War
1
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.1
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.2
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.3
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.4
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.
2
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.
3
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 re-establish 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.
4
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
Crisis after crisis followed. The Provisional Government did not have a strong base of support from rank-and-file soldiers, but nonetheless recommitted to war. Many Russians, however, had dreamed of not just freedom from the Tsar but freedom from combat; the government lost supporters by supporting an inherently unpopular conflict.
Stalemates followed, making it impossible to govern. The Kadets, including V. D. Nabokov, left the government in a dramatic July resignation. A Bolshevik uprising followed immediately and was put down at the last minute only by the arrival of a cavalry unit loyal to the Provisional Government. There was talk of arresting Lenin. Trotsky was arrested and taken to Kresty Prison, which had housed V. D. Nabokov years before. But a deliberate choice was made, as Nabokov’s father phrased it, not “to eliminate Lenin and Co.”21
Instead, the uprising resulted in concessions to socialists and the installation of a new prime minister, Alexander Kerensky. Short-haired, shortsighted, and quick to passion, Kerensky was caught between dramatic public posturing and halting efforts to forge a faith in the government that might ensure its survival until the elections that fall.
From the beginning, Nabokov’s father had little hope that the Provisional Government could succeed—and as small as it started out, that hope continued to diminish. The government was assailed on a daily basis by those who saw it as incompetent and sinister, or simply viewed its search for stability as a naïve investment in the status quo.
The outlook for democracy in Russia had turned so grim that fall that V. D. Nabokov wavered in his lifelong fight against capital punishment, supporting the imposition of the death penalty in an army he felt had been infected by revolutionary agitators. That September, he found himself listening in amazement to stories of a furious argument erupting among leaders over whether the old Imperial eagle buttons on formal chamber attire should be banned. The Tsars had failed Russia; now the Provisional Government was failing her, too. National elections were delayed again but scheduled for November.22
Vladimir Nabokov turned eighteen that year at the center of an empire in the process of imploding. Amid the destruction, Russia’s future was taking shape, and a new kind of concentration camp was just a year away.
Yet Nabokov’s world still intersected only tangentially with the political upheaval around him. His refusal to engage, he would later recall, led to his being denounced as a foreigner by his Tenishev teachers and classmates. Otherwise, his life was taken up with mundane events. In May, he was operated on for appendicitis in Petrograd; in the summer, he went, as usual, away to Vyra. Day after day, he wrote new poems. He returned to Petrograd with a school friend; he wrote tributes to a new love, a sophisticated older Jewish girl whom he had met in Finland.23
If those more politically minded than the young Nabokov were holding their collective breath to see what the elections would bring, history and the Bolsheviks would not wait that long. Faith in the Provisional Government continued to decline, and the first week of November, Bolshevik forces captured strategic points in the city and launched another attempt to seize power. The following morning, Kerensky—who had pledged to have loyal forces that could put down just such an uprising—was revealed to have no support at all.
V. D. Nabokov went to the Winter Palace to see what the government would do in response. On discovering that they would do nothing, he left. Minutes later, Bolshevik forces streamed in, sealed the Palace, and dissolved the Council, taking its members to the Peter and Paul Fortress. There was, in that moment, no grand battle for control of the city or Russia. No defiant stands were made in the name of the government or its leader. Alexander Kerensky was seen in an open car and said to be fleeing south out of Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had seized power.
Nabokov’s father remained in place as the head of the electoral commission, refusing to acknowledge Bolshevik rule and investing whatever hope he had left in the will of the voters. The elections, for which so many people had hoped for so long, could not be so easily crushed.
