Nabokov in Time

There were, of course, worse decisions made in 1939, but in not giving an obscure and impoverished émigré a teaching job, the University of Leeds condemned the Russo-Yorkshire novel to death before it had been born. Vladimir Nabokov was desperate to find an academic position in England and he had travelled over from Paris, under impending threat of invasion by the Nazis, trying to find a safe haven for his Jewish wife and son. For a moment Yorkshire beckoned, but the opportunity fizzled out. Just think what was lost: Pnin among the Pennines, Kinbote of Cottingley, Humbert Humbert prowling the banks of the Humber.

When Nabokov did finally escape France it was on a boat to Ellis Island in May 1940, a month before Paris fell to the German army. Britain’s loss was America’s gain. Nabokov had arrived in London in what he described as ‘catastrophic poverty’, pleading with his friend Gleb Struve, an academic at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, to organise a reading for him, calling it a ‘life and death question’.¹ He spoke impeccable English and had a fistful of references from leading Russian intellectuals, including Ivan Bunin, Russia’s first Nobel laureate, but all he managed to secure was a guest lecture at the University of Manchester.

Until that point, Britain had been a place of sanctuary for Nabokov and his family. The aristocratic Nabokovs had made for London in May 1919, fleeing the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, renting houses first in Kensington, then in Chelsea. Back in St Petersburg the Nabokov family had been committed Anglophiles; Vladimir’s first reading was in English and he was raised by English nannies. His father, a leading criminologist, newspaper editor and progressive politician, socialised with H. G. Wells and sent his shirts to be laundered in London. With Vladimir’s uncle, Konstantin, chargé d’affaires at the Russian Embassy in London, England was a logical rallying point.

The family only stayed in London for a year before moving to the hub of the Russian emigration in Berlin, but Vladimir tarried in England longer, having gone up to Trinity College at Cambridge University in October 1919. Before his parents left for Germany, he would return to London in the breaks between terms to enjoy the White Russian social circuit. He even took his Anglophilia so far as to spend a winter weekend in Margate.²

While his time at Cambridge was often intellectually uninspiring and tainted by a painful nostalgia for Russia, it became a rich resource for his work – in the sixty-three stanzas of ‘The University Poem’ (1926), in the Russian novel Glory (1932) and, most evocatively, in his autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951).³ When he finally settled in Berlin after finishing his degree, he would cultivate the mien of the English sportsman, wearing his Trinity blazer around town.

With little aptitude for German, it is hard to understand why Nabokov stayed in Berlin as long as he did. His father was murdered in 1922 while trying to protect a political rival from an assassination attempt, and in the following decade there was an exodus from Berlin to Paris, which became the new home of the emigration (in 1923 there were 500,000 Russians in Berlin, by 1933 just 10,000).⁴ From the early 1930s he was already thinking of flight to England, something catalysed by the rise to power in 1933 of Adolf Hitler, whose hectoring broadcasts, channelled through loudspeakers, echoed through the Berlin streets. He started writing in English as early as 1935, working up autobiographical sketches and then translating his novel Despair into English for publication in London.

Nabokov sailed over on a job hunt for the first time in 1937, and his friends organised...