Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (9 page)

The initial strategy for these camps was that detainees would be arrested, then investigated, with the clearly innocent being freed. And occasional waves of releases did happen, but continuous or widespread exonerations did not take place as planned. Many cross-border families had no idea where their relations were and so could not contact them. In some countries, civilian prisoners—many of whom were loyal to the countries that had imprisoned them—languished near starvation for years.
⁵

When it came to selecting internees, being of military age and a subject or citizen of an enemy country were the most common determinants, but criteria for arrest could be arbitrary and inconsistent. If, instead of a German mother and a Russian father, V. D. Nabokov had been born to a Russian mother and German father, he himself might have been a candidate for a concentration camp.
⁶

The camps of the Great War provided a stepping-stone to darker incarnations that would directly impact the Nabokov family, yet the concept of prison camp itself was not new to Russia. The country had a long history of punitive measures against political activists, and Siberian exile and hard labor had been regular tools of Imperial justice for centuries. But the phenomenon of the concentration camp—in which people were arrested and imprisoned for years without trial, without rights of correspondence, and often without judicial review of any kind, simply on the basis that they
might
represent a threat—was new.
⁷

Absorbed in his first love and protected from the war by his parents, Nabokov nonetheless noticed the arrival of Russia’s first concentration camps. He would later make use of one in a novel, but even then, his attention to history would largely be in vain. His narrator’s past would remain an enigma to readers because less than two decades after their creation, the camps from the First World War would be as good as forgotten.

Nabokov’s affair with Lyussya survived the bitter winter of 1915–16 in Petrograd, sustained by furtive meetings in which the lovers had little privacy. He continued composing poetry in tribute to their passion, and in the spring she cheered him on at a soccer match. The following summer, romance returned when they met again in the more idyllic, more permissive countryside.

Nabokov immortalized his first love by publishing a collection of his own poems about her. Printed in the second year of the war, the book was a fearless stab at establishing an identity in the world. It was also a vanity project. Many teenagers might have fantasized about becoming the next Alexander Pushkin, but few had the wherewithal to pay a publisher to further the dream.

At Tenishev, such presumption may have seemed less than democratic. In what can only have been a nightmare for even the most self-assured child, Nabokov’s literature professor, Vladimir Hippius (a poet
himself), obtained a copy of the book and brought it in to mock the most intimate lines out loud in front of Vladimir and his classmates. Nabokov would later recall the book being savaged in the minor press. In case the reviews had not provided a clear response to V. D. Nabokov, his friend Joseph Hessen expressed his dismay over the book. Hippius’s cousin, a poet of some distinction, told Nabokov’s father that Vladimir would under no circumstances make it as a writer.
⁸

During that summer at Vyra, Nabokov saw not only Lyussya but also Yuri, who took leave from officer training school to spend a week with his cousin. The teenagers improvised a game with a rope swing in the garden. Each taking turns standing on a board that, at its lowest point, passed just barely above where the other one lay on the ground, they learned not to move as the swing moved at greater speeds from higher distances, despite every indication of disaster.
⁹

They went for their usual stroll in the village. On a lark this time, the young men exchanged clothes before setting out, Yuri wearing white flannels and a striped tie, and Vladimir buttoned into his cousin’s military uniform, with its dark pants, gray jacket, and white leather belt. They went to the village and came back, then traded clothes again, the boy poet and boy soldier, protected offspring of one of the most cosmopolitan cultures in the world, each seeking his own inimitable destiny and dreaming of different kinds of glory.

As the war entered its third year, Uncle Ruka died in Paris. With him went his declarations of heart trouble (which proved to be prescient), as well as his foppish canes, his stutter, his high-heeled shoes, his father’s legendary cruelty to him, and his attention to his nephew Vladimir. The young Nabokov inherited Ruka’s two-thousand-acre country house at Rozhdestveno, along with a fortune that made him a millionaire. The inheritance had long been planned, with other properties from Elena’s side of the family slated for Sergei and Olga, but V. D. Nabokov was less than pleased about his brash son’s new, independent wealth.
¹⁰

In clear contravention of the rules of romance, by the time Nabokov got the money, he had lost the girl. The end of summer had already begun to seal a distance between Nabokov and Lyussya. He would not remember their final encounter that season at Vyra, but it seems likely that they were dogged by their different, irreconcilable futures. Lyussya had promised her mother she would look for a job that fall; Vladimir returned to Tenishev. The marriage he had promised, which she seemed to have believed in far less than he did, never materialized. He would move on to a series of affairs, from one-night stands to more earnest associations, the two sometimes overlapping.
¹¹

In the meantime, life for many Russians was on a downward trajectory as steep as Nabokov’s enchanted ascent. Fielding the biggest army in the war, with more than twelve million soldiers mobilized, Russia paid a proportionate price. In all, the war would take nearly two million Russian lives, a total only Germany would surpass. With such staggering losses, the reflexive patriotism from the war’s early months had faded.

By the end of 1916, political discontent was still fragmented but rising dramatically. As the New Year rolled in, strikes erupted continuously. In mid-February, female textile workers in Petrograd protested war shortages and called for increased bread rations. Munitions factory workers reprised the role they had played in 1905 and joined the demonstrations. When the police failed to reestablish order, guards regiments were called out, to no avail. Soldiers who initially followed orders to fire on demonstrators began to mutiny.

Protesters took over Nevsky Prospect. A dozen years after Trotsky had been arrested as leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet, the Mensheviks resurrected the banned organization and began to advocate for a republic.
¹²

If the war had been happening somewhere off-stage for Vladimir Nabokov, the Revolution would take place at closer range. Children had been shot from the trees in front of St. Isaac’s in 1905, but by
March 1917, grown men had taken their place, and they were ready to shed more blood on St. Isaac’s Square for the prize that had been lost a dozen years before.

