Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (8 page)

If Vladimir perplexed his Tenishev teachers, Sergei, who seemed to trail adolescent drama in his wake, unsettled them more profoundly. Vladimir may already have been aware of the nature of these dramas; but if not, he soon would be: snooping in his brother’s diary as a teenager, he found passages that clarified Sergei’s homosexuality. Startled by what he had found, Vladimir gave the diary to his tutor, who gave it to the Nabokovs; and so one brother outed the other to their parents. Sergei would have several distressing romances with boys at Tenishev before being transferred to another school.
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Vladimir stayed on, still feeling pressured to conform to the Tenishev way. The anxiety, however, may have been more his than theirs—his schoolmaster described him in records as morally decent, modest, and respected by all. But in Nabokov’s young mind, being the son of V. D. Nabokov might have been enough to create its own unreachable standards.
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Nabokov continued to resist engagement in any activities promoting social change or democracy. He did not attend meetings, historical groups, or political discussions—any of the things that
might make him a leader, or at least a productive member, of a hazily imagined (but still somehow substantial, real, and perhaps just around the corner) democratic Russia. Despite the marvelous example provided by his father, he was not a joiner.

At that moment in time, joining was thought to be the only hope for Russia. The sweep of history was away from kings and emperors, and it was understood that something different would emerge within years rather than centuries. But how to get from Tsarist Russia in 1911 to some post-Imperial state had become a burning question. The change that had once seemed almost in the grasp of the politically active opposition had retreated as they approached it.

Meanwhile, Nabokov did not know how to explain to his teachers his growing awareness that shaping his ideas in concert with others not only went against the free spirit of his own curiosity, but that engagement had real risks. His father’s meetings, held so often in the security of his own home, did not just offer the rhetoric of point and counterpoint. Meeting nights, Nabokov would hear the pencil sharpener grinding in anticipation of the note-taking; he would see the coats and overshoes shed by their visitors. The meeting could have been any one of his father’s interests, from criminology to philanthropy, except, of course, that one kind of meeting was actually completely different from the others—not that a child could tell the difference. Some meetings could lead to arrest and prison. Some activities could lead servants to betray their masters—as the Nabokovs were eventually betrayed by their servant Ustin, who would in time escort the Bolsheviks to the Nabokovs’ wall safe filled with jewels. The price of political involvement was that a spy for the Tsar’s secret police could be discovered hiding in the private closets and back rooms of one’s childhood home, hoping to eavesdrop on anti-government plots that could lead to arrests, begging on his knees for the librarian to keep silent when she found him. The price of engagement was that enemies might be anywhere. Even home was not secure, and those ostensibly charged with protection were the ones just waiting to denounce.
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As Nabokov attended his classes at Tenishev and started down a long road of resisting political activism, other Russians got involved, but did so cautiously. Banned parties continued to meet furtively, producing vast archives of pamphlets and newspapers. Socialist parties had been forced underground; major unions had been outlawed. The Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist wing collapsed. Lenin and the Bolsheviks continued to squabble with Leon Trotsky’s Mensheviks, holding competing party conferences and jockeying for control of Marxism in the East. Russia settled into an ongoing state of suppressed instability.
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Six years on from what had seemed like a Revolution, joining together had only accomplished so much. The Kadets’ idealism began to falter amid the polarization of extremes, in which there appeared to be no room for politics like V. D. Nabokov’s. The Kadets continued to modify their platform in an attempt to expand support, but their effort to develop a broader coalition left them hamstrung. Their support of women’s suffrage riled the Tatar Muslims; their frank defense of Jews and other minorities alienated many on the right.
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Yet when the accusation of blood libel reared its head again, V. D. Nabokov would not give ground on anti-Semitism. The brutal murder of a thirteen-year-old boy in southwestern Russia led to the arrest of Mendel Beilis, a thirty-seven-year-old Jewish man. Beilis sat in jail for more than two years before being brought to trial, accused of ritually murdering a Christian boy to use his blood for religious purposes. Nabokov’s father reported on the case, sending telegrams from Kiev to St. Petersburg to update his accounts of the proceedings. His reporting on the dubious arguments and evidence of the trial was picked up by the
Manchester Guardian
and
The New York Times
, and drew a fine from the government.
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The disgust with anti-Semitism that would later make its way into Vladimir Nabokov’s work had its seeds in his father’s own writing on the issue. V. D. Nabokov described the wonder of finding a nearly illiterate jury in an educated city (the pool would later turn out to have been rigged far in advance), of the simultaneous
accusations against Beilis and indictment of an entire religion, of the legal violations of the trial, these “ravings … from anti-Semitic literature of the lowest kind,” cloaked in the guise of scientific authority and admitted as evidence. Indicating the deterioration of justice in Russia, he wrote that staging the Beilis trial even a decade earlier “would have been impossible.”
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Workers struck and took up fund drives in Beilis’s support. But prosecutors played on the fear and prejudice of the jurors. A priest was brought in to describe Jewish practices, which he claimed required Christian blood for such a wide variety of purposes that a correspondent for the
Times of London
wondered mockingly how Jews had managed to find enough Christians to go around. American George Kennan (whose nephew of the same name would one day hail Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in the West) observed the Duma seriously debating the existence of a Jewish sect that ritually murdered Christians for religious purposes. The arguments were ominous; one deputy warned that if Russian liberals made it impossible for a Jew who murdered a Christian child to be tried, there would be no Jews left to save, because they would all be slaughtered by mobs.
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Outside Russia, Western public reaction formed a tidal wave of revulsion. But from certain corners, a more qualified disapproval appeared. One trial chronicler would later note that in between the groups clearly supporting Beilis’s prosecution and those who anguished over a Russia trapped in the Middle Ages lay a third, slippery faction. To that faction belonged many normally reasonable people, who warned Russia’s Jews against pursuing “their vendetta with Russia”—at a time when all the vengeance seemed to be running the other way. Advising against public protests,
The Oxford and Cambridge Review
suggested that while Judaism as a whole, even Orthodox Judaism, should not be held liable for the crimes laid at Beilis’s feet, it was entirely possible that some Jewish sect somewhere
might
be committing ritual murder.
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Despite the unwillingness of some observers to condemn prosecutors, the mythical horror story that they had fabricated was so
ludicrous it could not be kept aloft. Many of the best lawyers in the country joined Beilis’s defense team, and they discredited lie after lie. After approximately two hours of deliberation, a jury of Russian Christians rendered a verdict of not guilty and freed Beilis.
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In 1903, Russia had shocked the world with the pogroms unleashed in Kishinev, followed by a disastrous war that strained patriotism and national unity. A decade later, as teachers prompted the teenage Nabokov to engage politically for the future of his country, the spiral of history wound its way full circle. The Beilis trial revisited the slur of blood libel, and one year later, the same incompetent government found itself again facing the threat of war.

