While Vera was still in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov found temporary refuge in Paris with Ilya Isidorovich Fondaminsky, a Jew who accepted Orthodoxy, a social revolutionary from 1905 who would end up in Auschwitz in 1942. "His political and religious interests were foreign to me, our natures and skills were completely different - and none of that mattered."
photo: Nabokov archiveDAYS IN PARIS: Vladimir Nabokov
For a time he lived with him in a small boudoir next to the dining room, where evening gatherings were often held in which Nabokov did not participate. Once he inadvertently found himself in the position of a captive eavesdropper when two writers in the dining room started talking about him.
"So, did you go to Sirin's party last night?"
“I am.”
“So, how was it?”
Unfortunately, the conversation was interrupted by the third guest who entered with a greeting: "Vonjur, Monsieur dam..."
"For some reason," notes Nabokov, "the expressions common to French postmen seemed to our poets like subtleties of Parisian style."
"When he arrived from Berlin, he was surrounded by people who greeted him enthusiastically, people who had known him since childhood, friends of Vladimir Dmitrievich (his father, one of the leaders of the Cadet Party in the Duma), Russian liberals, with Milyukov, with the widow of (cadet Maxim) Vinaver, with former members of the St. Petersburg Masonic Lodge, diplomats of old Russia, colleagues of Konstantin Dmitrievich, Nabokov's uncle, the Russian ambassador in London who served there until the day the Soviet government sent its representative to England.
For all those people he was Volodya; they remembered that he "always wrote poetry", was a "perspective child", so it was not surprising that he is now writing and publishing books, talented, but not always understandable to everyone (a strange Russian critical criterion!).
Everyone came to the premises of the Russian newspaper to see him, and Milyukov introduced him somewhat ceremoniously to the staff", this is how Vladimir Nabokov's Paris days are described by the poet Nina Berberova in the book Italics are mine..
...THE LAST DEPARTURE FOR EMIGRATION: At the beginning of World War II...
Brian Boyd and Stacey Schiff, drawing on Vladimir Nabokov's letters to Vera, cite his long and tedious description of his preparations for the reading in Paris:
"I got a good shave and started to get dressed. The tuxedo sleeves turned out to be too short, the cuffs of the nice silky shirt sticking out too much. The belt was sticking out from under the waistcoat."
The story about it continues on four pages. They fixed those elastic bracelets, gave him suspenders... "When it was all settled, I looked very smart."
He takes a taxi to a crowded hall. When the reading finally begins, he opens the briefcase, a "very nice one" borrowed from a friend, and arranges the papers. After sipping water from the jug, he begins to recite. The acoustics are "magnificent", and each song is greeted with enthusiastic applause.
......leaving Paris...
THE LOVE OF UNHAPPY IRINA GVADANINI
During one of the series of literary evenings organized by Fondaminski, among the listeners was Vera Kokoshkina with her daughter Irina Guadanini, who was thirty-two years old at the time. Born in 1905 in Tambov, where her grandfather was the mayor of the city at the end of the 19th century, Irina was the stepdaughter of the lawyer Vladimir Kokoshkin (1874–1926), the brother of that Fyodor Kokoshin, a member of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party, who was killed in 1918 before the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in Petrograd.
After the Revolution, Irina and her mother fled first to Belgrade, then to Bled, where her mother had a boarding house in 1922, and then they moved to Brussels. There, in 1928, Irina married Peter Vasilievich Malakhov, who was ten years her senior, a former lieutenant colonel of the White Army who had found service in the Congo. Her mother, worried about her health, forbade her to go to Africa with her husband from Belgium. Irina soon divorced, spoke of her husband with hostility, took her maiden name again and went to Paris with her mother. At one time in Paris, Irina was engaged to Vsevolod Obolensky, son of Vladimir Obolensky, cadet, deputy of the First State Duma. The engagement did not lead to anything because that Vova could not find a job, he carved something out of wood or knitted raffia belts and did not have time to learn French grammar. In her letters, Irina complained that she lived miserably, that she was dying of penury, that she was nervous and sick. She earned her living, among other things, by clipping dogs.
