Pale Fire
1
Sailing east for seven days, Vladimir and Véra Nabokov reversed their wartime migration and returned to Europe. The Old World, conquered in their absence, anxiously awaited their arrival.
With fame came more obligations. Nabokov still pondered adapting Lolita for the screen. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which had been out of print, got a second life. Dmitri, long graduated from Harvard, had rendered Invitation to a Beheading into English. Plans for publishing Nabokov’s entire back catalog in England would soon be set. While many communities still banned Lolita, translations were negotiated around the world, from Japan to Sweden and Israel. Nabokov’s feud with Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press over rights to the novel would continue for years, but the French version published by Gallimard had gone off like a firecracker in Paris that spring.
In the midst of it all, Nabokov wrote his British publisher, protesting the choice of a particular author for a history of Soviet Russia. Did he not know the man was a Communist? The least they might do, Nabokov noted, would be to let a “real scholar” annotate the “historical myth” the man was sure to create, in order to avoid furthering Soviet propaganda in England.1
Articles about Nabokov had already run that year in any number of outlets, including the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Libèration, Arts, L’Express, L’Aurore, I’Observateur littéraire—and all those in just two weeks. One critic argued that Lolita did not qualify as erotic but was nonetheless “essentially sadistic.” Another suggested that Lolita was “in effect, America, her prejudices, her morals, her hypocrisy, her myths, seen by a completely cynical spirit.”2
Europe, meanwhile, was anxious to see Mr. Nabokov in person. Paris could not get enough of him and his absolutely adult wife. On October 23, Véra and Vladimir made their debut at a celebration in Nabokov’s honor thrown by Gallimard. Véra reigned in silk, mink, and pearls. Nabokov, in gray flannel, charmed the crowd, first by hunting for his glasses, then a forgotten pen—the mere mention of which conjured several from the pockets of those in attendance. Two thousand people were present; there was champagne. Véra smiled, reveling in the acknowledgment of her husband, overdue but sweet on arrival. From a distance, Sonia Slonim imagined their triumphant return to Europe as a marvelous ball.3
But the discord between Nabokov and Russian émigrés in Europe had not vanished in his absence.4 At the Paris reception, Nabokov came face-to-face with Zinaida Shakhovskoy, who had been an early believer in his work, helping him repeatedly in the 1930s when he had been desperately poor. He offered a formal hello, as if she were a stranger.
Had Nabokov been overwhelmed by the crowd, or had he snubbed Shakhovskoy deliberately? Several people thought the latter. Véra had accused Shakhovskoy in 1939 of making an anti-Semitic comment, and Nabokov was slow to forgive such slights. But if he felt provoked to rudeness, it was equally likely to have been caused by an incendiary article she had just written under a pseudonym—an article he had seen—savaging his work and claiming everything in his stories was “nightmare and deceit.” She lamented the deep wounds of exile that led him to “forget the friends of his darkest days.”5
Shakhovskoy was the sister of Nathalie Nabokov, and so a former sister-in-law of Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas. As such, she was a distant half-relation, but the Nabokovs’ interactions with immediate family members could be just as problematic.
Véra’s sisters Lena and Sonia had not spoken to each other in decades. Véra still exchanged letters intermittently with her older sister, but they seemed locked in the binary states of outrage or icy recrimination. Véra continued to question Lena’s conversion from Judaism, a move that had alienated her profoundly. Lena, unwilling to be scolded, wrote of witnessing death and torture in Berlin and observed how “easy and simple” Véra’s life was compared to hers. She furthermore noted that she had heard that Véra was corresponding with a Russian Nazi in England.6
Véra denied the charge, but it may have had a whisper of truth. The Nabokovs and Elena had been working to bring Nabokov’s nephew Rostislav out of Prague (too late, it would turn out; less than a year after the Gallimard reception, he would be dead). In their efforts to rescue Rostislav, Vladimir or Véra may well have written to Boris Petkevič, Rostislav’s Russian father, who had in fact collaborated with the Nazis before escaping to England.7
Nabokov’s reunion with his sister Elena and brother Kirill in Geneva was considerably less fraught. Elena, a librarian for the United Nations, had kept up a warm exchange of letters with the Nabokovs as a pair, though she chided Vladimir for rarely writing her directly. Kirill, now a travel agent, had not seen his older brother for more than twenty years. What did they talk about? There was no shortage of material. Evgenia Hofeld was gone; Elena’s second husband had died the year before. The younger siblings saw fit to correct a few details in their brother’s autobiography.8 They may also have discussed their absent sister Olga, still in Prague behind the Iron Curtain. Nabokov had little contact with her but continued to send money for the care of her son, and he knew that she now had a grandson, also named Vladimir.
We do not know if the conversation turned to the other absent sibling—Sergei. But just as the lost brother haunted Sebastian Knight even before Sergei’s death, he continued to wind his way through Nabokov’s writing long after his life ended at Neuengamme.
At a party early in the decade, Nabokov had announced to dinner companions that he was planning to write a story about a pair of Siamese twins. (“You will not,” Véra had declared.9) Nabokov nonetheless worked out fragments of the tale of Floyd and Lloyd, two conjoined brothers living on the Black Sea.
