By Gary Topping–
Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, is a loving recollection of life during the last years of Czarist Russia and the first twenty years of his exile in Paris and Berlin after having fled the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Nabokovs were aristocrats of fabulous wealth on both sides of the family, with a staff of fifty domestic servants, a mansion in St. Petersburg that appears to have covered an entire block, and three vast country estates worth millions of dollars. Nabokov himself had an estate of two thousand acres donated to him personally by an uncle. One often feels that he is reading Doctor Zhivago, with its cast of fur-clad aristocrats in their silently gliding sleighs moving from one sumptuous country estate to another. (In fact, it appears that Nabokov and Boris Pasternak never actually met; Pasternak rarely left Russia, and Nabokov was forbidden on pain of death from ever returning there.)
Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Sr., was a politician of liberal persuasion who served in the Russian parliament and in various government posts. As a landowner, he was benevolent almost to a fault to his tenant farmers. Many were the dinners, Nabokov recalls, when his father was called from the table to meet a delegation of his tenants who sought permission to cut down a few trees or some such little privilege. Permission was invariably forthcoming, at which time the peasants would grab his father and repeatedly throw him up in the air in the jubilant manner we have seen in Russian movies. One gets the impression that if the entire Russian upper caste had been similarly benevolent, the revolution would never have taken place.
But of course it did. The Nabokovs fled with only what they could carry in suitcases, first to Ukraine where they falsely hoped the long arm of Bolshevik tyranny would not reach, then to Paris and Berlin.
Indicative of the three-hundred-year influence of Peter the Great, who insisted upon “Westernization” in an attempt to bring backward Russia into the European family of nations, the Nabokov family was fluent in both English and French, their household languages. Nabokov had to learn his “native” Russian language later in life. As his mother would read English stories to him as a small boy, Nabokov remembered being fascinated by a large ruby ring encircled with diamonds as her hand turned the pages. It would have taken a very large crystal ball for him to have foreseen that later, in Paris, the sale of that ring alone would set up their entire émigré household in the style to which they had been accustomed.
Nabokov’s father died an early and heroic death. In 1922, at a public lecture given by a friend of his in Berlin, he leaped into action as a couple of Bolshevik assassins suddenly rose to shoot the lecturer. The elder Nabokov, a large, muscular man, subdued one of them, but a bullet from the other one took his life. Vladimir’s mother lived another seventeen years, until 1939. he kept her husband’s wedding ring, and wore it on the same finger as her own. It was, of course, much too large to stay on her slim finger alone, so she took a piece of black thread and lashed the two rings together in a vivid symbol of undying love.
Three rings. If one wants a way to account for Nabokov’s greatness as a writer, it can be found partially in his eye for such seemingly insignificant, but immensely telling, details.
POSTSCRIPT: Unrelated to any of the above, but of interest to those of us who have never had any appreciable wealth, is Nabokov’s attitude toward having lost so much of it. In an angry interjection in Chapter Three of Speak, Memory, Nabokov addresses: “the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me:”
“My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who ‘hates the Reds’ because they ‘stole’ his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.”
How good it would be for us, living in such an age of rampant materialism, to cultivate a similar detachment from it.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian
