Waiting for Solzhenitsyn
1
After revising Speak, Memory, Nabokov would spend his last decade moving further away from the world, falling deeper into his created universes. His relative isolation in his “portable Winter Palace” at Montreux separated him from many of the mundane settings and human interactions that had provided a compelling present within which he could conceal the past.1 As a result, the past and the present wrestled for control of his work, and the coherence, often as not, was lost.
He had not yet finished reminding readers of the forgotten past and hypocrisies of the present, but he would do so less and less vibrantly. His last years were split between novels that wandered through decades without the discipline that had focused his best writing and books that addressed death and its aftermath.
Nabokov, like his mother, acknowledged signs and portents, and paid particular attention to his dreams. He had always had nightmares—one from his last years included guillotines set up in his bedroom for Véra and himself. But in the decade after revising Speak, Memory, his nights were also full of reveries that crossed unbridgeable gaps. He dreamed of Sergei. He imagined Edmund Wilson coming up behind him and surprising him, triggering a happy reunion. Another night, Nabokov’s father came to visit, sitting pale and glum on an imaginary beach.2
In between dreams, he completed Ada, Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a novel sprung out of concepts of time and distance that he had been thinking about for years. Beginning with a reversal of the start of Anna Karenina—“ All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike”—Nabokov portrayed an inverted take on family life.
Keeping with his penchant for shocking sexual situations, he moved from the mock-incest scenario of stepfather Humbert in Lolita to a simpler brother-sister pairing. The sibling lovers of the novel, Van and Ada, are two difficult people living in an alternate reality caught up in an intermittent but lifelong affair, their existences studded with bits of lost and reinvented literature and history.
The book, Nabokov’s longest novel, skitters through a maze of puns, wordplay, subplots, and winking references to everything from Chekhov to the book of Genesis. With a loose narrative of the lovers’ grievous separation and joyful reunion stringing it all together, Ada is by far Nabokov’s most rambling work. But as with nearly all Nabokov’s mature writing, a sense of a menacing history operates in the background, hinting that Van and Ada have concealed something in their complex reminiscences. Oblique and unconnected nods to blood-filled mosquitoes in a secret location, capital “T” Terror, the grotesque rape of a young boy by Van, and a “first prison term” at a putative school further destabilize the landscape.3
Van and Ada’s home world, Demonia, is an amalgam of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Earthlike settings. On Demonia, the empire of Tartary rules in the East, and Russians, including Van and Ada’s forebears, were transported years before to settle in North America. Legends persist of another, or real, world named Terra, but belief in Terra is viewed a form of mental illness, and as a psychiatrist-psychologist, Van studies patients who have such delusions. In his youth, Van writes the book Letters from Terra under a pseudonym, recounting these patients’ beliefs, but it is read by only a handful of people.
Yet it is the strange world of Demonia—which Van at times navigates upside down, walking on his hands—that may be nothing more than a figment of Van and Ada’s imagination. As they begin to detail their family’s life on Demonia early in the book, Ada wonders in a parenthetical note if they should describe with such enthusiasm a place which may not have existed outside of the study of dreams. Midway through the novel, Van wonders if he is merely dreaming inside another dream. Elsewhere, Ada says to him excitedly, “You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra?” saying she knows he wants to prove the reality of the other world.4
Decades later, a famous director uses old documentary films to turn Van’s book about Terra into a wildly popular movie. In the last pages of the book, however, after recounting the craze for stories from Terra that briefly promotes Van to fame, our narrators describe all the letters Van receives from thousands of believers who are convinced that their government has hidden the truth from its people. The ideas of those believers bleed into Van’s description of events until it sounds as if it is him talking, and the story that Van and Ada have so carefully constructed across more than five hundred pages unravels: “Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported … ages ago—they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary.”5
Nabokov once again provided, or allowed his characters to construct, a delusion which protects them from reality, even as the epic events of Nabokov’s lifetime—the existence of the Holocaust and the Gulag—cannot be excised from the book. Van and Ada seek refuge in each other and reassemble the last centuries of history in a distorted world in which the apparently mentally ill are the ones most aware of reality, and those who know the truth are subjects for psychiatric study.
The world that Van and Ada spin out of their fantastic imaginings turns inevitably back to the camps—which may have been in the background all along. It seems relevant to note that as Nabokov worked on Ada, newspapers and magazines were busy detailing the ways in which psychiatric analysis was used to punish Soviet dissidents. The practice was hardly new—for decades, the noncompliant had been consigned to mental hospitals. But such psychiatric abuses became common knowledge in the 1960s as Russia resorted again to high-profile trials. Russian writer Valery Tarsis was sentenced to a mental hospital for publishing his material abroad, and his case became a cause célèbre in the West until he was given permission to emigrate.6
Soviet psychiatric “treatment” was ubiquitous enough that it could provide material for comedy. One 1964 editorial on Khrushchev’s invisibility in the weeks after his fall from grace suggested that the former leader himself might have been condemned to the involuntary hospitalization inflicted on so many others during his years in power. During Nabokov’s final year working on Ada, newspapers worldwide reported on a group of Soviet mathematicians who had made a public statement against the institutionalization of their colleague in a psychiatric hospital after he protested the trial of dissident intellectuals.7
But upon publication, Nabokov’s Ada was not viewed as a commentary on modern Russia, and was instead embraced, or loathed, for its fantastic elements, the ways in which it seemed to scramble reality, rather than the ways it echoed bleak current events. A gaggle of studio heads with Lolita on their minds made their way to Montreux, where each took his turn with the manuscript and was given a chance to bid on its film rights.8
As Nabokov’s characters invented an alternate Russia, his sister Elena made plans to visit to see its real-world counterpart. Beginning in 1969, she started making trips to the Soviet Union nearly every year.9 Nabokov, who had cut off collaborating with Roman Jakobson over his visit, seems not to have begrudged his sister her travels.
Nabokov did not go to the Soviet Union, but made plans to visit Israel instead. He had been invited late in 1970 and wanted to see butterflies there; however, the Nabokovs’ interest was an extension of Nabokov’s politics, too. Supporting Israel as an anti-Soviet, democratic state, Vladimir and Véra had cancelled a French vacation in 1967 in protest over the French response to the Six-Day War.10
After anti-Israeli attacks, Nabokov tagged her neighbors as Bolshevik stooges and sent money to the Israeli Embassy in Berne noting as much. No fan of religious restrictions, however, he also contributed to the cause of a former Tenishev classmate in Israel, who was promoting greater freedoms for non-Orthodox Jews in Israel. And he continued to send money to the organizations that had directly helped him: the Russian Literary Fund and the Union of Russian Jews.11
He had only a single note to sound with friends on the international threat of Communism, but for all his stridency, he sometimes did sit silent. Nabokov told a visitor to Montreux that among their left-leaning acquaintances in Montreux, he “just wouldn’t talk about Vietnam.” Véra, coaxing old friends to visit, promised not to “discuss Viet Nam or anything political.”12
But Cold War dynamics lapped at the borders of everything, as politics had for Nabokov’s entire life. Just weeks after Ada’s publication in the spring of 1969, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn were both honored by the Academy of Arts and Letters, under the direction of George Kennan, who had been elected president of the Academy.
Nabokov had planned to attend the ceremony, but Véra developed an eye condition, which prohibited travel. Solzhenitsyn was likewise absent, sitting in Moscow, where he had just turned learned that the Writers’ Union was toying with the notion of expelling him.
