Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (6 page)

The Nabokovs’ wealth came from Elena’s side of the family—her millionaire father had been born into a mining family. He had loved the theater and devoted himself to philanthropic projects, but was also given to legendary rages in which he intimidated his daughter and terrorized his son. He had died when Nabokov was a toddler, leaving behind the St. Petersburg house and a country estate at Vyra, forty-five miles south of the city.
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When in the country, Elena Nabokov painted watercolor landscapes and picked mushrooms. In town, she stayed out until three in the morning playing poker. She was emotional and expressive with her children; but with those outside the immediate family, she could be guarded and slow to friendship. She remained a nervous, brittle woman all her life. As a Lent-and-Easter-Sunday churchgoer, she leaned toward signs and portents: furtive knocks and apparitions populated her personal belief system in such a way that she was spiritual without being religious. Seeing letters and numbers in color, just as her son Vladimir did, she believed in second sight.
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She was also her son’s formative instructor in matters of deception, the first practitioner to model what would become the defining feature of his literary style. He would pay tribute to her cunning later in life, recounting two incidents from childhood in his autobiography.

In the first, Nabokov describes his mother’s anxiety over a longtime servant. Like most women of her class, Elena Nabokov did not work. She also had little interest in running the household, leaving the task to her childhood nurse, a woman in her seventies who had been born a serf. Slipping into dementia, the former nurse hoarded scraps and jealously guarded the family food, parceling it out reluctantly even to the Nabokovs themselves.

Unwilling to humiliate the woman by relieving her of her duties, Nabokov’s mother encouraged the former nurse in a convoluted fantasy that she ruled over the pantry, when in fact, she controlled
only a “moldy and remote little kingdom” maintained to reinforce her delusion. Everyone else knew what was happening and mocked the nurse behind her back—she herself had suspicions about the arrangement from time to time. But the pity Nabokov’s mother felt kept her from ever divulging the truth. He would remember his mother’s guile for decades, and would mention the former nurse in
Speak, Memory
, along with an even more intricate ploy.
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By the time Nabokov was four, his paternal grandfather, Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, had begun to lose his mind. The former Minister to the Tsar put rocks in his mouth. He pounded the floor with his cane for attention. He swore. He confused his attendant for nobility and the Queen of Belgium for a troublemaker. He became convinced that he was only safe in his apartment at Nice, on the French Riviera. The presence of Nabokov’s mother there soothed him, but his condition worsened, and doctors recommended moving him to a northern climate.

During one insensible spell, the old man was brought to live in St. Petersburg, where Elena Nabokov recreated his room in Nice. Someone gathered furnishings recalling his old apartment, and some of his possessions were brought in by special messenger. Mediterranean flowers were obtained for his room.

It was not just a question of making him comfortable—Elena Nabokov fostered the illusion that he had never moved at all. She had the side of the house that was visible from his window painted Riviera white. He lived out his few remaining days under the happy delusion that he was safe in Nice and nowhere near a Russia that had just embarked on a catastrophic conflict with Japan.
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That same winter, Nabokov watched General Kuropatkin, a friend of the family, begin to demonstrate a trick with matches on the living room sofa, only to be interrupted by the call to war. Four years later, Vladimir would watch the boys’ Ukrainian tutor make a coin disappear right before their eyes. A pre-teen Nabokov would sit through yet another tutor’s magic lantern slides—glass plates in which large stories were reduced to a handful of images, and tiny
moments became epic. But for all the inversion, sleight of hand, and trickery Nabokov would hoard and deploy in his writing across his lifetime, it was his mother who first blended reality and illusion, veiling hard truths in fantasy, and offering comforting lies with a deception born from power and pity.

The young Nabokov was so shielded by his parents from the violence of history that to review the political traumas that surrounded his family from his birth is also to note their absence from his daily life, to register that he somehow lived his first decades as a bystander to a cultural maelstrom.

This simultaneous immersion in and distance from social upheaval would eventually find a mirror in his writing. Like his family, Nabokov’s characters would be shaped by history, though their invented pasts would often be less lordly than his own. The grandfather dying in St. Petersburg but imagining himself on the Riviera had once owned 390 human beings. At the height of his influence he had been Minister of Justice under Tsars Alexander II and III—the first a reform-minded ruler who freed the serfs and established independent courts, and the second a regressive one who began to roll back the liberties bestowed by his predecessor.

As a result of that political career, Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, had been born at Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar’s country estate. He had grown up in St. Petersburg in the political beehive of the Winter Palace. As a child, V. D. Nabokov had lived through assassination of Alexander II and the anti-Semitic pogroms that had convulsed the country in its wake. He had witnessed his own father’s struggle to preserve at least some of Russia’s reforms.
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Surrounded by political turmoil, Nabokov’s father had chosen to make a life in it. Establishing himself early on as a liberal, V. D. Nabokov had been a student protester facing arrest, choosing to stay with his fellow detainees rather than take advantage of his father’s
influence. He had grown up to become a legal scholar with a strong sense of justice.
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His democratic inclinations, however, stopped short of material possessions: he had lived among finery from birth and loved elegant things. He owned two automobiles—a Benz sedan and a black limousine—and a wardrobe that attracted more attention than his wife’s. His house was filled with soap and books imported from England, while his mind was filled with dreams of a British parliamentary system that he hoped to import as well. His fastidiousness was severe, his intelligence was fierce, and he had dedicated himself to promoting civil rights for everyone.
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Nabokov’s father would be the formative influence on him from childhood until death. And when Vladimir, nicknamed Volodya, was about to turn four—still a small boy delighting in riding sleeper cars to the Riviera and finding bits of colored glass on the beach—V. D. Nabokov made a choice that would define his legacy.

