Nabokov Exposed

Book in the spotlight: The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer

Vladimir Nabokov once told an interviewer that books unable to meet his standards of excellence were shut with a bang and banished from his bed. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer would have been one of those books, a priori. Nabokov resented unsupervised examinations of his life, disdained conventional interpretations of his works, and was skeptical of female authors. Pitzer’s book checks all three boxes. Its title alone would have made Nabokov bristle. A past master of riddles and mystifications, he would have found a work called The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov an exercise in poshlost, if not the biographic equivalent of a home invasion. Being far less exacting in my own standards of excellence, I have devoured the book from beginning to end. The allure of learning something new about a writer I thought I knew well proved irresistible, and over-the-top encomia from publications such as Kirkus Review and The New Republic only added to the expectations. Having now finished it, I can only take a leaf out of Nabokov’s book and, bang or no bang, dispatch Pitzer’s to some literary purdah.

At first blush, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov has everything going for it. It was well received upon its publication in 2013, with Foreign Policy naming it the best book of the year. Pitzer did her homework, traveling as far as Saint Petersburg to visit relevant places of interest, and the text itself seems to have been meticulously researched. Well intentioned, too — an inconspicuous but moving note at the end informs the reader that a fifth of the author’s proceeds will be donated to apposite charities (“split evenly between Nabokov-related organizations and memorial groups focusing on the Holocaust and the Gulag”). It is certainly well written, and readers new to Nabokoviana will find the book “unputdownable,” to use a word Nabokov would have considered the epitome of poshlost. But once you do put it down, the answer to the question of what is wrong with it should come easily — more or less, everything.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. In the case of this book, you would do better not to judge it by its title. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov is not really a history of Vladimir Nabokov, much less a secret one. Pitzer herself says so in the introduction, assuring the reader her work is not meant to supplant any of the existing biographies. She is right to indemnify herself — no serious biography of Nabokov already in print is at risk of being supplanted here. Genre-wise, Pitzer’s book is a mongrel — biography, history, and lit crit all rolled into one — and it says nothing new about Nabokov the man. Pitzer gallops through the familiar precincts of the writer’s life: a gilded childhood in Saint Petersburg and its environs; the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing loss of Nabokov’s private paradise; the murder of his noble-spirited father in Berlin; marriage to Véra Slonim and the birth of their son, Dmitri, also in Berlin; peregrinations about Europe following the Nazi takeover of power, amid indigence and relative obscurity; a torrid but inconsequential extramarital adventure; the death of a homosexual brother in a Nazi camp; academic tenure and a new life in America; the publication of Lolita and the subsequent leap to stardom; finally, a long gilded sunset on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland — a country where, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, few things begin but a great many of them end — complete with butterflies and adoring fans. If you have read a single biography of Nabokov, you will know all this. If you are familiar with the history of 20th-century Europe, you will also be unlikely to glean anything new here. So where is the secret life promised to us by the title?

Pitzer’s radical take on Nabokov centers on the idea that Nabokov was not at all the fanatical apostle of Art for Art’s Sake the world has always believed he was. Au contraire! Far from being a brilliant but aloof wordsmith solely concerned with aesthetic considerations, Nabokov was a passionate believer in social justice and freedom, and he made these themes recondite in all of his works. While Nabokov’s oeuvre has traditionally been seen as dazzling linguistic pyrotechnics detached from weighty issues, it is actually watered with the tears and blood of millions, including those shed and spilled by people he loved. It turns out — gasp! — we haven’t been reading Nabokov the right way all along. “What if,” Pitzer asks, “Lolita is the story of global anti-Semitism as much as it is Humbert Humbert’s molestation of a twelve-year-old girl?” What if Pale Fire is “part elegy for the victims of the Gulag” and “a memorial to the dead of Nabokov’s own life”? What if the crucial fourth chapter of The Gift treats the theme of incarceration and man’s helplessness in the face of tyranny, and was Nabokov’s attempt to explore the “roots and historical foundations” of penal institutions just as the “threat of modern camps loomed larger in the world”? To buttress her argument, Pitzer drags Solzhenitsyn, of all people, into the book; serving as Nabokov’s doppelganger and Pitzer’s Fifth Business, Solzhenitsyn ambushes the reader at various strategic checkpoints throughout the text. Pitzer attempts to demonstrate that the aristocratic aesthete and the chronicler of the Gulag had much more in common than is commonly supposed. They were, (Pitzer’s) truth be told, both writing about freedom and tyranny, only Solzhenitsyn did it explicitly, while Nabokov, not being one to wear his cause on his sleeve, resorted to clues and hints. Nabokov must be turning in his grave.

