Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (10 page)

Crisis after crisis followed. The Provisional Government did not have a strong base of support from rank-and-file soldiers, but nonetheless recommitted to war. Many Russians, however, had dreamed of not just freedom from the Tsar but freedom from combat; the government lost supporters by supporting an inherently unpopular conflict.

Stalemates followed, making it impossible to govern. The Kadets, including V. D. Nabokov, left the government in a dramatic July resignation. A Bolshevik uprising followed immediately and was put down at the last minute only by the arrival of a cavalry unit loyal to the Provisional Government. There was talk of arresting Lenin. Trotsky was arrested and taken to Kresty Prison, which had housed V. D. Nabokov years before. But a deliberate choice was made, as Nabokov’s father phrased it, not “to eliminate Lenin and Co.”
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Instead, the uprising resulted in concessions to socialists and the installation of a new prime minister, Alexander Kerensky. Short-haired, shortsighted, and quick to passion, Kerensky was caught between dramatic public posturing and halting efforts to forge a faith in the government that might ensure its survival until the elections that fall.

From the beginning, Nabokov’s father had little hope that the Provisional Government could succeed—and as small as it started out, that hope continued to diminish. The government was assailed on a daily basis by those who saw it as incompetent and sinister, or
simply viewed its search for stability as a naïve investment in the status quo.

The outlook for democracy in Russia had turned so grim that fall that V. D. Nabokov wavered in his lifelong fight against capital punishment, supporting the imposition of the death penalty in an army he felt had been infected by revolutionary agitators. That September, he found himself listening in amazement to stories of a furious argument erupting among leaders over whether the old Imperial eagle buttons on formal chamber attire should be banned. The Tsars had failed Russia; now the Provisional Government was failing her, too. National elections were delayed again but scheduled for November.
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Vladimir Nabokov turned eighteen that year at the center of an empire in the process of imploding. Amid the destruction, Russia’s future was taking shape, and a new kind of concentration camp was just a year away.

Yet Nabokov’s world still intersected only tangentially with the political upheaval around him. His refusal to engage, he would later recall, led to his being denounced as a foreigner by his Tenishev teachers and classmates. Otherwise, his life was taken up with mundane events. In May, he was operated on for appendicitis in Petrograd; in the summer, he went, as usual, away to Vyra. Day after day, he wrote new poems. He returned to Petrograd with a school friend; he wrote tributes to a new love, a sophisticated older Jewish girl whom he had met in Finland.
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If those more politically minded than the young Nabokov were holding their collective breath to see what the elections would bring, history and the Bolsheviks would not wait that long. Faith in the Provisional Government continued to decline, and the first week of November, Bolshevik forces captured strategic points in the city and launched another attempt to seize power. The following morning, Kerensky—who had pledged to have loyal forces that could put down just such an uprising—was revealed to have no support at all.

V. D. Nabokov went to the Winter Palace to see what the government would do in response. On discovering that they would do nothing, he left. Minutes later, Bolshevik forces streamed in, sealed the Palace, and dissolved the Council, taking its members to the Peter and Paul Fortress. There was, in that moment, no grand battle for control of the city or Russia. No defiant stands were made in the name of the government or its leader. Alexander Kerensky was seen in an open car and said to be fleeing south out of Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had seized power.

Nabokov’s father remained in place as the head of the electoral commission, refusing to acknowledge Bolshevik rule and investing whatever hope he had left in the will of the voters. The elections, for which so many people had hoped for so long, could not be so easily crushed.

