Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (43 page)

While Nabokov polished his draft, he was inundated with nuclear news from Nova Zembla. During his daily reading of the
New York Herald Tribune
in Switzerland, he would have seen more than a dozen frontpage stories mentioning Nova Zembla. Nova Zembla appeared on maps in newspapers around the globe, with fallout patterns noted. Debates over safe radiation levels continued. Milk was tested to see if children should still drink it, and at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow Khrushchev announced plans to detonate a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb. The UN took up the issue, and after long debates, finally passed a resolution imploring the Soviets not to explode the monster device.
³¹

Nevertheless, on October 30, the Tsar Bomba, the biggest bomb in history, exploded over Nova Zembla. The casing was too large to even fit in the bomb bay of the airplane assigned to drop it. Pieces of the plane’s fuselage had to be cut away to accommodate its cargo,
which was suspended underneath, hanging more than halfway out of the plane. When the bomb was released, an enormous parachute trailed behind it, one so large that its assembly was rumored to have triggered shortages in the production of Soviet hosiery.
³²

The blast happened in mid-air, leveling buildings in a seventy-five-mile radius and cracking windows more than five hundred miles away; it was ten times more powerful than the combined total of all the explosives used in World War II. Pregnant women on the other side of the world drank iodine in an effort to stave off birth defects. Frontpage stories around the globe announced the blast. Trace levels of radiation crossed the continent to the Nabokovs’ suite in Montreux.
³³

Within a week, diplomatic initiatives intensified, and political pressure from the world mounted. And then the frenzied bombing at Nova Zembla stopped. A month later in Montreux, Nabokov mailed his publisher the manuscript for a magical novel about a northern kingdom called Zembla.
Pale Fire
appeared the following spring.

By a quirk of history, the Soviets shifted for a time to another testing ground in southern Russia, and no bombs fell on Nova Zembla in the months before and after
Pale Fire
’s publication. Reminders of real-world tests at Nova Zembla, which might have been obvious in the fall of 1961, sat in the book unnoticed by critics for decades.
³⁴
A straightforward path connecting the Zembla of the novel to the real-world Nova Zembla was lost. And readers puzzling over
Pale Fire
never thought to explore the islands’ twentieth-century history, where they would have found that in addition to being a Soviet nuclear test site, Nova Zembla had long been notorious for a very different reason.

Five days after the Tsar Bomba set fire to the sky over Nova Zembla, Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a train to Moscow, with a dream of submitting his own short novel for publication. Along with millions of people in and outside Russia, he had listened to the October speeches
of the Twenty-Second Party Congress and had been surprised by what he had heard.

It was not, however, Khrushchev’s threat to explode a monster bomb that had shaken him. The words that stayed in his mind were those from a speech by Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of
Novy Mir
, the most candid of contemporary Soviet magazines. Tvardovsky declared at the Congress that Soviet literature had praised the victories of the people but had yet to deliver work that also reflected their suffering. Tvardovsky said that he was still waiting for a literature “totally truthful and faithful to life.”
³⁵

Solzhenitsyn had spent almost a decade outside the camps preparing himself for this moment; it was more than long enough to agonize over the possibility of being sent back. No longer even in remote exile, he had built a good life—he was living in Ryazan, a provincial town an afternoon train ride away from Moscow. His wife Natalia had remarried him. His cancer had reappeared, but it had been successfully treated. More miraculously, as part of Khrushchev’s thaw he had been rehabilitated by the State.
³⁶

Many others had been freed or welcomed back by society, but Solzhenitsyn was still aware of those who were not so lucky. He had noticed the spot near Ryazan’s railway station where prisoners were still offloaded away from other passengers. He had given a lecture on physics at a local correctional facility, where he found himself thinking of those who would go back to their cells after his talk.
³⁷

In his life as a free man, he had written several short stories and miniatures. He had tried his hand at a play on personality modification. He had done three revisions of a novel,
The First Circle
, which was based on his years in a scientific research
sharashka
. He had submitted one essay arguing against autobiography to
Literary Gazette
, the official publication of the Union of Soviet Writers—only to see it immediately rejected.
³⁸

He longed to see his work published, and he had one story about a labor camp that seemed like a good candidate. His readers thought it
the best thing he had written; it had made a friend cry. After reading the story, another friend is said to have told Solzhenitsyn that three atom bombs had made their way into the world: “Kennedy has one, Khrushchev has another, and you have the third.”
³⁹

The story that had so moved his friends possessed the ungainly title of
Shch-854
, a reference to the prisoner number of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. In it, Solzhenitsyn did little more than recount the events in one man’s life across a single day in a labor camp. Ivan Denisovich does not suffer the most harrowing events of camp life—torture, rape, or execution—but the depiction of subsistence-level existence and bitter cruelty in which the average prisoner had to find a way to survive was powerful in its restraint. The complicated strategies required to navigate every moment of the day, from reveille to the mess hall, give way to an awareness of the transcendence of Ivan Denisovich, who manages not just to survive but to retain his humanity.

As an unknown writer who had been rehabilitated, Solzhenitsyn could create freely in secrecy. Freely, of course, is hardly the right word. After a fair copy of any given work had been written out, it had to be concealed. Any remaining drafts had to be gathered, and after all the neighbors had gone to sleep, burned one page at a time in the communal kitchen.
⁴⁰

If Solzhenitsyn sent out his real work—not just a criticism of something written by someone else, but a story that went to the heart of what he had seen and wanted to say—he knew he would be publicly identified as a writer with an agenda. If the Soviet leaders chose to, they could keep him from writing in the future.