The story was meant to be a three-part tragedy, in which the brothers were to maintain their separate identities—even avoid each other—as much as they could, despite the forced intimacy of their condition. In the first section, Floyd dreams of being severed from the twin with whom he has so little communion. When he imagines the aftermath of the separation in nightmares, he is healthy and complete, escaping alone, holding some token object (a crab, a kitten) to his left side where his missing brother should be.10 But in his dreams, the other brother has not managed to get free—Lloyd staggers along, still somehow hobbled by a twin.
In the remaining parts of Nabokov’s triptych, the brothers were to find love and undergo a separation from each other which would result in Lloyd’s death. But Nabokov composed only the first part of the story. Having lived through the separation from and death of Sergei in real life, he seems not to have wanted, or not to have been able, to revisit them in fiction. Nabokov never finished his story of the surviving brother and his dead twin. The part he did write, “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” was rejected by The New Yorker and remained unpublished for eight years, until Lolita transformed even his dross into gold.11
Nabokov had folded Sergei more overtly into his autobiography years before. Conclusive Evidence casts Sergei as “my brother” dozens of times in childhood and in early adolescence, and Nabokov occasionally gave his sibling a reflected primacy. “My brother and I,” he wrote, “were born in St. Petersburg, in the capital of Imperial Russia.”
Sergei appears again and again, fleeing governesses and enduring tutors with Volodya, escaping Petrograd with him after the Revolution. But as with “Double Monster,” Nabokov had not finished the story. Like a Soviet-era photo edited to alter the past, Sergei slowly disappears from Conclusive Evidence. My brother heads to Cambridge and enrolls at Christ College. My brother tags along with Vladimir to see their parents in Berlin late in their college career. And then, nothing. The death that had not been a charade was reduced to a passing reference early in Conclusive Evidence (“a brother of mine … who is now also dead”), the separation as erased as it could be without being completely denied.
By the time Nabokov had finished his autobiography, he had accomplished what he had not been able to do in fiction—to shape and control the story of the brothers so that the loss of one could be contained. The boys’ time together at Cambridge, Sergei’s years in Paris, and the events at Neuengamme that had permanently divided them were nowhere to be found in Nabokov’s account of his own life. After 1919, it was as if Sergei had vanished.
2
Having conquered Milan and London—which included dinner with Graham Greene—the Nabokovs returned to America in February 1960. They had settled on terms to write a screenplay for Lolita and were due in California in mid-March.
Working their way across the country, they stopped in Utah to collect butterflies. Arriving in California, Nabokov spent six months in back-and-forth writing and revising, with Kubrick continually emphasizing the need to cut. Only shards of Nabokov’s effort would make it into the final movie; the dismemberment of his work had begun almost as soon as he delivered the script.12
And so the crowning moment of the 1960 return to the U.S. happened not in California at all, but back in New York that October in a hotel overlooking Central Park, where Nabokov hit on a clear idea of how to construct his next novel. He had been wrestling with the project for years, and the roots of the story stretched even further back, to the first months of World War II. His aborted 1940 project Solus Rex, with its madman who imagines himself a king, had been Nabokov’s last Russian-language fiction. He had already borrowed its grieving widower and dystopian framework for Bend Sinister, but he was not yet through with the idea of the distant northern kingdom in the earlier work.
In 1957 Nabokov had written to Jason Epstein, his editor at Doubleday, proposing a novel in which a northern king flees to the U.S., creating political headaches for President Kennedy.13 After being deposed by a coup—whose plotters would have help from nearby Nova Zembla—and then a transatlantic escape, the king was to go on a spiritual quest while an assassin circled the globe, closing in on him.
Doubleday bit, but after just three months of research, Nabokov had put the new novel aside. Two years later, still unsure on how to proceed and wondering if the contractual obligation of the advance were interfering with the story’s evolution, he had returned the money and said of the novel, “I am not sure I shall ever write it.”14
But surrendering the commitment led to a breakthrough. He had spent two full years assembling his 1, 300-page treatment of Eugene Onegin, caught up in his dizzying, obsessive commentary on Pushkin’s verse. A flash of insight led him to imagine a novel in which a whole life was somehow tucked into a commentary on a poem. He fused the story of his ex-king to the afterglow of his Onegin project, and once inspiration struck, he was consumed. Nabokov left for France days later, and settling in Nice, began to write a 999-line poem that would serve as the launch pad for his novel. He blazed through it in ten weeks, and headed on to Geneva to spend Easter with Elena.
Leaving Nice with spring underway, Véra and Vladimir went to northern Italy to see Dmitri’s opera debut in La Bohème. Afterward, they made their way to Stresa, closer to the Swiss border, where Nabokov dove back into work on his poem-novel, which would in time acquire the title Pale Fire. Scribbling away on three-by-five-inch index cards, he erased words, revised, and crossed out whole sections. By June the Nabokovs had made their way into Switzerland; by mid-July Nabokov thought himself halfway done with the book; by August 7 they were driving into Montreux.15
They got a room away from the shores of Lake Geneva, and started looking for a place where he could settle and finish the novel. Russian actor Peter Ustinov—who had just won an Academy Award for his role in Spartacus—recommended over dinner that the Nabokovs join him at the Montreux Palace Hotel. They visited the place and found that the lakeside resort suited them. By the beginning of September, they had signed a contract for rooms at the Palace, and Nabokov prepared to finish his most inventive novel yet.
3
In its completed form, Pale Fire would tell the story of two men: John Shade, an American poet who is murdered, and Charles Kinbote, who steals Shade’s verse as he lies dying. Shade’s magnum opus, the 999-line rhymed poem that Nabokov had written before starting the rest of the book, appears in the novel in its entirety. The rest of the story unfolds through Charles Kinbote’s increasingly eccentric commentary on the poem, which establishes him as a narrator who cannot be trusted with facts or young boys.