Poet and editor of the newspaper "Russian Thought" Zinaida Shahovskaya, who organized Nabokov's public readings in Brussels in the early thirties and was his friend at the time, is convinced that between Vladimir Nabokov and Irina Guadanini there were genuine, sincere feelings, something like a lightning strike.
Blonde with regular, classic features, thin, pale, coquettish, educated, perceptive, playfully ironic and divorced, Irina Yurievna Guvadanini Kokoshkina easily memorized lines. She and Nabokov began to appear together in cafes and cinemas, and soon all of Russian Paris knew about their romance.
Judith Truman in The New Yorker, on the occasion of the publication of a book of Vladimir Nabokov's letters, quoting biographer Boyd, writes that Vladimir's devotion to Vera reached its lowest point in the spring of 1936, the "darkest and most painful" year of their marriage.
The moment could not have been more inauspicious. As a Jewish woman in Hitler's Berlin, with her four-year-old son Dmitri, exposed to Hitler's anti-Semitic threats, Vera was no longer allowed to work.
Not suspecting her husband's deception, she suggested that they travel to Prague to visit, as they had long promised, his mother Jelena Ivanovna; she was very old, and the only thing that could make her happy was the visit of her beloved son and grandson, whom she had never seen. "Better to get on the first train and pick you up in Berlin, which, of course, is neither reasonable nor cheap," he wrote to Vera, "than to go to some remote Czechoslovakia, where (psychologically, geographically, and in every other sense) I will again be cut off from every source and possibility of earning."
His mother died in May 1939 in a completely neglected apartment that she shared with her granddaughter and Evgenia Konstantinovna, her closest friend. On the dilapidated furniture lay notebooks in which she had copied her favorite songs for years and worn books of emigrant publications next to casts of her father's hand.
Stacey Schiff, the author of the biography of Vera Nabokov, writes that Vera received an anonymous letter in French, but "apparently from the Russians" in which she was informed that Vladimir was obsessed with the blonde divorcee Irina Guadagnini in Paris. Some publicists speculate that the letter was sent by Irina's mother with the intention of speeding up the divorce of Vladimir and Vera. When Vera told him what she found out, he tried to dissuade her: "I forbid you to be unhappy. There is no force in the world that could take away or spoil even an inch of this endless love." He wrote to Vera every day that he loved her and urged her to come as soon as possible so that the whole family could live in the south of France. At the same time, Vladimir wrote to Irina about their perfect attraction: "I love you more than anything in the world."
That spring, he reported to Vera about excruciating pain and excruciating itching and bleeding from his severe psoriasis. Eric Nyman in The Times Literary Supplement (October 31, 2014) suspects that these reports were probably exaggerated to gain Vera's sympathy since he knew she had heard rumors of an affair.
Vera cold-bloodedly presented Vladimir with a choice: her or me. He wrote to Irina that Vera found out about their secret correspondence and that he was afraid that she might go crazy. Irina answered him that she is ready to come to Cannes and escape to the end of the world with him. He begged her not to.
Irina, broken, went on vacation with her mother. A day later she still came to Cannes and from Frederic Mistral Square saw the windows of the Nabokovs' apartment, three bathing suits hung on a rope and a woman's hand that took off the children's and men's swimming trunks from the wire. When she saw Nabokov taking Dmitri to bathe, she ran towards him. He backed down and told her that he loved her, but that he had too much in common with Vera. He asked her to go and return the letters to him. She refused.
When he and Dmitri settled on the beach, she sat down at a distance. After some time Vera joined them. When the whole family went to lunch, Irina stayed on the beach. That was his last meeting with Irina.
In chapter 19 "On the Move: France" biography Nabokov: Russian years, Brian Boyd quotes how in the final scene Eugene Onegin the hero, kneeling down, confesses his love to Tatyana, but she rejects him:
"I love you (why lie?),
But I am given to another and I will be.
Faithful to him until the end of his life.”
Nabokov later expressed deep remorse. "There is an element of trust in everything that is enchanted," he wrote. Break the trust – and the magic is gone.
...…and goes to the USA
Later in the first novel in English The real life of Sebastian Knight (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941) Nabokov describes the character of a writer who leaves his wife Claire for another, elusive figure - and dies. "Girls of her type do not destroy a man's life," writes Nabokov, "they build it."
