Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (63 page)

88
Poznanski, 265.

89
USHMM Web site:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005215
.

90
“French Jews Sent to a Nazi Oblivion,” NYT, April 1, 1943, 2.

91
Yad Vashem central database of Shoah victims; Klarsfeld, Beate et Serge.
Le Memorial de la deportation des juifs de France
, Paris 1978.

92
Rashke, Richard,
Escape from Sobibor
(1995), 79–80; Patenaude, Bertrand.
A Wealth of Ideas: revelations from the Hoover Institution Archive
(2006), 156.

93
aided the French Resistance
: Schakovskoy Family Papers, Amherst College Center for Russian Culture;
working with the Jesuits in Berlin
: Schiff, 265;
despite having an infant son
: Schiff, 100. Lena had left her husband before the start of the war.

94
Bunin, Ivan.
The Liberation of Tolstoy: a tale of two writers
(2001), 21 and related note on 160.

95
Interview with Vladimir Petkevič, grandson of Olga Nabokov, Prague, November 2011.

96
November 2011 interview with Vladimir Petkevič; see also earlier interview in Russian of Petkevič by Ivan Tolstoy, “110th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s Birth,”
Myths and Reputations
, Radio Svoboda, April 2009.

97
BBAY, 48; Belletto, Steven,
No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives
(2011), 4.

98
BBAY, 69.

99
Ibid., 68.

100
taking her turn at France Forever
and
only to be turned away
: Sonia Slonim’s FBI file.

101
Interview with Petkevič, Prague, November 2011; also, Tolstoy, 2009.

102
Brigham, Daniel, “Inquiries Confirm Nazi Death Camps,” NYT, July 3, 1944, 3.

103
Koestler, Arthur, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” NYT, January 9, 1944, SM5.

104
Karski, Jan,
The Story of a Secret State
(1944), 322.

105
VNSL, 47–8.

106
AFLP, 235.

107
STOR, 593.

108
Currivan, Gene, “Nazi Death Factory Shocks Germans on a Forced Tour,” April 16, 1944, 1.

109
AFLP, 29. Shrayer, Maxim D., “Saving Jewish-Russian Émigrés,” International Nabokov Conference in Kyoto, Japan, March 2010:
http://fmwww.bc.edu/SL-V/ShrayerSavingJRE.pdf
.

110
Shrayer, Maxim D.,
An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature
(2007), 462–3.

C
HAPTER
N
INE
: A
FTER THE
W
AR

1
BBAY, 88.

2
VNSL, 63.

3
Ibid., 60–64; the poet he mentioned was Alexei Apukhtin.

4
NWL, 173.

5
“
human life
”: NWL, 175; “
destroying whole Japanese towns
”: Dabney, 304.

6
NWL, 173.

7
Ibid., 174. As Dabney notes, even Mary McCarthy returned to friendly terms with Wilson later (296); BBAY, 78.

8
NWL, 175.

9
VNSL, 63.

10
a terrible price
: In “Conversation Piece” (originally “Double Talk”), Nabokov has a very unsympathetic Russian insist that when the Red Army came into Germany, no one was harmed. The group discusses its anxieties over the Soviets sending “intellectuals and civilians—to work like convicts in the vast area of the East,” STOR, 594.

to strip bare the countries they occupy
: McCormick, Anne O’Hare, “Abroad: When the Policemen Want to Go Home,” NYT, January 14, 1946, 18; Hill, Gladwin, “Flow of Displaced Tangled in Europe,” NYT, May 30, 1945, 12. The Russian émigré community in New York, many of them now American citizens, protested the agreement at Yalta that forced Soviet citizens to return to Russia. See “Russian Exiles in U.S. Censure the Soviet,” NYT, August 1, 1945, 9.

rather than heading home
: Clark, Delbert, “Soviet Deserters Said To Be Hiding to Avoid Forced Return To Russia,” NYT, March 26, 1947, 12.

11
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 140.

12
Ibid., 132.

13
It is a request Nabokov likely never made of Véra. While Natalia was there, Solzhenitsyn taught her to shoot a pistol (Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 130), a skill Véra had acquired decades before (Schiff, 55).

14
Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn
, 136.

15
Ibid., 142.

16
Schiff, 137.

17
NWL, 173; VNSL, 66–7.

18
“Mr. Churchill’s Address Calling for United Effort for World Peace,” NYT, March 6, 1946, 4.

19
BBAY, 126.

20
NWL, 144.

21
Ibid., 97–8.

22
Ibid., 171.

23
BBAY, 107; Schiff, 134; ANL, 436.

24
Information from Sonia Slonim’s U.S. Army Military Intelligence file.

25
Information from Sonia Slonim’s FBI file.

26
VNSL, 72–3. In what seems to be an argument for either the ineffectiveness of the program or Nicholas Nabokov himself, a composition student of Nicholas Nabokov’s would later recall his claim about the post that his “most significant contribution was unmasking the radio theme song for ‘The FBI in Peace and War’ as the work of a Communist.” See Argento, Dominick,
Catalogue raisonné as memoir
(2004), 2–3.

but Nicholas had
: Nicholas Nabokov’s references are listed in his FBI file.

27
All material on Nicholas Nabokov here is taken from his FBI file (No. 77–2199), including a summary of a 1948 interview of George Kennan by the FBI.

