After he escaped forever in 1919 Russia, Vladimir Nabokov stayed briefly in Istanbul, in Pera, which seemed ugly to him, to arrive on the Greek coast on his twentieth birthday. Publicist Alexey Booth finds that the emptiness did not remain in the heart of the young Nabokov for long. Already on the ship "Nadezhda", he started a "romance" with a certain poetess Alla, and in Greece with a certain Nadezhda Gorodkovski.
He dedicated several songs to the Acropolis, but he Grčka disappointed. He was bored by the barking of herding dogs, while for two spring months he searched in vain for the yellow Heldrich butterfly and the white Kruper butterfly.
In May 1919, the Nabokov family moved to London and settled at 55 Stanhope Gardens. Of some help to Vladimir Nabokov was that his father enjoyed a reputation among European liberals, especially in England and France, among other things, because the cadets during the time of the Provisional Government in 1917 supported the slogan "war to a victorious end".
In the fall of 1919, Vladimir and his brother Sergei enrolled at Cambridge. He initially studied zoology, but soon gave up dissecting fish to devote himself to Russian and French literature.
He wrote poetry in Russian, he translated, he published a poem in the magazine "Trinity". He founded the Slovenian (later Russian) society. He played tennis and was the goalkeeper of the university football team.
An attractive waitress named Elisabeth caught his eye, and he was also engaged to the dancer Marina Schreiber, but she later left him.
WHEN YOU REACH BULOV STREET, THEY SHOUTED "RUSSIA! "
After a year spent in England, his father Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov moved with his wife and three younger children to Berlin.
At the moment when the news of Wrangel's defeat reached Berlin, the first issue of the newspaper "Rulj" appeared, which Vladimir Dmitrievich edited together with the Jewish publicist and lawyer from Odessa, Joseph Gesen, a long-time cadet deputy in the Russian Duma.
Russian historian Konstantinu D. Kotelnikov writes that white emigrants came to Berlin, the geographically closest capital outside the Russian Empire, from St. Petersburg and Moscow via Poland, by train, car and all possible means.
According to police records, there were more than 100.000 Russian refugees in Berlin between 1920 and 1924.
When the tram drivers reached Bulov Street, they shouted: "Russia!"
"You could hear Russian at every turn. If you heard German, it would cause great disbelief: how German? What are they looking for in our city? Shop owners changed prices every day, the mark fell. Herds of foreigners are rolling around the Kurfurstendamm: they are buying the remnants of former luxury for a pittance," remembered the poet Ilya Ehrenburg, who arrived from Moscow in the fall of 1921.
"There were beggars without arms and legs, disabled people from the previous war, many of them decorated with iron crosses... they showed their stumps to passers-by", testified the poet Andrej Beli. Dozens of Russian restaurants opened with balalaikas and zurla, gypsies, blinis, shashlik and, of course, the inevitable longing (with sadness, set, longing, longing; Nabokov, they say, had a hard time finding an adequate expression in English).
At that time, Berlin became the meeting place of the intellectual elite of the Russian migration - there were about a hundred Russian publishing houses, many bookstores. As Tom Rice writes in the "Berlin Wall" section knjige Orientalist, the Russian high school in Charlottenburg, one of the two Russian high schools in Berlin, was attended mainly by émigré children and was assisted by émigré communities from Berlin and Paris.
Among the girls in that high school were Lydia and Josephine, sisters of the writer and poet Boris Pasternak. There was also the black-haired Valentina Brodskaya, who became Marc Chagall's second wife under the name of Vava Brodskaya. Vava's best friend was Yelena Nabokov, the younger sister of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, according to the description of the pianist Alexander Brailovsky - "blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked (what could be described as a complexion of blood and milk in the words of Russian folklore) with a pointed nose, luscious lips, long and heavy blond hair and a sinful body."
THE MURDER OF VLADIMIR DMITRIYEVIC NABOKOV
On the evening of March 28, 1922, about one and a half thousand people came to the Berlin Philharmonic to hear the lecture "America and the Restoration of Russia" by the former Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pavel Milyukov.
photo: Nabokov archiveASSASSINATED TRYING TO DEFEND PAVEL MILYUKOV: Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov, father of writer Vladimir Nabokov
As soon as Milyukov finished the first part of the lecture at 10 o'clock in the evening, Petar Shabeljski-Bork, a small man in a dark jacket, jumped out of the audience and shot several times in his direction, shouting: "For the imperial family and for Russia!"
Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov jumped up, grabbed the assailant by the arm and, trying to disarm him, knocked him to the floor. In the next moment, another assailant, Sergei Taboritsky, a tall young man, slightly bald, burst onto the scene and shot Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov three times. Two bullets hit him in the spine, the third went through the left lung and heart. Death occurred instantly.