Along with the two main characters in Pale Fire, Nabokov also gave a starring role to a mystery land called Zembla. While the characters inhabit a mundane campus very similar to Nabokov’s Cornell, the narrator Kinbote believes he is actually the exiled ruler of the fantasy land of Zembla, a king who has escaped from a guarded prison and made his way to America. Kinbote cares only for what he imagines will be Shade’s masterpiece—the story of lost Zembla and its hidden crown jewels, which are so well concealed that Kinbote thinks they will never be found, even though Soviet-style agents have been tearing apart the Zemblan royal castle in search of them.
Kinbote’s stories of his homeland include a Communist-style revolution that shattered his happy reign—along with a kitchen-sink hodgepodge of scenes borrowed from real-world literature, history, and even a Marx Brothers movie.16 Highlights include royal genealogy, murder, and Kinbote’s homosexual longings and pedophilia, as well as his prowess at ping-pong. A dramatic account of his escape from Zembla takes up some thirteen pages of the novel and leads him through a tunnel, backstage at a theater, into a racecar, across mountains, and onto a boat before his arrival in Paris.
Despite being a fellow professor at the university where Shade teaches, Kinbote exists in a fantasy world. He hears voices, imagines conspiracies, and his misunderstanding of Shade’s poem distorts it into something unrecognizable. Shade’s story of love for his wife and the suicide of his daughter are twisted by Kinbote into a chronicle of Zemblan history.
People in the campus town tell stories about Kinbote behind his back and call him a lunatic to his face, though he hardly seems to need their encouragement to gin up paranoia. He reads a confusing note pointing out his halitosis and thinks someone has realized he has hallucinations. Kinbote is the kind of person who wishes Shade would have a heart attack to provide him with an opportunity to comfort his ailing friend.
Shade is the only one who seems to have any sympathy for Kinbote; even Shade’s wife avoids Kinbote or shoos him away. Across the course of the book, the ex-king’s affairs go awry and his young tenants leave him. The other characters in the book realize Kinbote is ludicrous, and readers easily see how pathetic he is, but he remains oblivious.
Yet, like Pnin, Kinbote is more than a comic figure. Everything readers learn about him seems to have an off-kilter or freakish aspect: his fondness for table tennis, his left-handedness, his star-crossed relations with young men at the college where he teaches, his predilection for even younger boys—a predilection from which, like Humbert with girls, he longs to be delivered. But beneath his self-aggrandizing melodrama, his royal fantasies are laced with grief. He dreams of suicide and absolution from the horror he carries. He writes of the temptation to end his life with a handgun, but manages to keep himself alive long enough to make sure the tale of Zembla is recorded for posterity.17
Kinbote’s mad take on his dead friend’s poem parallels Nabokov’s struggle to interpret Eugene Onegin. And his despair over exile from a country devastated by revolution directly echoes Nabokov’s grief about Russia. Yet the reality of Zembla is more baffling to deconstruct, and Nabokov seems to have wanted it that way. When he was distraught over plans for Pale Fire’s pre-release publicity, Véra sent a seven-point list to his publisher on his behalf, directing exactly how the fantasy land should be presented. The Nabokovs particularly balked at labeling Zembla as “non-existent,” insisting that “Nobody knows, nobody should know—even Kinbote hardly knows—if Zembla really exists.”18
What is Zembla? Readers found themselves trying to make sense of the place: was it meant to be real in the novel, or only a figment of Kinbote’s fierce longing? In one of the first reviews of the book, New Republic critic Mary McCarthy noted the existence of “an actual Nova Zembla, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, north of Archangel.” The link was not a stretch—McCarthy also noted that Zembla had been used centuries before by Alexander Pope in reference to the islands as a metaphor for the strange and distant North.19
But in the dissection of the book that would obsess readers for the next fifty years, the world did not realize that Pale Fire’s mad narrator was not the first king of Zembla. Centuries before Charles Kinbote was a wild spark in Nabokov’s eye, a real person had held that title, and he had had a harrowing escape of his own—one that Nabokov seems to have known about for decades—from a kingdom at once real and imaginary.20
4
Of the three voyages that intrepid Dutch sailors made to Nova Zembla at the end of the sixteenth century, the first found luck, the second misfortune, and the third an equal measure of both. All three were piloted by William Barents, who dreamed of finding a Northeast trade route from Europe to China. On the first voyage, the sailors had managed to venture into the great unknown and land near the islands’ northern tip. On the second trip, one sailor had been seized unawares and devoured by a polar bear before the fleet was blocked by ice on Zembla’s southern end.21
And in May 1596, the third time Barents set out from Amsterdam, an initial attempt to find open Polar Sea met only icepack. The sailors looked up into the sky and saw three suns bracketed by a triple rainbow.22 The optical illusion in the sky was new and strange, but the situation on the water was terrifyingly familiar: more and more ice, and again, polar bears. After nearly a month of disputes over which direction to proceed, the expedition’s two ships went their separate ways. As they sailed on, the bears would scale the ice floating near the ship again and again to try to climb aboard, or swim around the boat in search of food.
Following the rocky shore, they rounded the northern tip of Nova Zembla. But ice set in early that season. It soon broke the tiller and the rudder, shattering their smaller boat against the ship. After five days of struggling against the frozen sea, Barents was locked in place.
