Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (42 page)

In its completed form,
Pale Fire
would tell the story of two men: John Shade, an American poet who is murdered, and Charles Kinbote, who steals Shade’s verse as he lies dying. Shade’s magnum opus, the 999-line rhymed poem that Nabokov had written before starting the rest of the book, appears in the novel in its entirety. The rest of the story unfolds through Charles Kinbote’s increasingly eccentric commentary on the poem, which establishes him as a narrator who cannot be trusted with facts or young boys.

Along with the two main characters in
Pale Fire
, Nabokov also gave a starring role to a mystery land called Zembla. While the characters inhabit a mundane campus very similar to Nabokov’s Cornell, the narrator Kinbote believes he is actually the exiled ruler of the fantasy land of Zembla, a king who has escaped from a guarded prison and made his way to America. Kinbote cares only for what he imagines will be Shade’s masterpiece—the story of lost Zembla and
its hidden crown jewels, which are so well concealed that Kinbote thinks they will never be found, even though Soviet-style agents have been tearing apart the Zemblan royal castle in search of them.

Kinbote’s stories of his homeland include a Communist-style revolution that shattered his happy reign—along with a kitchen-sink hodgepodge of scenes borrowed from real-world literature, history, and even a Marx Brothers movie.
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Highlights include royal genealogy, murder, and Kinbote’s homosexual longings and pedophilia, as well as his prowess at ping-pong. A dramatic account of his escape from Zembla takes up some thirteen pages of the novel and leads him through a tunnel, backstage at a theater, into a racecar, across mountains, and onto a boat before his arrival in Paris.

Despite being a fellow professor at the university where Shade teaches, Kinbote exists in a fantasy world. He hears voices, imagines conspiracies, and his misunderstanding of Shade’s poem distorts it into something unrecognizable. Shade’s story of love for his wife and the suicide of his daughter are twisted by Kinbote into a chronicle of Zemblan history.

People in the campus town tell stories about Kinbote behind his back and call him a lunatic to his face, though he hardly seems to need their encouragement to gin up paranoia. He reads a confusing note pointing out his halitosis and thinks someone has realized he has hallucinations. Kinbote is the kind of person who wishes Shade would have a heart attack to provide him with an opportunity to comfort his ailing friend.

Shade is the only one who seems to have any sympathy for Kinbote; even Shade’s wife avoids Kinbote or shoos him away. Across the course of the book, the ex-king’s affairs go awry and his young tenants leave him. The other characters in the book realize Kinbote is ludicrous, and readers easily see how pathetic he is, but he remains oblivious.

Yet, like Pnin, Kinbote is more than a comic figure. Everything readers learn about him seems to have an off-kilter or freakish
aspect: his fondness for table tennis, his left-handedness, his star-crossed relations with young men at the college where he teaches, his predilection for even younger boys—a predilection from which, like Humbert with girls, he longs to be delivered. But beneath his self-aggrandizing melodrama, his royal fantasies are laced with grief. He dreams of suicide and absolution from the horror he carries. He writes of the temptation to end his life with a handgun, but manages to keep himself alive long enough to make sure the tale of Zembla is recorded for posterity.
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Kinbote’s mad take on his dead friend’s poem parallels Nabokov’s struggle to interpret
Eugene Onegin
. And his despair over exile from a country devastated by revolution directly echoes Nabokov’s grief about Russia. Yet the reality of Zembla is more baffling to deconstruct, and Nabokov seems to have wanted it that way. When he was distraught over plans for
Pale Fire
’s pre-release publicity, Véra sent a seven-point list to his publisher on his behalf, directing exactly how the fantasy land should be presented. The Nabokovs particularly balked at labeling Zembla as “nonexistent,” insisting that “Nobody knows, nobody should know—even Kinbote hardly knows—if Zembla really exists.”
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What
is
Zembla? Readers found themselves trying to make sense of the place: was it meant to be real in the novel, or only a figment of Kinbote’s fierce longing? In one of the first reviews of the book,
New Republic
critic Mary McCarthy noted the existence of “an actual Nova Zembla, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, north of Archangel.” The link was not a stretch—McCarthy also noted that
Zembla
had been used centuries before by Alexander Pope in reference to the islands as a metaphor for the strange and distant North.
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But in the dissection of the book that would obsess readers for the next fifty years, the world did not realize that
Pale Fire
’s mad narrator was not the first king of Zembla. Centuries before Charles Kinbote was a wild spark in Nabokov’s eye, a real person had held that title, and he had had a harrowing escape of his own—one that
Nabokov seems to have known about for decades—from a kingdom at once real and imaginary.
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Of the three voyages that intrepid Dutch sailors made to Nova Zembla at the end of the sixteenth century, the first found luck, the second misfortune, and the third an equal measure of both. All three were piloted by William Barents, who dreamed of finding a Northeast trade route from Europe to China. On the first voyage, the sailors had managed to venture into the great unknown and land near the islands’ northern tip. On the second trip, one sailor had been seized unawares and devoured by a polar bear before the fleet was blocked by ice on Zembla’s southern end.
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And in May 1596, the third time Barents set out from Amsterdam, an initial attempt to find open Polar Sea met only icepack. The sailors looked up into the sky and saw three suns bracketed by a triple rainbow.
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The optical illusion in the sky was new and strange, but the situation on the water was terrifyingly familiar: more and more ice, and again, polar bears. After nearly a month of disputes over which direction to proceed, the expedition’s two ships went their separate ways. As they sailed on, the bears would scale the ice floating near the ship again and again to try to climb aboard, or swim around the boat in search of food.