An idea had come to him in 1958 to write a vast account of the Soviet labor camp system, based on what he had seen himself and the experiences of others. If he moved forward with trying to publish his story about a single prisoner, it was entirely possible he would jeopardize the larger project. Unbeknownst to Solzhenitsyn, the camp theme was already percolating among some of the most gifted Russian writers of the day, but it had not yet found officially sanctioned
publication.
⁴¹
Had Tvardovsky been serious in his speech—were Soviet leaders ready to hear the truth about the suffering of the Russian people?

After consulting with friends again in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn decided his time had come. He was forty-two years old, soon to be forty-three. The wife of a former fellow prisoner would deliver the story of Ivan Denisovich to Tvardovsky at the offices of
Novy Mir
. It was the first piece of fiction he sent out into the world.

After
Lolita
, Vladimir Nabokov no longer faced any uncertainty when it came to finding a home for his work. Putnam’s was waiting in the wings for
Pale Fire;
within five months his manuscript was proofed and printed.

When the book arrived, Edmund Wilson had no comment on it, but in the pages of
The New Republic
Mary McCarthy called it “one of the very great works of art this century.” Others were less enthralled; one critic declared it “the most unreadable novel I’ve attempted this season.”
⁴²
Nabokov’s convoluted tale managed to hook on to the bottom of the bestseller lists, despite its opaque structure and baffling mysteries. How can a poem and its commentary be a novel? Who is the narrator? What is Zembla? What is the significance of the crown jewels?

Scholars, fans, and other authors tried to find and dissect hidden codes in the book. Perhaps the poet invented the ex-king—or did the ex-king invent the poet? Readers were encouraged in their speculations and literary autopsies by the novel’s author, who coyly proclaimed to the
New York Herald Tribune
that the book was “full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find.”
⁴³

If Nabokov wanted readers to do the hard work of finding a hidden message in
Pale Fire
, he was not above offering some clues. In the same interview, he told his interviewer that the narrator Charles Kinbote was not actually a king or an ex-king of Zembla, that he was in fact insane. Furthermore, he had committed suicide—at the age
of forty-four, if readers trace the chronology—before completing the last entry in the Index, which is
Zembla
.

Perhaps to give additional fodder to interpreters, Nabokov had anchored his fantastic tale in the real world. In addition to nuclear allusions and Cold War references, he had given
The New York Times
a prominent role in
Pale Fire
, spending a page and a half describing articles from the newspaper, some of which mention Zembla.
⁴⁴
The stories are actual articles taken from July 1959 editions of the newspaper, but as with so much of what Kinbote touches in the novel, the news has been bent and twisted to reflect his mania for his lost country. Kinbote imagines Zemblan children singing songs as part of an international youth exchange, and he inserts Zembla into a story of Khrushchev canceling a visit to Scandinavia.
⁴⁵

The
Times
serves as a source for news about Zembla inside
Pale Fire
, but what the real-world
Times
had to offer on the real-world Nova Zembla—if the world had only looked—says more. In 1955, just two years before Nabokov began making his first notes toward his novel, a brief mention of the Arctic islands appeared in a story by an American named John Noble.

Noble had lived through World War II in Germany with his family. When Soviet forces swept in at the end of the war, Noble had been sent to Buchenwald (which was under Russian control) before being deported more than three thousand miles northeast to the labor outpost of Vorkuta. Above the Arctic Circle, he mined coal with thousands of other prisoners, later participating in a prisoner revolt.
⁴⁶

Mining coal in the Arctic seems a harsh enough fate, but among Vorkuta inmates it was understood that however bad things got, they could be worse. What they truly feared was the place Noble described as the destination of last resort for the worst offenders: Nova Zembla, the place “from which there is no return.”
⁴⁷
Noble’s three-day
Times
account of his experiences in Vorkuta became the book
I
Was a Slave in Russia
, a bestseller in America that year.

But the
Times’
accounts of the islands’ forgotten history stretch back before Noble’s years in the camps. At the beginning of 1942,
the Russian army badly needed reinforcements for the war effort, and turned to Polish forces. The
Times
reported on the contentious issues blocking a Soviet-Polish agreement. One question centered on tens of thousands of missing Polish officers (whose bodies would later be found in a mass grave in Katyn Forest); the other related to reports of Polish prisoners being deported to labor camps in horrific conditions on “the barren and desolate island of Nova Zembla.”
⁴⁸

Yet Nova Zemblan history in the
Times
goes even further back, before the war, winding past stories of plans to build an Arctic resort there in 1934 and sightings of mysterious airplanes on it 1931,
⁴⁹
all the way back to 1922, where along with a story Walter Duranty had in the paper that day sits an August 28 account explaining that Socialist Revolutionary prisoners would, for the first time, be shipped to Nova Zembla.

In the wake of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, it was noted, the defendants had disappeared. Intellectuals and professors were being arrested, and many of them held in concentration camps at Archangel. But some prisoners, veterans of prison under Tsarist rule, had escaped from the mainland camps. As a result, the remaining prisoners would be “sent to Nova Zembla, two large islands in the Arctic Ocean, where even the former Czars never sent criminals.”
⁵⁰

The story also ran in the
Times of London
. The news of prisoners sent to certain death had echoed and repeated in Europe and America, appearing two days later in the newspaper with the largest circulation of any Russian-language daily in Germany, a place where Nabokov had published so much of his work—
Rul
, the paper of Nabokov’s dead father. Within the camps, inside Russia, and across Europe and America, Nova Zembla had been feared as the cruelest outpost of the camp system, a place of terror for all of Vladimir Nabokov’s adult life.