Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (16 page)

Ganin discovers that his childhood love, Mary, whom he has not seen in years, is married to his neighbor in the same Berlin pension. She has been trapped in the Soviet Union but will soon come to join her husband in Germany. Ganin is caught up in his recollections of
their time together, their meeting in a gazebo on the family estate, and the jewel-colored panes of glass there. He recalls the sorrow at the end of summer when they parted, and their frustrating reunion in St. Petersburg, with no place to meet alone.

The night before Mary’s return, Ganin encourages her husband to get thoroughly drunk and leaves the man passed out with an alarm clock set for the wrong hour. He abandons his old apartment for good, planning to meet Mary at the train station himself.

Nabokov had marshaled more than enough coincidences to put a bow on his tale. But just before meeting Mary, his young protagonist takes flight, realizing that he has his love and his memory of her in his heart, and these memories suffice and transcend all the shortcomings of reality. Implicit in the book’s end is that Mary, who has lived the drudgery—and horror—of daily life under the Bolsheviks, will stand waiting at the train station utterly alone, met by no one. The narrator, who cherishes the memory of her, imagines that he needs from her only what he already possesses, and apparently owes her nothing. She no longer exists for him except as a figment of his past, where she remains vibrant and untouchable.

Like Ganin, Nabokov would come to be defined by his departures. Having already left Russia to the Bolsheviks and his mother in Prague, his writing now acknowledged the punishing gap between longing and reality. Nabokov was still working to seduce readers with the tenderness or nostalgia that had characterized his early poetry, but he had begun to resist the temptations of sentiment. If
Mary
showed Nabokov looking to the East wondering if everything that had been lost might be recovered, he was suggesting it could happen, but only through art and memory—never in life.

Nabokov described his main character as “not a very likeable person” but was delighted he had been able to slip five love letters Lyussya had written to him into the book.
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Folding the details of his life into the story in such a way that no one but Lyussya and himself (and perhaps Véra) would recognize them, he wrote a letter sharing the secret with his mother.

His self-absorbed protagonist had served as the fulcrum for magic. By tucking Lyussya’s words in with his own inventions, Nabokov did in fact immortalize a sliver of that time, their love, and their lost country forever.

In his second published novel,
King, Queen, Knave
, Nabokov crafted a more overtly unpleasant group of characters. The callow, self-absorbed Franz arrives center stage in Berlin and proceeds to have an affair with his aunt and take part in a plot to kill his uncle. The novel marks Nabokov’s first use of principally German characters and contains only a shadow of the tenderness shown in
Mary
—offering a faint, oblique indictment of Germany that would become more pronounced over time.

The uncle, a flawed, failed dreamer, offers financial backing to an inventor who is crafting more and more realistic mobile mannequins. Discovering how to rattle his audience, Nabokov, like the inventor, was learning to make readers engage with increasingly more lifelike creatures, some of them corrupt and repellent.

Outside of fiction, however, Nabokov could summon more gallant human responses. In 1927 the wife of a Romanian violinist committed suicide, seeking relief from her husband’s abuse. The violinist evaded German legal penalties, but news of his violence spread. Hearing the story, Nabokov and a friend went to a restaurant to find the musician, and drew straws for the privilege of taking the first swing at him. Nabokov won, and chaos ensued. At some point after the whole orchestra joined in, Nabokov, his co-conspirator, and the violinist were briefly taken to the police station.
³⁰
Nabokov had accommodated himself to creating fictional cads, but in dealing with real-life cruelty he retained his father’s longing for justice.

He remained bitterly homesick for Russia. “The University Poem,” written between his two first novels, is a long account by a Russian exile attending college in England. It is a litany of absences and departures: a spring that is not like the Russian spring, the
smell of a bird cherry tree that becomes painful to recall; a girl ripe for spinsterhood who now expects to be abandoned each year by departing students; the Russian narrator who tells himself that return to his homeland will one day be possible, but who may not himself believe it.

