Berlin: The Russian Émigré Community Between the Two World Wars

Culture in Berlin: A Parallel World

By the middle of the nineteenth century Berlin’s cultural life, permeated with the Romantic spirit, was pushed into the background by economic development.

An important center of industry and commerce, Berlin was attracting the best technicians and economists from all over Germany (Baedeker 41). Within a few years of the foundation of the Reich in 1871 Berlin attained worldwide importance as the capital of the German Empire and the residence of the Emperors. At the turn of the century Berlin numbered about two million inhabitants, and the great period of the increasingly large metropolis began. Attracted by the cosmopolitan spirit of the capital, poets, artists, musicians, actors, scholars, and scientists gave Berlin a special atmosphere of its own, and in most cases they found a permanent home here. The early years of the new century brought the ﬁ rst taxis, buses, and underground trains. With the absorption of neighboring towns and rural parishes after World War I came another great leap forward.

If the 1820-30s are considered Russia’s Golden Age, then the 1920s certainly were the Golden Age of Berlin. The period begins at about 1910 and ends very abruptly on the night of the January 30^th 1933, with Hitler’s accession to power:

The twenties were a period of violence, creative anarchy, a Renaissance age of gangsters and aesthetes, in short — an extraordinary decade. The arts flourished on German soil in the 1920s as they had not since the age of Goethe. During this short period of artistic freedom in Weimar, Gropius founded his legendary Bauhaus with Mies van der Rohe, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Moholy Nagy. Einstein and Max Planck were at work in Berlin, where relativity in the world of physics seemed to find an echo in the despondent relativism of other disciplines, and soon enough in public and private morals. The twenties saw the great age of the silent film in Berlin: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Faust, The Golem, The Blue Angel; and the short spectacular triumph of Expressionism in literature, music, and painting. (Mander 119)

Refugees poured into Berlin from Russia after the revolution and were compelled to continue their trek in the company of the largely Jewish-led Berlin avant-garde to Paris, London and New York after Hitler took power. One should not forget that although the action of The Gift unfolds during the late 1920s, the fact that Nabokov recreates it a decade later, when Hitler’s thugs had rid Germany of the arts for a generation, strongly colors his and the readers’ perception.

German intellectuals, especially artists, probably never felt at home in the German Reich either, being strangers in their own land: “From the time

that Bismarck’s Second Reich gave physical, materialist, and military forces precedence over the life of the intellect, when the character of the drill sergeant was proposed and recognized by the world as the typical representative of Germany, from that time German writers have felt they were living in moral banishment and exile. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine” (Roth 209). It is no wonder that before biding farewell to its readers The Gift also encapsulates a comic image of the police sergeant: the protagonist is stopped by a policeman on a rainy Berlin evening in the ﬁ nal pages of the novel (“‘Standing in the nude is also impossible,’ said the policeman. ‘I’ll take off my trunks and imitate a statue,’

suggested Fyodor. The policeman took out his notebook and so ﬁ ercely tore the pencil out of the pencil-hold that he dropped it on the sidewalk”; G347).

The State of Russian Émigré Art

The abstract painter and art theorist Vasily Kandinsky’s move to Germany was only one of thousands of such emigrations from Russia in the early 1920s. Refugees from Russia ﬂ ocked into Berlin, and by 1922 the Russian population alone was estimated at 100,000. In addition to the permanent émigrés, there were a large number of privileged transients and temporary visitors such as artists Natan Altman, Iosif Chaikov, and El Lissitzky, “who traveled on Soviet passports and who did not intend to settle outside the Soviet Union” (Bowlt 217). Marc Chagall said of those days: “After the war, Berlin had become a kind of caravansary where everyone traveling between Moscow and the West came together. . . . In the apartments round the Bayrische Platz there were as many samovars and theosophical and Tolstoyan countesses as there had been in Moscow. . . . In my whole life I’ve never seen so many wonderful rabbis or so many Constructivists as in Berlin in 1922” (Roditi 27).

