Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (23 page)

A book (also called “The Eternal Jew”) put out the same year by the Nazi Party showed images of ghetto Jews purportedly carrying out “criminal activities” amid their “bad smells and piles of filth,” while employing “the glittering world of perversion as a way of unnerving and enslaving” others. The Nazis had moved from mass propaganda projects extolling the virtues of Aryans to trying to create a groundswell of anti-Semitism solid enough to act on. The
exhibition was condemned in newspapers in Europe and America, but was visited by hundreds of thousands of Germans before it began a tour of Germany and Austria.
²⁶

Details of the exhibit and book’s Wandering Jew theme echoed
Agasfer
, Nabokov’s own literary treatment of the legend from fourteen years before, but drew the stereotype in a cruder fashion, characterizing the representative Jew as the harbinger of political instability and a sexually perverted merchant of corruption for more than a millennium. But where the twenty-three-year-old Nabokov had held out the possibility of redemption and love for his broken traveler, the Nazis framed the myth to argue that Jews were congenitally defective, beyond salvation, and a threat to the entire world.

Whatever use the young Nabokov had made of cultural stereotypes floating in the ether in the 1920s, many things in his life had changed by the fall of 1937. In
The Gift
, Fyodor notes how Zina, at first irritatingly but then more persuasively, slowly shifted his callousness about anti-Semitism into a deep sensitivity, leading him to regret that he had previously ignored hateful comments from friends and associates.
²⁷
Nabokov had undergone a parallel transformation. He had been married to the proudly Jewish Véra Nabokov more than a decade, and he had a three-year-old son who had been sitting at the center of a public campaign of hate, becoming a potential target of an apparently bottomless reservoir of malice.

By the end of 1937, the Nazis had begun to show that malice in new ways, expanding their network of concentration camps. The 4, 800-person facility at Dachau was demolished, and a larger complex erected in its place. In 1937, Buchenwald opened in the forested hills just northwest of Weimar. On the outskirts of Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen concentration camp was receiving prisoners too.
²⁸

Nabokov, who had already referenced Russian camps and prisons in his stories, began to weave the German nightmare into his work. The specter of violence turns to actual bloodshed in “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” a short story written that summer. A Russian man who wins a vacation at a charity ball ends up traveling in the countryside with
a group of Germans. Even though his companions turn out to be unpleasant and crude, he believes that the trip holds great promise for him, that something wondrous will be revealed. Though the Germans force him to sing along on their strident songs about tramping along fearlessly through the countryside, the Russian manages to see the world through his own eyes. He finds the transcendent landscape of the story’s title and a room with a view of it where he makes plans to stay.

But the Germans refuse to leave him to his own future. They force him back onto the train, where they kick him with their heavy boots and then torture him with a corkscrew and a Soviet-inspired improvised whip. The man survives, but returns to the author of the story, unwilling or unable to continue the narrative. He begs to be released from humanity, and the author lets him go.

Nabokov had written “Cloud, Castle, Lake” in 1937 while he was with Véra and Dmitri at Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. Despite the proximity to Germany—they were just a few miles away—the Nabokovs had been out of harm’s way. But how long the rest of Europe would remain safe had become a real question; German anti-Semitism and political upheaval had already crossed the border. Under pressure from Hitler, a March political coup in Vienna ushered in the German annexation of Austria and the creation of as many as 185,000 new refugees, including Sigmund Freud.

