Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (36 page)

Solzhenitsyn, however, was already thinking of what he himself might do on that score. He had a novel of his own he wanted to write, one whose fragments lay like a bomb in his briefcase sitting in the hands of the investigators. The stories and names he had written down could be used to make a narrative that would consider everything that had gone wrong. But they were just as liable to lead to the arrest and conviction of Solzhenitsyn’s acquaintances.

Fortunately for his friends, four months into his interrogation all those notes and papers were thrown into the fire of the Lubyanka furnace, flying away from the highest chimney of the prison as “black butterflies of soot.” He would not inadvertently bear witness against those whose stories he had recorded. But the destruction of evidence from his briefcase took with it the raw material of his epic Russian novel.
²⁶

He dreamed, however, of writing again. He would remember for decades Yuri’s indictment of Nabokov and the other émigrés, and would one day use Yuri’s words to express his own grief and anger at those who seemed to have abandoned Russia. He did not intend for his work to suffer from their callousness. He would not avoid addressing the Revolution or the Russian people directly. His would be a literature fully dedicated to history. He would tell the story of the Revolution, the millions upon millions of his countrymen and their beautiful, lost cause.

At the conclusion of the investigation, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. He would serve those years in their entirety, spending three of them in the relative oasis of a
scientific research
sharashka
analyzing acoustics and the human voice. The rest of the time he spent moving timber, digging clay in wet misery, angling for a good bunk, in agonies of desire for a cigarette, casting a homemade spoon out of aluminum and hiding it in his shoe so as not to have to eat soup with his fingers. Working in the smoke-filled inferno of a foundry, he learned to look out for himself as he slowly began to doubt nearly everything he had believed in.
²⁷

And when written words were not only illegal but too dangerous to contemplate, he began composing entirely in his head. His prodigious feats of recall astounded his fellow prisoners, one of whom noted that Solzhenitsyn had created—and remembered—an epic poem twice as long as
Eugene Onegin.
²⁸
Memorizing twelve thousand lines using a rosary strung with beads made from clumps of soaked, dried bread, he formed a section of words for each bead, tying together the story of Russia and her people.

Any émigrés still hoping Vladimir Nabokov would address Russian history in his next book were profoundly disappointed. The first Nabokov novel of the 1950s would offer a story as un-Russian as anything he had written.
²⁹

In a letter to Pascal Covici of Viking Press, Nabokov had summed up his current project as dealing “with the problems of a very moral middle-aged gentleman who falls very immorally in love with his stepdaughter, a girl of thirteen.”
³⁰
An extraordinary one-sentence summary, Nabokov would build it into much more.

What he had first titled as
The Kingdom by the Sea
would inhabit a very different landscape than Nabokov’s earlier look at a child molester. For his new story, Nabokov would invent America itself as seen by a foreigner and explore the notion of timeless love as understood by a pedophile.

He had many sources of inspiration. Since his 1939 story “The Enchanter,” Nabokov and Wilson had discussed the memoirs of a Ukrainian man undone by his compulsion for sexual encounters
with children. Added to this were newspaper stories of young girls kidnapped, raped, and taken on road trips through America—one of which Nabokov himself would directly reference in his book. A colleague at Stanford had turned out to be obsessed with nymphets. Nabokov rounded out his research with bus rides eavesdropping on prepubescents, literary acquisition of various limbs of Dmitri’s young friends, and details from textbooks on current theories about the sexual development of girls.
³¹

Nabokov did not want the book to be published under his name, knowing that readers (particularly Americans, as Véra noted) would likely interpret the narrator as representing Nabokov himself. Such an assumption would hardly be surprising, given that he had lovingly fostered just such confusion in the two English-language novels he had already written.
³²