A thesis is like a floozy — you should never marry one. Pitzer throws her lot in with her thesis and, as with all such matrimonial unions, the book is the child that suffers — along with the reader. Yes, Nabokov was not indifferent to various social issues. Yes, he was buffeted by the vicissitudes of History (with a capital H), and it is not unreasonable to expect the tragedies of his century to echo in his works. Yes, it’s true that there are references to tyranny, bigotry, and other warts and tumors of the human experience in his novels, and that they take central place in such short stories as Cloud, Castle, Lake (which Pitzer mentions) and Tyrants Destroyed (which she does not), as well as in some of his poems. But these are secondary concerns; to paraphrase something said by Humbert Humbert in Lolita, albeit in a very different context, they are incidental and are not concerned with the general trend. They serve as the backdrop. Nabokov’s main interest was language. His works pullulate with allusions, alliterations, puns, neologisms, and purple metaphors, which all come at the expense of everything else that normally makes fiction interesting. Any serious reader who approaches Nabokov’s texts objectively will note the banality of his plots, the stiltedness of his characters, the artificialness of his dialogues. The elements that are central to the peristalsis of other novels are mere props in Nabokov’s writings, meant to support his virtuosic wordplay.

Pitzer’s thesis reduces Nabokov to the tired classroom method of determining “what the author is trying to say,” a method responsible for having discouraged many a student from exploring high-quality fiction. Nabokov expands our understanding of what literature is and what literature can do; he is usually not trying to “say” anything. With Nabokov, only the language is the point; to look for any other point is, tautologically speaking, pointless. Nabokov says as much in the afterword to Lolita: “I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction and . . . Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.” Most other books, Nabokov adds with his trademark hauteur, are “topical trash.” There it is, Nabokov’s credo. Pitzer thinks she knows better and engages in what I can only call literary revisionism.

It is on perfect display in The Gift and Lolita, two novels that Nabokov singled out as the best works he had written. In The Gift, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a young White émigré, seeks to make a name for himself as a struggling poet in 1920s Berlin (much like Nabokov himself) while courting Zina (read: Véra), with whom he is in love. Godunov-Cherdyntsev proceeds to write a biography of the 19th-century revolutionary thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and the biography — a book within a book — takes up the entire fourth and penultimate chapter. Pitzer’s hurried analysis of The Gift made me wonder if she and I had read the same book. She interprets the Chernyshevsky chapter as the story of a “human being subjected to political oppression.” It is not. Chernyshevsky, author of the novel What Is to Be Done?, acts as a foil to Godunov-Cherdyntsev; while the latter tries to infuse his art with sublime beauty, the former is mocked as a “myopic materialist” whose conception of art was entirely utilitarian. Chernyshevsky’s attitude towards art in general and literature in particular was anathema to Nabokov, who regarded writers retailing in “didactic fiction” as philistines and purveyors of kitsch. The Chernyshevsky chapter is a humorous one-way literary duel in which shots are fired by a fictional character (Nabokov’s alter ego) at a dead historical figure. At the heart of The Gift is Nabokov’s view of the role of literature and not his thoughts about the darker side of tsarist absolutism. In the novel, the bulk of Berlin’s Russian literary community sees Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s biography not as a compassionate defense of a “human being subjected to political oppression” but as a nasty hit piece, and it is sufficiently scandalized for a number of publishers to reject the work. In real life, a literary publication friendly to Nabokov was equally appalled and, Pitzer’s lofty interpretation of the Chernyshevsky piece notwithstanding, the editors requested that the offending chapter be suppressed.

Things get even more problematic when Pitzer trains her guns on Lolita. She presents the novel as Nabokov’s condemnation of what he saw as America’s anti-Semitic problem. It is true that there are several passing references to the “Jewish question” in the text. (They are also present in The Gift: Zina is half-Jewish on her father’s side, but her stepfather is an uncouth, vulgar anti-Semite and is deliciously lampooned.) Charlotte Haze, whom Humbert Humbert marries to get his paws on her daughter, asks him if he doesn’t happen to have a “certain strange strain” in his family. Similar suspicions of a “certain strange strain” prompt a hotel desk clerk to tell Humbert the room he has booked is no longer available; the same hotel advertises itself as being “near churches” (supposedly a euphemism for “Gentiles only”). One of Charlotte’s neighbors is on the verge of making an anti-Semitic slur but is timely interrupted by his wife. Quilty, who kidnaps Lolita and is eventually tracked down by Humbert, tells him just before he is shot that his is a “Gentile’s house.” I may have missed another reference or two. But, in a novel of more than 300 pages, they are nugatory and hardly add up to “the story of global anti-Semitism.” Nabokov devotes a lot more space to vivid descriptions of American landscapes; I have yet to hear anyone refer to Lolita as an atlas or a treatise on US geography.

Not content with leaving things there, Pitzer ups the ante. She suggests that Humbert might be Jewish himself. A radical proposition — even Alfred Appel’s annotated edition of Lolita, while highlighting all the examples of the anti-Semitism theme in the text, does not go that far. In one of her own notes, Pitzer says Nabokov once told Appel that “Humbert identifies with the persecuted,” which of course is not the same thing as being one of the persecuted. While nothing in the novel precludes Pitzer’s hypothesis, the obvious question is why Nabokov would have wanted to open the door to such speculation, however jerry-built. Enlightened, tolerant, and married to a Jewish woman, Nabokov was famously philosemitic. Making a character like Humbert Jewish would have only reinforced anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish ogres defiling helpless Gentile maidens. Pitzer anticipates the objection: “And a Jewish Humbert would appear to defy Nabokov’s monumental sympathy for Jewish suffering — in the wake of the Holocaust, the creation of a pedophile Jew seems monstrous.” You don’t say — but Pitzer has an explanation. Humbert is, just like his creator, a victim of History: “After the death of Annabel Leigh, flight from Europe, visions of the Holocaust, and continued bigotry in America after the war, Humbert’s delusions and crimes are not only the cause of his persecution in the world; they are, in some measure, the result.” If we strip this sentence to its bare essentials, it means that Humbert is a pedophile because of what the world has done to him, and if he also happens to be Jewish, his sexual perversion is a factor of global anti-Semitism, which, of course, is what Lolita is all about. I very much doubt that this is how Nabokov would have cared to express his “monumental sympathy for Jewish suffering.”