Looting and commandeering of property across Russia continued. While Nabokov wrote at night, he heard machine-gun fire in the streets. One afternoon during the unrest, armed street fighters charged through the ground-floor window of the library into the Nabokov family home, believing that Vladimir, who was assaulting only his father’s punching bag, had been taking potshots at them. A servant dissuaded them from seeking retribution for the ghost insult, and for the first time in his life, Nabokov eluded imminent danger.
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Nabokov finished school, taking his exams weeks early. The family had planned for Vladimir and Sergei to enroll in English universities, but not for several months. In the meantime, the boys could not stay in Petrograd and avoid the consequences of the Revolution forever. It was understood that a call would soon go out for Red Army conscripts, and those who were unwilling to serve would find themselves unable to refuse.
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Ten days before the election, Vladimir Nabokov and his brother Sergei stood at a Petrograd train station before their father, who made the sign of the cross over each of them and explained that he might never see them again. They left the city on a southbound train that night. Soldiers who had abandoned their posts at the front rode
the top of the train, slept in the corridors, and tried to force their way into the boys’ locked first-class compartment. Men on the roof relieved themselves down the ventilator shafts of the car, while other soldiers eventually broke in, only to find Sergei giving a dramatic rendition of a patient in the throes of deadly typhus—a deception that served to protect both Nabokov brothers.
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The free elections took place as scheduled at the end of November, and thirty-three million voters made their voices heard. It took weeks for the final results to be tallied, but when the numbers came in, the Socialist Revolutionaries had clearly dominated, with their chief rivals, the Bolsheviks, garnering just a quarter of the vote. V. D. Nabokov’s party, the Kadets, had lost all but a tiny percentage of support. The results were a rebuke to Bolshevik rule, but the Bolsheviks argued that the election results were meaningless, because all power should go to the revolutionary councils—the Soviets—which were, they claimed, the real representatives of the people’s will.

The week after the elections, V. D. Nabokov was arrested, along with the other members of the electoral commission. But after five days in jail and repeated attempts to intimidate them, the commissioners were all inexplicably released. V. D. Nabokov realized that staying in the capital would merely return him to prison. His wife and three youngest children had already followed Vladimir and Sergei to the Crimea. The time had come for him to leave Petrograd, too.
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The Constituent Assembly, the result of Russia’s first national elections, would soon convene for the first time. Though the Kadet Party had been outlawed, there was still the possibility that the entire election would not be in vain. The people, by and large, had rejected both the party of Nabokov’s father and the party of Lenin. They had chosen the Socialist Revolutionaries and vested them with the authority to govern. At that point, it was still possible to imagine that elected delegates would somehow find a way to move forward into a post-Imperial Russia.

But on January 18, 1918, the first day the Constituent Assembly convened, the Bolsheviks demanded to be recognized as the majority.
The Assembly refused. The Bolsheviks and a bloc of Socialist Revolutionaries who had allied themselves with the Bolsheviks walked out. The next day, the entrance to the Tauride Palace was locked, and the Assembly was not permitted to meet. It was a quiet coda for Russian democracy.
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In the far southwestern corner of the former Empire, Kadets and monarchists lived a half-hidden existence. Tsar Nicholas’s mother, the Dowager Empress, camped out near Yalta discreetly with several members of her court.

The Crimea was nominally under revolutionary control, and troops with Bolshevik sympathies were emphasizing how far they would go to defend the new order against opponents. Tying the hands and feet of suspected enemies, they took their captives out on barges and threw them into the Black Sea.
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Arriving in this outpost of Imperial Russia, Vladimir and Sergei found a different world. Nabokov had been at ease on the Riviera, in St. Petersburg, and among the fields and forests of Vyra, but now found himself in an alien environment, disoriented by braying donkeys, Muslim calls to prayer, almond and oleander trees, and mountains plunging down to the sea. A plaintive letter from Lyussya made its way south to further establish his exile.

