Stalking Nabokov (6 page)

4. The Nabokov Biography and the Nabokov Archive

In
Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes writes:

You can define a net in one of two ways…. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as … a collection of holes tied together with string.

And then, for some strange reason, he proceeds to talk about biography.

In the case of Nabokov’s biography, it’s a wonder that we’re left with anything but holes. He had a hypertrophied sense of privacy. “I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of ‘human interest.’ I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life” (
LRL
38). He would deplore the fact that I was allowed to see the manuscript from which I have just quoted, and he would especially deplore the fact that I am about to quote what he first wrote: “no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life—I hope”; he then crossed out the hope, lest a biographer think that there
might
be some hope of peeking behind the scenes.
¹
He placed a fifty-year restriction on the papers he deposited at the Library of Congress. He hid behind literary masks and then retreated entirely from the public gaze to the tranquility of Montreux. Ensconced there, he fired off brusque letters to various editors protesting against factual inaccuracies or infringements of his privacy.

In his books Nabokov turned biography upside-down and inside-out. His critical biography of Nikolay Gogol begins with Gogol’s death and ends with his birth. His last Russian novel,
The Gift
, contains as an insert the young narrator’s 120-page biography of the real writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky, full of genuine scholarly detail but exuberantly defiant of every biographical decorum. In
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
the narrator’s comically frustrated search for the facts of his half-brother’s life becomes not only all we can have of Sebastian Knight’s biography but also a handbook for all biographers, crammed with precepts and cautionary tales.

Nabokov had least time of all for the biographies of writers, and trying to compose
his
biography seemed at times like preparing a lovingly executed portrait for a Byzantine iconoclast. “Remember that what you are told is really threefold,” he intones in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
: “shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale” (
RLSK
52). Shrewd advice, wise caution. Much more chilling for a potential biographer of Nabokov is this comment that V. makes on Sebastian Knight:

I soon found out that except for a few odd pages dispersed among other papers, he himself had destroyed [his manuscripts] long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except the perfect achievement: the printed book; that its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm, and that for this reason the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist.

(36)

In his own person, Nabokov stressed “the plain truth of the documents…. That, and only that, is what I would ask of my biographer—plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions” (
SO
156).

All this makes my presence here something of a miracle. I happen to be in North America at the moment for two main reasons: for the publication of the second volume of my Nabokov biography, and for this announcement that the Nabokov Archive has become part of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. But Nabokov says he wants a biographer to stick to the plain truth of the documents—and then wants all the documents but the published works destroyed. Hardly a promising basis for either a biography or an archive.

As if Nabokov hadn’t constructed all these ramparts between himself and the future image of his past, history added moats of its own. The Nabokov family had to flee at short notice from Petrograd to the Crimea in November 1917, leaving behind a young lad’s papers, books, and butterfly collection; they had to flee again from the Crimea to London in 1919, in even more desperate haste; and after becoming the most distinguished new writer to emerge in the Russian emigration, Nabokov had to escape Europe in May 1940 as German tanks rolled toward Paris. This time, he left some of his papers in the basement of his friend Ilya Fondaminsky’s home. Fondaminsky’s apartment was ransacked by the Gestapo, the papers were scattered across the street, and Fondaminsky himself was carried off to die in a concentration camp. Other materials, including the manuscripts of much of Nabokov’s unpublished early work, had remained in Prague in the custody of his mother and then passed into the keeping of his rather erratic and unliterary sister, Olga. After the Iron Curtain descended, Olga, conscious of the Soviet bloc’s attitude to émigrés, burnt many of her brother’s letters to their parents. In the 1950s Nabokov himself, at a time when he was still planning to publish
Lolita
anonymously, burnt each index card of the manuscript as soon as Véra typed it up. Somehow he also simply lost the manuscript of
Pnin
.

But the success of
Lolita
not only earned Nabokov a reprieve from teaching but also saved his papers from the ashcan. Suddenly faced with much more to pay in income tax than ever before, he was approached by the Library of Congress to donate some of his personal papers in return for a tax concession. Despite his abstract convictions, Nabokov readily agreed and continued to donate more material over the next ten years until the tax laws changed. And from the Library of Congress’s first approach he began to hoard assiduously his notes, his manuscripts, his galleys, and his page proofs, sometimes in duplicate or triplicate. So much for destroying everything.

For all the drama of abandonment and destruction enacted by Nabokov’s papers, other forces had in fact been at work all along to ensure that an unusually high proportion of his work survived. Those forces are easily identified: their names were Elena and Véra, his mother and his wife. For decades his mother gathered, transcribed, and pasted into albums her son’s published and unpublished verse, stories, plays, essays. The fat albums she assembled in Prague from his manuscripts and her own transcriptions did not reach Nabokov in Switzerland until the 1960s; now they constitute one of the glories of the Nabokov Archive and the prime tool for establishing the canon of his early work and the development of his art.

