Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (5 page)

A table for four was ready. The Palace was a luxury hotel, its restaurant surely capable of providing Solzhenitsyn one of the finest meals of his life. As the hosts waited for their guests, Véra was probably wearing, as was her habit, something simple against her white halo of hair and blue eyes. Nabokov might have dressed for the occasion, too, at least a little more formally than the long shorts and knee socks in which he typically climbed hillsides hunting for butterflies (and still out-hiked reporters half his age).

What did Nabokov imagine the two writers would talk about—one whose Russian existence was born with the Revolution, and the other whose died with it? If asked, Nabokov could have detailed his defiance, in life and in fiction: the invitation to return as a guest of the state, an invitation refused despite his longing to see his homeland; the friends he had cut off or rebuked for their perceived sympathies with Soviet rule; the conversations about the Vietnam War that upset some friends but which would have found a sympathetic listener in Solzhenitsyn.

A visit with the newly minted exile was a chance to meet his distorted Soviet double, someone who had attained his own measure of celebrity, someone who understood the corruption of the Soviet state from Lenin’s first Terrors and had rejected the romance of the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn had managed to expose the system publicly, to chronicle its crimes, and he had survived to tell the story.

But for half a century—for all of Solzhenitsyn’s life—Nabokov had lived that defiance from across the border. While Solzhenitsyn could imagine returning,
longed
to return, Nabokov’s Russia had been obliterated; his Russia could only exist in his books and the hidden corners of his heart. In 1962 he had explained, “All the Russia I need is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian childhood. I will never return. I will never surrender.”
³³

Solzhenitsyn believed that in order to survive, Nabokov had turned his back on Russia and the human suffering he had seen. But the Nabokov who sat waiting for Solzhenitsyn had done things in his stories that had never been noticed. He had crafted an exquisite chronicle of his own, in which his modernist pyrotechnics and linguistic acrobatics cloaked a devotion to the very mission Solzhenitsyn had taken on.

Inside the stories that earned him the label
cruel
, Nabokov had folded other narratives that had gone undetected, documenting intolerance and atrocity. The names, dates, and places he had woven into his poetry, plays, and fiction decade after decade created his own private map, revealing the most profound losses of his life and the forgotten traumas of his age. As the story of his family became the story of not just St. Petersburg or Russia but twentieth-century Europe and America, Nabokov had bound together the beauty and the horror of all of it inside his art. A ledger recording the forgotten and dead had been exquisitely preserved in Nabokov’s stories for more than thirty years—even in
Lolita
. And readers had missed almost all of it.

The lost history inside the stories had been sitting there for so long—including Russian tragedy that Solzhenitsyn himself had
referenced. Had he seen through Nabokov’s mask to the denunciation of injustice and the tenderness in the work, a tenderness not always apparent in the public face of the man? Did he know the story of Nabokov’s life beyond the obvious theme of flight and exile? What would they say to each other? One floor above the street where Solzhenitsyn approached in his car, Nabokov sat and waited.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Childhood

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov entered the world during the last spring of a dying century on April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The date was not yet notable for also being the birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a twenty-nine-year-old radical exiled to Siberia and three years away from immortality as Lenin.

Nabokov’s mother had already given birth to one stillborn child, and her second pregnancy had no doubt worried her—Elena Ivanovna was a sensitive woman given to fretting. But if the care she had in reserve to lavish on her newborn could make the difference, he would be among the most fortunate souls on the planet.
¹

Along with love, money and culture were also in plentiful supply. The house at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya had been Elena’s dowry, and Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, came from a family that had been in the service of the Tsar for decades. A legal scholar with a taste for opera and literature, V. D. Nabokov not only had a magnificent library, he had a librarian to go with it. A passion for luxury,
a fascination with butterflies, and a rebellious streak characterized the father, who from the beginning “idolized” his first-born son.
²

As always in the world, the moment held harbingers of hope and despair. History has little regard for clean breaks, and so the best and worst of the passing century found no barrier to entering the new. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II was in his fifth year of rule over the largest contiguous nation in the world. His work toward the Hague Convention of 1899, which created a court to settle international disputes and sought to eliminate aerial bombing, would soon garner him a nomination for the first Nobel Peace Prize. The conference would be remembered as one of Nicholas’s few shining moments.

In Paris a French Jew named Alfred Dreyfus, who had been framed as a German spy and imprisoned years before in disease-ridden isolation on Devil’s Island, was brought back to the land of the living to stand trial again. New evidence was presented that spring, revealing the anti-Semitism responsible for his conviction. But evidence and public outrage would not be enough to defeat it, and he would once again be found guilty before being granted an extraordinary pardon.

In Cuba, a group of “re-concentration camps” established by the Spanish military had just been shut down amid outcry over the horrible conditions—conditions that helped earn their creator the nickname “the Butcher.” Despite the reports of widespread suffering, however, the concept had already caught on. As Nabokov crawled and walked and ran into the new century, concentration camps would be introduced in colonial territories by one Western nation after another: the U.S. in the Philippines, the British in South Africa, and the Germans in SouthWest Africa.
³

In time, Vladimir Nabokov would have good reason to ponder Lenin, tsars, virulent anti-Semitism, and concentration camps. But opening his eyes on the second floor of an elegant pink granite house, the newborn child arriving auspiciously at daybreak, would, at most, find himself the first live child of Elena Nabokov. And if he could not yet appreciate that fact, he would still benefit tremendously from it.

