Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (31 page)

On her trip east, she wrote a note that she managed to drop from the window of a train.
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The communication, however, ran only one direction. Too late for affection or apologies, the tenderness, the pettiness, the kind gestures and cruelties alike were frozen in place forever.

Neuengamme sat in the north of Germany, not far from Hamburg. A scouting party arrived the evening of May 2, just hours after the camp had been abandoned by the last members of the SS. Three days later, Allied forces inspected the facilities, escorted by a contingent of former prisoners. The camp, with its train tracks, barracks, morgue, and crematorium, was nearly empty by then.

The British had arrived. The surviving prisoners were freed. But liberation came nearly four months too late to save Sergei Nabokov, who had already been logged into the Neuengamme Book of the Dead.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

After the War

That fall when the war was over, Nabokov dreamed of his brother. Until that dream, Vladimir had imagined Sergei somewhere in hiding with Hermann. But his nightmare delivered up an alternate vision—Sergei alone and suffering in an anonymous concentration camp.
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Soon after, Nabokov received two letters from Europe that revealed the truth. Making contact through
The New Yorker
, his other brother Kirill wrote to say that Sergei had died of a stomach ailment at Neuengamme. A separate letter sent by Evgenia Hofeld bearing the same news arrived at almost the same time.
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Everyone but Sergei had survived. Hofeld was still in Prague, still taking care of Nabokov’s nephew Rostislav. Nabokov’s sister Elena had also been spared, as had her husband and son. Nabokov wrote his family back, relaying his joy and relief at hearing they were alive. Kirill, he learned in a brief exchange, was an interpreter for the American army in Berlin. Nabokov was more forthcoming with Elena, taking nearly a thousand words to catch her up on his American life: his
lunch of two sandwiches and milk, the details of his own “retreat into entomology,” and the weight he had put on that led him to resemble a grossly obese nineteenth-century poet. He mentioned Sergei to Elena (“(p)oor, poor Seryozha”), and told Kirill that he would ask their cousin Nicholas, then in Germany on a mission with U.S. forces, to try to uncover additional information about Sergei’s fate.
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In a letter to Edmund Wilson later that month, Nabokov mentioned both brothers. Of Sergei, he wrote that his brother had been sent to “one of the worst concentration camps (near Hamburg) and perished there.” Nabokov confessed shock at the news that his brother had been arrested as a British sympathizer. Hardly able to imagine an identity for Sergei that included being a political prisoner, Nabokov noted he had been a “harmless, indolent, pathetic person who spent his life vaguely shuttling between the Quartier Latin and a castle in Austria that he shared with a friend.”
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Just back from an unstable Greece that was about to explode into civil war, Wilson sent his regrets. “Human life,” he wrote, “means absolutely nothing in Europe today.” Wilson, however, felt a sympathy for Germany that Nabokov did not, and meant the statement to apply to all players in the war. He had been horrified by his homeland’s willingness to demolish Dresden and “go the Nazis one better by destroying whole Japanese towns.”
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Wilson had his own news to share, not tragic but sad enough: he was faced with divorcé from his third wife, Mary McCarthy. Nabokov had already heard the rumors about the collapse of their turbulent relationship. McCarthy had briefly been committed to a psychiatric hospital, saying Wilson had beaten her, while Wilson claimed he had done no such thing. Nabokov, who in Europe had competed with friends for the right to punish an abuser, declared himself “Very much’ upset” not to have had an initial explanation from Wilson directly.
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But in 1945 their mutual affection seemed indestructible. Not only did Nabokov remain friends with Wilson after the divorce, but Véra, too, had developed a fondness for Wilson, adding a personal note to a letter, inviting him to Boston in the midst of his legal
turmoil. Vladimir and Véra even moved in with Wilson for a week at his request, to relieve the anxieties of his live-in cook that she would be swept into the divorce proceedings.
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Their camaraderie, however, could not erase their ideological differences. Even as the war receded into the past, the friends continued to regard it differently. In light of all the death, Wilson felt the killing had to stop and advocated against condemning Nazi leaders to death.
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Hitler’s suicide, however, was not recompense enough for Nabokov. Even with the Germans defeated, Nabokov was not inclined toward mercy. A Christmas letter from Dmitri’s school asking for clothing to be sent to German children was met with a return missive suggesting that while he was in principle in favor of the ideal of aiding former enemies, it would not be until the needs of desperate “Greek, Czech, French, Belgian, Chinese, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, (and) Jewish” children had been addressed that he might consider fulfilling the school’s request.
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Nabokov knew, however, that Soviet troops were already making Germans pay a terrible price for their sins. Newspapers ran stories of refugees streaming westward at Germany’s defeat. Editorial writers described scenes in which Soviet forces continued “to strip bare the countries they occupy.” Thousands tried to escape Soviet occupation zones, refusing to return home. Some Eastern Europeans were initially given a choice about whether to go back, but others were not. As part of the Allied agreement that emerged from Yalta, Soviet citizens were to be repatriated to Russia whether or not they were willing. Widespread desertion took place among Soviet soldiers stationed in Germany, who filtered out to live on the lam or made their way into camps for displaced persons rather than heading home.
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As a captain in the Soviet Army, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had traveled through Soviet-occupied territory as the Red Army had advanced. He had crossed paths with liberated Soviet POWs as they marched
homeward. Innocent as he still was, he was deeply puzzled by their profound dejection at the prospect of returning to Russia.