Within days, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for a world conference on the question of Jewish refugees. That July, representatives of thirty-two nations met in Evian-les-Bains, France, to consider the fate of the Jews. Hitler cannily expressed hope that those who had been expressing “such deep sympathy for these criminals” might finally take action. He was, he said, more than happy to send Germany’s Jews to them, on luxury liners if need be.
²⁹

Some observers, at least, understood how vital the meeting was. On July 4, Independence Day—two days before the Evian conference—
New York Times
correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick called on Americans and the American delegation to see clearly what was
happening. “Can America live with itself,” she wrote, “if it lets Germany get away with this policy of extermination, allows the fanaticism of one man to triumph over reason, refuses to take up this gage of battle against barbarism?” She noted that willingness to fight a war was not even required to do the right thing in this case—only a commitment to provide shelter for persecuted people so obviously in need. It was, she argued, “a test of civilization.”
³⁰

As the conference unfolded, civilization would fail that test. America, for a brief time, would fill her annual quota of bringing in more than 25,000 German Jews. But the State Department, which controlled the visa process and worried about incoming anarchists, would soon reduce immigration of German Jews to just a fraction of the number permitted under U.S. law.
³¹

At Evian, Swiss representative Heinrich Rothmund explained that Switzerland feared being swamped by Jewish refugees it did not want. Argentina’s representative spoke glowingly of the benefits that refugees bring—and then right after the conference, his country passed a new law limiting immigration and giving preference to “assimilable immigrants.” While countries tossed the hot potato of sheltering the refugees from one to another, a group of fleeing Austrian Jews languished in the middle of the Danube River, with both Czechoslovakia and Hungary refusing to admit them. Only the Dominican Republic proclaimed its shores open to the refugees.
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As Germany pointed out with glee and Machiavellian accuracy, the rest of the world wanted to criticize Germany without having to address its own anxieties over Jewish refugees. Instead of improving the situation, the Evian Conference seemed to worsen it.
³³

This willful hedging of the world’s democracies in the face of Third Reich cruelty had consequences in Germany and abroad. Shortly after the Nabokovs returned to Paris after a year in southern France, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jew, shot German Embassy staffer Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Within hours, anti-Semitic lectures were advertised in public flyers on the streets of France, accompanying the already-active sticker campaign calling for the
removal of Jews. Germany’s official news service immediately suggested that German Jews would be punished in retaliation.
³⁴

German newspapers trumpeted news of the shooting the next morning, attributing it to a conspiracy of “International Jewry.” Vom Rath died two days later, and the country exploded in orchestrated rage against Jews. On November 9 and 10, during what would come to be called
Kristallnacht
, Germans and Austrians smashed windows, burned more than two hundred synagogues, and looted thousands of Jewish businesses. Nearly a hundred Jews were killed outright; thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps
en masse.
³⁵

Véra had escaped Germany with Dmitri in time, pulling out her cousin Anna Feigin in their wake. Sonia Slonim had left long ago for Paris. But Véra’s other sister, Lena Massalsky, remained in Germany.

In an official capacity, or perhaps for old times’ sake, friends of Taboritski, V. D. Nabokov’s assassin, began sniffing around. Lena had converted to Catholicism, but it would have been no secret to Taboritski that she was Jewish. The Nabokovs wrote to friends, asking for assistance getting her out. But outside help was not forthcoming or had become impossible, and Lena stayed in Germany.
³⁶

Kristallnacht
was witnessed by the world, with foreign correspondents reporting from Berlin and other cities on the death and destruction, as well as recounting the enthusiasm shown by some Germans at the humiliation of their Jewish neighbors. The Nazi government assessed a billion
-Reichsmark
fine (roughly four hundred million dollars at the time) on German Jews for the damage done to the nation. And weeks later, Neuengamme, a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp complex, opened for business on the grounds of an old brick factory near Hamburg.
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The same month, Nabokov stepped away from the theme of camps, prisons, and murderous narrators to blaze through his first English-language novel. The story of two brothers who live their lives at an
emotional remove from each other and their homeland,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
takes place in mid-1930s Western Europe. When the celebrated author Sebastian Knight dies at the age of thirty-six, his younger half-brother V. tries to bridge the distance post-mortem by diving into the relics of Sebastian’s life and writing a biography. Just as Nabokov was contemplating a move to England or America and trying his hand at a language in which he could build a future as an international writer, the fictional exile Sebastian had surrendered his native Russian for English in an effort to find an audience. Not surprisingly, V. delivers his brother (and his author) from culpability, insisting that Sebastian’s love for his lost language and native land was whole, and that Sebastian’s writing in English was no betrayal.