Kennan gave prepared remarks, promoting the value of the arts in a troubled era. “What is essential,” he said, “is the will to self-expression with grace and subtlety and power.”13 Though one of the writers he was referencing got credit only for his grace, and the other only for his power, two more self-expressive authors can hardly be imagined.
2
In the wake of Lolita, a field of Nabokovians emerged to quiz and take down the words of the master and puzzle over his cryptic phrases. By then deeply committed to a public façade he had created for himself—the genteel, charming cosmopolitan, incapable of being dented or diminished by history—Nabokov lived long enough to monitor the first wave of chroniclers.
Alfred Appel, a former student of Nabokov’s from Cornell, had by 1970 assembled an annotated version of Lolita, which bracketed the novel with more than 200 pages of literary references, translations of foreign phrases, and attention to recurring themes. Appel had noticed a number of things in the novel that had escaped most readers, and he had the good luck of having a complicit Vladimir Nabokov to point out several more.
Among the fairy-tale history and the Edgar Allan Poe references, Appel identified “the anti-Semitism theme” running through Lolita. It was to Appel that Nabokov mentioned Humbert’s pity for Lolita’s classmate, who was Jewish.14 Appel also pointed out ideas echoed or amplified in Lolita that were bound up with earlier or later works. Trying to explain the novel, he invoked lines from Nabokov’s 1923 version of the Wandering Jew story, but Appel assumed that the many people in Lolita who believe Humbert is Jewish were mistaken.15
Nabokov seemed delighted to have Appel annotating his work—he referred to him with glee in a conversation with a visiting translator as “my pedant.… Every writer should have one.”16 Across their relationship, he repaid Appel’s diligent work with treasures, in the form of friendship and the interview in which Nabokov identified the location of Pale Fire’s crown jewels.
In his hunt for an authorized biographer, Appel would have been a natural choice for Nabokov, but he did not read Russian. And so Nabokov turned to Andrew Field. Field had gotten his master’s at Columbia University and then had been part of a Harvard exchange program with Moscow University. During Nabokov’s final visit to America in 1964, Field had approached him to give him a book acquired during his stay in the Soviet Union—a collection of essays on criminal law written by Nabokov’s father.17
A gift of something so rare could only have warmed Nabokov’s heart, and he reviewed carefully the draft manuscript of a book Field was preparing on Nabokov’s writing. Nabokov invited Field to do a bibliography of his work, and in 1968 Field asked if he might write an actual biography of Nabokov, a question that was answered in the affirmative.18
In addition to being a known quantity, Field may have seemed appealing for other reasons as well. He had by then written about pre-Revolutionary Russian literature and Soviet fiction for several years. He also had an understanding of the circumstances of Soviet life that most young and literary Americans did not. Traveling from Moscow with his wife in 1964, Field had gotten into a disagreement with guards on the Soviet-Polish border. An ostensible problem with his visa escalated into confrontation, and he was arrested. The matter turned into an international incident—the State Department had called a press conference about the young American held captive by the Polish authorities. Field spent ten days in jail before being released on bond. Two weeks after his release, he stood trial on charges of assaulting an officer. Field was convicted and given an eight-month sentence, but the sentence was suspended. He had to wait two more weeks before being given permission to depart Poland. The compelling story made for articles day after day in the first weeks of February, totaling more than a half-dozen wire reports from the Associated Press and United Press International on his detention.19
In subsequent years, Field’s experience gave him a kind of authority in writing about the work of some Soviet authors whose work had been carried to the West. When two dissident writers were put on trial in the Soviet Union in 1966, a trial transcript was smuggled out and published abroad.20 In statements under interrogation, one of the defendants had quoted Field’s statements about his work. Field himself in turn had been invited by The New York Times to review the published transcript of the dissidents’ trial. For these reasons and others, Nabokov may well have thought that he had found a kindred spirit, a hardworking scholar devoted to his work who understood something of the dangers of Soviet life, not to mention anxiety over identity papers and visas.
Field’s visits to Montreux started even before he had taken on the role of authorized biographer. He talked to Nabokov’s friends and relations, asking questions in an attempt to address angles that Speak, Memory had not. Nabokov in conversation could be playfully revelatory, but at times he remained enigmatic.
On the topic of the Holocaust, it was clear that Nabokov had more to say—despite the encroaching infirmities of age, he informed Field that he was in no way done with writing about what had happened. One day, he declared, he would even visit Germany—something he had said he would never do—in order to see for himself the places in which atrocities had been committed: “I will go to those German camps and look at those places and write a terrible indictment.” Field noted that he had never heard Nabokov speak so emotionally about anything.21
With regard to Sergei, however, Nabokov did not venture very far from the material included in Speak, Memory, except to note how very fastidious his brother had been, and that he had been friends with Jean Cocteau, who had once called Sergei’s apartment with a warning that his line was tapped.22
Nabokov had defied history, and when writing his own story he emphasized that narrative arc. Recounting his family’s shipboard flight from Russia in his autobiography, Nabokov had described the old-world gallantry of playing chess with his father as the Bolsheviks fired on the vessel. Nabokov had not mentioned the Cartier staff calling the police on him in Paris in 1919; he did not discuss the lice or the dog biscuits from the crossing that his sister Elena described to Field.
Nabokov did not mind portraying himself in an occasionally unpleasant light, even as “precious”—but the identity of the victim, the displaced person, the man humiliated by history, was one he utterly rejected. Like his father writing a legal article on the topic of solitary confinement while actually serving a sentence in solitary, Nabokov’s persona was built around having triumphed despite history’s betrayals. He would never display his wounds publicly. Asked by Field about the details Elena had provided on their flight from Russia after the Revolution, Nabokov acknowledged that they were all probably true but “wince(d) at such obvious refugee clichés.”23
In his first years of conversation with Field, Nabokov seems to have felt regret for savaging the work of a poet who later died in the Holocaust, and even about the brisk trade in insults that had inspired him decades before to turn the name of critic Georgy Adamovich into Sodomovich. Field would later note that Nabokov apparently felt better about it by 1973, when he insulted Adamovich again.24
But Nabokov did not want his own style of criticism turned on him. Discussing with Field the deconstruction he had done on the reputation of revolutionary icon Chernyshevsky in The Gift, he realized the danger he was in, then paused and pointedly told Field that the biography they were working on “musn’t be written this way.”25
But Field showed every sign of disregarding Nabokov’s injunction. He, too, seems to have been interested in looking beyond the legend crafted for history, humanizing the man, and not taking him at his word. The relationship that had developed between Field and the Nabokovs across several years began to cool. Nabokov claimed to Field that he was listening to nonsense from others; Field protested that he had talked, in many cases, to the people to whom Nabokov had sent him. Field occasionally sailed off into strange places—for instance, that V. D. Nabokov “might have been the illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander II.” Nabokov began to feel misunderstood by Field, who could also be wobbly on dates.26
When Nabokov eventually reviewed Field’s manuscript, his disappointment was profound. The biographer he himself had chosen had not written the story he had hoped would be told. He began marking up the manuscript, correcting items, cutting quotes, asking for changes, and denying statements that had been made about him.
As if in response, for his next novel, Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov turned to yet another mad narrator and the conflicting biographies that can exist for one person. Not surprisingly, the narrator Nabokov chose was a man very much like him—Vadim Vadimovich, a Russian exile and writer.
Fragments of the narrator’s life are fed back to him in strange form—others seem to know a good deal of information about someone they take him to be but whom he does not recognize as himself. But rather than making the supporting characters completely off-base in their descriptions about the narrator, Nabokov often gives them ammunition from his own life.
