Andrea Pitzer on The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

When Andrea Pitzer first read Nabokov as a college student, she wasn't an immediate fan. "I didn't mind violence, or sex, or protagonists who were not nice—I didn't even need them to reform," she writes in the introduction to her first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. "But I wanted the events and the people in his books to matter."

Nabokov escaped Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany (with his Jewish wife and son) and then Occupied France. He witnessed unimaginable violence and tragedy in his lifetime (1899–1977). Even while he's praised for being a brilliant prose stylist, he's criticized for his indifference to these political atrocities.

But what if the Lolita author folded hidden layers of meaning into his books—stories that "have something profound to teach us about being human and our very way of interacting with art"? That's what Pitzer finds in The Secret History, drawing on information from court cases, FBI files, Red Cross records and other forgotten or newly declassified documents. I recently spoke with the D.C.-based writer about her revelatory new book.

You talk about being drawn to Nabokov's writing when you were 18. Did you have the sense, even then, that there was more to his books than gorgeous sentences?
When I first encountered his work when I was young, it was, Wow, this guy really knows how to write, but he's freaking me out. I really identified with Lolita the character, but what happened to her seemed so horrific that, while I appreciated the skill that went into [the novel], I didn't want to immerse myself too fully in it. The second time, I thought, This language is really so incredible. Let me give it more of a chance. As I read more and more, I sensed there was more to his books, but it was a really long time before I went back to find out what that was.

Do you think a lot of readers of Nabokov don't get the "whole experience" by just focusing on the language or the fact that his fiction has been perceived as scandalous?
There are certainly people who go on the reputation of [his writing] or the subject matter and read it as one step above a dirty old man writing about dirty-old-man subjects. Those are clearly not the serious readers. There's so much to his work that serious readers can really pick one thing and pay attention to it, and it's as rich as the entire tapestry of what another writer would do.

I think his public personality that he put forward—especially after Lolita, when he became so famous—was someone who was beyond it all, who couldn't be touched. He was making art and was disengaged from the world, and he wanted to present the novels that way. So it was a little bit of a sales job that he did. It's speculation, but I feel that because he'd been a refugee in Europe and had had such a hard time for so long, he [wanted] to show that he couldn't be touched by any of it—that he was beyond history and had survived and triumphed. But I also think that he was folding these things into the book, and people who read carefully would see little pieces of them.

When you set out to write the book, did you have a plan for how you'd start exploring Nabokov's world and the history that surrounded it?
I really stumbled into it. I was at Harvard for a year as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. I took a course on Nabokov and just got swept back into it. That's when I really wanted to sit down and focus on his work in a way I never had.

I had studied international affairs and a lot of nuclear talks and disarmament issues when I was an undergraduate, so when I was reading Pale Fire, I noticed all these dates and places that seemed to recall this nuclear history, and it made me curious. That was the keyhole I went through. Everything just expanded from there.

How long did you work on The Secret History?
Five years, nonstop. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and make notes. I'd literally stay up the entire night sometimes—just consumed with it. I would say to my husband, "I'm going to look for this thing today, and I bet it's going to be there." It would be something from the books. I'd get a feel for the pattern of how he was folding things in, half hidden. I'd say, "I bet I'm going to find there was a concentration camp in this place." And I'd go, and the history would be there. 

You talk about how Nabokov wanted his literature students to read with a microscope and look for things that weren't so obvious. Is that what he wanted for his own readers?
There are some cases where I think he did want this history to be found, because after the books would come out, he'd say certain things in public. In some cases, it was literally, "This book is full of plums I'm waiting for someone to pull out." But for him, I think plumbing the literary allusions and diving into the language and history was all the same thing—the curiosity of a really vibrant reader.