A more literal return was, of course, already available to Nabokov. The U.S.S.R. regularly tried to lure cultural figures back, leaning heavily on the exiles’ nostalgia for their homeland and the fact that the collapse of the Soviet government hoped for by so many had failed to transpire. Major émigrés had already heeded the call. The “fairly talented” (in Nabokov’s words) poet Boris Pasternak, novelist Aleksey Tolstoy (a distant relation of Leo Tolstoy), and Andrei Bely (whose novel
Petersburg
Nabokov believed one of the best books of the twentieth century) had all gone home, or at least to live in closer proximity to its ghost.
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Maxim Gorky, who had been living in Europe during the 1920s, made a triumphant return in 1928 to his homeland in time for a massive public celebration of his sixtieth birthday. He would return for good in 1933.

But a literal return to the Soviet Union was not what Nabokov wanted. His fiction—dark enough to begin with—took on a bleaker edge. Nineteen twenty-nine found him creating his first novel with a protagonist tortured by madness.
The Defense
tells the story of Luzhin, a Russian chess grandmaster who succumbs to despair, eventually becoming trapped inside a game that is both chess and life, a game he cannot finish. The narrative mimics events surrounding the death of a chess master whom Nabokov had known who, like Luzhin, had abandoned a championship match, later jumping to his death from a bathroom window in Berlin.
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A few chapters into the book, Luzhin’s father, a writer of books for boys, plans to create a melodramatic tale of his son’s rise to celebrity as a prodigy. But contemplating his structure, he agonizes over the degree to which the war and the Revolution hover in the background of his story. Like Nabokov, the young Luzhin had not been directly involved in Russia’s upheaval. Unlike Nabokov, he
had been turned over to a Svengali who managed his career in Europe. Still, the intrusion of history on the father’s tale—his own memories of starvation, arrest, and exile; the story he does not want to tell—frustrates his attempt to clear the way for a simple, sentimental narrative.

Nabokov already knew by this point that such a story, one stripped of history, was not the kind of art he wanted to make. His first two novels had reflected the Russian past and 1920s Berlin in a traditional way—history and geography provide a backdrop which informs the plots and helps to sketch the characters. But by
The Defense
, Nabokov had begun to think strategically about the intersection of world events and the creation of art, and a more innovative relationship between the two.

The protagonist of Nabokov’s first novel,
Mary
, was a wounded soldier, but with
The Defense
, Nabokov began to move his characters onto the periphery of history’s epic violence, showing how even bystander status cannot protect them from madness or keep them from being hobbled by the past. As a child, Luzhin fears being overtaken by the glass-rattling explosions of the cannon at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. By 1917, the threat has become real, as he stares at windows in fear that shooting will break out.

It remains a mystery exactly what Luzhin has seen in the interval between those two moments—his exterior life during wartime is glossed over in a single paragraph that covers more than a decade. This kind of literary ellipsis would become a mainstay of Nabokov’s style.
The Defense
, in fact, would set the pattern for many Nabokov novels that followed. Never again would he write a book without destabilizing a main character’s past or fate and turning the story into a puzzle.

Despite a handful of critics who assailed Nabokov’s dark worldview, the stylistic achievements of
The Defense
astonished the literary community and sealed Nabokov’s reputation as the leading author of the emigration. Ivan Bunin himself acknowledged that Nabokov had “snatched a gun and done away with the whole older
generation, myself included.” Russian writer Nina Berberova later recalled the amazement of reading the first chapters of the novel in Paris and her sudden belief that everything the exiles had lost would live on in Nabokov’s work—his literary legacy would redeem their very existence.
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Nabokov heard the applause from Berberova and Bunin in France, where there were richer possibilities for émigré authors. And with the support of Véra, the breadwinner of the family, he built enough of a literary reputation that Paris came to court him in the form of Ilya Fondaminsky. An editor with the Socialist Revolutionary émigré journal
Contemporary Annals
, Fondaminsky was a patron saint of Russian émigré literature, known for paying good money to the best authors he could find.
Contemporary Annals
had published Nabokov’s fiction before, but Fondaminsky was hoping for more. To Nabokov’s delight, Fondaminsky agreed to buy his next project—soon to be called
Glory
—unfinished as it was, without conditions, intending to serialize it.
³⁴
It was Fondaminsky’s first extravagant acknowledgement of Nabokov’s genius, but it would not be the last.

