Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (13 page)

V. D. Nabokov hounded his son to keep him accountable, but cherished his company. Their spirited conversations ranged from writerly humor to chess, tennis, and boxing. V. D. Nabokov also promoted his son’s artistic emergence, continuing to publish Vladimir’s fiction and poetry in
Rul
and commissioning work from him for Slovo, the new Russian-language publishing house he helped to establish in Berlin.

When Nabokov returned to Germany in 1922 for his month-long Easter break, father and son had just finished preparing the next set of Nabokov’s poems for publication under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. A half-human bird of paradise dangerous to mortals, the sirin was a creature of Russian legends that serenaded saints and gods. Nabokov imagined it as a firebird that embodied the soul of Russian art.
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On the last Thursday in March, V. D. Nabokov got home from
Rul
in time to have dinner with his son. The two men sparred playfully afterward, as Nabokov showed his father a boxing technique. Changing for bed, they called to each other from their separate rooms, then came together to try to recall the details of an elusive scene in the opera
Boris Godunov
. They discussed Sergei and the “abnormal inclinations” of his homosexuality.
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Nabokov’s father cleaned a pair of shoes, then helped to press his son’s pants. Heading to bed, V. D. Nabokov slipped some newspapers to his son through the slit between two barely open doors. Later, Nabokov would recall the strange sensation of not seeing his father’s face or even his hands in that moment.

The next evening, V. D. Nabokov went out to a meeting at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall for a speech by Paul Milyukov. After nearly a year of public disputes, they had still not reconciled. An overture in that morning’s paper made by Nabokov’s father announced Milyukov’s speech and called for the remembrance of the shared goals that had bound them together in the past. But there was no response.

Speaking to more than 1, 500 people seated in the elegant symphony hall, Milyukov described the role America could play in Russian liberation. After an hour, he called a brief break. As he headed toward the exit, confusion erupted.

A man sitting in the front row stood up, pulled out a revolver, and fired shots toward the retreating Milyukov. A man in the crowd shouted, “For the Tsar’s family and Russia.” Milyukov threw himself to the ground or was pushed down. V. D. Nabokov raced toward the gunman to grab his arm. Nabokov’s father and a friend pinned the gunman. As the friend went to check on Milyukov, V. D. Nabokov continued to hold the assailant.

A second man stepped onstage amid the chaos and shot Nabokov’s father three times. He hit V. D. Nabokov twice in the spine and once with a bullet that pierced his left lung and his heart. In all, twelve shots were fired, killing or injuring eight people. “Curiously,” one paper mistakenly reported, “all were struck in the knees
or ankles.”
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The body of the unconscious V. D. Nabokov was carried into a nearby room.

Five plainclothes police officers present in the auditorium tried to arrest the first gunman. But they ended up fighting with the crowd, who were convinced they were part of the assassination plot and refused to turn him over. The plainclothesmen called in uniformed policemen to whom the Russians finally surrendered the captive.
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Both assailants were arrested, but only by luck. The crowd had been so intent on apprehending the first shooter that the second had almost escaped, edging toward the exit until someone in the crowd noticed him. The first shooter, who had been caught by the journalists, launched into a vitriolic harangue against Jews.
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Beaten bloody by the crowd as he was led across the hall, he was nearly lynched.

A car was sent immediately to fetch family members, but before the twenty-two-year-old Nabokov and his mother could arrive, the police surgeon announced that V. D. Nabokov was dead.

