Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (59 page)

43
“
a slow torturous death”: Rul
, August 15, 1922, LC;
sent to concentration camps: Rul
, August 25, 1922, LC.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE
: A
FTERMATH

1
BBRY, 194.

2
SP, 7.

3
BBRY, 194.

4
the acquisition of a steady job
: BBRY, 196;
as good as the women
: “Hives of Russian Refugees,” NYT, Jan 8, 1922, 84.

5
De Bogory, Nathalie, “The New Russian Exile and the Old,” NYT, April 24, 1921, BRM4.

6
down to one meal a day
: “The New Russian Exile and the Old,” NYT, April 24, 1921, BRM4; “Princesses Work as Riga Typists,” NYT, May 3, 1921, 8;
fever for hidden jewels
: Stories of men and women being tortured to death in the hunt for concealed treasure leaked out from Russia in the first years after the Revolu tion. See, for example, “Streams of Jewels Out of Russia,” NYT, June 11, 1922, 91.

7
“Dying Refugees Crawl into Brest-Litovsk,” NYT, August 9, 1921, 3.

8
stagnant quarters
: “Constantinople’s Russians,” NYT, April 23, 1922, 105;
dying with a slow grace
: “Hives of Russian Refugees,” 84.

9
AFLP, 147.

10
Alice in Wonderland
, whose heroine Nabokov transformed into Anna, became
Anya v Stranye Chudes
in Russian.

11
Nabokov worked in the orchards of Solomon Krym, who had headed up the Crimean regional government in which Nabokov’s father had been Minister of Justice.

12
“
awaited one
”: BBRY, 207;
lost permission to practice
: As Maxim D. Shrayer notes in “Jewish Questions in Nabokov’s Art and Life,” Véra’s father had refused to solve the problem, by converting to Christianity, as so many others had (75). See also AFLP, 177.

13
Nabokov had grown up with tales of explorers and adventures from childhood, and the rough outline of events and language he chose hew surprisingly close to those of the real Scott’s journal. But Nabokov also bent his story to his own needs. He renames the last surviving expedition members, and more strangely, as the characters are freezing to death miles from the
South
Pole with no prospect for rescue or return, his invented Scott records seeing the northern lights (USSR, 280). The real Scott had mentioned the lights generically in his diary, but Nabokov transformed the plain
aurora
into their northern variety. The move further dislocates the story and recalls others then facing starvation in a desolate, snowbound landscape—the Russian exiles of the far north.

14
Jewish wandering was diagnosed as “a racial, pathological disorder” at Jean-Martin Charcot’s Paris hospital in the 1890s. See Henry Meige’s “
The Wandering Jew
in the Clinic: a Study in Neurotic Pathology,” in
Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, Hasan-Rokemand Dundes
, 190–194. The account was also published in the U.S. in
Popular Science
, vol. 44 (February 1894). Nabokov was familiar with some of Charcot’s work and mocked it in passing in his book on Gogol.

15
The Wandering Jew
debuted in Manchester in August 1920 and London a month later, moving on to the Knickerbocker Theater in New York the following year.

16
“
staged symphony
”: USSR, 28—only
Agasfer
’s prologue survives;
Jean-Paul Marat
: Marat had coined the phrase “enemy of the people,” a phrase that gained a new life in post-Revolutionary Russia. By 1922, Marat was so lauded by the Soviets that they had named multiple ships after him.

17
AFLP, 163.

18
Schiff, 8.

19
Ibid., 30.

20
considered herself a socialist
: AFLP, 177;
anti-Bolshevik assassination plot
: Schiff, 55.

21
BBRY, 220; SM, 48.

22
unaware that he intended
: Schiff, 10; “
I shall have you come here
”: AFLP, 174.

23
AFLP, 87.

24
“Shun Russian Mail in Fear of Typhus,” NYT, March 18, 1922, 2.

25
Lucie Leon in
Triquarterly
, Winter 1970, 214.

26
BBRY, 234.

27
Ibid., 233.

28
Ibid., 239.

29
SM, 249; BBRY, 146.

30
BBRY, 271.

31
fairly talented
: Nabokov would in the next sentence describe Pasternak’s verse as “convex, goitrous, and goggle-eyed” but remained a fan of him as a poet, if not as a novelist. Barnes, Christopher and Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,
Boris Pasternak: 1928–1960, A Literary Biography
(1989), 308.

32
Klein, Sandy, “Nabokov’s Inspiration for
The Defense
,” note on NABOKV-L, the Nabokov Listserv, May 28, 2011. The German chess master was Count Curt von Bardeleben. See Daniel Johnson’s
White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard
(2008), 68.

33
“
snatched a gun
”: BBRY, 343, quoting Lev Lyubimov in the March 1957
Novy Mir; redeem their very existence
: Berberova, Nina,
The Italics Are Mine
(1999), 315.

34
BBRY, 355.

35
Nabokov specifically noted later that he had made Martin (
Martyn
in the original Russian) singularly untalented. For more on why, see Leona Toker’s
Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures
(1989).

36
Nabokov had real-life examples of such exploits (the original Russian title of the book,
Podvig
, translates as Deed or Exploit). As Maxim D. Shrayer has noted,
Glory
recalls Boris Savinkov, who was part of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s political assassination wing with Abram Gotz and Ilya Fondaminsky before the Revolution, and an anti-Bolshevik provocateur after it, sneaking over the border to meet with conspirators in the Soviet Union. He was lured inside the Soviet Union in 1924, captured and put on trial, dying in captivity soon afterward. See Shrayer’s “The
Perfect
Glory
of Nabokov’s Exploit,”
Russian Studies in Literature
, vol. 35, no. 4, 29–41.