Written on luggage laid over a bidet in the bathroom of the Nabokovs’ Paris apartment,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
also incorporated the flotsam of Nabokov’s own relationships. Disconnected in childhood, mysteries to each other even as adults, V. and Sebastian are not entirely separate from Vladimir and Sergei Nabokov. Without fully mirroring himself or Sergei, Nabokov manages to tuck in fragments of each: Sebastian, too, attended Trinity College at Cambridge, where he wore Nabokov’s trademark canary yellow sweater. He betrayed his love for a woman who had been his creative muse and partner by having an affair. Sebastian, however, also recalls elements of Sergei: his awkwardness with sports and “feminine coquetry.” The book reads almost as if Nabokov wanted not so much to represent himself or Sergei directly in a character, but rather to bridge the distance between them by fusing their worlds.

Their real-life worlds did not merge so smoothly. Sergei spent the 1930s bouncing between Paris and the Austrian castle of his partner, Hermann. It was not uncommon for the brothers to see each other in Paris, and Sergei would sometimes drop by his brother’s apartment. But the essential awkwardness between them never vanished. Nabokov still saw his brother as indolent and ineffectual,
squandering his talents. For his part, Sergei found Véra difficult and believed that marriage to her had damaged Vladimir. Had Sergei accepted the idea, put forward by some émigrés, that Véra’s Jewishness had changed Nabokov or his writing for the worse, or did he simply dislike her? Either way, Sergei reported relief that Véra and Dmitri had had made their way out of Germany, telling his sister Elena that they would have been in dire straits had they not escaped when they did.
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At the end of Nabokov’s novel about brothers, V. declares that he himself
is
Sebastian Knight, or Sebastian is him, or perhaps they are both a person who remains unknown to either of them. Nabokov’s story pivots on the necessity of recovering the past, our terrible inability to do so, and the invention of stories that preserve memory, even memories that we have spun in part ourselves. The narrator somehow succeeds in bridging the chasm inserted by death, fusing with his idea of his brother so completely that he ends up uncertain whose story he is telling.

As with
The Gift
, however, Nabokov had once again preserved political history
sub rosa
for posterity. In Sebastian Knight, a supporting character named Mr. Silbermann meets V. by chance on a train. A dealer in leather goods, he speaks English with a heavy accent (“Dat is not love! Ppah!”). He knows several other languages, and even spoke Russian long ago but has forgotten it. He pointedly asks V. if he is a
traveller
, too, and turns out to be an almost magical sidekick who offers to unearth crucial information on cue for the narrator. Silbermann turns up a few days later with the names and addresses of four women who might be the mystery lover responsible for the destruction of Sebastian’s life.

Silbermann’s arrival marks
Sebastian Knight
’s turn toward history. With his big nose, past travels, and forgotten languages, like some saintly version of the Wandering Jew, Silbermann’s mystic presence redirects the novel to larger matters.
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Using one of the names provided by Silbermann, V. makes a trip to Berlin, where he meets a young Jewish-Russian woman and her family in Nazi Germany in
1936. The family is in mourning. Her brother-in-law has just died; we are not told why. The narrator realizes immediately that the woman is clearly not Sebastian’s cruel paramour; rather, she is unimaginably beautiful, graceful, and generous. From his
post-Kristallnacht
vantage point, Nabokov presents a loving, idealized Jewish family from two years earlier, a portrait clearly defying the real-world German propaganda of the day. The family cannot know, as Nabokov did, what lies ahead, any more than Nabokov in 1938 could imagine everything that would follow
Kristallnacht
. But by putting them in his story, he has immortalized them and denied the Nazis the last word on their lives.