A genius and a villain, born on this day

Let astrologists explain this coincidence. Born 29 years apart not just under the same sign, but on the same day, 22 April, were Vladimir Lenin and Vladimir Nabokov.

According to star-gazers, the two men were supposed to share some personality traits, not just a birthday or, in this case, Christian name. Oh well, if any more proofs of astrological quackery are needed, this is surely one of them.

Lenin, b. 1870, was arguably among the most evil men in history and definitely in the 20^th century. Nabokov, b. 1899, was arguably among the best novelists in history and definitely in the 20^th century.

Lenin was driven by hatred, a craving for revenge, misanthropic destructiveness not balking at mass murder. All such urges were fully realised after the Bolshevik coup: at least 15 million perished in famines, the Civil War and the CheKa cellars on Lenin’s watch (1917-1924).

The pride of Russia, her creative intelligentsia, starved to death (Rozanov et al.), were murdered (Gumilev et al.), thrown out of the country (Berdyaev et al.) or wisely managed to escape of their own accord.

The Nabokovs were in that last group. The family had no chance of surviving in Lenin’s Russia, with an orgy of what Prof. Rummel called democide, murder by category, raging at full blast. The prime categories slated for extermination were the rich and the noble – and the Nabokovs were both.

On his father’s side, the writer descended from a 14^th-century Mongol prince named Nabok Murza. Without going too deep into Russian history, let’s just say that the English equivalent of such roots would be descent from the 1066 Normans.

Nabokov’s mother, née Rukavishnikova, came from one of Russia’s wealthiest families. Her grandfather made millions from gold mines, and the future writer grew up in gentle luxury and largely Anglophile – and Anglophone – culture.

Given that background, the family had only two options: emigrating or dying a horrific death. (When mentioning the execution of prominent Russians under Lenin, encyclopaedias coyly state they were shot. If only. Compared to the way many of them died – I’ll spare you the gruesome details – a bullet would have been an act of mercy.)

Anyone who likes literature must be grateful that the Nabokovs chose the first option. However, the writer’s father, Vladimir Sr., didn’t escape a violent death. In 1922 he was shot dead at a Berlin conference by a Russian fascist.

That group, made up of ethnic Russians and Russified Baltic Germans, was active in Germany at the time. One of them, Alfred Rosenberg, went on to become the principal ideologue of the Nazi Party. But even before Hitler’s rise to power, Russian fascists had exerted an influence on the budding Nazis, mainly in the area of anti-Semitism.

Nabokov Sr., a liberal member of the short-lived Provisional Government, was hated by that group with febrile passion. It was one of them, Sergei Taboritsky, who eventually pulled the trigger. His target was the leader of the Russian liberals, Milyukov, but Nabokov tried courageously to stop the murderer and was shot three times point blank.

The young writer found himself at a loose end, having to make a transition from luxury to penury. He moved to Paris, where he lived hand to mouth, while slowly gaining fame as a Russian-language essayist, poet and eventually novelist.

An interesting touch: Rachmaninov, who was enjoying a lucrative career as a pianist, was moved by a Nabokov article, in which the writer described his ‘abject poverty’. Rachmaninov immediately sent him 10,000 francs, with a note saying, “Please consider this a loan you can repay whenever the situation you describe is no longer the case.”

Eventually Nabokov moved to England, where he studied at Cambridge and indulged his two passions: literature and lepidopterology. His career in the former is better known than in the latter, but he was equally serious about both. Over 30 butterflies are named after or by him, which is a considerable achievement.

When I called Nabokov one of the best 20^th century writers, I was exercising aesthetic judgement, not so much personal preference. For me, his work is to be admired, but not necessarily loved. Most of Nabokov’s novels strike me as exercises in unrivalled virtuosity untouched by emotional warmth.

He had a capacity for the latter, but he left much of it behind along with other possessions when fleeing Russia. Genuine feeling did sometimes shine through Nabokov’s structural and linguistic brilliance, but only when he wrote about Russia and the Russians.

His most moving books are Speak, Memory, an autobiography mainly about his childhood and youth, and Pnin, a novel describing the ordeal of a Russian émigré professor at an American university. That too had strong autobiographical elements, for Nabokov himself taught at several US universities, including Cornell. His lectures on Russian and Western literature have been published, and they are full of penetrating insights.

Nabokov’s initial job application was rejected by the Cornell administration. When other professors explained to the bureaucrats that Nabokov was a celebrated Russian writer, they replied: “So what? If we looked for a professor of zoology, we wouldn’t hire an elephant.”

A celebrated Russian writer Nabokov indeed was. His three great pre-war novels, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift and The Defence, were written in Russian, but not as anyone knew it.

Bunin, another Parisian Russian (1870-1953), walked the path charted by Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov. It was as if he had eyes only in the back of his head, looking backwards into the 19^th century and – even after his own emigration – into Russia.

Every story in Bunin’s magnificent collection, Dark Alleys, unfolds as if old Russia was still there, occupied with unrequited love and the drama of parting. The stories were written in 1937-1944, when millions of Russians were dying of hunger, slave labour, executions and in various wars.

By contrast, Nabokov looked ahead of him, all the way to our century. No one had written Russian prose the way he did before he did it, and, though many have tried since, none have succeeded.  

Having moved to the US, Nabokov began to write in English, and it was in that language that he found world-wide fame and, at last, financial security. His 1955 novel Lolita became an instant hit, which was a right result for wrong reasons.

Lolita was serious literature, but it became so popular not because of its superlative literary quality but because of its treatment of paedophilia, something that appealed to a public demanding to have its naughty bits tickled.

Bunin, incidentally, got his Nobel Prize in 1933, but Nabokov never did despite having been nominated eight times.

He was a more significant literary phenomenon than Bunin, and infinitely more so than some of the other Nobel laureates I could mention from the years he was nominated (Giorgos Seferis, 1963, anyone? Shmuel Yosef Agnon/Nelly Sachs, 1966?). But perhaps the scandalous reputation of Lolita worked against Nabokov.

I can’t think offhand of another writer achieving such a stratospheric level in two languages, especially those as different as Russian and English. There have been quite a few bilingual men who were writers, but they, like Joseph Conrad, usually wrote only in their second language.

Without in any way attempting to put myself on anything like a similar level, I myself am a bilingual man, but not a bilingual writer. I never wrote anything in Russian, which is why I call myself an English writer. So much more do I appreciate Nabokov’s virtuosity in both languages.

Like most people who write in a language they weren’t born to, Nabokov was a bit of a show-off. If Russian was the language of his soul, English was the language of his mind, more of an instrument than his own flesh and blood.

Having mastered that instrument perfectly, he didn’t mind flaunting that achievement. His English prose is more complex and coruscating than Russian, and Nabokov loved playing on words, sometimes building his whole narrative on an elaborate multi-tiered pun (Pale Fire is an example of that).

On this anniversary of his birth, one he shares with Lenin, it’s hard not to notice the different niches the two men occupy in Russian history. Every town and city in Russia still has numerous statues of Lenin, with streets and squares named after that murderous ghoul.

Yet not a single Russian street is named after Nabokov, and no statues commemorate that sublime writer even in his native Petersburg. I could use this example to draw far-reaching conclusions about that country, but I won’t – for fear of being too obvious.

P.S. Russian history is replete with such biographic coincidences. To name another one: Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day, 5 March, 1953.