Before the assassins were disarmed and arrested, seven more people were wounded.
Biographer Brian Boyd in the book Vladimir Nabokov: Russian years writes that it is assumed that the assassination of Milyukov, who remained unharmed, was organized by Colonel Winberg, the leader of the Russian ultra-right in Bavaria, but that he was never brought to court due to lack of evidence.
Fyodor Winberg, a Russian general of German origin, a dark figure somewhere in the middle between the Black Hundred Movement and the Nazis, advocated the return of the Russian Tsar with German support and spread the content of the so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", falsified reports created at the end of the 19th century by the Paris department of the Russian secret service, the Okrana. He allegedly also influenced Hitler before the corporal putsch in Munich, before he fled to France, where he died in 1927.
It was established in court that the assassins, who lived and worked in Munich, the center of Russian monarchists in Germany, knew nothing about Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, but did not repent when they learned that he was one of the leaders of the Cadet Party.
In March 1917, as the secretary of the State Duma (more precisely, the secretary of its "honorable commission" - i.e. the Presidency), after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov took part in the editing of the text of the abdication of the Tsar's brother Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, who did not refuse but, at Nabokov's suggestion, postponed the acceptance of the crown, "until the Constituent Assembly, on the basis of a popular vote, establishes the form of government and elects a new supreme ruler..."
Petar Shabelski-Bor, who had previously vowed to take revenge on Miliukov as the culprit of the February Revolution, was sentenced to 12 and Sergej Taboritsky to 14 years of hard labor. The Prussian government, however, changed the sentence to eight or nine years, with the possibility of parole after serving half of the sentence. Already in the spring of 1927, both were released for good behavior. Rumors circulated that Shabelski had married a German woman while serving his prison sentence and that he was released thanks to bail provided by his wife's parents.
...DEATH THAT SHOOK GERMANY AND EUROPE: Walter Rathenau, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Weimar Republic, a victim of right-wing forces
DEATH SPRING 1924.
Between 1918 and 1922, the radical right in Germany killed 376 people, including members of the left, Jews and liberals. Freikor paramilitary groups, sponsored or tolerated by the Social Democrat coalition government of Friedrich Ebarth, were particularly brutal, responsible for kidnappings, torture and executions, such as the cases of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were put down after the Spartak Uprising.
In a wave of growing right-wing danger in the Weimar Republic, on June 24, 1924, Walter Rathenau, one of the leading German industrialists who, during the First World War, headed the Department of War Raw Materials from August 1914 to March 1915, unsuccessfully warned the generals that Germany would lose the war due to the depletion of material resources. In 1921, he was appointed Minister of Reconstruction, and a year later he became Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Weimar Republic.
All his mother said to him then was: "Why did you do this to me?"
"I really had to, Mom," Rathenau replied, "they couldn't find anyone else for the job."
His death was followed by national mourning, as well as widespread demonstrations against counter-revolutionary terrorism.
"What motive will I cite if we get caught?" asked Ernst von Salomon, one of the terrorists, who would later become a hero of the Freakor. "As far as I'm concerned, you can say he was one of the wise men of Zion or... whatever comes to your mind," said one of the conspirators. "They will never understand our true motives."
Right-wing nationalist groups of the time (including the nascent Nazi Party) declared Rathenau a part of the Jewish-Communist conspiracy and an "Elder of Zion." After the Nazis came to power in 1933, all commemorations in honor of Rathenau as a democratic martyr were banned. Tom Rice in the book Orientalist it is written that the murdered Rathenau advocated for the establishment of special relations between Germany and Soviet Russia in the Rapallo negotiations, in order to circumvent the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Weimar Germany did open schools for pilots near Lipetsk, tanks near Kazan and a test site for chemical weapons near Saratov to the USSR, as documented by the German historian Manfred Seidler (Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920–1933).
Jonathan Haslam, a professor at Cambridge, for example, proves that the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 did not have any hidden military clauses, but that the Germans did not then practice blitzkrieg in the Moscow region, as, for example, revisionist Tom Rice claims in the book Orientalist.
By the way, during the implementation of the Rapala Treaties and the economic policy of the NEP in the USSR (1921–1928), a smaller number of Russians returned to the USSR. Among them was the theoretician of the Russian Silver Age poet Andrei Bely (real name Boris Bugaev), who after several years spent in Switzerland and Berlin returned to Moscow in 1923, where he worked on an epic novel. Moscow, as well as studies on Alexander Blok and died in 1934. In an appendix to his English translation Eugene Onegin, Nabokov writes that "Andrei Bely's theories of rhythm are as vaguely mystical as his prose, but they show an extraordinary sensitivity to the pulse of Russian verse."
