Natasha's Dance (91 page)

    Berlin was a particularly difficult place to live, as thousands of Russians fled the city after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The Nabokovs stayed in the German capital. They lived in poverty - Vera working as a secretary and Nabokov giving private lessons in English and in French. But it was obvious that they, too, would have to leave. Vera was Jewish, and in 1936 the man who had assassinated Nabokov’s father, Sergei Taboritsky, was appointed second-in-command of

    Hitler’s department for emigre affairs. Nabokov searched in desperation for an academic post in London or New York, anywhere but Hitler’s Germany, and settled in the end for a move to Paris in 1938. From there the Nabokovs made arrangements to go to New York in the spring of 1940, just two weeks before the Germans reached Paris. In their studio apartment near the Bois de Boulogne Nabokov locked himself in the bathroom, laid a suitcase across the bidet and typed out his entry ticket to the English literary world:
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
published in New York in 1941.

    Nabokov’s passage to New York had been arranged by Alexandra Tolstoy, the novelist’s daughter and the head of the Tolstoy Foundation, which had just been set up to look after the interests of Russian emigres in America. The outbreak of the Second World War had brought about a flood of well-known refugees from Hitler’s Europe: Einstein, Thomas Mann, Huxley, Auden, Stravinsky, Bartok and Chagall - all made new homes for themselves in the USA. New York was swollen with Russian emigres. The literary capital of Russia in America, its daily Russian newspaper,
Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian Word)
had a national readership of half a million. The Nabokovs settled in ‘a dreadful little flat’ on West 87th Street, near Central Park. As a writer Nabokov was not well known among the emigres in the USA. Until the scandal and success of
Lolita,
completed in 1952 but not published until 1955, he struggled to survive from his writing. Like the hero of his novel
Pnin
(1957), he was forced to make his living from temporary lecturing jobs at, among other universities, Stanford, Wellesley and Cornell. Not that his financial hardship reduced Nabokov’s considerable pride. When Rachmaninov sent the struggling writer some of his old clothes, Nabokov, who was something of a dandy and the son of possibly the best-dressed man in the entire history of St Petersburg,* returned the suits to the composer, complaining that they had been tailored ‘in the period of the Prelude’.
⁶⁸

    * Nabokov
pere
was famous for his finely tailored English suits, which he wore, without self-consciousness, in the Duma assembly, where many of the rural deputies were dressed in peasant clothes (A. Tyrkova-Williams,
Na putiakh k svobode
(New York, 1952), P. 2.70). His sartorial extravagance was a common source of anecdotes in pre-revolutionary Petersburg. It was even said that he sent his underpants to England to be washed.

    ’America is my home now,’ Nabokov said in interviews in 1964. ‘I am an American writer.’
⁶⁹
Despite his sometimes rather scathing portraits of the USA (most notoriously in
Lolita),
it appears the sentiment was genuinely held. Nabokov liked to play the real American. Having lost the Nabokov inheritance in the Old World way, through revolution, he had earned his fortune in the New World way: by hard work and brains.
⁷⁰
The bounty of
Lolita
was a badge of his success as an American, and he wore it with great pride. ‘This is the only known case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle’, writes an envious but admiring reviewer of the Russian writer and emigre Vadim (read: Nabokov) in
Look at the Harlequins!
(1974).
⁷¹
Nabokov would not tolerate any criticism of America. He was a patriot. Throughout his life he kept the oath which he had sworn when he became a US citizen in 1945. When Gallimard produced a cover design for the French edition of
Pnin
showing the professor standing on the US flag, Nabokov objected to the Stars and Stripes ‘being used as a floor coverage or a road surfacing’.
⁷²

    Nabokov’s anti-Soviet politics were at the core of his Americanism. He sided with McCarthy. He despised the liberals who harboured sympathies for the Soviet Union. He refused to have anything to do with Soviet Russia - even at the height of the Second World War when it was an ally of the West. When Nabokov learned, in 1945, that Vasily Maklakov, the official representative of the Russian emigres in France, had attended a luncheon at the Soviet embassy in Paris, and had drunk a toast ‘to the motherland, to the Red Army, to Stalin’, he wrote in anger to a friend:

    I can understand denying one’s principles in
one
exceptional case: if they told me that those closest to me would be tortured or spared according to my reply, I would immediately consent to anything, ideological treachery or foul deeds and would even apply myself lovingly to the parting on Stalin’s backside. Was Maklakov placed in such a situation? Evidently not.

