Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (19 page)

On her way home from work that May, Véra Nabokov witnessed just one of the bonfires held nationwide to burn works by Jewish and other “decadent” authors. Books destroyed that evening in Berlin included the writing of Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and the archives of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish advocate for decriminalizing homosexuality—to whose journals V. D. Nabokov had once contributed an article on the subject.
¹³

Closure of gay and lesbian social clubs and cultural organizations had already begun, and Hirschfeld, in America at the time of the inferno, never returned to Germany. At the bonfire, seeing the early signs of what was to come—the singing crowd, the celebratory dancing, and the delight in hatred—Véra moved on.
¹⁴

Nabokov, too, had an early introduction to life under the Nazis, finding the
Sportpalast
where he and George Hessen went to watch boxing matches decked out in Nazi banners and ringed with flags. It was the same arena in which Hitler would make his most important speeches, where the crowds would salute and shout “Heil!” for the movie cameras that captured history while Joseph Goebbels egged them on.

After one fight night at the
Sportpalast
, Nabokov, Hessen (who was Jewish), and another friend rode the tram home next to a Nazi couple. Hessen would later claim that during the ride, Nabokov had toyed with the woman’s hat, intentionally rattling him and delighting in his anxiety. Nabokov denied being the responsible member of
their party, but it is tempting to give credence to Hessen’s account. At a time when political radicals were already being sent to concentration camps, and the Red Cross was reporting on the brutality there, Hessen also remembered Nabokov prank-calling him to ask when their Communist cell would meet.
¹⁵
Nabokov’s sense of humor included a dash of heartlessness, because the danger was real.

Nazi anti-Semitism mirrored sentiment among the more reactionary Russian exiles. When Ivan Bunin received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, the first literary Nobel ever awarded to a Russian, a banquet was held in his honor that December by the Union of Russian Writers. Bunin was living in a run-down house in southern France at the time, but serendipitously was in Berlin for the festivities. Before the banquet, a Russian businessman and publisher announced that his staff had decided that Joseph Hessen and Nabokov—the “kike and the half-kike”—should not speak at the dinner.
¹⁶
Nabokov and Hessen disregarded the threat and presented anyway.

In an anti-Semitic dig only slightly more subtle, émigrés critical of Sirin’s writing suggested that all of the work Nabokov had been doing with the Jewish editors at
Contemporary Annals
had ruined him: “Educated among monkeys, he has become one himself.” And in the wake of his marriage to Véra, it was not just strangers who assigned a Jewish identity to Nabokov. Criticism among his acquaintances about becoming “completely Jewified” after his marriage to Véra had enough momentum to roll on for decades.
¹⁷

Nabokov, for his part, wore his philosemitism proudly. He made a point of entering Jewish-owned businesses with a friend the day after the Nazis first imposed a boycott on them, despite the fact that coming to the attention of the regime was a more and more unpleasant prospect.
¹⁸

Early on, Hitler made a pretense of asking his followers to refrain from street violence, but the half-hearted messages were at odds with official actions. The Nazis had based their campaign on a repudiation of fifteen years of German shame since the loss of the war, but as a
New York Times
editorial noted, one might more
appropriately have to return to the Dark Ages—or Tsarist Russia—to find a comparable complicity in generating race hatred on the part of a government.
¹⁹

As the rising tide of stories about prison, exile, forced labor, camps, and executions in both Russia and Germany found their way into newspapers, Nabokov contemplated his next novel.
The Gift
would become a book within a book: the fictional story of a Russian émigré in Berlin who reveals his genius by writing a biography of another writer, revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky. A real-world hero of the political left for almost a century, Chernyshevsky had inspired generation after generation—not only Lenin but also the Socialist Revolutionaries who were publishing so much of Nabokov’s work in Paris.
²⁰

Spending more than a year researching Chernyshevsky’s life, Nabokov planned to tuck a nonfiction biography into a single chapter at the heart of his novel. From
Despair
’s nod to real-world concentration camps during the Great War, Nabokov moved on to tackle one of the most legendary incarcerations in Russian history.

