Before Vladimir Nabokov was ten years old, the Russian Revolution of 1905, tsarist political tyranny, and the imprisonment of his father, a deputy in the First Duma, all had affected his life. Briefly a millionaire when he inherited his uncle’s vast fortune in 1916, he was, for a period, the wealthiest writer since Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was, however, forced to make an abrupt adjustment to wrenching exile and extreme poverty, and later claimed he was no more aware of getting his inheritance than he was of losing it.
He narrowly escaped the Bolsheviks in 1919 and in Speak, Memory describes how, ignoring the machine guns strafing his ship as it left the Crimea, he coolly played chess with his father. After his father was assassinated in Berlin in 1922, Nabokov continued to defy history. With his Jewish wife and son, he fled from Germany before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and escaped from France to America a few weeks before the Nazi conquest of Paris in 1940.
He was not involved in Russian émigré politics or the Orthodox Church. Even his close friend Edmund Wilson maintained that Nabokov was “totally uninterested” in politics and social change, and had “never taken the trouble to understand them.” But in this bookn Andrea Pitzer convincingly argues that, behind the art-for-art’s-sake façade, Nabokov described “the most profound losses of his life and the forgotten traumas of his age . . . the horrors of his era and attending to the destructive
