Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (15 page)

Her name, he would discover, was Véra. And in France, just weeks later, he would write a poem, speculating on whether she might be the “awaited one.” Learning her last name, he realized that he already knew her father, Evsei Slonim, whom he had called on as a potential publisher. A law-school graduate, Slonim had lost permission to practice law in Russia after the occupation had been closed to Jews. He had moved on to forestry, and found great success as a businessman. But having surrendered his land with his country, he was now in Berlin trying to build a career yet again. Véra was the second of his three multilingual daughters. She often sat in the office that Vladimir had visited, yet somehow they had never run into each other.
¹²

Véra was on Nabokov’s mind that summer, but thoughts of her did not keep him from mailing an aching missive to Svetlana. And it did not in the least dam up the continuing stream of poetry, fiction, and now plays, which he drafted in the room on the farm where he stayed up at night to write. One drama,
The Pole
, fictionalized the
final hours of delirium and death faced by Captain Robert Scott’s 1910 polar expedition.
¹³
Another script deviated from reality even further in telling of a determined executioner going after his escaped prey years after the French Revolution.

On his return to Germany that fall, Nabokov also dipped his pen into a universe more familiar to his fellow Russians—one populated with angels and Biblical themes. To that universe belongs
Agasfer
, his retelling of the story of the Wandering Jew.

The story was well known to any religious or literate European of the day. In the Christian legend, a Jewish cobbler chided Jesus on his way to the cross. Because of his cruelty, he was condemned to travel the earth learning repentance and love until Christ’s return. Pushkin, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Hans Christian Andersen, among a host of others, had already done their own versions of the tale before Nabokov’s birth. Even before their efforts, the story had become perhaps the most common way for Christians to explore the global predicament of the Jewish people—the idea being that they had sinned against God by being responsible for the death of Christ, were guilty of rejecting him, or both. As a result, the entire race was said to be doomed to suffer and roam the face of the earth.
¹⁴

While the degree to which the story was used to justify religious violence had waxed and waned, after more than seven centuries as a religious parable and two centuries as a literary trope, the theme had not lost its popularity. It had even moved to the stage in 1906. But the definitive script was Ernest Temple Thurston’s
The Wandering Jew
, which was produced in theaters across England—and even on Broadway, where it starred Tyrone Power—during Nabokov’s Cambridge years.
¹⁵

By 1923, Thurston’s play had already been adapted into a feature film. In it, the man who becomes the Wandering Jew does, in fact, curse Christ on the way to the cross, believing Jesus has filled his dying wife’s head with a fantasy of a cure. He forbids her to follow Christ’s injunction and spits on the Messiah. After Christ condemns him to wander the earth, the man’s beloved dies.

More than a thousand years later, he becomes obsessed with another woman, whom he pursues across the globe in order to possess her, against her will if necessary. During his centuries on earth, he proceeds to take on different identities (a knight, a merchant of jewels). Witnessing the hatred and trauma of the world, he finally reforms and recognizes his sin, becoming holier than the people who, century after century, continue to condemn him—including, at last, the priests of the Inquisition.

The year
The Wandering Jew
debuted as a movie, Nabokov sat down with a collaborator to work on his own version.
Agasfer
opens as an extended monologue meant to accompany a “staged symphony.” Echoing the template of Thurston’s play, Nabokov gave the Wandering Jew many key roles across history. In Nabokov’s case, however, the identities were sometimes real historical figures: in the prologue, the Wandering Jew reveals that he exploded in Judas, who betrayed Christ, and later appeared again as the sexual swashbuckler Lord Byron, accused of incest and homosexuality. Several other eras are mentioned, from Greece and Medici-era Florence to the Inquisition. The Jew’s most recent incarnation was Jean-Paul Marat, a hero of the French Revolution who was also much beloved by the Soviets. In Nabokov’s verses, the Wandering Jew declares that he is learning how to love and that one day his love will fill the heavens, but in the world as it is, he sells the sky for sin.
¹⁶

The identities Nabokov chose for
Agasfer
were rooted in betrayal, murder, sexual perversion, and anarchy. Though clearly an attempt at something more expansive, Nabokov’s portrayal of the Wandering Jew as a sick but remorseful merchant of corruption fell short, particularly when trotted out as the frame for a love story.

His approach incorporated a softer version of stereotypes about Jews that were part of a rising trend of political thought in Germany, where extremists were already drawing similar conclusions, minus Nabokov’s romanticism. Yet perhaps even vaguely human stereotypes were becoming passé by then;
Agasfer
was performed only once.

This early effort for the stage disappeared with little trace, leaving only the prologue for posterity, but it would influence Nabokov’s writing in profound ways for much of his life. A half-century later he would denounce his fledgling attempt at the story, declaring the work
horrible
and swearing that if he found an existing copy, he would destroy it himself.
¹⁷

Vladimir’s romance with the twenty-one-year-old Véra Slonim blossomed. By the time Nabokov returned to Berlin that August, the pair had seen their work (his inventions and her translations) published simultaneously in
Rul
, and had already begun to know each other through their literary output.
¹⁸

What more did Nabokov have to learn? Véra Evseevna Slonim had been born in 1902 in St. Petersburg. Growing up in much the same environment as Nabokov, she had her share of governesses, as well as math lessons and language instruction that led her to speak not only Russian, but also German, French, and English. Her father had given all three of his daughters—Lena, Véra, and Sonia—an education befitting an aristocratic family; but as a Jewish man facing vast occupational and residential restrictions under Nicholas II, he had leaped many more hurdles than the Nabokovs in order to do so.

