Aftermath
1
V. D. Nabokov’s murder devastated his family’s world. After just three weeks in which to mourn, Nabokov returned to Cambridge to finish his degree. Sergei stayed in Berlin during his final term to care for their bereft mother, going back to Cambridge only for exams.1
In his anguish, Nabokov immediately sought solace in words. For the pages of Rul, he crafted “Easter,” a poem commemorating the loss of his father. Its narrator, immersed in grief, sees new life emerging everywhere in spring. Death—so incongruous in the natural world during a season of birth—cannot be denied. But if spring’s beauty and rebirth is not just “bedazzling lies,” he writes, perhaps it carries some promise of resurrection in nature and in the very poem the author is writing, where love and memory bring the dead to life.2
“Easter” sings with hope, but in the real world, Nabokov was staggered by the loss of his father. During his last weeks in England, Vladimir wrote in despair to his mother saying, “At times it’s all so oppressive I could go out of my mind—but I have to hide. There are things and feelings no one will ever find out.”3
By the middle of 1922, Vladimir Nabokov had returned to Berlin a young man with a university degree living in a city he would come to loathe, the oldest son of a widow with little and diminishing prospects of regaining his home or wealth. At the moment of his entry into adulthood, his future still floated in the ether. His mother was one of thousands of educated aristocrats thrown back on whatever could be conjured from thin air. Yet she was still responsible for three of her children; that summer Nabokov’s sister Olga was nineteen, Elena was sixteen, and Kirill turned eleven.
Grieving for his father and not yet knowing how the family would manage, Nabokov picked an unsettled time to propose to his current girlfriend, seventeen-year-old Svetlana Siewert. The girl’s family was not opposed to the engagement but was worried enough about the charismatic Vladimir to make the marriage conditional on the acquisition of a steady job. While there may have been some whiff of propriety behind the demand, the Siewerts were not alone in their concerns. Russian girls in emigration who supported their parents and husbands had become a stereotype among exiles, furthering the popular judgment offered by one observer that “if (Russian) men, on the average, had been as good as the women, Bolshevism would never have succeeded.”4
Newspapers in Europe and America were filled with tales of down-at-heel Russian aristocrats. At a New York City hotel, a count who had taken the post of head waiter was struck by a patron after he accidentally spilled wine on a customer. The count calmly removed his jacket and laid it over a chair with a striking delicacy before bloodying the customer, who required the assistance of several policemen in fighting off his opponent. After witnessing such elegance in responding to the insult as a matter of honor, the other patrons took up a collection to pay his fine and send him to Paris, where he hoped to find more suitable work.5
Countless just-so stories proliferated from China to New York. An actress who had lost her own servants and theater in Russia was dancing in a Broadway café and down to one meal a day. Princesses were seen working in Riga as typists. Some of the well-born, like Nabokov’s family, had escaped with at least a few of their treasures. Many others, believing they would return in short order, had not. Their abandoned necklaces and tiaras stoked the fever for hidden jewels that raged in Russia during the first years of Bolshevik rule.6
The riches-to-rags stories of Russia’s ruined aristocracy thrilled reporters, who did not have so far to fall and could appreciate the humbling of the mighty. But the vague Schadenfreude of the humorous stories was offset by other accounts of the refugees’ plight. Headlines such as “Dying Refugees Crawl into Brest-Litovsk” had also become commonplace.7 Scattered to London, Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Harbin, Stockholm, Berlin, and beyond, many were now in their third or fourth year of exile and simply had no money left and no way of earning any.
By this time, the shattered remnants of the White Army were holed up in a barracks in Constantinople, dependent on the Red Cross for insubstantial daily rations of tea, soup, and sometimes bread. A leaky loft housed tubercular patients, including row after row of families in stagnant quarters divided only by hanging rugs and blankets. More than one outsider suggested that the White Russians were a dead class in flight from a dead society, imagining their resurrection and return while the rest of the world understood that they were doomed to exile and starvation. And if they did not have the means for survival, one reporter noted, they at least had mastered the “unusually difficult art of dying with a slow grace.”8
Small wonder that Svetlana’s parents were keeping an eye on the ability of their daughter’s fiancé to find a job. And whether Nabokov felt desire to win his girl’s hand, distaste at appearing the indolent aristocrat, or pressure to provide for his family, when the time came to go to work, Vladimir Vladimirovich complied.
Joining his brother Sergei at positions arranged for them at a German bank, he showed up for his first day of work in a sweater. Reinforcing the stereotype of the shiftless Russian aristocrat, he managed to hold the job for three hours. Sergei, attire unknown, stayed the course for a week.9
Nabokov did not care for Germany’s Teutonic face or commercial character. But in 1922 it was a mercifully cheap place for a writer without employment, or for one who had assembled just enough freelance tutoring and coaching to hold a day job at bay. Sessions teaching children and adults everything from English to boxing allowed Nabokov to get by.
What Nabokov did do enthusiastically was write, and years of prior effort came to fruition all at once. Beginning late in 1922, he saw four books published under his Sirin pseudonym in as many months, including a Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland.10 Following on the tentative start he had made during his Cambridge years, he also began to write short fiction in earnest, turning out fifteen stories in 1923 and 1924.
