Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (53 page)

Yet after years of access to Soviet archives, the human rights organization Memorial began pulling camp records together to
create a master listing of Gulag sites. It became clear that the Nova Zemblan accounts from prisoners of war were problematic. Despite the tidal wave of anecdotal evidence that circulated inside and outside Russia in the Soviet era, no wartime files on camps and mines on Nova Zembla have been found. A paper published by Memorial indicates that the details of mining from the prisoner-of-war accounts of the 1940s also do not match up with geological information about Nova Zembla, and suggests that these accounts must be considered with skepticism.
⁷⁹

Records do show that in 1925, a Nova Zemblan (
Novozemelskaya)
geological expedition tested ore at a number of places north of the mainland. Five years later, OGPU officers brought in prisoners to begin mining. The expedition landed not on Nova Zembla proper, but on Vaigach Island, the southernmost island of the Nova Zemblan archipelago.

Conditions were miserable, especially during the first winter of 1930–31, when the prisoners had to set up camp on an inlet. Mines were established on the other side of the bay, and altogether almost 1, 500 prisoners were ferried over from the mainland. In winter, a series of posts connected with rope ran across the bay from the settlement to the mines, so that prisoners could find their way in poor visibility. In bad conditions, those who lost their way simply died.

The main benefit to the hard work on Vaigach was that every day served on the Nova Zemblan archipelago counted for two days off a prisoner’s sentence. Due to the polar bears, prisoners were sometimes given rifles to protect themselves.
⁸⁰

One minor rebellion sprang up, but it was put down quickly; there was no question of escape. The climate was brutal, but treatment was often better than prisoners would receive at other camps. In the evenings chess and performances were permitted. A small brass band composed of prisoners once played the “Internationale” for a meeting of the local indigenous Nenets.
⁸¹

In the fourth year of operations, water flooded the mine. By 1936, the Vaigach experiment had come to an end. All the prisoners were
pulled away to work more promising deposits or to help build rail lines to new Arctic camps. The Vaigach Expedition may well have been responsible for decades of legends about the severity of Nova Zembla, but it never set foot on Zembla proper.

The 1922 stories about Socialist Revolutionary prisoners sent there are also likely mistaken. Lining up the Nova Zembla camp stories with news accounts turns up another piece of the puzzle. The 1922 stories relayed that because too many prisoners were escaping from the mainland camps around Archangel, the Socialist Revolutionaries would be shipped en masse to Nova Zembla. The announcement of the prisoners’ deadly fate was made on the cusp of autumn, but by that point the climate likely made transportation north problematic.
⁸²
Heading north of the mainland would have been ill-advised, so prisoners would likely have been held until spring.

But despite the stories that ran in
The New York Times, The Times
of London and the accounts of Berlin’s own
Rul
, no camp records unearthed to date indicate that any prisoners were sent to Nova Zembla the following year either. Where did they go?

The question dovetails with a piece of history that is already on the books. In June 1923, just as the seas cleared enough for navigation, Solovki received its first large batch of Socialist Revolutionary prisoners.
⁸³
In retrospect, it seems likely that rumors of a Nova Zemblan destination for the prisoners who had disappeared the previous fall were just that—rumors. The stories were true in spirit—prisoners were, in fact, being sent to a desolate northern island, and it was a place that would soon become a nightmare of horrors—but it was in all probability not Zembla they went to but Solovki.

Later, when stories leaked out in the 1930s and 1940s of people sent to hardship posts in the Arctic to build new mines, confusion reigned again. The name
Vorkuta
circulated, but until the 1931 expedition of prisoners sent to create it, the Arctic city of Vorkuta had not existed. People did not know where it was. Western sources from the
Tribune de Genève
to
The New York Times
accurately relayed that new mines were being worked by tens of thousands of prisoners at a
place called Vorkuta. But they mistakenly located Vorkuta on Nova Zembla.
⁸⁴
And so Nova Zembla—which even before the Revolution had been a setting for expeditions, fairy tales, and starvation—continued in its legendary half-real, half-imagined status.

