Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

Arriving back in Berlin on February 29 from an unusually pleasant month in Paris, Nabokov found several letters from agents. When Nina Berberova had recently passed on to him still another agent's name, he had thanked her but added:I have more agents than readers, and the business side of my life consists of the complicated distribution of countless, hopeless options. If they herded all these men and women together it would make a huge international hospital—for it's strange, after the first passionate period of telegrams there follows a mysterious silence, which several queries later is explained by "an illness." A little clinic in a pine forest could be made up just of my female translators.

It was no accident that Nabokov began Invitation to a Beheading while Goebbels as Minister of People's Enlightenment and Propaganda was striving to make all German culture Nazi "culture," or while Stalin's grip on the Union of Soviet Writers and on everything else in the Soviet Union was becoming still tighter. But the optimistic Nabokov did not foresee all the horrors of the next ten years, and his novel is not a narrowly political one. He could keep his invented world lightly comic in a way he could not in the much more grimly political Bend Sinister, written one brutal decade later.

At the end of July, ablaze with the ideas of Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov replied to a letter from Khodasevich, taking issue with his friend's latest weekly column in the Paris daily Vozrozhdenie. Writers should ignore problems of emigre ideology, he declared, and just work away in their own space, like stokers knowing only their own furnaces, whatever might be happening on deck or at sea. They should occupy themselves only with their own meaningless, innocent, intoxicating business and justify only in passing all that in reality does not even need justification: the strangeness of such an existence, the discomfort, the solitude . . . and a certain quiet inner gaiety. For that reason I find unbearable any talk—intelligent or not, it's all the same to me—about "the modern era," "inquietude," "religious renaissance," or any sentence at all with the word "postwar." I sense in this "ideology" the same herd instinct, the "all-together-now" of, say, yesterday's or last century's enthusiasm for world's fairs. ...I am writing my novel. I do not read the papers.