“Russian Spoken Here,” one of the first, was written not long after the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries. The son of a White Russian émigré in Berlin punches out a Soviet visitor in the middle of his father’s tobacco shop. They determine from the contents of his pockets that the visitor is with the GPU, the successors to the Cheka secret police who had imprisoned the father years before. Father and son hold a sham trial in which the defendant is given the nominal last word. The two debate what sentence to impose—and whether to execute the man for the sins of all the secret police. They reject the death penalty and prepare a cell for their prisoner, whom they hide from the world. The kidnapped man is supplied with food, books, and daily walks, but is informed that he will be kept in a locked bathroom as a permanent hostage until the Bolsheviks fall from power. When they entrust their secret to the narrator of the story, they explain that if the father dies before the end of the Bolshevik era, the son will inherit the captive. This prisoner, the shopkeeper explains, has become a family jewel.
If the least sophisticated kind of storytelling deals in wish fulfillment, the young Nabokov laid bare a fantasy, using fiction to wield power over the GPU from a thousand miles away. A son with fast fists and the father he loves—a father who, like V. D. Nabokov, was once captured by the Bolsheviks but survived—collaborate on redemptive justice, providing a service to their homeland. Six months later, they remain happy and decidedly more humane than their Soviet counterparts. No complications ensue; no moral dilemmas exist. In the last line, the father wonders how long they will hold their prisoner. The question would outlive its author.
Far from being able to feed a hidden GPU officer himself, Nabokov could not even support his mother. Dubious of his prospects, Svetlana’s parents ended the engagement. The sudden separation from his fiancee released a torrent of grief-stricken poetry but did not long keep Nabokov from other women. Before leaving for a summer job picking cherries and peaches in the orchards of southern France, Nabokov managed romances with at least two women, both Jewish, and met a third at a costume ball.11 This last prospect, an elegant Russian with fair hair wearing a wolf’s-head mask, quoted his poetry back to him but didn’t reveal her face, even as he followed her out of the ballroom.
Her name, he would discover, was Véra. And in France, just weeks later, he would write a poem, speculating on whether she might be the “awaited one.” Learning her last name, he realized that he already knew her father, Evsei Slonim, whom he had called on as a potential publisher. A law-school graduate, Slonim had lost permission to practice law in Russia after the occupation had been closed to Jews. He had moved on to forestry, and found great success as a businessman. But having surrendered his land with his country, he was now in Berlin trying to build a career yet again. Véra was the second of his three multilingual daughters. She often sat in the office that Vladimir had visited, yet somehow they had never run into each other.12
Véra was on Nabokov’s mind that summer, but thoughts of her did not keep him from mailing an aching missive to Svetlana. And it did not in the least dam up the continuing stream of poetry, fiction, and now plays, which he drafted in the room on the farm where he stayed up at night to write. One drama, The Pole, fictionalized the final hours of delirium and death faced by Captain Robert Scott’s 1910 polar expedition.13 Another script deviated from reality even further in telling of a determined executioner going after his escaped prey years after the French Revolution.
On his return to Germany that fall, Nabokov also dipped his pen into a universe more familiar to his fellow Russians—one populated with angels and Biblical themes. To that universe belongs Agasfer, his retelling of the story of the Wandering Jew.
The story was well known to any religious or literate European of the day. In the Christian legend, a Jewish cobbler chided Jesus on his way to the cross. Because of his cruelty, he was condemned to travel the earth learning repentance and love until Christ’s return. Pushkin, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Hans Christian Andersen, among a host of others, had already done their own versions of the tale before Nabokov’s birth. Even before their efforts, the story had become perhaps the most common way for Christians to explore the global predicament of the Jewish people—the idea being that they had sinned against God by being responsible for the death of Christ, were guilty of rejecting him, or both. As a result, the entire race was said to be doomed to suffer and roam the face of the earth.14
While the degree to which the story was used to justify religious violence had waxed and waned, after more than seven centuries as a religious parable and two centuries as a literary trope, the theme had not lost its popularity. It had even moved to the stage in 1906. But the definitive script was Ernest Temple Thurston’s The Wandering Jew, which was produced in theaters across England—and even on Broadway, where it starred Tyrone Power—during Nabokov’s Cambridge years.15
By 1923, Thurston’s play had already been adapted into a feature film. In it, the man who becomes the Wandering Jew does, in fact, curse Christ on the way to the cross, believing Jesus has filled his dying wife’s head with a fantasy of a cure. He forbids her to follow Christ’s injunction and spits on the Messiah. After Christ condemns him to wander the earth, the man’s beloved dies.
More than a thousand years later, he becomes obsessed with another woman, whom he pursues across the globe in order to possess her, against her will if necessary. During his centuries on earth, he proceeds to take on different identities (a knight, a merchant of jewels). Witnessing the hatred and trauma of the world, he finally reforms and recognizes his sin, becoming holier than the people who, century after century, continue to condemn him—including, at last, the priests of the Inquisition.
The year The Wandering Jew debuted as a movie, Nabokov sat down with a collaborator to work on his own version. Agasfer opens as an extended monologue meant to accompany a “staged symphony.” Echoing the template of Thurston’s play, Nabokov gave the Wandering Jew many key roles across history. In Nabokov’s case, however, the identities were sometimes real historical figures: in the prologue, the Wandering Jew reveals that he exploded in Judas, who betrayed Christ, and later appeared again as the sexual swashbuckler Lord Byron, accused of incest and homosexuality. Several other eras are mentioned, from Greece and Medici-era Florence to the Inquisition. The Jew’s most recent incarnation was Jean-Paul Marat, a hero of the French Revolution who was also much beloved by the Soviets. In Nabokov’s verses, the Wandering Jew declares that he is learning how to love and that one day his love will fill the heavens, but in the world as it is, he sells the sky for sin.16
The identities Nabokov chose for Agasfer were rooted in betrayal, murder, sexual perversion, and anarchy. Though clearly an attempt at something more expansive, Nabokov’s portrayal of the Wandering Jew as a sick but remorseful merchant of corruption fell short, particularly when trotted out as the frame for a love story.