Vadim Vadimovich sees himself as distinct from the person that the characters in the book believe him to be, but those characters, with striking consistency, know our Nabokov. A bookstore owner recalls that the narrator attended operas with his brother and father, an illustrious member of the First Duma with an Anglophilic manner of speaking. But the mentally ill Vadim Vadimovich is spared the painful memories that Nabokov had about his own father—he maintains that the brother, the father, the opera, the Duma, none of it had anything to do with him. His father, he explains, died six months before his birth.27
The novel touches on bits of Nabokov’s plots and themes, pointing to a scattershot series of possibilities readers had missed in previous books, and showing that earlier hints he had dropped still preoccupied him decades later. In a nod to Lolita, the Russian narrator is accused of betraying his genius and his country to write obscene stories about a little girl raped by a man who, he notes, tucked in among other things, may be “some Austrian Jew.”28 Twenty years on, Nabokov was still directing readers to details in Lolita that had not been explored.
On the same page, readers learn from the same character that two other people in the book—a couple living in the Soviet Union—were separated for years when one of them was sentenced to labor camps and psychiatric treatment for his “mystical mania.”29 The lovers, still wildly infatuated with each other, are reunited in the end, when the patient is “cured” and released. No one recognized this brief subplot in a late and minor Nabokov novel as an echo of an earlier storyline and a way to untangle the shattered wonderworld that is Ada.
The self-referential madness of the narrator crashes again and again against the rocks of Nabokov’s preoccupations from his own life and century. The gentle Jewish-Russian bookseller, with his tender memories of our Nabokov’s father, later dies trying to escape “in bloodstained underwear from the ‘experimental hospital’ of a Nazi concentration camp.”30 Near the close of the book, the narrator survives a clandestine re-entry into the Soviet Union, a quest another Nabokov character had embarked on four decades earlier.
If Nabokov meant these roundabout references as clues to the things readers had not yet found in his work, why did he conceal material that was important to him so deeply in the first place? If he was bearing witness to the atrocities of his century, what could be gained from this stealth method?
During his years as a professor, Nabokov himself had spoken on how to approach works of genius:
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.31
In Nabokov’s universe, art which does not challenge, which does not draw blood, is not art. Out of the relics of tragedy, he created literature which calls on readers to examine not just history but also their own assumptions in their own place and time. But only by diving deep into the heart of his books, only by earning their secrets, is it possible to understand the most profound aspects of what he had expressed.
Near the end, perhaps because he did not know if some connections would ever be made, Nabokov let some tricks tumble out of his sleeves. But still he waited for readers to meet him halfway—he did not strip his art entirely of its deceptions. He repudiated the story Field had created from his life, but he did not have long left to fashion whatever he had left to say himself. Look at the Harlequins! was the last novel he would finish before his death.
3
An endless authorial loop of reflection and masks is appropriate as a final novel for Nabokov’s last years. Field noted later that Nabokov seemed occasionally to get lost in the many versions of himself he had created for his life and his books, to a degree that he may have ended up unsure whether or not any given statement was made in earnest. This was particularly apparent in Nabokov’s tendency to describe Edmund Wilson as a very old friend, “in certain ways my closest.”32 He used the same line repeatedly in a stylized bit of theater after which he would eye the recipient of the comment knowingly.
But for all the façade behind which he alternately hid and revealed himself, Nabokov seems to have missed the friendship with Wilson deeply. Years after his dream of a reunion, at a point when both friends had become very old men recording lists of illnesses in their journals, Nabokov wrote to Wilson after hearing he was sick. Saying that he had reread the whole of their long correspondence, Nabokov noted “the warmth of your many kindnesses, the various thrills of our friendship, the constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery.” He wanted his friend to know that he did not bear a grudge, and no longer held Wilson’s “incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin’s and Nabokov’s Onegin” against him.33
Wilson responded immediately with a note saying he would correct his own Onegin mistakes and point out more of Nabokov’s errors in a forthcoming volume on his Russian articles. He related that he had, in fact, had a stroke and now had trouble using his right hand. Warning Nabokov of another volume coming out which would revisit his 1957 trip to the Nabokovs’ home in Ithaca, Wilson hoped it would not further crimp relations between them. Despite the warmth of Nabokov’s letter and Wilson’s polite reply, after mailing his letter back to Nabokov, Wilson shared his feelings about Nabokov in a letter to a friend, writing about how “it always makes (Nabokov) cheerful to think that his friends are in bad shape.”34
Upstate, Wilson’s account of his trip to Ithaca, came out later in 1971. The book provided vivid details with much interpretation by Wilson. Nabokov, he suggested, had triumphed despite “miseries, horrors, and handicaps” that “would have degraded or broken many.” He described drinking and exchanging erotic and pornographic literature with Nabokov during his visit. He wrote that Véra seemed to begrudge attention to anyone but her husband, and suggested that Nabokov had suffered humiliation due to some unfathomable combination of not being accepted by the real Russian nobility and because of his father’s assassination. Wilson also observed, perhaps more acutely, that Nabokov “has his characters at his mercy and at the same time subjects them to torments and identifies himself with them.”35
Infuriated by Wilson’s description of the visit, Nabokov wrote to the editor of The New York Times Book Review suggesting that if he had known Wilson’s thoughts at the time, he would have thrown him out of the house. The torments Wilson claimed Nabokov had suffered were “mostly figments of (Wilson’s) warped fancy.” Wilson had not lived Nabokov’s life (true enough) and had never read Nabokov’s autobiography (not true). Nabokov explained that Speak, Memory had detailed one long happy exile starting almost from birth—an interesting description of a book containing a line about “the things and beings” he loved most being “turned to ashes or shot through the heart.” In the interest of compassion, Nabokov noted that he would like to disregard statements made by an ailing “former friend,” but Wilson’s insults were a matter of “personal honor.”36
Mutual friends once again took sides. Nabokov had his partisans, but so, too, did Wilson. Katharine White, Nabokov’s former editor at The New Yorker, wrote to Wilson wondering what had happened to the Nabokov they had once known. Tut-tutting the idea of Nabokov’s honor being sullied, she described her sadness at seeing “how an overwhelming ego like his and world-wide success can change a man’s personality so shockingly.”37
The following spring Nabokov wrote again to the editor of the Book Review commenting on the feud, but Wilson had fallen into a precipitous decline. Early in May he had another stroke, and made his way back to his childhood home, where the Nabokovs had visited him in 1955. In his last days he sneaked off to a theater to watch The Godfather. With an oxygen tank and a phone for emergencies, he stayed focused on his next projects—more of his diaries awaiting publication, planned revised editions, and new writing.38 Sitting in his pajamas with his back to the corner and a view through the sheer curtains, he worked with his papers and pills laid out on a long table, his wispy hair splayed into a crown of feathers. By mid-June, he was dead.
But Wilson was not through with Nabokov. In A Window on Russia, which came out that fall, Wilson took on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov as a whole for the first time. There is not much to the entry in terms of insight. He finds Bend Sinister sadomasochistic and admits his inability to finish Ada, but interestingly contrasts “one of Solzhenitsyn’s camps from which there can be no escape” with Nabokov allowing a character to escape prison and death.39
In another posthumous book, the revised edition of To the Finland Station published that August, Wilson finally gave ground on the history that had been the first bone of contention with Nabokov. “I have … been charged with having given a much too amiable picture of Lenin,” he says in the new introduction, “and I believe that this criticism has been made not without some justification.”40 He makes some excuses as to why the original version of the book had unfolded as it had, but then proceeds to acknowledge in a few pages the much more complicated character of Lenin.