When the time had come to flee Russia after the Revolution, the three Slonim girls had traveled separately from their father, who left ahead of them to avoid arrest. Lena was twenty years old, Véra was seventeen, and Sonia just ten. Heading south by train, they had ridden through territory where Ukrainian troops were rampaging and pogroms were legion. The train had been filled with Ukrainian separatists, who were likewise fleeing the Bolsheviks but had little affection for Jews. Sleeping on the floor that night, Véra had been awakened by a confrontation between another passenger—a Jew—and a separatist threatening to throw him from the train. Véra had spoken in the passenger’s defense, and the Ukrainian backed down. But more than simply backing down, he and his friends had become
enthusiastic escorts for the Slonim girls, warning them not to get off in Kiev, where battle was imminent, delivering a message to their father, and keeping them safe in a region rife with anti-Semitism.
¹⁹

Véra was a regal blue-eyed blonde who looked every inch the indomitable spirit she was. If her childhood had been similar to Nabokov’s, her response to Russia’s political turmoil had been more proactive. At the start of the Revolution, she had considered herself a socialist. While Nabokov fantasized about revenge, Véra had apparently plotted hers. Classes with a marksman in Berlin had left her a crack shot, and it was known that she carried a pistol in her purse. She told more than one person of her involvement in an anti-Bolshevik assassination plot in the early 1920s—one said to have targeted Trotsky, or perhaps the Soviet ambassador.
²⁰

Véra, like her father, was proud of her Jewish identity. Fiercely intelligent, she turned out to be more than capable of quoting Sirin’s poetry to him from memory. Before long, she began transcribing his work and quickly became his staunchest defender.

Their romance had all the makings of a happy ending; but that fall, hyperinflation savaged Germany, hitting the already-destitute émigré community especially hard. The Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi coup put down the same season, did little to promote German stability. Sliding from being the least expensive refugee hub to a financial catastrophe, Berlin’s cost of living suddenly broke the backs of its many publishing houses and cast bankrupt Russians to the wind, scattering them once more.

By Christmas, Nabokov’s mother could no longer survive in Germany. Elena Nabokov left with her younger daughter for Czechoslovakia, where a government pension was offered to her and other prominent refugees. Olga followed, and, soon after, Nabokov escorted Evgenia Hofeld, a maid, and his brother Kirill as they relocated to Prague.
²¹

Nabokov intended to return alone to Berlin once everyone was settled. Véra was not the only attraction that made Germany seem more congenial for the moment; the Prague apartment was cold,
squalid, and bug-infested. Back in Berlin, Nabokov wrote to his mother soon after her move, describing how in two months, or “as soon as possible I shall have you come here.”
²²

Material circumstances were hard enough, but Elena Nabokov was less battered by them than by the loss of her husband, playing down her financial deprivation as a comfort. In Russia, she explained, she sometimes had woken up anxious about which among her fifty hats to choose on any given day, while the benefit of having only one reduced the choice to simply whether to wear it or not.
²³

However bad things were in Germany or Prague, it was understood that those still in Russia had it worse. Typhus had become so widespread that letters leaving the country were thought to have infected postal workers in Estonia. All Russian mail was stopped and left untouched by German postal employees, who demanded disinfection measures. Berlin newspapers carried stories of mass starvation, of wolves, dogs, and cats all eaten, of towns where two thirds of the residents were dead, of people buried naked because their clothes were desperately needed by the living, of others buried in shallow graves and dug up by dogs, of dogs and wolves hunted by humans until there was nothing left to eat.
²⁴

While the remaining Nabokovs were not yet starving, they were also not together. Nabokov stayed in Berlin, and Sergei went to Paris, even farther from their mother and younger siblings in Czechoslovakia. Both brothers made ends meet by giving English and Russian lessons.
²⁵

Nabokov earned enough money to visit his mother that summer, but if she had any hope of being invited to return to Berlin with him, she was disappointed. What was likely the biggest announcement of that trip was of a very different order: he was engaged to Véra. Elena still dreamed of visiting her husband’s grave, but by this point, Nabokov supporting even himself had become a dubious proposition. After another visit to Prague, he found his coat had been confiscated by his landlady, who suspected he might run out on his rent tab.
²⁶

Vowing to make more money to bring his mother back, Nabokov imagined taking on more students, or even doing manual labor breaking rocks.
²⁷
But the possibility of a traditional job, such as his brief stint in banking, had disappeared with the rest of the German economy. Even if one might have been found, a conventional career, which started out as an already improbable fate for Vladimir Nabokov, had become almost unimaginable.

And still he wrote. In 1924 he began a novel with the title
Happiness
. The cost of living continued to rise, forcing him to load up on clients. Offering boxing, tennis, French, and English several days a week, he careered across the city from student to student, staying up late at night to write. He could not bring his mother to Berlin, but he managed to earn enough to send money to her each month.

Nabokov failed to finish
Happiness
, which was aborted for the time being. But he produced short stories at a steady clip, and thought about how they might be turned into movies. He collaborated on comedy sketches for the Bluebird Theater; he worked as an extra in Berlin film productions. And in the town hall of Berlin on April 15, 1925, he married the twenty-three-year-old Véra Slonim.
²⁸

Marriage provided a more auspicious start to his efforts as a novelist. Yet as he began to work on the first novel he would actually complete,
Mary (Mashenka)
, it was Nabokov’s childhood love Lyussya who gave him a road back to Russia through his writing. With
Mary
, he folded his past and his present into a love song for his native land.

In a very recognizable grim Berlin filled with Russian refugees, the protagonist, Ganin, is a former White Army soldier injured in the Crimea and now living in Germany. The sad minor characters of the Russian emigration surround him—among them a dying poet trying desperately to get to Paris, a young woman surviving by working in a German office, and two giggling male ballet dancers.