His approach incorporated a softer version of stereotypes about Jews that were part of a rising trend of political thought in Germany, where extremists were already drawing similar conclusions, minus Nabokov’s romanticism. Yet perhaps even vaguely human stereotypes were becoming passé by then; Agasfer was performed only once.
This early effort for the stage disappeared with little trace, leaving only the prologue for posterity, but it would influence Nabokov’s writing in profound ways for much of his life. A half-century later he would denounce his fledgling attempt at the story, declaring the work horrible and swearing that if he found an existing copy, he would destroy it himself.17
2
Vladimir’s romance with the twenty-one-year-old Véra Slonim blossomed. By the time Nabokov returned to Berlin that August, the pair had seen their work (his inventions and her translations) published simultaneously in Rul, and had already begun to know each other through their literary output.18
What more did Nabokov have to learn? Véra Evseevna Slonim had been born in 1902 in St. Petersburg. Growing up in much the same environment as Nabokov, she had her share of governesses, as well as math lessons and language instruction that led her to speak not only Russian, but also German, French, and English. Her father had given all three of his daughters—Lena, Véra, and Sonia—an education befitting an aristocratic family; but as a Jewish man facing vast occupational and residential restrictions under Nicholas II, he had leaped many more hurdles than the Nabokovs in order to do so.
When the time had come to flee Russia after the Revolution, the three Slonim girls had traveled separately from their father, who left ahead of them to avoid arrest. Lena was twenty years old, Véra was seventeen, and Sonia just ten. Heading south by train, they had ridden through territory where Ukrainian troops were rampaging and pogroms were legion. The train had been filled with Ukrainian separatists, who were likewise fleeing the Bolsheviks but had little affection for Jews. Sleeping on the floor that night, Véra had been awakened by a confrontation between another passenger—a Jew—and a separatist threatening to throw him from the train. Véra had spoken in the passenger’s defense, and the Ukrainian backed down. But more than simply backing down, he and his friends had become enthusiastic escorts for the Slonim girls, warning them not to get off in Kiev, where battle was imminent, delivering a message to their father, and keeping them safe in a region rife with anti-Semitism.19
Véra was a regal blue-eyed blonde who looked every inch the indomitable spirit she was. If her childhood had been similar to Nabokov’s, her response to Russia’s political turmoil had been more proactive. At the start of the Revolution, she had considered herself a socialist. While Nabokov fantasized about revenge, Véra had apparently plotted hers. Classes with a marksman in Berlin had left her a crack shot, and it was known that she carried a pistol in her purse. She told more than one person of her involvement in an anti-Bolshevik assassination plot in the early 1920s—one said to have targeted Trotsky, or perhaps the Soviet ambassador.20
Véra, like her father, was proud of her Jewish identity. Fiercely intelligent, she turned out to be more than capable of quoting Sirin’s poetry to him from memory. Before long, she began transcribing his work and quickly became his staunchest defender.
Their romance had all the makings of a happy ending; but that fall, hyperinflation savaged Germany, hitting the already-destitute émigré community especially hard. The Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi coup put down the same season, did little to promote German stability. Sliding from being the least expensive refugee hub to a financial catastrophe, Berlin’s cost of living suddenly broke the backs of its many publishing houses and cast bankrupt Russians to the wind, scattering them once more.
By Christmas, Nabokov’s mother could no longer survive in Germany. Elena Nabokov left with her younger daughter for Czechoslovakia, where a government pension was offered to her and other prominent refugees. Olga followed, and, soon after, Nabokov escorted Evgenia Hofeld, a maid, and his brother Kirill as they relocated to Prague.21
Nabokov intended to return alone to Berlin once everyone was settled. Véra was not the only attraction that made Germany seem more congenial for the moment; the Prague apartment was cold, squalid, and bug-infested. Back in Berlin, Nabokov wrote to his mother soon after her move, describing how in two months, or “as soon as possible I shall have you come here.”22
Material circumstances were hard enough, but Elena Nabokov was less battered by them than by the loss of her husband, playing down her financial deprivation as a comfort. In Russia, she explained, she sometimes had woken up anxious about which among her fifty hats to choose on any given day, while the benefit of having only one reduced the choice to simply whether to wear it or not.23
However bad things were in Germany or Prague, it was understood that those still in Russia had it worse. Typhus had become so widespread that letters leaving the country were thought to have infected postal workers in Estonia. All Russian mail was stopped and left untouched by German postal employees, who demanded disinfection measures. Berlin newspapers carried stories of mass starvation, of wolves, dogs, and cats all eaten, of towns where two thirds of the residents were dead, of people buried naked because their clothes were desperately needed by the living, of others buried in shallow graves and dug up by dogs, of dogs and wolves hunted by humans until there was nothing left to eat.24
While the remaining Nabokovs were not yet starving, they were also not together. Nabokov stayed in Berlin, and Sergei went to Paris, even farther from their mother and younger siblings in Czechoslovakia. Both brothers made ends meet by giving English and Russian lessons.25
Nabokov earned enough money to visit his mother that summer, but if she had any hope of being invited to return to Berlin with him, she was disappointed. What was likely the biggest announcement of that trip was of a very different order: he was engaged to Véra. Elena still dreamed of visiting her husband’s grave, but by this point, Nabokov supporting even himself had become a dubious proposition. After another visit to Prague, he found his coat had been confiscated by his landlady, who suspected he might run out on his rent tab.26
Vowing to make more money to bring his mother back, Nabokov imagined taking on more students, or even doing manual labor breaking rocks.27 But the possibility of a traditional job, such as his brief stint in banking, had disappeared with the rest of the German economy. Even if one might have been found, a conventional career, which started out as an already improbable fate for Vladimir Nabokov, had become almost unimaginable.
