The Magical Chorus

actually nominated was in 1947, but the committee then rejected his candidacy, because while The Quiet Don was “juicy and colorful,” it wanted to wait for the publication of Sholokhov’s announced work-in-progress on the war, They Fought for the Homeland (which was never completed).

Sholokhov was a favorite of Stalin and then of Khrushchev, and the leadership continued lobbying on his behalf. In the meantime, Sholokhov made a move to strengthen his reputation in Stockholm. When he went to France in 1959, Sholokhov, once again displaying his independence of character, supported the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the USSR, even though he called it an “unpolished, shapeless” work (an opinion shared, among others, by Akhmatova and Nabokov). That unorthodox statement caused an almost apoplectic reaction in the corridors of the Kremlin as “contradicting our interests.”²¹

In October 1965, when Sholokhov, then sixty, got the news that he had been selected, he was hunting deep in the woods of the Urals. His first phone call was not home, but to Moscow, to the Central Committee, for permission to accept the award. Only after he received the official word did Sholokhov send a telegram to Stockholm to confirm that he would appear at the awards ceremony. There is a memorandum in the Central Committee archives about giving Sholokhov a subsidy of $3,000 for the purchase of a tailcoat and “to equip the persons accompanying him,”²² the loan to be repaid from his Nobel Prize winnings.

It is hard to imagine the other longtime Russian pretender to the Nobel Prize, the elegant, restrained, and proud Vladimir Nabokov, in a similar humiliating situation. The aristocratically punctilious Nabokov, in the 1960s considered the preeminent contemporary writer by many in the West, where he lived, never did receive that highest literary accolade, joining Chekhov, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Platonov among the overlooked. For many years the Nobel committee was scandalized by Nabokov’s most famous work, Lolita (1958), about the forbidden love of Humbert Humbert, a forty-year-old professor, for the twelve-year-old “nymphet” (a word invented by Nabokov). Despite his ironic attitude toward fame, Nabokov was deeply hurt by this. He had positioned himself as the most innovative Russian prose writer since Bely, busily experimenting with narrative, while combining precise, acutely observed, details with a markedly phantasmagoric and parodic form.

Nabokov’s surrealism increased gradually, from his Russian-language novel The Gift (1937–38, arguably his best work), which shocked the emigre community with its mockery of nineteenth-century liberal icon Nikolai Chernyshevsky, to his late pyrotechnical English-language works Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969). All that time, Nabokov was eyeing the Nobel.

His Western biographers tend to underestimate the symbolic value of the Nobel Prize for a Russian emigre. The fact that the first Russian to get the prize in 1933 was his fellow emigre Bunin, with whom he had a complex relationship of master and ambitious younger colleague, must have encouraged Nabokov, because it evinced the pull of stylistically refined prose for the international literary arbiters.

Both Lenin and Stalin had been well informed about Nabokov’s father, a prominent prerevolutionary politician of a liberal bent (he was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by an extremist monarchist). Nabokov fils came to the attention of Lenin and other Politburo members in 1923 in the Soviet censors’ “secret bulletin” with the firm conclusion: “Hostile to the Soviet regime.”²³ Since that first notice, Nabokov’s works published in the West were included on the Soviet blacklists, as was most of Russian emigre literature.

Nabokov remained hostile to the Soviet regime throughout his life, both in his writing and his teaching at Cornell University. This unwavering hostility (unlike that of some other emigre luminaries, like Rachmaninoff or Bunin) was one of the reasons that kept him from appreciating Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, where the Bolshevik revolution and its leader, Lenin, were depicted as a legitimate phenomenon: a position unacceptable for Nabokov. He dismissed Doctor Zhivago as “a sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, and trite coincidences.”²⁴

Nabokov had started out as a poet and continued writing poetry (it was nice, but in Brodsky’s stern opinion, “second-rate”) all his life, and Pasternak’s baroque poetic style was alien to him. He ridiculed Pasternak even in 1927: “His verse is fleshy, goitrous, with bulging eyes: as if his muse suffered from exothalmic goiter…. And even his syntax is perverted.”²⁵ That is, Nabokov disdained the early Pasternak for excessive avant- gardism and the later writing, on the contrary, for primitivism.

Pasternak’s ode addressed to Stalin and published in Izvestiya in 1936, his prominent role in the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, and his subsequent appearance at the pro-Soviet International Writers’ Congress in Paris, would hardly have disposed the anti-Communist Nabokov toward the poet. This was at the root of the bizarre theory Nabokov shared privately, that the scandal surrounding the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West was planned by the Soviets for a single goal: to guarantee the commercial success of the novel so that the hard currency earnings could be used to finance Communist propaganda abroad.

Nabokov’s ideological and stylistic disagreements with Pasternak were amplified by personal motives. Interestingly, Pasternak knew or guessed that it was so: in 1956 he told a visitor from Great Britain that Nabokov envied him.²⁶ Scholars who deny the very possibility of envy (“And what was there to envy?”) forget how marginalized culturally the emigre Nabokov must have felt in comparison to Pasternak, who was declared the country’s leading poet in 1934 by the Bolshevik Bukharin.

And what could Nabokov have felt in 1958, when Lolita, which had at last reached the top of American best-seller lists, was knocked from its perch by Doctor Zhivago, which he hated so much (and which he felt was supported by the Soviet government) and which was propelled to the top of the list by the news of the Nobel Prize? In addition, Nabokov knew that many critics watching this unprecedented battle between two novels by Russian authors in the Western arena preferred Doctor Zhivago as the more worthy, “noble” work with Christian values.

This was not only the opinion in Russian emigre circles, which Nabokov quite understandably felt should be supporting a fellow exile, but to his great dismay, his best American friend, the influential critic Edmund Wilson, had ignored Lolita but praised Doctor Zhivago to the skies in his notable review in The New Yorker.

The Communist leadership always considered the Swedish Academy an anti-Soviet institution. However, there is no doubt that it was Nabokov’s uncompromising anticommunism (which extended not only to Stalin but Lenin, which in those years was considered extremist by many Western intellectuals), together with his vulnerable position as an emigre, that made his candidacy “inconvenient” for the Nobel Prize. The semipornographic reputation of Lolita was a mere excuse for the Swedish academicians.

That is why they were not moved even by the passionate letter supporting Nabokov’s candidacy from Moscow, sent by Solzhenitsyn, who had just received the Nobel Prize in 1970. The letter, in which Solzhenitsyn hails Nabokov as a writer with a “blinding literary gift, precisely the kind we call genius,”²⁷ is very curious. Solzhenitsyn praised Nabokov’s novels, written both in Russian and in English, for their refined wordplay and brilliant composition while feeling little sympathy for high modernism, whose great representative Nabokov was.