Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (64 page)

superficial
: NWL, 245.

7
Dabney,
Edmund Wilson
, 287.

8
NWL, 271.

9
a Russian narrator
: “Thatin Aleppo Once,” STOR, 563;
first fictional representation of Holocaust denial
: Author interview with Maxim D. Shrayer, February 2012.

In addition, the story “Time and Ebb” introduced a Jewish scientist who flees France and the Holocaust as a child, surviving well into the twenty-first century. His continued existence is a triumph, but the past—Hitler and the “indescribable tortures … inflicted by a degenerate nation upon the race to which I belong”—remains the unchangeable past (583).

10
the same jars of jelly
: BBAY, 115;
lush, unforgettable images
: To his students, Nabokov explained that art can “improve and enlighten the reader” but only “in its own special way,” when “its own single purpose remains to be good, excellent art” (BBAY, 111).

11
NWL, 238.

12
chastised Alexandra Tolstoy
: Shrayer, Maxim D., “Jewish Questions,”
Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives
, 90, n11; “
Bloom’s Jewishness too full of clichés
”: BBAY, 170.

13
SO, 228; NWL, 173. Sartre, who had written a dismissive review of
Despair
a decade earlier framing Nabokov as a second-rate Dostoyevsky, had been repaid in kind. In the review itself, Nabokov pointed out, with some disdain, that the songwriter of that particular (real-world) song was not Jewish but Canadian. The “Negress” whom the main character believes sings the song, Nabokov notes, was actually Sophie Tucker, a Jewish-Russian émigré. Nabokov highlights these apparent errors in the core of his savage review, but in fact, Sartre seems to have known this song well, having referenced it a decade before in the context of anti-Semitism the very year
Nausea
had been published in French. Nabokov may well have made the same mistake he abhorred in his own reviewers: confusing the character’s unpleasant attributes with the author’s. See Judaken, Jonathan,
Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question
(2007), 44.

14
Christian propaganda
: EO, Commentary, 354–7;
no reason to drag in
: EO, Commentary, 354;
blintzes
: EO, Commentary, Index, 43.

15
SM, 9.

16
In
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
, Richard Rorty suggests that in contrast to novelists such as Dickens, Nabokov’s writing “gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves” (xvi). Leona Toker refined some of Rorty’s arguments and added her own in “Liberal Ironists and the ‘Gaudily Painted Savage,’” from
Nabokov Studies
, vol. 1, 1994, 195–206.

17
CE, 78.

18
Ibid., 26.

19
CE, 177.

20
Ibid., 10. Interestingly, Nabokov was mistaken in his belief that Zhernosekov had been executed. He later corrected this in
Speak, Memory
.

21
NWL, 287.

22
Shrayer, Maxim D., “Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin: A Reconstruction,”
Russian Literature XLIII
(1998), 392.

23
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 144–48; Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, Volume 1, 15–17.

24
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 156.

25
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander,
The Gulag Archipelago
, Volume 1, 220.

26
Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, 136.

27
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 257, 377, and 305.

28
Ibid., 325.

29
Under the heading of Nabokov’s books addressing Russian subjects,
Lolita
would merit the briefest of mentions, with only a White Russian named Maximovich—a taxi-driving colonel and former advisor to the Tsar who cuckolds Humbert, urinates noisily in his toilet, and then steals his Polish wife.

30
VNSL, 128.

31
Ukrainian man
: NWL, 229–30;
young girls kidnapped
: Nabokov refers to the kidnapping of Sally Horner in
Lolita
, a real-life event covered in newspapers as he worked on the novel. See Dolinin, Alexander, “What Happened to Sally Horner?”
The Times Literary Supplement
, September 9, 2005, 27–8.

one of his colleagues at Stanford
: BBAY, 33;
literary acquisition of various limbs
: BBAY, 211.

32
likely to interpret the narrator
: VNSL, Véra Nabokov to Katharine White, 142;
the English-language novels he had already written
: One of which has a narrator named V., the other of which has a narrator who is a moth-collecting writer.

33
“
acute nervous exhaustion
”: NWL, 194;
before Véra intervened
: Schiff, 166;
no precedent in literature
: VNSL, 140.

34
BBAY, 73.

35
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 253. Natalia had divorced Solzhenitsyn because the lab where she worked had been declared classified, and if she had revealed on a new staff questionnaire that she was married to a prisoner convicted as a counterrevolutionary, she would have lost her job. She explained the reason for her actions, but news of the decision fell very hard on Solzhenitsyn.

36
Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, vol. 3, 420.

37
Cornell itself may have provided Nabokov a literary inspiration for
Pnin
in the form of Professor Marc Szeftel, a Jewish-Russian émigré who was a lesser light in the firmament of the university faculty. Szeftel, who helped arrange Nabokov’s schedule with him prior to his first classes at Cornell, and who worked with him on a project related to
The Lay of Igor’s Campaign
, bore a startling resemblance to the portrait of Pnin Nabokov outlined for the book’s cover. Szeftel had lost his mother in a German camp, and never seemed to navigate America or academia with anything approaching Nabokov’s confidence. It is not hard to see an echo of Szeftel’s grief and displacement in Pnin, who is also an object of ridicule by his co-workers, shown up by the arrogant countryman who ultimately outshines him. While Nabokov’s arrival did not force Szeftel out, he cast his fellow Russian further into shadow. See Galya Diment’s thorough treatment of the Szeftel-Pnin parallels in her
Pniniad
.