It was not to Nabokov’s advantage to spar with Wilson’s ghost. A lukewarm survey of Nabokov’s writing could not touch him; he had trumped Wilson in the literary pantheon. But two years later, discussing a collaborative plan to publish the Wilson-Nabokov letters, he wrote Elena Wilson saying, “I need not tell you what agony it was rereading the exchanges belonging to the early radiant era of our correspondence.”41
Despite their many differences, the two men had not always disagreed. Even in their final private exchange, they had come to consensus on the matter of a celebrated author whom both found personally remarkable but uninspiring from a literary standpoint: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In his last letter addressed to the Montreux Palace, Wilson wrote that perhaps these shortcomings were not surprising: “after all he has nothing to tell but his story of illness and imprisonment.”42
4
Wilson’s indictment is striking, because Solzhenitsyn was wrestling so directly with the intersection between literature and history, and Wilson had committed himself to the creation of a calculus that could describe that region. But his words had little effect; by the time he dismissed Solzhenitsyn, Wilson was no longer a kingmaker in American literary circles, and Stockholm had awarded the novelist of the camps the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It had been a long five years for Solzhenitsyn between the loss of his archive to the KGB and the capture of the Nobel Prize. He had spent months stunned and depressed over what he felt to be this “greatest misfortune” of his life—a more significant blow than even his years in the camps.43 He chastised himself for losing all the survival skills that had preserved him through so much danger. When he was ready to unleash all the history he had collected all on the world, he reasoned, it would be different, but to be caught now, after so many had risked so much to tell him their stories, and then to know that perhaps those stories would never be told, and his countrymen would never be forced to come to terms with “the millions whose last whisper, last moan, had been cut short on some hut floor in some prison camp” was devastating. For a time, he had considered suicide.44
In the end, Solzhenitsyn had decided to adopt as public a profile as possible, in the hopes that high visibility would make it more difficult to silence him. At the same time, however, he refused to associate himself with any movement that might jeopardize his historic and literary missions. Like Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn was not a joiner. Even in the case of two dissidents convicted for the statements of their fictional characters—writers who had been arrested just as his archive had been seized—Solzhenitsyn would not sign a letter calling for the men’s release.45
He similarly turned down a request from Jean-Paul Sartre to meet in Russia, on the basis that as a constrained Soviet writer, he would not be able to talk freely or on equal terms (Sartre’s companion, author Simone de Beauvoir, believed it was pride and shyness on Solzhenitsyn’s part that were to blame).46
Though Solzhenitsyn would not sign on to others’ causes, in advance of the 1967 Writers’ Congress in 1967 he circulated a letter of his own. Condemning oppression, Solzhenitsyn called for the abolition of literary censorship. He wrote with characteristic drama about the high-stakes game in which he was now upping the ante: “I am, of course, confident that I will fulfill my duty as a writer under all circumstances, from the grave even more successfully and unobstructedly than in my lifetime.”47 The letter circulated at the Congress hand-to-hand, creating a buzz that none of the sessions could match. Solzhenitsyn received the written support of nearly a hundred writers. The story made newspapers worldwide.
Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn’s unpublished manuscripts spurred debates and denunciations—he was a tool of the West, he was the hope of Russian writers. His own Novy Mir editors were still torn about what to do with his work.
He was summoned to assemblies of secretariats and committees, at which he presented himself unapologetically and denounced the KGB (indirectly but clearly) for its plots against him. Summoned for yet another meeting to ensure the publication of the first chapters of a new novel, he was on his way to the train station, headed to Moscow, when he inexplicably turned around and came home.48 They could debate the matter with among themselves, he said. They could ask questions of his wife, whom he sent in his stead. He would stay alone and as isolated as possible, and write.
Solzhenitsyn’s public statements guaranteed that no new work would appear from him; but when no new work appeared, it only magnified his prominence. A Pravda editor suggested ominously that he was suffering from mental illness; other sources circulated rumors that he had collaborated with the Germans during the war. The situation could not go on indefinitely. He had only one theme to write about; it was the very theme the authorities did not want addressed. (Nabokov, on the other hand, wrote about the same theme with absolute freedom, but did it so cryptically that it was hardly recognizable.)
Solzhenitsyn’s celebrity was starting to change him; he began to imagine himself capable not just of recording history but influencing it. He had acquired a stature and power few outside the system could claim. But some friends and acquaintances felt that he had paid a price for his rise—that he had begun to lose his endearing humility, and had somehow had become distant and imperious.49
His forty-ninth birthday passed. He finished The Gulag Archipelago with Natalia in a frenzy of typing. They prepared microfilms, which were smuggled out by a courier who ran a small but real risk of being caught. Waiting day after day without knowing if his work had been intercepted was agony, but eventually news came that everything had arrived safely, bringing with it profound relief.50 Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and The Gulag Archipelago had been safely deposited outside Soviet borders. Whatever role history assigned to him, even if he were killed, Solzhenitsyn’s writing would survive. His voice could not be silenced.
But the Soviets could try. In November 1969, the local chapter of the Writers’ Union summoned him to an afternoon meeting and voted to expel him on the grounds of “anti-social behavior,” truncating his official career as a writer in his homeland.51 The decision would have real effects, but it is hard to imagine what the Union thought they would accomplish. By then, Cancer Ward and The First Circle had been published in the West, to monstrous acclaim. He had been hailed as a towering talent, “a major 19th century writer suddenly appearing in the last half of the 20th century.”52 Rumors began to circulate abroad that Solzhenitsyn had something else waiting to come out, something reported in English as “The Archipelago of Gulag.”
The following year, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize. After publicly planning to go to Stockholm, he then reversed his plans for fear he would not be allowed to return to Russia. Though he did not leave the country, the Nobel spurred hope in Solzhenitsyn that his situation might change. It did not, although the prize may have made him almost untouchable. His star had certainly risen high in the West—several biographers were sniffing around. But he issued a public warning to make clear that these people had not talked to him and did not know his life. Their stories were their own.
Not knowing what to do about The Gulag Archipelago for the time being, Solzhenitsyn did nothing. Privately, he worked on his own memoir, which careered between judgment and generosity, and would in time shock many friends. He had also started a series of novels, set in the early twentieth century, which aimed to explain what exactly had gone wrong in Russia before the Revolution.
The Writers’ Union decision was not the only new stress in his life. He was also caught up in the detritus of his marriage. At fifty-two, he had gotten his mistress pregnant, and his wife was reluctant to be left by a man for whom she had risked so much, a man she still loved.53
There were, in fact, many possible reasons behind his hesitation to release The Gulag Archipelago, his biggest weapon. Publication might harm the people who had shared their stories with him. He was anxious to finish his novels on the Revolution before he might be arrested or otherwise kept from writing. And, of course, he realized that publishing The Gulag Archipelago would change everything.
In the end, the question was taken out of his hands. He was spied on, shadowed, wiretapped, and bugged. An acquaintance retrieving Solzhenitsyn’s car for him one afternoon stumbled into the midst of a KGB raid and was brutally beaten.54
The police harassment intensified. Solzhenitsyn’s typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, was picked up by the KGB, who surely knew (if only from the many articles that had by then appeared in the West) the title and character of the documents they were looking for. Voronyanskaya was taken to Leningrad and interrogated night and day for most of a week, until she revealed the location of Solzhenitsyn’s hidden manuscript. Returned to her home under house arrest, she was kept from notifying Solzhenitsyn. Two weeks later, she died in vague circumstances said to involve suicide.55
The KGB took its time but eventually picked up the manuscript from its hiding place. And Solzhenitsyn finally tripped the wire, signaling for The Gulag Archipelago to be published in Paris.