In spite of the large colony of émigrés, the new Soviet state paradoxically

“enjoyed the sympathy of the new Weimar Republic. On both an ideological and a cultural level the two nations shared common ground” (Bowlt 218). Dadaism began in Zurich and Berlin; a painter like Max Ernst was hailed as a ‘Surrealist’

on migrating to Paris in 1923. Both Germany and the Soviet Union wished to establish a relationship between the working classes and art, and “both felt that radical politics and radical art made a reasonable combination” (Ibid.). Hence, the most important artistic developments in the Berlin of the early 1920s were the ideas of the nonobjective avant-garde who had developed a new world view of art from the Suprematism (nonobjective Cubism) of Kazimir Malevich (Neumann 21). The experimental works by the painter Vsevolod Romanov in The Gift seem to reﬂ ect these and other contemporary trends in the realm of visual arts.

Young Nabokov, on the contrary, contributed to an elegant Russian art journal published in Berlin, Zhar-ptitsa (Fire-Bird), which “concerned itself with the national traditions of Old Russia and sought to uphold the concept of good taste” (Bowlt 218). Many of the old members of the “World of Art,” such as Léon Bakst and Vasily Shukhaev, were associated with Fire-Bird. Also containing articles on Russian ballet and poetry, this popular journal appealed to those who nostalgically yearned for a bygone Russia.

Nabokov recalls that one of the striking features of émigré life, in keeping with its itiner ant and dramatic character, was “the abnormal frequency of the literary readings in private houses or hired halls” (Speak, Memory 281). In addition to diverse exhibitions and cultural events regularly held in Berlin in the 1920s, there was a ﬂ ourishing theatre scene, including dramatic cabarets such as Der Blauf Vogel and Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theatre in 1923. Between the World Wars, actors and companies that had emigrated together made efforts to establish permanent repertory theaters. Most of those were in fact carrying on the dramatic genres and styles that had developed and achieved popularity in Russia on the eve of the revolution (Raeff 407), but this is not to say that contemporary themes were dismissed altogether. For example, a number of Nabokov’s plays were successfully staged at that time. Eventually the difﬁ culties in setting up permanent theaters drove most émigré actors and directors from Germany to other centers of the Diaspora or back to their homeland.

The Vanished World of Russians in Germany in the 1920–30s

When asked to explain why he would never write another novel in Russian, Nabokov gave this detailed account of “the great, and still unsung, era of Russian intellectual expatriation”: “Roughly between 1920 and 1940 — books written in Russian by émigré Russians and published by émigré ﬁ rms abroad were eagerly bought or borrowed by émigré readers but were absolutely banned in Soviet Russia . . . An émigré novel, published, say, in Paris and sold over all free Europe, might have, in those years, a total sale of 1,000 or 2,000 copies — that would be a best seller — but every copy would also pass from hand to hand and be read by at least 20 persons, and at least 50 annually if stocked by Russian lending libraries, of which there were hundreds in West Europe alone” (Strong Opinions 36-37). Nabokov’s Berlin of White-Russian refugees generated a contemporary joke that “to cross the Tiergarten from the city centre to Charlottenburg one had to apply for a Russian visa” (Mander 125). Another popular anecdote of the time is about the German who, hearing only Russian spoken on the Kurfürstendamm, returns to his apartment and hangs himself because he is homesick (Struve 25).

The effect of these refugees is discernible in the artistic life of the time — in the

second-hand theatrical inﬂ uence of Constantin Stanislavsky and Alexander Tairov on producers like Piscator, and in ﬁ lms like Peter the Great, which the Russian producer Buchovetsky made with Emil Jannings. However, the era of expatriation ended during World War ii. Old writers died, Russian publishers also vanished, and the general atmosphere of exile culture inevitably faded.

Like James Joyce, for whom the suggestive potential of minor details in describing Dublin of 1904 was enormously fascinating, Nabokov tried to be meticulously exact in recreating the reality of Berlin in The Gift. The precision of his use of minor detail is among the most important aspects of his literary technique. Alexander Goldenweizer, a lawyer, publisher and family friend, wrote to Nabokov from the United States on 29 July 1938, sharing with the author his impressions of the recently published portion of the novel:

