Free Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer Page A

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    Many writers, myself included, would weep with gratitude to have written those four sentences, just half a paragraph in a throw-away scene from one of Nabokov’s least famous books. The more Nabokov I read as an adult, the more I began to suspect that what I had longed for at eighteen was in there somewhere, but hiding. Later, when I became consumed with the idea of putting Nabokov’s writing into historical context, it turned out that many things were, in fact, hiding inside his novels—more, in fact, than I could have imagined.
    Even though I no longer believe him to be perpetually subjecting his characters to horrific events solely for his own amusement, I am not yet one who believes that Nabokov had a gentle soul. But fury and compassion reside together in his writing in ways that, more often than not, have gone unrecognized. He has taken an unprecedented approach to preserving all the grief of his lifetime—the world’s and his own—in his novels.
    For those who have read his elegant autobiography Speak, Memory , it is hardly a secret that Nabokov narrowly escaped Bolshevik Russia, the Holocaust, and Occupied France—or that friends and members of his family suffered terrible political violence andwere rendered mute by history. But by losing the particulars of that violence and that history, the ways in which these events made their way into his stories have often also been lost. And a whole layer of meaning in his work has vanished.
    This lost, forgotten, and sometimes secret history suggests that behind the art-for-art’s-sake façade that Nabokov both cultivated and rejected, he was busy detailing the horrors of his era and attending to the destructive power of the Gulag and the Holocaust in one way or another across four decades of his career.
    On a local level, this means that court cases, FBI files, and Nazi propaganda shed light on subtle references in Lolita . Red Cross records recall Revolutionary trauma hidden in Despair. New York Times articles suggest a radically different reading of Pale Fire . On a global level, it becomes apparent that Nabokov, who was so reluctant to engage in politics in any public forum, was responding to and weaving in the details of the events that he had witnessed or remembered, as if preserving them before they could be forgotten.
    Yet as readers focused on Nabokov’s shocking subjects and linguistic pyrotechnics, those details were forgotten. This book is an attempt to retrieve them.
    What if 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 a love letter to the dead of the Russian Gulag? What if forty years of Nabokov’s writing carries an elegy for those who resisted the prisons and camps that devastated his world?
    Nabokov presents different faces to different people, and so this book seeks to draw out one particular story. It is not an attempt to replicate the prodigious feats of the biographers of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, which could hardly be surpassed. It is not a study of butterflies, or an account of Nabokov’s views on the afterlife—though both topics were undeniably important to him. This is a story as much about the world around the writer as the writer himself, and a look at how epic events and family history made their way, unseen, into extraordinary literature.
    This book covers a lot of territory, from biography to history and criticism. After the first chapter, Nabokov’s life unfolds from birth to death. In the beginning, the story of Nabokov’s youth is almost eclipsed by the whirlwind events of the new century. As race hatred and concentration camps begin to swamp Europe, they wind their way closer and closer to his world—and his work. The relevance of many events recounted in the early chapters only becomes apparent once Nabokov begins to write in English, fusing the past and everything that has been lost with spectacular invention, creating