The broad facts of Chernyshevsky’s life were already well-known to Nabokov’s readers. Arrested for political activity under Tsar Alexander II, Chernyshevsky had been sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1862, where he wrote
What Is To Be Done?
—a novel that served as the template for revolutionary idealism right up to the Revolution itself. After more than a year of imprisonment and a cruel mock execution, Chernyshevsky had spent the rest of his life working in mines on the Chinese border more than four thousand miles from St. Petersburg, then living in exile in Siberia and Astrakhan.

Rather than simply relaying the familiar story, however, Nabokov collected details that had been forgotten by most readers. He traced the improbable path of the manuscript for Chernyshevsky’s famous novel, which was smuggled out of the Peter and Paul Fortress by a doctor but slid off a sleigh into the snow, only to be found by a clerk
(who did not hear Nabokov’s small voice crying from the future to destroy it).
²¹

Nabokov extracted Chernyshevsky’s humanity from the legend—his freckles, his nearsightedness, his failed attempts to follow
What Is To Be Done?
with anything memorable—treating his subject not as a revolutionary juggernaut but as an accident of history, someone “half-crushed by years of penal servitude,” living out his last decades an old man “unable to reproach himself for a single carnal thought.” Parodying Chernyshevsky’s account of a fictional revolutionary who slept on a bed of nails to prepare for the rigors of arrest and imprisonment, Nabokov focused on the frailty and foibles of a real human being, arrested and imprisoned. Fighting despair and helplessness, Chernyshevsky writes to his wife about the wonderful stories he is making up. And his guards relay that at night, their prisoner “sometimes sings, sometimes dances, and sometimes weeps and sobs.”
²²

A strange hybrid of ridicule and tenderness,
The Gift
represented another Nabokov story in which a character who has taken arms up against no one is crushed by banishment and imprisonment. As the threat of the modern camps loomed larger in the world, Nabokov ventured farther back in history, exploring their roots and historical foundations.

Despite his immersion in the past, pressing matters demanded Nabokov’s attention in the present. A visit by Joseph Hessen to Prague that February revealed that Elena Nabokov was seriously ill.
²³
Nabokov agonized over what to do—it was not just his mother he had to consider. Evgenia Hofeld was in Prague as well, along with both his sisters, now married. Olga had a toddler son, Rostislav—the first grandchild of V. D. Nabokov.

More than a decade after Nabokov had promised to bring his mother to Berlin, he was further from that prospect than ever. If he and Véra left Germany, which they had begun to realize was inevitable, it would add even more distance. The prior summer, he had
looked into teaching at a Swiss university, which would have solved several problems at once, but no offer was forthcoming.
²⁴

Yet—even with his mother’s illness, the intensifying Nazi nightmare, and the lack of money, of which there was sometimes more and sometimes less but never enough, the spring was a joyful one. If fate’s most generous gesture had been introducing Nabokov to Véra, it now offered a close runner-up. Into a world of hardship and multiplying hatreds came a gift: on May 10, 1934, in one of Berlin’s private clinics, a healthy son was born.
²⁵
Nabokov walked home from the maternity clinic at five
A.M.
down a street half in sunlight, half in shadow, past windowshop portraits of Hitler and Hindenburg framed with flowers, measuring his newfound love against all the mortal threats arrayed against it.

In a deception that may have owed as much to privation as to skill, Véra had concealed her pregnancy from start to finish, surprising friends so greatly with the news of the birth that the announcement may have been taken for a prank.
²⁶
The couple wrote their friends and family in Paris, London, and Prague with news of the birth of their son Dmitri.

