Free Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer Page B

terrifying fairy tales out of magic and dust.
    Not all those he loves escape, and so it hardly comes as a surprise that Nabokov makes use of that history. Personal and political tragedies intertwine as he crafts his greatest novels.
    If this history is relevant, it shows Nabokov reinventing the reader’s role in literature, creating books with brilliant narratives which have whole other stories folded inside them. This interior Nabokov is more vulnerable to the past than he publicly led the world to believe, yet has no interest in comforting us. His hidden stories have something profound to teach us about being human and our very way of interacting with art.
    Much of the story of Nabokov’s life unspools here in a series of juxtapositions with his contemporaries. Ivan Bunin reigned over the Russian literary emigration until Nabokov replaced him and refused to write about Russia on anyone’s terms but his own. Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas also went from Russia and Western Europe to America, and likewise faced a life crisis in 1937, but made very different choices in its wake. Walter Duranty, whose reporting from Russia on the fledgling Soviet state deeply influenced the opinions of educated Americans for more than two decades, laid the foundation for a kind of blindness about the U.S.S.R. that drove Nabokov to despair. Critic Edmund Wilson, who was devoted to literature but had a very different way of interpreting it—and indeed of understanding history itself—forced Nabokov to define himself explicitly.
    Among Nabokov’s other contemporaries were filmmakers and writers who, for reasons honorable or selfish, put their gifts wholly at the service of politics. And capping the beginning and end of these comparisons is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that other Russian exile whose books horrified and unnerved twentieth-century readers, a man with whom Vladimir Nabokov has more in common than has ever been imagined.

    My first full day in St. Petersburg in 2011, I was accompanied by Fedor, the son of a professor at St. Petersburg State University. He took me to see the major sites, and at the top of my wish list were prisons.
    We met at Vladimir Nabokov’s house and began to work our way up the Neva, heading first to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where so many writers and revolutionaries had been incarcerated. A Nabokov had once been its commander. Standing in a pitch-black cell, Fedor dug in his pocket for a lighter and talked about history. He was young enough not to remember life in the Soviet Union.
    We walked back out into the sunlight and made our way farther along the river. My guidebook also listed a penal museum at Kresty Prison, where Nabokov’s father had been sentenced to solitary confinement in 1908 under Tsar Nicholas II.
    Fedor seemed uncertain about going at first—he had never heard of a museum there—but agreed to take me anyway. As we talked on the way, I realized he was trying to explain that Kresty was still a prison, an operational prison, and, as such, was someplace that most people would rather not go.
    He was still game, however, so we kept walking until we came to Kresty’s red brick perimeter walls and buildings. When Nabokov’s father had served his sentence, the facility’s innovative design was celebrated for its modern approach to incarceration; but by 2010 its buildings looked like factories or tenements in the heart of anymid-size American city, with some ornate brick flourishes added. It is today the largest functioning prison in Europe.
    We had trouble finding a main door, but in time we stumbled on an unlocked entrance to a side building. The door opened onto a stairwell that made up in graffiti what it lacked in plaster. We went up. After one or two floors, a smell of cooking food drifted by. The building was strangely silent. We were hardly in danger, but I was struck by the feeling that we had wandered into someplace we were not supposed to be—that we were trespassing.
    Back outside, a