Life of a Russian Emigre Effects of Emigration Lifestyle Assimilation in a New Culture

¶ … Russian emigres draws upon a very distinct Russian tradition of intellectuals in exile. Both the Russian Empire and Soviet Union had many exiles, both inside the empire and outside it. Many of those that left voluntarily early in their lives, including Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, and Ayn Rand, reflected the sentiments of those that were later forced into political exile, which include Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn and Sakhalov. Some, like Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, are considered among the best Russian writers in Russian history and are almost universally read at home. Others, like Rand, are still virtually unheard of outside their adopted countries. The idea of separation from Russia is ingrained in the Russian culture, as Dostoyevsky, Lenin and so many others were at one point in exile. In this work I will primarily address Nabokov's cohort of Russian emigres to Europe and America.

Nabokov was a native of Saint Petersburg, which at the time of his childhood dominated Russian culture as it had been the home of the Czar and represented not only the seat of the Russian government but also its connection to the commerce of the west. Nabokov, like Rand and other emigres who grew up in Piter during the aughts and teens, was a child of privilege who vacationed in the Crimea and in continental Europe; in many respects he was similar to the upper middle class that one finds today in Moscow. Nabokov grew up in a wealthy suburb of St. Petersburg; at that time, small villages like Vyra and Tsarsky Celo had regular rail service to the center of town. He was taught by private tutors and spoke several languages from a very early age. Nabokov's evocative imagination surfaced at an early age, and he later remembered his childhood with clarity as we can see from his autobiographical work, Speak, Memory: "The white one alone, that lanky albino among pencils, kept its original length, or at least did so until I discovered that, far from being a fraud leaving no mark on the page, it was the ideal implement since I could imagine whatever I wished while I scrawled." (Nabokov, 1951)

The circle that Nabokov traveled in was rather small and included the family of Ayn Rand, then Alissa Rosenbaum, who was also a member of an aristocratic Saint Petersburg family that vacationed in Crimea and was friends with Nabokov's sisters. According to Rand's biography, Nabokov's sister was a constitutional monarchist; Nabokov's father later joined the Duma of the provisional government. Although Rand was to become more of a pop-fiction novelist whereas Nabokov received more critical acclaim, her take on the fall of Saint Petersburg to the Bolshevists remains of interest to us in that it captures much of the indignation felt by many of the city's elites who later emigrated. Her novel, "We the Living" reads like a Petrograd-era "Gone with the Wind," opening with a Russian upper-middle class family returning from the Black Sea to find their estate parceled out to ugly peasants. A similar scene can be found in Dr. Zhivago where we see the protagonist return to his beautiful townhouse in central Moscow only to find that he must share it with a barrage of ugly peasants under the nose of the new communist government. However, Nabokov never witnessed the Revolution in Saint Petersburg. Between 1917 and 1919, however, he was witness to the skirmishes between white, red, and Ukrainian armies that battled for control of the region.

This society - that which came of age during the revolution and left Russia upon reaching adulthood, was often fluently bi or tri-lingual and had been raised looking to the west for sophistication. It was of this group that it was said that they would rather speak bad French than good Russian, and most of them took pride in owning imported luxury goods. Nabokov had an English governess from the time he was three years old; in Speak, Memory he notes that his first memories date to the 1903 when he was four. As the Russian aristocracy had always admired the French, it is unsurprising that much of the escaped nobility settled in Paris, although Nabokov eventually settled in Berlin after attending University in Paris and Berlin was considered the home of choice for Russians that had escaped communism. According to Asher Milbauer, when Nabokov wrote Mary, his first book, he "was praised for his remarkable ability to convey the mood of frustration then prevailing among thousands of exiled Russians who were roaming helplessly over Europe with Berlin as their headquarters." (Milbauer, 1985: 28)

By the time he published Mary, Nabokov had already written many poems and had published a book of poems with family money as a teenager at a loss. Mary is an interesting portrayal of Russia's best as having left the country and re-assembled into a chaotic Diaspora of newly-impoverished intellectuals set in a boardinghouse. The protagonist is Lev Glebovich Ganin, a former White Army soldier who loves poetry (as does Nabokov) and plays chess. Lev is bored with his new mistress, Lyudmila Rubanski, and feels stifled by the depressing boarding house he shares with a would-be poet who wishes to emigrate to France, Klara, a clerical worker, and Alfyorov, a mathematician who wishes to be re-united with his wife in Russia and is tormented by two homosexual dancers. The protagonist is beset with apathy having unsuccessfully tried to gain employment; whereas he had thought that any job would satisfy him, he meets with folly after discovering himself to be much to intelligent to commit himself to the daily torment of meaningless employment.