Amid thunderous booming, ice floes tipped the boat. The ship itself seemed to be coming apart; it was lifted higher and higher out of the water, while even larger icebergs drove in from the sea. After two weeks in fear for the destruction of his ship but holding on to a faint hope of escape, Barents realized that they would have to spend the winter on Nova Zembla.
With a six-month freeze ahead of them, the men knew they needed a cabin. No trees grew on the islands, yet if they were to dismantle their boats entirely, they could never sail home. Searching for driftwood that might suffice, they stumbled onto a gift: whole trees that had been swept from the mainland to Nova Zembla. The trees lay miles away from the ship; the men built sleds to haul them back.
In clear weather, they made progress, but when visibility was poor, they did not venture far, mindful that the bears that could smell the sailors long before the men could see them coming. The ship’s carpenter died before a cabin was even begun. A cleft in a hill had to serve for a tomb, as the ground was too hard to dig a grave.
After two weeks of labor, they raised the main beams of a shelter. They continued work on the house for another seven days, and were trailed by the bears as they carried goods from the ship to the crude structure. As if the hungry bears were not enough to manage, a barrel of beer left overnight froze in the arctic air and burst its bottom. For the former, there were noise and bullets; for the latter, there was no harm sustained: it was so cold that the beer had frozen as it ran out of the barrel, and they were able to pick it up and save it. In the house, they set up a clock and a lamp, which they fed with melted polar bear fat.
In the cabin, nominally sheltered from blizzards, they peeked out at a polar moon that rode the sky day and night. A layer of ice more than an inch thick formed on the walls inside the house. Once the two-month polar night set in and their clock froze, they could not tell day from night without tracking the tally of the twelve-hour sandglass they had brought from the ship.
By mid-December, they ran out of kindling, but managed to dig around outside the house for wood they had left there. Christmas came and went, bringing with it foul weather that trapped the men inside and piled snow higher than their house. Their shoes froze solid and became useless, forcing them to wear several pairs of socks under loose clogs they crafted from sheepskins. Running out of wood again, they began burning non-essential possessions. The only way to see outside was to look up the chimney.
Once the weather calmed, they cleaned their filth from the cabin and gathered as much wood as possible. They then recalled that it was January 5th, Twelfth Night, when Dutch tradition held that the world turned upside down and the normal order of life would be reversed.
Celebrating with wine they had left, the men made pancakes and were given some of the captain’s biscuit, which they soaked in the wine. Pretending that they were back home, they imagined themselves at a royal feast. Following the holiday tradition, they drew lots. And so it happened that on January 5, 1597, for the hours up until the stroke of midnight—a span remembered for four hundred years even as his name was lost to history—the gunner on William Barents’s third expedition drew the winning lot and reigned as the first king of Nova Zembla, an imaginary monarch in a land of ice and death, a ruler over hope and despair, a king of nothing.
5
As Vladimir and Véra Nabokov moved into the Palace Hotel on October 1, 1961, apocalyptic fears rattled the West, and a different kind of history was being made on Nova Zembla.
A series of highly publicized nuclear weapons tests was under way in the Soviet Union, and in the weeks between the Nabokovs signing their contract and moving onto the third floor of the old wing of the hotel, ten explosions had already taken place, with more than a dozen to follow in the next two months.23
Competitive series of tests had taken place regularly from 1951 to 1958, in which the Americans and Soviets traded bomb blasts, with an occasional contribution made by the British. But in the fall of 1961 the Soviets began using their tests as a kind of propaganda to intimidate the U.S. and appear to rival its arsenal, which far outstripped the four lonely Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles then in existence.24
Radiation clouds from the test blasts drifted with the wind over neighbors to the west and south, raising fears about the long-term effects of fallout on humans, livestock, and agriculture. Concerns about the tests were raised at the United Nations, where countries’ responses tended to fall along the Cold War divide between U.S. allies and the Soviet sphere of influence, with non-member states refraining from taking sides.25
If the Swiss government was officially neutral, Switzerland’s newest resident was not. Nabokov’s guiding principle was to choose “that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.”26 The fact that Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had launched a thaw and attacked Stalinist myths did nothing to warm Nabokov to him or the Soviet government. Nabokov appears to have been likewise unimpressed by the nuclear drama.
The thermonuclear tests were just one in a series of crises that year. The Berlin Wall had begun to rise in August, and late that October Soviet and U.S. tanks rolled up to the line dividing the city, facing each other for sixteen hours in a standoff that caught the world’s attention.27 Against this backdrop, every few days in September and October a new bomb detonated; sometimes tests were conducted daily.
The earliest Soviet explosions had taken place in eastern Kazakhstan, not far from where Solzhenitsyn had been sent into exile. But in 1958, a year after Nabokov started collecting “bits of straw and fluff” for Pale Fire, newspapers announced that the Soviets had inaugurated a new testing ground just north of the Russian mainland.28 For the entire time that Nabokov had worked on drafting his next novel, the primary Soviet test site had been located on Nova Zembla.
