Читаем Berlin полностью

Among the exciting people who settled in Berlin in the early Weimar years was the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who joined an already thriving Russian colony that had gathered in the Spree metropolis in the wake of the Russian revolution. At the time of Nabokov’s arrival in 1922 some 200,000 Russian émigrés lived in Berlin, clustered primarily in Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Wilmersdorf. Their presence brought dozens of Russian cafés and restaurants, a theater, and over one hundred Russian-speaking taxi drivers. Berliners complained that in parts of Charlottenburg, which they nicknamed “Charlottengrad,” one heard only Russian in the streets. One could certainly read a lot of Russian: there were eighty-six Russian-language publishing houses and eight Russian newspapers. The largest of the publishers was Slovo (Word), which was backed by Ullstein and managed by a colleague of Nabokov’s father (also named Vladimir), while the most important paper, Rul’ (The Rudder) was edited for a time by Nabokov senior. Before moving to Berlin from Cambridge, where he had studied, young Nabokov insisted that he had no desire to live in Germany. In a way he never did. The Berlin milieu that he inhabited was so thoroughly Russian that he barely learned German and made few German friends. He might have agreed with his fellow émigré, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who described Berlin as “the stepmother of Russian cities.”

Nabokov’s fifteen-year stay in Berlin was blighted at the outset by the accidental death of his father in a botched political assassination. On March 28, 1922, Pavel Miliukov, formerly a minister in the Kerensky government that had briefly ruled Russia between the collapse of the Romanov empire and the Bolshevik revolution, delivered a speech at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall. He had been invited by Nabokov senior, who had also introduced him. Just as he was finishing his speech, a man approached the stage and started firing at the speaker with a pistol. Nabokov threw himself in front of Miliukov and took a bullet to the chest. A second gunman, mistaking him for the former minister, pumped two more rounds into his prostrate body (Miliukov himself remained unscathed). It turned out that the would-be assassins were fanatical czarists then living in Munich. They were captured, tried, and sent to jail, but this was no solace to Nabokov fils, who wanted to challenge both the gunmen to duels.

Nabokov wrote his first eight novels in Berlin, and all were set entirely or partly in the German capital. Because of their author’s self-imposed ghettoization, however, these works focus almost exclusively on the émigré community, leaving the rest of the city untouched. They deal with people trying to hold on to their former homeland through memory, preferring to live in the past rather than in the present. Berlin, as such, figures mainly as a backdrop of dreary apartment houses, shoddy rented rooms, and parks where one might catch the occasional butterfly. Nabokov later claimed that his Berlin novels could just as well have been written in Naples, Rumania, or Holland. But could they have? Only in a large émigré community such as Berlin’s could individual exiles retain so much of their former lives; only in a metropolis so internally fragmented and unsure of itself could they escape the usual pressures to adopt native manners, language, and customs. Nabokov’s Berlin oeuvre was the product not of a “melting pot,” but of an urban bouillabaisse (or borscht) full of very discrete chunks.