Six weeks after it appeared, the KGB came for him. He imagined being taken to a dramatic confrontation with Party leaders, but after a brief, unnerving prison stay, the Soviets disposed of the thorn in their side by deporting him to Germany and hoping that would be that.
5
The day Solzhenitsyn left Russia, Vladimir Nabokov sat down to write a note welcoming him to a life of freedom. Apologizing for not answering an earlier letter, Nabokov explained that he had a policy of not writing anyone in the Soviet Union, for fear of endangering his correspondents. “I am, after all, some kind of scaly devil to the Bolshevik authorities—something that not everyone in Russia realizes.” He thought it unlikely that Solzhenitsyn had seen his work, but he assured him that “since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write.”56
He explained that he would not make any political statement about the matter—he never made such statements—but privately wanted to extend a warm welcome to the newest Russian exile.57 If Solzhenitsyn were ever in Switzerland, he would be most welcome to visit. Settling soon after in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn wrote to say that fate had brought him to the same country so that the two men might meet.
Solzhenitsyn got a hero’s welcome in Europe, but some commentators questioned whether it would last. William Safire wondered if, “Now that he is out of the Soviet Union … his martyrdom shrewdly denied, cracks will appear in the pedestal we have built for him.” Seeing his writing judged as literature rather than propaganda, learning more about his religious fervor, “(p)oliticians who praise him now for his opposition to oppression may discover, to their dismay, that their chosen symbol does not share their appreciation for democratic principles.”58
Safire’s words soon hit the mark. Solzhenitsyn quickly startled his supporters by establishing himself as a proponent of a kind of Russian nationalist religiosity. The West, Solzhenitsyn argued, was in “a state of collapse” due to a moral crisis created by the Renaissance and exacerbated by the Enlightenment. American government was so weak, it could not even protect itself from a rogue reporter, Daniel Ellsberg, who had stolen and published government documents. Britain could not handle her own Irish terrorists. The West did not hold the answers to Russia’s problems. Solzhenitsyn would soon predict that the young American men who refused to serve in Vietnam would one day find themselves fighting in a war to defend American territory. Presidential aides began to wonder if he might be mentally unstable after all.59
He was damaging his own reputation, but the harm done to the Soviets by The Gulag Archipelago was greater. Nabokov, who read the first volume that summer, would have seen the stories of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the terrors of Solovki, and the details of Lubyanka Prison. He would have read about people whose fates he had mourned, couched in the rhetoric of outrage and offering all the details of their suffering.
He would also have seen that Solzhenitsyn had chronicled the Russian émigré culture of which the Soviet people had known next to nothing. Solzhenitsyn had written about the emergence of “the incredible writer Sirin-Nabokov,” as well as the fact that Ivan Bunin had continued to write for decades in exile.60 Elsewhere, in a less laudatory mention, one of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag witnesses names Nabokov and other émigré authors. After reading their works, he wonders, “What was wrong with them?” How could the brilliant inheritors of Russian culture waste their “unutterably precious freedom” and forget their countrymen?
By the time he read The Gulag Archipelago, Nabokov appears to have surrendered his suspicions that Solzhenitsyn was collaborating in any way with KGB schemes. And the changes wrought by Solzhenitsyn’s arrival seem to have broken Nabokov’s half-century paralysis of public inaction on Soviet matters. Nabokov finally felt that perhaps his speaking out might do more good than harm to those he championed.
Three months after Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in Germany, Nabokov took up the cause of Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident who he noted had been held for years in a psychiatric hospital before recently being sent on to Perm. Bukovsky, who had spent years in medical detention, had most recently been sentenced for turning over case files to the West, offering incontrovertible proof of Soviet psychiatric abuses. Nabokov sent a letter to Britain’s Observer, urging “all persons and organizations that have more contact with Russia than I have to do whatever can be done to help that courageous and precious man.”61
In Bend Sinister nearly thirty years before, Nabokov had mentioned the camps to which Bukovsky would later be sent, calling them “the ghoul-haunted Province of Perm.” But even there his veiled reference to the labor camps had been so oblique that Véra Nabokov had felt the need to make it explicit in a note for the book’s translator.62 Nabokov did not want to recapitulate the miseries of the dying and the dead with the kind of “juicy journalese” used by Solzhenitsyn, but in building something transcendent to memorialize their suffering, the question remains whether he memorialized it or obscured it.63
As Solzhenitsyn headed into Montreux on the morning of October 6 to visit Nabokov, it is not clear if he knew that Nabokov had mocked his work in interviews and dismissed him as an inferior author. Neither is it clear if he knew about Nabokov’s recent overtures on the behalf of Bukovsky—dozens of luminaries had publicly supported that cause, and Solzhenitsyn was focused on his own mission. Given that Nabokov had written to Solzhenitsyn that he had never stopped thundering against the Soviets, it remains unknown what weight Solzhenitsyn would have given to small overtures on behalf of dissidents nearly sixty years after the Revolution.
Solzhenitsyn, like Nabokov, had been attacked for taking help from others while giving only a cold shoulder in return. But he interpreted what he saw as Nabokov’s literary reticence on matters of Russian history as possibly beyond his fellow exile’s control, later speculating that perhaps “the circumstances of his life” had kept Nabokov from being able to serve his country by writing about its destruction.64
Rolling up to the driveway of the Palace Hotel on their way to meet the Nabokovs, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his second wife (also named Natalia) were not clear on whether or not they were welcome. Nabokov had invited them—of that they were sure. And they had sent the date they would stop by, and had made their plans. But they had received no confirmation, and their subsequent phone calls trying to get in touch had not been answered.
For a stemwinding prophet, Solzhenitsyn had an uncharacteristic delicacy in the matter of visits. Years before, he had heard from a former schoolmate who had been threatened with arrest based in part on comments made by Solzhenitsyn. The friend blamed Solzhenitsyn for his close call with prison, but when the latter had risen to fame, the two exchanged letters. Though they realized they had profound differences, they made a plan to meet in person.
Goingto his friend’s apartment, Solzhenitsyn rangthebell, but there was no answer. After an hour spent waiting in the lobby, he wrote a note and started to slip it through a lidded mail slot in the door. As he did, he glimpsed the slippers on his friend’s feet through the slot as the former classmate stood motionless on the other side of the door, unwilling or unable to open it. Solzhenitsyn let down the cover and left.65 He had chosen a different road for himself, but the pain of addressing the past directly was something that he understood.
As he neared the hotel, Solzhenitsyn did not know that Nabokov was waiting with Véra in the private dining room they had reserved for lunch. Any small harm their mutually critical comments had done was surely irrelevant in comparison to the things that admired about each other. But something made Solzhenitsyn pause.
He acknowledged Nabokov’s genius, even as he regretted that his fellow Russian had not used his art to do anything for their homeland. Solzhenitsyn surely wanted to visit. Such a meeting, however, would be complicated. His fondest wish was to move to a rustic cabin somewhere. Did he feel awkward in the face of the luxury setting? Was he concerned that Nabokov, who was not a young man, was ill or indisposed?
Whatever his worries, Solzhenitsyn did not stop. He did not get out of the car. He did not go with Natalia into the private dining room of the hotel restaurant reserved for them and find the seventy-five-year-old Nabokov, who sat waiting for Solzhenitsyn.
Instead, Solzhenitsyn—with the same sensitivity he had shown to his old friend, or perhaps with the same anxiety over the past that had kept his friend from opening the door—drove away on the Grand Rue of Montreux, heading north just a tenth of a mile to a bend in the road that was Rue du Lac. Another mile to go and they were already out of Montreux.
