Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (49 page)

Nabokov once again provided, or allowed his characters to construct, a delusion which protects them from reality, even as the epic events of Nabokov’s lifetime—the existence of the Holocaust and the Gulag—cannot be excised from the book. Van and Ada seek
refuge in each other and reassemble the last centuries of history in a distorted world in which the apparently mentally ill are the ones most aware of reality, and those who know the truth are subjects for psychiatric study.

The world that Van and Ada spin out of their fantastic imaginings turns inevitably back to the camps—which may have been in the background all along. It seems relevant to note that as Nabokov worked on
Ada
, newspapers and magazines were busy detailing the ways in which psychiatric analysis was used to punish Soviet dissidents. The practice was hardly new—for decades, the noncompliant had been consigned to mental hospitals. But such psychiatric abuses became common knowledge in the 1960s as Russia resorted again to high-profile trials. Russian writer Valery Tarsis was sentenced to a mental hospital for publishing his material abroad, and his case became a
cause célèbre
in the West until he was given permission to emigrate.
⁶

Soviet psychiatric “treatment” was ubiquitous enough that it could provide material for comedy. One 1964 editorial on Khrushchev’s invisibility in the weeks after his fall from grace suggested that the former leader himself might have been condemned to the involuntary hospitalization inflicted on so many others during his years in power. During Nabokov’s final year working on
Ada
, newspapers worldwide reported on a group of Soviet mathematicians who had made a public statement against the institutionalization of their colleague in a psychiatric hospital after he protested the trial of dissident intellectuals.
⁷

But upon publication, Nabokov’s
Ada
was not viewed as a commentary on modern Russia, and was instead embraced, or loathed, for its fantastic elements, the ways in which it seemed to scramble reality, rather than the ways it echoed bleak current events. A gaggle of studio heads with
Lolita
on their minds made their way to Montreux, where each took his turn with the manuscript and was given a chance to bid on its film rights.
⁸

As Nabokov’s characters invented an alternate Russia, his sister Elena made plans to visit to see its real-world counterpart.
Beginning in 1969, she started making trips to the Soviet Union nearly every year.
⁹
Nabokov, who had cut off collaborating with Roman Jakobson over his visit, seems not to have begrudged his sister her travels.

Nabokov did not go to the Soviet Union, but made plans to visit Israel instead. He had been invited late in 1970 and wanted to see butterflies there; however, the Nabokovs’ interest was an extension of Nabokov’s politics, too. Supporting Israel as an anti-Soviet, democratic state, Vladimir and Véra had cancelled a French vacation in 1967 in protest over the French response to the Six-Day War.
¹⁰

After anti-Israeli attacks, Nabokov tagged her neighbors as Bolshevik stooges and sent money to the Israeli Embassy in Berne noting as much. No fan of religious restrictions, however, he also contributed to the cause of a former Tenishev classmate in Israel, who was promoting greater freedoms for non-Orthodox Jews in Israel. And he continued to send money to the organizations that had directly helped him: the Russian Literary Fund and the Union of Russian Jews.
¹¹

He had only a single note to sound with friends on the international threat of Communism, but for all his stridency, he sometimes did sit silent. Nabokov told a visitor to Montreux that among their left-leaning acquaintances in Montreux, he “just wouldn’t talk about Vietnam.” Véra, coaxing old friends to visit, promised not to “discuss Viet Nam or anything political.”
¹²

But Cold War dynamics lapped at the borders of everything, as politics had for Nabokov’s entire life. Just weeks after
Ada
’s publication in the spring of 1969, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn were both honored by the Academy of Arts and Letters, under the direction of George Kennan, who had been elected president of the Academy.

Nabokov had planned to attend the ceremony, but Véra developed an eye condition, which prohibited travel. Solzhenitsyn was likewise absent, sitting in Moscow, where he had just turned learned that the Writers’ Union was toying with the notion of expelling him.

Kennan gave prepared remarks, promoting the value of the arts in a troubled era. “What is essential,” he said, “is the will to self-expression with grace and subtlety and power.”
¹³
Though one of the writers he was referencing got credit only for his grace, and the other only for his power, two more self-expressive authors can hardly be imagined.

In the wake of
Lolita
, a field of Nabokovians emerged to quiz and take down the words of the master and puzzle over his cryptic phrases. By then deeply committed to a public façade he had created for himself—the genteel, charming cosmopolitan, incapable of being dented or diminished by history—Nabokov lived long enough to monitor the first wave of chroniclers.

Alfred Appel, a former student of Nabokov’s from Cornell, had by 1970 assembled an annotated version
of Lolita
, which bracketed the novel with more than 200 pages of literary references, translations of foreign phrases, and attention to recurring themes. Appel had noticed a number of things in the novel that had escaped most readers, and he had the good luck of having a complicit Vladimir Nabokov to point out several more.

Among the fairy-tale history and the Edgar Allan Poe references, Appel identified “the anti-Semitism theme” running through
Lolita
. It was to Appel that Nabokov mentioned Humbert’s pity for Lolita’s classmate, who was Jewish.
¹⁴
Appel also pointed out ideas echoed or amplified in
Lolita
that were bound up with earlier or later works. Trying to explain the novel, he invoked lines from Nabokov’s 1923 version of the Wandering Jew story, but Appel assumed that the many people in
Lolita
who believe Humbert is Jewish were mistaken.
¹⁵

Nabokov seemed delighted to have Appel annotating his work—he referred to him with glee in a conversation with a visiting translator as “my pedant.… Every writer should have one.”
¹⁶
Across their relationship, he repaid Appel’s diligent work with treasures,
in the form of friendship and the interview in which Nabokov identified the location
of Pale Fire
’s crown jewels.