The attitude of the boardinghouse is one of quiet desperation; we are made aware of the idea that most of the Russians are very talented, capable individuals but are in many cases victims of themselves and in almost all respects are limited by the linguistic barrier between themselves and the outside world. One of the jobs that Ganin takes is that of an extra in a film, which takes on symbolic significance in that life is passing these extras by as the main characters are given most of the fame and attention. Ganin comments that they "knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part" (Nabokov, 1925: 21) and laments the lot of the Russian immigrants as "those innocent exiles, old men and plain girls who were banished far to the rear simply to fill in the background." (Nabokov, 1925: 21)

In this context, Nabokov writes that it is necessary for the intellectual to gain some sort of hope that he may survive these ordeals by retaining his identity. Nabokov introduces here the concept of the 'other' or 'doppelganger,' a symbol that is to become prominent in his works. Ganin recognizes his twin in the crowd of Russian emigrants:

Because of that beard and his starched shirt he had always landed in the front row; in intervals he munched a sandwich and then, after the take, would put on a wretched old coat over his evening dress and return home to a distant part of Berlin, where he worked as a compositor in a printing plant." (Nabokov, 1925:21)

This man not only represents Ganin, but the lot of all anonymous Russian immigrants attempting to survive in European society. His other double that gives him reason for self-reflection is the image of himself on the screen. He is taken aback by how terrible he looks, and introspectively comments on the need to re-establish momentum in a life dominated with nostalgia.

When he returns to his home and speaks with Alfyorov, the latter describes Russia as 'accursed,' which strikes Ganin as no more than curious. Alfyorov's wife, Mary, Ganin discovers to be the Mary of his memory; his first love. This is a theme we see several times in Nabokov's work - in the "Return of Chorb," both the protagonist and a prostitute associate memories with a room that they share in a hotel; we get a sense of the subjectivity of simulacra. Ganin detests Alfyorov, and we get the sense that Mary represents Russia; as Russia is invoked in the recollection of various emigres, it often conflicts with the recollections of others that they encounter. This is an important concept, as it shows how the varying degrees of difference between Russian expatriates fails to reconcile itself with their memories of their .

More than anything, Mary is a story of Ganin's feeling of utter dejection. Chapter three is only two pages long, but offers a full account of the pain and emptiness that Ganin feels. It is poetic but morose, and reveals Nabokov's feeling of being a lonely stranger in '?

' world; the Russian word is appropriate in that it portrays the city that he lives in as being not only 'German' but also from the old Russian meaning 'Not us' or alien.

The duality of his memory of Mary alongside Alfyorov's Mary, or Mary alongside Lyudmilla, is characteristic of Nabokov in that he portrays things in terms of dichotomies and often fixates on women and spatially associated memories of women. In Lolita we find a suitable example of this in Humbert's memory of his first girlfriend in the setting of some seaside resort in France, that he later discovered had died several months later. This caused him to seek new relationships that matched this early memory of his first love. However, in Nabokov's earlier work, Russia figures more prevalently into his writing. We see, for instance, Humbert's criticisms of America through his disdainful view of Delores's mother's trinkets and his thoughts on the roadside hotels of middle America in the 50's. These criticisms are more familiar to us in light of European takes on American culture; Jean Baudrillard's America is a great example of such criticism as he describes Ronald Reagan's smile, Salt Lake City's 'Mormon symmetry, and Las Vegas as 'the whore on the other side of the desert.' We can assume that by the 50's, Nabokov has been fully integrated into Europe's culture and sensibilities.

Memory of places and aesthetics both play a large role in Nabokov's work. Ganin has the ability to dwell on a memory of a garden, or a pavilion or a birch tree, commenting that the only thing that he can't commit to memory are smells. We are given a profound sense of the way the physical world psychologically affects Nabokov through his senses. Return of Chorb strikes us in much the same way; here again the protagonist is Russian, his thoughts are beset by the loss of a woman, and the setting is Germany. Here the protagonist stays in a hotel room that he was first in following marriage to his German wife, who has recently died. He only knows this by recognizing a picture of a pink baigneuse above the bed. Here we see the memory and nostalgia play the key role in the story as the protagonist attempts to fix the memory of his first wife permanently into his mind. In the light of his next novel, "A Guide to Berlin," we get more evidence that Nabokov thinks with his senses, and that exile from Russia represents a sensual estrangement that he must come to terms with in order to establish the primacy of his own happiness.

