Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (24 page)

V. never returns to close that loop, so we can only imagine the family’s fate. They sit in the novel in plain sight, but, as with
Despair
, Nabokov stitched real-world tragedy into the margins of his tale in such a way that the past becomes an invisible rider on a story ostensibly about something else.

In a scene near the end of the book, graffiti in a phone booth catches the eye of the narrator, providing a quick glimpse into the French political inferno of the day. Someone has posted a slogan for Léon Blum’s coalition (
“Vive le front populaire”)
and a response is there, too: “Death to the Jews.” Written in a white heat in two months after Poland and Austria and Germany had savaged their Jewish communities,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
carries in its corners the shadow of expanding persecution.

If Nabokov was casting that shadow, in English, for an English-language audience to see, larger signals of the approaching apocalypse were already being successfully ignored. The British government, which had promised to take in fifty thousand refugee children, stalled on its pledge mid-process. A bill introduced that February in the United States would have allowed twenty thousand refugee children into the country, but an opinion poll revealed that more than sixty percent of Americans were opposed to the measure, and it was defeated in committee without ever receiving a full vote.
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Soon after, the British, facing the third year of an Arab
revolt in Palestine, would limit Jewish immigration to the Middle East as well. With few exceptions, Jews had nowhere to go.

The world continued to watch and not do much. Almost a year to the day after Austria had been subsumed into the Third Reich, the German army entered Prague. Hitler went to Prague Castle, a thousand-year symbol of Czech heritage, and watched his honor guard march in with their heavy boots and helmets, carrying long guns and forming a rectangle of crisp perpendicular rows, facing inward on their jubilant leader. Hitler entered the castle and waved from a third-story window; he stood on the steps of the castle; he announced the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now under German control. He was just a little over a mile away from the apartment of Nabokov’s mother.

The annexation marked an end to the modest pension the Czechs had provided, meaning that Elena Nabokov, now burdened with pleurisy, no longer had any income of her own. Her health continued to decline.

Looking ever more desperately for a job, Nabokov headed to London again. Asking his friend Gleb Struve for a letter of recommendation (along with any other acquaintance he thought might deliver), Nabokov declared that getting a position outside France had become “a life and death question.”
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Going to London was like crossing into another world. Nabokov stayed again in the home of a former Russian diplomat, where the familiar comforts of childhood—spacious lodgings, a butler, tennis outings, visits to the British Museum, and butterflies—occupied his free time.

He enjoyed these things immensely, but probably did not need Véra to remind him of the urgency of his mission or just what was at stake—though letters prodding him arrived regularly, just in case. Trying to ingratiate himself through an endless round of social engagements, readings, and small talk in an effort to find a position teaching Russian literature did not play
to Nabokov’s strengths, and he left at the end of the month with few prospects.

The news back in Paris was even worse. Elena Nabokov had died in Prague on May 2. Nabokov did not take a chance on returning to Czechoslovakia, which was now German territory, for the funeral. There was not just Taboritski to worry about; the pro-Nazi Russian newspaper
New Word
in Berlin had called for Nabokov’s placement alongside Jewish artists in the “boiling pots” so that a true Russian literature might flourish.
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Nabokov’s brother Sergei, a less famous target, requested permission from the Gestapo to travel. He made his way to Prague in time for the funeral, but it was a risky move. Sergei was known in Berlin’s gay community and had associated with activist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose library had been incinerated six years before.
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He and his partner, Hermann, had both been straightforward about their relationship with their families. With a past full of capes and canes and makeup, Sergei had never truly been closeted. He had had gay roommates; he had publicly moved in Parisian circles known for their extravagant homosexuality.

When the Nuremberg Laws were put in place, the Nazis had updated the legal code that covered homosexual crimes. In the past, some evidence had been required in order to arrest someone suspected of homosexual activity; under the new measures, gossip, a letter from a gay friend, or even thought or intention could be introduced as evidence.
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Since the persecutions of homosexuals in German had first stepped-up five years before, several gay men had been castrated—some against their will, while others were offered a choice between an operation and a longer prison sentence. By the time of Elena Nabokov’s funeral, arrests of homosexuals were at their peak, with offenders often sentenced to regular prisons, but also to Dachau and Neuengamme. Foreign homosexuals were not targeted as often, but Sergei’s statelessness made him more vulnerable, and his long involvement with Hermann, a once-Austrian and now-German
national, heightened the risk for both of them.
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Yet Sergei went to Prague that May, writing to Vladimir afterward to describe the funeral.

Nabokov spent July and August of 1939 with Véra and Dmitri in a pension on the Riviera, which was cheaper than staying in Paris. But a bleak and sudden end to that summer came when war erupted on the first of September, 1939.

The day after the German invasion of Poland, the Nabokovs returned to Paris. On September 3, England and France declared war on Germany. Two weeks later, Russia invaded Poland from the east, effectively splitting the country between German and Russian control. Vladimir and Véra wanted to get out of Europe as quickly as possible. Horrified at the prospect of being drafted into the French army, the forty-year-old Nabokov stepped up his efforts to get visas to America.

Other émigrés, however, felt less pressure to leave. Critic Mark Aldanov intended to stay in Paris; Ivan Bunin had no plans to go. Sonia Slonim was in no rush to depart either. Unlike Véra and Vladimir, she had held French papers for almost a decade, and had found steady employment. As part of her translation career, she had been working on screen treatments for refugee filmmakers in Paris. She also claimed to be working for French intelligence.

In that capacity, she explained to friends, she had been asked to keep an eye on a German refugee who had arrived in Paris not long before, carrying forged papers. The story must have come as a surprise to those who recognized her new companion: the former Communist propagandist turned Nazi filmmaker Carl Junghans.

