Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (22 page)

Unwilling to leave Véra, unable to forget Irina, Vladimir Nabokov also struggled to stay sane. Working through the worst point in
his life after his father’s murder—this crisis, unlike the prior one, completely of his own making—he ended his affair and returned to writing
The Gift.
¹¹

The first installment of the novel, in which a young Russian poet searches for his place in 1920s Berlin, had already appeared in Fondaminsky’s magazine. In subsequent chapters, the writer Fyodor contemplates writing a biography of his lost father, who disappeared in Siberia in 1919. But he finds himself daunted by the monumental story of his father’s life.

After several false starts, he finally meets Zina, a beautiful half-Jewish émigré who admires his work. Realizing that what he wants to write is the life story of Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Fyodor throws himself into an innovative biography—the biography that Nabokov had researched and composed years earlier.

Having taken on the saint of Russia’s revolutionary movement, Fyodor finds himself castigated when the biography comes out. In Nabokov’s world—our world—Chernyshevsky had faced mock execution, followed by hard labor and exile. But in the fictional world of
The Gift
, Chernyshevsky had been subjected not to mock execution but the real thing. Fyodor has added more than two decades onto his cramped and miserable life.

What Fyodor invents as fiction in the novel is historical truth in our world. He imagines what Nabokov knows: the rest of Chernyshevsky’s life has much to offer readers who are willing to see him as a human being subjected to political oppression rather than an idealized political symbol.

Through Fyodor’s experiences, Nabokov recreated the small world of the emigration and its critics. And in a gesture of charity to the Russian émigré community, despite the widespread condemnation of Fyodor in the novel, his talent does not go unnoticed. But even those who denounce Fyodor can no longer touch him—he has Zina, and he has delivered on his gift.

Chapter Two of
The Gift
was nearly due by the time the Nabokovs got to Cannes that July, but Nabokov was not finished revising it.
He improvised, and instead sent Chapter Four—the biography of Chernyshevsky—north to Paris.
¹²

A colleague of Fondaminsky’s received the chapter and refused to publish the novel out of sequence. First he demanded Chapter Two. Then he read the chapter Nabokov
had
sent and responded in horror. Not only would they not run the chapters out of order, the magazine would not run the biography of Chernyshevsky at all.
¹³

What was Nabokov thinking? For the editors of
Contemporary Annals
, Chernyshevsky was a martyr whose life had been stolen, a legend who had given everything for his ideals and his country. He had fought for the emancipation of the serfs, helped promote many of the most gifted writers in Russian history, and faced arrest, mock execution, labor camps, and exile for his ideals. Nabokov, it would have been glaringly apparent to the editors, had been born with great talent and privilege and, unlike Chernyshevsky, in the face of the brutality afflicting his homeland, had risked nothing for his country, refusing to take a political stand or even to engage in any literary movement beyond socializing in writers’ groups that located themselves farther and farther from the tempestuous politics of the day. While the facts from his life of Chernyshevsky were scrupulously accurate, Nabokov’s attention to the revolutionary’s failings, the author’s unforgiving checklist of a hero’s pettiness and pathetic aspects, smacked of mockery.

Nabokov had insulted his most reliable benefactor at a time when he had few sources of income. But he wrote saying he would not bend. If Chapter Four were refused, he would not allow any more of
The Gift
to be published in the pages of
Contemporary Annals
. He was grieved by the decision; he had admired the journal for its independence and the range of political viewpoints and literary styles it had published. But he would not change a word; he would not cut a line.
¹⁴

Two weeks passed without surrender on either side. Nabokov’s stance was doomed; he could not afford his pride. Whether Véra or his own better judgment made the point clear to him, Nabokov
capitulated in the end, mailing off Chapter Two. He had no job, he had lost his mistress, and he had savaged his marriage; now his masterpiece would be hollowed out by censorship. The overdue chapter arrived at the last possible moment to meet the printer’s deadline.
¹⁵