In the book Give (written in 1938, published in 1956) is about the love of a gifted emigrant in exile. In the story Spring in Fialta (1936), a melancholic Ninushka surrendered to the wind with tender submission.
In his book In Search of Nabokov, the poetess Zinaida Shahovska, who was one of the few who read Nabokov's letters to Irina, sympathetically claimed that Nabokov behaved "ungentlemanly" in her opinion. She reproached him that it seemed that he, who had left Russia, not as a child but as a young man, had never heard what was considered decent and what was indecent there: a woman could ask her lover to return letters that might compromise her, but a man was not allowed to demand the return of his - especially he was not allowed to add to the humiliation of the breakup the unconvincing admission that his confusing letters "contained a lot of literary exaggeration." It is believed that Irina left a mark on his work and may have been the inspiration for the aforementioned character of Nina in the short story Spring in Fialta.
Irina Guadanini never married again. "Harper's magazine" writes that throughout her life she kept an album with memories of Nabokov, including Vera's photographs. Under the literary pseudonym Aletrus, she published poems in the Russian emigre magazines "Ruska Misao" and "Sovremenik" in Toronto and in Munich in 1962, but in emigre circles she was not known for her poetry, but for her 1937 affair with Vladimir Nabokov.
It is known that in 1959 Irina worked in the Russian editorial office of Radio Freedom. They say that at that time she had stern features and sad eyes, which would occasionally lighten up, that she seemed to be neurotic and sick. In the article "Poor Irina", published in "Ruska Misla" in 1997, Shahovskaya writes that in 1968, having lost her job at Radio, she became free. Shahovskaya, who had just taken over the newspaper, could only offer her a low-paid position, where she stayed for only a few days. She suffered from a mania of pursuit. Eight years later, in 1976, penniless, lonely and mentally ill, she died in a home for old Russian emigrants near Paris.
"YOU WILL DIE IN TERRIBLE PAIN AND COMPLETELY LONELY... "
When Vladimir and Vera arrived in Paris with their son Dmitry in 1937, they lived in a small apartment. Nabokov wrote in the bathroom by moving a suitcase over the bidet to make a table.
photo: wikimediaTHE NOBEL LAUREATE AND THE "WOMAN OF STEEL" - FELLOW WRITERS IN EMIGRATION: Ivan Bunjin...
Paris was then the cultural center of the Russian diaspora. Ivan Bunin, one of the leading voices of the Old Russian emigration, who became a Nobel laureate in 1933, lived and wrote there since 1919. Bunin, whose books he loved as a teenager, was met by Vladimir Nabokov in exile, just when he won the Nobel Prize and was morbidly fascinated by the passage of time, old age and death - and happily claimed that he behaved better than him, thirty years younger.
Bunin invited him to a restaurant, expensive and fine, and Vladimir Nabokov could not stand restaurants, vodka, snacks, music, or cordial conversations, and by the end of the dinner they were unbearably bored with each other...
"'You will die in terrible agony and completely alone,' Bunin told me as we headed for the coat hangers.
A thin girl in black, finding our heavy coats, fell, holding them in her arms, on the low bar. I was about to help the slender old man put on his coat, but he stopped me with a wave of his hand. Continuing to struggle politely – now he was trying to help me – we slowly drifted out into the pale, overcast winter's day…
With joint efforts we pulled out my long woolen scarf, which the girl tucked into the sleeve of his coat. The scarf came out very gradually, like the unwrapping of a mummy, and we turned silently around each other. Having finished this Egyptian operation, we proceeded quietly to the corner, where we said good-bye.
Since then we have met quite often in public and for some reason, a depressingly witty exchange has developed between us - and we have never agreed on art at all, and now it is too late ... the stars burn menacingly and miraculously on the velvet of the coffin, and something bitter smells from the fields, and in the infinitely responsive distance of our youth, roosters crow in the night", writes Nabokov in To other shores.
