THE SECRET HISTORY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

A shocking and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. Yet he repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics? He drew ire from other Russian exiles like Solzhenitsyn, who wondered why émigré authors like Nabokov did not write about the "blood flowing from Russia's living wounds." But was one of our greatest contemporary writers simply an amoral aesthete? Or did he hide an extensive network of clues deep within his text, clue that refer back to unimaginable horrors lost to oblivion? Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’s Jewish identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire is unmasked as a survivor of the most notorious camp of the Gulag, a camp the world has forgotten. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricably into his fiction. Chasing the real-world history buried in Nabokov's novels leads to important new discoveries about his life, including his veiled tribute to brother Sergey killed in the Holocaust, his sister-in-law's wartime espionage, her long-time affair with a Nazi filmmaker, and Lenin's direct denunciation of Nabokov's father a full decade before the Revolution. Recently-declassified FBI files and recovered concentration camp histories shatter existing ideas about Nabokov's life and art — and even what we know about our own past. Andrea Pitzer founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Her work has also appeared in print in USA Today's Life section and online at HiLowbrow.com. She presented on Nabokov's fiction at the 2009 MLA Conference, is a graduate of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and lives in Northern Virginia.