Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (52 page)

For a stemwinding prophet, Solzhenitsyn had an uncharacteristic delicacy in the matter of visits. Years before, he had heard from a former schoolmate who had been threatened with arrest based in part on comments made by Solzhenitsyn. The friend blamed Solzhenitsyn for his close call with prison, but when the latter had risen to fame, the two exchanged letters. Though they realized they had profound differences, they made a plan to meet in person.

Goingto his friend’s apartment, Solzhenitsyn rangthebell, but there was no answer. After an hour spent waiting in the lobby, he wrote a note and started to slip it through a lidded mail slot in the door. As he did, he glimpsed the slippers on his friend’s feet through the slot as the former classmate stood motionless on the other side of the door, unwilling or unable to open it. Solzhenitsyn let down the cover and left.
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He had chosen a different road for himself, but the pain of addressing the past directly was something that he understood.

As he neared the hotel, Solzhenitsyn did not know that Nabokov was waiting with Véra in the private dining room they had reserved for lunch. Any small harm their mutually critical comments had done was surely irrelevant in comparison to the things that admired about each other. But something made Solzhenitsyn pause.

He acknowledged Nabokov’s genius, even as he regretted that his fellow Russian had not used his art to do anything for their homeland. Solzhenitsyn surely wanted to visit. Such a meeting, however, would be complicated. His fondest wish was to move to a rustic cabin somewhere. Did he feel awkward in the face of the luxury setting?
Was he concerned that Nabokov, who was not a young man, was ill or indisposed?

Whatever his worries, Solzhenitsyn did not stop. He did not get out of the car. He did not go with Natalia into the private dining room of the hotel restaurant reserved for them and find the seventy-five-year-old Nabokov, who sat waiting for Solzhenitsyn.

Instead, Solzhenitsyn—with the same sensitivity he had shown to his old friend, or perhaps with the same anxiety over the past that had kept his friend from opening the door—drove away on the Grand Rue of Montreux, heading north just a tenth of a mile to a bend in the road that was Rue du Lac. Another mile to go and they were already out of Montreux.

Nabokov was a thoroughly modern writer, yet somehow he himself had become an anachronism. Embarking on a new existence, Solzhenitsyn was as free to leave his fellow Russian behind as the soldier in Nabokov’s first novel had been when he abandoned his childhood love at the train station and sailed into the future on his own terms.

Vladimir and Véra Nabokov sat in the room that they had reserved, where they had hoped to talk with the man whose writing they did not admire but whose bravery they did not dispute, the man who might have understood what Nabokov had done with all those books, if Solzhenitsyn had only known that every one of them was meant to stand against totalitarianism, the man whose exile had somehow persuaded Nabokov to write a public letter during a campaign by Amnesty International in an effort to save a single “precious” life.
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The person best equipped to see through Nabokov’s elaborate games missed his cue, defying the fate he claimed had brought them together. The Nabokovs waited at the table for more than an hour before rising to go. The two men never met.

Having entered the public fray on behalf of those still being subjected to Soviet abuses, Nabokov wrote another missive near the end of the year. At the request of American friends who had built a publishing
house specializing in Russian-language literature, he sent a telegram directly to Leningrad calling for the immediate release of dissident short story writer Vladimir Maramzin.
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Maramzin had been arrested, and his library containing a copy of
Lolita
, had been burned.

Worried that there had been no response, the Nabokovs attempted to add a little publicity for Maramzin’s cause by pointing out that a forthcoming piece in
People
magazine might advantageously make mention of the telegram, which it did.
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The rest of the
People
interview from the same year is a mishmash of truth and deliberate gamesmanship on Nabokov’s part. He claimed to loathe student activists and hippies, which was probably true—and he expressed regret that Véra never laughed, which was not. Before the interview, as with nearly every interview he did in Montreux, Nabokov had requested the right to review the story as planned for print and to make corrections.

He made these edits often, even after the fact. In collected interviews published as part of
Strong Opinions
late in Nabokov’s life, it is interesting to see what he chose to leave out. He redacted his own comments about the weight he had gained, his chatter about Tolstoy catching a sexually transmitted disease from a Swiss chambermaid, and insults directed at Pasternak and other writers. “I cannot be made to criticize contemporary writers,” he wrote in a note to his interviewer, as if he had somehow not already done it or not known he had been speaking to reporters when he did so.
⁶⁹

Asked about being a perverse or cruel author in another interview, he had responded, “Is a butcher cruel?” He followed up with an explanation: “If I was cruel, I suppose it was because I saw the world as cruel in those days.”

With the back and forth of choreographed answers and revisions, it becomes impossible to trace the thread back to discover which Nabokov is being discussed at any point in time—the public façade of the esteemed writer; the jocular, teasing host; or the magician who buried his past in his art and waited for readers to exhume it.
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As a result, in his
People
interview it is hard to know if it was
the reporter or Nabokov himself who is responsible for a passage in which Nabokov is described as joining “the current of history not by rushing to take part in political actions or appearing in the news but by quietly working for decades, a lifetime, until his voice seems … almost as loud as the lies. Deprived of his own land, of his language, he has conquered something greater.… He has won.”
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What had he won? Fame, money, and artistic immortality, without a doubt. But the world consigned Nabokov to the artful prison he had built for himself, and his books, every one of which was meant to fight tyranny, were seen as arch games in a self-referential hall of mirrors.
⁷²

Nabokov did not live to see the fall of Soviet Russia. But in the autumn of the missed meeting with Solzhenitsyn, other Soviet exiles made their way to Montreux to visit with him. He spent long hours translating
Ada
into French; he entertained a representative from McGraw-Hill, his American publisher. He continued to plan new novels and started on
The Original of Laura
, which would be completed in his mind but never on the page.