Nabokov was a thoroughly modern writer, yet somehow he himself had become an anachronism. Embarking on a new existence, Solzhenitsyn was as free to leave his fellow Russian behind as the soldier in Nabokov’s first novel had been when he abandoned his childhood love at the train station and sailed into the future on his own terms.
Vladimir and Véra Nabokov sat in the room that they had reserved, where they had hoped to talk with the man whose writing they did not admire but whose bravery they did not dispute, the man who might have understood what Nabokov had done with all those books, if Solzhenitsyn had only known that every one of them was meant to stand against totalitarianism, the man whose exile had somehow persuaded Nabokov to write a public letter during a campaign by Amnesty International in an effort to save a single “precious” life.66
The person best equipped to see through Nabokov’s elaborate games missed his cue, defying the fate he claimed had brought them together. The Nabokovs waited at the table for more than an hour before rising to go. The two men never met.
6
Having entered the public fray on behalf of those still being subjected to Soviet abuses, Nabokov wrote another missive near the end of the year. At the request of American friends who had built a publishing house specializing in Russian-language literature, he sent a telegram directly to Leningrad calling for the immediate release of dissident short story writer Vladimir Maramzin.67 Maramzin had been arrested, and his library containing a copy of Lolita, had been burned.
Worried that there had been no response, the Nabokovs attempted to add a little publicity for Maramzin’s cause by pointing out that a forthcoming piece in People magazine might advantageously make mention of the telegram, which it did.68
The rest of the People interview from the same year is a mishmash of truth and deliberate gamesmanship on Nabokov’s part. He claimed to loathe student activists and hippies, which was probably true—and he expressed regret that Véra never laughed, which was not. Before the interview, as with nearly every interview he did in Montreux, Nabokov had requested the right to review the story as planned for print and to make corrections.
He made these edits often, even after the fact. In collected interviews published as part of Strong Opinions late in Nabokov’s life, it is interesting to see what he chose to leave out. He redacted his own comments about the weight he had gained, his chatter about Tolstoy catching a sexually transmitted disease from a Swiss chambermaid, and insults directed at Pasternak and other writers. “I cannot be made to criticize contemporary writers,” he wrote in a note to his interviewer, as if he had somehow not already done it or not known he had been speaking to reporters when he did so.69
Asked about being a perverse or cruel author in another interview, he had responded, “Is a butcher cruel?” He followed up with an explanation: “If I was cruel, I suppose it was because I saw the world as cruel in those days.”
With the back and forth of choreographed answers and revisions, it becomes impossible to trace the thread back to discover which Nabokov is being discussed at any point in time—the public façade of the esteemed writer; the jocular, teasing host; or the magician who buried his past in his art and waited for readers to exhume it.70 As a result, in his People interview it is hard to know if it was the reporter or Nabokov himself who is responsible for a passage in which Nabokov is described as joining “the current of history not by rushing to take part in political actions or appearing in the news but by quietly working for decades, a lifetime, until his voice seems … almost as loud as the lies. Deprived of his own land, of his language, he has conquered something greater.… He has won.”71
What had he won? Fame, money, and artistic immortality, without a doubt. But the world consigned Nabokov to the artful prison he had built for himself, and his books, every one of which was meant to fight tyranny, were seen as arch games in a self-referential hall of mirrors.72
Nabokov did not live to see the fall of Soviet Russia. But in the autumn of the missed meeting with Solzhenitsyn, other Soviet exiles made their way to Montreux to visit with him. He spent long hours translating Ada into French; he entertained a representative from McGraw-Hill, his American publisher. He continued to plan new novels and started on The Original of Laura, which would be completed in his mind but never on the page.
He continued to argue over Andrew Field’s biography into 1976, by which point relations were fully adversarial. And no wonder Field struggled—the manuscript of the corrections running back and forth between the two parties had transformed into the literary equivalent of Dickens’s Bleak House. Nabokov was simultaneously doing useful things—clarifying details, making corrections, and editing things that referred to people behind the Iron Curtain—while also cutting out the kind of tidbits that he liked to retract from interviews, now with the intercession of lawyers.
Primed by combat with Field, Nabokov lashed out at critic John Leonard in the last weeks of his life, with just a hint of a threat of legal action over a line describing a legendary forger as “a liar on such an extravagant scale, a Nabokov of Peking.”73 Such matters were hardly worth his time, of which there was not much left. He was caught up in real or imagined slights against his personal honor as if he were still living in pre-Revolutionary Russia, which he nearly was—or at least as close to it as he could get.
He had one eye on eternity, and for all those who dismissed him as a gamesman or chastised him for tormenting his characters, he predicted that another view would prevail in the end: “I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.”74
The immortality Nabokov had achieved for his writing could not add a single day to his life. He woke one night, thinking he was dying, and screamed for Véra, who did not hear him. That evening was only a dress rehearsal, but it was no secret that death was coming. He had fallen while hiking the year before, and from there slowly began to slide into the world of intermittent illness. It was as if he were returning to his childhood quinsy and pneumonia, but with sleeping-pill-induced hallucinations instead of his own wild imaginings. Fever and urinary tract infection had their way with him. After sentencing characters to die into their stories, leaving the narrative permanently incomplete, he was slowly expiring without any prospect of finishing his last tale.
In the end, there were none of the grotesque details he loved to recount from Gogol’s demise—the alternating warm and frigid baths, the invalid’s convex belly, the leeches bleeding him, hanging from his nose, slipping into his mouth.75 Nabokov died the plainest of deaths, with recurrent fever, bronchial congestion, and fluid in his lungs, all of which refused to give ground.76
He had planned to go to Israel the May before, but postponed the trip; he had hoped to get to America again. And although he did not believe it would ever happen, he had dreamed of returning to Russia. But Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, who loved small jars of fruit jellies; who resented Pasternak’s success as if it could annihilate his own; who was rumored to have wanted to challenge his father’s killers to a duel; who had mocked people who ended up dying terrible, unimaginable deaths; who had once referenced the current plotline of the comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D., to an astonished scholar; who stitched more than a century of camps and prisons—real and invented—into his writing, died a distinctly un-Nabokovian death. It was perhaps as good an end as a modern writer can have, short of not dying: before nightfall, with attention to his comfort, in the company of his wife and son, with no question that his works would survive him.
7
Nabokov’s life had been surrounded by politics and intrigue from birth, and was bound up in many of the major events of his century, which he preserved through magical flight and escapes that he knew were not the norm but a gift. In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that so many people in his world managed to survive, chief among them his wife and son.
Dmitri Nabokov spent his early adulthood on two things his father had studiously avoided—driving and music. In addition to becoming an opera singer and a race car driver, he was also the preferred Russian-to-English translator of his father’s Russian works. He would later become the shepherd of his father’s literary estate, defending Nabokov’s work and personal reputation fiercely, arguing for a fundamental gentleness and kindness that did not always show up in others’ depictions of the man.
Véra Nabokov, who had made herself as invisible as possible to the public during her husband’s lifetime, survived more than a decade after his death, carrying on Nabokov’s literary legacy, supervising translations, working hand-in-hand with a new biographer to establish a life story for Nabokov that might erase Field’s.77 She kept a grueling schedule but survived to the age of eighty-nine and would eventually earn her own biographer. She died in 1991, living just long enough to witness the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
8
When the U.S.S.R. imploded, the doors to history opened. Closely guarded records became available, and a broader view of twentieth-century Russian history emerged. If the portrait of 1917 and 1918 became more complicated than Nabokov might have liked, he would have been heartened by documents establishing Lenin’s ruthlessness from the beginning.