38
PNIN, 135.

39
Ibid., 136 and 168.

40
BBAY, 270.

41
VNSL, 178.

42
BBAY, 288.

43
VNSL, 143–4 and 153.

44
Rape that happened three times a day, as Nabokov underlines in the Russian translation he himself later did of the book (BBAY, 490). For all that the idea
of a willing, seductive
Lolita
has entered the lexicon as a slightly naughty underage delight, Nabokov seems to have intended to cast his girl-child as a victim of brutality.

45
ANL, 284.

46
LL, 2; BBAY, 175.

47
under his own name
: BBAY, 264;
look for one in Europe
: NWL, 321.

48
BBAY, 267.

49
Ibid.

50
VNSL, Vladimir Nabokov to Girodias, July 18, 1955, 175.

51
Donleavy would eventually have his revenge, and then some. After twenty years of litigation with Girodias over the rights to sell the novel in England, he would shut out Girodias altogether when he bought the Olympia Press name at a bankruptcy hearing. See James Campbell’s “The spice of life,”
The Guardian
, June 25, 2004.

52
BBAY, 293.

53
more than one Olympia Press title: Histoire d’O
and Jean Genet’s
Notre-Damedes-Fleurs;
NWL, 320.

54
“
is a highly moral affair
”: NWL, 331; “
no moral in tow
”: ANL, 314

55
vain and cruel wretch
: SO, 94.

56
“
broke her spell
”: The words are Humbert’s own: “… until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.” ANL, 15.

rooted in a tragedy the world had forgotten
: Nabokov knew this history because he had lived it. He had spent the same summer, the summer of 1923, only before the bombing, picking apples in southern France, only miles from the Riviera coastline where Humbert and Annabel Leigh met that fictional summer. The refugee crisis had poured out across the sea that year, with thousands of Armenian refugees also housed in hotels and held in camps in Marseille and along the French coastline.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
: F
AME

1
BBAY, 295.

2
VNSL, April 4, 1957, 215.

3
John Hollander’s Autumn 1957
Partisan Review
critique
of Lolita
, taken from Page’s
Vladimir Nabokov
(83).

4
Popking, Henry, “The Famous and Infamous Wares of Monsieur Girodias,” NYT, April 17, 1960, BR4.

5
“published by some shady firm”: NWL, 322;
pulled the books from the shelves
: BBAY, 300.

6
Nabokov makes clear that Humbert is an anarchist in the afterword that he added before
Lolita
was published in America (315).

7
There were in fact many expeditions (and wartime battles) over meteorological stations in the Arctic, the vague outlines of which had been covered
in the news of the day, but Junghans seems to have invented the details and names that he gave the FBI on this topic.

8
“
cold labor
”: ANL, 34; “
menial work
”: 33:
who were anarchists
: Nabokov well knew the fate of anarchists in wartime America, and would underline it in his next book, where Pnin is detained as a result of a incorrect belief that he is an anarchist.

9
DHH 90/237, at the Directorate of History and Heritage, Canadian National Defence Headquarters.

10
“British move assailed: ‘Congress Is Told Jewish Relief Worker Is Interned,’” NYT, March 3, 1945, 8. Civilian internees arriving in Camp Q reported being robbed of their possessions on arrival at the camp, after which they had to sleep on wet ground in makeshift tents that had been thrown up when it was clear there was not enough space in the barracks. Sleeping in tents, however, was nothing compared to the futility of trying to explain that some of them were not military prisoners at all. They were called traitors by one camp commander, who told them he would rather deal with full-fledged Nazis than refugees. See Koch,
Deemed Suspect
, 92.

Newspaper coverage tilted heavily toward escape attempts. Civilians occasionally made the effort, and there were spectacular attempts by groups of Nazi officers, including one gang of twenty-eight which was initially successful. Only one person, however, managed to get to still-neutral America and avoid deportation. Some were shot for their trouble. (See, for example, “28 Nazi Fliers Tunnel to Liberty in Canada,” NYT, April 20, 1941, 1; “2 Nazi Airmen Slain in Canadian Break,” NYT, April 22, 1941, 3; “German Flier Escapes in Canada,” NYT, January 9, 1943, 4; etc.)

11
“Putzi’s Progress,”
The New Yorker
, November 1, 1941, 12. Ahalf-dozen articles on Hanfstaengl’s unusual situation also ran in the NYT, though none of them mentioned Camp Q by name.

12
BBAY, 301 and 357.

13
Putnam’s publisher was Walter Minton; the showgirl was Rosemary Ridgewell (Schiff, 237n). It is not clear whether Ridgewell got the promised finder’s fee.

14
VNSL, 226. When Dmitri walked through the door in uniform for the first time, Nabokov recalled his cousin Yuri, whose coffin he had helped to carry in the Crimea almost forty years before.

15
Girodias knew that he was losing a fortune in potential sales, and in November 1958 sued the French government for more than 32 million francs (then about $75,000). He was not about to let the nymphet go without extracting his portion of the proceeds, potential or real.

16
BBAY, 362.

17
at liberty to appeal
: “British Seize
‘Lolita,’”
NYT, May 5, 1959, 36;
game of cricket
: Middleton, Drew, “Blue-Law Reform Sought in Britain,” NYT, January 12, 1959, 12.