Véra Nabokov always denied that she was Zina Mertz in
The Gift,
but if the two women—both Russian Jews, both muses for a Berlin émigré writer—are not identical, they are the only known specimens of their very distinctive species. Fyodor finds out that Zina has been collecting clippings of his verse even before they meet; and Véra’s first album of Nabokov’s poetry, now in the Archive, begins with clippings of his poems published almost two years before she met him. Already before they were married Véra was preserving everything Nabokov wrote and everything she could find that was written about him. Fifteen years later, when he switched to English and the originality of style he had evolved in the Russian emigration proved an obstacle to publication in America, she began to preserve all of his rejections slips for the amusement of posterity, never doubting that posterity would see things her way. Another twenty years on, as cartoons about
Lolita
began to appear in newspapers and magazines around the world, she collected them all. Two decades later, after her husband’s death, she still carried on, despite age and ill health. She even fetched me all the way from New Zealand to Switzerland to sort out the manuscripts. And just this year she died, seventy years after clipping out that first Nabokov poem. Now that clipping and the album she pasted it into are here, in a collection that owes so much to her seven decades of dedication.

Nabokov asked of his biographer just “the plain truth of the documents.” I had to violate his sense of biographical method. I interviewed people he would not want me to have seen; I saw papers he had asked to be destroyed; I stalked and I sleuthed; I gathered all the facts I could and then had to move beyond the plain facts into attempts at explanation. But although I knew he would have arched his pale eyebrows at my
methods
, I still wanted to imagine he might not have thought my
results
simply “attractive but preposterous conclusions.” He hasn’t let me know.

If I couldn’t confine myself to the “plain truth of the documents,” I also couldn’t have done without them: documents Nabokov never dreamed of, documents that turned up in places where he never set foot, but especially the thousands and thousands of notes, letters, diaries, and manuscripts in his own hand that now form part of the Berg Collection.

Biography can be either plain or fancy, straight or crooked: it can follow the life from start to finish, or it can choose its own sweet course. Nabokov had already overturned biographical expectations so thoroughly that to try to outdo or even match him seemed futile. Besides, if I had tried to zigzag, someone else would have come along to serve all those who crave the straight sequential line. Why
invite
competition?

On the other hand, a biography needs a little more shape than mere sequence. I would like now to trace some of the shape I built into the two volumes of the biography and to illustrate the interplay between the different kinds of material available—the comparatively reliable, enormously copious, but still inevitably gappy archival evidence; the dangerously indirect evidence of the published fiction; the unreliable or perhaps unforthcoming oral evidence of witnesses—and the interplay between what can be found and what can’t.

One way to provide shape was to link the life and the art in the right way—not in the manner of the Shakespearean scholar Nabokov refers to “who deduced Shakespeare’s mother from the plays and then discovered allusions to her in the very passages he had twisted to manufacture the lady” (
SO
218).

Another was to establish my biography’s relationship to Nabokov’s splendid autobiography,
Speak, Memory
, not by trying either to undermine or to ignore it but by deliberately beaming onto it and bouncing off it. And, of course, I also had to define the very different relationship between my biography (or
Speak, Memory
, for that matter) and the work of Andrew Field, which had cost Nabokov so much vexation in his last years.

A third way was to build a second spotlight into each of the two volumes, one, Nabokov’s father, growing dimmer through volume 1 as Nabokov himself steps to center stage, the other, Nabokov’s wife, glowing brighter throughout volume 2 as they move toward the final long embrace.

So let me describe first a few ways in which materials in the Archive pertinent to Nabokov’s father allowed me to establish in volume 1 certain relationships between Nabokov’s art and his life and between
Speak, Memory
and
The Russian Years
.

A 1949 letter in the Archive reveals that Nabokov would have liked to travel down from Ithaca to the Library of Congress to carry out research into his father’s public career for the first version of his autobiography, but he ran out of money and time (
SL
95). That letter certainly encouraged my own inclination to feature V. D. Nabokov, especially since I had also found in the Archive a host of family papers relating to Nabokov’s father that reached Nabokov from Prague only in 1961. Some of these he used when he revised
Speak, Memory
in 1966, but by this stage he did not want to tamper with the original structure of the book and so said less about his father than the material warranted.

By focusing on V. D. Nabokov, I could not only fill in the gaps his son had left in
Speak, Memory
but could also describe the cultural and political background of later imperial Russia—a world shrouded in myth in the English-speaking world—in a way that would still be intensely personal and that would show how the Nabokovs lived right at the center of Petersburg’s swankest street, its artistic animation, its turbulent times. There is other valuable material on V. D. Nabokov in archives and libraries in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Columbia, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford and, of course, historical minutiae in newspapers and journals of the time in research libraries all over the world, but if I had not found in the Archive V. D. Nabokov’s memoirs about the St. Petersburg theater of his youth or about the oppressiveness of the state school system, despite his own personal success within it, I would never have been able to paint such a vivid and personalized backdrop of what was, at the time of Nabokov’s birth, Russia’s immediate past.