The challenges of this new war would again eclipse the abilities of the Tsar. This time, however, Nicholas would have company: much of the known world would descend into madness with Russia. In the wake of the Beilis trial, one Russian newspaper commentator identified Jews as “an exclusively criminal species,” which led him to pray, “May Russia be saved from Jewish equality even more than from fire, sword, or open invasion by enemies.”
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As it turned out, he would have his wish, and its fulfillment would mark the beginning of the end of Nabokov’s childhood.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

War

In the summer of 1914, the world went to war, and Vladimir Nabokov became a poet. He had already been composing verse for years, but in the season of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a fever took hold of him that never left. The metamorphosis would be linked later in his mind with a pavilion that sat over a small bridge on the family’s summer estate, its jewel-colored glass with some panes shattered and “Down with Austria!” graffiti providing a premonition of everything that would follow.
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In truth, however, the fifteen-year-old Nabokov was cocooned enough from the currents of history that he was spared much of the reality of the First World War. The six years that elapsed between the births of Wilfred Owen, the British martyr poet of the war, and Vladimir Nabokov set a generation gap between their respective fates. In a few short years, Nabokov would turn his literary attention to those whose lives had been shattered by conflict, but he would never become a war writer.

Instead, he wrote Romantic poetry, caught up for the first time in creation and inspiration that threatened to slip away but could sometimes be recovered. He would remember fashioning and refashioning his first
real
poem in his mind, waiting until it was polished and ready before reciting it to his mother, who, as he hoped (and expected), wept at the performance.

Cousin Yuri visited that June, and reported that he had, at sixteen, taken up with a married countess and a general’s wife. The following summer, Nabokov found his own romance in the countryside with Lyussya Shulgin, a fifteen-year-old Petrograd girl staying for the summer at a dacha in the village. They met alone in the pavilion with the panes of colored glass, and Nabokov spent August 1915 in a state of rapture, escaping for trysts, eating the fruit his mother had a servant leave out for his late-night returns. His mother copied the love poems he recited to her into a special album but, perhaps fearing to break his illusion or hers, asked no other questions. His father, more practical or more suspicious, subjected his teenage son to pesky interrogations aimed at preventing premature fatherhood.
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While the composition of romantic verse and the passion of first love occupied Nabokov, Europe had exploded. As country after country entered the war, V. D. Nabokov was mobilized with an infantry regiment. Elena Nabokov organized a private hospital for soldiers, where she volunteered, but she found the services she offered bitterly insufficient for the needs of the wounded veterans she encountered. Furthermore, she felt that her efforts failed in the breach: her kindnesses could not bridge the deep-rooted subservience of the injured peasants she had hoped to help.
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At the start of hostilities Russia had initially responded with the kind of patriotism Nicholas II had been dreaming of for decades. St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd, in order to seem less German. V. D. Nabokov suspended his political activities in light of the conflict.

Across Europe, paranoia set in. The British Parliament discussed completely impossible numbers of German spy networks and
saboteurs. The Germans feared that fellow countrymen deported by Russia were engaged in espionage against their homeland. Across the continent, these suspicions provided the impetus to import concentration camps from far-flung colonies into Europe itself. Facilities were constructed from London to Petrograd and built even more widely abroad, from Canada to Australia.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—both men and women—were labeled as “enemy aliens” and subject to arrest and internment. A year into the war, Britain had locked up more than 32,000 German, Hungarian, and Austrian civilians of military age. German facilities housed more than 100,000 French, British, and Russian prisoners. And in Russia, more than 300,000 civilians from Germany and other Central Power nations were placed into camps by 1917. Civilians were also held in prisons or concentration camps in France, the United States, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Egypt, Togoland, the Cameroons, Singapore, India, Palestine, the Habsburg lands, Bulgaria, Siam, Brazil, Panama, Haiti, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. From the handful of camps that had existed in Cuba before Nabokov’s birth, concentration camps had expanded to circle the globe.
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