And still he wrote. In 1924 he began a novel with the title Happiness. The cost of living continued to rise, forcing him to load up on clients. Offering boxing, tennis, French, and English several days a week, he careered across the city from student to student, staying up late at night to write. He could not bring his mother to Berlin, but he managed to earn enough to send money to her each month.
Nabokov failed to finish Happiness, which was aborted for the time being. But he produced short stories at a steady clip, and thought about how they might be turned into movies. He collaborated on comedy sketches for the Bluebird Theater; he worked as an extra in Berlin film productions. And in the town hall of Berlin on April 15, 1925, he married the twenty-three-year-old Véra Slonim.28
Marriage provided a more auspicious start to his efforts as a novelist. Yet as he began to work on the first novel he would actually complete, Mary (Mashenka), it was Nabokov’s childhood love Lyussya who gave him a road back to Russia through his writing. With Mary, he folded his past and his present into a love song for his native land.
In a very recognizable grim Berlin filled with Russian refugees, the protagonist, Ganin, is a former White Army soldier injured in the Crimea and now living in Germany. The sad minor characters of the Russian emigration surround him—among them a dying poet trying desperately to get to Paris, a young woman surviving by working in a German office, and two giggling male ballet dancers.
Ganin discovers that his childhood love, Mary, whom he has not seen in years, is married to his neighbor in the same Berlin pension. She has been trapped in the Soviet Union but will soon come to join her husband in Germany. Ganin is caught up in his recollections of their time together, their meeting in a gazebo on the family estate, and the jewel-colored panes of glass there. He recalls the sorrow at the end of summer when they parted, and their frustrating reunion in St. Petersburg, with no place to meet alone.
The night before Mary’s return, Ganin encourages her husband to get thoroughly drunk and leaves the man passed out with an alarm clock set for the wrong hour. He abandons his old apartment for good, planning to meet Mary at the train station himself.
Nabokov had marshaled more than enough coincidences to put a bow on his tale. But just before meeting Mary, his young protagonist takes flight, realizing that he has his love and his memory of her in his heart, and these memories suffice and transcend all the shortcomings of reality. Implicit in the book’s end is that Mary, who has lived the drudgery—and horror—of daily life under the Bolsheviks, will stand waiting at the train station utterly alone, met by no one. The narrator, who cherishes the memory of her, imagines that he needs from her only what he already possesses, and apparently owes her nothing. She no longer exists for him except as a figment of his past, where she remains vibrant and untouchable.
Like Ganin, Nabokov would come to be defined by his departures. Having already left Russia to the Bolsheviks and his mother in Prague, his writing now acknowledged the punishing gap between longing and reality. Nabokov was still working to seduce readers with the tenderness or nostalgia that had characterized his early poetry, but he had begun to resist the temptations of sentiment. If Mary showed Nabokov looking to the East wondering if everything that had been lost might be recovered, he was suggesting it could happen, but only through art and memory—never in life.
Nabokov described his main character as “not a very likeable person” but was delighted he had been able to slip five love letters Lyussya had written to him into the book.29 Folding the details of his life into the story in such a way that no one but Lyussya and himself (and perhaps Véra) would recognize them, he wrote a letter sharing the secret with his mother.
His self-absorbed protagonist had served as the fulcrum for magic. By tucking Lyussya’s words in with his own inventions, Nabokov did in fact immortalize a sliver of that time, their love, and their lost country forever.
3
In his second published novel, King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov crafted a more overtly unpleasant group of characters. The callow, self-absorbed Franz arrives center stage in Berlin and proceeds to have an affair with his aunt and take part in a plot to kill his uncle. The novel marks Nabokov’s first use of principally German characters and contains only a shadow of the tenderness shown in Mary—offering a faint, oblique indictment of Germany that would become more pronounced over time.
The uncle, a flawed, failed dreamer, offers financial backing to an inventor who is crafting more and more realistic mobile mannequins. Discovering how to rattle his audience, Nabokov, like the inventor, was learning to make readers engage with increasingly more lifelike creatures, some of them corrupt and repellent.
Outside of fiction, however, Nabokov could summon more gallant human responses. In 1927 the wife of a Romanian violinist committed suicide, seeking relief from her husband’s abuse. The violinist evaded German legal penalties, but news of his violence spread. Hearing the story, Nabokov and a friend went to a restaurant to find the musician, and drew straws for the privilege of taking the first swing at him. Nabokov won, and chaos ensued. At some point after the whole orchestra joined in, Nabokov, his co-conspirator, and the violinist were briefly taken to the police station.30 Nabokov had accommodated himself to creating fictional cads, but in dealing with real-life cruelty he retained his father’s longing for justice.
He remained bitterly homesick for Russia. “The University Poem,” written between his two first novels, is a long account by a Russian exile attending college in England. It is a litany of absences and departures: a spring that is not like the Russian spring, the smell of a bird cherry tree that becomes painful to recall; a girl ripe for spinsterhood who now expects to be abandoned each year by departing students; the Russian narrator who tells himself that return to his homeland will one day be possible, but who may not himself believe it.
