Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (12 page)

Partnering with fellow Kadet Paul Milyukov in London, V. D. Nabokov also began to work on the English-language journal
New
Russia
. More jewels were sold to pay rent, and Nabokov’s parents settled in London.
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That fall, Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, showing administrators the transcript of Samuil Rosov, his former Tenishev classmate, in order to avoid taking qualifying exams. Sergei started at Oxford, but quickly became unhappy there and after just one semester joined his brother at Cambridge. Nabokov began by studying natural sciences, and Sergei French literature; but as Sergei moved from Oxford to Cambridge, Nabokov, who identified more and more strongly as a writer, changed to literature, too.
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The brothers’ years at Cambridge meant more time together and more cordial relations. They often played tennis. Nabokov was the more gifted athlete, but left-handed Sergei, despite his weak serve and nonexistent backhand, had a relentless ability to return the ball. A friend from those years contrasted the two young men, describing Vladimir as a charmer with a hint “of malice at the back of his voice” and Sergei as a towheaded dandy with a curl over his eye, attending the Diaghilev
Ballets Russes
premieres “wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.”
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Nabokov boxed and played goalkeeper for the Trinity men’s soccer team, which brought him into the orbit of British students. But his chosen topics for poetry were still women and Russia. His main companions were aristocratic Russians, too, including not just Sergei, but a count, an exiled prince, and roommate Mikhail Kalashnikov.
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Nabokov’s letters to his mother were filled with mentions of family, home, and politics—but he also found time for misbehavior. He was threatened with fines on campus for walking on the grass. He got into fistfights with those who disparaged Russian speakers. In the kind of antics undertaken by students for centuries, he broke two of his landlady’s chairs, he neglected to pay his tailor, and he smeared food on the walls.
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If Nabokov still delighted in playing the child, he was also finding that one by one, the indulgences of childhood were being scraped
away. He and his Russian friends did not see eye to eye with progressive British students. While Nabokov was at Cambridge, H. G. Wells—whom V. D. Nabokov had hosted at his home in 1914—visited Lenin and praised Bolshevik ideals before the Petrograd Soviet. Wells’s son George, who had made the trip too, got into a dormitory dispute with Nabokov in which each son defended his father’s views. Their disagreement escalated into a shouting match, with Nabokov condemning all socialists, and Kalashnikov chiming in with “Kill the Yids!”
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In a letter to his mother, Nabokov found his roommate’s comment amusing and regrettable, but the argument cannot be counted as a shining moment for any of the participants. Kalashnikov handily confirmed at least one stereotype Wells likely had about White Russian émigrés, which was fair enough, as Nabokov’s roommate was not known as a rigorous thinker. During their two years together, Kalashnikov threatened to burn Nabokov’s books and expounded on the mysteries of the anti-Semitic
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
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Anti-Semitism, Nabokov quickly learned, was not limited to Russia; Kalashnikov’s vicious conflation of Jews and Bolsheviks found a reflection in more elegant generalizations by others. In
The Jews
, written during Nabokov’s years at Cambridge, the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc—a former member of Parliament and one of the leading historians of his day—tried to tackle what he termed “the Jewish problem.” His ideas reveal the state of British thought in that era on the rising global tide of anti-Semitism.

Explaining the causes and effects of the 1917 “Jewish revolution,” Belloc explained that during the prior decade, the Boer War in South Africa had been “provoked and promoted by Jewish interests.” Over time, he believed “a monopoly of Jewish international news agents” developed, as well as a Jewish presence in “the governing institutions of Western Europe” at a rate of fifty to one hundred times any proportional representation.
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Belloc concluded that the Jews were in part to blame for the animosity they faced, because they acted superior to others, behaved in deceptive and secretive ways, and
refused to acknowledge the evidence of Jewish conspiracy marshaled against them.

Such arguments were mixed in with more measured thinking but rank among the best that the nation received at the time from an ostensibly careful thinker who was by and large sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. Similar ideas would become less subtle and more consequential in the coming years.

But for the twenty-year-old Vladimir Nabokov at Cambridge, if a choice had to be made between Bolshevik sympathizers and Kalashnikov’s kind, he was sticking with the Russians. Nabokov headed back to Berlin that June with Sergei and Kalashnikov, and over the summer began dating Kalashnikov’s cousin Svetlana.

Like Lyussya before her, Svetlana received her romantic due in poems, but the love for which Nabokov pined most was much farther away. Nostalgia for his own Russian geography overwhelmed him. If he had been called a foreigner in St. Petersburg, he was painfully Russian in London. He clung to Russian things. He found a copy of Dahl’s Russian dictionary and did exercises in it, so as not to lose his native language. He wrote his mother longing letters about the details of Vyra, as if the act of remembering might itself create some road for return, though he had begun to suspect that that road might not exist. He wrote poem after poem, expressing fidelity by “composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew.”
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One year into their exile, Nabokov’s parents moved to Germany. The new home was far from their oldest sons, who still had two years to go at Cambridge, but postwar Berlin was a much more affordable city and ideal for reentering the world of publishing. V. D. Nabokov planned to collaborate on the founding of a new newspaper. Moving quickly into a cultural leadership role in the community of Russian exiles in Berlin that autumn, V. D. Nabokov helped to launch
Rul (The Rudder)
, which soon became Berlin’s largest Russian-language daily.

Events in Russia led Nabokov in a new direction, inspiring him to tackle fiction. In January 1921,
Rul
published a story from him, in which fairy-tale woodland spirits of Russian legend collide with the new Bolshevik reality of fields of beheaded, rotting corpses and bodies floating downstream.
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All the enchanted fairies of Russia, one sprite laments, have been turned into exiles. The story is thin, and not long, but it makes plain the fact that from the first days of his career as a prose writer, Nabokov combined myth and fantasy with modern political horror.

