Recently I stumbled on a Nabokov's short story Signs and Symbols in the New Yorker which I had never read. It's worth reading and re-reading – great to discover something you haven't read when you've read and re-read just about everything else from an author. Like discovering there's a post-humous new Maeve Binchy novel. Ok, no comparison, but you know…

Signs and Symbols seems very close to home for a number of reasons.

And then I read my colleague Michael Weiss' excellent book review of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer.

I didn't like Nabokov much when I was young and especially never got through Pale Fire. It wasn't until my young daughter discovered Nabokov and read every single work cover to cover, intensely, that I decided to read them all again, Laughter in the Dark — everything. Well, I didn't feel as if I needed to read Lolita again, but maybe I do. One of my favourite books is Pnin, which for some reason I hated when I was supposed to read it in college and then only appreciated now. The main character is a barely-disguised Nabokov — a Russian exile living the life of an impoverished professor on an East Coast college campus, complete with lapidoptery. Somehow, the scenes in the library with the 3×5 card and the books and then that scene with the pathetically sad emigres in the woods at the country party, well, they're just very real. In a surreal way. Maybe because I've seen them.

Michael Weiss explains the hook:

All of Nabokov’s novels feature what he called “plums” but might also be
thought of as Easter eggs: hidden allusions or jokes or legends for
working out what it was that the great Russian had in mind with the use
of a date, a name, or a metaphor. Nothing in Nabokov is ever wasted, yet
much can be missed, especially upon the first reading, which is why he
thought that books could only be “re-read.” For instance, how many will
have noticed that a scientist named Sig Leymanski, with his
“anagram-looking name,” featured in a science fiction story contained
within Ada, or Ardor, one of the later, longer novels, is
de-scrambled as Kingsley Amis? And Leymanski’s character, we’re further
informed, is derived in part from the hamfistedly named “Dr. Froid,” a
figure mentioned in passing in Ada proper. We know that the
inventor of psychoanalysis, that “Viennese witchdoctor,” ranked only
with Dostoevsky in the Nabokovian catalogue of comic intellectual or
literary horrors. So this is how the old devil took oblique revenge on Amis’s review of Lolita, a pan justified by the book’s fundamental flaw that “so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough.”'

I would have never figured out the Kingsley Amis/Sig Leymanski in a million years, even if I, too, have synesthesia, like Nabokov, and can do the Jumble in record time.

But here's the most interesting thing Weiss discovers about Pitzer's analysis:

The “secret” here isn’t in the life, which scholars have done to death already and which the man himself did twice (Conclusive Evidence and Speak, Memory);
it’s in how the life slyly crept its way into the margins or subtexts
of the work. How could it not given that that life was lived as a serial
witness to every kind of 20th century atrocity? The Nabokov family
were, famously, Constitutional Democratic refugees from the Bolshevik
seizure of power in 1917, and Nabokov’s famous father, Vladimir
Dmitrievich, was later shot by a czarist loyalist. Vladimir and his
Jewish wife Vera (to whom he dedicated all of his books) escaped the
Nazi occupation of France, if not quite the last vestiges of global
anti-Semitism. Nabokov’s brother-in-law was then implicated as a Russian
Nazi collaborator in Europe. Finally, his gay younger brother Sergei
died under dire circumstances in Hitler’s Neuengamme concentration camp.
“This lost, forgotten, and sometimes secret history,” Pitzer writes,
“suggests that behind the arts-for-art’s-sake facade that Nabokov both
cultivated and rejected, he was busy detailing the horrors of his era
and attending to the destructive power of the Gulag and the Holocaust in
one way or another across four decades of his career.”

I can't wait to read Pale Fire now, which I had avoided ever since I first remembered seeing it on my parents' book shelf in the 1960s. And then I'll read Pitzer's biography.

Meanwhile, I was reminded of another place where I had see the insight that Nabokov's works are really a way of making sense of the two great horrors of the past century, the Holocaust and the Communist Great Terror (see, it doesn't even have a proper name yet, as people tend to call it "the Stalin Terror" when it really stretches back to Lenin and of course the time described by Nabokov in his fable about Novaya Zembla; I wonder if it will ever have a name – the Ukrainians never had a problem giving the terror-famine, as Robert Conquest called it — Holodomor).

That is, this insight is not related to Nabokov per se, but the idea of culture in the 1960s being a reaction to the horrors of the 1930s through 1950s – the Holocaust, the Communist Terror and Hiroshima and Nagasaki — concentration death camps, the GULAG, and the nuclear bomb.