In Paris, Nabokov became close to the Symbolist poet Vladislav Hodasevich, who came to Paris from Berlin in the mid-1920s, where "despising fame and attacking corruption, vulgarity and meanness with terrible force, he made many influential enemies:
I can see him so clearly sitting with his thin legs crossed at the table, with his long fingers pushing half of a 'green corporal' into the mouthpiece." Those strong cigarettes of the French brand Caporal in green packaging (in Russia "Zelënyi Kaporal") popular since the end of the 19th century were a sign of "intellectual and bohemian" style.
He also met Jean Pollan, the editor of "La Nouvelle Revue Francaise", for which he writes an essay in French about Pushkin, as well as James Joyce and numerous writers of the European avant-garde of the time, but he did not want to be part of collective currents, neither emigrant nor French. He called himself a "temporary guest".
"I saw writers a little. I once went on a strange, lyrical walk with (Marina) Tsvetaeva, I think in 1923, in a strong spring wind, through some Parisian hills. In the 1930s, I remember Kuprin (Alexander, a writer popular at the beginning of the century, who emigrated after the October Revolution and before his death returned to the USSR - Stalin approved, Voroshilov abstained) in the rain and yellow leaves, as he raises a bottle of red wine from a distance as a greeting."
photo: wikimedia...and Nina Berberova
Nina Berberova, who got to know Vladimir Nabokov well in the 1930s, when he began to occasionally come from Berlin to Paris, and when, finally, before the war, he settled in Paris with his wife and son, writes in the book Italics are mine. that she herself gradually got used to his constant failure to recognize acquaintances, that after many years of acquaintance he addresses Ivan Ivanovich as Ivan Petrovich, that he calls Nina Nikolayevna Nina Aleksandrovna, that he despises someone who was previously dear to him, that he ridicules someone who was favorable to him in the press, that he takes everything he can from a famous author, and then says that he has never read him.
"Now I know all that, but I'm not talking about him, I'm talking about his books. I stand 'at the dusty crossroads' and watch his 'royal train' with gratitude and the knowledge that my generation (and therefore myself) will live in it, and will not disappear, will not be dissolved between the cemeteries of Biancourt, Shanghai, New York, Prague..."
HE LOVED A WRITER - VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Nabokov's attitude towards the classics was highly selective and often sarcastic.
He sincerely respected Pushkin, Gogol, Joyce and Kafka. He especially appreciated irony and grotesque humor in Gogol, while he considered Pushkin the greatest master of the Russian language. For years he worked on translations of Pushkin, Gogol and Songs about Igor's CampaignHe considered Anna Karenina the highest literary masterpiece of the 19th century, and he especially singled it out Death of Ivan Ilyich. On the contrary, Resurrection i Kreutzer Sonata he did not like it at all, while Tolstoy's journalistic tirades were "unbearable" to him.
He called Dostoevsky a "journalist", accusing him of "dramatic confusion and vulgar, false mysticism". He believed that his heroes are "sinners who pave their way to Jesus through their crimes". Brothers Karamazov he categorically rejected it, and Crime and punishment despised because of "disgusting moralizing".
He repeatedly criticized socially engaged literature, believing that a writer must be an artist, not a preacher. "The purpose of art is not to teach, but to enchant," he said.
He called TS Eliot "a self-proclaimed and fake"; He considered Pasternak a "melodramatic scumbag"; He accused Faulkner of "wornness and biblical mumbling". He rejected Hemingway, Henry James, Balzac, Ezra Pound, Stendhal, DH Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Malraux, Sartre...
Nikolai Melnikov, associate professor at Moscow State University's Department of Literary Theory and one of Nabokov's leading interpreters, noted: "True, there was one writer that Vladimir Nabokov really loved, and that was Vladimir Nabokov himself."
"NABOKOV IS THE ONLY RUSSIAN AUTHOR, IN RUSSIA AND IN EXILE, BELONGING TO THE WHOLE WESTERN WORLD OR THE WORLD AT ALL"
Zinaida Shahovska, under the pseudonym Jacques Croisette, wrote that Nabokov lived in such emotional desolation in European emigration that in his autobiography he “even forgot to mention the friends of his darkest days” (“даже забыл упомянуть друзей своих самых черных дней”).
