Vladimir Nabokov arrived in England in the spring of 1919 with a butterfly net, a schoolboy’s English, and no country to go back to. The three years he spent at Trinity College, Cambridge, rarely feature in accounts of a career that produced Lolita and Pale Fire. Yet the man who would become perhaps the most dazzling English prose stylist of the twentieth century spent his English education determined not to become English at all. Cambridge is where displacement hardened into a vocation. It is a quietly instructive episode in the long history of literature made by exiles, and it happened on a soggy playing field and in a second-hand bookshop.
Off the last boat from the Crimea
Nabokov was born in St Petersburg on 22 April 1899, into a wealthy and liberal aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a leading figure in the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party and a man of conspicuous principle. The Bolshevik seizure of power drove the family south to the Crimea, and then out of Russia altogether. On 2/15 April 1919, as the Red Army closed on the peninsula, the Nabokovs sailed from Sevastopol aboard a small Greek cargo steamer called the Nadezhda – “Hope”. In Speak, Memory Nabokov recalled concentrating on a game of chess with his father on deck while the ship left harbour under fire.
They reached London on 27 May 1919 and took rooms at 55 Stanhope Gardens, in South Kensington. That autumn the two eldest sons went up to Cambridge: Vladimir to Trinity, his brother Sergei also to the university. On 1 October 1919 Nabokov moved into rooms at R6, Great Court, sharing with a fellow Russian émigré, Mikhail Kalashnikov. He and Sergei had places arranged, as émigré chroniclers record, on the understanding that they were sons of a prominent exiled Russian. For a family that had lost its estates, its city and its language-world in the space of eighteen months, Trinity’s medieval courts were a strange, damp sanctuary.
Zoology, then words
He matriculated to read Natural Sciences, meaning zoology – the discipline of the butterflies he had chased since boyhood. He soon switched to Modern and Medieval Languages, taking French and Russian. His college tutor was the classicist Ernest Harrison; in Speak, Memory Nabokov remembered fumbling a tea tray at their first meeting, an early note of the misfit’s comedy that runs through his account of England.
As a student he was brilliant and largely absent, preferring the writing of poems to the attending of lectures. He was not idle, though. In 1920 the London journal The Entomologist carried his first scientific paper, on butterflies he had collected in the Crimea before the family fled. He experimented in English verse too, placing a poem, “Remembrance”, in The English Review in 1920. But his serious work was in his own language. He published Russian poems in Rul’, the Berlin émigré newspaper his father helped edit, at first under the pen name “Cantab”, and from January 1921 under the byline that would carry his entire Russian-language career: Vladimir Sirin, after a mythical bird of Russian folklore.
The goalkeeper as a portrait of exile
Nabokov kept goal for his college. The passage he devotes to goalkeeping in Speak, Memory is one of the most quoted things he wrote about Cambridge, and it is really a self-portrait. To Nabokov the goalkeeper was a romantic solitary, the “lone eagle”, a figure of glamour and reserve set apart from the scrimmage. Standing alone in the drizzle at the far end of a sodden English field, he wrote, he felt less the keeper of a soccer goal than “the keeper of a secret”.
It is the whole Cambridge experience compressed into an image. Here was a young man in the correct kit, playing the national game of his host country, competent and admired, and entirely somewhere else in his mind. The English took him for a plausible undergraduate. Behind the jersey he was mounting a private resistance.
A dictionary against forgetting
The secret was Russia, and above all the Russian language, which he was frightened of losing to disuse and foreign contamination. On a bookstall in Cambridge’s Market Place he found a second-hand set of Vladimir Dahl’s Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language, four fat volumes of it, and set himself the discipline of reading at least ten pages a day, copying out words and turns of phrase that pleased him. His fear of losing or corrupting the one thing he had salvaged from Russia – her language – became, in his own word, “positively morbid”.
This is the key to the whole period, and it is why the Cambridge years matter far beyond the biographical footnote. Nabokov later reflected that the true story of his college years in England was the story of his trying to become a Russian writer. While English undergraduates debated at the Union and punted on the Cam, he was conducting a salvage operation on a tongue that was, with every passing year of Soviet rule, spoken by a smaller and more scattered diaspora. Culture built in culture exile has to be carried in the head, and Nabokov spent Cambridge stocking the hold.
He kept England, meanwhile, at a deliberate arm’s length. His memoir is candid about how little of Cambridge intellectual life reached him; he moved among a small Russian circle and treated the surrounding country as weather to be endured rather than a society to be joined. This was not snobbery so much as self-defence. To let England in fully was to let Russia go, and letting Russia go was the one thing he would not do.
The telegram from Berlin
Politics did not leave the family in peace. On 28 March 1922, at a public meeting in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, two Russian monarchists attempted to assassinate the liberal leader Pavel Milyukov. Nabokov’s father threw himself at one of the gunmen and was shot dead by the second. Vladimir was in his final term at Cambridge when the news came. His father’s murder in exile, shielding a political ally, is the shadow that falls across the end of the Cambridge chapter and much of the work that followed; assassinations and the sudden violent theft of a father recur through his fiction for the rest of his life.
He sat his examinations that June regardless. Having taken a starred first in the first part of the Tripos, he graduated with second-class honours, and on 21 June 1922 he left England for Berlin, where his widowed mother and the younger children had settled among the Russian émigré colony. He never lived in Britain again, though he would return to English soil only in the language itself.
What Cambridge left him
Nabokov liked to claim he learned little at Cambridge, and in the narrow academic sense that may be true. What the place gave him was not an education but a condition. He went up as a displaced boy who still half-expected to go home; he came down an exile who had accepted there was no home to go to, and had chosen instead to carry the homeland in his prose.
The paradox is worth holding onto. The three years he spent guarding his Russianness against England eventually produced the writer who, from the 1940s, would out-write native novelists in their own language – Lolita in 1955, Pale Fire in 1962, a body of English work of almost unfair brilliance. That English mastery was seeded, strangely, in the years he spent refusing to be English. Cambridge did not make Nabokov an Englishman. It made him an exile, and the exile made the novelist.
Image: The Great Court and Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Vladimir Nabokov studied. Aquatint by Thomas Malton, 1798. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