Soon after Vladimir and Sergei’s trip south, their mother followed with Olga, Elena, and six-year-old Kirill—and then came their father in December. The family settled in for the winter five miles outside the resort city of Yalta, in a guest house on an estate that Tolstoy had visited years before. V. D. Nabokov, very much a person of interest to the Bolsheviks, kept his name but hid his identity, lying low and pretending to be a lung specialist named Dr. Nabokov.
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By June some bodies from the Bolshevik executions had washed up on shore—but not all of them. The Germans had invaded the Crimea that spring, and when Kaiser Wilhelm’s divers swept the harbor, reports emerged that the upright corpses of those who had
drowned had been found, still trapped underwater. Nabokov vividly imagined them sunk to the bottom of the sea floor, bones beginning to show through, their arms stretched to the sky, mute but gathered together and seeming to converse. He wrote a poem about the bodies that July, in which he felt himself drawn into that underwater world, floating among the dead of Yalta, who vowed to forget nothing.
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The violence of the world had entered Nabokov’s writing. During his Crimean stay, he would also make use of seraphim and guardian angels in his work; but in exile from his home city, he could no longer ignore the changes convulsing Russia. He would continue to generate poems reflecting the brutality around him. In response to Russian poet Alexander Blok’s revolutionary tribute “The Twelve,” which ends with Jesus Christ leading a mob of Bolshevik revolutionaries in Petrograd, Nabokov wrote “The Two,” an account of an educated young man and his wife who find themselves brutalized by a mob of twelve peasants and forced to flee into a blizzard, where they die.
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The Tsar, his wife, and his children were executed at Yekaterinburg that July. Having definitively eliminated one potential rival, the Bolsheviks nevertheless faced several additional threats. Other Socialists protested Bolshevik dictatorship. A global workers’ revolution (anticipated by Lenin to arrive immediately in Europe) failed to materialize. The smooth path to a fully Revolutionary Russia that Lenin had envisioned was just as elusive. An anti-Bolshevik White Army began to rise in the east and the south.

As V. D. Nabokov started working on a memoir of the short-lived Russian Provisional Government, Vladimir and Sergei spent time with new friends at a neighboring villa, adopting an expatriate lifestyle in the far reaches of their homeland. For companions, they had White Army officers on the cusp of battle, along with a famous artist, a ballet
danseur
, and several young women. Generous amounts of local wine conspired to lull the boys into suspended days of beach parties and bonfires. Nabokov wrote poem after poem, imagining a heart true to his memories of Lyussya even as he exploited his opportunities for local romance with guilt and gusto. And somewhere
not far enough away, the Allied fight with the Kaiser was picked up, turned inside out, and transformed into a Russian civil war.

It was a war with more than two sides. Shifting allegiances of former Imperial troops, liberals, monarchists, Socialist Revolutionaries of all stripes, and independent Cossack regiments would combine with sporadic deliveries of Allied munitions to take a toll on civilian populations. Anti-Semitic laws had historically constrained most Jews to the Pale of Settlement in the regions of the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland. Even though these restrictions had been abolished by the Provisional Government, the front lines of the civil war crossed and recrossed territory that was home to a disproportionately Jewish population.

By this point, Judaism had come so thoroughly to represent the Revolution in the minds of many Russians and Europeans—even those not inclined toward bigotry—it would have been difficult to protect local Jewish communities, which were highly visible and omnipresent. But at least some of those creating propaganda for the Volunteer Army seem to have been largely untroubled by such concerns. Posters depicting the Jewish Trotsky as a hook-nosed subhuman monster supervising the executions of true Russians appeared in the company of White Army slogans like “Strike at the Jews and save Russia!” White Army forces committed hundreds of pogroms during the Russian Civil War.
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British Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill, warned of the atrocities by Prime Minister Lloyd George, repeatedly told his ostensible allies that their failure to control the anti-Semitic massacres would result in a cutoff of weapons and support.
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Ukrainian separatists were similarly brutal. Under the drive for independence led by Simon Petliura, tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. Even the Red Army allies of the Bolsheviks, who publicly embraced Jews and denounced the brutality of White forces, committed more than a hundred pogroms. In the end, despite some innovative efforts at collaborative government and Jewish militias formed for self-defense, an estimated fifty to one hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered in the Ukraine during the Civil War.
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