A day before our departure, the latest issue of Sovremennye zapiski arrived, full of interesting stuff. The present excerpt from The Gift is especially good [Volume 66 contained Chapter Three of the novel. — Y.L.]. During my Berlin years I visited the barrister’s firm of Traum, Baum, and Käsebier frequently, and I can testify that you have depicted the live and dead furnishings of this office perfectly well. Like your heroine, I was always astonished by the striking contrast of the exterior appearance of the staircase and the office, which reminded me of the cells of our lay magistrates, and comparatively luxurious furniture of the chiefs’

offices . . . I am waiting for the next instalment impatiently — maybe I will meet more acquaintances there. (Glushanok 121)

In The Gift we read about the ﬁ rm to which Goldenweizer refers: “It began with a dark, steep, incredibly dilapidated staircase which was fully matched by the sinister decrepitude of the ofﬁ ce premises, a state of affairs not true only of the chief barrister’s ofﬁ ce with its over-stuffed armchairs and giant glass-topped-table furnishings” (G189).

The three names — Traum, Baum, and Käsebier — comprise a meaningful triad (“a complete German idyll, with little tables amid the greenery and a wonderful view” [G190]); in German Traum means a “dream,” Baum =

“tree,” Käse + Bier = “cheese” + “beer.” For Nabokov, in addition to the realia in the background, the names and toponyms hold a special place if they can be reinforced by identiﬁ able literary references. The reader is prompted here by an earlier remark that the atmosphere of Zina’s ofﬁ ce reminds Fyodor “somehow of Dickens” (G189). The clue is not misleading; the required answer is indeed available from Charles Dickens himself: the London law ﬁ rm of “Chizzle, Mizzle, Drizzle” is featured in Bleak House (1853), his ninth novel, which was viewed as an assault on the ﬂ aws of the British judiciary system. What is more, Nabokov then draws special attention to this play with the owners’ “emblematic names”

in his Lectures on Literature (72; noted in Dolinin, Kommentarii 695). The actual

ﬁ rm was then called Weil, Gans & Dieckmann. In the novel Nabokov has the lead partner writing popular biographies of ﬁ gures like Sarah Bernhardt in his desire to cozy up to his French clientele. Like his ﬁ ctional counterpart, Weil wrote on Dreyfus, to the same end (Schiff 64).

Details drawn from reality are abundant in The Gift, and the background against which the main plot unfolds produces a strong impression that the novel has an almost documentary quality. Chapter Three of this book, entitled “Setting,”

provides a more detailed analysis of this tendency; I will offer here only a typical example of the novel’s dense Berlin texture: “The Shchyogolevs had ﬁ nished

[Ill. 2-11, 2-12] Haus Vaterland (Berlin, 1920s)

their packing; Zina had gone off to work and at one o’clock was due to meet her mother for lunch at the Vaterland. Luckily they had not suggested that Fyodor join them — on the contrary, Marianna Nikolavna, as she warmed up some coffee for him in the kitchen where he sat in his dressing gown, disconcerted by the bivouac-like atmos phere in the apartment, warned him that a little Italian salad and some ham had been left” (G355). The Vaterland, where Zina is to meet her mother for lunch, was a restaurant located at Potsdam Square (Potsdamer Platz), in the heart of Berlin. It was identiﬁ able by a trafﬁ c tower with a clock in the very center of the square; from the top of this tower a policeman (and later Germany’s ﬁ rst trafﬁ c lights, installed in 1924) controlled the ﬂ ow of trafﬁ c. Together with Leipziger Platz on its eastern edge the square formed the main road link between the east and west of the city (in 1925, close to the ﬁ ctional time frame of The Gift, 600 trams passed through the square every hour). Numerous hotels and cafés attracted people to Potsdam Square, but a true magnet for tourists was the

“Haus Vaterland” (House of the Fatherland), a restaurant and a variety theater. It could seat two thousand after a major renovation in 1927–28 by architect Carl Stahl-Urach, making it the largest restaurant in Europe. For Marianna Nikolavna, therefore, inviting her daughter to such a fashionable place before her impending departure is a symbolically generous gesture; Fyodor does not earn the same invitation because Marianna is not intending to waste money for a lunch on her dubious tenant whom she, presumably, will never see again.