In addition to his work on the Olympic films, Junghans had done several other pictures for a Nazi-Fascist film collaborative, as well as two tributes to Nazi leadership.
⁴⁶
But Junghans apparently had a dispute with Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda over a film script. He had become so fearful for his safety that he had obtained false papers to escape Germany via Switzerland.

Junghans had picked a good time to leave. He abandoned Nazi propaganda at the very moment that Goebbels began to use movies to redefine the way that people thought about Jews and Judaism, fust as the Nazis had used the “Eternal few” exhibition two years before in Munich to counter the influence of an exhibition in New York, Goebbels would remake and recast three British movies from recent years that had offered sympathetic portrayals of Jews. One of the three, a new 1933 version of
The Wandering Jew
, was based on the English play that had been on stage and in movie theaters during Nabokov’s years at Cambridge.
⁴⁷

Goebbels intended to make his own
Wandering Jew
—in German,
Der Ewige Jude
, portraying a Judaism more in line with the Nazi vision. He would take an obsessive interest in his “documentary” film project for more than two years, writing about it in his diary and discussing it with Hitler. His plan was to use the movie to awaken the public’s latent distrust of Jews, understanding that the more alien and disturbing they appeared, the more inhuman the policies that could be applied against them.

“This is Tuesday,” the Torah reader announces in the film, speaking in Hebrew to indicate that German officers are forcing him to perform on the wrong day, noting the fraud for posterity.
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Disturbing footage of kosher slaughter, pictures of Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin (both deemed dangerous by the Nazi leadership), as well as fraudulent statistics and ominous narration, round out a film meant to convince Germans once and for all of the perfidy of the Jewish people.

Half the cinematographers for
The Eternal Jew
had previously assisted Carl Junghans on his Olympic documentary.
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If Junghans had not left Berlin, it is entirely possible that he would have been expected to work on it. Junghans had served the Nazi cause as he had served that of the Soviets. But it was a big step between fetishization of German glory and the demonization of an entire people. Junghans ended up leaving before it became clear whether or not he would be willing to cross that divide.

Junghans’s reunion with Sonia Slonim in Paris was brimming with irony: he had managed to ally himself with both the totalitarian regimes that had threatened her family. The road Junghans had chosen ran in direct opposition to the path taken by Nabokov. Both were gifted artists—Junghans’s 1929 independent film
Such Is Life
was one of the last great silent movies—but Nabokov refused public engagement in the political realm, while Junghans had repeatedly put his art entirely at the service of extreme ideology.

It is certainly possible that Sonia had been assigned by French intelligence to keep an eye on Junghans, but if so, she seems to have taken on her task happily and at particularly close quarters. Declassified documents, however, do make clear that French intelligence worked very hard to keep track of Junghans. Communists, and even ex-Communists, were not popular in France at the time. As soon as war was declared, the French Communist Party, following the Soviet lead, denounced the French entry into the conflict as imperialist. As a result, the party was outlawed, and forty-four Communist deputies had been sent to prison.

Nazi collaborators, not surprisingly, were also in bad odor in Paris. As a former Communist and former Nazi filmmaker, Junghans was a rare bird indeed. Before the reunion with Sonia, French secret police had been hunting for him, interviewing friends and associates in a desperate effort to find him. By the end of the month, he had begun producing propaganda for the French government.
⁵⁰

His cooperation earned his liberty, and, according to him, money. But he was told to stay in Paris. If he tried to leave, he understood that he would be shot. He had a letter he showed to acquaintances everywhere he went, which appeared to be a police document giving him asylum and acknowledging his work for the department. But the French intended to keep him on a short leash.

Nabokov had his own collection of letters that he hoped would grant him a broader freedom. One from Bunin drafted by Nabokov
himself suggested that Mr. Vladimir Nabokoff was “a novelist of quite exceptional talent” and would make “a teacher … of quite exceptional quality at any English or American University.” Bunin had elsewhere called Nabokov a “monster” and would refer to him as a “circus clown,” but he admitted to a certain affection for circus clowns. And in matters of survival, Bunin was willing to help.
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Nabokov was lucky that his dreams of teaching in England had not borne fruit in the lean days of 1939, because the British cancelled all visas upon entry into the war. But via a serendipitous chain of events, a very different hope for deliverance appeared out of nowhere. Through fellow émigré Mark Aldanov—who had written at length on the role of chance in history—Nabokov learned about an opening teaching a summer course in Russian literature at Stanford University in California. Aldanov had been invited to teach himself, but at that time had no plans to leave Europe.

Perhaps Stanford would be interested in Nabokov? Nabokov was certainly interested in Stanford. The thorny path to a visa suddenly became straight and paved, and the still-imaginary future turned its face toward a distant campus more than five thousand miles away in America.

A job offer in America was the first step, but even with a destination, Nabokov faced months of preparation. Exit permits had to be obtained along with American visas, and there were more affidavits to collect from the American side. Alexandra Tolstoy (daughter of the Russian literary titan) shepherded one letter of support from the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She even suggested within the community of refugee-aid groups that she could obtain a testimonial for Véra Nabokov’s skills as a domestic. With ever-stricter immigration quotas weighing against those who wanted to emigrate, willingness to fulfill demand for cheap domestic work in England and America (or at least to pretend that one would do so) was frequently the fastest, sometimes the only, route for Jews to enter the country.
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In the meantime, destitution and war still had to be managed. After pleas written to America the year before, Nabokov had received
2, 500 francs from composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and twenty dollars from the U.S. Russian Literary Fund.
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By the time war had broken out, he was receiving a thousand francs a month from a friend. He returned to old habits, advertising for students interested in learning English. He collected three pupils, including a businessman and a young harpist named Maria Marinel.