In his hunt for an authorized biographer, Appel would have been a natural choice for Nabokov, but he did not read Russian. And so Nabokov turned to Andrew Field. Field had gotten his master’s at Columbia University and then had been part of a Harvard exchange program with Moscow University. During Nabokov’s final visit to America in 1964, Field had approached him to give him a book acquired during his stay in the Soviet Union—a collection of essays on criminal law written by Nabokov’s father.
¹⁷

A gift of something so rare could only have warmed Nabokov’s heart, and he reviewed carefully the draft manuscript of a book Field was preparing on Nabokov’s writing. Nabokov invited Field to do a bibliography of his work, and in 1968 Field asked if he might write an actual biography of Nabokov, a question that was answered in the affirmative.
¹⁸

In addition to being a known quantity, Field may have seemed appealing for other reasons as well. He had by then written about pre-Revolutionary Russian literature and Soviet fiction for several years. He also had an understanding of the circumstances of Soviet life that most young and literary Americans did not. Traveling from Moscow with his wife in 1964, Field had gotten into a disagreement with guards on the Soviet-Polish border. An ostensible problem with his visa escalated into confrontation, and he was arrested. The matter turned into an international incident—the State Department had called a press conference about the young American held captive by the Polish authorities. Field spent ten days in jail before being released on bond. Two weeks after his release, he stood trial on charges of assaulting an officer. Field was convicted and given an eight-month sentence, but the sentence was suspended. He had to wait two more weeks before being given permission to depart Poland. The compelling story made for articles day after day in the first weeks of February, totaling more than a half-dozen wire reports from the Associated Press and United Press International on his detention.
¹⁹

In subsequent years, Field’s experience gave him a kind of authority in writing about the work of some Soviet authors whose work had been carried to the West. When two dissident writers were put on trial in the Soviet Union in 1966, a trial transcript was smuggled out and published abroad.
²⁰
In statements under interrogation, one of the defendants had quoted Field’s statements about his work. Field himself in turn had been invited by
The New York Times
to review the published transcript of the dissidents’ trial. For these reasons and others, Nabokov may well have thought that he had found a kindred spirit, a hardworking scholar devoted to his work who understood something of the dangers of Soviet life, not to mention anxiety over identity papers and visas.

Field’s visits to Montreux started even before he had taken on the role of authorized biographer. He talked to Nabokov’s friends and relations, asking questions in an attempt to address angles that
Speak, Memory
had not. Nabokov in conversation could be playfully revelatory, but at times he remained enigmatic.

On the topic of the Holocaust, it was clear that Nabokov had more to say—despite the encroaching infirmities of age, he informed Field that he was in no way done with writing about what had happened. One day, he declared, he would even
visit
Germany—something he had said he would never do—in order to see for himself the places in which atrocities had been committed: “I will go to those German camps and
look
at those places and write a
terrible
indictment.” Field noted that he had never heard Nabokov speak so emotionally about anything.
²¹

With regard to Sergei, however, Nabokov did not venture very far from the material included in
Speak, Memory
, except to note how very fastidious his brother had been, and that he had been friends with Jean Cocteau, who had once called Sergei’s apartment with a warning that his line was tapped.
²²

Nabokov had defied history, and when writing his own story he emphasized that narrative arc. Recounting his family’s shipboard flight from Russia in his autobiography, Nabokov had described
the old-world gallantry of playing chess with his father as the Bolsheviks fired on the vessel. Nabokov had not mentioned the Cartier staff calling the police on him in Paris in 1919; he did not discuss the lice or the dog biscuits from the crossing that his sister Elena described to Field.

Nabokov did not mind portraying himself in an occasionally unpleasant light, even as “precious”—but the identity of the victim, the displaced person, the man humiliated by history, was one he utterly rejected. Like his father writing a legal article on the topic of solitary confinement while actually serving a sentence in solitary, Nabokov’s persona was built around having triumphed despite history’s betrayals. He would never display his wounds publicly. Asked by Field about the details Elena had provided on their flight from Russia after the Revolution, Nabokov acknowledged that they were all probably true but “wince(d) at such obvious refugee clichés.”
²³

In his first years of conversation with Field, Nabokov seems to have felt regret for savaging the work of a poet who later died in the Holocaust, and even about the brisk trade in insults that had inspired him decades before to turn the name of critic Georgy Adamovich into
Sodomovich
. Field would later note that Nabokov apparently felt better about it by 1973, when he insulted Adamovich again.
²⁴

But Nabokov did not want his own style of criticism turned on him. Discussing with Field the deconstruction he had done on the reputation of revolutionary icon Chernyshevsky in
The Gift
, he realized the danger he was in, then paused and pointedly told Field that the biography they were working on “musn’t be written this way.”
²⁵

But Field showed every sign of disregarding Nabokov’s injunction. He, too, seems to have been interested in looking beyond the legend crafted for history, humanizing the man, and not taking him at his word. The relationship that had developed between Field and the Nabokovs across several years began to cool. Nabokov claimed to Field that he was listening to nonsense from others; Field protested that he had talked, in many cases, to the people to whom Nabokov had sent him. Field occasionally sailed off into strange places—for
instance, that V. D. Nabokov “might have been the illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander II.” Nabokov began to feel misunderstood by Field, who could also be wobbly on dates.
²⁶

When Nabokov eventually reviewed Field’s manuscript, his disappointment was profound. The biographer he himself had chosen had not written the story he had hoped would be told. He began marking up the manuscript, correcting items, cutting quotes, asking for changes, and denying statements that had been made about him.