Nabokov, however, had been thinking about Nova Zembla in the context of his new novel even before the nuclear tests began there—he had mentioned it in the pitch letter he sent to Doubleday in 1957. And two years after sending that letter, he had acquired an additional reason to ponder the islands’ historic role: he had learned of a personal connection to the place. A cousin had researched family genealogy and sent a letter mentioning their great-grandfather, whom he believed to have taken part in a nineteenth-century expedition that resulted in the naming of the Nabokov River there. Nabokov had written his cousin back, delighted at what felt like the “mystical significance” of the existence of such a river in Nova Zembla.29
But during his first weeks in Montreux, Nabokov would have learned that the world was now very much aware of those islands, too. Given the daily news in the last three months of his work on Pale Fire, it is hardly surprising to find Nabokov seeding nuclear signs and symbols through the pages of his novel. Pale Fire mocks Albert Schweitzer, a peace activist despised by Nabokov, and offers a cutting comment about left-wing professors who fret over “Fallouts occasioned solely by US-made bombs,” as if Russia had not been busy testing her own arsenal. While the poet Shade writes of an “antiatomic chat” on television, Nabokov (or Kinbote, or Shade—it is not clear) ridicules anyone impressed by nuclear stunts, “when any jackass can rig up the stuff.” Describing the news during a period in which the real-world U.S.S.R. had played a game of brinksmanship with nuclear tests in Nova Zembla, the novel’s poem tells how “Mars glowed,” a reference to the Roman god of war.30
While Nabokov polished his draft, he was inundated with nuclear news from Nova Zembla. During his daily reading of the New York Herald Tribune in Switzerland, he would have seen more than a dozen front-page stories mentioning Nova Zembla. Nova Zembla appeared on maps in newspapers around the globe, with fall-out patterns noted. Debates over safe radiation levels continued. Milk was tested to see if children should still drink it, and at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow Khrushchev announced plans to detonate a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb. The UN took up the issue, and after long debates, finally passed a resolution imploring the Soviets not to explode the monster device.31
Nevertheless, on October 30, the Tsar Bomba, the biggest bomb in history, exploded over Nova Zembla. The casing was too large to even fit in the bomb bay of the airplane assigned to drop it. Pieces of the plane’s fuselage had to be cut away to accommodate its cargo, which was suspended underneath, hanging more than halfway out of the plane. When the bomb was released, an enormous parachute trailed behind it, one so large that its assembly was rumored to have triggered shortages in the production of Soviet hosiery.32
The blast happened in mid-air, leveling buildings in a seventy-five-mile radius and cracking windows more than five hundred miles away; it was ten times more powerful than the combined total of all the explosives used in World War II. Pregnant women on the other side of the world drank iodine in an effort to stave off birth defects. Front-page stories around the globe announced the blast. Trace levels of radiation crossed the continent to the Nabokovs’ suite in Montreux.33
Within a week, diplomatic initiatives intensified, and political pressure from the world mounted. And then the frenzied bombing at Nova Zembla stopped. A month later in Montreux, Nabokov mailed his publisher the manuscript for a magical novel about a northern kingdom called Zembla. Pale Fire appeared the following spring.
By a quirk of history, the Soviets shifted for a time to another testing ground in southern Russia, and no bombs fell on Nova Zembla in the months before and after Pale Fire’s publication. Reminders of real-world tests at Nova Zembla, which might have been obvious in the fall of 1961, sat in the book unnoticed by critics for decades.34 A straightforward path connecting the Zembla of the novel to the real-world Nova Zembla was lost. And readers puzzling over Pale Fire never thought to explore the islands’ twentieth-century history, where they would have found that in addition to being a Soviet nuclear test site, Nova Zembla had long been notorious for a very different reason.
6
Five days after the Tsar Bomba set fire to the sky over Nova Zembla, Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a train to Moscow, with a dream of submitting his own short novel for publication. Along with millions of people in and outside Russia, he had listened to the October speeches of the Twenty-Second Party Congress and had been surprised by what he had heard.
It was not, however, Khrushchev’s threat to explode a monster bomb that had shaken him. The words that stayed in his mind were those from a speech by Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of Novy Mir, the most candid of contemporary Soviet magazines. Tvardovsky declared at the Congress that Soviet literature had praised the victories of the people but had yet to deliver work that also reflected their suffering. Tvardovsky said that he was still waiting for a literature “totally truthful and faithful to life.”35
Solzhenitsyn had spent almost a decade outside the camps preparing himself for this moment; it was more than long enough to agonize over the possibility of being sent back. No longer even in remote exile, he had built a good life—he was living in Ryazan, a provincial town an afternoon train ride away from Moscow. His wife Natalia had remarried him. His cancer had reappeared, but it had been successfully treated. More miraculously, as part of Khrushchev’s thaw he had been rehabilitated by the State.36
Many others had been freed or welcomed back by society, but Solzhenitsyn was still aware of those who were not so lucky. He had noticed the spot near Ryazan’s railway station where prisoners were still offloaded away from other passengers. He had given a lecture on physics at a local correctional facility, where he found himself thinking of those who would go back to their cells after his talk.37
In his life as a free man, he had written several short stories and miniatures. He had tried his hand at a play on personality modification. He had done three revisions of a novel, The First Circle, which was based on his years in a scientific research sharashka. He had submitted one essay arguing against autobiography to Literary Gazette, the official publication of the Union of Soviet Writers—only to see it immediately rejected.38
He longed to see his work published, and he had one story about a labor camp that seemed like a good candidate. His readers thought it the best thing he had written; it had made a friend cry. After reading the story, another friend is said to have told Solzhenitsyn that three atom bombs had made their way into the world: “Kennedy has one, Khrushchev has another, and you have the third.”39
The story that had so moved his friends possessed the ungainly title of Shch-854, a reference to the prisoner number of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. In it, Solzhenitsyn did little more than recount the events in one man’s life across a single day in a labor camp. Ivan Denisovich does not suffer the most harrowing events of camp life—torture, rape, or execution—but the depiction of subsistence-level existence and bitter cruelty in which the average prisoner had to find a way to survive was powerful in its restraint. The complicated strategies required to navigate every moment of the day, from reveille to the mess hall, give way to an awareness of the transcendence of Ivan Denisovich, who manages not just to survive but to retain his humanity.