Open archives also made it possible to match prisoner files to existing oral accounts, and to begin to fill in the landscape sketched by The Gulag Archipelago and individual memoirs. The files, of course, were unreliable in their own way—charges were often trumped up; confessions were often not confessions at all. History, it turns out, is complex. But it is not entirely opaque.
Wanting to preserve the enigma of Pale Fire, the Nabokovs had made clear to their publisher in 1962 that nobody should know if Zembla really exists. But what of Nova Zembla—the Arctic destination of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1922? What about the camp from which Solzhenitsyn, too, had dreamed of hearing a story, the place to which Gulag memoirists said a thousand prisoners were sent each year, but none returned?
In addition to the Times of London and New York Times articles, the mines of Nova Zembla are mentioned in dozens of publications of the 1930s, from Pennsylvania’s Tyrone Daily to Popular Science. An American Federation of Labor Gulag map from 1951 shows two camps on the southern island; a Routledge atlas from 1972 shows just one camp at the top of the northern island. In 1943 a Polish officer named Andrey Stotski recounted his own experiences on Nova Zembla in a memoir excerpted and translated into English under the title “I Dwelt with Death.” Classified CIA reports from the 1950s include pictures from Nova Zembla and testimony gathered from POWs after the war, who described in detail the kinds of mining done there, from a copper-pyrite quarry down to the ore-processing plant on the northern island. Robert Conquest references the “virtually unrecorded ‘death camps’” of Nova Zembla in his 1990 book The Great Terror: A Reassessment78
Yet after years of access to Soviet archives, the human rights organization Memorial began pulling camp records together to create a master listing of Gulag sites. It became clear that the Nova Zemblan accounts from prisoners of war were problematic. Despite the tidal wave of anecdotal evidence that circulated inside and outside Russia in the Soviet era, no wartime files on camps and mines on Nova Zembla have been found. A paper published by Memorial indicates that the details of mining from the prisoner-of-war accounts of the 1940s also do not match up with geological information about Nova Zembla, and suggests that these accounts must be considered with skepticism.79
Records do show that in 1925, a Nova Zemblan (Novozemelskaya) geological expedition tested ore at a number of places north of the mainland. Five years later, OGPU officers brought in prisoners to begin mining. The expedition landed not on Nova Zembla proper, but on Vaigach Island, the southernmost island of the Nova Zemblan archipelago.
Conditions were miserable, especially during the first winter of 1930–31, when the prisoners had to set up camp on an inlet. Mines were established on the other side of the bay, and altogether almost 1, 500 prisoners were ferried over from the mainland. In winter, a series of posts connected with rope ran across the bay from the settlement to the mines, so that prisoners could find their way in poor visibility. In bad conditions, those who lost their way simply died.
The main benefit to the hard work on Vaigach was that every day served on the Nova Zemblan archipelago counted for two days off a prisoner’s sentence. Due to the polar bears, prisoners were sometimes given rifles to protect themselves.80
One minor rebellion sprang up, but it was put down quickly; there was no question of escape. The climate was brutal, but treatment was often better than prisoners would receive at other camps. In the evenings chess and performances were permitted. A small brass band composed of prisoners once played the “Internationale” for a meeting of the local indigenous Nenets.81
In the fourth year of operations, water flooded the mine. By 1936, the Vaigach experiment had come to an end. All the prisoners were pulled away to work more promising deposits or to help build rail lines to new Arctic camps. The Vaigach Expedition may well have been responsible for decades of legends about the severity of Nova Zembla, but it never set foot on Zembla proper.
The 1922 stories about Socialist Revolutionary prisoners sent there are also likely mistaken. Lining up the Nova Zembla camp stories with news accounts turns up another piece of the puzzle. The 1922 stories relayed that because too many prisoners were escaping from the mainland camps around Archangel, the Socialist Revolutionaries would be shipped en masse to Nova Zembla. The announcement of the prisoners’ deadly fate was made on the cusp of autumn, but by that point the climate likely made transportation north problematic.82 Heading north of the mainland would have been ill-advised, so prisoners would likely have been held until spring.
But despite the stories that ran in The New York Times, The Times of London and the accounts of Berlin’s own Rul, no camp records unearthed to date indicate that any prisoners were sent to Nova Zembla the following year either. Where did they go?
The question dovetails with a piece of history that is already on the books. In June 1923, just as the seas cleared enough for navigation, Solovki received its first large batch of Socialist Revolutionary prisoners.83 In retrospect, it seems likely that rumors of a Nova Zemblan destination for the prisoners who had disappeared the previous fall were just that—rumors. The stories were true in spirit—prisoners were, in fact, being sent to a desolate northern island, and it was a place that would soon become a nightmare of horrors—but it was in all probability not Zembla they went to but Solovki.
Later, when stories leaked out in the 1930s and 1940s of people sent to hardship posts in the Arctic to build new mines, confusion reigned again. The name Vorkuta circulated, but until the 1931 expedition of prisoners sent to create it, the Arctic city of Vorkuta had not existed. People did not know where it was. Western sources from the Tribune de Genève to The New York Times accurately relayed that new mines were being worked by tens of thousands of prisoners at a place called Vorkuta. But they mistakenly located Vorkuta on Nova Zembla.84 And so Nova Zembla—which even before the Revolution had been a setting for expeditions, fairy tales, and starvation—continued in its legendary half-real, half-imagined status.
But what about those who were actually prisoners at Vorkuta, who reported terror at the prospect of being sent further north to Nova Zembla, the site to which as many as a thousand rogue thieves were shipped off each year? While it is possible that they were taken to Nova Zembla and left there, there are no records of functioning mines or prisoner transports sent to them. Those condemned thieves may have been exported to other penal labor sites or simply executed.85
But the stories in and outside the camps proliferated. And so Nova Zembla entered the gulag lexicon as the place that allowed prisoners to imagine that no matter how bad things got—and conditions were atrocious at Vorkuta—there was always someplace farther north that was worse.86
Revisiting stories of starvation and cannibalism in the fishing villages of Nova Zembla during Nabokov’s childhood and the accounts of the apocalyptic Tsar Bomba in his later years, even Nova Zembla’s undisputed history has attained mythic stature. No wonder the islands intrigued Nabokov for decades, from his 1941 poem mentioning Nova Zembla to the Nabokov River he references there in Speak, Memory, and Pale Fire’s very idea of a refugee hailing from its desolate shores.
Nabokov had told his classes that all great stories were fairy tales, but he also knew, as well as anyone, that their horrors were real. How fitting that in the history of the Russian camps, the islands were for a time the false double of two of the system’s most notorious and lethal outposts, Solovki and Vorkuta.
9
By the time of Véra Nabokov’s death, her husband had been rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, and many of his works had legally entered the country.87 Dmitri Likhachev, who had reported to Solzhenitsyn about his time on Solovki for The Gulag Archipelago, was instrumental in bringing Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin to Russia.