The Berlin Police Murder Commission interrogated the two assailants in the hall and, determining that it was a premeditated assassination, called in the political police. The prisoners, Peter Shabelski-Bork and Sergei Taboritski, turned out to be Tsarist cavalry officers. The gunmen had been living in poverty and working as interpreters at a publishing house in Munich. They had traveled to Berlin with few possessions, including a photograph of the late Russian Empress, and had taken up residence in a modest hotel.
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Shabelski-Bork, undersized and wild-eyed, blamed Milyukov for all Russia’s troubles and admitted to stalking him for years. Without Milyukov, he believed the Tsar would surely have concluded a separate peace with Germany and forestalled the Revolution.
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The day after the assassination, the Congress of Constitutional Monarchists met in Berlin. It opened with a speech in honor of V. D. Nabokov, after which the audience rose to pay tribute to the fallen Kadet. The murder was condemned and a resolution offering condolences to Nabokov’s mother passed, at which point, the police—perhaps not recognizing the distinctions between reactionary
assassins and democratically inclined mourners—showed up and arrested thirty Russians as suspects. Attendees were taken in for questioning but quickly released.
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On March 30 a memorial service attended by hundreds took place in the chapel of the former Russian Embassy in Berlin’s Unter den Linden. The church could not hold everyone, and an overflow crowd formed in the embassy courtyard. Twenty-two-year-old Vladimir Nabokov was there with his mother, Sergei, and the rest of the children. Also in attendance were the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, ambassadors, professors, doctors, journalists, as well as members of the Russian Red Cross, the German Red Cross, and the aid organization for Russian refugees that V. D. Nabokov had chaired and whose latest financial report was published in
Rul
the morning after his death.
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A final service was held on April Fool’s Day at the St. Constantine and Helena Russian Orthodox Church on the outskirts of the city. Inside the narrow stone building with its three onion domes lofting their three lighter crosses skyward, pale flowers crowded the open casket in which V. D. Nabokov lay, his face turned sharp and strange, its boyish plumpness surrendered in death.

Nabokov looked on his father for the last time. Mixed with the tragedy was a terrible irony: three years after outrunning arrest and certain execution by the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov had been shot dead in another country by an assassin intent on killing someone else.

A large photo of V. D. Nabokov, the flower of St. Petersburg culture, ran on the front page in the April 5 edition of
Rul
and was sent out around the globe to more than thirty countries.
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Condolences poured in from Berlin, Paris, and Prague, calling Nabokov’s father “a bright paladin of freedom.” The Union of Russian Jews held a special meeting to pay tribute to the loss of V. D. Nabokov and to request permission to send a delegation to the funeral.

Nabokov’s father was eulogized in sanctuaries and in print by what seems like half the Russian community living in Berlin,
from Russian literary titan Ivan Bunin to former ambassadors and German cabinet ministers. Anton Chekhov’s widow sent condolences.

On the day of his murder, V. D. Nabokov had extended the hand of friendship to Paul Milyukov. After his death, Milyukov had remained with the body all night. The next day, in mourning, Milyukov described V. D. Nabokov in generous terms. The murderers, he wrote, acting on deluded nationalism, had “killed a Russian patriot, who is eternally above their tiny horizon.”
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The murder of V. D. Nabokov ended his dispute with Milyukov. And in the way that history has of making vital questions moot, their fight over the Socialist Revolutionary Party would also be sidelined. Milyukov did not yet know that Vladimir Lenin had just declared a new wave of terror, designed in part to crush any internal support for the Socialist Revolutionaries and “Milyukovites.”
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Rumors circulated in European and American newspapers that the Socialist Revolutionaries who had been rounded up would all be executed in secret. But just days before V. D. Nabokov’s death, under pressure to make international gestures of goodwill, the Politburo had surprised the world by announcing that the Bolsheviks would put their political enemies on trial in sessions open to the public. Those proceedings would rattle Russian exiles around the globe, holding the gaze of the entire world. And the fate of the defendants would linger in Nabokov’s mind for forty years.

