Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (58 page)

38
“
burning hatred of the English
”: Zeman, Zbyněk A. B.,
Germany and the Revolution in Russia: documents from the archives of the German Foreign Ministry
(1958), 82. Trotsky had immortalized his Nova Scotian detour in one of the earliest documents in the widely circulated Red Army traveling library col lection. Trotsky’s pamphlet on his incarceration appeared before Karl Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
on the list of documents prioritized for inclusion in front-line traveling libraries.

a concentration camp
: Applebaum,
Gulag
, 8.

39
the sort of people: Some POWs and enemy aliens had been released after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which ended Russia’s participation in the war, but many in the south sheltered in place amid the turbulent back-and-forth of the Civil War, lacking money, food, or a safe path to try to get home.

Trotsky wrote a memo
: Applebaum,
Gulag
, 8.

“
sweeping floors,”
etc.
: Trotsky, Leon, “A Prisoner of the English,” a Red Army pamphlet dated May 17, 1917.

40
Applebaum,
Gulag
, 8.

41
Ibid.

42
Nabokov himself would make this distinction later in
Bend Sinister
: “While the system of holding people in hostage is as old as the oldest war, a fresher
note is introduced when a tyrannic state is at war with its own subjects and may hold any citizen in hostage with no law to restrain it” (xiii).

43
“
regime of bloodshed, concentration camps, and hostages
”: CE, 176.

44
Nabokov must have been persuasive enough—Boyd notes that the soldiers ended up bringing butterflies to him soon after (BBRY, 142).

45
make his stage debut
: AFLP, 131.

46
godforsaken
: AFLP, 131; Medlin and Parsons, 35;
make use of the libraries
: BBRY, 149–150.

47
The nineteen-year-old Vladimir would remember that V. D. Nabokov referred to his title as minister “of minimal justice,” and in truth, with the regional government dependent upon the Volunteer Army for protection, justice was ill-served in the south. V. D. Nabokov found himself badly positioned to prosecute military abuses, and was distrusted as part of a government led by both Jewish and Tatar elements. He managed to transform the local judiciary but could not do much more (BBRY, 155 and 158; SM, 177). Dana Dragunoiu writes of a case in which known Bolsheviks had killed Army officers. Army officers demanded the death penalty, but the regional government had outlawed it. The proceedings were moved to another location that was more stable, and on the way, the soldiers responsible for transporting them shot the defendants.
Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism
(2011), 123.

48
SM, 200; AFLP, 134; BBRY, 158.

49
westward to Sebastopol in a car
and
misappropriated government funds
: BBRY, 159.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR
: E
XILE

1
lice-ridden quarters
: AFLP, 135. Lice were more than unpleasant—they were a vehicle for the transmission of typhus, which killed more people in the Russian Civil War than died in combat. See Evan Mawdsley’s
The Russian Civil War
(2007), 287.

a single glass of water
: AFLP, 135.

2
BBRY, 163.

3
Ibid., 164.

4
Nabokov, V. D. “A Distressing Problem,” February 7, 1920, from
Struggling Russia, Volume 2
, Arkady Joseph Sack, ed., 737. My thanks to Matthew Roth for passing along this piece.

5
New Russia: Rul
eulogies of V. D. Nabokov, March and April 1922, LC;
jewels were sold
: BBRY, 165.

6
transcript of Samuil Rosov
: Nabokov was apparently showing it to them to explain that he and Rosov had received nearly identical marks, but college admissions staff members seem to have thought it was Nabokov’s own. AFLP, 137.

changed to literature
: BBRY, 170.

7
Lucie Leon’s reminiscences,
Triquarterly
, Winter 1970, 212.

8
AFLP, 139–40; BBRY, 168. The count, Robert de Calry, had a Russian mother but had not grown up in Russia.

9
threatened with fines
: BBRY, 167;
got into fistfights
: BBRY, 181;
smeared food,
etc.
: BBRY, 175.

10
did not see eye to eye
: SM, 261;
whom V. D. Nabokov had hosted
: SO, 104;
praised Bolshevik ideals
: Wells did make a point of finding some Bolshevik methods problematic but regrettably necessary—which given his general support, was a finer point that would not likely have impressed either V. D. Nabokov or his son. “H. G. Wells Lost in the Russian Shadow,” NYT, December 5, 1920, 102.

“
Kill the Yids!
”: BBRY, 179.

11
amusing and regrettable
: BBRY, 179; AFLP, 139.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion
: Those
Protocols
had made their way west in the luggage or pockets of more than one Russian exile, and had become instantly popular abroad. They would in short order be translated, printed, and distributed across five continents. But they received what may have been their biggest boost a year after Nabokov’s arrival in England, when American inventor Henry Ford incorporated them into a series of articles for
The Dearborn Independent
, which had a vast circulation. The same year, Ford also published
The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem
, a book drawn from the first installments of the series. It purported to make a clear link between Bolshevism and a Jewish plot for world hegemony. The book alone was translated into more than a dozen languages, and soon made its way back to Russia (see USHMM Web site,
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007244
).

By 1921 the
Protocols
had been definitively debunked as a hoax in the
Times of London
, which outed the original stories and novels from which they had been cribbed (originally denunciations not of Jews, but of Napoleon and freemasons). They would nonetheless continue to proliferate worldwide.

12
“
Jewish revolution
”: Belloc, Hilaire,
The Jews
(1922), 182; “
provoked and promoted by Jewish interests
”: Belloc, 50; “
a monopoly of Jewish international news agents
”: Belloc, 48;
proportional representation
: Belloc, 48.