In 1939, Vera strongly condemned Šahovska's anti-Semitism, which she did not forget. Ten years after his death, Zinaida Shahovska is in the book In Search of Nabokov claimed that Vladimir Nabokov's talent "withered under foreign, Jewish influence". "I wrote that book against Vera," she admitted to biographer Boyd, "but if you say it publicly, I will deny it."
Nina Berberova gave a credible answer to the question of whose author is Vladimir Nabokov in the book Italics are mine.: "Nabokov is the only Russian author, both in Russia and in exile, who belongs to the whole Western world or the world in general, not only Russia. Belonging to one nationality or one language does not play a significant role for people like him: already 70 years ago a completely new situation in the cultural world began - August Strindberg in Confessions, Oscar Wilde in Salome, Joseph Conrad and Santayana sometimes, or always, wrote in a language other than their own. For Kafka, Joyce, Ionesco, Beckett, Jorge Borges and Nabokov, language ceased to be what it had been in a narrowly national sense 80 or 100 years earlier. Both linguistic effects and national psychology, unsupported by anything else, have ceased to be a necessity for both the author and the reader in our time.
During the past 20, 30 years in Western literature, or rather at its highest levels, there are no more 'French', 'English' or 'American' novels. The best that emerge become international…”
ESCAPE TO AMERICA ON A BOAT "CHAMPAGNE"
In France, Nabokov could not obtain a work permit; even the issuing of an identity card, carte d'identité, took more than a year.
French officials also made it difficult for him to go to America. In the second week of May 1940, the Germans occupied the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and carried out the first air attack on France. By May 15, they had crossed the French border in several places, and the commander of the French army warned the government that he could not guarantee the safety of Paris for more than a day.
When it was time to say goodbye, Nabokov stopped by Kerensky's, where he found Bunin and Merezhkovsky. Nabokov said a warm farewell to Kerensky, a polite farewell to Bunin and went down the stairs together with the black-bearded Merezhkovsky, who looks like a prophet, and the made-up wife of Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, the one who claimed in Petrograd that he would never be a poet. By that moment, he had more or less reconciled with Zinaida, who was then ready to recognize his talent. However, she irritated him with questions: "You are going to America? Why are you going? Why are you going?"
And it was of vital importance that Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Vera and their son Dmitri left France before the arrival of the Germans, because his wife was Jewish, and thus his son, according to German laws, was also Jewish. As early as 1935, Jews were declared second-class people in Germany.
HIAS - the New York organization for the rescue of Jews - hired the ship "Champlain" to transport refugees. Brian Boyd states that the head of that organization was Yakov Frumkin who, like many other Jews from Russia, remembered with gratitude the late Vladimir Dmitrievich, who courageously and fervently criticized the Russian government for its inaction regarding the pogrom of Jews in Chisinau in 1903 and 1905. He offered to help his son by giving him a half-price ticket for the first class cabin.
The Germans advanced so quickly that the ship "Champlain" did not set sail from Le Havre, as originally planned, nor from Cherbourg, as was later reported, but from Saint-Nazaire, a port located right under the nose of the Brittany peninsula.
In Saint-Nazaire, the French security services arrested two German spies on board. The Nabokovs traveled with their sick son in a sleeping car and were given sulfonamides all night, every four hours, so that they would not be prevented from boarding if they noticed that the child was sick. In the morning, they left the station building and headed for the pier: between the parents, holding their hands, walked a perfectly healthy boy.
Nabokov writes that in May 1940, two periods of his life ended in Saint-Nazaire: "Here is the model of my life. The main theme of the thesis is my twenty-year period in Russia (1899-1919). The antithesis is the period of emigration (1919-1940) spent in Western Europe. The fourteen years (1940-1954) that I spent in my new homeland seem to mark the beginning of synthesis."
He calls it the rhythm of Mnemosyne to whom he says he humbly obeyed. English title of his autobiography Talk, memory! (Speak, Memory) is associated with the ancient Greek goddess Mnemosyne, daughter of Uranus and Gaia and mother of nine muses, personification of memory...
While sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, panic broke out when the sailors opened fire on what they mistook for a submarine, which turned out to be a whale. The fear was justified: during the next tour across the Atlantic, a German submarine sank the ship "Champlain".
(To be continued)