By the time “The Wood-Sprite” appeared in print, most White Army remnants had retreated across the Black Sea. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in combat. Even more had died from disease—the toll from typhus alone ran into the millions. The war would continue to play out in skirmishes and uprisings, but by 1921, military conflict no longer topped the list of Russia’s troubles.

Other tragedies were waiting in the wings. Three years of scorched-earth tactics, combined with crop failures, led to starvation through the breadbasket of the country. By 1921, full-blown famine had spread across whole sections of Russia, adding to the death toll.

Revolutionary Russian writer Maxim Gorky put out an international plea for assistance on behalf of the Bolsheviks. The situation became so dire that the Bolsheviks created an All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Hungry. The International Red Cross suddenly found itself back in the region, not to visit the concentration camps as they had during the war (the Russian camps were now closed to them), but to try to arrange relief. Global efforts followed, with Nabokov’s mother raising money for those starving to death in a homeland to which her family could not return.
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Full-page appeals for money in British newspapers led to an outpouring of funds and a massive commitment from Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration. Even with the influx of foreign aid, the disaster eventually brought slow death to at least five million people.
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Nabokov moved through his student years never far from news of the violence unfolding in his country but surrounded by socialists
who considered the new Russian state just and admired it. His attempts to persuade his peers otherwise were ignored or ineffective. After committing one of his father’s articles to memory for a debate on Bolshevism during his first year at Cambridge, Nabokov found himself incapable of offering any points or rebuttal on his own and was easily defeated.
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He could parrot his father’s ideas, but in print and in person, he had not yet found the words to reflect events in his native land.

It was 1922, and the world tilted on the verge of modernity. International leaders met to de-escalate a buildup of dreadnoughts that threatened to reignite an arms race. The head of the Indian National Congress, Mohandas Gandhi, went to jail for sedition over his nonviolent struggle for Indian independence. The film industry was in its infancy, with
Nanook of the North
appearing as the first narrative documentary. England was not yet ready to publish the frank sexual content of fames Joyce’s
Ulysses
, but pieces of it had seen the light of day in a small American review, and that February Sylvia Beach in Paris would take a chance on the book, making it the first title to be published by Shakespeare and Company.

Germany faced widespread unrest. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the nation had gone through its own revolution and civil conflict, a fight that left more than 1, 200 dead and Berlin a very uneasy place.
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The establishment of the Weimar Republic led to a democracy, but the First World War had ended on bitter terms for Germany, fostering economic ruin and discontent across the political spectrum and fueling interest in a young speaker named Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was already publicly labeling Bolsheviks as corrupt Jewish seducers threatening Germany. In 1922, however, the Nazis were merely a fringe group; it was, instead, the specter of assassination that haunted Europe. Targeted killings—by Socialist Revolutionaries, the Irish Republican Army, right-wing German reactionaries, or left-wing anarchists—remained a popular political tool. Ultra-right extremists in Germany used machine guns and a hand grenade to kill Jewish politician and industrialist Walter Rathenau that
summer, triggering more political violence and ushering in massive economic instability.

Spies were everywhere. Frank Foley, British Passport Control officer by day, was Berlin station chief of the British intelligence organization MI6 by night. Willi Lehmann, tasked with counterespionage for the Berlin police force, would turn into a paid informer for the Soviet secret police. A Russian intelligence memo from the era refers to Berlin as the Soviet “central office for espionage abroad,” listing among its priorities the infiltration of the many anti-Bolshevik organizations that populated the city, the recruitment of formerly Tsarist officers, and luring émigrés back east.
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If the danger often felt veiled or vague, intermittent murders underlined the stakes of political gamesmanship.

Newspapers and propaganda were likewise omnipresent, and it was not always easy to tell the difference. Every organization, every cause, and every party, it seemed, had its own newspaper, running the political gamut from soft promotion of ideology to strident calls to anarchy.

From his new post as an editor in Paris, fellow Kadet Paul Milyukov openly bickered with Nabokov’s father over the best strategy to wrest Russia from Bolshevik hands. The dispute between the men continued for months, becoming more contentious.
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Their differences lay in their interpretations of history, with Milyukov backing the Socialist Revolutionaries and some Marxism, and Nabokov’s father still unconvinced of the merits of revolution.

Yet possible alliances with outside parties or governments were sometimes all the exiles, powerless and removed as they were, had to dream of. In truth, for all they could effect change in that moment, their debates over the future of Russia might as well have taken place on another planet.

The community of exiles in which Nabokov’s family lived was just as spiritually distant—and physically distinct—from its Berlin setting. Wilmersdorf, the neighborhood around the City Zoo, served as the social center for Russian émigrés, the place where they rented
rooms from formerly well-to-do military families. But for the most part, the Russians kept to themselves and had no interest in assimilating. Their real interest was in leaving as soon as possible. The exiles in Berlin built an island of Russian anti-Bolshevik resistance, but had no front on which to resist. And so they fretted over next steps and waited for some new cataclysm to destroy them or call them home. With each year, the likelihood of return would grow smaller and smaller, but who could blame them for expecting the known universe to reverse itself before their eyes? It had already happened once.

During his last year at Cambridge, Vladimir Nabokov continued to accumulate police attention and university rebukes for his social activities (smashing streetlights, setting off rockets), provoking lectures from his tutor about time better spent in the library. On a bet, Nabokov had also begun a French translation for his father, who likewise had to goad him to get results. He nonetheless managed to win a prize for his performance on the first set of exams required for his undergraduate degree.
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