As an unknown writer who had been rehabilitated, Solzhenitsyn could create freely in secrecy. Freely, of course, is hardly the right word. After a fair copy of any given work had been written out, it had to be concealed. Any remaining drafts had to be gathered, and after all the neighbors had gone to sleep, burned one page at a time in the communal kitchen.40
If Solzhenitsyn sent out his real work—not just a criticism of something written by someone else, but a story that went to the heart of what he had seen and wanted to say—he knew he would be publicly identified as a writer with an agenda. If the Soviet leaders chose to, they could keep him from writing in the future.
An idea had come to him in 1958 to write a vast account of the Soviet labor camp system, based on what he had seen himself and the experiences of others. If he moved forward with trying to publish his story about a single prisoner, it was entirely possible he would jeopardize the larger project. Unbeknownst to Solzhenitsyn, the camp theme was already percolating among some of the most gifted Russian writers of the day, but it had not yet found officially sanctioned publication.41 Had Tvardovsky been serious in his speech—were Soviet leaders ready to hear the truth about the suffering of the Russian people?
After consulting with friends again in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn decided his time had come. He was forty-two years old, soon to be forty-three. The wife of a former fellow prisoner would deliver the story of Ivan Denisovich to Tvardovsky at the offices of Novy Mir. It was the first piece of fiction he sent out into the world.
7
After Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov no longer faced any uncertainty when it came to finding a home for his work. Putnam’s was waiting in the wings for Pale Fire; within five months his manuscript was proofed and printed.
When the book arrived, Edmund Wilson had no comment on it, but in the pages of The New Republic Mary McCarthy called it “one of the very great works of art this century.” Others were less enthralled; one critic declared it “the most unreadable novel I’ve attempted this season.”42 Nabokov’s convoluted tale managed to hook on to the bottom of the bestseller lists, despite its opaque structure and baffling mysteries. How can a poem and its commentary be a novel? Who is the narrator? What is Zembla? What is the significance of the crown jewels?
Scholars, fans, and other authors tried to find and dissect hidden codes in the book. Perhaps the poet invented the ex-king—or did the ex-king invent the poet? Readers were encouraged in their speculations and literary autopsies by the novel’s author, who coyly proclaimed to the New York Herald Tribune that the book was “full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find.”43
If Nabokov wanted readers to do the hard work of finding a hidden message in Pale Fire, he was not above offering some clues. In the same interview, he told his interviewer that the narrator Charles Kinbote was not actually a king or an ex-king of Zembla, that he was in fact insane. Furthermore, he had committed suicide—at the age of forty-four, if readers trace the chronology—before completing the last entry in the Index, which is Zembla.
Perhaps to give additional fodder to interpreters, Nabokov had anchored his fantastic tale in the real world. In addition to nuclear allusions and Cold War references, he had given The New York Times a prominent role in Pale Fire, spending a page and a half describing articles from the newspaper, some of which mention Zembla.44 The stories are actual articles taken from July 1959 editions of the newspaper, but as with so much of what Kinbote touches in the novel, the news has been bent and twisted to reflect his mania for his lost country. Kinbote imagines Zemblan children singing songs as part of an international youth exchange, and he inserts Zembla into a story of Khrushchev canceling a visit to Scandinavia.45
The Times serves as a source for news about Zembla inside Pale Fire, but what the real-world Times had to offer on the real-world Nova Zembla—if the world had only looked—says more. In 1955, just two years before Nabokov began making his first notes toward his novel, a brief mention of the Arctic islands appeared in a story by an American named John Noble.
Noble had lived through World War II in Germany with his family. When Soviet forces swept in at the end of the war, Noble had been sent to Buchenwald (which was under Russian control) before being deported more than three thousand miles northeast to the labor outpost of Vorkuta. Above the Arctic Circle, he mined coal with thousands of other prisoners, later participating in a prisoner revolt.46
Mining coal in the Arctic seems a harsh enough fate, but among Vorkuta inmates it was understood that however bad things got, they could be worse. What they truly feared was the place Noble described as the destination of last resort for the worst offenders: Nova Zembla, the place “from which there is no return.”47 Noble’s three-day Times account of his experiences in Vorkuta became the book I Was a Slave in Russia, a bestseller in America that year.
But the Times’ accounts of the islands’ forgotten history stretch back before Noble’s years in the camps. At the beginning of 1942, the Russian army badly needed reinforcements for the war effort, and turned to Polish forces. The Times reported on the contentious issues blocking a Soviet-Polish agreement. One question centered on tens of thousands of missing Polish officers (whose bodies would later be found in a mass grave in Katyn Forest); the other related to reports of Polish prisoners being deported to labor camps in horrific conditions on “the barren and desolate island of Nova Zembla.”48
Yet Nova Zemblan history in the Times goes even further back, before the war, winding past stories of plans to build an Arctic resort there in 1934 and sightings of mysterious airplanes on it 1931,49 all the way back to 1922, where along with a story Walter Duranty had in the paper that day sits an August 28 account explaining that Socialist Revolutionary prisoners would, for the first time, be shipped to Nova Zembla.
