The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

Overview

A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors.

Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fled France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?

Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from WWI to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’s secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world.

From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from the CIA to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricably into his fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639361182
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	11/15/2021
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Andrea Pitzer founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Her work has also appeared in print in USA Today's Life section and online at www.HiLowbrow.com. She presented on Nabokov's fiction at the 2009 MLA Conference, is a graduate of Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and lives in northern Virginia.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Chapter 1 Waiting for Solzhenitsyn 1

Chapter 2 Childhood 22

Chapter 3 War 45

Chapter 4 Exile 66

Chapter 5 Aftermath 84

Chapter 6 Descent 111

Chapter 7 Purgatory 130

Chapter 8 America 162

Chapter 9 After the War 196

Chapter 10 Lolita 218

Chapter 11 Fame 241

Chapter 12 Pale Fire 262

Chapter 13 Speak, Memory 288

Chapter 14 Waiting for Solzhenitsyn 312

Coda 349

Acknowledgments 353

Abbreviations 359

Notes 361

Index 423

Editorial Reviews

Despite the title, this literary study–cum–biography contains little in the way of salacious details from Nabokov’s personal life. Instead, journalist Pitzer argues that Nabokov’s work, and his eventful but not notably scandalous life, intersected with very public history in ways often missed or misunderstood. Many know Nabokov as a Russian aristocrat and refugee from the Bolsheviks, but Pitzer expands on these facts to describe how his liberal reformer father, V.D., fell afoul of both Lenin and czarist supporters. Though the experience made Nabokov staunchly anticommunist, Pitzer’s use of Alexander Solzhenistyn in counterpoint throughout illustrates how much more subtly her subject addressed political violence. The Holocaust also casts a shadow over this account of his life, from his gay, outspokenly anti-Nazi brother Sergei’s death in a concentration camp, to his beloved wife Vera’s defiant assertions of her Jewish identity against postwar America’s more genteel but still pervasive anti-Semitism. Pitzer finds this latter theme running through Lolita in unspoken parallel to Humbert Humbert’s more obvious obsessions, while Zembla, the lunatic narrator’s apparently illusory birthplace in Pale Fire, turns out to correspond to the Arctic archipelago Nova Zembla, a mysterious last stop for Soviet political prisoners. Though Pitzer’s stylized prose is burdened by a vain hope of equaling Nabokov’s mastery, her fresh perspective will likely send readers back to his books. 16 pages b&w photos. Agent: Katherine Boyle, Veritas Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"In a personal note Nabokov sent to Solzhenitsyn in 1974, on the day the dissident writer was expelled from the Soviet Union, Pitzer recognizes a telling connection between two writers who shared more than most critics have realized. A penetrating analysis certain to compel a major reassessment of the Nabokov canon."

Booklist (starred)

"The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov shows how the specters of history and politics shaped one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. In clear and bracing prose, Pitzer demonstrates the complex engagement with politics in the deepest recesses of Nabokov’s most famous novels, including Lolita and Pale Fire. This book manages the impressive feat of being at once a wide-ranging introduction to Nabokov’s life and work as well as a game-changer for those readers who thought they knew his writing cold."

Steven Belletto

"Fifty years is long time to wait for a decryption device but one has been furnished by Andrea Pitzer, the author of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, not just one of the most beguiling literary biographies to come out in years but also a first-rate addition to the shelf of Nabokov studies."

Daily Beast

"Andrea Pitzer has given students of Nabokov a startling gift: a fundamentally new way to read one of the English language’s preeminent prose wizards. She demolishes the false distinction between the literary gamesman we know Nabokov to be and the historically engaged writer he supposedly isn’t. His famous characters’ psychoses, it turns out, are bound up inextricably with those of the horror-drenched century through which their creator navigated. In a feat of fascinating literary detective work, Pitzer supplies a long-overdue map of these connections."

Christopher Goffard

"Certainly the most remarkable and insightful book on Vladimir Nabokov in many years. It is by taking big history with its small devastating details into account that Pitzer brilliantly manages to unlock a secret door in the oeuvre of the often misunderstood Mandarin. A must for even non-Nabokovians."

Michael Maar

"Pitzer, like Nabokov, is a beautiful writer and gimlet-eyed observer, especially about her subject; even as an impoverished refugee living in America, she writes, “Nabokov was never shy about his sense of self.” Her attention to history’s moral components is refreshingly blunt: “The dead are not nameless,” she writes of the writers and others killed in Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s. Inviting us to reconsider Nabokov, Pitzer also introduces herself as a writer worthy of attention."

Boston Globe

"Pitzer shows history—if not politics—was never far from Nabokov’s considerations. Nabokov was, for example, an ardent enemy of anti-Semitism and a supporter of civil rights in the American South. Pitzer depicts him as fully engaged with the concerns of the world—though he was far too courtly, too genteel, to shout his convictions from the rooftops."

The New Republic

"In a personal note Nabokov sent to Solzhenitsyn in 1974, on the day the dissident writer was expelled from the Soviet Union, Pitzer recognizes a telling connection between two writers who shared more than most critics have realized. A penetrating analysis certain to compel a major reassessment of the Nabokov canon."