This is what Norman Mailer writes in The White Negro, a controversial work then and now:

PROBABLY, WE WILL never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization founded upon the urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect — in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed he subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

This article from 1957 was controversial not because of the word "Negro," which was an accepted term at the time, but because of its presumptuousness about the black experience and it's lurid analysis and predictions. James Baldwin was said to be very put out with it. Well, read it and you'll see.

Mailer concludes:

No matter what its horrors, the Twentieth Century is a vastly exciting century for its tendency is to reduce all of life to its ultimate alternatives. One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the regulators. Which of course is carrying speculation beyond the point where speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and bleakness of the future have become so engrained in the radical temper that the radical is in danger of abdicating from all imagination. What a man feels is the impulse for his creative effort, and if an alien but nonetheless passionate instinct about the meaning of life has come so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate people, come out of the most intense conditions of exploitation, cruelty, violence, frustration, and lust, and yet has succeeded as an instinct in keeping this tortured people alive, then it is perhaps possible that the Negro holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and if this is so, the radical humanist could do worse than to brood upon the phenomenon.

Well, as I said, lurid, but my point here is to note that Mailer, too, had the insight that the beat and hipster culture was a reaction to and a kind of articulation of the horrors of the 20th century — which of course, didn't affect most Americans directly.

Yes, Mailer is awful. I remember once having to spend a very unpleasant evening with him. Can you imagine? Back in 1986, Robert Bernstein, formerly the president of Random House and founding chair of Human Rights Watch, gave a dinner in honour of Elena Bonner, the wife of Andrei Sakharov. She had been allowed to travel from the USSR at the time to the US for medical care and was just recovering from heart surgery.

It's funny how in my memory of that long-ago time, the dinner felt like something else — a roast of Bob Bernstein, you know, one of those dinners in honour of someone that people organize for a retirement or a birthday, and then tell jokes at the expense of the host. Something about the occasion made me remember it that way, although it was in fact intended to honour Elena and draw attention to Sakharov's plight — he was still in exile, not allowed to travel (that was to come in 1988, and then he died in December 1989, having written his last sentence, "Tomorrow there will be a battle" about the tempestuous Soviet Congress of People's Deputy, the parliament of the era.

But on that night in February — it was around Elena's birthday, too — there were we at the Regency Hotel, with tables arranged for 150 people right out in the foyer — perhaps because the dinner had been organized on short notice and the Waldorf was booked. So the entire event had a dark and chilly feeling because we were out in a open, drafty space on a marble floor.  Elena herself was cold and not feeling very well, but she had her Russian coat.  The rest of us were in our "black tie" and feeling chilly. Norman complained and sat glowering and uncommunicative. Also at the table I believe was Kurt Vonnegut and some other writers. Was it Ed Doctorow?

Vonnegut lived near our office at that time in the 40s on the East Side, and I would run into him — several times he took visiting Soviet or Russian authors up to the Beekman tower or a bar nearby he used to hang out at, and I honestly think that except for the bar-tender, the tourists and UN staff who used to frequent that bar didn't know it was he. He was very kind and supportive to the Soviet dissident authors and spoke out frequently about the imprisoned ones.

I was the translator and researcher at Helsinki Watch and various other groups such as the Freedom to Write Committee of the American Association of Publishers, and I knew these people in a service capacity — I would see them at functions and committees and dinners like this and serve as an interpreter. An interpreter should be heard and not seen.  Even so, I felt I had to try to keep the conversation going — here was Norman Mailer, after all, and the other literary lions — and Elena, who of course had seen many presidents and prime ministers and parliamentarians in her time struggling on behalf of human rights in her country. It was hard to find something in common to talk about.

To return to my thesis — of course, the Sakharovs had experienced all the horrors of the 20th century. Elena served as a nurse in World War II, one of the many Soviets fighting the Nazis, and her eye was permanently injured in a blast — and repeated treatment for this was a reason why she sought travel permission. Sakharov worked in a munitions plant. And  of course he was the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, which was necessitated as parity for what the Americans had, as they thought. Sakharov was among the lead scientists working on the very Tsar Bomba and he protested the plan to explode it in Novaya Zemlya. Sakharov saw innocent people harmed or even killed by the nuclear tests and among his first "dissident" acts was campaigning to end above-ground testing.

None of these stories are related, but really they are.