Free Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer

I NTRODUCTION

    The Neva River flows from east to west, sweeping along a wide channel and into the canals of St. Petersburg, the former Imperial capital of Russia. Rounding a hairpin turn just before Kresty Prison, the current follows a more elegant arc past the Field of Mars and the Winter Palace, then slips toward the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, lapping at the far bank as it goes by, less than half a mile north of the childhood home of Vladimir Nabokov.
    Now a museum, the house where Nabokov was born sits on reclaimed swampland in the middle of an engineered island at the heart of an engineered city built by slaves and veiled in baroque magnificence. The same could be said of Nabokov’s writing.
    In 2011, during my fourth year of research for this book, I went to Nabokov’s home city to see what I might learn from it. Many buildings have been restored in recent years, and in twenty-first-century St. Petersburg it is impossible to go more than a block or two without being startled by spectacle, from the lights framing the long panorama of Palace Square at night to the rainbow-studded onion domes of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood.
    I immediately thought it the most beautiful city I had ever seen. And yet St. Petersburg still felt uncomfortably imperial, built on ascale that could only have been accomplished by a dynasty willing to spend lives and treasure without much regard for the cost.
    The director of the Nabokov Museum, Tatiana Ponomareva, was kind enough to be my guide during two days of the trip. She took me to the Tauride Palace, where Nabokov’s father had served in the First Duma, an experiment in constitutional monarchy that was terminated by the Tsar after just three months. We headed to the former site of Tenishev School, where the teenage Nabokov had been mocked as a foreigner for his lack of interest in Russian politics. She pointed out the park where he had walked in winter with his first love, Lyussya, who was later immortalized in the novel Mary . And we strolled by the childhood apartment of Véra Slonim, who, years into exile, met Nabokov in Berlin and became his wife.
    During other research trips to other countries, I was reminded of the ways in which the story of Nabokov’s life and family intersected again and again with not just political upheaval in his home city but also the collapse of democracy in every nation in which he lived until the age of forty-one. It is one thing to know this intellectually. It is quite another to leave St. Petersburg, to leave Berlin, to leave Paris, and to imagine Vladimir Nabokov abandoning the most magnificent cities of Europe one after the other, fleeing the instability that followed him like a plague.

    I came to Nabokov as a college student and found myself put off by the abuse he heaped on his characters, whom he described as “galley slaves.” I didn’t mind violence, or sex, or protagonists who were not nice —I didn’t even need them to reform—but I wanted the events and the people in his books to matter. I wanted some sense from Nabokov that he loved what he had created, and that, on closer inspection, his characters had something to offer beyond their unblinking submission to his stylistic gifts.
    Returning to him as an adult, I found the style more persuasive on its own terms. Can anyone who cares about writing fail to marvel at passages such as this one from Glory , the story of Martin, a young man bereft of his country and in love with Sonia, who does not love him in return?
Martin could not restrain himself. He stepped out into the corridor and caught sight of Sonia hopping downstairs in a flamingo-colored frock, a fluffy fan in one hand and something bright encircling her black hair. She had left her door open and the light on. In her room there remained a cloudlet of powder, like the smoke following a shot; a stocking, killed outright, lay under a chair; and the motley innards of the wardrobe had spilled onto the