Months later, Nabokov finished drafting
Glory
(originally
Podvig
in Russian), the story of Martin, a young man who, like Nabokov, fled Russia in 1919, lost his father at a young age, and played goalkeeper for Trinity College at Cambridge. The young protagonist exists in a suspended netherworld, where émigré Russians are waiting for history to resolve, even as they are slowly left behind.

Martin finds himself irritated by his maudlin Swiss uncle, who wonders if Russia needs a dictator to put things right. The uncle dramatically bemoans the execution of Martin’s former tutor by the Bolsheviks, only to be told that she is alive and well and living in Finland. At Cambridge, Martin meets a professor who fetishizes his own narrative about Russia in a different way, waxing nostalgic over it as others do Rome or Babylon—as an ancient, dead culture. Alienated by these men’s treatment of Russia as completely lost,
Martin longs to engage it as a living force himself but lacks the creative gifts to do so.
³⁵

Person after person in
Glory
(originally
Podvig
in Russian) fails to acknowledge the specificity of experience and human individuality. Even a Socialist Revolutionary, whose heroic border-crossing and espionage Martin admires, speaks of the devastation of Russia and its famines and executions; but at the end of an entire evening spent in Martin’s company mistakes him for someone else.

Martin develops a romantic attachment to Sonia, a Russian girl who has a “half-witted” cousin, Irina. As a normal teenager fleeing Russia after the Revolution, Irina was molested and witnessed deserting soldiers or peasants shoving her father through the window of a moving train. The traumas of the trip and a severe typhus infection took away her ability to speak, leaving her, as one character notes, a “living symbol” of all that has happened. Irina’s survival and damaged state reflect the brutalization of Russia and Martin’s own muteness—his inability to transcend or express the events that have overtaken him. He hides briefly behind a Swiss passport, and on one trip pretends to
be
Swiss, in an attempt to relieve himself of his historical burden.

With Sonia, who flirts with him for a time, Martin invents the fantastic country of Zoorland. They discuss the strange habits of residents in their imaginary land, riffing on its rules and customs in an absurdist take on the Soviet Union. The untalented and unlucky Martin fails to win Sonia’s love, and is likewise disappointed when he finds his only real stab at creation—the magical world of Zoorland—has been turned into a novella by a romantic rival to whom Sonia has described it in detail.

Inspired by the Socialist Revolutionaries he knows, Martin eventually sets out to sneak back into the Soviet Union alone for twenty-four hours, though he suspects his exploit will end badly. One of the anti-Bolshevik activists in the novel is said to have escaped the Soviet Union wrapped in a shroud; Martin, too, plays at death in his attempt to live.

Unlike the professionals, he does not go in the service of any larger cause. No actual mission or agenda burdens his trip with exterior meaning. He is a pure spy, an unaffiliated intruder, harming no one, entering a world clandestinely with no possibility of political repercussions against anyone but himself. He understands the risks—he has already imagined his execution. Like Nabokov himself, Martin tries to use longing to create an artistic experience from historical exigencies, refusing to serve or engage on anyone’s terms but his own. The end of the book takes place among his friends and family after he has disappeared, leaving Martin’s fate unknown forever.
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In
Mary
, Nabokov had nodded toward an absent love living through “years of horror” in the Soviet Union. In
The Defense
, he had mentioned penal servitude, torture, and hard labor camps, but without specifics. In
Glory
, he has Martin briefly imagine himself escaping from labor camps, but only in passing. Concentration camps had started to cast a pall over Nabokov’s novels, just as they were continuing to expand into his century, but they had only begun to shadow his own life.