A more literal return was, of course, already available to Nabokov. The U.S.S.R. regularly tried to lure cultural figures back, leaning heavily on the exiles’ nostalgia for their homeland and the fact that the collapse of the Soviet government hoped for by so many had failed to transpire. Major émigrés had already heeded the call. The “fairly talented” (in Nabokov’s words) poet Boris Pasternak, novelist Aleksey Tolstoy (a distant relation of Leo Tolstoy), and Andrei Bely (whose novel Petersburg Nabokov believed one of the best books of the twentieth century) had all gone home, or at least to live in closer proximity to its ghost.31 Maxim Gorky, who had been living in Europe during the 1920s, made a triumphant return in 1928 to his homeland in time for a massive public celebration of his sixtieth birthday. He would return for good in 1933.
But a literal return to the Soviet Union was not what Nabokov wanted. His fiction—dark enough to begin with—took on a bleaker edge. Nineteen twenty-nine found him creating his first novel with a protagonist tortured by madness. The Defense tells the story of Luzhin, a Russian chess grandmaster who succumbs to despair, eventually becoming trapped inside a game that is both chess and life, a game he cannot finish. The narrative mimics events surrounding the death of a chess master whom Nabokov had known who, like Luzhin, had abandoned a championship match, later jumping to his death from a bathroom window in Berlin.32
A few chapters into the book, Luzhin’s father, a writer of books for boys, plans to create a melodramatic tale of his son’s rise to celebrity as a prodigy. But contemplating his structure, he agonizes over the degree to which the war and the Revolution hover in the background of his story. Like Nabokov, the young Luzhin had not been directly involved in Russia’s upheaval. Unlike Nabokov, he had been turned over to a Svengali who managed his career in Europe. Still, the intrusion of history on the father’s tale—his own memories of starvation, arrest, and exile; the story he does not want to tell—frustrates his attempt to clear the way for a simple, sentimental narrative.
Nabokov already knew by this point that such a story, one stripped of history, was not the kind of art he wanted to make. His first two novels had reflected the Russian past and 1920s Berlin in a traditional way—history and geography provide a backdrop which informs the plots and helps to sketch the characters. But by The Defense, Nabokov had begun to think strategically about the intersection of world events and the creation of art, and a more innovative relationship between the two.
The protagonist of Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, was a wounded soldier, but with The Defense, Nabokov began to move his characters onto the periphery of history’s epic violence, showing how even bystander status cannot protect them from madness or keep them from being hobbled by the past. As a child, Luzhin fears being overtaken by the glass-rattling explosions of the cannon at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. By 1917, the threat has become real, as he stares at windows in fear that shooting will break out.
It remains a mystery exactly what Luzhin has seen in the interval between those two moments—his exterior life during wartime is glossed over in a single paragraph that covers more than a decade. This kind of literary ellipsis would become a mainstay of Nabokov’s style. The Defense, in fact, would set the pattern for many Nabokov novels that followed. Never again would he write a book without destabilizing a main character’s past or fate and turning the story into a puzzle.
Despite a handful of critics who assailed Nabokov’s dark world-view, the stylistic achievements of The Defense astonished the literary community and sealed Nabokov’s reputation as the leading author of the emigration. Ivan Bunin himself acknowledged that Nabokov had “snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included.” Russian writer Nina Berberova later recalled the amazement of reading the first chapters of the novel in Paris and her sudden belief that everything the exiles had lost would live on in Nabokov’s work—his literary legacy would redeem their very existence.33
4
Nabokov heard the applause from Berberova and Bunin in France, where there were richer possibilities for émigré authors. And with the support of Véra, the breadwinner of the family, he built enough of a literary reputation that Paris came to court him in the form of Ilya Fondaminsky. An editor with the Socialist Revolutionary émigré journal Contemporary Annals, Fondaminsky was a patron saint of Russian émigré literature, known for paying good money to the best authors he could find. Contemporary Annals had published Nabokov’s fiction before, but Fondaminsky was hoping for more. To Nabokov’s delight, Fondaminsky agreed to buy his next project—soon to be called Glory—unfinished as it was, without conditions, intending to serialize it.34 It was Fondaminsky’s first extravagant acknowledgement of Nabokov’s genius, but it would not be the last.
Months later, Nabokov finished drafting Glory (originally Podvig in Russian), the story of Martin, a young man who, like Nabokov, fled Russia in 1919, lost his father at a young age, and played goalkeeper for Trinity College at Cambridge. The young protagonist exists in a suspended netherworld, where émigré Russians are waiting for history to resolve, even as they are slowly left behind.
Martin finds himself irritated by his maudlin Swiss uncle, who wonders if Russia needs a dictator to put things right. The uncle dramatically bemoans the execution of Martin’s former tutor by the Bolsheviks, only to be told that she is alive and well and living in Finland. At Cambridge, Martin meets a professor who fetishizes his own narrative about Russia in a different way, waxing nostalgic over it as others do Rome or Babylon—as an ancient, dead culture. Alienated by these men’s treatment of Russia as completely lost, Martin longs to engage it as a living force himself but lacks the creative gifts to do so.35
Person after person in Glory (originally Podvig in Russian) fails to acknowledge the specificity of experience and human individuality. Even a Socialist Revolutionary, whose heroic border-crossing and espionage Martin admires, speaks of the devastation of Russia and its famines and executions; but at the end of an entire evening spent in Martin’s company mistakes him for someone else.
Martin develops a romantic attachment to Sonia, a Russian girl who has a “half-witted” cousin, Irina. As a normal teenager fleeing Russia after the Revolution, Irina was molested and witnessed deserting soldiers or peasants shoving her father through the window of a moving train. The traumas of the trip and a severe typhus infection took away her ability to speak, leaving her, as one character notes, a “living symbol” of all that has happened. Irina’s survival and damaged state reflect the brutalization of Russia and Martin’s own muteness—his inability to transcend or express the events that have overtaken him. He hides briefly behind a Swiss passport, and on one trip pretends to be Swiss, in an attempt to relieve himself of his historical burden.