13
longing letters
: BBRY, 177; “
composing verse
”: 167; SM, 268.

14
BBRY, 180; STOR, 4–5.

15
BBRY, 189.

16
Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration
: Once Hoover had signed on, the Soviets disbanded their own domestic relief committee and arrested several of its members. Yedlin, Tova,
Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography
(1999), 135–6.

five million people
: Lynch, Allen,
How Russia Is Not Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development
(2005), 67.

17
SM, 179.

18
Lutz, Ralph Haswell,
The German Revolution
, vol. 1 (1922), 129.

19
Frank Foley
: “Address given at the unveiling of a plaque commemorating Foley’s service,” British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, February 11, 2011;
Willi Lehmann
: Siddiqi, Asif,
The Rockets’ Red Glare
(2010), 171; “
central office for espionage abroad
”: Lukes, Igor,
Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s
(1996), 20.

20
Milyukov continued to see the Socialist Revolutionaries as the vital link, but V. D. Nabokov resisted the notion of playing to class concerns or joining an international revolutionary front. As unlikely as V. D. Nabokov’s interventionist strategies were, Milyukov’s current approach represented equally wishful thinking. By the end of 1921, the Socialist Revolutionaries certainly had no interest in a Kadet alliance. They were undercut from the Left by Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed farmers to retain control over much of their crops, wiping out a source of farmer and peasant affection for the S.R.s. After months of Milyukov’s efforts to build bridges, the Russian S.R. leadership openly rejected his courting, repeating descriptions of him as “a pittiful (sic) fragment of the Kadet party” and saying that he “represented nobody.” The S.R.s were not playing hard to get—they had had enough of the Bolsheviks trying to link them to monarchists and anti-revolutionary forces, and they were not about to help their opponents make the case.

21
BBRY, 189.

22
Ibid., 180–1.

23
Ibid., 192.

24
“Czarist Officers Shot at Milukov,” NYT, March 30, 1922, 3.

25
Ibid.

26
“The Death of V. D. Nabokov,”
Rul
, March 30, 1922, LC.

27
“Anti-Milukov Plot Under Munich Inquiry,” NYT, March 31, 1922, 3.

28
Shabelski-Bork also held Milyukov responsible for the hardships suffered by the Russian émigré community, and claimed to have written repeatedly to demand the return of letters belonging to the Tsarina which Milyukov had in his possession. Taboritski, who at first claimed not to be involved in the plot, later confessed to a part in the conspiracy but claimed he had not shot anyone. “Czarist Officers Shot at Milukov,” NYT, March 30, 1922, 3.

29
The police, however, made clear that they could not guarantee the mon archists’ safety and demanded the cancellation of the conference. Trains heading south from the city were monitored for any collaborators who might have been planning to flee. “Czarist Officers Shot at Milukov,” NYT, March 30, 1922, 3.

30
“Anti-Milukov Plot Under Munich Inquiry,” NYT, March 31, 1922, 3;
Rul
, March 29, 1922, LC.

31
BBRY, 198.

32
Milyukov’s tribute to V. D. Nabokov in the pages of
Rul
, March 30, 1922, LC.

33
Taken from a March 19, 1922 letter from Lenin to Molotov on the Black Hundreds’ anti-clerical campaign. The Bolsheviks had already revoked the amnesty extended years earlier to the S.R.s who had opposed them in the Civil War. When new waves of arrests unfolded in early 1922, the number of targeted groups expanded to include additional S.R. leaders, priests, academics, and intellectuals.

34
Nabokov would reference decades later
: EO, Commentary, Part2, 121–2;
above the table hung a red banner
: Early film footage exists from the trial and the public holiday/pro-death penalty events occurring surrounding it.

35
Chief among the foreign attorneys was Belgian Emile Vandervelde, former chair of the Second Internationale, a collective of socialist and labor organizations to which Lenin and Trotsky had previously belonged for nearly a decade.

36
The defendants were divided into three groups: those who had committed lesser offenses, those who had become witnesses for the prosecution, and twelve prisoners who pleaded not guilty. The group of twelve represented the heart of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia. “Thirty-four Persons on Trial,” NYT, June 10, 1922, 5.

37
foreign attorneys announced
: Shub, David, “The Trial of the SRs,”
Russian Review
, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct 1964), 366. News reports appeared suggesting that Vandervelde had been assassinated, but in truth, the attorneys had only been detained. They were refused exit visas and had to go on a hunger strike before they were permitted to leave Russia.

38
TWATD, 22; Yedlin,
Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography
, 162.

39
Duranty, Walter, “Soviet Chiefs Stage Anti-Treason Show,” NYT, June 22, 1922, 3.

40
TWATD, 84.

41
waited ten hours
: TWATD, 86.

42
Nabokov liked Blok’s poetry in general but loathed “The Twelve,” which he described as having a “pink cardboard Jesus” stuck onto its end (Gold, Herbert, “The Art of Fiction, No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov,” interview from
The Paris Review
, Summer-Fall 1967). In TWATD, Karl Kautsky, a German Marxist who had fallen out with Lenin and Trotsky, writes: “There is no material difference between the rule of a ‘legal’ Czar and a clique that accidentally established itself in power. There is no difference between a tyrant who lives in a palace and a despot who misused the revolution of the workers and peasants to ascend into the Kremlin.”