Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (69 page)

38
Dabney, 512.

39
Wilson took the position that Cincinnatus in
Invitation to a Beheading
is not executed, but “simply gets up and walks away.” Wilson, Edmund,
A Window on Russia
(1972), 233.

40
Wilson, Edmund,
To The Finland Station
(2003), xxiii.

41
NWL, 2.

42
Ibid., 373.

43
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander,
The Oak and the Calf
, 103.

44
Ibid., 104.

45
Solzhenitsyn, paradoxically, was critical of the two men for sending their works to the West, suggesting that they had “sought fame abroad.” Solzhenitsyn,
The Oak and the Calf
, 557.

46
Ibid., 558.

47
Kunitz, Stanley, “The Other Country Inside Russia,”
NYT Sunday Magazine
, August 20, 1967, 24.

48
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 606.

49
Ibid., 574 and 558–9.

50
Ibid., 629.

51
Ibid., 675.

52
Salisbury, Harrison, “The World as a Prison,” NYT, September 15, 1968, BR1.

53
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 726.

54
Ibid., 740. The acquaintance was Alexander Gorlov. A year after Solzhenitsyn had been expelled, he emigrated to the United States.

55
An additional tragedy, as Michael Scammell notes, is that the copy whose location Voronyanskaya revealed was one Solzhenitsyn had repeatedly asked her to burn, but she had been worried that the other copies might be confiscated, and so she had preserved it. Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 816.

56
VNSL, 528.

57
Two weeks later, Nabokov was invited by
The New York Times Magazine
to write an open letter to Solzhenitsyn, an offer he predictably refused. VNSL, 529.

58
Safire, William. “Solzhenitsyn without Tears,” NYT, February 18, 1974, 25.

59
American men who refused to serve in Vietnam
: Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, “The Big Losers in the Third World War,” NYT, Jun 22, 1975, 193;
if he might be mentally unstable
: Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn, 917
.

60
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander,
The Gulag Archipelago
, vol. 1, 263.

61
VNSL, 531.

62
BBRY, 316.

63
Kelly Oliver has explored the concept of the impossibility of witnessing in relation to atrocity, arguing that the effort to do so is nonetheless what gives rise to our very agency and humanity. She paraphrases Shoshana Felman’s arguments in a way that finds echoes in Kinbote’s dissociation:

What would it mean to bear witness to the Holocaust? asks Felman. To witness from the inside, from the experience of the victims? She argues that it would first mean bearing witness from inside the desire
not
to be inside. Also, it would mean testifying from inside the very binding of the secret that made victims feel as though they were part of a secret world. It would mean testifying from the inside of a radical deception by which one was separated from the truth of history even as one was living it. Moreover, it would mean testifying from inside otherness, bearing “witness from inside the living pathos of a tongue which nonetheless is bound to be heard as noise” (from
Witnessing: Beyond Recognition
, 2001, 90).

It is true that the Gulag is not the Holocaust, and that psychoanalyzing a fictional character can be a futile exercise. But it is possible to look at Nabokov’s fiction as embracing a similar notion of art serving as a way to acknowledge and explore what is beyond our ability to understand or express directly, no matter what recorded history we bring to bear.

64
Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, vol. 1, 220; Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 906.

65
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 593–4.

66
In his letter, Nabokov referenced an appeal made by Viktor Fainberg. Fainberg, a dissident who had been released, had worked out of Amnesty International’s offices, helping to free Bukovsky. See William Burridge’s “How Amnesty Is Fulfilling Pope’s Holy Year Appeal,”
Catholic Herald
, March 7, 1975.

67
at the request of American friends
: The friends, Carl and Ellendea Proffer, had named their publishing house Ardis, which is the name of the family estate in Nabokov’s
Ada
. The Proffers were responsible for a tremendous amount of Russian and Soviet literature getting into print (or staying there) in the United States, and became friends with the Nabokovs.

he sent a telegram
: VNSL, 540.

68
The cable may well have helped, but the publicity for it came too late. The March 17
People
profile ran after Maramzin had already been released. “Soviet Writer Gets Suspended Sentence,” NYT, February 22, 1975, 2.

69
VNSL, 359.

70
Michael Wood has most thoroughly considered the different façades Nabokov offered the world—and their effects on his art—in
The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
(1997).

71
Salter, James,
People
profile of Vladimir Nabokov, March 17, 1975.

72
Ada
had ridden in on the tails of Nabokov’s most stellar works and been treated with mercy. Coming on the heels of
Ada
, Nabokov’s next novel,
Look at the Harlequins!
, had been treated much more roughly by critics.

73
VNSL, 564.

74
SO, 193.

75
NG, 2.#8211;3.

76
BBAY, 663.

77
Brian Boyd would have his challenges, too. Véra would reject the use of statements she had made to him herself, and even of things she had written. Trying to discuss Nabokov’s affair with Irina Guadanini with Véra, Boyd would find that Véra maintained it had never happened right up until he mentioned that their letters still existed. Schiff, 344.