Following the rocky shore, they rounded the northern tip of Nova Zembla. But ice set in early that season. It soon broke the tiller and the rudder, shattering their smaller boat against the ship. After five days of struggling against the frozen sea, Barents was locked in place.

Amid thunderous booming, ice floes tipped the boat. The ship itself seemed to be coming apart; it was lifted higher and higher out of the water, while even larger icebergs drove in from the sea. After two weeks in fear for the destruction of his ship but holding on to a faint hope of escape, Barents realized that they would have to spend the winter on Nova Zembla.

With a six-month freeze ahead of them, the men knew they needed a cabin. No trees grew on the islands, yet if they were to dismantle their boats entirely, they could never sail home. Searching for driftwood that might suffice, they stumbled onto a gift: whole trees that had been swept from the mainland to Nova Zembla. The trees lay miles away from the ship; the men built sleds to haul them back.

In clear weather, they made progress, but when visibility was poor, they did not venture far, mindful that the bears that could smell the sailors long before the men could see them coming. The ship’s carpenter died before a cabin was even begun. A cleft in a hill had to serve for a tomb, as the ground was too hard to dig a grave.

After two weeks of labor, they raised the main beams of a shelter. They continued work on the house for another seven days, and were trailed by the bears as they carried goods from the ship to the crude structure. As if the hungry bears were not enough to manage, a barrel of beer left overnight froze in the arctic air and burst its bottom. For the former, there were noise and bullets; for the latter, there was no harm sustained: it was so cold that the beer had frozen as it ran out of the barrel, and they were able to pick it up and save it. In the house, they set up a clock and a lamp, which they fed with melted polar bear fat.

In the cabin, nominally sheltered from blizzards, they peeked out at a polar moon that rode the sky day and night. A layer of ice more than an inch thick formed on the walls inside the house. Once the two-month polar night set in and their clock froze, they could not tell day from night without tracking the tally of the twelve-hour sandglass they had brought from the ship.

By mid-December, they ran out of kindling, but managed to dig around outside the house for wood they had left there. Christmas came and went, bringing with it foul weather that trapped the men inside and piled snow higher than their house. Their shoes froze solid and became useless, forcing them to wear several pairs of socks under loose clogs they crafted from sheepskins. Running out
of wood again, they began burning non-essential possessions. The only way to see outside was to look up the chimney.

Once the weather calmed, they cleaned their filth from the cabin and gathered as much wood as possible. They then recalled that it was January 5th, Twelfth Night, when Dutch tradition held that the world turned upside down and the normal order of life would be reversed.