The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries opened in Moscow on June 8. The proceedings took place in the converted ballroom of the Noble Assembly, the Great Hall of Columns where Pushkin had fallen in love a century before, a place Nabokov would reference decades later in his commentary on the masterpiece
Eugene Onegin
. Towering pillars and crystal chandeliers stood as reminders of a lost world, one that was receding into the past at an accelerating rate. A table hoisted onto a red-carpeted stage sat facing hundreds of chairs, and above the table hung a red banner with gold
letters stating that the people’s court would safeguard the people’s revolution.
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The trial had ongoing coverage by wire services and European correspondents, with all the information filtered and summarized in the pages of the Russian émigré papers in Berlin. Soldiers stood at the door of the courtroom, granting admission to more than a thousand ticketholders who had been selected in advance. Some of the most famous socialists in the world had come to Moscow to represent the accused.
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The outcome of the trial had already been arranged with these socialists. In exchange for a united front that set aside the animosity the Bolsheviks had generated among revolutionaries in Europe, the twelve key defendants would have the right to choose their own attorneys and would not be given the death penalty.

But Russian delegates in Germany who had negotiated those terms had not cleared them with Lenin, who publicly rebuked the representatives in the pages of
Pravda
. The international panic triggered by Lenin’s displeasure quieted when European attorneys were permitted to come to the aid of the accused as promised.

On the opening day of the trial, one of the defendants rose to deny the legitimacy of the court. After hours of arguing, which one reporter suggested threatened to re-enact the entire Russian Revolution, the charges were finally read.
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The members of the tribunal announced that while they could not be impartial, bias would not create a problem as long as their partiality “was in the interests of the revolution.” Defendants and defense attorneys alike were given leeway to criticize the current government, but they were not allowed to call witnesses. The tribunal refused to grant them the right even to introduce evidence into the court record.

Realizing, only a week in, that their presence was meaningless, the foreign attorneys announced that they would no longer allow their involvement to support the charade of a fair trial. They withdrew from the proceedings and did not show up the next day.
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An orchestrated mob made its way to the courtroom, where eight demonstrators spoke in favor of execution. It seemed for a moment that the defendants might be killed then and there. When the remaining defense attorney complained that allowing insults and harangues in the hall would prejudice the court against their clients, the tribunal declared that the “workers did not go through any law school and do not know the laws of etiquette.” Presiding judge Georgy Pyatakov again dismissed the idea that impartiality was the goal. A defense attorney who chided the court for its bias was jailed for his trouble. Newspaper headlines around the world began to announce that the death penalty was inevitable.

The Socialist Revolutionaries had already lost their European attorneys; now they had lost their Russian counsel. But they remained defiant. They had come of age fighting and going to prison under the Tsar. If it was true that many had taken part in the Provisional Government or fought Bolshevik rule, they had also been steadfast radicals for years and were not easily intimidated.

They had led hunger strikes; some among them had killed. Defendant Abram Gotz had already been sentenced to death once by a Tsarist court in 1907, launching a commuted sentence of exile in Siberia that had ended only with the Revolution. Yet this trial held one key distinction from the other, earlier proceedings: it was a trial by fellow revolutionaries.

The writer Maxim Gorky appealed in print to Soviet leaders, begging them to take the message to Trotsky, writing, “If the trial of the Socialists-Revolutionists (sic) results in murder it will be preconceived contemptible murder.… I have pointed out repeatedly the crime and stupidity of rooting out the intelligentsia in our illiterate and uncultured country.”
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During the last days of deliberations, in a clear bid to have an excuse to offer clemency, the defendants were presented with the opportunity to plead with the court a final time, to save their lives if they would repudiate their party. Not one of the twelve asked for mercy.

Were the Russian people torn by the events taking place in their midst? Not if
New York Times
reporter Walter Duranty’s accounts of the 1922 trial are to be believed. The citizens of Moscow, Duranty wrote, were tired of politics and interested only in getting on with their lives. In his coverage of the trial from Moscow, well on his way to being the elder statesman of Western journalists in Moscow, Duranty suggested that while groups could be ginned up to riot in support of the death penalty, in truth, no one cared what happened to the defendants one way or the other: “Once the peasants followed the Social Revolutionary banner because the Socialist Revolutionaries promised them land. Now that they have it from the Bolsheviki they desire to enjoy its fruits in peace and prosperity. If the Soviets give them that, they may shoot a thousand revolutionary leaders, for all the peasants care.”
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