Vera (6 page)

Through these mine-infested waters Evsei Lazarevich cut a careful if confident path. His career was marked on all sides by the on-again, off-again game of acculturation: When he had come to Petersburg—and he appears to have been the first in his family to have done so—his name was
Gamshey Leizerovich.
^*
Under that name he earned his legal degree, which secured his
right to settle in Petersburg. Each semester he secured residency papers, renewed with each return from a visit to Mogilev, and extended when necessary. He was part of a huge wave of Jewish law students that greatly alarmed the State; by 1890 nearly half the Empire's apprentice lawyers were Jewish. The release of these statistics set off a furor. Within a matter of years it was next to impossible to do what Evsei Lazarevich had dreamed of doing in 1884. Between 1889 and 1896 no Jews were
admitted to the bar anywhere in the Empire. Over the next eight years—when Evsei Lazarevich would himself have relinquished the idea of sitting for his law boards—only fifteen Jewish candidates were approved. Jewish lawyers represented a particular embarrassment to the State because they were able to argue against the laws that had been promulgated to keep them in their places.

And this was, in part, what Evsei Lazarevich spent the next years doing. His actual legal career was short-lived: He worked as an apprentice for the four years following his graduation, for two Jewish barristers, the second of whom had an established practice and appears to have arranged for his lodging. Almost certainly because of the new restrictions—this was the year he should have passed the bar—he moved house and changed professions; the year of his marriage found him working for a large tile business, evidently owned by the Jewish family of a law school classmate. Possibly with the help of his wife's dowry, he opened a
kitchen tile company in 1900, which he ran for several years. The business entitled him to a trade certificate but did not automatically confer on him the rights of a merchant of the second guild. Whatever he did immediately afterward proved profitable, as he was able to buy a building in 1907 and to obtain his first telephone number. Other members of the family joined him in the capital: a brother, Iser Lazarevich, practiced dentistry and lived with his family in Slonim's building, into which a cousin, an engineer, moved a few years later. An older brother, David Lazarevich, appears to have moved to Petersburg with or just before Evsei Lazarevich, but not to have stayed in the city. An uncle enjoyed some prominence in business circles.

Véra Nabokov remembered her father as a lumber merchant. He was “a born pioneer in the truest sense, having taught himself forestry and priding himself on never allowing a tree to be felled without having one planted in replacement. He also built a little railway, a kind of feeder line, on one of the estates to bring timber close to the bank of Zapadnaya Dvina, down which river it was floated to Riga, tied up into enormous rafts by skilled peasants.” At least after 1909, he did so in conjunction with a Dutchman named
Leo Peltenburg, a man who became a close friend and who would be instrumental in helping Slonim to transfer his assets abroad at the time of the Revolution.
Also the father of three daughters, Peltenburg was a kindhearted man, quick to dispense wisdom and good cheer. Véra reserved a soft spot for him in her heart; she corresponded with him all her life. Leo Peltenburg ran a one-man firm, with agents throughout Russia and Germany; he traveled often to Petersburg, along with his daughters. For Evsei Slonim there were more than the usual advantages in having a foreign partner. What Véra Nabokov left unsaid in her impressive report on her father is that the timber trade—Russia's second-largest export business at the time—was a predominately Jewish one. And as such, additional regulations applied. The Jewish lumber merchant could not freely fell timber. He could not build or operate sawmills. He was obliged to ship his timber abroad in log form, which was less profitable than shipping lumber. He could ship only through specified ports (Petersburg was not among them); he could not lease land from the railroads in order to store his inventory. Of this Véra made no mention. There was every reason, however, why she would have a natural ear for a narrative technique later described as a “
system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.”

Slonim put his legal training to good use over these years. In a number of court petitions he represented Pavel Vladimirovich Rodzianko, an eminent industrialist—his brother was chairman of the Duma—engaged in a number of gold-mining operations. Slonim negotiated for the exploration rights in several mountain ranges in eastern Russia, government concessions of which were elaborate affairs. He would have received a quick education in securing timber rights from his court work on Rodzianko's behalf. The relationship appears to have been a close and mutually satisfactory one; from 1913 until the Revolution Slonim served as the chief estate manager for Pavel Vladimirovich's daughter, a neighbor on Furstadtskaya Street. Maria Pavlovna Rodzianko and her brother controlled a colossal fortune, including a great deal of Petersburg real estate. The finances were in a fabulously tangled state when they entrusted them to Evsei Slonim, who remained in place when Maria Pavlovna and her husband separated.
The Rodzianko work constituted a prestigious position—a mere sideline according to Véra, but a time-consuming one, judging from the court appearances and the petitions filed regularly on Pavel Vladimirovich's behalf—and one that suggests that Slonim's politics may not have been as left-wing as could otherwise be expected of a Jewish non-barrister practicing in Petersburg. He voted with the Kadets, as did most of the intelligentsia, but the family was less radical politically than the liberal Nabokovs.

