Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (60 page)

Nabokov worked not just the early camps but a whole tapestry of Russian history into
Despair
. At the height of Stalin’s drive toward collective farms, with its mass executions and the founding of the Gulag, Hermann’s wife declares that Russian peasants have become extinct (23). We learn that his wife’s cousin, Innocent, was executed by a firing squad just after Hermann and his bride escaped Russia (47). And her other cousin, Ardalion, bears a huge scar from his time with the White Army (39).

64
Nabokov later suggested in the intro to the English translation that the book had less appeal to White Russians than his previous novels.

C
HAPTER
S
IX
: D
ESCENT

1
See Michael Morukov’s piece from Gregory and Lazarev,
The Economics of Forced Labor
, Hoover Press (2003), 160.

2
Figes, Orlando,
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
(2008), 114–115.

3
longer than the Panama and Suez Canals
: Duranty, Walter, “Soviet Hopes High as Industry Gains,” NYT, July 3, 1933, 3; “merciful as well as merciless”: Duranty, Walter, “Soviet Releases 12, 484 in Record Amnesty,” NYT, August 5, 1933, 1.

4
In advance of FDR’s first campaign for the White House, Roosevelt publicly consulted with Duranty about Russia. After Roosevelt won, he sent representa tives to Moscow to open discussions on normalizing relations. That November, Walter Duranty traveled with Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to the U.S., where formal diplomatic relations were established between the two coun tries. At the banquet given in Litvinov’s honor at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, Duranty received a standing ovation. He would come to refer to Litvinov’s visit as the “ten days that steadied the world.” See S. J. Taylor’s
Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’ Man in Moscow
(1990), 190–91.

5
Taylor, 208.

6
celebrated in the Nabokov family apartment in Berlin
: BBRY, 117;
the release of his brother
: Figes,
The Whisperers
, 194.

7
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 81–2.

8
a novel called Chocolate: Despair
, the next novel Nabokov wrote after meeting Tarasov-Rodionov, would be narrated by a man who makes chocolate but has utterly lost his moral compass;
grew alarmed
: BBRY, 375.

9
Kessler, Harry and Charles Kessler,
Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918–1937
(2001), 428.

10
“
who endanger state security
”: “Ein Konzentrationslager für politische Gefangene in der Nähe von Dachau”
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
(from The Holocaust History Project), March 21, 1933: “The Munich Chief of Police, Himmler, has issued the following press announcement: On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 persons. ‘All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.’”

haunting stories and lullabies
: “Party Foes Held by Nazis Decline,” NYT, April 15, 1934, E2. In addition, Morris Janowitz notes that a traditional prayer wishing to be good had been transformed into one that translates (rather awkwardly) as: “Dear God, make me dumb/so I will not to Dachau come.” “German Reactions to Nazi Atrocities,”
The American Journal of Sociology
, vol. 52, no. 2 (September 1946), 141–146.

11
“
‘Siberias’ of the German revolution
”: “Party Foes Held by Nazis Decline,” NYT, April 15, 1934, E2; “
preventive custody
”: “Anti-Nazi Feeling Grows in Bavaria,” NYT, Nov. 11, 1933, 8.

12
“German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis,” NYT, March 20, 1933, 1.

13
Maar, Michael,
Speak, Nabokov
(2010), 24–5.

14
Schiff, 67; Tim, Annette,
The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin
(2010), 88.

15
AFLP, 199.

16
was in Berlin for the festivities
: Johnston, Robert Harold,
New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles 1920–45
(1988), 110;
should not speak
: Schiff, 68; BBRY, 403.

17
“
Educated among monkeys
”: BBRY, 400; “
completely Jewified
”: Shrayer, Maxim D., “Jewish questions in Nabokov’s art and life,”
Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives
, 90n7.

18
BBRY, 400;
unpleasant prospect
: on his way back to France, Bunin had been strip-searched by the Gestapo, made to swallow castor oil, and detained until the laxative had done its work, just to prove that he was not smuggling hidden jewels. AFLP, 195.

19
“Nazi Violence,” editorial in NYT, March 12, 1933, E4.

20
Lenin had borrowed Chernyshevsky’s title
What Is To Be Done?
for a key political treatise. And the Paris Socialist Revolutionaries had named their
journal
Contemporary Annals
in part as a tribute to Chernyshevsky’s own
Contemporary
.

21
GIFT, 275.

22
“
half-crushed by years of penal servitude
”: GIFT, 228;
who slept on a bed of nails
: Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, and Michael Katz,
What Is To Be Done?
(1989), 288; “
sometimes weeps and sobs
”: GIFT, 288.

23
BBRY, 405.

24
Ibid., 403.

25
Ibid., 407.

26
Schiff, 69; BBRY, 407.

27
served as a translator
: AFLP, 199;
a hidden cache of weapons
: “Nazis Hunt Arms in Einstein Home,” NYT, March 21, 1933, 10;
idiocies of “liberalistic” university education
: “In the liberalistic era, the professor who became important and famous was the one whose theories were least comprehensible, Herr Frank asserted. Only this, he added, could account for the cult like (sic) that reared around Dr. Albert Einstein.” “Reich Professors Warned by Nazis,” NYT, Oct. 6, 1934, 4.

28
ITAB, 114.

29
transcribing the speeches
: AFLP, 199–200;
they claimed to be surprised
: Schiff, 67.