While Nabokov rehashed nineteenth-century Russian history with his editors, twentieth-century Russia continued to writhe under Stalin’s purges. Foreign correspondents reporting what they could uncover about the trials got a surprising amount of accurate information directly from Soviet publications, which trumpeted each new set of tribunals as victories for the people—up to and including the purge of the Press Bureau itself. One
New York Times
reporter summarized the groups of people who had been eliminated in the prior year, starting with heroes of the 1917 Revolution and continuing through the generals of the Red Army, the leaders of the NKVD secret police, top staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Communist party leaders around the country, officials of the Young Communist League, agricultural managers, and thousands of railway administrators. The purges had become so widespread, the story claimed, that officials had to settle for cooks and nurses when hunting for new saboteurs. A wire report from October 1937 announced that the head keeper at the Moscow Zoo had been tried for connections to spies, playing loud music at the park, and for feeding badgers sausage stuffed with strychnine.
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Prosecutors argued that in a complicated effort to sabotage the Revolution, doctors had injected their patients with syphilis, and people on the street had conspired with foreign assassins, spies, and snipers. Those who had seemed to be Communists to the core had been secretly working for decades to destroy Soviet Russia from the inside.

Outsiders became confused. Stalin’s purges were so extensive that their legitimacy broke the back of credulity on a daily basis.
But why would the accused confess publicly, as they had at trials of some of the most senior Soviet officials? Left-wing sympathizers and those who looked to Russia as a potential ally against the growing German threat hoped fervently that some truth existed that could excuse the burgeoning atrocities.

Émigrés had a clearer idea than most of what was happening in Moscow, in part because not everyone who was arrested was shot or sent to the camps for life. Accused foreigners were sometimes released without being sentenced or after serving short terms. As they managed to leave the U.S.S.R., proof of trumped-up charges leaked out, along with more details on interrogations, confessions, and executions.
¹⁷

While Nabokov remained outside political activism, several in his circle did not. Alexander Kerensky in Paris continued to issue statements as a spokesman for anti-Soviet Russians. Responding to growing concerns about Russian stability and German aggression in 1938, Kerensky hit the lecture circuit in America. Sporting a tall crew cut and a gold-rimmed monocle, he talked about the essential sameness of the Soviet and Nazi dictatorships. Kerensky suggested that the way of the future was not a choice between fascism and communism, but a rededication to democracy. He predicted (as he had for more than a decade) that democracy would return to Russia. Asked for a specific date, Kerensky demurred that he was no prophet but offered that the Russian people might taste freedom in as little as four months or as long as four years. That November, Kerensky would also come out forcefully against Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest and radio personality in the U.S. who blamed the Russian Revolution on a conspiracy of Jewish activists and bankers.
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Inside Russia, people knew both more and less than exiled Russians abroad. Critical analysis of conspiracies fabricated by Stalin and his secret police did not find its way into the Soviet press. But signs of the scope—and the absurdity—of the purges were everywhere. An official given honors in the afternoon could be arrested the same night. Not wanting to affiliate too closely with those
targeted by the purges, Soviet citizens learned not to ask about friends or colleagues who had disappeared.
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In the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, even the nineteen-year-old Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his compatriots—ardent Soviets all—knew enough to see through the show trials, laying the blame for the problems of the state at the feet of Joseph Stalin. If only the Revolution had followed the trail blazed by Lenin, the argument went, Russia’s suffering would never have been so enormous. It was an argument that could be made only quietly, among trusted friends.
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Like the true believers inside Russia at the close of the 1930s, leftists in Europe and America who had cheered Soviet progress or been sympathetic to the Communist Party found themselves confronted with evidence of a system gone haywire. Edmund Wilson’s
Travels in Two Democracies
, based on his Russian trip, appeared in 1936. Its critical details did not endear him to the Soviet Union—and they embarrassed Walter Duranty—but Party officials should, perhaps, have been grateful. Wilson included unflattering observations but censored his realization that the U.S.S.R. had become a totalitarian state.

