Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (51 page)

He similarly turned down a request from Jean-Paul Sartre to meet in Russia, on the basis that as a constrained Soviet writer, he would not be able to talk freely or on equal terms (Sartre’s companion, author Simone de Beauvoir, believed it was pride and shyness on Solzhenitsyn’s part that were to blame).
⁴⁶

Though Solzhenitsyn would not sign on to others’ causes, in advance of the 1967 Writers’ Congress in 1967 he circulated a
letter of his own. Condemning oppression, Solzhenitsyn called for the abolition of literary censorship. He wrote with characteristic drama about the high-stakes game in which he was now upping the ante: “I am, of course, confident that I will fulfill my duty as a writer under all circumstances, from the grave even more successfully and unobstructedly than in my lifetime.”
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The letter circulated at the Congress hand-to-hand, creating a buzz that none of the sessions could match. Solzhenitsyn received the written support of nearly a hundred writers. The story made newspapers worldwide.

Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn’s unpublished manuscripts spurred debates and denunciations—he was a tool of the West, he was the hope of Russian writers. His own
Novy Mir
editors were still torn about what to do with his work.

He was summoned to assemblies of secretariats and committees, at which he presented himself unapologetically and denounced the KGB (indirectly but clearly) for its plots against him. Summoned for yet another meeting to ensure the publication of the first chapters of a new novel, he was on his way to the train station, headed to Moscow, when he inexplicably turned around and came home.
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They could debate the matter with among themselves, he said. They could ask questions of his wife, whom he sent in his stead. He would stay alone and as isolated as possible, and
write
.

Solzhenitsyn’s public statements guaranteed that no new work would appear from him; but when no new work appeared, it only magnified his prominence. A
Pravda
editor suggested ominously that he was suffering from mental illness; other sources circulated rumors that he had collaborated with the Germans during the war. The situation could not go on indefinitely. He had only one theme to write about; it was the very theme the authorities did not want addressed. (Nabokov, on the other hand, wrote about the same theme with absolute freedom, but did it so cryptically that it was hardly recognizable.)

Solzhenitsyn’s celebrity was starting to change him; he began to imagine himself capable not just of recording history but influencing
it. He had acquired a stature and power few outside the system could claim. But some friends and acquaintances felt that he had paid a price for his rise—that he had begun to lose his endearing humility, and had somehow had become distant and imperious.
⁴⁹

His forty-ninth birthday passed. He finished
The Gulag Archipelago
with Natalia in a frenzy of typing. They prepared microfilms, which were smuggled out by a courier who ran a small but real risk of being caught. Waiting day after day without knowing if his work had been intercepted was agony, but eventually news came that everything had arrived safely, bringing with it profound relief.
⁵⁰
Cancer Ward, The First Circle
, and
The Gulag Archipelago
had been safely deposited outside Soviet borders. Whatever role history assigned to him, even if he were killed, Solzhenitsyn’s writing would survive. His voice could not be silenced.

But the Soviets could try. In November 1969, the local chapter of the Writers’ Union summoned him to an afternoon meeting and voted to expel him on the grounds of “antisocial behavior,” truncating his official career as a writer in his homeland.
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The decision would have real effects, but it is hard to imagine what the Union thought they would accomplish. By then,
Cancer Ward
and
The First Circle
had been published in the West, to monstrous acclaim. He had been hailed as a towering talent, “a major 19th century writer suddenly appearing in the last half of the 20th century.”
⁵²
Rumors began to circulate abroad that Solzhenitsyn had something else waiting to come out, something reported in English as “The Archipelago of Gulag.”

The following year, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize. After publicly planning to go to Stockholm, he then reversed his plans for fear he would not be allowed to return to Russia. Though he did not leave the country, the Nobel spurred hope in Solzhenitsyn that his situation might change. It did not, although the prize may have made him almost untouchable. His star had certainly risen high in the West—several biographers were sniffing around. But he issued a public warning to make clear that these people had not talked to him and did not know his life. Their stories were their own.

Not knowing what to do about
The Gulag Archipelago
for the time being, Solzhenitsyn did nothing. Privately, he worked on his own memoir, which careered between judgment and generosity, and would in time shock many friends. He had also started a series of novels, set in the early twentieth century, which aimed to explain what exactly had gone wrong in Russia before the Revolution.

The Writers’ Union decision was not the only new stress in his life. He was also caught up in the detritus of his marriage. At fifty-two, he had gotten his mistress pregnant, and his wife was reluctant to be left by a man for whom she had risked so much, a man she still loved.
⁵³

There were, in fact, many possible reasons behind his hesitation to release
The Gulag Archipelago
, his biggest weapon. Publication might harm the people who had shared their stories with him. He was anxious to finish his novels on the Revolution before he might be arrested or otherwise kept from writing. And, of course, he realized that publishing
The Gulag Archipelago
would change everything.

In the end, the question was taken out of his hands. He was spied on, shadowed, wiretapped, and bugged. An acquaintance retrieving Solzhenitsyn’s car for him one afternoon stumbled into the midst of a KGB raid and was brutally beaten.
⁵⁴

The police harassment intensified. Solzhenitsyn’s typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, was picked up by the KGB, who surely knew (if only from the many articles that had by then appeared in the West) the title and character of the documents they were looking for. Voronyanskaya was taken to Leningrad and interrogated night and day for most of a week, until she revealed the location of Solzhenitsyn’s hidden manuscript. Returned to her home under house arrest, she was kept from notifying Solzhenitsyn. Two weeks later, she died in vague circumstances said to involve suicide.
⁵⁵

The KGB took its time but eventually picked up the manuscript from its hiding place. And Solzhenitsyn finally tripped the wire, signaling for
The Gulag Archipelago
to be published in Paris.