Booklist

Fifty years is long time to wait for a decryption device but one has been furnished by Andrea Pitzer, the author of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, not just one of the most beguiling literary biographies to come out in years but also a first-rate addition to the shelf of Nabokov studies.

The Daily Beast

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov provides a valuable antidote to decades of emphasis on the puzzling preciosity of the writer who seemed to be the Wallace Stevens of modern fiction. The magician buried his past in his art and Pitzer has exhumed it. She reads the novels for their cryptic hints, oblique allusions and hidden political themes, their cunning fusion of history and art, and reveals new dimensions of meaning.

The New Criterion

Pitzer, like Nabokov, is a beautiful writer and gimlet-eyed observer,
especially about her subject; even as an impoverished refugee living in
America, she writes, “Nabokov was never shy about his sense of self.”
Her attention to history’s moral components is refreshingly blunt: “The dead are not nameless,” she writes of the writers and others killed in
Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s. Inviting us to reconsider
Nabokov, Pitzer also introduces herself as a writer worthy of attention.

The Boston Globe

Pitzer shows history—if not politics—was never far from Nabokov’s considerations.
Nabokov was, for example, an ardent enemy of anti-Semitism and a supporter of civil rights in the American South. Pitzer depicts him as fully engaged with the concerns of the world—though he was far too courtly, too genteel, to shout his convictions from the rooftops.

Alexander Nazaryan - The New Republic

In a personal note Nabokov sent to Solzhenitsyn in 1974, on the day the dissident writer was expelled from the Soviet Union, Pitzer recognizes a telling connection between two writers who shared more than most critics have realized. For beneath the consummate artifice of Nabokov’s tales, Pitzer discerns a hidden historical vision aligned to a surprising degree with Solzhenitsyn’s. Largely undetected, the same nightmarish world of communist brutality that Solzhenitsyn exposed in his Gulag Archipelago lies embedded in the recesses of Nabokov’s major works, including Bend Sinister, Pnin, and Ada. The ugly historical effects of the Soviet Union’s open-air nuclear testing lie behind otherwise puzzling features of Pale Fire. Perhaps most surprising is the presence in the depths of Nabokov’s (in)famous Lolita of the horrific history of the Nazi death camps. Through her historically grounded readings of his fiction, Pitzer discredits the widespread but misleading perception of Nabokov as an art-for-art’s-sake writer indifferent to the moral and political exigencies of his day. But as readers explore his devious strategies for veiling sobering historical realities in aesthetic illusions, they slowly become aware of the interpretive responsibilities that Nabokov places on the reader. A penetrating analysis certain to compel a major reassessment of the Nabokov canon.

STARRED REVIEW Booklist

"In a personal note Nabokov sent to Solzhenitsyn in 1974, on the day the dissident writer was expelled from the Soviet Union, Pitzer recognizes a telling connection between two writers who shared more than most critics have realized. A penetrating analysis certain to compel a major reassessment of the Nabokov canon."

Booklist

Pitzer shows history—if not politics—was never far from Nabokov’s considerations. Nabokov was, for example, an ardent enemy of anti-Semitism and a supporter of civil rights in the American South. Pitzer depicts him as fully engaged with the concerns of the world—though he was far too courtly, too genteel, to shout his convictions from the rooftops.

The New Republic - Alexander Nazaryan

Narrator Susan Boyce gives weight and expression to what might easily have been a standard author biography, elevated, and burdened, by the proposition that Nabokov’s writings reflect the conflicts and social upheavals of his time. Pitzer’s review of historical events—revolution, war, concentration camps—may seem overfamiliar to those who know much about them, but Boyce delivers the text with authority and conviction, and her pace never lags. What results is a very good general biography of Nabokov in the context of his times, and a thesis sure to be debated for years to come. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

JULY 2013 - AudioFile

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) always claimed that art and politics don't mix, but this new biography suggests his own art tells a different story. In her first book, Pitzer focuses on one of the lingering mysteries about Nabokov: How could anyone so acquainted with the horrors of the Soviet Union (which killed his father) and Nazi Germany (which killed his brother) be so detached from the real world in his work? Born in the twilight of Czarist Russia, Nabokov fled the post-revolutionary landscape and spent years making his name among the émigré writers in Berlin, where he would also be forced to flee, with his Jewish wife and their young son, as Hitler came into power. Arriving in America and landing a teaching position, Nabokov focused on his writing and, as some saw it, forgot the past; he never spoke out against injustice, signed petitions, made speeches or even voted. While Solzhenitsyn was suffering in a Soviet prison camp, Nabokov was crafting an intricate novel about a middle-aged pervert's passion for a 12-year-old "nymphet." Yet, according to Pitzer, in his own imaginative way, Nabokov was bearing witness to the horrors he knew. Drawing on new biographical material and her sharp critical senses, Pitzer reveals the tightly woven subtext of the novels, always keen to shine a light where the deception is not obvious. She suggests that Humbert Humbert, Lolita's predatory narrator, is a Jew who has been destroyed by what he experienced during the war years. Hermann in Despair, the title character of Pnin and Kinbote in Pale Fire--all bear similar psychic wounds, victims of history who sometimes become villains. Though no substitute for Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography, this is a brilliant examination that adds to the understanding of an inspiring and enigmatic life.

Kirkus Reviews