He likewise brokered discussions about returning the family home on Bolshaya Morskaya to Nabokov’s son Dmitri.88 But in the end the first floor of the house became a museum dedicated to Nabokov’s life and writing. Visitors can see first editions of Nabokov novels, his Russian Scrabble game, and his butterfly net. Battered samizdat copies of Nabokov works that once circulated underground are kept under glass. A copy of the century-old architectural plans for the house is posted; a seminar room with a film projector shows documentaries, including one in which Solzhenitsyn comments mildly on Nabokov. Solzhenitsyn’s remarks are brief, stressing how unexpected Nabokov’s work was, coming as it did on the heels of his nineteenth-century Russian predecessors. Solzhenitsyn does not add, as he did elsewhere, that to reach Western readers, Nabokov had broken with the past and lost his Russian roots.89
Not long after the aborted meeting with Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn retreated to the hills of Vermont, ranting against the spiritual wasteland of the West and writing about the past, eventually outliving the political regime he despised. In 1994 he returned to Russia in triumph, knowing his writing had changed the course of history. He had engaged the enemy, and he had won.
But engagement had a price. His strident opinions on America, on Western governments, and global history he did not know well permanently dented his international reputation. Compelled by unfolding events to rush translations of his most important works, he was unable to take the time and attention that Nabokov had lavished on his works in other languages. Despite the Nobel Prize that Solzhenitsyn had won—and Nabokov had not—the political aspects of his writing seem destined to overshadow its literary merits.90
Westerners who saw Solzhenitsyn as committed to freedom were dismayed to watch him embrace Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official who has held on to nostalgia for aspects of the Soviet past. Solzhenitsyn went on to represent a Russian nationalism that made many squirm. Making a public stand in favor of reinstituting the death penalty in 2001, he pointed out that even Vladimir Nabokov’s father, an anti-death-penalty activist, had reversed himself on the issue in 1917 when Russia had been in jeopardy.91
Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008. One year later, excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago became required reading in Russian high schools, and the Moscow road formerly known as Big Communist Street was named after Russia’s most stalwart anti-Communist.92
Today in St. Petersburg, a few memorials and museums have found a place in the cityscape. A slab of rock from Solovki sits on a pedestal in front of the House of Political Convicts. A memorial to the founder of the Cheka, that forerunner of Soviet secret police organizations, has become a museum on the history of all the political police in Russia across the centuries. Across the Neva River from Kresty Prison where Nabokov’s father was held (where others are held today) sits Mikhail Shemyakin’s monument to victims of political repression. A pair of sphinxes face each other, with a stone book and barbed-wire crown between them. Taking just a few steps around to view them from the perspective of Kresty Prison reveals half-skull faces and protruding ribs on the statues’ reverse sides.
Germany has created many more memorials for the dead of its camps, though today no train runs from the Hamburg suburb of Bergedorf out to the stop on the grounds of the former concentration camp at Neuengamme, which remained a prison until 2003.
Walking from the rebuilt section of track to the center of the camp, perhaps the most surprising thing is how the acres of the site stretch on and on—a single human being represents a very small presence. Fence posts remain, marking camp boundaries, but the barbed wire and even the fencing are gone. The memorial can be visited twenty-four hours a day. Vandalism happens, but camp staff reports that it is rare.93
Taking the train from Germany to Prague in 2011, it is possible to find a car and driver and head into the countryside up and down the hills for hours with a translator who helps to locate a particular retirement home in the far eastern Czech town of Šumperk. On the upper level of the complex lives a man who was once a Gulag prisoner in the Arctic.
A visit to the archives will reveal a copy of his NKVD file that will prove it, and then army records can confirm it, in case doubt lingers.94 Paperwork shows that the man spent nearly two years at Vorkuta before being released early for the war effort, as so many were, into the relative comfort of crossfire on the eastern front in World War II.
Phoning ahead only leads him to say not to come, that no one wants to talk to such an old person. But pressed, he relents, and seems to like having guests. He introduces his wife as well, who will also soon turn ninety, and she talks about being deported to work in Germany during the war.
Asked about his time in the Gulag, the man offers up stories, including a description of a stint mining ore for blacktop on Nova Zembla, where, he explains, prisoners were sometimes given an extra ration offish. He stops being at all reluctant. Offering homemade pickles and encouraging guests to stay and listen, he answers every question, sharing what he can about the camps, detailing his war service, spinning his own stories to replace whatever it is he cannot remember or cannot say, talking all about his time on Nova Zembla.
Riding back to Prague with the translator, it is four hours to the heart of the Old Town and Charles University, where Vladimir Petkevič teaches. The great-grandson of V. D. Nabokov and grandson of Nabokov’s sister Olga, Petkevič is generous with his time, and talks about his beloved grandmother, whom nature or a privileged childhood had rendered incapable of performing even simple tasks, and his father, who died in despair in communist Czechoslovakia at the age of twenty-nine.
Reminded that Nabokov had once written a scathing letter to Roman Jakobson, the linguist who visited the Soviet Union before its collapse, Petkevič will not defend Jakobson, though he admires the man’s work deeply. “I fully agree with Nabokov,” Petkevič says, still angry at the Western intelligentsia decades later. “I almost hated them. They didn’t understand anything. We did, we who lived here. We knew what it was like.”95
Flying into Geneva, and taking the train around the lake to Montreux, the station sits just blocks up the hill from the Palace Hotel. It is possible to get a room in October, the time of year that Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were supposed to meet—though probably not the Nabokov Suite, which is generally booked well in advance by visiting Russians.
One floor above the lobby, the doors stand open on the Salon de Musique, the room where Nabokov waited for Solzhenitsyn. Regulations for the preservation of historic buildings are strict, so not much has changed since Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn’s failed meeting. The present recalls the past.
Except for some tables and chairs, and a massive chandelier, the Salon de Musique is empty in the offseason. For all the temptation to imagine literary ghosts, no spectral breeze lifts the sheer curtains. Nabokov no longer sits believing that Solzhenitsyn will come, or wonders what they will say to each other, two fiercely independent Russians with incendiary subjects, proud, suspicious, and opposed to Revolution. People book the Nabokov Suite, but no one expects to see Nabokov wander through, and no one thinks that Solzhenitsyn will arrive, young and still feigning humility, or old and hemmed in at the end by as much pride as Nabokov.
Suggesting to Nabokov that Solzhenitsyn had nothing to write about but imprisonment, Edmund Wilson never realized how thoroughly Nabokov had mined the same theme. Solzhenitsyn recorded the suffering of prisoners; Nabokov imagined the ways they had tried to escape.
In the end, both recorded the toll of political oppression on the human spirit. From The Gift’s immersion in penal labor under the tsars to Despair’s nods to internment camps from World War I, the death camps of Pnin and Lolita, and, always, “the torture house, the blood-bespattered wall” of the Soviet Gulag, Nabokov had tucked a record of the inhumanity of concentration camps into work after work, chronicling their crushing effects on those savaged by history.
He had used his mother’s arts to carry on his father’s legacy, indicting anti-Semitism and condemning repression. He had subjected his characters to cruelty and mockery and violent ends, but preserved their dreams and their veiled pasts, which continued to levy a terrible toll in the present. The roots of nearly every Nabokov story lie in “the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world,” a tenderness that “is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness.”96 Teaching readers a new way of interacting with a story, speaking to them over the heads of the characters, Nabokov ridiculed social novels that aimed to transform whole societies, but he believed it possible to awaken a single reader to the collateral damage of real events—the human lives fractured and forgotten.
Only the long view reveals Nabokov’s strategy. As a casualty of history who found a way to escape, magically, again and again, he let his most famous characters find a parallel refuge in insanity. And he, too, hid his own treasures and grief inside his stories, with their created worlds cobbled out of the brittle past: the dead of the camps, the prisoners’ wild tales, the tenderness for those he had mocked, the reflections of a world steeped in cruelty, his sorrow at everything that had been lost. Whatever tales Nabokov wished to tell, whatever history he hoped we would remember, must be earned. It is inside his stories that he sits and waits.