Six weeks after it appeared, the KGB came for him. He imagined being taken to a dramatic confrontation with Party leaders, but after a brief, unnerving prison stay, the Soviets disposed of the thorn in their side by deporting him to Germany and hoping that would be that.

The day Solzhenitsyn left Russia, Vladimir Nabokov sat down to write a note welcoming him to a life of freedom. Apologizing for not answering an earlier letter, Nabokov explained that he had a policy of not writing anyone in the Soviet Union, for fear of endangering his correspondents. “I am, after all, some kind of scaly devil to the Bolshevik authorities—something that not everyone in Russia realizes.” He thought it unlikely that Solzhenitsyn had seen his work, but he assured him that “since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write.”
⁵⁶

He explained that he would not make any political statement about the matter—he never made such statements—but privately wanted to extend a warm welcome to the newest Russian exile.
⁵⁷
If Solzhenitsyn were ever in Switzerland, he would be most welcome to visit. Settling soon after in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn wrote to say that fate had brought him to the same country so that the two men might meet.

Solzhenitsyn got a hero’s welcome in Europe, but some commentators questioned whether it would last. William Safire wondered if, “Now that he is out of the Soviet Union … his martyrdom shrewdly denied, cracks will appear in the pedestal we have built for him.” Seeing his writing judged as literature rather than propaganda, learning more about his religious fervor, “(p)oliticians who praise him now for his opposition to oppression may discover, to their dismay, that their chosen symbol does not share their appreciation for democratic principles.”
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Safire’s words soon hit the mark. Solzhenitsyn quickly startled his supporters by establishing himself as a proponent of a kind of
Russian nationalist religiosity. The West, Solzhenitsyn argued, was in “a state of collapse” due to a moral crisis created by the Renaissance and exacerbated by the Enlightenment. American government was so weak, it could not even protect itself from a rogue reporter, Daniel Ellsberg, who had stolen and published government documents. Britain could not handle her own Irish terrorists. The West did not hold the answers to Russia’s problems. Solzhenitsyn would soon predict that the young American men who refused to serve in Vietnam would one day find themselves fighting in a war to defend American territory. Presidential aides began to wonder if he might be mentally unstable after all.
⁵⁹

He was damaging his own reputation, but the harm done to the Soviets by
The Gulag Archipelago
was greater. Nabokov, who read the first volume that summer, would have seen the stories of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the terrors of Solovki, and the details of Lubyanka Prison. He would have read about people whose fates he had mourned, couched in the rhetoric of outrage and offering all the details of their suffering.

He would also have seen that Solzhenitsyn had chronicled the Russian émigré culture of which the Soviet people had known next to nothing. Solzhenitsyn had written about the emergence of “the incredible writer Sirin-Nabokov,” as well as the fact that Ivan Bunin had continued to write for decades in exile.
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Elsewhere, in a less laudatory mention, one of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag witnesses names Nabokov and other émigré authors. After reading their works, he wonders, “What was wrong with them?” How could the brilliant inheritors of Russian culture waste their “unutterably precious freedom” and forget their countrymen?

By the time he read
The Gulag Archipelago
, Nabokov appears to have surrendered his suspicions that Solzhenitsyn was collaborating in any way with KGB schemes. And the changes wrought by Solzhenitsyn’s arrival seem to have broken Nabokov’s half-century paralysis of public inaction on Soviet matters. Nabokov finally felt that perhaps his speaking out might do more good than harm to those he championed.

Three months after Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in Germany, Nabokov took up the cause of Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident who he noted had been held for years in a psychiatric hospital before recently being sent on to Perm. Bukovsky, who had spent years in medical detention, had most recently been sentenced for turning over case files to the West, offering incontrovertible proof of Soviet psychiatric abuses. Nabokov sent a letter to Britain’s
Observer
, urging “all persons and organizations that have more contact with Russia than I have to do whatever can be done to help that courageous and precious man.”
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In
Bend Sinister
nearly thirty years before, Nabokov had mentioned the camps to which Bukovsky would later be sent, calling them “the ghoul-haunted Province of Perm.” But even there his veiled reference to the labor camps had been so oblique that Véra Nabokov had felt the need to make it explicit in a note for the book’s translator.
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Nabokov did not want to recapitulate the miseries of the dying and the dead with the kind of “juicy journalese” used by Solzhenitsyn, but in building something transcendent to memorialize their suffering, the question remains whether he memorialized it or obscured it.
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As Solzhenitsyn headed into Montreux on the morning of October 6 to visit Nabokov, it is not clear if he knew that Nabokov had mocked his work in interviews and dismissed him as an inferior author. Neither is it clear if he knew about Nabokov’s recent overtures on the behalf of Bukovsky—dozens of luminaries had publicly supported that cause, and Solzhenitsyn was focused on his own mission. Given that Nabokov had written to Solzhenitsyn that he had never stopped thundering against the Soviets, it remains unknown what weight Solzhenitsyn would have given to small overtures on behalf of dissidents nearly sixty years after the Revolution.

Solzhenitsyn, like Nabokov, had been attacked for taking help from others while giving only a cold shoulder in return. But he interpreted what he saw as Nabokov’s literary reticence on matters of Russian history as possibly beyond his fellow exile’s control, later speculating that perhaps “the circumstances of his life” had kept
Nabokov from being able to serve his country by writing about its destruction.
⁶⁴

Rolling up to the driveway of the Palace Hotel on their way to meet the Nabokovs, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his second wife (also named Natalia) were not clear on whether or not they were welcome. Nabokov had invited them—of that they were sure. And they had sent the date they would stop by, and had made their plans. But they had received no confirmation, and their subsequent phone calls trying to get in touch had not been answered.