A polarity emerged which seemed to offer Europe only Communist Russia or Nazi Germany as a political model (although for a time, Mussolini had his own shadow contingent). In June 1936, France feinted left and elected Léon Blum, its first socialist, and first Jewish, president.

Nabokov had moved to France in the midst of Blum’s one-year tenure, which included battles over bitterly contested workers’ rights. French conservatives played to racial and political anxieties with the slogan “Better Hitler Than Blum.” Though Blum had been born in Paris, one National Assembly member suggested he was not really a Frenchman but “a subtle Talmudist.” In turn, Trotsky, in Mexico after being expelled by Stalin, condemned Blum for not being revolutionary
enough
. Blum was, Trotsky claimed in a statement echoed by others, the Kerensky of France.
²¹

By the time Nabokov said a final good-bye to his mistress on the French Riviera, Léon Blum had resigned under economic and political pressure. Writers on the left throughout Europe had finally begun to openly denounce the Soviet system. André Gide detailed Soviet human-rights abuses in 1936 with
Return from the U.S.S.R.
A year after his statement that the Soviet Union represented the moral top of the world, Edmund Wilson, too, acknowledged that Soviet justice was a sham. He joined a group of writers with Communist sympathies who labeled Stalin a liar and a villain.
²²

John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings may have rethought their sympathies after visiting the Soviet state, but never having offered a kind word about Soviet rule, Vladimir Nabokov had nothing to recant. In two decades of exile he had not given an inch on the question of Bolshevik legitimacy, and he had never subordinated his writing to any political party. He admired his father’s ideals; but unlike V. D. Nabokov, he stood apart from the fray.

During his trip in England at the beginning of 1937, he had visited his alma mater to have lunch with an old Cambridge classmate, who in his student days had supported the Bolsheviks. Nabokov braced himself for the rationalization he knew would follow: the surgical attempt to separate Stalin from Lenin, the willingness to mourn the victims of the current purges, without any acknowledgment, as Nabokov would later put it, of “the groans coming from the Solovki forced labor camp or the Lubyanka dungeon” under Lenin.
²³

If, arbitrarily, the world of writers were reduced to just two camps—those who dreamed of reinventing literature and those devoted to reforming society—Nabokov would not have hesitated to choose the former. But in
The Gift
, he managed to sidestep the choice. Pulling off a spectacular literary invention, he also addressed the roots of Russian revolutionary history, pointing to the fruit of that legacy in the twentieth century—the very reason for the existence of the émigré community.

He also immortalized the world of Berlin’s Russian émigrés, who had largely surrendered that city by the time the book was finished.
The émigrés, however, were offended by his transparent portrait of their world, and by his lionization of the genius protagonist who seemed like a standin for Nabokov himself.

Even under a pseudonym, the condemnation of Georgy Adamovich, a critic particularly loathed by Nabokov, was recognizable in
The Gift
. Charged with malicious insult of a fellow writer, Nabokov responded that in creating immortal literature, if it became necessary to “take along for the ride, free of charge” contemporaries who would otherwise be forgotten by history, those he had selected should not complain.
²⁴

Nabokov was doing for, or
to
, his literary compatriots what his character Fyodor had done to Chernyshevsky. He had immortalized the human eccentricities and the tiny world of the Berlin exiles before their lives could be reduced to sentiment and hagiography. He would not wax nostalgic about them, but neither would he let them vanish into the past.

In September 1937, Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini paraded their alliance in front of a million people in Berlin. Two months later, an exhibit opened in Munich called “The Eternal Jew.” The title, the German name for the Wandering Jew legend, reinforced the idea of the dislocated, immortal Jew, morally and politically depraved, at the helm of a Bolshevik revolutionary tide threatening the world. The exhibit was developed in direct response to a New York exhibition called “The Eternal Road,” which recorded the persecution of Jews throughout history.
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