With Sonia, who flirts with him for a time, Martin invents the fantastic country of Zoorland. They discuss the strange habits of residents in their imaginary land, riffing on its rules and customs in an absurdist take on the Soviet Union. The untalented and unlucky Martin fails to win Sonia’s love, and is likewise disappointed when he finds his only real stab at creation—the magical world of Zoorland—has been turned into a novella by a romantic rival to whom Sonia has described it in detail.
Inspired by the Socialist Revolutionaries he knows, Martin eventually sets out to sneak back into the Soviet Union alone for twenty-four hours, though he suspects his exploit will end badly. One of the anti-Bolshevik activists in the novel is said to have escaped the Soviet Union wrapped in a shroud; Martin, too, plays at death in his attempt to live.
Unlike the professionals, he does not go in the service of any larger cause. No actual mission or agenda burdens his trip with exterior meaning. He is a pure spy, an unaffiliated intruder, harming no one, entering a world clandestinely with no possibility of political repercussions against anyone but himself. He understands the risks—he has already imagined his execution. Like Nabokov himself, Martin tries to use longing to create an artistic experience from historical exigencies, refusing to serve or engage on anyone’s terms but his own. The end of the book takes place among his friends and family after he has disappeared, leaving Martin’s fate unknown forever.36
5
In Mary, Nabokov had nodded toward an absent love living through “years of horror” in the Soviet Union. In The Defense, he had mentioned penal servitude, torture, and hard labor camps, but without specifics. In Glory, he has Martin briefly imagine himself escaping from labor camps, but only in passing. Concentration camps had started to cast a pall over Nabokov’s novels, just as they were continuing to expand into his century, but they had only begun to shadow his own life.
In the beginning Nabokov no doubt found it easier to write from the point of view of émigrés who had, like him, escaped the worst of Russia’s fate. But his initial silence may have been due in part to how few specifics were known early on about the camps. There were trials, of course—and not just of the Socialist Revolutionaries, but also priests and intellectuals. After the trials came the rumors of people being sent north and east en masse, but for a time, much of what followed was touched with mystery.
Some facts, however, were known. By 1923, Russian exiles in the West understood that katorga, the hard labor in exile first established under the Tsars, had a new face and a new home. The heart of the Soviet penal system had moved onto the Solovetsky Islands—to a monastery familiarly known as Solovki.
Perched northeast of the Russian mainland, Solovki had been established five hundred years before as an outpost of the Russian Orthodox Church. As early as the sixteenth century, the first religious prisoner had been sent there by the Tsar. Others had followed, with the monastery of Solovki becoming a jail for the Empire’s religious dissidents.37
The Bolshevik takeover, however, quickly changed Solovki’s identity. Initially, post-Revolutionary Russian concentration camps had been run on an ad hoc basis, but in June of 1923, more than a hundred inmates were sent to the islands, followed by additional waves of prisoners. That fall, Solovetsky monastery grounds were officially turned over to the secret police. In November of the same year, Lenin named Solovki a “northern camp of special significance.”38
Lenin died just months later; but for Nabokov, Solovki would become a symbol of the country’s suffering and shorthand for Bolshevik cruelty under Lenin. Newspaper readers in Europe and even America soon learned its name, as reports of suicide and executions on Solovki trickled out, offering little hope to those whose family members had been sent there. By 1926, it was internationally known as “the most feared prison in Soviet Russia.”39
The struggle for succession after Lenin’s death was eventually won by Joseph Stalin, but those hoping the camps would play a diminished role under his rule were disappointed. The number of prisoners held at Solovki increased exponentially, and Western newspapers carried a Soviet announcement detailing the inauguration of airline service between the port city of Kem and Solovki, to speed up incarceration and free prisoner transport from seasonal restrictions of ice and winter.40
Meanwhile, conditions on Solovki deteriorated. Whispers of bizarre abuse in the camps made their way into print outside Russia. The Soviet use of a “mosquito torture,” in which inmates were stripped naked and left to the mercies of swarms of biting insects, was noted in English-language newspapers for the first time.41
Prisoners soon emerged to tell their own tales of torture and starvation. Some inmates served out their sentences or were released because of their shattered health, returning to the mainland. Others managed to escape into exile, and got their stories published in newspapers across Europe and America. The first fulllength accounts from former prisoners appeared in the mid-1920s; by 1931 several more had arrived.
Former political prisoners at Solovki recounted torture and executions. Non-political prisoners reported harvesting lumber in grueling conditions. Testimony from a member of a lumber crew detailed how those who failed to complete a daily quota by evening would be beaten by guards and kept working far into the night. Forced laborers resorted to chopping off their own hands, feet, or fingers in a search for relief from the endless work. Conditions in the camps entered the public debate on Capitol Hill in the U.S. and the British Parliament, resulting in an international boycott of some Soviet exports, including lumber.42
Solovki horror stories and testimony continued to spread internationally, spurring an internal investigation. But the outrage did not shake Soviet faith in the rehabilitative possibilities of concentration camps. Solovki-style camps soon became the template for incarcerating and rehabilitating political opponents. A 1929 Politburo resolution called for the creation of a network of camps to build on the Solovki model, using prison labor to develop the nation’s natural resources.43
In the beginning the word GULag was merely an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, meaning “Main Administration of Camps.” Convicts might unlearn their opposition to the Bolsheviks; and in the meantime, their work would help to build the Soviet state.