Evsei Lazarevich's longest-running legal concern had nothing to do with
his aristocratic neighbors. In 1900 he filed a petition for the right to enter the second guild of the St. Petersburg Merchantry, which may explain the detour he had made into the tile business the previous year. Rank mattered more than wealth in prerevolutionary Russia, and entry into the second guild would have assured Slonim of the closest thing a Jew could claim to an in-alienable right: the secure privilege of residency in Petersburg. In particular he made the case for his right to hire a Jewish clerk from the Pale of Settlement in his home. He appears to have had in mind his brother Iser, then a member of the Mogilev petty bourgeoisie. The matter was tightly regulated, as the government feared a kind of Trojan horse invasion of the capital. In a case that reads like a collaboration between Sholom Aleichem and Joseph Heller, Slonim's petition wound its way from ministry to ministry. Briefly he had been a member of the second guild of merchants' sons in Mogilev; he argued that by virtue of his law degree, his trade, and his present residence he should be admitted to that guild in Petersburg. In 1900 the courts ruled that he must first obtain the right to unrestricted residency in the Empire, a right conferred by the very rank he was seeking. Whether Slonim fought the verdict as he did for the sake of his daughters, whose right to reside in Petersburg was contingent on his standing; whether he fought purely for the fate of his brother; whether he fought for the additional rights for himself; or whether he fought for principle's sake is unclear. He was known for his selflessness; legal precedent may well have been his interest. He proved uncommonly persistent. He pursued the matter for thirteen years, in which time Iser secured his right to live in Petersburg by virtue of his medical degree, and in which time the petition wound its way to the Senate. The request Evsei Lazarevich filed in October 1900 was ultimately denied in November 1913.

Both Véra Evseevna and her future husband were quick to stress the primacy of childhood impressions. To his first biographer, Andrew Field, Nabokov confessed his belief that the “
specific gravity” of childhood fixes the character of a Russian even more so than it does the character of other nationalities.
Speaking for Martin in
Glory
and as himself in
Speak, Memory
, he held that prerevolutionary Russian children had a sort of genius for recollection, that their memories were somehow rendered more indelible by a destiny who knew what she was about to deprive them of. Independently Véra made the same observation in 1958: “
An average Russian child of the beginning of this century can ordinarily record a total of reminiscences which appears staggering
even to an exceptionally gifted American.”
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She was by no means inclined to dwell on these recollections; everything in her history but little in her temperament could have made her a full-time nostalgic. She appeared almost frighteningly detached from her past. When asked about her Petersburg childhood and that of her husband, Véra Nabokov confined herself to lines like “
Both of our sets of parents were extremely intelligent people.” In her eighties, she declined an offer of photos of the Furstadtskaya Street home. Her sister Lena told her son that she had been taught to look forward, never back; she spoke of wanting to put the past in a box and
turn the key, twice. Véra effectively did as much, without seeming to realize that the key hung heavily on her delicate wrist. Evsei Lazarevich plainly took misfortune in stride and forged on, a habit he imparted, with some variation, to his daughters. From the opposite angle Slava Borisovna's demeanor may have worked the same effect. She was a high-strung woman, enough so to have produced an unflappable daughter, one with no taste for any kind of unnecessary hand-wringing. As one of her closest relatives wrote Véra many years later, “
Judging by your letter, you're in a good mood, but then again, you know how to make a good mood.” The Slonim girls, living in straitened circumstances in Berlin ten years after the Russian Revolution, could not have been less similar to the more famous three sisters in Russian literature. They were taught to be proud and capable and supremely rational, to rise above and, perhaps most of all to expect, adversity. In their sixty years of correspondence the past is rarely mentioned; there were no plaintive wails for St. Petersburg.

Some things were to be insisted upon, on the other hand. Véra Slonim learned a great number of lessons from her father, only one of which was how to hold a thirteen-year-grudge, a lesson she would put to good use. “They were raised to be perfect,” reports Lena Slonim's son, who knew his mother and aunts were pushed hard to excel academically. They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one.
^†
In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain climate; the lessons Véra Slonim learned were exactly the reverse of those her future husband learned in the incunabula of his first pampered eighteen years. “
One is always at home in one's past,” Nabokov would write, certainly not in reference to his wife. Evsei Lazarevich passed
his lofty sense of responsibility on to his middle daughter, whom he clearly encouraged. As she recalled later:

As precarious as the world may have been around them, Evsei Slonim had a taste for adventure, one he fostered in his daughters. He wrote off a neighbor's child with the remark that the child was “
calm, but uninteresting.” When
slandered in a newspaper—during the war he was cited by name as an exploitative apartment owner, after he had actually waived his rent for soldiers' wives—he lost no time in challenging the paper's editor to a duel. He received an apology instead.

“
As a little bit of musk fills an entire house, so the least influence of Judaism overflows all of one's life,” observed the poet Osip Mandelstam, who had already embarked on his literary career in Petersburg when Véra Slonim was a child, but whose background was in many respects similar. Véra Evseevna remained as areligious all her life as her family appeared to be in Russia, but knew well that her existence was predicated on a hard-won—and flimsy—right. She offered only one view of her distant ancestors, asserting that her father “
traced his descent in direct line from a celebrated though abstruse commentator of the Talmud who flourished in Spain in the XVII century, and who traced
his
descent in direct line from the Ancient Judean Kings.” None of this can be documented, though Véra Nabokov's was neither an unlikely nor an unusual claim. The most telling thing about it may be her simple assertion of the fact. It is what she believed, or what she wanted believed, or—at best—both. It is also not something she might have asserted in quite the same way in Petersburg. It was possible to feel affluent, even, to an extent, acculturated, but never entirely at ease. Mandelstam wrote of
the Jewish tutor who first introduced him to the concept of Jewish pride and whom he failed to believe, as he could see the tutor put that pride away as soon as he set foot again in the street.