But what about those who were actually prisoners at Vorkuta, who reported terror at the prospect of being sent further north to Nova Zembla, the site to which as many as a thousand rogue thieves were shipped off each year? While it is possible that they were taken to Nova Zembla and left there, there are no records of functioning mines or prisoner transports sent to them. Those condemned thieves may have been exported to other penal labor sites or simply executed.
⁸⁵

But the stories in and outside the camps proliferated. And so Nova Zembla entered the gulag lexicon as the place that allowed prisoners to imagine that no matter how bad things got—and conditions were atrocious at Vorkuta—there was always someplace farther north that was worse.
⁸⁶

Revisiting stories of starvation and cannibalism in the fishing villages of Nova Zembla during Nabokov’s childhood and the accounts of the apocalyptic Tsar Bomba in his later years, even Nova Zembla’s undisputed history has attained mythic stature. No wonder the islands intrigued Nabokov for decades, from his 1941 poem mentioning Nova Zembla to the Nabokov River he references there in
Speak, Memory
, and
Pale Fire
’s very idea of a refugee hailing from its desolate shores.

Nabokov had told his classes that all great stories were fairy tales, but he also knew, as well as anyone, that their horrors were real. How fitting that in the history of the Russian camps, the islands were for a time the false double of two of the system’s most notorious and lethal outposts, Solovki and Vorkuta.

By the time of Véra Nabokov’s death, her husband had been rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, and many of his works had legally entered the country.
⁸⁷
Dmitri Likhachev, who had reported to Solzhenitsyn
about his time on Solovki for
The Gulag Archipelago
, was instrumental in bringing Nabokov’s
Eugene Onegin
to Russia.

He likewise brokered discussions about returning the family home on Bolshaya Morskaya to Nabokov’s son Dmitri.
⁸⁸
But in the end the first floor of the house became a museum dedicated to Nabokov’s life and writing. Visitors can see first editions of Nabokov novels, his Russian Scrabble game, and his butterfly net. Battered
samizdat
copies of Nabokov works that once circulated underground are kept under glass. A copy of the century-old architectural plans for the house is posted; a seminar room with a film projector shows documentaries, including one in which Solzhenitsyn comments mildly on Nabokov. Solzhenitsyn’s remarks are brief, stressing how unexpected Nabokov’s work was, coming as it did on the heels of his nineteenth-century Russian predecessors. Solzhenitsyn does not add, as he did elsewhere, that to reach Western readers, Nabokov had broken with the past and lost his Russian roots.
⁸⁹

Not long after the aborted meeting with Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn retreated to the hills of Vermont, ranting against the spiritual wasteland of the West and writing about the past, eventually outliving the political regime he despised. In 1994 he returned to Russia in triumph, knowing his writing had changed the course of history. He had engaged the enemy, and he had won.

But engagement had a price. His strident opinions on America, on Western governments, and global history he did not know well permanently dented his international reputation. Compelled by unfolding events to rush translations of his most important works, he was unable to take the time and attention that Nabokov had lavished on his works in other languages. Despite the Nobel Prize that Solzhenitsyn had won—and Nabokov had not—the political aspects of his writing seem destined to overshadow its literary merits.
⁹⁰

Westerners who saw Solzhenitsyn as committed to freedom were dismayed to watch him embrace Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official who has held on to nostalgia for aspects of the Soviet past. Solzhenitsyn went on to represent a Russian nationalism that made
many squirm. Making a public stand in favor of reinstituting the death penalty in 2001, he pointed out that even Vladimir Nabokov’s father, an anti-death-penalty activist, had reversed himself on the issue in 1917 when Russia had been in jeopardy.
⁹¹

Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008. One year later, excerpts from
The Gulag Archipelago
became required reading in Russian high schools, and the Moscow road formerly known as Big Communist Street was named after Russia’s most stalwart anti-Communist.
⁹²

Today in St. Petersburg, a few memorials and museums have found a place in the cityscape. A slab of rock from Solovki sits on a pedestal in front of the House of Political Convicts. A memorial to the founder of the Cheka, that forerunner of Soviet secret police organizations, has become a museum on the history of all the political police in Russia across the centuries. Across the Neva River from Kresty Prison where Nabokov’s father was held (where others are held today) sits Mikhail Shemyakin’s monument to victims of political repression. A pair of sphinxes face each other, with a stone book and barbed-wire crown between them. Taking just a few steps around to view them from the perspective of Kresty Prison reveals half-skull faces and protruding ribs on the statues’ reverse sides.

Germany has created many more memorials for the dead of its camps, though today no train runs from the Hamburg suburb of Bergedorf out to the stop on the grounds of the former concentration camp at Neuengamme, which remained a prison until 2003.

Walking from the rebuilt section of track to the center of the camp, perhaps the most surprising thing is how the acres of the site stretch on and on—a single human being represents a very small presence. Fence posts remain, marking camp boundaries, but the barbed wire and even the fencing are gone. The memorial can be visited twenty-four hours a day. Vandalism happens, but camp staff reports that it is rare.
⁹³

Taking the train from Germany to Prague in 2011, it is possible to find a car and driver and head into the countryside up and down the hills for hours with a translator who helps to locate a particular
retirement home in the far eastern Czech town of Šumperk. On the upper level of the complex lives a man who was once a Gulag prisoner in the Arctic.

A visit to the archives will reveal a copy of his NKVD file that will prove it, and then army records can confirm it, in case doubt lingers.
⁹⁴
Paperwork shows that the man spent nearly two years at Vorkuta before being released early for the war effort, as so many were, into the relative comfort of crossfire on the eastern front in World War II.

Phoning ahead only leads him to say not to come, that no one wants to talk to such an old person. But pressed, he relents, and seems to like having guests. He introduces his wife as well, who will also soon turn ninety, and she talks about being deported to work in Germany during the war.

Asked about his time in the Gulag, the man offers up stories, including a description of a stint mining ore for blacktop on Nova Zembla, where, he explains, prisoners were sometimes given an extra ration offish. He stops being at all reluctant. Offering homemade pickles and encouraging guests to stay and listen, he answers every question, sharing what he can about the camps, detailing his war service, spinning his own stories to replace whatever it is he cannot remember or cannot say, talking all about his time on Nova Zembla.

Riding back to Prague with the translator, it is four hours to the heart of the Old Town and Charles University, where Vladimir Petkevič teaches. The great-grandson of V. D. Nabokov and grandson of Nabokov’s sister Olga, Petkevič is generous with his time, and talks about his beloved grandmother, whom nature or a privileged childhood had rendered incapable of performing even simple tasks, and his father, who died in despair in communist Czechoslovakia at the age of twenty-nine.

Reminded that Nabokov had once written a scathing letter to Roman Jakobson, the linguist who visited the Soviet Union before its collapse, Petkevič will not defend Jakobson, though he admires
the man’s work deeply. “I fully agree with Nabokov,” Petkevič says, still angry at the Western intelligentsia decades later. “I almost hated them. They didn’t understand anything. We did, we who lived here. We knew what it was like.”
⁹⁵

Flying into Geneva, and taking the train around the lake to Montreux, the station sits just blocks up the hill from the Palace Hotel. It is possible to get a room in October, the time of year that Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were supposed to meet—though probably not the Nabokov Suite, which is generally booked well in advance by visiting Russians.

One floor above the lobby, the doors stand open on the Salon de Musique, the room where Nabokov waited for Solzhenitsyn. Regulations for the preservation of historic buildings are strict, so not much has changed since Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn’s failed meeting. The present recalls the past.