For all the delight his parents took in his arrival, Dmitri’s timing was not propitious. Jews were being forced out of public life in Germany; a Russian Jew was doubly suspect. And as a Semitic foreigner with a tendency to speak her mind, Véra’s associations might not have helped. She had once served as a translator at the home of Albert Einstein, whose pacifism and statements against the Nazis led to the revocation of his citizenship and a raid on his home in search of a hidden cache of weapons—a cache the authorities were sorely disappointed not to find. Reich propaganda cast Véra’s former client as the reviled face of Semitism, with his abstract, difficult theories used as examples of the idiocies of “liberalistic” German university education.
²⁷

Even Hitler’s allies had reason to be nervous. During late June and early July 1934, potential rivals were rounded up during the Night of the Long Knives and arrested or executed. More than eighty people were killed in the summer purge.

Véra kept up with the German papers, but news of the executions—which sailed around the world—might actually have escaped Nabokov’s notice. In the midst of
The Gift
, he had been struck by inspiration. Shifting gears to draft an entire novel in a two-week frenzy, he wrote through three days of arrests and assassinations that would seal Nazi power for more than a decade.

The result of that inspiration was
Invitation to a Beheading
, the story of Cincinnatus, sentenced to death for the crime of “gnostical turpitude” in a dislocated universe. Unfolding in the window between Cincinnatus’s sentencing and his execution, the book takes place in a fortress in which he is the first prisoner—a facility as changeable, incomplete, and improvised as a stage set. Cincinnatus’s individualism is set against the machinations of the prison staff, who conspire against him; his wife and family, from whom he feels alienated by his singular fate; and a strangely promiscuous little girl with a red and blue ball.

In a Kafkaesque punishment for corrupt thinking (an antecedent to George Orwell’s thoughtcrime), Cincinnatus remains perpetually uncertain of when he will be executed. Wondering if he might find a way to avoid his fate, he is told by a fellow prisoner that “only in fairy tales do people escape from prison.”
²⁸

The prison has a circus atmosphere—the same prisoner flips onto his hands and performs a trick upside down. His identity will soon be inverted, too, for he is actually Cincinnatus’s future executioner. Cincinnatus spends his remaining days in a revolving, unstable unreality, but just prior to his beheading realizes that it is possible to step out of the story, that his mind has the power to free him. Just as he is executed, he climbs down from the scaffold amid the outraged cries of his jailers, whose theater he is disrupting, and the universe begins to unravel.

Invitation to a Beheading
, like
Despair
and
The Gift
, marked Nabokov’s third novel in a row with a key character imprisoned not for his deeds but his thoughts, his words, or his identity. The imprisoned characters’ stories ranged from pure history to pure
invention, but refracting the madness of the police state, Nabokov was in the throes of a new theme, and he would spend many more years devoted to it.

Berlin in the 1930s hardly required a dystopian fairy tale—the monstrous comedy of a police state unfolded daily. But by writing his own version, Nabokov could shape the story to his own ends, retaining some kind of control over his circumstances, even if it were only imaginary.

The money from Nabokov’s books and stories was still insufficient, and work for Véra had become more complicated. She had taken Americans on guided tours of the city. She had been employed at the French Embassy in Berlin for a time, and had done translation to pay medical debts from her father’s final illness. And, as always, she was typing and revising Nabokov’s work for him. In the meantime, the family had expanded, and parental obligations pressed at her from one side, while restrictions under the Nazis hemmed her in on the other.

The authorities were willing to overlook those restrictions for a time. Needing a stenographer, the Nazis invited her to take shorthand at an International wool congress held in Berlin, where she ended up transcribing the speeches of four ministers. After she made a point of explaining that she was Jewish, they claimed to be surprised she would think they cared.
²⁹

They did, of course, care deeply. Such work would become rarer, and Véra’s safety was less and less certain. The Nabokovs knew they would have to leave at some point—but where precisely they could go remained an unanswered question. Véra was wary of France, where, despite the experience of her sister Sonia, Russian emigrants faced challenges in getting identity papers and work permits. Where could they survive?