Russian Literature in Exile

Nabokov’s ﬁ rst Russian novel, Mary, was written in Berlin in 1926 (a German translation was published by Ullstein in 1928); his next seven novels were also written in Berlin and all of them were set at least partly in Berlin. This period, when Nabokov’s ﬁ rst book was published, serves for two main reasons as a watershed in the development of Russian literary modernism emerging out of the political cataclysms of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution. The ﬁ rst reason, as Evelyn Bristol recapitulates, is that in 1925 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union passed a resolution enunciating a comprehensive position on questions of literature and art (although it did not actually exert its control, it asserted its right to do so in the future, and eventually did so). The second reason is that this was the time in which many literary émigrés realized that their exile was not a short-term condition, and they began in a serious way to create a branch of Russian culture in emigration. Vladislav Khodasevich, one of the marshals of émigré Russian culture and Nabokov’s mentor, settled in Paris in 1926 and helped make it the leading center of émigré literature until World War ii (Bristol 387). It was Khodasevich who called Berlin the “Stepmother of Russian Cities” in his 1923 poem.

Upon moving to Berlin as a young émigré Nabokov feared he might lose the beauty and richness of his Russian by learning to speak German ﬂ uently. The task of linguistic occlusion was made easier by the fact that Nabokov, like many of his compatriots, lived in a closed émigré circle of Russian friends and read exclusively Russian newspapers, magazines, and books (if we are to believe Nabokov, his

“only forays into the local language were the civilities exchanged with [his]

successive landlords or landladies and the routine necessities of shopping”;

Strong Opinions 189). Indeed, the emigration restored to writers an audience, a literary institution and a style of communication that had not existed in Russian literature since the salons of the 1820s: “That wonderful semipermeable membrane between reality and literature, which allowed readers to anticipate that they might ﬁ nd themselves or their Petersburg friends wandering into the pages of Eugene Onegin or frequenting the milieu from which it had arisen, had disappeared with the formation of a literary relation between author and public that was on a much larger, more anonymous scale” (Greenleaf 141). Enjoying absolute freedom of thought was not without certain disadvantages though, and many émigré artists experienced a sense that they were working in an absolute void: “True, there was among émigrés a sufﬁ cient number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris, and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively large scale; but since none of those writings could circulate within the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile un reality” (Speak, Memory 280).

Images of the city created by Russian authors in exile usually contrast with and defy the canonical myth of dazzling, sparkling, ﬂ ashing Berlin. Instead of the multicolored, kaleidoscopic urban festival, they portray a dull, monotonous, and monochrome cityscape. Oswald Spengler’s concept of the modern city as a demonic megalopolis — or, better, a necropolis — where Western civilization is coming to its imminent end served as a model for many Russian writers to conceptualize their Berlin experience (Dolinin, “The Stepmother of Russian Cities” 230; 234). Nabokov, however, was able both to preserve the charm of a thriving urban space and to stay in line with the émigré artistic tradition (as, for instance, in his short stories “The Reunion” and “A Guide to Berlin”).

Russian literary forces in Europe were grouped around several “thick”

journals, the most important of which, Sovremennye zapiski, was published in Paris. Other periodicals and almanacs, such as Chisla (Numbers) and Krug (Circle), were almost exclusively devoted to the works of the younger generation.

Several publishing houses in Paris, Berlin, and even Harbin, China, published Russian prose and poetry; the Russian branch of the American ymca press in Paris did much to promote Russian literature abroad. “Notwithstanding the encouragement and aid offered by various cultural organizations, the Russian literary emigration experienced great hardships”; it is greatly to the credit of the

émigré literary community that it “continued its creative work in spite of these difﬁ culties and remained true to its calling, instead of seeking a more lucrative occupation or letting itself be overwhelmed by [its] misfortunes” (Iswolsky 61).

While the younger generation of writers and poets had inevitably submitted to the inﬂ uence of Western literature, especially to that of the modern French and English masters, the memory of Russia formed the leitmotif of the works produced by the older generation headed by Ivan Bunin (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933). Its representatives cherished memories of their native land and feared lest its image should be dimmed or forgotten. Poet Boris Poplavsky, a kind of Russian Rimbaud, “with the face of a soccer player rather than a poet”

(Terapiano 112), living the life of the Montparnasse literary bohemian before dying allegedly by suicide, was one of the promising members of the younger generation. Nabokov’s kaleidoscopic The Gift reserved a generous space for all of them, some more recognizable and others less, within the conﬁ nes of a carefully

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