78
Pennsylvania’s Tyrone Daily
: “Gold in Arctic,” from the Tyrone (Pa.)
Daily Herald
, February 4, 1933;
Popular Science
: Armagnac, Armand, “New Cities in the Arctic,”
Popular Science
, May 1937, 25–6 (text and map);
American Fed eration of Labor Gulag map
: Mike Adler, author of
Dreaded Island: A History ofNovaya Zemlya
(2011) unearthed this map and also pointed out to me the existence of Andrey Stotski’s memoir in Polish and English.

a Routledge atlas
: Gilbert, Martin,
The Routledge Atlas of Russian History, Fourth Edition
(2007), 111–2. First published 1972;
his own experiences on Nova Zembla
: The English-language version of Stotski’s story ran in the
Plain Talk
anthology, Don Levine, Isaac, ed. (1976), and was originally published in the magazine of the same name from May to August 1947.

“
virtually unrecorded ‘death camps’”
: Conquest, Robert,
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
(2007), 330.

79
Larkov, S. and F. Romanenko. “The Northernmost Island of
The Gulag Archi pelago
,” from the Memorial Web site:
www.memorial.krsk.ru/Articles/2007Larkov2.htm
.

80
Kizny, Tomasz.
Gulag: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps
(2004), 186. See also Applebaum’s
Gulag
, 82.

81
rebellion sprang up
: Figes,
The Whisperers
, 212;
small brass band
: Kizny, 186.

82
Even today with warmer temperatures and a reduced ice pack, most routine trips to Solovki end in September.

83
Applebaum, Anne,
Gulag: A History
(2003), 21.

84
“Russians Said to Get Coal from New Arctic Mines,” February 14, 1947, 3.

85
who reported terror: “…
we heard a terrifying rumour that the camp was to be closed down and we were to be sent to Novaya Zemlya on the Polar Sea—a place from which there would be no return.” Buca, 325–6;
were shipped off
each year
: See Noble’s I
Was a Slave In Russia
(1960) and Joseph Scholmer’s
Vorkuta; no records of functioning mines
: Mineshafts were dug on Nova Zembla later, when it became a nuclear testing ground. But there is no record of prisoner transports used as manpower for them. (There are, however, records of non-prisoner military personnel, engineers, and miners brought to the island to do the work of constructing test site facilities and mineshafts for underground explosions.)

Which leaves Polish Gulag prisoner Andrey Stotski’s account of having worked mines on Nova Zembla. To its credit, Stotski’s story was written just after his release to fight in the war, rendering it more reliable than hearsay accounts recorded decades later. It is also incredibly detailed. But the vast network of mines and sophisticated equipment like pneumatic drills that Stotski describes would demand organizational planning and transportation sufficient to administer a true mining enterprise, which would also require the kind of massive resources that would show up in multiple records. It is possible that these mines existed, and all paperwork related to them was destroyed before it could be collected by Gulag archivists. It may be more likely that Stotski was somehow misled that he was on Nova Zembla, or that his story, as with those of many former prisoners, somehow encapsulated the terror of Nova Zembla, which was felt so deeply that it became bound up with Gulag experiences, even for those who were never sent there.

86
This fusion of the extremes of horror and geography echoes Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Man
, part of which Kinbote quotes in
Pale Fire
, and another part of which also makes reference to Zembla:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As to be hated needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

But where th’extreme of Vice was ne’er agreed:

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.

No creature owns it in the first degree,

But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he;

E’vn those who dwell beneath its very zone,

Or never feel the rage or never own;

What happier natures shrink at with affright,

The hard inhabitant contends is right.

87
BBAY, 662.

88
NABOKV-L, the Nabokov Listserv, Archives from October 2, 1999:
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910&L=nabokv-l&F=&S=&P=1464
. The discussions reportedly fell apart when the mayor lost his reelection bid.

89
Kramer, Hilton, “A Talk with Solzhenitsyn,”
NYT Book Review
, May 11, 1980, BR1.

90
Solzhenitsyn biographer Michael Scammell suggests that some of the criti cism that has been leveled against Solzhenitsyn’s skill as a writer is a result of translations that fail to fully deliver on the richness of the original text (author interview with Scammell, February 2012).

91
He neglected to point out that the extraordinary measures had been futile, and that V. D. Nabokov had returned to his original stance shortly afterward.

92
Not everyone was happy with the renaming. See Harding, Luke, “Signs of dispute on Moscow’s Solzhenitsyn Street,”
The Guardian
, December 12, 2008.

93
Interview with Reimer Möller, November 2011.

94
NKVD and Soviet Army Records obtained with the assistance of Adam Hradilek, head of the Oral History Group of the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Prague, the Czech Republic.

95
Interview with Vladimir Petkevič, November 2011.

96
A line from “Signs and Symbols” explaining the world view taken on by the Jewish-Russian refugee mother of the boy who has gone mad (STOR, 601).