Beam’s carelessness reaches an apogee in the Boston Globe article Nabokov was such a Jerk.
It’s not worth dwelling on much of the content: there’s little there of substance. But I shall take a look at the claim that Beam makes regarding Doctor Zhivago. Zhivago is important to this story, as while Nabokov hated the book for artistic and political reasons, Wilson latched onto it. “A black cat came between us … Doctor Zhivago” as Nabokov explained.
Beam is expanding on this in The Feud:
Nabokov went so far as to suggest that Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, had written the [Zhivago] manuscript. But she would have been generally unavailable to help, because in 1950 she had begun a five year sentence in the gulag … Know them by the company by which they keep: it was Nabokov and the vestigial Stalinist stooges inside the USSR who pushed the ugly Ivinskaya theory”.
In the article, this has become a “a bitter, personal campaign against Pasternak”.
You cannot be serious
It’s certainly true that Nabokov strongly disliked Zhivago. Given his history, it is no surprise that he “found the book fundamentally antiliberal in glorifying Lenin’s overthrow of Russian democracy” [VN: The American Years]. He also did have some strange ideas about the pervasiveness of the KGB in the Soviet union, believing anything published there (including Solzhenitsyn) must have their approval.
But he had high regard for Pasternak as a poet, believing this was justification enough for winning the Nobel prize, and took care to avoid bringing trouble to Pasternak’s precarious position in Russia: he was worried a serious critique would have left Pasternak “more vulnerable than ever.” After the Soviets had denounced the book themselves, Nabokov still refused “to go out of my way to demolish it in public”.
The jockeying of Zhivago and Lolita in the bestseller list was far more jovial than Beam portrays it. As Galya Diment records in the wonderful Pniniad (the story of Marc Szeftel, a partial inspiration of Pnin):
Szeftel personally saw Nabokov checking the list weekly in the Periodicals Room of the Cornell Library. It was to Marc Szeftel (and Classicist Harry Caplan, which may explain the use of Latin) that Nabokov, happy with his top ranking for the week, made the statement about defeating Pasternak’s novel … “Delendam esse [sic] Zhivago!”.
This is hardly the stuff of bitter, personal campaigns.
The “Ivinskaya theory”
But what of Ivinskaya? In the article, Beam is trying to imply that the Soviet authorities, and Nabokov, were pushing some kind of common “Ivinskaya theory” to discredit Pasternak. Were they?
Beam is trying to imply that the Soviet authorities, and Nabokov, were pushing some kind of common “Ivinskaya theory” to discredit Pasternak. Were they?
Beam has no citation for this, but the only reference to Nabokov making such a comment about Ivinskaya – Pasternak’s mistress (he was simultaneously married) – comes from Stacy Schiff’s ambitious biography of Véra Nabokov. It is repeated in a number of works Beam cites elsewhere, including Nabokov’s Secret History, but they all use Schiff as the source.
Schiff notes that the implication was that it read “as if written by a woman” (Véra, 243). Brian Boyd, while praising the aim of Schiff’s work, noted in a review (Handmaid to genius, Globe and Mail Toronto May 15, 1999) that “Schiff had to cast her net wide. Unfortunately, she often uses her catch rather indiscriminately … almost certainly erroneous, patch of colour to the plain outline of the truth” – as we shall see, perhaps this is the case here.
Conclusive evidence?
There are five references Schiff backs this up with. Two of them do not susbtantiate the “mistress” claim (and two are impossible to verify):
- Two appear to contain nothing on Pasternak’s mistress or wife
- Marc Szeftel in the Cornell magazine, Nov 1980 (this is reproduced in an appendix of Pniniad)
- The last is the Russian language Russkaya Mysl, which I cannot check
- The second is conversation to Filippa Rolf, and is impossible to verify
- Finally, to David Slavitt, a Newsweek reporter who became a novelist himself. This can be verified. Slavitt’s account can be found in The Nabokovian.
Contra Beam’s characterisation, he paints a warm picture of the Nabokovs’ hospitality to a young and clueless reporter: “He was most cordial, made me feel welcome at once” and supplies him with the story he needs. And he learns that that Nabokov “suspected Pasternak’s wife had written much of” Dr Zhivago.
Wife, not mistress, in 1958. Is Slavitt just misremembering? Was Nabokov even aware of Ivinskaya at the time? There is little evidence either way, but the sense seems clear: Nabokov was making the point that Zhivago sounded “feminine”, not particular claims about Ivinskaya.
The real tragedy of Ivinskaya
Where do the Soviets come into this? Well, they did suggest that Ivinskaya had written it – privately to her, during a KGB interrogation, after Pasternak’s death in 1960. She was arrested on trumped up charges of receiving foreign currency (the book’s royalties) from abroad, and the interrogator tried to use a dedication to show she was the author (and so incriminate her). There was no publicised theory that she was the author, and Nabokov could not have been aware of it.
To say that Beam is reaching here: to combine these two events distant in time, disconnected from each other and not even clearly about the same subject – to create a common Ivinskaya-as-author theory would be a huge understatement. While Nabokov’s deprecation of women’s literature – something he would recant with regard to Jane Austen – is very dubious, plainly the attack on Pasternak here was artistic, not part of some campaign in common with the USSR.
The details do matter, and Beam’s reaching around for unrelated fragments out of animus for his subject is more evidence of his disregard for them.