Declassified documents and public records in The Secret History
What’s so secret about The Secret History? The most important history in the book is information that was once public knowledge but which has fallen out of public memory–Nabokov’s secret history as our forgotten past. But there is also some actual secret history in there: classified documents and public records that shed light on Nabokov’s life […]
Meet Carl Junghans: informer, propagandist, and… literary inspiration for Nabokov?
Vladimir Nabokov threw a Molotov cocktail into twentieth-century literature with Lolita. Alexander Solzhenitsyn survived Russian forced-labor camps and brought the word gulag into the global lexicon. Plenty of drama involving both of them appears in The Secret History, but as characters in the book they nonetheless faced competition from a lesser-known, scenery-chewing German named Carl […]
Was Véra Nabokov’s sister a spy?
When the Nabokovs came to America in 1940, they sailed through immigration, pausing only to struggle with a locked trunk that needed to be inspected by customs. But arrival in a new country was less simple for thousands of other refugees fleeing Europe during World War II, including Véra Nabokov’s younger sister Sonia. Making her […]