YOUNG VLADIMIR IN BERLIN
After the murder of his father, young Vladimir Nabokov moved to Berlin. Before arriving, he completed his studies in French and Russian literature at Cambridge. He was then 20 years old.
"My father's death", he wrote later, "became not only the limit of my childhood, but also the deepest source of all my moral conclusions."
The Berlin of the twenties was different from the one that Vladimir saw for the first time when, as an eleven-year-old, he went there on the Nord Express for good dentists. Germany was no longer "the land of poets and thinkers", as the teachers-dreamers in St. Petersburg taught him.
Publicist Tom Rice recalls that Berlin once earned the nickname "Athens on the Spree" due to the cultural initiatives of Frederick the Great, but that it was essentially "Sparta on the Spree, the capital of a rigid, militaristic state."
The death of the father marked the end of the family's well-being and the loss of material support. Vladimir Nabokov will write in To other shores that shares in the Ural mines, Alapaev factories collapsed when, in the 1930s, in Berlin, numerous descendants inherited, after all the devaluations, a fraction of the accumulated income from the precious tobacconists of his ancestor Karl Heinrich Graun (1701–1759), a talented careerist, author of oratorios The death of Jesus and Frederick the Great's assistant in writing operas.
His mother Jelena Ivanovna, who lived by selling off the last pieces of jewelry, soon moved with her daughter Jelena to Prague, where she was granted a state pension as a widow.
At a time when Germans were taking inflationary wages home in buckets, work was hard to come by, but emigrants' savings and the help of charities covered basic expenses.
For Vladimir Nabokov, Berlin in 1922 was a Russian city in a German environment: Russian books, newspapers, a circle of friends. He wrote: "I see myself and thousands of other Russian people leading a somewhat strange, but not devoid of pleasure, life in material poverty and spiritual bliss, among phantom foreigners who play absolutely no role, in whose cities we, the exiles, had to physically exist."
Under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin, he published poems in his father's newspaper "Rulj". And he earned his living by giving language lessons to the children of rich parents or by translating. He was also a tennis and boxing coach. He passionately loved football, just like the French philosopher Albert Camus, and he played it until 1932 when, during a match between one of the Russian emigrant teams and a German club of factory workers, the ball hit him, a goalkeeper from the Petrograd days, so hard in the head that, according to his memory, he was "carried off the field dead".
Vladimir Nabokov was a stateless man in Germany, with a Nansen passport (Nansen certificate), a travel document named after the Norwegian polar explorer Dr. Fritjof Nansen, who was appointed by the Council of the League of Nations as high commissioner in 1921 with the task of finding a solution for Russian refugees in Europe. This means that as a tenant or applicant for stateless status, he was in a humiliating position in his daily encounters with German bourgeois and officials.
Many Russian white emigrants, who came from the upper strata of society, felt similar humiliations. The poet Marina Tsvetayeva, the daughter of a famous Moscow scientist, who grew up in a rich family, constantly complained about the insults and insults she had to endure as a poor emigrant.
Nabokov claimed that he had never learned German: "My American friends obviously did not believe me when I told them that in my fifteen years of living in Germany I had never met a single German, never read a single German newspaper or book, and never felt the slightest discomfort for not knowing the German language."
Some of Vladimir Nabokov's biographers do not believe that claim. For example, Professor of Contemporary Literature at Griffith University in Brisbane Andrew Field, the author of two disputed biographies of Nabokov, argued that Nabokov took a passage from a novel by the German expressionist writer Leonard Frank, implying that he must have known German well.
Or did he have an excellent translator?
SILENT PARTNER VERA SLONIM
photo: heritage imagesGERMAN DAYS: Vladimir Nabokov with his wife Vera Sloni
Vladimir Nabokov lost his father in Weimar Berlin, who was his role model and support, but on May 8, 1923, he met Vera Evseyevna Slonim, his future wife, at a masquerade ball. Born on January 5, 1902 in Saint Petersburg, in a wealthy Jewish family, Vera emigrated with her family via Kiev, Odessa, Istanbul and Sofia to Berlin. Vera's father, a lawyer, founded a publishing house in Berlin, one of 86 that served Russian emigrants. Vera taught English and translated from several languages.
She was pale and petite, with huge eyes that gave her the appearance of an orphan, and from a young age she was raised to be "perfect", which for her and her sisters meant marrying well. Her choice fell on a young aristocrat, chess player, dandy and lepidopterist - Vladimir Nabokov, who earned money as a private tutor and wrote poetry under the pseudonym V. Sirin.