Celebrating with wine they had left, the men made pancakes and were given some of the captain’s biscuit, which they soaked in the wine. Pretending that they were back home, they imagined themselves at a royal feast. Following the holiday tradition, they drew lots. And so it happened that on January 5, 1597, for the hours up until the stroke of midnight—a span remembered for four hundred years even as his name was lost to history—the gunner on William Barents’s third expedition drew the winning lot and reigned as the first king of Nova Zembla, an imaginary monarch in a land of ice and death, a ruler over hope and despair, a king of nothing.

As Vladimir and Véra Nabokov moved into the Palace Hotel on October 1, 1961, apocalyptic fears rattled the West, and a different kind of history was being made on Nova Zembla.

A series of highly publicized nuclear weapons tests was under way in the Soviet Union, and in the weeks between the Nabokovs signing their contract and moving onto the third floor of the old wing of the hotel, ten explosions had already taken place, with more than a dozen to follow in the next two months.
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Competitive series of tests had taken place regularly from 1951 to 1958, in which the Americans and Soviets traded bomb blasts, with an occasional contribution made by the British. But in the fall of 1961 the Soviets began using their tests as a kind of propaganda to intimidate the U.S. and appear to rival its arsenal, which far outstripped the four lonely Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles then in existence.
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Radiation clouds from the test blasts drifted with the wind over neighbors to the west and south, raising fears about the long-term effects of fallout on humans, livestock, and agriculture. Concerns about the tests were raised at the United Nations, where countries’ responses tended to fall along the Cold War divide between U.S. allies and the Soviet sphere of influence, with non-member states refraining from taking sides.
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If the Swiss government was officially neutral, Switzerland’s newest resident was not. Nabokov’s guiding principle was to choose “that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.”
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The fact that Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had launched a thaw and attacked Stalinist myths did nothing to warm Nabokov to him or the Soviet government. Nabokov appears to have been likewise unimpressed by the nuclear drama.

The thermonuclear tests were just one in a series of crises that year. The Berlin Wall had begun to rise in August, and late that October Soviet and U.S. tanks rolled up to the line dividing the city, facing each other for sixteen hours in a standoff that caught the world’s attention.
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Against this backdrop, every few days in September and October a new bomb detonated; sometimes tests were conducted daily.

The earliest Soviet explosions had taken place in eastern Kazakhstan, not far from where Solzhenitsyn had been sent into exile. But in 1958, a year after Nabokov started collecting “bits of straw and fluff” for
Pale Fire
, newspapers announced that the Soviets had inaugurated a new testing ground just north of the Russian mainland.
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For the entire time that Nabokov had worked on drafting his next novel, the primary Soviet test site had been located on Nova Zembla.

Nabokov, however, had been thinking about Nova Zembla in the context of his new novel even before the nuclear tests began there—he had mentioned it in the pitch letter he sent to Doubleday in 1957. And two years after sending that letter, he had acquired an additional reason to ponder the islands’ historic role: he had learned of a personal connection to the place. A cousin had researched family genealogy and sent a letter mentioning their great-grandfather,
whom he believed to have taken part in a nineteenth-century expedition that resulted in the naming of the Nabokov River there. Nabokov had written his cousin back, delighted at what felt like the “mystical significance” of the existence of such a river in Nova Zembla.
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But during his first weeks in Montreux, Nabokov would have learned that the world was now very much aware of those islands, too. Given the daily news in the last three months of his work on
Pale Fire
, it is hardly surprising to find Nabokov seeding nuclear signs and symbols through the pages of his novel.
Pale Fire
mocks Albert Schweitzer, a peace activist despised by Nabokov, and offers a cutting comment about left-wing professors who fret over “Fallouts occasioned solely by US-made bombs,” as if Russia had not been busy testing her own arsenal. While the poet Shade writes of an “antiatomic chat” on television, Nabokov (or Kinbote, or Shade—it is not clear) ridicules anyone impressed by nuclear stunts, “when any jackass can rig up the stuff.” Describing the news during a period in which the real-world U.S.S.R. had played a game of brinksmanship with nuclear tests in Nova Zembla, the novel’s poem tells how “Mars glowed,” a reference to the Roman god of war.
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