a week later the KGB investigated those friends as the focus of a separate inquiry, and Solzhenitsyn’s archive was confiscated.

While Solzhenitsyn agonized over whether and when the KGB would arrest him, another kind of literary intrigue shook the West. In April 1966, editors of the anti-Communist but fairly liberal
Encounter
—in which the work of both Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov had appeared—woke up to find themselves and their longtime funder,
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, accused by
The New York Times
of receiving financial support from the CIA.
⁴⁶

The suggestion that some of the most liberal thinkers in the West had, wittingly or not, been supported by the CIA as potential pawns in the Cold War created a firestorm in European and American newspapers. Direct support for Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas, still Secretary-General of the Congress, came quickly in the form of a letter to the editor cosigned by George Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur Schlesinger. It was followed the next day by an assertion of editorial independence by current and former
Encounter
editors. A week later, Nicholas Nabokov himself wrote to
The New York Times
to say that suggestions “that the Congress has been an instrument of the C.I.A. are deeply unfair to intellectuals around the world who have found in the Congress and its associated activities a chance to write and talk without constraint on the urgent issues and hopes of our age.”
⁴⁷