Inside Story by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis [Amis, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

VII

The Nabokovs were refugees, and three times over. As teenagers they independently fled the October Revolution; on her way out Véra Slonim passed through a pogrom in the Ukraine involving tens of thousands of mob murders. That was in 1919. They fled the Bolsheviks, horsemen of terror and famine, and, via the Crimea, Greece, and England, sought sanctuary – in Berlin. Then France, until the Germans followed them there; then the eleventh-hour embarcation to New York in 1940, a few weeks ahead of the Wehrmacht (on its next westbound crossing their boat, the Champlain, was torpedoed and sunk). VN’s father (also Vladimir Nabokov), the liberal statesman, was murdered by a White Russian fascist in Berlin (1922); in the same city his brother Sergei was arrested in 1943 (for homosexuality), rearrested the following year (for sedition), and died in a concentration camp near Hamburg in January 1945. That was their Europe; and they went back there, in style and for good, in 1959.

Yes, and I met Véra too. I spent most of a day with her, in 1983, in the still centre of Europe, the Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland (where they had lived since 1961), breaking only for lunch with her son, the incredibly tall Dmitri, whom I would meet again. Véra was a riveting and convivial goldenskinned beauty; on sensitive subjects she could suddenly turn very fierce, but I was never disconcerted because there was always the contingent light of humour in her eyes.

Vladimir died in 1977, aged seventy-eight. Véra died in 1991, aged eighty-nine. And Dmitri died in 2012, aged seventy-seven.

From Dmitri’s funeral address in April 1991:

On the eve of a risky hip operation two years ago, my brave and considerate mother asked that I bring her her favourite blue dress, because she might be receiving someone. I had the eerie feeling she wanted that dress for a very different reason. She survived on that occasion. Now, for her last earthly encounter, she was clad in that very dress. It was Mother’s wish that her ashes be united with those of Father’s in the urn at the Clarens Cemetery. In a curiously Nabokovian twist of things, there was some difficulty in locating that urn. My instinct was to call Mother, and ask her what to do about it. But there was no Mother to ask.

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