    All that remains is to outline a classification of the emigration. I distinguish five main divisions:

    1. The philistine majority, who dislike the Bolsheviks for taking from them their little bit of land or money, or twelve Ilf-and-Petrov chairs.

    2. Those who dream of pogroms and a Rumanian Tsar, and now fraternize with the Soviets because they sense in the Soviet Union the Soviet Union of the Russian people.

    3. Fools.

    4. Those who ended up across the border by inertia, vulgarians and careerists who pursue their own advantage and lightheartedly serve any leader at all.

    5. Decent freedom-loving people, the old guard of the Russian intelligentsia, who unshakeably despise violence against language, against thought, against truth.
⁷³

    Nabokov placed himself in the final category. In his courses on Russian literature he refused to lecture on any literature since 1917, although in his classes at Cornell he made a concession for Akhmatova and the poetry of Pasternak.* Nabokov maintained that the communist regime had prevented the development of an ‘authentic literature’.
⁷⁴
He was equally hostile to the realist tradition of the nineteenth century which looked to literature for social content and ideas - a tradition which he rightly saw as a predecessor of the Soviet approach to literature. It was on this basis that he criticized both
Dr Zhivago
(‘dreary conventional stuff), which competed with
Lolita
at the top of the bestseller lists in 1958, and Solzhenitsyn’s
The Gulag Archipelago
(1973-5) (‘a kind of juicy journalese, formless, wordy and repetitious’)
⁷⁵
- although there must have been some jealousy at work

    * Nabokov was normally dismissive of Akhmatova and of the many female imitators of her early style. In
Pnin
the professor’s estranged wife Liza sings out ‘rhythmically, in long-drawn, deep-voiced tones’ a cruel parody of Akhmatova’s verse:

    ’I have put on a dark dress And am more modest than a nun; An ivory crucifix Is over my cold bed.

    But the lights of fabulous orgies Burn through my oblivion, And I whisper the name George -Your golden name!’

    (V. Nabokov,
Pnin
(Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 47). Akhmatova was deeply offended by the parody, which had played upon the ‘half-harlot, half-nun’ image used by Zhdanov in 1948 (L.Chukovskaia,
Zapiski
ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2
vols. (Paris, 1980), vol. 2, p. 383).

    there as well (for unlike Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov never won the Nobel Prize). And yet, despite his political denials, he felt a deep attachment to the Russian tradition. He longed to write another novel in his native tongue. He felt that there was something of his tragic hero Pnin - the bumbling, noble-hearted emigre professor of Russian who cannot quite adapt to his American environment - not only in himself but in all the best emigres.

    In 1965 Nabokov worked on a Russian translation of
Lolita.
In the afterword to the English edition he had referred to his switch from Russian into English as a ‘private tragedy’. But he now began his afterword to the Russian edition by confessing that the process of translating his prose back again had been disillusioning:

    Alas, that ‘marvellous Russian language’ that I thought awaited me somewhere, blossoming like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate whose key I had kept safe for so many years, proved to be nonexistent, and beyond the gate are nothing but charred stumps and the hopeless autumnal vista, and the key in my hand is more like a jimmy.
⁷⁶

    The Russian language had moved on since Nabokov left his native land, and ‘the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions’ which he had used like a magician in his early Russian novels were now lost on his Soviet audience.

    When the poet Zinaida Gippius and her husband Dmitry Merezhkov-sky arrived in Paris in 1919 they opened the door of their flat with their own key and found everything in place: books, linen, kitchenware.
⁷⁷
Exile was a return to their second home. For many of the old St Petersburg elite, coming to Paris was like returning to the old cosmopolitan lifestyle that they themselves had imitated in St Petersburg. The Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, brother-in-law to the last Tsar, arrived in Paris in the same year as the Merezhkovskys and made like a homing pigeon for the Ritz Hotel - his bills paid courtesy of a rare collection of Tsarist coins with which he had fled from his native land. This Paris was

    not so much a ‘Little Russia’ as a microcosm (and continuation) of the extraordinary cultural renaissance in St Petersburg between 1900 and 1916. Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Benois, Bakst, Shaliapin, Goncharova, Koussevitsky and Prokofiev - they all made Paris home.