In the wake of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, it was noted, the defendants had disappeared. Intellectuals and professors were being arrested, and many of them held in concentration camps at Archangel. But some prisoners, veterans of prison under Tsarist rule, had escaped from the mainland camps. As a result, the remaining prisoners would be “sent to Nova Zembla, two large islands in the Arctic Ocean, where even the former Czars never sent criminals.”50
The story also ran in the Times of London. The news of prisoners sent to certain death had echoed and repeated in Europe and America, appearing two days later in the newspaper with the largest circulation of any Russian-language daily in Germany, a place where Nabokov had published so much of his work—Rul, the paper of Nabokov’s dead father. Within the camps, inside Russia, and across Europe and America, Nova Zembla had been feared as the cruelest outpost of the camp system, a place of terror for all of Vladimir Nabokov’s adult life.
8
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of life in a labor camp did not immediately make it onto the desk of Alexander Tvardovsky, Novy Mir’s editor in chief. But it astounded the first person who read it, a copy editor at the magazine. Fearing it would be spiked by others or might fall into the wrong hands, she cagily bypassed the usual hierarchy and carried it to Tvardovsky herself.
Taking it home from work that evening, he began reading and stayed up all night, going through it twice. Barely able to contain himself until dawn, he began calling around to discover who had written the treasure that had been delivered to him. He returned to Novy Mir offices and broke into a junior editor’s desk to find extra copies, which he carried to the house of a friend, calling for vodka and announcing, “A new genius is born!” The only goal he had left in life, he vowed, was to shepherd the story of Ivan Denisovich into print.51
Solzhenitsyn was summoned to Moscow for a meeting with the magazine’s editorial board, which he attended in deliberately shabby clothes to underline his outsider status. Tvardovsky paid tribute to choice after choice that Solzhenitsyn had made in the story, quoting passages aloud to the group. It was on the level of Dostoyevsky, he said—perhaps better.
Novy Mir signed a contract for what was now being called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. As an advance, the magazine paid Solzhenitsyn one thousand rubles, more than his teaching salary for the entire year.52
Though Solzhenitsyn was ecstatic, he understood that the journal having acquired the story was no guarantee that the Party would allow its publication. The steps forward that Khrushchev had pointed to in his October speech had not entirely found support in the Congress. Even though the history Solzhenitsyn referred to in the book had taken place more than a decade before and had since been condemned at the highest levels, such a vivid depiction of human suffering imposed by the state still seemed too raw to appear as Soviet literature. Tvardovsky let the manuscript sit for more than four months without submitting it.53
He did, however, begin to send the story around under the table to those whose opinions he valued, asking established writers to contribute assessments supporting its importance. Some of them simply thought he was wasting his time, because it would never be allowed to see the light of day. Others contributed enthusiastically, comparing Solzhenitsyn to Tolstoy and suggesting “it would be unforgivable to keep this from readers.” But the net effect of giving it to a few writers, for even the space of a few hours, was that those writers made and kept their own copies, and then passed them along to their friends. As many as five hundred bootleg copies of Ivan Denisovich circulated through unofficial channels; all of Moscow was talking about a novella that did not yet officially exist.54
One of those copies ended up in the hands of Nikita Khrushchev’s private secretary, who admired the work and was willing to take it directly to his boss. A series of edits was asked for; some caused Solzhenitsyn to balk, declaring that he had waited one decade already, he could wait another.55 In the end, minor changes were agreed on, and the revised manuscript, accompanied by a cover letter from Tvardovsky, was forwarded to Khrushchev’s secretary.
Khrushchev read it and wondered why it had not already been published. The Central Committee, however, was less inclined to move so quickly and demanded copies for all its members. The novel was discussed behind closed doors, where Khrushchev reportedly said, “There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even some of the Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”56
In the end, Ivan Denisovich made its way past the editors, the opinions of the Moscow literati, Nikita Khrushchev, and even the Central Committee. People heard it was coming in the next issue of Novy Mir, they waited anxiously for it. Thousands of extra copies were printed, yet in the days after its release, Moscow bookstores ran out of the magazine. Pravda and Izvestia praised the story; Khrushchev told the plenary session of the Central Committee they should read it. The full run of 95,000 copies of the magazine had sold out entirely.
Within days, Kremlinologists were discussing the novel abroad, heralding a new openness in Soviet literature and wondering about the political implications. Weeks later, English-language translations appeared in the West, to great acclaim. The Soviet information minister felt compelled to ask aspiring Russian writers—so many of whom now seemed keen to address life in Stalin’s camps—to keep in mind that there were, in fact, other subjects available to them.57 In the pages of Western newspapers, comments like these sounded like a joke. In Moscow, they were understood to be a warning.
9
Ivan Denisovich won readers over with his plainspoken decency; Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote, monster that he is, captured them with his outrageous inventions. But for all their differences, the two characters may have something in common.
