Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (66 page)

1
VNSL, 302. On this count, Nabokov was not mistaken. Louis Aragon was then a member of the central committee of the French Communist Party and, despite occasional public contravention of the Party line, would remain so for decades.

2
“Le triomphe de
Lolita
,” an excerpt from Maurice Couturier’s
Nabokov ou la tentation française
(2011). See NABOKV-L, January 2011, for this excerpt. The first quotation is from Madeleine Chapsal in the May 8, 1959 issue
of l’Express
, the second from Jean Mistler in
L’Aurore
, on May 12.

3
a celebration in Nabokov’s honor
: BBAY, 294; Couturier,
Nabokov ou la tentation française
. These recollections are from then-newly-minted
Figaro
literary critic Bernard Pivot, who would do a legendary interview with Nabokov much later in his career.

a marvelous ball
: Schiff, 254.

4
Nor had things improved with Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia contract Nabokov had been declaring void for more than two years. Girodias appeared at the reception, and later claimed to have been snubbed by Nabokov, who declared that he had not seen Girodias at all, let alone talked with him. Given Girodias’s conduct, Nabokov’s propensity to snub, and his equal tendency to be completely unaware of others in social settings, it can only be said with confidence that 1) both men were in the room that night, and 2) they did not leave as friends. (See Boyd’s, Schiff’s, and Girodias’s account.)

5
slow to forgive such slights
: BBAY, 396; “
nightmare and deceit
” and “
friends of his darkest days
”: BBAY, 396.

6
Schiff, 265.

7
he would be dead
: Nabokov’s nephew Rostislav, for whom he had written an affidavit in the hopes of getting him into the West (BBAY, 126), would die in 1960 behind the Iron Curtain at the age of 29, from what his son would later describe as a combination of several factors bound up with profound despair.

had collaborated with the Nazis
: November 2011 Interview with Vladimir Petkevič.

8
BBAY, 394.

9
Ibid., 171.

10
a crab, a kitten
: STOR, 616. For more on Nabokov and Sergei in “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” see Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s essay “The Small Furious Devil” in
A Small Alpine Form
(1993). Sweeney suggests that in his Siamese twin tragedy, Nabokov was working with something so troubling that it resulted in one of his few failures to transform his own emotional struggles into “transcendent fiction” (198).

11
BBAY, 185.

12
Ibid., 415.

13
VNSL, 212.
President Kennedy
: Oddly enough, President Kennedy had yet to be elected when Nabokov composed the letter.

14
VNSL, 297.

15
halfway done with the book
: BBAY, 421.

16
Duck Soup
. See SO, 165.

17
longs to be delivered
: Watching a child fly a model plane, Kinbote begs, “Dear Jesus, do something” (PF, 93);
absolution from the horror
: PF, 258;
end his life with a handgun
: PF, 220;
alive long enough
: Dolbier, Maurice, “Nabokov’s Plums,” interview with Vladimir Nabokov,
New York Herald Tribune
, June 17, 1962, B2; also mentioned in Nabokov’s diary—see BBAY, 709 n6.

18
BBAY, 463–4.

19
group of islands
: McCarthy, Mary, “A Bolt from the Blue,”
The New Republic
, June 4, 1962, 21;
Zembla had been used centuries before
: In “An Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope drew on Nova Zembla’s northern location as an analogy for corruption and vice that always seems relative to those engaged in it, and always apparently more extreme in some location farther along:

Ask where’s the north?—at York ‘tis on the Tweed;

In Scotland at the Orcades; and there

At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.

See Chapter 14, note 128 for a longer excerpt from Pope’s verse.

20
had known about for decades
: In his poem “The Refrigerator Awakes,” written in 1941, Nabokov makes several polar references to real and imagined explorers, and includes a nod to Nova Zembla, “with that B in her bonnet.” That B, William Barents, spent the winter of 1596–7 trapped on the northern tip of Nova Zembla. The legendary story of the expedition’s survival was printed by the Hakluyt Society, whose accounts of voyages Nabokov and Véra had both read and admired.

21
This account of Barents’s voyage is taken from Gerrit de Veer’s
The Three Voy ages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions (1594, 1595, and 1596)
.

22
saw three suns
: Interestingly, on the very first page of
Pale Fire
, narrator Charles Kinbote talks
of parhelia
, known as sun dogs or mock suns.

23
Khalturin, Vitaly et al., “A Review of Nuclear Testing by the Soviet Union at Novaya Zemlya 1955–1990,”
Science and Global Security
: 13 (2005), 1–42; “Parameters of 340 UNTs Carried Out at the Semipalatinsk Test Site,” LamontDoherty Earth Observatory web site, Columbia University:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~richards/340STS.html
.

24
Day, Duane. “Of myths and missiles: the Truth about John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap,”
The Space Review
, January 3, 2006.

25
The U.S. would face similar attention in the wake of injuries and increased rates of cancers and deformities after its test blasts in the Pacific at Bikini and Rongelap Atolls. (See 2009 Newsday project
Fallout)
.

26
Meaning Bertrand Russell, noted philosopher of logic and peace activist whose leftist politics Nabokov disliked. See Herbert Gold’s interview “The Art of Fiction, No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov,” in
The Paris Review
, Summer-Fall 1967.

27
Gruson, Sidney. “U.S. and Russians Pull Back Tanks from Berlin Line,” NYT, October 29, 1961, 1.

28
“
bits of straw and fluff
”: SO, 31 as first noted in BBAY, 306;
a new testing ground
: “Arctic Called Soviet Test Site,” NYT, March 9, 1958, 41.