6
With a burgeoning prison culture back home, few economic prospects in Europe, and nowhere to turn, some émigrés immolated themselves via suicide, alcohol, or the oblivion of cocaine.44 In Germany, Nazi Party brownshirts skirmished with Communists in street fights that echoed a clash of extremes that émigrés had lived through more than a decade before. More Russians left Berlin for Paris or America. Others trudged on. And some chose Luzhin’s end.
For those who remained, a less lethal escape was available through cinema, which blossomed in Germany through the 1920s and 1930s. Filmmakers came from around the world to work in Berlin in the postwar years. Germany, like Nabokov, had begun to produce harrowing stories of madmen and monsters, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligah to Nosferatu. But the Nabokovs, who went to the movies regularly, had a wide range of films from which to choose. French, British, and American movies made the rounds, including comedy from the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton—two of Nabokov’s favorites.45
Like her husband, Véra had played an extra in Berlin productions. More than acting, however, Nabokov had an interest in developing scenarios—screenwriting promised more money than poetry or fiction could provide. And at one point Hollywood beckoned—a Russian-American director took an interest in Nabokov’s “The Potato Elf,” a story about a dwarf who falls in love. There was talk of bringing Nabokov to California, but as he sent additional material along, interest declined.46
Véra’s younger sister Sonia was also serious about a cinematic vocation, and spent two years training at a Berlin drama school in hopes of becoming an actress. Nabokov, in contrast, seems to have approached acting more recreationally—he once found himself chosen as an extra simply because the evening clothes he showed up in fit that day’s scene.47
Perhaps he enjoyed the creative hubbub, watching the dirty work of making art. Or maybe there was some satisfaction in the de facto deception inherent in all film. Cartier staff had called the police on Nabokov in Paris when his attire had made him seem something he was not; why not use his dinner jacket to create the illusion of an identity that no longer existed?
Along with big-budget German projects and smaller émigré productions, Berlin was also home to a large group of Communist filmmakers. In the early 1920s, German Marxist Clara Zetkin had called for a new kind of Revolutionary art, saying, “The cinema must reflect social reality, instead of the lies and fairy tales with which the bourgeois cinema enchants and deceives the working man.” As an artistic statement, it was the loose antithesis of Nabokov, who had begun to rework fairy tales and fashion new worlds from the husks of history, making enchantment and deception the very basis of his art. But talented filmmakers responded to Zetkin’s appeal and began to produce movies that focused on the harsh realities of poverty and oppression.48
Sergei Eisenstein in Russia had already created powerful narratives about the Revolution with movies like Strike and Battleship Potemkin. His breathtaking work straddled the line between art and propaganda, and profoundly influenced his Communist counterparts in Berlin.49 By 1928 German documentarians such as Carl Junghans were already unveiling montage-style films in tribute to Lenin and the Revolution.
Lenin’s death had not increased Nabokov’s appreciation for the Communists, and, if such a thing were possible, Véra held them in even lower esteem. And so it seems unlikely to have garnered the approval of either Nabokov when Véra’s gregarious sister Sonia became involved with Junghans, a freewheeling Communist filmmaker more than a decade her senior.50 Others knew the fashion-forward Sonia as Junghans’s girlfriend, and the affair was public as early as 1930—likely a particular embarrassment for Véra in the small world of Russian emigration.
And in the way that so much of Nabokov’s life seeped into his art, his next book told the story of a self-absorbed and mercenary young woman who dreams of being an actress and the older married German whose marriage and life she destroys. The cinematically structured Camera Obscura marked Nabokov’s first book about a sexually charged younger woman and a reprehensible older man helpless in the face of his obsession.
7
Véra’s sister Sonia, however, was not destined to stay in Berlin much longer. In 1931, she left not just Junghans but also her job at a perfume company and Germany itself, heading for Paris to make a new start.51
A year later, Nabokov followed, on a different mission. He planned to do a public reading, and hoped to find out if his reputation had grown enough for Paris to support him as a writer. Staying first with his cousin Nicholas, who had become a composer for the ballet, Nabokov went every day to the house of Ilya Fondaminsky, where he saw all the living literary and political figures of the emigration. In mid-November, Nabokov moved from Nicholas’s rooms to stay with the Fondaminskys, where his hosts enjoyed his brilliance and tolerated his smoking.
Preparing for Nabokov’s Parisian debut, an unofficial committee came together to dress him on the night of his reading. Wearing a shirt and tuxedo borrowed from a former Tenishev classmate, armbands improvised by Fondaminsky’s wife, and suspenders borrowed from a Socialist Revolutionary (whose pants threatened to fall down all evening), Nabokov was simultaneously himself and a product of the Russian emigration.52 He read several poems, a short story, and two chapters from the forthcoming novel Despair. Staged and promoted by Fondaminsky, the program took place in front of a sold-out audience, which responded enthusiastically.
Paris also provided Nabokov a chance to see his brother. Sergei had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926—the city, apparently, was still worth a Mass.53 But whatever piety he had acquired had not curbed his sense of style. Partnered with his ever-present bow tie, the dramatic cane and cape of his university years found their match in the full makeup in which Sergei was said to attend services. Still living in the difficult circumstances that afflicted Russian émigrés every where, he had nonetheless conquered the cultural ramparts of the city. With his cousin Nicholas, he had entered the social circles of some of Paris’s most prominent artists, including Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev, novelist and rising filmmaker Jean Cocteau, Edith Sitwell, and Gertrude Stein. Sergei had also become involved with an Austrian heir named Hermann Thieme.