He continued to argue over Andrew Field’s biography into 1976, by which point relations were fully adversarial. And no wonder Field struggled—the manuscript of the corrections running back and forth between the two parties had transformed into the literary equivalent of Dickens’s
Bleak House
. Nabokov was simultaneously doing useful things—clarifying details, making corrections, and editing things that referred to people behind the Iron Curtain—while also cutting out the kind of tidbits that he liked to retract from interviews, now with the intercession of lawyers.

Primed by combat with Field, Nabokov lashed out at critic John Leonard in the last weeks of his life, with just a hint of a threat of legal action over a line describing a legendary forger as “a liar on such an extravagant scale, a Nabokov of Peking.”
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Such matters were hardly worth his time, of which there was not much left. He was caught up in real or imagined slights against his personal honor as if he were still living in pre-Revolutionary Russia, which he nearly was—or at least as close to it as he could get.

He had one eye on eternity, and for all those who dismissed him as a gamesman or chastised him for tormenting his characters, he predicted that another view would prevail in the end: “I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.”
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The immortality Nabokov had achieved for his writing could not add a single day to his life. He woke one night, thinking he was dying, and screamed for Véra, who did not hear him. That evening was only a dress rehearsal, but it was no secret that death was coming. He had fallen while hiking the year before, and from there slowly began to slide into the world of intermittent illness. It was as if he were returning to his childhood quinsy and pneumonia, but with sleeping-pill-induced hallucinations instead of his own wild imaginings. Fever and urinary tract infection had their way with him. After sentencing characters to die into their stories, leaving the narrative permanently incomplete, he was slowly expiring without any prospect of finishing his last tale.

In the end, there were none of the grotesque details he loved to recount from Gogol’s demise—the alternating warm and frigid baths, the invalid’s convex belly, the leeches bleeding him, hanging from his nose, slipping into his mouth.
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Nabokov died the plainest of deaths, with recurrent fever, bronchial congestion, and fluid in his lungs, all of which refused to give ground.
⁷⁶

He had planned to go to Israel the May before, but postponed the trip; he had hoped to get to America again. And although he did not believe it would ever happen, he had dreamed of returning to Russia. But Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, who loved small jars of fruit jellies; who resented Pasternak’s success as if it could annihilate his own; who was rumored to have wanted to challenge his father’s killers to a duel; who had mocked people who ended up dying terrible, unimaginable deaths; who had once referenced the current plotline of the comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D., to an astonished
scholar; who stitched more than a century of camps and prisons—real and invented—into his writing, died a distinctly un-Nabokovian death. It was perhaps as good an end as a modern writer can have, short of not dying: before nightfall, with attention to his comfort, in the company of his wife and son, with no question that his works would survive him.

Nabokov’s life had been surrounded by politics and intrigue from birth, and was bound up in many of the major events of his century, which he preserved through magical flight and escapes that he knew were not the norm but a gift. In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that so many people in his world managed to survive, chief among them his wife and son.

Dmitri Nabokov spent his early adulthood on two things his father had studiously avoided—driving and music. In addition to becoming an opera singer and a race car driver, he was also the preferred Russian-to-English translator of his father’s Russian works. He would later become the shepherd of his father’s literary estate, defending Nabokov’s work and personal reputation fiercely, arguing for a fundamental gentleness and kindness that did not always show up in others’ depictions of the man.

Véra Nabokov, who had made herself as invisible as possible to the public during her husband’s lifetime, survived more than a decade after his death, carrying on Nabokov’s literary legacy, supervising translations, working hand-in-hand with a new biographer to establish a life story for Nabokov that might erase Field’s.
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She kept a grueling schedule but survived to the age of eighty-nine and would eventually earn her own biographer. She died in 1991, living just long enough to witness the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

When the U.S.S.R. imploded, the doors to history opened. Closely guarded records became available, and a broader view of
twentieth-century Russian history emerged. If the portrait of 1917 and 1918 became more complicated than Nabokov might have liked, he would have been heartened by documents establishing Lenin’s ruthlessness from the beginning.

Open archives also made it possible to match prisoner files to existing oral accounts, and to begin to fill in the landscape sketched by
The Gulag Archipelago
and individual memoirs. The files, of course, were unreliable in their own way—charges were often trumped up; confessions were often not confessions at all. History, it turns out, is complex. But it is not entirely opaque.

Wanting to preserve the enigma of
Pale Fire
, the Nabokovs had made clear to their publisher in 1962 that nobody should know if Zembla really exists. But what of Nova Zembla—the Arctic destination of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1922? What about the camp from which Solzhenitsyn, too, had dreamed of hearing a story, the place to which Gulag memoirists said a thousand prisoners were sent each year, but none returned?

In addition to the
Times of London
and
New York Times
articles, the mines of Nova Zembla are mentioned in dozens of publications of the 1930s, from Pennsylvania’s
Tyrone Daily
to
Popular Science
. An American Federation of Labor Gulag map from 1951 shows two camps on the southern island; a Routledge atlas from 1972 shows just one camp at the top of the northern island. In 1943 a Polish officer named Andrey Stotski recounted his own experiences on Nova Zembla in a memoir excerpted and translated into English under the title “I Dwelt with Death.” Classified CIA reports from the 1950s include pictures from Nova Zembla and testimony gathered from POWs after the war, who described in detail the kinds of mining done there, from a copper-pyrite quarry down to the ore-processing plant on the northern island. Robert Conquest references the “virtually unrecorded ‘death camps’” of Nova Zembla in his 1990 book
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
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