37
The beautiful castle complex built across the centuries came to play an intermittent role in Russian history. The monks of Solovki ran their distant outpost in quasi-independence from Moscow in its first three hundred years, then were more closely monitored from St. Petersburg in the next two centuries. As early as the sixteenth century, a first lone religious prisoner was sent there by the Tsar. For a full history of the islands, see Roy Robson’s
Solovki
(2004).

38
Applebaum,
Gulag
, 20.

39
shorthand for Bolshevik cruelty
: CE, 202; NWL, 222;
suicides and executions
: “Emma Goldman Denounces
Rule
of Soviets,” NYT, April 5, 1925, XX4; “Russian Arrests Drop,” NYT, February 17, 1924, 56; “
most feared prison
”: Emery, Steuart, “Soviet Sends Exiles to Jail by Airplane,” NYT, March 21, 1926, XX24.

40
“Soviet Will Start Prisoners’ Air Service To Take Exiles to Lonely Solovetsky Island,” NYT, January 24, 1926, E1.

41
The first reference I found to the mosquito torture in the Western press came from Emma Goldman in 1925. She discussed the terrors of Solovki but mentioned the mosquito torture in connection with other camps. Soon after, the two would be linked. Goldman, Emma, “Emma Goldman Denounces
Rule
of Soviet,” NYT, April 5, 1925, XX4.

42
beaten by guards
: “British Tory Fights Reds’ Forced Labor,” NYT, February 8, 1931, 15;
chopping off their own hands, feet, or fingers
: “House Committee To Press Embargo on Soviet Products,” NYT, February 1, 1931, 1;
international boycott
: Toker, Leona,
Return from the Archipelago
(2000), 16.

43
Gregory, Paul and Valerii Lazarev,
The Economics of Forced Labor
, Hoover Press (2003), 45.

44
Nabokov’s story “A Matter of Chance” has a protagonist who is a cocaine user; as does a Russian novel
Cocaine Romance
(or
Novel with Cocaine)
, written by an anonymous émigré, whom some believed to be Nabokov, though this was later disproven.

45
BBRY, 353.

46
Ibid., 376; AFLP, 160.

47
two years training at a Berlin drama school
: Sonia Slonim studied at the city’s celebrated Hoeflich-Gruening School (see Slonim’s application for work with the U.S. Army in her FBI file);
once found himself chosen as an extra
: AFLP, 159.

48
“
The cinema must reflect social reality
”: Clara Zetkin, quoted in
Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung
1918–1932, vol. 2, (1975), 55;
responded to Zetkin’s appeal
: Zetkin, meanwhile, proved herself a master of political theater of another kind by serving on the prosecuting team at the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries.

49
In later years, Nabokov liked to mangle Eisenstein’s name and refer to him as Eisenstadt—and believed that his experiments with montage had given the false impression that the arts were flourishing in the Soviet Union. Nabokov mentions him repeatedly in his letters to Edmund Wilson. NWL, 222.

50
A friend of Junghans and Sonia Slonim in touch with both of them later recalled first meeting Slonim as Junghans’s girlfriend in Berlin in 1930. Carl Junghans’s internment file, USNA.

51
Sonia Slonim worked at Houbigant Cheramy Perfume. Nabokov would refer ence Houbigant in his play “The Man from the U.S.S.R.,”
USSR
, 70.

52
BBRY, 395.

53
Schiff, 99.

54
Yet he could recite poetry flawlessly in four languages. See Grossman’s “The Gay Nabokov.”

55
he wanted to address the distance
: BBRY, 396;
handsome and charismatic
: Grossman, “The Gay Nabokov.”

56
BBRY, 396.

57
The Soviets had invited him to collaborate on a film about American racism with Langston Hughes. See Arnold Rampersad’s
The Life of Langston Hughes
, vol. 1 (2002), 247–9.

58
Anna Feigin
: Feigin was Véra’s cousin but had moved in with Véra’s father (who was not a blood relation to Feigin) after Véra’s parents had separated. Schiff, 42–3.

turn the story over to his delusional narrator
: Nabokov had already been practicing with disturbing first-person narration, having finished “The Eye,” a novella with a dislocated Russian émigré as narrator who dies at the beginning of the novel.

59
German films of the nineteen-twenties
: People have long seen resemblances between Nabokov’s work and
Dr. Caligari
—see Norman Page’s
Vladimir Nabokov
(1982), 21.

fascination with doubles
: The references to Dostoyevsky would be underlined when the book was translated into English. See Dolinin, Alexander, “The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in
Despair
,” originally in
Cycnos
, vol. 12, no. 2, 1995, 43–54, expanded and posted online at
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/doli1.htm
.

60
When
Despair
was published in English, Nabokov would underline the Astrakhan setting for readers by including a reference to the Caspian Sea as Hermann has a flashback to his internment.

61
Tiepolo, “
Reports of the delegates of the Embassy of the United States of America in St. Petersburg on the situation of the German prisoners of war and civil person in Russia
,” 3.

62
The historic murders echo through
Despair
. “Dead water” and its reflections abound. In an interior story in the novel, evidence is tied to a stone and sunk
in water (144). After the murder, a bag and a gun are submerged in the Rhine (174). And Hermann himself wanders by his own lakeside murder scene with “stone-heavy shoes” (172). For an account of the executions at Astrakhan, see Thomas Remington’s
Building Socialism in Socialist Russia
(1984), 109.

63
When
Despair
was translated into English, Nabokov had Hermann express his “belief in the impending sameness of us all” as rationale for his faith in Communism, more explicitly linking his politics with his own murder plot. DESP, 20.