29
From a March 1959 letter cited in BBRY, 17.

30
“
Fallouts … by US-made bombs
,” PF, 266; “
antiatomic chat
”: PF, 49.

“
any jackass can rig up the stuff
”: PF, 270. The uncertainty with regard to who is speaking is deliberate. The poem has sections of discarded lines—variants—that Kinbote includes in his commentary. Several have clearly been tampered with (Kinbote goes so far as to claim some of his contributions), and the authorship for the rest must remain in doubt, with Kinbote as the most likely suspect.

“
Mars glowed
”: PF, 58.

31
50-megaton hydrogen bomb
: Topping, Seymour, “Policies Outlined,” a summary of Khrushchev’s speech to the Twenty-Second Party Congress, NYT, October 18, 1961, 1;
resolution imploring the Soviets
: Telsch, Kathleen, “U.N., 87–11, Appeals To Soviet on Test,” NYT, October 28, 1961, 1.

32
DeGroot, Gerard,
The Bomb: A Life
(2005), 254.

33
five hundred miles away
: Khalturin etal., 18;
all the explosives used in World War II
: DeGroot, 254;
an effort to stave off birth defects
: Sullivan, Walter, “Bomb’s FallOut Moving To Urals,” NYT, October 31, 1961, 14;
trace levels of radiation
: Khalturin et al., 19.

34
Steven Belletto would be the first to point out the strength
of Pale Fire
’s Cold War references and note that Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya in Russian), was a key nuclear test site at the time of the book’s composition. See “The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold,”
ELH
, vol. 73, no. 3, 755–80.

35
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 407.

36
Ivan Bunin, too, had been rehabilitated, but just a little too late to see his work return to the Soviet Union—he died in 1953 (Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 401).

37
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 378.

38
Ibid., 390.

39
Ibid., 400. Apparently, Solzhenitsyn’s arsenal eclipsed the French and the British atomic capabilities.

40
an unknown writer
: It is unlikely his lone, irritable article about the Soviet postal system had brought him to anyone’s attention.

one page at a time
: Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 377 and 385.

41
a vast account
: Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 379;
the camp theme was already per colating
: Scammell, 410–1.

42
Mary McCarthy: “A
Bolt from the Blue”;
Macdonald, Dwight
: review
of Pale Fire, Partisan Review
, vol. 39, no. 3 (summer 1962), 437–42.

43
Dolbier, Maurice, “Nabokov’s Plums,”
New York Herald Tribune
, June 17, 1962, B2.

44
There are many Cold War references, from a mention of Soviet generals arriving in Zembla, and passing mention of BIC (215), which was used in contemporary politics to indicate a country or region Behind the Iron Curtain which separated the Soviet sphere of influence from the West.

45
an international youth exchange
: The actual article is “30 Children Join Picnic of Nations,” NYT, July 20, 1959, 12;
Khrushchev canceling a visit
: “Khrushchev Calls Off Plan for Visit to Scandinavia,” NYT, July 21, 1959, 1.

46
Noble managed to get word of his fate to Germany via a postcard smuggled out by a barber, and was freed after President Eisenhower made public calls for his release. See Adam Bernstein’s obituary “John H. Noble Survived, Denounced Soviet Captivity,” from
The Washington Post
, November 17, 2007.

47
they could be worse
: Joseph Scholmer and Edward Buca also wrote memoirs of their time in Vorkuta. See Buca’s
Vorkuta
(1976) and Scholmer’s
Vorkuta
(1954).

“
from which there is no return
”: Noble, John, “Varied Groups Found in Vorkuta, Arctic Slave Camp of the Soviet,” NYT, April 5, 1955, 12. For nearly mirror descriptions of Nova Zembla, see Buca (325–6) and Scholmer (82).

48
a mass grave in Katyn Forest
: The missing Polish officers had disappeared from prisoner of war camps. A year later, many of the bodies would be unearthed in a mass grave at Katyn Forest in Russia, along with several other similar sites. The discovery by the German Army led to the fracture of the short lived Soviet-Polish alliance. In 1990, the Russian government would finally acknowledge Soviet responsibility for the massacre.

“
the barren and desolate island of Nova Zembla
”: Post, Robert. “Nazi Spring Drive in Russia Expected,” NYT, January 10, 1942, 6.

49
plans to build an Arctic resort
: “An Arctic Resort for the Russians,” NYT, April, 22, 1934, XX12;
sightings of mysterious airplanes
: “Plane Shown Clearly in Arctic Photograph,” NYT, August 22, 1931, 5.

50
“Exiled Russians To Leave This Week,” NYT, August 28, 1922, 10.

51
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 411–4.

52
Ibid., 416 and 418.

53
Ibid., 422.

54
it would be unforgiveable
: Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 425. The opinion quoted is that of Samuil Marshak, poet and celebrated children’s author.

As many as five hundred bootleg copies
: Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 428.

55
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander,
The Oak and the Calf (1980)
, 38.

56
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 435.

57
Salisbury, Harrison, “Books of the Times: Changes Perception Surviving Is a Triumph,” NYT, January 22, 1963, 7. The tide was already turning against Khrushchev, and by extension, Solzhenitsyn (Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 468–470).

58
“
frozen mud and horror
”: PF, 258; “
tale of torture
”: PF, 289; and when he writes of the temptation to die, Kinbote recounts the story of a young boy who is told his family “is about to migrate to a distant colony where his father has been assigned to a lifetime post.” The trusting boy believes that the new land where his family will live forever will be even better than his current home (219).