Looting and commandeering of property across Russia continued. While Nabokov wrote at night, he heard machine-gun fire in the streets. One afternoon during the unrest, armed street fighters charged through the ground-floor window of the library into the Nabokov family home, believing that Vladimir, who was assaulting only his father’s punching bag, had been taking potshots at them. A servant dissuaded them from seeking retribution for the ghost insult, and for the first time in his life, Nabokov eluded imminent danger.24
Nabokov finished school, taking his exams weeks early. The family had planned for Vladimir and Sergei to enroll in English universities, but not for several months. In the meantime, the boys could not stay in Petrograd and avoid the consequences of the Revolution forever. It was understood that a call would soon go out for Red Army conscripts, and those who were unwilling to serve would find themselves unable to refuse.25
Ten days before the election, Vladimir Nabokov and his brother Sergei stood at a Petrograd train station before their father, who made the sign of the cross over each of them and explained that he might never see them again. They left the city on a southbound train that night. Soldiers who had abandoned their posts at the front rode the top of the train, slept in the corridors, and tried to force their way into the boys’ locked first-class compartment. Men on the roof relieved themselves down the ventilator shafts of the car, while other soldiers eventually broke in, only to find Sergei giving a dramatic rendition of a patient in the throes of deadly typhus—a deception that served to protect both Nabokov brothers.26
The free elections took place as scheduled at the end of November, and thirty-three million voters made their voices heard. It took weeks for the final results to be tallied, but when the numbers came in, the Socialist Revolutionaries had clearly dominated, with their chief rivals, the Bolsheviks, garnering just a quarter of the vote. V. D. Nabokov’s party, the Kadets, had lost all but a tiny percentage of support. The results were a rebuke to Bolshevik rule, but the Bolsheviks argued that the election results were meaningless, because all power should go to the revolutionary councils—the Soviets—which were, they claimed, the real representatives of the people’s will.
The week after the elections, V. D. Nabokov was arrested, along with the other members of the electoral commission. But after five days in jail and repeated attempts to intimidate them, the commissioners were all inexplicably released. V. D. Nabokov realized that staying in the capital would merely return him to prison. His wife and three youngest children had already followed Vladimir and Sergei to the Crimea. The time had come for him to leave Petrograd, too.27
The Constituent Assembly, the result of Russia’s first national elections, would soon convene for the first time. Though the Kadet Party had been outlawed, there was still the possibility that the entire election would not be in vain. The people, by and large, had rejected both the party of Nabokov’s father and the party of Lenin. They had chosen the Socialist Revolutionaries and vested them with the authority to govern. At that point, it was still possible to imagine that elected delegates would somehow find a way to move forward into a post-Imperial Russia.
But on January 18, 1918, the first day the Constituent Assembly convened, the Bolsheviks demanded to be recognized as the majority. The Assembly refused. The Bolsheviks and a bloc of Socialist Revolutionaries who had allied themselves with the Bolsheviks walked out. The next day, the entrance to the Tauride Palace was locked, and the Assembly was not permitted to meet. It was a quiet coda for Russian democracy.28
5
In the far southwestern corner of the former Empire, Kadets and monarchists lived a half-hidden existence. Tsar Nicholas’s mother, the Dowager Empress, camped out near Yalta discreetly with several members of her court.
The Crimea was nominally under revolutionary control, and troops with Bolshevik sympathies were emphasizing how far they would go to defend the new order against opponents. Tying the hands and feet of suspected enemies, they took their captives out on barges and threw them into the Black Sea.29
Arriving in this outpost of Imperial Russia, Vladimir and Sergei found a different world. Nabokov had been at ease on the Riviera, in St. Petersburg, and among the fields and forests of Vyra, but now found himself in an alien environment, disoriented by braying donkeys, Muslim calls to prayer, almond and oleander trees, and mountains plunging down to the sea. A plaintive letter from Lyussya made its way south to further establish his exile.