During the child’s first weeks he was taken to a nearby church, where he was baptized and nearly christened Victor by mistake. If the Russian Orthodox archpriest followed the full traditional rite, the newly named Vladimir was immersed naked in a tub of holy water before losing four locks of hair (in the shape of a cross) and being anointed with oil over his entire body to help him slip from the grasp of evil forever. In the life he was to lead, he would need all the assistance he could get.
⁴

The Nabokov home sat on the western half of Bolshaya Morskaya, an elegant street just around the corner from St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Commissioned by a Russian Tsar, designed by a French architect, the largest Orthodox cathedral in the city also contained Greek, Byzantine, and Russian elements. St. Isaac’s had an eclectic style that, given the magic required to escape, might have successfully emigrated to Paris, Berlin, or beyond.

St. Isaac’s was, however, firmly rooted in St. Petersburg, the capital city founded by Peter the Great two centuries before. And like so many buildings in the old city, whose beauty was shot through by a network of canals, St. Isaac’s foundations had been laid on reclaimed swampland. Because the terrain lacked the stability to support the weight of granite pillars and pediments, a forest of wooden timbers had to be driven into the ground as a base before construction began. That reclamation came at a price: tens of thousands of serfs died in the initial effort to create a modern European capital, and Peter’s unhappy wife had cursed it to become a “city built on bones,” a landscape of crumbling families.
⁵

The cathedral had risen in sight of the Neva River and just a half-mile southwest from the Peter and Paul Fortress. The first building Peter had constructed in the city, the fortress was meant at first to ensure the security of the then-frontier town, but had quickly become the site of a political prison. In 1718 Peter’s own son paid a price for trying to flee the country, becoming one of the prison’s first occupants. Tortured on orders from his father, he died there at the age of twenty-eight.
⁶

The fortress secured Peter’s capital, and the city that Peter raised had in turn lifted up the Nabokov family. More than a hundred years later, one of Nabokov’s great-great-uncles was appointed commander of the prison. During his tenure, he loaned books to the imprisoned Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then charged with plotting revolution and reading banned literature.
⁷

At the time of Nabokov’s birth, his family’s affairs had been bound up with Russian Imperial politics for centuries, but from the beginning he belonged to both Russia and the world. His earliest memories were of the web of cotton cords padding his crib at home and a fleeting image of rain on a roof during a trip to his uncle’s chateau in southern France. He had a wet nurse who complained that he never slept. He had a daily bath. He was not spanked. At a time when his Russian literacy extended no further than the words for
cocoa
and
Mama
, he was already reading and writing in English. His British governess, Miss Norcott, fell in love with another woman. His Russian tutor, Ordyntsev, fell in love with his mother. He reorganized the cushions of the family sofa to create a dark tunnel behind it for adventuring.

When he was small, his mother read him tales of knights and damsels, and stories of the button-eyed blackface Golliwogg doll. Later, he himself read Dickens and Daudet,
Punch
and H. G. Wells. He was exquisitely well-read, even as a child. Sherlock Holmes, Conrad, and Kipling all caught his fancy for a time.

Vladimir grew up alongside Sergei, a brother born less than a year after him, an almost-twin and companion in early childhood. As has been the lot of so many younger siblings since the dawn of family life, less time and attention were bestowed on the second-born. Each subsequent child—Olga in 1903, Elena in 1906, and Kirill in 1911—would be provided for magnificently. But unlike their oldest brother, they would learn to live more or less in the arms of governesses.
⁸

Standing closest to the dazzling Vladimir, Sergei was, often as not, cast into shadow. The brothers had little in common. Vladimir
inherited his father’s fondness for boxing and butterfly hunting; Sergei, a love of opera. Vladimir was charismatic and extroverted, while Sergei possessed a severe stutter and no physical grace. The boys nonetheless had to serve as playmates for one another, and under Vladimir’s leadership, they eluded their guardians more than once. At the ages of four and five, they managed to lose their governess on a visit to Germany, boarding a steamboat and traveling down the Rhine from Wiesbaden. Two years later, to escape the equally chafing rule of their French tutor, they fled the family’s country estate on foot in their parents’ absence, striking out with Turka, the family’s Great Dane. Vladimir led the way as they tramped through the snow to the main road. When Sergei became tired and cold, he was assigned to ride the dog. Heading out into the moonlit night, with Sergei occasionally falling off Turka, they were miles from home before they were retrieved.

Vladimir and Sergei shared a nursery for the first decade of their lives, sleeping on either side of a Japanned screen. Both boys were permitted to browse their father’s massive library. Physically slight but athletically confident, Vladimir liked to lap his brother at the roller rink, or to sneak up on him as he practiced piano, vulnerable to attack. Sergei acquired a fondness for Napoleon, and slept cradling a little bronze bust of the foreign emperor. Unlike many grade school stutterers, his affliction stuck with him, and his poor vision required the additional indignity of spectacles. The boys were never friends. Frequently subject to Vladimir’s teasing as well as his brilliance, Sergei played the moon to his brother’s bright sun.
⁹

Vladimir remained his parents’ favorite, but he was also a sickly child, afflicted by quinsy, scarlet fever, and pneumonia in turn. In the winter when he was ill, his mother Elena had a driver take her in a sled to the busy international shops on Nevsky Prospect, where she bought her invalid a new present each day. It was a life of crimson
crystal eggs for Easter, and his mother’s tiaras and necklaces from a wall safe to play with before bed.