30
SM, 286–7; BBAY, 423.

31
AFLP, 195.

32
Michael Maar notes the spare power of Victor Klemperer’s diary of life under the Nazis in 1942, in which Klemperer lists thirty-one prohibitions—among them buying cigars, possessing fishing licenses, owning typewriters, and using lending libraries. Klemperer notes that they are all nothing compared to “home invasion, abuse, prison, concentration camps and violent death,” but the meanness of the restrictions amplified their power and sometimes seemed as significant as the violence. See Maar’s “Tagebücher: warum schreibt man sie, warum liest man sie?,”
Schriftenreihe der Vontobel Stiftung
, 2012.

33
Marvin, Carolyn, “Avery Brundage and American participation in the 1936 Olympic Games,”
The Journal of American Studies vol
. 16 (1982), 82–3. Brundage would later host Leni Riefenstahl when she came to America to try to market her film of Hitler’s Olympics.

34
The earlier effort by Junghans to collaborate with Langston Hughes and the Soviet film company Meschrabpom had ended in international disaster. The group of educated, sophisticated African Americans who came with Hughes from America to help make a film about capitalist racism did not at all fit the Soviets’ expectations of what oppressed black American workers should look like—they were too young, too fair-skinned, and too intellectual. And as Junghans realized to his shock during screen tests for
Black and White
, most of them were completely unable to sing Negro spirituals.

Junghans tried to revise the script that he had been handed, but even with his revisions, Hughes dismissed the idea of the proletariat (or in other
drafts, the Red Army) coming to the rescue of black steelworkers in Alabama as “not even plausible fantasy.” Everyone involved with the film meant well, Hughes believed, but they had no workable conception of racism in America. See Rampersad’s
The Life of Langston Hughes
as well as Meredith Roman’s “Forging Freedom: Speaking Soviet Anti-Racism,”
Critique
, vol. 39, no. 3 (August 2011).

After the Olympic project, Junghans collaborated on pro-Fascist movies about the Spanish Civil War and
Die Grosse Zeit
, a tribute to the “Great Age” begun under Hitler.

35
“Reich Reclaiming Huge Moor Region,” NYT, Dec 25, 1936, 1.

36
Ibid.

37
For more on the labor camps of Southwest Africa—and for a wide-ranging history of the evolution of concentration camps across the twentieth century—see Kotek et al.,
Le Siècle des Camps: Détention, concentration, extermination
—
cent ans de mal radical
(2000).

38
Mindful of the suffering of the poor, a group of American writers, including novelist John Dos Passos and New York critic Edmund Wilson, had signed a letter in 1932 supporting the Communist Party in the United States. Taylor,
Stalin’s Apologist
, 156–157.

39
Duranty’s name, apartment, and words are mentioned several times in Wil son’s diary
The Thirties
.

40
Reef, Catherine,
E. E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), 79.

41
Red Army banquet and theater performances
: Dabney, Lewis,
Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature
(2005), 209.

42
felt like a prison
: Dabney, 211; “
moral top of the world
”: Taylor, 217.

43
Night of the Long Knives
: Don Levine, Isaac, “Soviet ‘Purge’ Condemned,” NYT letter to the editor, December 12, 1934, 22;
might fade overtime
: Dabney, 201–2.

44
“
can’t make an omelette
”: Taylor, 185; “
Judas Trotsky”: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course
(1948), 324; “
no one left to purge
”: The speaker is Vice Chairman of the Soviet State Planning Commission Valery Obolensky-Ossinsky, from “66 Are Executed by Soviet, Accused of Terrorist Plots,” NYT, Dec. 6, 1934, 1.

45
flying to Oslo
: Conquest,
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
, 152;
twenty minutes
: Conquest, 421.

46
coveted paycheck vanished
: Schiff, 74;
chance windfall
: BBRY, 429; Schiff, 75.

47
Schiff, 77.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
: P
URGATORY

1
everyday
: Schiff, 78.

2
a reputation
: Schiff, 87;
Nabokov stopped in
: Schiff, 86;
became lovers
: BBRY, 433.

3
money … they did not have
: BBRY, 434.

4
Psoriasis entry from PubMedHealth at the U.S. National Library of Medicine:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001470/

5
BBRY, 434.

6
to raise money for the trip
: BBRY, 435;
alienated members
: Schiff, 83.

7
AFLP, 228; Schiff, 83.

8
bad checks
: “Ex-Prince Declares He Can Beat Roulette,” NYT, July 23, 1926, 13;
would soon leave him
: Schiff, 100;
she was living in a hotel
: Schiff, 83 and 100.

9
Schiff, 85 and 90. Véra told Nabokov’s first biographer the former, and the latter is drawn from Nabokov’s letters at the time.

10
Nicholas’ life played out the alternate scenario of Vladimir’s 1937 drama: after his wife divorced him for his infidelity, he remarried, to a former student of his. The marriage lasted seven years, more or less, until his second wife filed for divorcé on the grounds of desertion. He would have five wives in all. Nicholas Nabokov’s FBI file.

11
Schiff, 85.

12
The same month, Nabokov wrote to Samuil Rosov, a Tenishev classmate who had tracked him down. In response to a letter with reminiscences of their friendship and Nabokov’s kindness to him as a boy, Nabokov sent a warm three-page missive recalling the class bully, a teacher driven to weeping by their classmates, a yogurt treat they used to eat with aluminum spoons, and the ride down Nevsky Prospect during which he first under stood that sex was sometimes for sale. Nabokov suggested that there were two kinds of people in the world, those who remember and those who do not. AFLP, 125–6.