In 1903 at Kishinev, in the far southwest corner of the Russian Empire, a local newspaper printed stories about the centuries-old slur of blood libel—Jews murdering Christians to collect blood for religious rites. The paper called for Christians “inspired by the love of Christ” and affection for the Tsar to band together to “massacre these vile Jews.” Sparked to action on Easter weekend, a mob went on a rampage. And once the pogrom erupted, it ran unimpeded. The destruction continued for almost three days. By the time it was over, 49 Jews had been killed outright, with hundreds injured, businesses broken into, and more than a thousand people homeless.
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At a time when it was forbidden for members of the Russian court to take a public stand on any matter without Imperial approval, Nabokov’s father wrote about the massacre directly and without permission. In “The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” he attacked the madness of anti-Semitism, noting the damage it did not only to the Jews who were its victims but also to a society crippled by blind hatred. He condemned the government for tacitly permitting the pogrom and the police for not stopping it.

Anti-Semitism was woven deeply into the national culture, and Russia’s Jews were blamed for nearly every revolutionary tendency and economic disenfranchisement in the country.
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Gentiles who sympathized with their plight were portrayed as treasonous by reactionary groups. Elena Nabokov kept a collection of political cartoons that attacked her husband for his political stances, including one image in which Nabokov recalled his father “handing over Saint Russia on a plate to World Jewry.”
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Pogroms had taken place intermittently for centuries, but widespread use of the telegraph made it possible for news of the carnage at Kishinev to travel in hours rather than days. Russian brutality instantly made headlines around the globe. Community organizations and newspapers from Warsaw to London and Texas condemned the assaults. They were a matter of such international outrage that Chinese immigrants in New York banded together to raise money for the victims of Kishinev.
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Less attention was paid in that moment to another series of articles that would profoundly affect the lives of millions in subsequent decades. A newspaper in Nabokov’s hometown circulated what it trumpeted as the discovery of the records of a secret plan of Jews to take over the world. The fictional material had been lifted from unrelated sources written across centuries, imported into Germany and Prussia, and stitched together into its final form in all probability by the Tsar’s secret police. The plan appeared first in stories printed by the same publisher whose newspaper had called for the pogrom in Kishinev.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, complete forgeries, began to make their way across Russia, where they played to existing prejudice and fears.
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As anti-Semitism wore new masks, denouncing bigotry in every form became a key facet of V. D. Nabokov’s politics, one that his son would embrace with equal fervor as an adult. Nabokov’s father particularly despised the government strategy of encouraging prejudice by manipulating uneducated peasants. Yet it was not just government-fostered anti-Semitism that moved him to protest the
tsarist regime. He argued vehemently against the death penalty, and, despite his belief that homosexuality was abnormal, he criticized Imperial laws against sodomy.

Nabokov’s father had been active in the St. Petersburg congress that demanded a constitution, a legislative body, and permanent civil rights. And he was far from alone—liberal and socialist ideals had been actively pursued during the nineteenth century by whole communities of Russian writers and thinkers, from anarchist pacifists like Leo Tolstoy to radicals more inclined toward violence.

In the face of such activism, repressive laws and calls to patriotism in the midst of the war with Japan did not have the desired effect. Momentum gained from civil rights granted in the nineteenth century could not be indefinitely stalled in the twentieth. As the old year gave way to 1905, strikes erupted across St. Petersburg. Protesters who went to the Winter Palace that January to deliver a petition to the Tsar asking for reforms found cavalry units charging them with swords drawn. When the crowd refused to disperse, the shooting began.

Demonstrators who ran from live bullets were hunted down. People threw themselves off low bridges onto the ice beneath. Looters were corralled breaking windows and taking fruit from the elegant shops on Nevsky Prospect. And just around the corner from the home of five-year-old Vladimir Nabokov, children searching for refuge who had climbed trees in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral were picked off by soldiers.
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Members of the Committee of Journalists and Poets—including V. D. Nabokov’s friend Joseph Hessen—were thrown into the Peter and Paul Fortress. Newspapers were closed. It was forbidden to gather in public places. City residents were frightened and outraged at the conduct of the troops, who, they noted, apparently found shooting unarmed civilians easier than fighting Japanese sailors.
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Nabokov’s father immediately condemned the massacre and proposed compensation for the families of the dead. Days later he was stripped of his court title. Suddenly V. D. Nabokov’s liberalism
was no longer a tolerable eccentricity in a brilliant legal scholar. Even his family judged him: V. D. Nabokov’s mother bemoaned her son’s susceptibility to “dark forces” that she predicted would doom his career and fortune.
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The strikes continued across the year, gathering millions of workers and paralyzing transportation. Military mutinies flared up and were fiercely extinguished. The ranks of the dead swelled from hundreds to thousands. When the Tsar finally acceded to political pressure and allowed the formation of a parliamentary-style Duma with limited powers, the Constitutional Democratic (“Kadet”) Party emerged, with V. D. Nabokov elected to membership on its Central Committee. Nabokov’s father, descended from men and women who had served the Tsars, was openly advocating sweeping changes to the autocratic system that had ruled Russia for centuries.

That winter, Vladimir and Sergei Nabokov started taking French lessons from a hypersensitive Swiss tutor, Mademoiselle Cécile Miauton. If V. D. Nabokov had hoped to insulate his children from the turbulence of government, he could not have done much better than to hire Mademoiselle. She was uninterested in Russian and Russia, and she faced life in a foreign land with exaggerated fortitude and chronic despair. She lived inside a world of literary escapism from daily insults in which the past was a beautifully constructed illusion to which the present could always be compared and found wanting. Nabokov would later devote a whole chapter of
Speak, Memory
to her foibles and melodrama.