Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

It can be tersely stated: under Lenin, the ‘value of human life collapsed’, as Alain Brossat put it. And that was the end of the matter, for the next thirty-five years.

Vasily Grossman:

‘Everything inhuman is senseless and worthless’… Amid the total triumph of inhumanity, it has become self-evident that everything effected by violence is senseless and worthless, and that it has no future and will disappear without trace.

Who, here, is describing whom?

In the course of those five February days when the revolutionary fight was being waged in the cold streets of the capital, there flitted before us several times like a shadow the figure of a liberal of noble family, the son of a former tsarist minister, ******* – almost symbolic in his self-satisfied correctness and dry egotism… He now became General Administrator of the Provisional Government… In his Berlin exile where he was finally killed by the stray bullet of a White Guard, he left memoirs of the Provisional Government which are not without interest. Let us place that to his credit.

The whom is Vladimir Nabokov (the father) and the who is Leon Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution (1932, and written in exile). How translucently bloodthirsty is the phrase ‘he was finally killed…’ Because Trotsky counted Nabokov among those he wanted killed, and someone ‘finally’ killed him. Trotsky was not accustomed to waiting so long. He joins Lenin as guilty of the basic charge, although he typically stated the case with more revolutionary ‘elan’: ‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ A considerable severance. Trotsky was not without literary talent, literary expressiveness. But Edmund Wilson, in To the Finland Station (1940), is ridiculous when he talks about Trotsky’s stuff as being ‘part of our permanent literature’. Trotsky’s History is a valuable historical document, but it is worthless as history, as historiography, as writing ; truth, like all other human values, is indefinitely postponable. After a while the reader is physically oppressed by the dishonesty of his prose. In any case, Trotsky’s final pages, for all their massive, inordinate – indeed, world-historical – complacency, are also quietly ironic when you consider the fate of their author. The History runs to three volumes, so these quotes are effectively from pages 1,258–59:

Enemies are gleeful that fifteen years after the revolution the Soviet country is still but little like a kingdom of universal well-being… Capitalism required a hundred years to elevate science and technique to the heights and plunge humanity into the hell of war and crisis. To socialism its enemies allow only fifteen years to create and furnish a terrestrial paradise…

The language of the civilized nations has clearly marked off two epochs in the development of Russia. Where the aristocratic culture introduced into world parlance such barbarisms as tsar, progrom, knout , October has internationalized such words as Bolshevik, soviet and piatiletka . This alone justifies the proletarian revolution, if you imagine that it needs justification.

Which leaves you wondering if piatiletka is Russian for ‘summary execution’, perhaps, or ‘slave camp’. [13] I searched without success for piatiletka in five end-of-monograph glossaries. Its clinching ‘internationalization’, then, didn’t last (although Hitler, and later Mao, took it up). Piatiletka means ‘five-year plan’. ‘Fifteen years after the revolution’: 1932. Stalin, Trotsky’s enemy and eventual murderer, was immovably emplaced, and 6 million people were being systematically starved to death. The Ukraine, in Conquest’s phrase, was becoming ‘one vast Belsen’…

Vladimir Nabokov (the son) met Edmund Wilson in 1940, just after the appearance of To the Finland Station ; and they became good enough friends to produce an inspiring correspondence: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940–1971 . As the editor, Simon Karlinsky, says in his introduction, Wilson acted, to begin with, as Nabokov’s ‘unpaid literary agent’. This spontaneous donation of energy was received with desperate gratitude by Nabokov, who would remain grossly overworked and more or less ‘penniless’ until Lolita (1955). He had just fled with his Jewish wife, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, from France, which was then collapsing to the Germans. Next, going backwards in time, Hitlerian and Weimar Berlin, where Nabokov incorporated into a novel ( The Gift , 1937–38) an erudite but also brilliantly impressionistic biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky – whose revolutionary primer (Nabokov translates it as What to Do? ) was Lenin’s looking-glass. [14] It would not have escaped Nabokov’s notice that Chernyshevsky’s centennial (1928) was the occasion of much lugubrious ceremony in the Soviet Union. Chernyshevsky was saluted as the grandsire of the ‘Socialist Realism’ that Stalin intended to impose on the country’s remaining writers. Then, going further back in time, the flight from revolutionary Russia. Cowed, perhaps, by Nabokov’s strictures on art and ‘ideas’, we neglect the political pulse in him and in his fiction. He wrote two novels about totalitarian states ( Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading ); these were imaginary, but the totalitarian states Nabokov had experienced were real: Lenin’s and Hitler’s. And, as Trotsky contentedly noted, Vladimir Nabokov (the father) was assassinated in Berlin in 1922, when Vladimir Nabokov (the son: in Speak, Memory he refers to the assailants as ‘two Russian Fascists’) was turning twenty-three; that night – ‘Father is no more’ – was the crux of his life. So, yes, there would be a political pulse. And this is partly why Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies. Even Lolita , especially Lolita , is a study in tyranny.

Wilson and Nabokov fell out. Their first enduring disagreement had to do with the Russian Revolution. Their second had to do with Russian prosody, and it was this, quaintly but intelligibly, that foreclosed their friendship, together with Wilson’s cold words about Lolita . As I regretfully see it, Bunny (Bunny was the nickname Volodya was soon using) began to pick fights with his friend at just about the point where Nabokov’s reputation was eclipsing his own. The friendship plummeted in 1966, when Wilson went into print with a hostile (and ignorant) review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin – and gave its last flicker, palely and politely, five years later.

In To the Finland Station Wilson had written about Lenin romantically: Lenin the warrior-poet, the quiet man of destiny, with something of the instinctive grace of the noble savage – Lenin, the savage savant . When the book was reissued in 1971 Wilson added a new introduction:

I have also been charged with having given a much too amiable picture of Lenin, and I believe that this criticism has been made not without some justification… one can see the point of Lenin’s being short with the temporizing and arguing Russians but one cannot be surprised that he gave offense and did not show himself so benevolent as I perhaps tend to make him.

Lenin, we note, is still being assessed merely as a social or collegiate being. As for Trotsky, ‘I have not found anything which obliges me to make any rectifications,’ writes Wilson, having read Isaac Deutscher’s (notoriously mythopoeic) biography. So this stands, among much else: ‘[I]t is as a hero of the faith in Reason that Trotsky must figure for us.’