'Quite Unlike Their Dear, Bright Selves'

“On the night of March 28, 1922, around ten o’clock, in the living room where as usual my mother was reclining on the red-plush corner couch, I happened to be reading to her Blok’s verse on Italy—had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, ‘Yes, yes, Florence does look like a dimniy [Russian for smoky] iris, how true!’ I remember—’ when the telephone rang.” 

Old Nabokov hands will be reminded of another telephone call, the one ringing in the final sentence of his 1948 story “Signs and Symbols.” Such calls often bring bad news in Nabokov, as in the passage above from Chap. 2 of Speak, Memory. Instead of describing the nature of the call, Nabokov next digresses into his mother’s future, noting only in passing that “a cast of my father’s hand a watercolor picture of his grave in the Greek-Catholic cemetery of Tegel, now in East Berlin, shared a shelf with émigré writers’ books, so prone of disintegration in their cheap paper covers."

 

One-hundred years ago today, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the novelist’s father, was murdered in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall by Russian monarchists. The former Russian foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, was delivering a lecture – “America and the Restoration of Russia” -- to a crowd of some 1,500. The event was sponsored by the exiled Constitutional Democratic Party -- the Kadets – formed during the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Kadets are customarily described as “liberal” in the Russian context. They favored an eight-hour work day and Jewish emancipation. After seizing power, the Bolsheviks issued an arrest warrant for the senior Nabokov. As a member of the first Duma, in 1906, he had already been deprived of court rank and imprisoned by the Tsarist government.

 

Two far-right monarchists, Peter Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky, entered the Berlin hall intending to kill Milyukov. One of them fired a revolver at him and shouted, “For the tsar’s family and Russia.” Nabokov leaped from his seat, grabbed the arm of the shooter – Shabelsky-Bork -- and tried to disarm him. Taboritsky shot Nabokov three times, killing him instantly. Seven others were wounded but Milyukov remained unharmed. Forty years later, another botched but fatally effective assassination would figure in Pale Fire.

 

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nabokov family had fled St. Petersburg and found refuge in Crimea. In April 1919, they settled in England, where the younger Vladimir attended Cambridge. A year later they moved to Berlin. In 1937, the novelist, his wife and son moved to France, fleeing the Nazi twin of Communism, and in 1940 to the United States for what he called the “spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America.” Ironies and bitterness abound. Nabokov, an apolitical man who wanted to get on with his art, was hounded all his life by politics.

 

His father’s assassins were convicted of the murder and sentenced to fourteen-year prison terms, but served only a fraction. Upon his release, Shabelsky-Bork befriended the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. The novelist’s younger brother, Sergey, died in a German concentration camp. Here is the closing paragraph of Chap. 2 in Speak, Memory:

 

“Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then -- not in dreams -- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”

[For a thorough account of the murder and its impacts on the Nabokov family and the Russian émigré community, see Bryan Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990).]