Soon after Vladimir and Sergei’s trip south, their mother followed with Olga, Elena, and six-year-old Kirill—and then came their father in December. The family settled in for the winter five miles outside the resort city of Yalta, in a guest house on an estate that Tolstoy had visited years before. V. D. Nabokov, very much a person of interest to the Bolsheviks, kept his name but hid his identity, lying low and pretending to be a lung specialist named Dr. Nabokov.30
By June some bodies from the Bolshevik executions had washed up on shore—but not all of them. The Germans had invaded the Crimea that spring, and when Kaiser Wilhelm’s divers swept the harbor, reports emerged that the upright corpses of those who had drowned had been found, still trapped underwater. Nabokov vividly imagined them sunk to the bottom of the sea floor, bones beginning to show through, their arms stretched to the sky, mute but gathered together and seeming to converse. He wrote a poem about the bodies that July, in which he felt himself drawn into that underwater world, floating among the dead of Yalta, who vowed to forget nothing.31
The violence of the world had entered Nabokov’s writing. During his Crimean stay, he would also make use of seraphim and guardian angels in his work; but in exile from his home city, he could no longer ignore the changes convulsing Russia. He would continue to generate poems reflecting the brutality around him. In response to Russian poet Alexander Blok’s revolutionary tribute “The Twelve,” which ends with Jesus Christ leading a mob of Bolshevik revolutionaries in Petrograd, Nabokov wrote “The Two,” an account of an educated young man and his wife who find themselves brutalized by a mob of twelve peasants and forced to flee into a blizzard, where they die.32
The Tsar, his wife, and his children were executed at Yekaterinburg that July. Having definitively eliminated one potential rival, the Bolsheviks nevertheless faced several additional threats. Other Socialists protested Bolshevik dictatorship. A global workers’ revolution (anticipated by Lenin to arrive immediately in Europe) failed to materialize. The smooth path to a fully Revolutionary Russia that Lenin had envisioned was just as elusive. An anti-Bolshevik White Army began to rise in the east and the south.
As V. D. Nabokov started working on a memoir of the short-lived Russian Provisional Government, Vladimir and Sergei spent time with new friends at a neighboring villa, adopting an expatriate lifestyle in the far reaches of their homeland. For companions, they had White Army officers on the cusp of battle, along with a famous artist, a ballet danseur, and several young women. Generous amounts of local wine conspired to lull the boys into suspended days of beach parties and bonfires. Nabokov wrote poem after poem, imagining a heart true to his memories of Lyussya even as he exploited his opportunities for local romance with guilt and gusto. And somewhere not far enough away, the Allied fight with the Kaiser was picked up, turned inside out, and transformed into a Russian civil war.
It was a war with more than two sides. Shifting allegiances of former Imperial troops, liberals, monarchists, Socialist Revolutionaries of all stripes, and independent Cossack regiments would combine with sporadic deliveries of Allied munitions to take a toll on civilian populations. Anti-Semitic laws had historically constrained most Jews to the Pale of Settlement in the regions of the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland. Even though these restrictions had been abolished by the Provisional Government, the front lines of the civil war crossed and recrossed territory that was home to a disproportionately Jewish population.
By this point, Judaism had come so thoroughly to represent the Revolution in the minds of many Russians and Europeans—even those not inclined toward bigotry—it would have been difficult to protect local Jewish communities, which were highly visible and omnipresent. But at least some of those creating propaganda for the Volunteer Army seem to have been largely untroubled by such concerns. Posters depicting the Jewish Trotsky as a hook-nosed subhuman monster supervising the executions of true Russians appeared in the company of White Army slogans like “Strike at the Jews and save Russia!” White Army forces committed hundreds of pogroms during the Russian Civil War.33 British Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill, warned of the atrocities by Prime Minister Lloyd George, repeatedly told his ostensible allies that their failure to control the anti-Semitic massacres would result in a cutoff of weapons and support.34
Ukrainian separatists were similarly brutal. Under the drive for independence led by Simon Petliura, tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. Even the Red Army allies of the Bolsheviks, who publicly embraced Jews and denounced the brutality of White forces, committed more than a hundred pogroms. In the end, despite some innovative efforts at collaborative government and Jewish militias formed for self-defense, an estimated fifty to one hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered in the Ukraine during the Civil War.35
The virulence of the identification of Revolution with Jewry in that time and place was such that it found reflection even in the writings of V. D. Nabokov. As he prepared a highly critical but fair account of Kerensky and other actors in the Provisional Government, a strange note sounds again and again in his story. “Jewish-looking young men” bar the doors to the Duma building after the Revolution. For no apparent reason, he notes that there were so many Jews on Russia’s Council of Elders in 1917 that it could “have been called the Sanhedrin.” Jews are singled out for their secretive or “servile” behavior—writing documents behind V. D. Nabokov’s back or hiding a Jewish identity behind a more elegant adopted name. In another aside, V. D. Nabokov describes the “impudent Jewish face” belonging to “the repulsive figure” of a Bolshevik revolutionary.36
V. D. Nabokov had Jewish men among his closest friends. He had risked his career defying official anti-Semitism, and had dedicated himself to covering the injustice of the Beilis trial. But the climate of Russian anti-Semitism was such that even he could not entirely refrain from saddling Jews with ugly clichés, on some level holding his enemies responsible, not just as Bolsheviks but as Jews, for the bitter reality of the Revolution.37
One of Nabokov’s closest companions at Tenishev School, Samuil Rosov, was Jewish. Rosov would later recall his friend’s indifference to race and creed. In 1919, however, the general sense of opposition between those seen as true Russians and Jews had infected every level of the debate about the Revolution. The young Nabokov would soon find himself affiliated with a wave of Russian émigrés which was seen—often correctly so—as hateful and bigoted.