Vladimir Nabokov later admitted to his sister that Vera arranged to meet him on May 8, 1923, during a masquerade ball, on a bridge over a canal with chestnuts, hiding her face behind a black harlequin wolf mask, which she did not lift as they wandered through the city to Hohenzollernplatz. She, as she herself admitted, memorized Sirin's poetry, including love poems dedicated to another woman, and recited them in a voice that was "exceptional" to Nabokov.
Vera knew that Vladimir loved women almost as much as he loved butterflies: at the beginning of their courtship, he allegedly presented her with a list of as many as thirty of his mistresses.
As the British literary critic Professor John Sutherland writes (John Sutherland, London Review of Books, 21 May 1987), the controversial biographer Andrew Field incurred the wrath of Vladimir Nabokov because he suggested that Vladimir, in his wandering bohemian life after the revolution, inherited the characteristics of his snob father, who married for money.
Vera knew that for some time he was engaged to Svetlana Sievert "Svet" (that's what he called her), one of the beauties of the Russian colony in Berlin. She allegedly told her parents something about Vladimir proposing some kind of "strange kiss" to her, and they immediately declared the suitor a "pervert". The engagement is broken.
His sister Elena explained to an interviewer from the magazine "Novij mir" much later: "Her parents decided that such a poor man does not suit her".
Before the wedding on April 15, 1925, Vladimir dictated to Vera a series of skills that she would never master: talking on the phone, driving a car, carrying an open umbrella, Goethe's language, and typing on a typewriter.
Leaving her literary career, Vera became his faithful collaborator, secretary, archivist, translator and the first reader of his works, his personal secretary. She answered letters addressed to him, and even phone calls, while he stood by and whispered what to say for him. She kept the manuscripts, retyped them and saved many texts from being lost in the turmoil of war. In terms of elegance and style, she was her husband's rival and his stylist. Nabokov said that her character was made of "small sharp arrows".
"There is no doubt that Mrs. Nabokov was interested in her husband's every success, toothache and fried egg," writes Judith Tuman in The New Yorker, but one can imagine that, in her dark moments, she was tired of his affections ("my little sunshine") and resented his nicknames ("lumpikin," whatever that meant). "When I think of you, I become so happy and light," exclaims Vladimir Veri in 1926, "and because I think of you constantly, I am always happy and light." He surrenders to that trance of joy and at the moment when Vera, the young bride, is sent to a sanatorium, apparently against her will, to recover from depression and weight loss.
THE NON-SEXING GIRLFRIEND
Nabokov, then newly married, in a novel about exile and nostalgia Mashenka (1926) does not feel much sympathy for its hero, the young emigrant Ganin, who at first confidently believes that his first love will leave her husband and go to the end of the world with him, but he gives up his intention to meet her, so we do not know if she even arrived in Berlin. Before that, in the poem entitled V. Š. On April 29, 1922, he wrote about a hypothetically possible meeting "if the wind of fate, just for fun" helps us find each other.
In the character of Mashenka, who had "fiery Tatar eyes", Boyd recognizes Lucy Shulygina, alias Tamara, with whom, according to the description in To other shores, "a hint of Tatar or Circassian blood probably explained the characteristic cut of her cheerful, black eyes".
Introducing the English edition Dolls, Nabokov said that with the help of that novel he "liberated himself", but that this does not mean that he "poured out his whole soul" on the pages of the novel. Boyd notes that in the first prose texts published under the pseudonym Sirin, some critics find certain similarities with Dostoyevsky - whom Nabokov tolerated.
In the novel Mashenka Nabokov paints the daily life of Russian refugees in Berlin: a cheap Russian boarding house near the train station in Berlin; the landlady, the widow of a German merchant who once took her away from Russia; an old poet who no longer has anyone to write to; a couple of ballet dancers-homosexuals, whose fate is not so sad because their art is freed from language restrictions, like the art of Stravinsky, Chagall and Pavlova; a man who dreams of a career as an entrepreneur and is ready to forget the old Russia, which he believes is gone forever; another trying unsuccessfully to get a visa and all the necessary approvals to move to Paris.
A NEW EXODUS OF THE RUSSIAN DIASPORA
Between 1924 and 1926, the exodus of Russian refugees from Berlin began, as many Russians sought a more stable refuge due to economic and political pressures. Philosophers, writers, politicians, scientists, artists and musicians, "everyone who could, went to Paris, Prague, London or America", writes Roman Gul in the book I kidnapped Russia.. Apology of the Russian emigration.
Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, the author of a work on the spiritual crisis of the intelligentsia who was expelled from the USSR in 1922, philosopher and existentialist Lev Shestov, historian of the philosophy of law professor Pavel Novgorodtsev, poet of the Russian Silver Age Sasha Cherny, modernist writer Alexei Remizov, composer and conductor Alexander Glazunov and a number of other artists moved from Berlin to Paris. Through Paris or Hamburg, many went to Canada, Argentina and Brazil. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, pianist Vladimir Horovic go to the United States... Thanks to various international aid programs and initiatives (some supported by the Czechoslovak authorities and non-governmental organizations), many students and intellectuals moved from Berlin to Prague in the early 1920s. The rights to the translation of his books began to bring a decent amount of money and in 1929, Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera traveled first to Paris and then to the Eastern Pyrenees - to catch butterflies.
SLIGHTLY RETOUCHED PICTURES OF THE EXECUTION
"I wonder," writes Nabokov in To other shores, "what would those moralists who despise butterfly collectors say about the hobby of a young German whom I caught in 1930 collecting photographs of executions."
Already at the second meeting, the kind, pale man took out a folder with a series of photographs, with the remark: "Ein bisschen retouschiert" ("a little retouched"), wrinkling his freckled nose. The photos showed various moments of common beheading in China. With almost expert knowledge, he pointed out the "beauty of the fatal saber" and the "wonderful atmosphere of complete cooperation between the executioner and the patient", which - in one of the particularly clear photos - ended with a "phenomenal geyser like smoke of gray blood".
In the Balkans, he said, he witnessed two or three "mediocre" hangings. On the Boulevard Arago in Paris - at the "widely advertised but miserable and mechanical guillotine", he failed to record "nothing interesting" with an expensive camera hidden in the sleeve of his raincoat.
In Regensburg, where executions were still carried out in the old-fashioned way - with an axe, to his great disappointment, the convict "was drugged", so the scene lost "all liveliness": the fool barely moved, only collapsed on the ground while clumsy helpers stumbled around her...
NAZIS AND NABOKOV
Probably in order to preserve Vera's peace, Vladimir rarely mentions Hitler in his letters from that era. And it is more than likely that Vladimir and Vera did not miss the fact that the first book burnings took place in May 1933, as well as the fact that in October of the same year 88 writers publicly took an oath of loyalty to Hitler, and that eminent literary figures such as Thomas Mann or Bertolt Brecht left the country at the same time.
Nabokov in the fourteenth chapter Other shores addresses Vera: "Let's go back to a May morning in 1934, in Berlin. We were expecting a child. I took you to the hospital near Bayrischer Platz and at five o'clock in the morning walked home to Grunewald. Spring flowers decorated the colored photographs of Hindenburg and Hitler in the windows of frame shops and florists. Left-wing groups of sparrows held noisy meetings in the lilac gardens and in the linden trees along sidewalks... When I came to you with flowers, you were lying in the hospital room, pale but radiant, and for a moment it seemed to me that you were a girl from another life, whom I once saw in a snowy village. Our son, wrapped in a diaper, clenched his fist as if he was ready to prove something to this world. I looked at him and thought how in this strange city, where the spring air smells like lilac and on the garage, gave birth to my future".
In the story Oblak, lake, ball, which he finished later, in Paris, Nabokov writes about the Germans who brought the Nazis to power and welcomed them enthusiastically.
In the last part of the book Gift also finished in Paris, the protagonist Fyodor calls Germany a country "as heavy as a headache". Because of that book, he was attacked by the Berlin newspaper "Novoje slovo" (1933-1944), which was edited by Russian emigrants from the circle of the so-called "national radicals", who believed that Hitler's Germany would destroy the Bolshevik regime in Russia. They were financed and controlled by Goebbels' Nazi Ministry of Propaganda.
Many Russian émigré writers (including Nabokov and Bunin) publicly refused any cooperation with the paper.
In the novel Call for beheading, the main character is sentenced to death because he is different from others - "a gnoseological abomination".
Much later, Vladimir Nabokov will learn that his brother Sergei ended up in a concentration camp during the war. He was a homosexual, and according to Nabokov, among his colleagues in Berlin - he worked in a translation agency - he criticized the Nazi leadership, which a German tipped off.
The anti-Semitic atmosphere in Germany worsened. Vera Nabokova, Jewish by nationality, was fired from her job. In Berlin, her further survival was uncertain.
A friend, the future Orthodox Metropolitan in San Francisco, saw Vera preparing to leave. She explained that the city was no longer safe for Jews. He suggested that we should "stay and suffer". She suffered like that until 1937.
And Vladimir Nabokov often went to Paris for literary evenings and the search for a publisher.
(to be continued)