In tiny asides scattered throughout the novel, Kinbote writes of the ghost toes of amputees and the “frozen mud and horror” in his heart. He compares the story of Zembla that he hoped Shade might tell to a “tale of torture written in the bruised and branded sky.” He is suicidal and morbidly fascinated with the spiritual joy that death would bring.58
Late in Pale Fire, one reason for Kinbote’s despair becomes clearer, when a history professor seems to recognize him. The professor has heard a good deal about Kinbote from someone—that he is actually Russian, that his name is not Kinbote but Botkin. Kinbote denies everything, declaring that the professor seems to have mistaken him for someone else. He is, Kinbote insists, “confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla.” In case readers missed the only appearance of the words Nova Zembla in the novel, Kinbote adds a phrase stressing the “Nova” again in brackets in the same line, even as he rejects any link between himself and this other person the professor is thinking of, between his beautiful Zembla and the geography to which the professor would pin him.59
In interviews after the book’s publication, Nabokov revealed that the history professor is right. Kinbote is not who he says he is; clues in the novel reveal that he is a Russian, and his name is Botkin.60 But in the first fifty years after Pale Fire’s appearance, no one recalled the stories that had leaked out about Nova Zembla. No one thought it possible for Kinbote to be a refugee not just from the Zembla he had invented, but the historical Nova Zembla as well. It was not understood what such a past would mean—the tragic story that it would imply for Kinbote.
The madman’s fantasy carries a grain of truth. Kinbote is no ex-king, but he did escape from Zembla. Like the first king of Nova Zembla, his rule was born in ice and suffering, in a bid to imagine that it might be possible to triumph over death. Nabokov’s paranoid, broken narrator hails from a nightmare corner of the Gulag.61
In Pnin, Timofey Pnin tries to forget the terrible loss of Mira Belochkin in a German camp, because only by pushing it out of his consciousness can he stay sane. Krug, the imprisoned hero of Bend Sinister, is touched with madness by the book’s narrator to spare him horror and grief in the wake of his son’s murder. Despair’s Hermann, driven mad in the camps, comes to believe in a resemblance between himself and his victim that does not exist. The Gift’s Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “half-crushed by years of penal servitude,” becomes an old man “unable to reproach himself for a single carnal thought.” Humbert, launched into depravity by the death of his childhood love amid the refugee camps of Corfu, lives with nightmares of women gassed in German camps, and ceases to resist even worse impulses. Pale Fire’s author mercifully gives refugee Kinbote the fantasy country of Zembla itself in which to lose his Nova Zemblan past, while he begs to be delivered from “his fondness for faunlets.”62 There is hardly a novel in Nabokov’s mature repertoire that does not have a major character shattered by his own imprisonment or haunted by memories of those who perished in the camps.
10
But what of Pale Fire’s crown jewels? If Zembla is some transformation of Nova Zembla, Kinbote’s attempt to transcend his real history, what kind of crown jewels could be found there? Kinbote, for one, is absolutely sure that the agents hunting on Zembla will never find them. The question dogged readers, though some discounted the jewels as merely a McGuffin intended to render the reader as insane as Kinbote.
History finds echoes here as well. The Soviet quest to gather the Russian crown jewels after the Revolution was widely covered in Western papers; the Bolsheviks’ search was reported to have led to torture and murder. The Soviets had even formed a Commission for Excavations to hunt for hidden Imperial treasure on the islands of Solovki.63 But what treasure would Nabokov have been pointing to on Nova Zembla?
Across time, readers noticed that Pale Fire’s index plays all sorts of games, one of which begins with the entry for Crown Jewels and leads the reader in a circle. Asked in an interview where the crown jewels were hidden, Nabokov made a reference to the index but also answered directly, explaining that they lay on Zembla “in the ruins, sir, of some old barracks.”64
The possibility of actual barracks on an actual Zembla—or what kind of treasure might be concealed in their ruins—was not pursued. But a real-world New York Times editorial from 1922 had more or less taken up the idea.
The week the world first learned of Russians being exiled to the desolate north, the story reported that the Bolsheviks were simultaneously hunting Imperial gems across the nation, “scrupulously guarding the crown jewels and other priceless treasures.” But the paper’s editors feared it would all end in tragedy. In their ignorance, Russian leaders were “throwing into the Arctic Sea or over Soviet borders a culture more precious than the wealth of these hoarded jewels.” The article warned that if Russia did not stop, all its genius would be in exile, prison, or the grave, and the nation would become one vast, “shut-off Nova Zembla.”65
The crown jewels in Pale Fire will never be found by the Russians hunting them because for Kinbote’s author, the real treasure was the creators and inheritors of liberal Russian society, the people lost to the “torture house, the blood-bespattered wall,” the “bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin.”66 The real crown jewels of Zembla—of Russia—lay forgotten in the ruins of barracks in not just the distant, mysterious north, but in countless places across the Soviet Union: the dead exiles, the executed prisoners, a beautiful culture, annihilated.
Solzhenitsyn had seen the camps and lived their terrors. Nabokov, however, could not speak to their daily realities with more than borrowed knowledge. How could he tell the story of a place of horror that could barely be imagined? By constructing a fantastic, unbelievable fairy tale on top of unknowable events—the kind of fairy tale Nabokov believed all great novels were at heart, the kind he fashioned to create Zembla, weaving history into his literary vision.
Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote, imaginary king of an Arctic wasteland, stands tribute to the dead exiles and prisoners of the Soviet camps. A fictional escapee who longs to bear witness to what he has seen, he is too insane to tell his tale. Nabokov, like Solzhenitsyn, created a masterpiece memorializing the suffering of his homeland, but he buried the past so deep in madness that the elegy went entirely unnoticed.