6
While pogroms flared in the Ukraine, a new kind of cruelty simultaneously took root in Russia. Trotsky’s 1917 internment in a concentration camp had left him with a “burning hatred of the English,” but his loathing did not keep him from adopting their measures. In his third month commanding Red Army forces, Trotsky called for a contingent of problematic prisoners of war to be put in a concentration camp.38
Those prisoners were the sort of people who had been put in camps by England, Germany, and Russia since 1914. But just days later, Trotsky wrote a memo in which he theorized that the bourgeoisie, too, might be placed in similar concentration camps, doing “menial work (cleaning barracks, camps, streets, digging trenches, etc.).” The kinds of projects recommended were similar to those that prisoners in Canadian camps had been required to do—tasks that the Central Powers and Allies alike had demanded of their civilian and military prisoners. Trotsky himself elsewhere recalled his stint in Amherst “sweeping floors, peeling potatoes, washing crockery, and cleaning the common lavatory.”39
Lenin likewise turned his attention to concentration camps as a revolutionary tool later that summer. In a telegram sent to the site of an anti-Bolshevik uprising, he called for mass terror against his opponents and for suspect individuals to be “locked up in a concentration camp outside town.”40
After Russia’s exit from the war, many prisoners of war and enemy aliens were in the process of being released. The concentration camp facilities, with their communal living, their extrajudicial status, and their history of forced labor, were handed over to the new secret police, the Cheka, which had been actively assigned the task of sowing terror across the country.41
Brutal measures were already under way but had proved insufficient to quell the unrest. Lenin unleashed the first of several waves of strategically applied Red Terror that fall. Widespread executions and detentions in concentration camps, known as “special camps,” quickly took on a key role.
When camps had been in the colonies of imperial powers, the native populations of those outposts had been the target populations. When camps had come to the heart of Europe, with few exceptions, foreign civilians and prisoners of war served as inmates. Now, Russia had opened a new chapter in concentration camp history—the government in power’s own citizens had become the target population that had to be preemptively incarcerated.42
As an adult, Nabokov would refer to the “regime of bloodshed, concentration camps, and hostages” that followed on the heels of the Bolshevik takeover. He would consistently lay responsibility for the first post-Revolutionary camps at the feet of Lenin, and in one form or another they would haunt his writing for the next five decades.43
7
In the small window of time before the Civil War consumed Russia, and before the Bolsheviks repurposed Russia’s system of wartime camps, Vladimir Nabokov took to the hills above the Black Sea to catch butterflies. As he walked between the bushes looking for prize specimens, a Bolshevik sentry suspected that his purported hunt for beauty masked some political purpose—surely he was signaling the British with his net. But the skinny boy, all head and legs, managed to extricate himself and his butterfly net from military arrest, avoiding the fate of the dead of Yalta.44
With an occasional turn from affairs of the heart toward the history unfolding all around him, Nabokov’s verse began to find publication in local newspapers. But as dark as news across the country had become, life still offered some shelter from the worst events underway. With plenty of romance and endless diversions, Nabokov had time to make his stage debut in the lively regional theater.45 He imagined himself in spiritual communion with Alexander Pushkin, who had also been exiled to the Crimea a century before. Nabokov sent letters to Lyussya, not knowing she had already left Petrograd. She wrote him, wondering why he did not write back. As letters slowly made their way to him, he toyed with joining the White Army in order to head inland to where she was now living, somewhere in the Ukraine.