Nabokov’s neighborhood—which included the cathedral, the War Office, the Admiralty Building, and the Military Hotel—was the last holdout against revolutionary forces. Besieged officials sent frenzied dispatches to the front, seeking some kind of military support greater than the last regiments still loyal to the Tsar packed around St. Issac’s.

No help, however, was forthcoming. Gun battles raged on Bolshaya Morskaya. Russian officers were herded in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and executed, and a red flag was hung from the pole outside the Admiralty. In the street shootings and violence that erupted and subsided in that year of Revolution, Nabokov sat suspended over Morskaya Street, looking from his mother’s bay window at two soldiers trying to bear away a man on a stretcher at a run while they kept an interloper from stealing the dead man’s boots. Russia was in her third year of war, but he would remember it as the first corpse he had seen.
¹³

In time that war, along with its food shortages and repressions, triggered what had been avoided more than a decade before. As Petrograd rose in revolt, the Tsar was away, but it became clear that his reign was over. Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, abdicated in favor of his son, then reversed himself to turn the throne over to his brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail.
¹⁴

But Mikhail refused the Imperial crown. V. D. Nabokov, whose legal brilliance was undisputed, helped to draft an abdication letter vesting power in a provisional body until elections could be held. On March 16, 1917, more than two centuries of Romanov rule ended.

The Petrograd Soviet began issuing orders, while opposition parties set about negotiating a Provisional Government. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, Joseph Stalin came back to Petrograd from Arctic exile—his seventh. Taking over
Pravda
, he offered conditional support to Russia’s transitional leadership.
¹⁵

In Zurich, Lenin had heard news of the Revolution and at first refused to believe it was true. He had spent almost no time in Russia since the end of his Siberian exile, but hoped to return immediately. Sending telegrams ahead, he insisted that no accommodation be made by revolutionaries—under no circumstances should they support any decision to continue the war.

But the war, in that moment, possessed an undeniable reality that blocked Lenin’s ambition. To get back to Russia, he would have to cross territory in which he would be an enemy alien, subject to arrest and detention in a concentration camp. His brief taste of internment in 1914 did not make him anxious to revisit it. He proposed to make himself part of a prisoner exchange, in which the Provisional Government would request safe passage for him and release German nationals held in Russia in exchange. Yet V. D. Nabokov’s friend, Minister of Foreign Affairs Paul Milyukov, refused to call for Lenin’s return.
¹⁶

Lenin reached out through other channels and found that the Germans (no doubt imagining the effect that Lenin would have on the collapsing Empire) would be delighted to guarantee him and other political émigrés safe passage. So Lenin, who would otherwise have been put in a camp on German territory, was permitted to pass through undisturbed, reading newspapers to catch up on all he had missed. The Provisional Government, with V. D. Nabokov as its executive secretary, was sure that he would be discredited as a German agent, and made no move to bar his return.
¹⁷

As his train pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station, Lenin was met on the platform by thousands of cheering revolutionaries. He was furious with his own party. He was first greeted by an honor guard of sailors, who expected congratulations. Instead, he told them they had been duped. Heading along the platform through the station to the street, he gave the cold shoulder to a fellow socialist who pleaded for cooperation. Leaving the station, he climbed on top of an armored car and announced to the crowd that the first thing to do was to cut off all support for the Provisional Government.

After more than a decade in opposing camps, Lenin and V. D. Nabokov were no closer to agreement. But the Tsars had been consigned to history, and the future of Russia lay completely open.

As the clouds of Russia’s post-Revolutionary destiny began to gather in Petrograd, Leon Trotsky was delayed in North America. At the moment the Romanovs abdicated, he was in New York City working as a journalist. Trotsky immediately made plans to return home, booking passage on a ship that left New York Harbor less than two weeks later.

The ship pulled out on schedule but was stopped at Nova Scotia, Canada, where Trotsky, his wife, and his sons were arrested. Trotsky and other male revolutionaries were taken from the ship to nearby Amherst, where they were put into a concentration camp run by a British colonel, a veteran of the Boer War. “So much for British democracy,” Trotsky wrote.
¹⁸

He found himself sleeping behind barbed wire in an old barracks of a foundry alongside more than eight hundred captured German sailors and a group of civilians held as enemy aliens. He protested his internment bitterly. What charges were there against him? He was a civilian and
not
an enemy alien; he had committed no crime. He attempted to send telegrams to the Provisional Government through the Russian consul at Montreal; he wrote to the British Prime Minister—to no avail. Russian foreign minister Paul Milyukov initially requested his release, but then thought better of it, and two days later rescinded the request.
¹⁹

Word leaked of Trotsky’s detention, and international calls were made for his release. News of the arrest became public in Petrograd, where the British ambassador proclaimed Trotsky a paid agent of Germany. The Provisional Government was faced with a dilemma: knowing as they did that Trotsky had already denounced the fragile government and would seek to destroy it, should they call for his release and meet the demands of their more radical allies?

War raged on, and the Provisional Government was planning for Russia to stay in the fight. Trotsky would certainly try to undermine that plan, and would present a formidable threat. But public pressure for his release was too strong. A month after he had left New York Harbor, Trotsky was freed. By May he was back in Petrograd.

He would take the time in his first days back to write a pamphlet about his weeks inside a
kontslager (Konzentrationslager
, concentration camp) and like Vladimir Nabokov, would not forget the camps of the First World War. Trotsky, however, would make use of his recollections much sooner, and in an infinitely more direct manner.
²⁰