When you stake everything on your thesis, you’d better get the thesis right. For inexperienced readers, a book with a faulty thesis can be a deathtrap. This is the case here. Anyone who uses this book as an introduction to Nabokov might end up in a cul-de-sac from which there is no exit — with Solzhenitsyn for company. Solzhenitsyn? What’s he doing here? Serving the thesis, of course. The book opens with the Nabokovs waiting at their Montreux hotel for Solzhenitsyn and his wife to pay them a visit, and Pitzer thus deftly uses him as a literary device to intrigue the reader. But “deft” can quickly turn into “daft,” and so it does. As the reader learns towards the end, the meeting between the two giants of Russian literature never took place. This is just as well. What would they have had to say to one another? Forget their writings; the men even looked different. Nabokov could have easily passed himself off as a university professor from Heidelberg or Oxford; Solzhenitsyn, with his pretentious beard à la Dostoevsky, cultivated the airs of a Russian muzhik. Nabokov was a classical liberal in the best, noblest sense of the term, and if he were still alive, the only thing he would have in common with the current Russian president would be the first name and the patronymic. Solzhenitsyn was anything but a classical liberal, and Pitzer acknowledges that, in later years, Solzhenitsyn endorsed Putin and “went on to represent a Russian nationalism that made many squirm.” What she omits is that, in 2001, Solzhenitsyn published Two Hundred Years Together, a two-volume “history” of Jews in Russia that led to accusations of anti-Semitism and marred the afterglow of Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as the conscience of the Russian people. Nabokov couldn’t have known that as he waited for Solzhenitsyn in a private dining room at the Montreux Palace Hotel in October 1974, but Pitzer ought to have been aware of it in 2013, and her constant attempts to build a crossable bridge between the philosemitic Nabokov and the author of Two Hundred Years Together are jarring.

It so happens that Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn defined the last semester of my last year of high school. It was a difficult time for me. As circumstances had it, my last year of high school was my first year at the particular high school into which said circumstances had thrust me. Most of the students had known each other for years, having grown up on the same streets, while I was a newcomer. Though not mistreated, I wasn’t made to feel especially welcome either. I had already lost a full school year, and failure to pass any one of my classes would have delayed my graduation from a place that struck me as a prison by another semester. Spring seemed to have been permanently canceled that year; there were hyperborean gusts of wind and angry bursts of flurries as late as May. At times it felt like this state of affairs would never end. As always, I read voraciously during those months but, years later, only two books stand out. One is Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. I hardly remember the plot; what I do remember is its vitality and the sense of hope that it gave me. It was a book brimming with life; it made the reader feel alive and, what’s more, it made the reader want to be alive. It was a book that made the days seem warmer, the skies bluer, and the wait for better days a lot easier. However much I have come to dislike Solzhenitsyn the man, I remain grateful to his novel for that salutary immersion in the maelstrom of life and for the message of hope that it imparted when I needed it.

The other book is Nabokov’s Lolita. It was the first time I had read it, and I retained little other than the memory of Humbert’s protracted voyages across America and the accompanying lush depictions of the country’s scenery. I cannot say that I liked the novel then; it made me think of an elegant, ornate box with unremarkable contents inside. Lolita, of course, is not a book one should read in one’s salad days, especially if the reader is a Nabokov virgin, and so I reread it recently, taking care to go through Appel’s detailed notes at the back. I enjoyed it even less. Not on account of its plot (unpleasant but relatively tame, by today’s standards), but precisely because it is a perfect exemplar of Nabokov’s Art-for-Art’s-Sake aesthetics that, as Pitzer would have her readers believe, contains hidden but profound messages about perennial issues afflicting the human condition. The baroque metaphors, the endless word games, the frequent dips into other languages the reader is expected to know — Lolita, like Nabokov’s other works, made me wonder if his linguistic pirouettes, for all their spellbinding magic, conceal a frigid bottomless void. Sniggers in the darkness; characters straight out of a Bosch painting; the cold malodorous breath of death and decay — this is the world of Nabokov, that cerebral demiurge of Russian literature who never knew how to wear his erudition lightly. Nabokov’s prose is akin to a first-rate museum: impressive, yes; worthy of admiration, yes; but you wouldn’t want to stay an hour longer than absolutely necessary. It took me years as a reader to realize that Nabokov’s real secret, which is not much of a secret, is that, in the end, his genius had everything — everything except warmth and that wonderfully elusive thing called a soul. You wouldn’t obtain this kind of clarity from The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, which, despite its best intentions, manages to undermine the one and only thing that makes reading Nabokov worthwhile.