More immediately disturbing to him were initial messages sent to soldiers from Stalin encouraging advancing troops to exact revenge on Germany in any form they wished. Their wishes, it turned out, were vicious.
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On the headlong dash into Germany, Solzhenitsyn made it as far as Königsberg, over seventy miles west of the border. He witnessed an NKVD tribunal and reprisals in recovered territory, and was also present for at least one execution of collaborators, an event which was promoted as the kick-off to a full-fledged party—one he declined to attend.
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Unlike Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn had seen combat; but like his fellow Russian, he had come to see his life’s work as writing. Thus it may have been with mixed motives that he managed in 1944 to send a forged army pass and a military disguise with an emissary, bringing his wife, Natalia, to join him at the front. For three weeks, she had occupied herself in the trenches, much as Véra Nabokov had in Cambridge the previous year—making clean drafts of her husband’s work and discussing Russian literature with him. Solzhenitsyn hoped his wife might stay indefinitely, but things did not always go smoothly. One point of contention from his perspective was her refusal to stand at attention when he entered the trench.
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By that point, Solzhenitsyn was still a true believer in the Revolution, but he had lost all respect for Stalin. He thought little of the military censors and routinely referred to the problems of Soviet life in relation to “the moustachioed one” or in similarly thinly veiled terms to friends also serving in the military.
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They believed that with enough revolutionary ardor, they might be able to help create a Soviet Union that lived up to its possibilities, helping Russia to recover from Stalin’s errors.

This Solzhenitsyn was a very different man than the one who had entered the Army. Despite his early incompetence and anguish, he
had managed to learn discipline and leadership. He was pleased by the respect and reputation he had earned.

But on the eve of the push to Berlin—the war was effectively over but yet to be won—Solzhenitsyn was called to the office of his brigadier general. Reporting for what he thought was a special assignment, he found himself in a room with brigade staff and Soviet counterespionage agents. As his revolver was taken away, his cap stripped of its star, and his epaulettes torn from his jacket, he realized he was under arrest.
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The closest Vladimir Nabokov got to a military campaign in World War II was his attempt to quit smoking. (Véra’s biographer records Nabokov’s self-mockery: “We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
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) Other than the trauma he was willing to do to the reputations of his fellow writers—mostly by this point picking on the famous or the dead—Nabokov confined his violence to literature, or writing letters to organizations that had provoked him. He taught at Wellesley, continued with his Guggenheim funding (now in its second year), caught new specimens, and reorganized Harvard’s butterflies. Meanwhile, he treasured his son, worked with Véra, and flirted with women half his age at Wellesley. He had published a half-dozen novels in as many years during his European exile, but he had much less to show for his time in America.

In the end Nabokov, who had lived through two world wars and a revolution, was not called up and never had to serve. Unlike the eastern remnants of his family, he had managed to avoid being pinned between fascism and Communism. He had no medals, and was a hero only, perhaps, to the son and wife with whom he had escaped Europe. For the duration of the war, he had been stateside, writing letters in support of the friends’ visas and fretting over the fate of those trying to get to America.

He beat the same drum after the war, encouraging a westward movement away from danger and toward liberty for family members
still trapped in the East. Still feeling financial strain, Nabokov was nonetheless more flush than usual with income from Harvard, Wellesley, and the sale of the movie rights to
Camera Obscura
, now titled
Laughter in the Dark
. He continued to send care packages with money and clothing to help Evgenia Hofeld take care of Rostislav, even as he lobbied for them to emigrate.
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The postwar landscape evolved quickly. Less than a year after the end of hostilities, Winston Churchill gave a speech in Missouri, announcing that from the Baltic to the Adriatic “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” trapping millions of central Europeans in a sphere in danger of Soviet repression.
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The Marshall Plan, announced the following year, allocated billions to restore the economies and infrastructure of Europe, with an eye toward strengthening democracy.

Nabokov understood that the Soviets would not treat their new territories of influence any differently than they had their own citizens. As they began to exercise their authority more aggressively in the occupied regions, the free elections that had been promised in Poland were hijacked in January 1947 via fraud and manipulation. A similar process unfolded across two elections in Hungary, with Communists intimidating, arresting, and exiling popular leaders after winning only a minority of the vote. Nabokov continued to think about how to extract his family and wrote a letter of recommendation for Elena, who was trying to get a job with the United Nations.
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Nabokov defined himself not just against the Soviets but parts of the émigré community, too. Edmund Wilson had learned that when it came to Russians, Nabokov could be picky. He knew well enough to warn Nabokov when Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew would be visiting the Wilsons in Wellfleet. A painter who had collaborated with Nicholas Nabokov on a Diaghilev ballet, Tchelitchew had also been Sergei Nabokov’s roommate in Paris. Giving Nabokov fair warning of the company he would have if he visited, Wilson added, “I hope this won’t keep you away.”
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Nabokov had not been shy about sharing his thoughts on Russia with Wilson, and he had begun to collect observations and anecdotes about America as well. During his lecture tour through the south, he met W. E. B. Du Bois and learned how the elegant “Negro scholar and organizer” had been welcomed as a Colonel in England because of the
Col
. designation on his passport, signifying “Colored.” Less amusing was a filthy man in the Pullman lavatory who reminded Nabokov of the reactionary militias from his childhood, only increasing the resemblance when he started spewing anti-Semitic comments.
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