The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer (review)

This remarkable volume is even more so for being its author’s first book. Andrea Pitzer is neither an academic nor a professional literary scholar but more of a general, all-around writing practitioner: a published poet, a onetime music critic, a free-lancer for USA Today and Slate, and, until recently, an editor at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Pitzer brings her divers writing talents to bear in what is an ambitious, highly original look at: 1) Nabokov’s life and development, 2) the larger history that the Russian master lived, escaped (in both senses) and survived, and 3) most important of all, the minutiae of a “hidden history” that are to be found deeply and subtly embedded in some of his novels. While her strictly biographical accounts do not displace but rather complement those classics by Brian Boyd and others, her impressive, extra-literary sleuthing cum close readings shed unexpected light on the Olympian wordsmith’s oeuvre to an extent that, to my knowledge, no other scholar-critic has yet even attempted on such a scale.

The title of the book is something of a pun. First, there is the broader history that forms the backdrop to Nabokov’s life and times. Indeed, at least a third of Pitzer’s text consists of large swaths of real-life history, tellingly rescued and strikingly retold. Among the many such subjects covered are the rise of concentration camps in Spanish Cuba, British South Africa, the U.S.-Philippine conflict, and across Europe during World War I; anti-Semitism in Russia prior to 1917 and during the Civil War; the Solovki prison camp; French anti-Semitic policy during the German Occupation; daily life in the Neuengamme labor camp (where Nabokov’s gay brother Sergei perished in 1945); and the tortured, obscure story of the Arctic isle of Nova Zembla (or Zemlya), ranging from sixteenth-century Dutch adventurers on to its possible (though uncertain) Gulag use and later as a site for nuclear testing. In addition, early on, the extensive role of Nabokov’s father as a liberal activist both under Tsarism and in German exile is eloquently narrated.

This is the wider setting against which Nabokov’s life and writings are here artfully placed. The creator of Lolita, needless to say, was himself no activist. From adolescence on he adamantly resisted any pressures to join group causes. Moreover, he felt and cultivated a lofty disdain for historical fiction and the social novel, and even more so for the historicizing of literature. (About the only position he ever acknowledged with any consistency was a generalized anti-Communism.) Going against both that public stance and the prevailing critical wisdom, Pitzer’s fresh look at Nabokov’s work unearths “secret” connections to a nightmarish history that even his most devoted readers have missed, scanted, or deemphasized. As she demonstrates, issues of conflict, repression, and bigotry, and the damage that these can inflict on the human psyche, are there to be found in the well-tended garden of his prose. And found them she has.

As an early instance, there are those concentration camps to which, in 1914-18, Europe’s warring nations sent thousands of allegedly suspicious alien residents. Fittingly, a younger Hermann in Despair, being part-German and studying in St. Petersburg at the onset of the war, was relocated to an internment camp in Astrakhan, southern Russia, and was released only in 1919—i.e. by the Bolshevik government. Hermann’s experience can thus be construed as a source of his mental derangement that later leads him to his crazed delusions and strange crime. It also explains Hermann’s being positively disposed toward a regime that, after all, had freed him from Tsarist imprisonment. In chapter 2 of the novel, Hermann spends an entire paragraph praising Communism as “a great and necessary thing” that was “producing wonderful values,” though of course, for Nabokov, this in itself could be interpreted as yet another...