Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (7 page)

Soon after Mademoiselle’s arrival, a seven-year-old Volodya found a parallel refuge—not yet in the past, but in the natural world. He became obsessed with butterflies. He learned to chase the rare swallowtails and common pearl-bordered fritillaries at Vyra, and also how to dispatch them with ether, insert a pin through the thorax, and spread their veined wings for display and
classification. Specimens accumulated in direct proportion to the instability that kept the children from returning to St. Petersburg.

That same season, elections for the first Duma were held. Revolutionary parties officially boycotted them, allowing the Kadets, in coalition with a peasant labor party, to dominate. An eloquent speech from V. D. Nabokov against the death penalty led to the unanimous passage of a measure outlawing it. Steps were proposed to relieve famine conditions, which had swept the countryside after crop failures during the war. The Kadets led the preparation of a petition demanding the power to select ministers, the surrender of some estates for redistribution, and the release of political prisoners—including those sentenced as terrorists. The deputies believed they had the upper hand—when Nicholas II gave his speech before the Duma, V. D. Nabokov was reported to have been seen “lounging in the front row with his hands in his pockets and openly smirking.”
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The Duma learned, however, that its demands would not even be considered. They passed a resolution of no confidence in the government. The Tsar’s ministers, they insisted, must be answerable to them. The Tsar begged to differ, and dissolved the Duma.

The following day, V. D. Nabokov and nearly two hundred other deputies decamped to Vyborg, across the Finnish border. They signed an appeal calling on the Russian people to refuse to serve in the military or to pay taxes, understanding that a government with a crippled budget and no army would be unable to govern.
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It was an act of shocking defiance, born of frustration, yet the Vyborg signers’ dramatic stand did nothing but injury to their own cause. Returning to Russia, they lost their political rights. New elections would be held, but the signers, including Nabokov’s father, were barred from running for office.

Violence exploded at both ends of the political spectrum. A leading Kadet found himself denounced in an anti-Semitic political cartoon. He had converted to Christianity long ago, but in the eyes of the reactionaries he remained part of the Jewish conspiracy bent on destroying Russia. He was murdered that July. For his
troubles, V. D. Nabokov learned that his name was next on the list of the group’s targets for assassination. His friends convinced him of the wisdom of traveling abroad.
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Strategic violence was also stepped up on the Left. The Socialist Revolutionary Party spawned a terrorist offshoot focused on mass casualties. Holdups and burglaries, along with attacks on landowners and small businesses, became commonplace. The Bolsheviks, too, embraced similar economic opportunities. With an aggressive approach to tactics and organization, Vladimir Lenin had by 1905 become one of a triumvirate of Bolshevik fundraisers. Lenin supervised bank robberies, deployed Bolshevik agents in sham marriages to swindle heiresses, and brought in professional criminals experienced in gunrunning. Among his lieutenants in these efforts was Joseph Stalin.
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As parties scrambled to gather funds and followers, elections for a second Duma were held early in 1907. Banned from political life, Nabokov’s father could not appear as a candidate; but, writing in the pages of the Kadet Party newspaper, he continued to press for liberalization, staking out a middle path between reactionary extremism and revolution.

Lenin, too, remained outside contention for a Duma seat—he would not put himself in jeopardy by returning to Russia. Denouncing calls for moderation, he issued a pamphlet insulting V. D. Nabokov and his allies by name, declaring war on the Kadets and condemning their peasant allies. He threatened the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were also considering an alliance with the Kadets. He wrote of the “dirty business” that would lead anyone, after the sacrifices of Bloody Sunday, to help elect V. D. Nabokov’s party to the Duma. Lenin acknowledged his cause might be betrayed by his partners in revolution, but he claimed to understand exactly what he was up against. And, he noted, “He who laughs last laughs best.”
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Lenin’s pamphlet was seized, and many copies of it destroyed, but history was already tilting his way. The Kadets lost ground in the elections, and the makeup of the Second Duma became far more radical than the first. After four months, the Tsar dissolved it, too.

The defiant members of the First Duma had likewise not been forgotten by Nicholas II. Former deputies who had signed the Vyborg Manifesto, including Nabokov’s father, were put on trial later that year and convicted of advocating the overthrow of the government. V. D. Nabokov was sentenced to three months in solitary confinement.
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After a failed appeal, he headed just a few minutes up the Neva River from his home to serve his time in Kresty Prison. While there, he wrote reassuring notes on toilet paper to his wife Elena, produced several legal articles, and studied Italian before tackling Dante. It was hardly the worst of prison conditions—he brought his collapsible bathtub along with him. But downplaying every aspect of incarceration, he was keen to demonstrate that his sentence was merely an inconvenience.
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By the time of V. D. Nabokov’s incarceration, a shared passion for butterflies marked his close relations with his son. He had already given his first-born a treasured catch from his own childhood; in return, Vladimir sent a butterfly to his father in prison.
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When Nabokov’s father was released, he rode to see his children in the country, making his way from the railroad station to a welcome party in the neighboring village on his way home. V. D. Nabokov’s mother had forbidden residents of her own land from celebrating his release from jail, but the local schoolteacher near Vyra had planned festivities, with decorations of red bunting, blue cornflowers, and pine boughs.
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In a twelve-month period, V. D. Nabokov had been denounced by Vladimir Lenin and convicted by the courts his father had supervised as Minister of Justice. His own mother had disavowed his politics. As he headed toward his country house, the carriage rolled past the river and the trees and the church and the mausoleum, the new schoolhouse and the old cabins. Volodya waited in the village to welcome his father home.

By the time of V. D. Nabokov’s return, the boy was infatuated with books and butterflies, he adored his parents, and no one but
the very old had ever died. He had already escaped political upheaval once, and the concepts that would become recurring themes in his work—flight, revolution, political tyranny, anti-Semitism, and imprisonment—had crept into the margins of his life before his tenth birthday.