The brothers’ reunion went badly. Despite possessing gifts of his own, Sergei was achieving nothing on the scale of his brother Vladimir, the newly crowned literary king of the Parisian émigrés. There was their childhood history to navigate, and Nabokov was still unsettled by Sergei’s homosexuality, by then a public part of his identity. Sergei’s stutter also made conversation tricky—the more urgent and important the words, the less able he was to get them out quickly.54
Sergei longed for a more meaningful connection to his brother. He made another overture during Vladimir’s Paris visit, saying that he wanted to address the distance between them. They met for lunch at a restaurant, and Sergei brought the handsome and charismatic Hermann along.55
Vladimir and Sergei’s conversation that day hinted at the possibility of bridging the gulf that had separated them since childhood. But Nabokov was still who he was: writing to Véra after the meeting, he had been surprised that Sergei’s “husband” was so congenial and “not at all the pederast type.” And he acknowledged being uncomfortable during the conversation, the more so when a friend of Sergei’s came over to talk.56
After five weeks in Paris, Nabokov continued on to Belgium, where he pulled off another successful reading. From a literary standpoint, Nabokov’s trip was a roaring success. He wrote to Véra, convinced that they should move to France at the beginning of the New Year.
By December, Nabokov had returned to Berlin. In elections held during his absence, the Nazi Party had won a third or more of the German vote for the second time that year. Communist paramilitary groups were banned—it was not hard to see that the Party itself would be the next to go. Communist filmmaker Carl funghans, already abandoned by Véra’s sister Sonia, divorced his wife and fled to Moscow.57
8
Moving from a pension into the Berlin apartment of Véra’s cousin in 1932, Nabokov plumbed a very different emigration in his next novel. Drafted in less than three months, Despair would deliver yet another madman for a central character, this one as lethal as the chess master Luzhin had been harmless. This time, however, Nabokov would turn the story over to his delusional narrator and let him portray that madness from the inside.58
Despair is recounted by Hermann, a chocolatier living in Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s. On a trip to Prague, Hermann meets a tramp named Felix and is taken with their mirror resemblance. Over time, Hermann develops the idea of faking his own death by killing Felix. Dressing Felix as himself, Hermann believes he can murder his double and disappear to start a new life, his secret safe forever. He imagines his execution as a work of art, and hatches a convoluted plan that he seems to pull off. But after he commits murder, Hermann realizes that he has left a crucial piece of evidence behind—and, more disastrous for him, no one else seems to see any resemblance between him and Felix. Hermann flees to France, but is quickly identified as the killer.
A tale from a madman with a twist that redefines the story—the same narrative arc was nearly a prerequisite in German films of the 1920s. Nabokov also overtly nods to, and mocks, Dostoyevksy’s fascination with doubles. But unlike Dostoyevksy’s books, there was no remorse for the crime and no apparent lesson to draw from it. Some reviewers—Jean-Paul Sartre among them—would later find the novel second-rate.59
But no one pursued the history Nabokov had scattered throughout Despair. Dates, places, and facts dropped at odd intervals can be gathered to reveal what happened to the narrator before the beginning of the novel—before he envisioned that murder might allow him to start over. Hermann, we learn, had a German father and Russian mother, which made him German by law. As a teenager, he had begun to study in Russia at St. Petersburg University. When the Great War broke out in 1914, he was interned as a German subject and sent to a concentration camp in the southern reaches of Russia.
He ended up living outside the city of Astrakhan, where reading was the only thing that helped him survive: two books every three days or so, a thousand eighteen books in all, across more than four years. Later, during the action of the novel—far from Russia and on his way to murder his imaginary double—Hermann has delusions that he is still in that camp, watching a man in an embroidered skullcap and a barefoot peasant girl outside his window, as dust scatters in the wind.60
Concentration camps in the real world had been a global phenomenon during the First World War, but the plight of those interned near Astrakhan had been particularly hard. Civilians there were held in bitter conditions without money, and they could not find paying work or get food at all. By 1915, news from Russia relayed that not only the prisoners’ comfort but also their lives were at stake. They were starving to death.61
The fact that Hermann’s confinement in Astrakhan stretches through the middle of 1919 reveals just as much. Russia had left the war in March of the prior year, but like the fictional Hermann, many real-world internees were trapped by the Civil War and could not escape. In the spring of 1919, a month before the Nabokovs fled Russia, Astrakhan fell into the hands of Bolshevik forces. Secret police units were sent en masse to the region to sow terror and force compliance. The people killed there were mostly starving Socialist Revolutionaries; they had been striking to restore reduced bread rations. Some were shot in the streets, while others were loaded with the bourgeoisie onto barges floated out into the Volga River. Like the dead of the Yalta pier who had haunted Nabokov the year before, their hands and feet were bound; some had stones tied to their feet. Across three days, dead or alive, resigned or pleading, thousands of people were sent to their own mute eternity at the bottom of the river.62
Knowing that civilians were interned in starvation conditions for years by the Tsar and then liberated by the Bolsheviks amid mass murder lends a different frame to Hermann’s faith in Communism and his willingness to kill. Nabokov’s first truly loathsome narrator, a murderer without even the recklessness of passion, on examination turns out to have spent nearly five years in a concentration camp.63 He is undeniably a villain, but to condemn him without acknowledging the devastating events that he lived through is to miss half the story.
Reports of millions held in prison and labor camps inside the Soviet Union had spread worldwide by 1931. And yet Nabokov chose not to write about the Soviet camps, but to look back in history and make use of a camp founded under the Tsar before the Revolution. Perhaps he wanted to thumb his nose at Russian émigré readers, many of whom were already romanticizing the bygone days of Empire.64 Perhaps he was not quite ready to tackle more recent history. In either case, he was just getting started.