Nabokov's hometown spurns him again

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Will Russia soon evict novelist Vladimir Nabokov for a second time?

Born in 1899 to a wealthy St. Petersburg family that lived in a splendid three-story townhouse here at Bolshaya Morskaya 47, the future world-famous author of Lolita and other novels had to flee the city - and the townhouse - with his family in 1917 as the Bolshevik Revolution gathered steam.

In 1997, a group of private, independent Nabokov admirers - among them the literary agent of Nabokov's son and executor, Dmitri - approached the St. Petersburg city government during the freewheeling post-perestroika Yeltsin era. They asked if they could establish a Nabokov Museum in a handful of rooms in the once-palatial mansion to honor the writer, who died in 1977. (Literary museums in the former homes or apartments of great writers are a notable part of official Russian culture, and St. Petersburg alone boasts such memorials to writers such as Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova.)

The city declined to lend financial support for a Nabokov Museum (the most common method being designation as a state institution and rent-free status), but told the group it could rent some space if it raised funds itself.

Now, in the increasingly efficient and autocratic Putin era, the city is threatening to evict the museum for a once-common behavioral pattern here - nonpayment of rent - and therein lies a tale.

"We hoped that the city would eventually forgive us the rent and cancel the future payments," says Olga Voronina, the museum's former deputy director, acknowledging that it hasn't paid its rent for a long time and now owes $23,000. St. Petersburg's City Committee for the Management of State Property will hold a hearing March 1 that could lead to an eviction notice.

"We thought," Voronina continues, "well, if other museums did not pay, and we were extra good by doing a lot of programs, being useful to the city, creating this new active, special cultural institution that is oriented to the West, and has a lot of international conferences and projects, the city would look at us favorably and forgive us the debt."

Yet the ironies of the situation go back to 1917.

The Soviets confiscated the palatial home, sold off its furniture and art, dispersed the family's 10,000-volume library, and assigned individual rooms to various Soviet entities - including, eventually and ironically, the office of literary censorship. "It is thanks to the importance of this censorship committee that we still have these rooms preserved," says Tatyana Ponomareva, the museum's director since 2002.

Nabokov spent the rest of his life as a literary emigre. He never owned a home of his own. Contemptuous of the Soviet Union, he never returned to Leningrad, his renamed home city, even for a brief visit. Instead, he maintained his aristocratic bearing and high literary style in a series of rented rooms and apartments in England, Germany, France, the United States and Switzerland, where he spent his final years in the Montreux Palace Hotel.

Russia, unlike such former Soviet satellite-states as Poland and the Czech Republic, has made no effort to return properties stolen by its Communist predecessor state to their former owners. If it did, it could just return the building to the Nabokov family.

Not much chance of that, everyone agrees. With virtually no original possessions - private collectors have contributed a few volumes from the disbanded Nabokov library, a pair of the writer's pince-nez, his Scrabble board, and so on - the museum offers as its main asset pure ambience: the very place where the writer was born and developed his nonpareil imagination.

Voronina, a Nabokov scholar and the estate's representative in Russia, says that's especially important in the case of Nabokov.

"Speak, Memory," she points out, referring to the writer's autobiography, "is probably the only book of that sort dedicated to a place, a house... . He spends the first few chapters describing his childhood in this house. And the house becomes a character in the book. No other writer has left a document like that."

Whether that will persuade the landlords at the City Commission remains to be seen. Even with its paltry holdings, the atmosphere and beautiful carved wood paneling draw 400 visitors a week.

The museum receives the proceeds from the sale of Nabokov's works in Russia, but that doesn't keep up with the approximately $500 monthly rent and other associated costs. Some revenue also comes from Friends of the Nabokov Museum, a tax-exempt group in the United States to which donations can be made. And there's a "donationglobe" in which visitors can stuff their own contributions. Judging by the number of 10-ruble notes (worth about 33 cents each), that's not the solution. Voronina and Ponomareva hope their plight will open the checkbooks of Nabokov fans (including potential corporate sponsors) elsewhere.

Already, one longtime donor, Terry Myers, a technical editor at Pratt & Whitney Aerospace in San Jose, Calif., who has given the museum a number of Nabokov first editions, has promised $10,000.

Voronina and Ponomareva both say that they believe the city's sudden aggressiveness toward the museum has nothing to do with Nabokov's own status as a writer hostile to the nondemocratic ethos many commentators now see waxing under Putin's regime.

"They just finally decided to collect," Voronina sighs.