The constants of Nabokov’s early years were his tender exchanges with his parents and the compulsory companionship of Sergei and his governesses. As he grew older, however, other characters moved center stage.

Elena Nabokov’s brother, Uncle Ruka, adored the young Volodya and made much of him. Nabokov remembered for decades the attention paid to him by his uncle, who took him on his knee and, with special names and sweet words, fondled him.
Fondle
is Nabokov’s word, and his account of their interactions was so nuanced as to leave events entirely unclear, while still striking an insistent note of unease.
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With five languages and pride in his cryptography, Uncle Ruka had a career in some type of diplomacy. He wore opera capes and furs, rode to hounds, and composed romantic music. He survived at least one airplane crash. Though it was Sergei who learned his uncle’s best composition by heart, Ruka was drawn to Vladimir.

Nabokov’s father was willing to leave his son with Ruka, at least in the company of others; yet he was short with his brother-in-law and would rebuke him (as he would later rebuke Nabokov) for rudeness to servants. He watched disapprovingly when Ruka turned melodramatic, lying down on the floor in the middle of dinner and claiming an incurable heart ailment.

V. D. Nabokov did not lie down on the floor in the middle of dinner. Nabokov’s father was a liberal, but he was also a man with a traditional sense of honor. He had criticized in print the archaic custom of dueling; but when a newspaper story suggested he had married his wife to obtain her fortune, he demanded that the editor of the
paper distance himself from the story with a retraction or be called out to fight.
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If a gallery of role models existed, V. D. Nabokov represented the heroic father, a Russian man motivated by honor and duty to serve his country. Uncle Ruka appeared to be something else—melancholy, homosexual, with artistic inclinations. As odd as his uncle was, Nabokov would long be troubled by the condescension Ruka endured even from those who liked him. As if in response, Nabokov would later build character after unsettling character who is mocked and misunderstood but who has his own secret life in tow.
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In addition to an object lesson in empathy—or at least pity—Nabokov’s family would also provide him with his closest childhood friend, Baron Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg. The son of V. D. Nabokov’s sister, Yuri was a year and a half older at an age when these things mattered, and he made for a much more adventurous playmate than the younger Sergei.

Above all, Nabokov admired his cousin’s preternatural fearlessness. Yuri was as enamored with guns as the prepubescent Nabokov was with butterflies. When they were together, the older boy’s interests dominated; they read and re-enacted Western novels, shooting at each other in an ascending calculus of weaponry, from toy pistols to dart guns and air guns, eventually progressing to nerve-rattling feats with a real revolver. Not long after their last, lethal toy was confiscated, Yuri would be old enough to begin training for real war.

Nabokov did not see Yuri often, and so occupied himself with his own interests. He wept over butterflies he failed to catch. He abandoned playmates less exciting than Yuri for his own solitary pursuits. But not all his time was spent playing; governesses overlapped and were followed by tutors, in whose company Nabokov studied at home until the age of twelve.

The tutors, he later noted, exposed him to almost every kind of Russian character at one point or another, as if his father had designed a roster of the cultural and religious cross-currents of the Empire. The village schoolmaster, an anti-war revolutionary
who taught him at Vyra, was succeeded by the son of an Orthodox carpenter. A Ukrainian mathematician was followed by a Latvian, who was replaced in turn by a Catholic Pole and a Lutheran of Jewish descent.

This panoply of diversity was not admired by everyone in the household. Nabokov’s aunts were prone to carrying on in the same vein as his grandmother, discussing the Jewish origins of the boys’ latest tutor, Filip Zelenski, and visibly unnerving their guest when Nabokov’s parents were not around. If Nabokov was then too young to understand the ramifications of the cultural and political divides within the walls of his own home, Zelenski became the first outsider the young Nabokov allied himself with as a human being, the first person he realized needed protection, the first person he would, even as a child, want to defend.
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Yet protectiveness toward Zelenski did not prevent the development of the adversarial relations Nabokov seemed to enjoy creating with every tutor—and some family members. Relatives, for better or worse, were not dispensable—but in the case of the tutors, he tracked the speed at which he could wear them out and drive them away.

As his tutors’ primacy gave way to institutional education, however, Volodya may have waxed nostalgic for the liberty of their care. In 1911, his parents enrolled him at the Tenishev School, known for its progressive spirit and democratic makeup. Future literary giant Osip Mandelstam also hailed from Tenishev, though Nabokov would later remember it as a typical school, distinguished mainly by its lack of discrimination in accepting students of different classes, races, and beliefs.
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Nabokov was a brilliant student and, although thin, a confident athlete. School nonetheless opened up a new, discouraging universe. For the first time, he was forced into ongoing proximity with people unrelated to him by blood or friendship. He did not want to use the filthy hand towels in the bathroom, and his first overnight school field trip—a three-day excursion to Finland—was a singularly
unpleasant experience. Not only did he feel that the teachers found his interest in butterflies eccentric, Nabokov later recalled it as the first time he had gone twenty-four hours without a bath.
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Vladimir Nabokov was vaguely dissatisfied with Tenishev, and he sensed that his teachers were likewise unhappy with him. Tenishev was devoted to producing active, educated citizens of a future Russian democracy; and as the first-born son of V. D. Nabokov, Nabokov felt himself hectored on this point by his instructors—even those who were normally kind. Nabokov helped edit the school’s literary journal, but why would he not join a debating society? Why would the son of V. D. Nabokov not walk the last blocks to school, instead of rubbing the other students’ noses in the chauffeur he commanded? Vladimir felt that even his position as goalkeeper in Tenishev soccer games was suspect, seen as a desire not to run and mingle with normal boys.
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