The man who had survived “acute nervous exhaustion” from the strain of writing
Bend Sinister
was nearly defeated by the attempt to portray a nymphet and her jailer. During his first year in Ithaca, he was so worried about the challenges and dangers of the novel that he set a blaze going in a galvanized trash can behind the house and had begun to feed his papers into the fire before Véra intervened. He planned to destroy the book multiple times, in each instance relenting and returning to battle with his material. Writing to
The New Yorker
’s Katharine White, he said that he was struggling with the novel amid terrible misgivings. “This great and coily thing,” he wrote, “has had no precedent in literature.”
³³

Lolita
, Nabokov’s nymphet novel in its final form, offered up Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European divorcé sexually obsessed with young girls. In postwar New England, Humbert catches a glimpse of Lolita, a twelve-year-old girl who recalls and then replaces his childhood love, Annabel Leigh. The spark that ignited his obsession with young girls, Leigh had died of typhus in 1923, just four months after a summer spent with the then-teenage Humbert.

Smitten with Lolita, Humbert Humbert moves into her home as a boarder, only to find the girl will be sent away to distant Camp Q for
the summer. Humbert marries Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, the better to get at the girl, but weeks later Charlotte is hit by a car, bringing Lolita under Humbert’s control. Avoiding prying eyes that might eventually guess his secret, Humbert drives his stepdaughter across glorious, oblivious America, staying in the very roadside inns and motor lodges that Nabokov and Véra knew so well from their own cross-country voyages.

While Humbert executes a plan to drug and fondle Lolita at a hotel, she wakes, only to shock him with her forwardness. She spends two years as his sexual captive before escaping with a mysterious pursuer, whom Humbert tracks down and kills. He realizes that he has destroyed Lolita’s childhood, and even later, that he loves her as she is, even though she is no longer a nymphet—none of which keeps him from trying to reunite with her and seeking revenge on his rival. Waiting in his cell on trial for murder, he writes a tribute to his love, meant to be published only after her death.

Taking a brief break to send a poem to Burma-Shave for its roadside billboard campaign (they did not use his submission), Nabokov finished
Lolita
in December 1953. Véra wrote to Katharine White, honoring their commitment to give
The New Yorker
a first look at his work, though they realized that she was unlikely to find any part of the novel suitable for publication. Véra requested that White not let anyone else see it, or at least not to let others know who its author was.
³⁴

Nabokov understood
Lolita
to be the best thing he had written in English; now it was up to America to receive it. But given his detailed descriptions of Humbert’s fantasies, and more than one scene in which they were realized, he wondered if his masterpiece would ever make it into print.

By the time Nabokov had finished the story of a traumatized girl and her articulate molester, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had served his sentence in the Gulag. He had been operated on for cancer, taken
part in a lethal camp strike, and discovered that his wife Natalia had divorced him.
³⁵
A Christianity with roots in his childhood had sprouted again. Concentration camps had taught him more about the Soviet system in eight years than he had managed to absorb in the first twenty-six years of his existence.

In February 1953, he was released into permanent exile. Condemned to live the rest of his life thousands of miles from Moscow, he rode trains with other prisoners, then marched, and, still wearing his battered Army greatcoat, finally caught a lorry into Kok-Terek, a desolate town in Kazakhstan, arriving two days before the death of Joseph Stalin.

On their first night in the village, the new exiles lay down to rest in the yard of the police station. Solzhenitsyn, however, had no plans to sleep. Watching the shadows of horses stabled nearby and listening to the braying of donkeys in the warm air, he could hardly believe his good fortune. He passed the hours walking in wonder all night, free under the stars.
³⁶

As prospective publishers were reading about Humbert Humbert’s nighttime visions (“everything soiled, torn, dead”), Nabokov was already well into his next novel. Stepping away from the agony of crafting his tortured nymphet, he plotted a shorter, simpler tale—one that ought to run no risk of offending the censors, one that had already begun unfolding chapter by chapter in
The New Yorker
.

The story of Professor Timofey Pnin introduces a bumbling Russian exile incapable of navigating everyday life. A comic mishap over a discussion of anarchy lands poor Pnin in detention at Ellis Island the moment he arrives in America. English defeats him. Inanimate objects seduce and betray him. His coffee maker explodes; his landlady forbids him access to the washing machine after he puts a pair of shoes in it.