28
Nicholas Nabokov FBI file.

29
Stonor Saunders, Frances,
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
(2000), 43.

30
Schiff, 332.

31
Schakovskoy Family Papers, Amherst College Center for Russian Culture.

32
“
we must build an organization for war
”: Stonor Saunders, 93; “
no artist … can be neutral
”: “Atomic Physicist Scraps Defense of Reds at Cultural Talk as Result of Korea Attack,” NYT, June 28, 1950, 9.

33
Stonor Saunders,
The Cultural Cold War
, 93.

34
other moral failings
: Krug is on the verge of molesting “a very young girl” a third his age when he and his son are arrested (137 and 197);
for five years
: Krug related that as a child, he had tripped the Toad and sat on his face every day (50–1).

35
BEND, 233.

36
Albeit with an American twist—as Boyd notes, the last sentence, “The child is bold” is a line from Nabokov’s own 1945 citizenship test. BBAY, 87.

37
BEND,xiii.

38
The narrator references “the ghoul-haunted Province of Perm,” a notorious Gulag site (BEND, 38);
BEND
, 108–9.

39
Krug is willing to cave, however (as Nabokov once noted he himself would cave), confronted with a choice between maintaining his principles and saving his child.

40
Watts, Richard, “Comic Strip Dictator,”
The New Republic
, July 7, 1947.

41
Darkness at Noon
would be published in England by a British publishing house as Koestler sat interned in Pentonville Prison in north London. Scammell,
Koestler
, 196.

42
He noted as much in a letter to Colonel Joseph Greene in a letter dated January 14, 1948. VNSL, 80.

43
Letter from Nabokov to Edmund Wilson dated February 1945. Quoted here from BBAY, 85.

44
Slonim testified before the Jenner Committee on March 20, 1953. “Sarah Law rence Under Fire: The Attacks on Academic Freedom During the McCarthy
Era,” 14. See Sarah Lawrence’s online exhibit at
http://archives.slc.edu/exhibits/mccarthyism/14.php
.

refused to fire him
: Nash, Margo, “ART REVIEW: Telling Its Story; The College That Roared,” NYT, August 21, 2005, WE7.

45
NWL, 187.

46
Frustrated by his situation near the end of the war, Nabokov had written a Hol lywood agent mentioning his interest in becoming a screenwriter. BBAY, 77.

47
BBAY, 123; Diment, Galya,
Pniniad
(1997), 31.

48
Though Nabokov did spend a summer picking fruit in the south of France during the summer of 1923, he himself noted how his employer—a friend of his father’s—allowed him the occasional escape to chase butterflies. AFLP, 202.

49
“Red Cornell,” Glenn Altschuler and Isaak Kramnic,
Cornell Alumni Magazine
, July 8, 2010.

50
See Schiff, 192, and Belmonte, Laura,
Selling the American Way: U.S. Propa ganda and the Cold War
(2008), 25–26. Warning that making such a selection would result in damage costing the American taxpayer as much as thirty-one million dollars, the congressman was apparently ignorant of the fact that the book had been removed from the list of selections before the hearings had even begun.

51
declared obscene
: Dabney,
Edmund Wilson
, 340–1.

52
Véra called McCarthy an “insignificant figure” (Schiff, 193). Later, when he started declaring open season on cultural figures, even those who had clearly repudiated Stalin, the American branch of the Nicholas Nabokov-led Congress for Cultural Freedom got mired in the issue. The U.S. branch engaged in a bitter argument over the mission of the Congress. If it was truly about cultural freedom, then many anti-Stalinist leftists argued that McCarthy was more of a threat to America than Communism. The more right-wing members of the Congress tried to block any broad-brush criticism of McCarthy’s anti-Red crusades. Nabokov was peripherally connected to this debate through his cousin (who ran the organization), his best friend in America (who had been attacked by McCarthy), and his best friend’s ex-wife (who was defending Wilson).

53
See the series of FBI files titled “Communist Infiltration into Education—Yale University,” April 1953, and similar titles, all of which look at colleges and universities.

befriended Ithaca’s resident G-man
: AFLP, 235; BBAY, 311.

54
Newman, Robert,
Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China
(1992), 215; Schiff, 191–2.

55
Vladimir Petrov’s
Soviet Gold
was published in 1949, and Elinor Lipper’s
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps
appeared in 1951. After realizing that he had been duped, Vice President Wallace later apologized to Petrov. See Adam
Hochschild’s
The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
(2003) for more on Wallace and Lattimore’s trip.

could not understand
: Hochschild,
The Unquiet Ghost
, 269.

56
Schiff, 198.

57
NWL, 188.

58
Wilson and Nabokov, the early years: “His point of view is neither White Russian nor Communist. The family were landowning liberals, and intellectually the top of their class” (Meyers, 260).

59
NWL, 208; BBRY, 179.

60
NWL, 210.

61
Ibid., 222–3.

C
HAPTER
T
EN
:
L
OLITA

1
Alfred Appel’s “Remembering Nabokov” from
Vladimir Nabokov: His Life, His Work, His World
, Quennell, Peter, ed. (1980), 18. Appel appears to be describing an improvisation witnessed by others from the semester before he studied with Nabokov. See also, BBAY, 172.

2
LL, 5; BBAY, 115.

3
the real clash
: A statement he later amended to “between the author and the reader.” SO, 183; CE, 220;
linked forever
: LL, 2.

4
LL, 385, 259–60.

5
NWL, 268.

6
Keep it down
: NWL, 237. In his letter, Nabokov used the Russian term for ideological content.