V. D. Nabokov described the corner of the Crimea they had come to occupy as godforsaken, but conditions could have been worse. In the fall of 1919, the family moved into a former Tsarist villa closer to town, so that the younger children could attend school and Nabokov could make use of the libraries at the house and in Yalta.46
German occupation, or the threat of it, kept the Red Army out of Yalta and extended Vladimir Nabokov’s innocence one more year. But once the First World War ended in November 1918, Germany withdrew, and a Regional Government was formed, with Nabokov’s father holding a political portfolio once again, as Minister of Justice. The state survived a few months before the tensions of foreign intervention, a dispirited army, and an unsustainable fledgling democracy replayed the collapse of the Provisional Government on a smaller scale.47
The terrain had all the beauty and trappings of the Arabian Nights for Nabokov, but the romance was stretched so thin over the yawning abyss of the future that at times it became transparent. His family was running out of ways to protect him; the violence of the world and the search to escape it would soon become a theme in Nabokov’s life and a dominant feature of his work.
The theaters and cafés of Crimean Russia became the shelters of ever-dwindling White Army power. A surging Red Army soon began to dislodge the refugees from their tentative hold on even this foreign piece of home and to disperse them across the globe, from China and Europe to America.
The less fortunate would never leave. Near the end of winter, Nabokov’s cousin Yuri Traubenberg rode ahead of a cavalry charge into a nest of Bolshevik machine gunners in northern Crimea, ending his short life. The war had finally managed to lay a finger on the nineteen-year-old Nabokov. He served as a pallbearer for his closest friend, who was laid to rest in the alien terrain of Yalta.48
Nabokov’s hedging on whether to enlist finally outlasted White Army control over the Crimea. White forces still had a series of improbable victories and dramatic defeats to go before they would be completely crushed, but the children born in the forge of that winter—Alexander Solzhenitsyn among them—would grow up with no memories of life under the Tsar or the Russian Empire.
The situation disintegrated quickly, and all the Nabokovs crossed westward to Sebastopol in a car winding up and down mountainsides, with Sergei throwing up on one side of the car, Elena on the other. After two days in the port city, they managed to board a vessel with other ministers of the regional government, only to be kicked off due to (incorrect) suspicions about misappropriated government funds. By the time the family set sail aboard a cargo ship named Nadezhda (“Hope”), the Bolsheviks had already retaken the harbor. But they escaped together: V. D. and Elena Nabokov, Vladimir and Sergei, Olga, Elena, Kirill, and their servant and companion Evgenia Hofeld, who had run the household since 1914.49
They possessed little more than a handful of valuables grabbed by a chambermaid from a dresser as the family fled Petrograd. The jewels that had been the playthings of the infant Volodya had so far been hidden in a bottle of talcum powder and buried in the ground. They now lay tucked into the small pigskin valise that had been part of Elena’s honeymoon trousseau.
As the Nadezhda pulled out into the Black Sea, Bolshevik machine-gun fire crossing its wake, Nabokov sat down to a game of chess with his father. He had already seen first-hand the disappointments that roared up from the gap between an ideal and its execution, and the choices between bad and worse that so often accompanied political action. But the future was not yet set.
Just days before his twentieth birthday, Nabokov surrendered his homeland to the sorrows that had come into the century with him: the fury of Lenin, the blight of the concentration camps, the rabid anti-Semitism that could lay waste to a whole universe. But these things—and the memory of the dead—had only begun to shape his world.