An assistant professor at the fictional Waindell College, Pnin is beset midway through the book by the arrival of the narrator,
who undermines Pnin’s place at the college. The new professor, one Vladimir Vladimirovich, also happens to be the narrator, a man remarkably like Vladimir Nabokov. The usurper even contradicts earlier accounts of Pnin’s life, leaving key scenes in the book permanently in doubt.
³⁷

Behind Pnin’s efforts to transcend the hurdles of everyday existence lurks profound grief. Both his parents died in 1917 from typhus, but he is particularly oppressed by the loss of his first love, Mira Belochkin, a Jewish girl killed at Buchenwald. He talks with an investigator in Washington in an attempt to find out more about her last moments, but there are no answers. Over and over, he forbids himself consideration of her many possible deaths, which spin forever in an irresolvable quantum state: was she infected with tetanus, injected with phenol, set on fire alive, or gassed in a final, false, shower? It is, however, impossible for Pnin not to think of her. He remembers kissing her, and she dies and dies again.
³⁸

A classic academic satire swirls on
Pnin
’s surface level, but underneath Nabokov again nods to the plight of Jews in the Holocaust, and in America. Nabokov creates a Jewish couple who decline attendance at a party once they realize a bigoted professor plans to attend. At Pnin’s party, the same unpleasant professor repeats an anti-Semitic story about the absent woman, which Pnin dismisses. The story, Pnin says, is a canard that circulated in Odessa decades before, and even in his youth, it was not funny.

The narrator of
Pnin
directly links Germany to “another torture house”—Russia. And Pnin himself suggests he will one day teach a course titled “On Tyranny,” a ledger sheet of terror and cruelty, ranging from Tsar Nicholas the First to imperial horrors in Africa and the massacre of Armenians. “The history of man,” Pnin says, “is the history of pain.”
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For all Nabokov’s stated intention of making Timofey Pnin ludicrous, he is a supremely likable main character and triggered exponentially less anxiety than that provoked by Humbert. Yet the book had its own challenges. If Nabokov’s nymphet was too
unsettling for the pages of
The New Yorker
, Pnin’s adventures were sometimes perceived as too slight, or too political. Katharine White accepted several chapters of the novel as standalone pieces, but the magazine rejected Chapter Five, which contained the death of Mira Belochkin—the heart of the book—reportedly because of repeated references to Soviet oppression and torture, references Nabokov refused to remove.
⁴⁰

Pnin
struggled elsewhere, too. Pascal Covici at Viking paid an early advance on the book, but after long indecision reviewing the final manuscript, refused to publish it without changes. In a friendly letter, Nabokov countered Covici’s criticisms, insisting that book was not a series of sketches, and Timofey Pnin was not “a clown.”
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Unwilling to make the demanded edits, Nabokov returned the advance. He was clearly frustrated at having to explain the novel, but in comparison to the moral posturing over
Lolita
, talking about
Pnin
must have been a relative relief. Still, finding a publisher dragged out several months;
Pnin
took a year and a half from completion to make its way into print.

Bringing
Lolita
to America would take much longer. Small wonder that publishers were so hesitant—instead of the quasi-celibate, saintly figure of Timofey Pnin,
Lolita
delivered a monster whose monstrousness is a central aspect of the novel. Publishers could have, perhaps, forgiven Nabokov for creating Humbert Humbert if he had only made everything take place in another room, away from the reader, or if Lolita were only older, or “a boy, or a cow, or a bicycle.”
⁴²
But through a strange hybrid of refined language and sophistry, the reader is brought into Humbert’s orbit. His complex rationalizations alternate with frankness, and his unsettling euphemisms (“the scepter of my passion,” her “brown rose”) along with the comedy and dim sympathy he evokes, render the entire process of reading the book disturbing.