Guide to Berlin" gives us a happy image of Nabokov's adopted home and the idea that locations are ephemeral, and their abandonment is necessitated by time as much as it is necessitated by the political need for exile. Nabokov evidences this thought when he comments that "The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished." (Nabokov, 1925:92) Nabokov gives the impression that everything decays over time, and that the maintenance of happiness is essential to us in order to understand the process of this decay and to appreciate things that are new. This is reflected in that the narrator is physically handicapped.

It is important to note that in 1925, Nabokov also married Vera Slonim, another Russian Jew that had left the turmoil of Saint Petersburg for a new life in Germany. Vera, who had met Nabokov two years earlier, shared his love for butterflies. Nabokov was to spend 13 years in exile in Berlin; in "A Letter that Never Reached Russia," he insists upon maintaining the courage to maintain a positive attitude even in a world beset by grief and tyranny when he describes the grave of a recently deceased man outside a Russian Orthodox Church where a woman is beside herself with grief:

centuries will roll by...everything will pass, but...my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp...in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness (Nabokov, 1925:87).

Here he shows happiness as an act of defiance, and a triumph of the will. Despite having established himself in Berlin, he faces the necessity of emigration to France in light of the persecution of the Jews, as his young wife and son are both Jewish. Johnson comments that "The story was also historically significant at the time in that it struck a blow against the orthodox notion in the Soviet press that life for all exiles was a 'sterile and bitter purgatory'." (Johnson, 2001) However, in this story he further presents the idea of Russia as a woman.

In 'A Russian Beauty,' a short story written by Nabokov in early 1934, he presents Tsarist Russia as this woman. Here he describes a formerly vivacious woman that has stopped socializing after the death of her father and now, in her 30's, fears that she will never marry. Olga 'was born in the year 1900, in wealthy, carefree family of nobles... Her childhood passed festively, securely, gaily, as was the custom in our country.' (Nabokov, 1934: pg. 3) This reflected the waning belief that tsarist Russia will be resurrected at a time when forced purges were killing millions of independent farmers who had been forced into collectives and penalized for not meeting exploitive quotas with mandatory starvation and exile to Siberia. Although most of these farmers were Ukrainian and not Russian per se, the likelihood that Imperial Russia would be resurrected was now being abandoned. In 1926 in New York, the property of the Russian Orthodox church, including St. Nicholas Cathedral and three million dollars, was handed over to the communists after a New York State Appellate Court found that they were the rightful owners. This was a blow to the Russian community in America, which was now divided along lines of loyalty as many of the former aristocracy continued to use their aristocratic titles in exile. Many of New York's Russian and Georgian emigre communities still use their ducal or princely titles on formal occasions. The tragic middle aged heroine in Nabokov's short story is paralleled by a secondary character in 'We the Living,' a middle-aged woman who was once known in aristocratic circles for her lovely hands. Rand comments that the character's hands had been destroyed by several bitter years of communist oppression.

Nabokov's characters reflect the variety in the lives of emigres. These people varied from nobles who spoke fluent French or English and maintained property outside Russia to general supporters for the Whites or the Czarist regime, including the military, to every variety of intellectuals, economists, artists, and musicians who saw their lifestyles radically compromised under the new regime. It must be remembered that under the soviets, a new reverse-caste system emerged; if one was from a family that supported the Czar or was known to be of an ethnicity that was manifestly anti-communist, such as the Ukrainians. Stalin was particularly brutal to ethnic musicians; in the late 20's he staged a cultural exhibition for wandering balalaika-players and had them all simultaneously executed. It should be remembered that many countries of the west were openly hostile to Russian immigrants. Many of the leftist intellectuals of the west attempted to portray Soviet society as cogent and progressive; the contrarian stories of immigrants required that they be branded as partisans or monarchists. Following the 2nd world war, they were often considered Nazi collaborators, as much of the Soviet Union's population (as well as the rest of Eastern Europe) was under Nazi control.