    The effect of the arrival of such emigres was to accentuate two related facets of Russia’s cultural image in the West. The first of these was a renewed appreciation of the European character of Russian culture as manifested in the so-called ‘neoclassical’ style of Stravinsky, Prokofiev and the Ballets Russes. Stravinsky himself disliked the term, claiming that it meant ‘absolutely nothing’ and that music, by its very nature, could not express anything at all.
⁷⁸
But his neoclassicism was itself a statement of artistic principles. It was a conscious rejection of the Russian peasant music of his early neo-nationalist phase, of the violent Scythian rhythms in
The Rite of Spring
which had erupted in the Revolution of 1917. Forced into exile, Stravinsky now clung nostalgically to the ideal of beauty embodied in the classical inheritance of his native Petersburg. He borrowed from Bach and Pergolesi and, above all, from the Italo-Slavs (Berezovsky, Glinka and Tchaikovsky) who had shaped a particular strand of the Russian musical style in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

    An important aspect of this renewed engagement with the Imperial past was Diaghilev’s promotion of Tchaikovsky’s ballets in Paris. Before 1917 Tchaikovsky had been regarded in the West as the least interesting of the Russian composers. His music, in the words of the French critic Alfred Bruneau in 1903, was ‘devoid of the Russian character that pleases and attracts us in the music of the New Slavic school’.
⁷⁹
Seen as a pale imitation of Beethoven and Brahms, it lacked the exotic Russian character which the West expected from the Ballets Russes; Tchai-kovksy’s ballets did not feature in the
saisons russes.
But after 1917 a nostalgia for the old Imperial St Petersburg and its classical traditions, which Tchaikovsky’s music epitomized, led to a conscious effort by the Paris emigres to redefine themselves by this identity. Diaghilev revived
The Sleeping Beauty
(1890) for the Paris season of 1921. Stravinsky, who re-orchestrated parts of the score, wrote an open letter to the London
Times
in which he saluted the ballet as ‘the most authentic expression of the epoch in our Russian life that we call the “Petersburg period”’. This tradition, Stravinsky now maintained, was just as

    Russian as the folk-based culture which before 1914 the Ballets Russes had pedalled to the West in the form of works like his own
Firebird:

    The music of Tchaikovsky, which does not seem obviously Russian to everyone, is often more profoundly Russian than that which long ago received the superficial label of Muscovite picturesqueness. This music is every bit as Russian as Pushkin’s verse or Glinka’s songs. Without specifically cultivating ‘the Russian peasant soul’ in his art, Tchaikovsky imbibed unconsciously the true national sources of our race.
⁸⁰

    The second cultural feature of the emigres in Paris was their reassertion of the aristocratic values that lay at the heart of the Petrine Imperial legacy. Beneath the surface gloss of its Slav exotica, this aristocratism constituted the essential spirit of the World of Art. This, too, was rooted in the music of Tchaikovsky, which had first brought together the three co-founders of the World of Art, Benois, Filosofov and Diaghilev, in the early 1890s. What they loved about the ballets of Tchaikovsky, as Benois was to put it in his
Reminiscences
in 1939, was their ‘aristocratic spirit’ which remained ‘untouched by any democratic deviations’ such as were to be found in utilitarian forms of art.
⁸¹
These were precisely the ‘Art for Art’s sake’ values which the emigres in Paris came to prize above all. They made a cult of the Alexandrine age with its high French Empire style and
raffine
artistic aristocracy exemplified by Pushkin. Harking back to these old certainties was a natural response by the emigres. The Revolution had destroyed the aristocratic civilization from which most of them had come, forcing them to find a second home in Europe. To some degree, despite Nabokov’s claims to the contrary, they were shaken, too, by the loss of status they had enjoyed as members of their country’s propertied elite. With their Nansen (League of Nations) passports* and their Alien