Provence Pastoral

Almost a century ago, the writer Vladimir Nabokov spent two months as a laborer in the fields and fruit groves of southern France. It proved to be a turning point in his life and art.

As 2009 drew to a close, and with it the first decade of a new millennium, a Ukraine-born soprano named Julia Kogan was laying down tracks in a St. Petersburg studio just around the corner from the Menshikov Palace. Her vocals were to star in an album called Troika: Russia’s Westerly Poetry in Three Orchestral Song Cycles.

Kogan was raised in the US and now lives in France. The album’s title alludes not only to the three song cycles, but also to the three languages of the lyrics’ poetry: English, French, and Russian. Tracks 11 and 12 are among six renditions of verses written by Vladimir Nabokov, who had been born 110 years earlier in the same city in which Kogan was recording.

Слоняюсь переулками без цели,
прислушиваюсь к древним временам:
при Цезаре цикады те же пели,
и то же солнце стлалось по стенам.

Поет платан, и ствол – в пятнистом блеске;
поет лавчонка; можно отстранить
легко звенящий бисер занавески:
поет портной, вытягивая нить.

И женщина у круглого фонтана
поет, полощет синее белье,
и пятнами ложится тень платана
на камни, на корзину, на нее.

Как хорошо в звенящем мире этом
скользить плечом вдоль меловых оград,
быть русским заблудившимся поэтом
средь лепета латинского цикад!

Сольес-Пон, 1923 г.

The booklet accompanying the album says of Nabokov: “Although known worldwide as an English-language novelist, he was also a prodigious poet and translator who, towards the end of his life, translated a number of his early Russian poems into English.”

This is precisely the case with track 11, titled “Прованс,” and its corresponding English version “Provence,” track 12. The Russian original was written in 1923. Nabokov’s English translation appeared in his 1969 book, Poems and Problems. The Provence pieces reflect their globe-trotting author’s tendency to memorialize in verse the places he visited. American fans of Nabokov might know “Lines Written in Oregon,” a poem published in the same book as “Provence,” in which he lyrically illustrates his sojourns during his famous stay in the southern Oregon town of Ashland.

But, in contrast with the Oregon musings, Kogan’s musical exhumation of Nabokov’s Provence poetry of 1923 serves as a guidepost to a sweeping and engrossing story that is not widely known. The six-song cycle of Nabokov poems on Troika was dubbed “Sing, Poetry,” in a nod to the literary titan’s memoir Speak, Memory. Despite devoting a chapter of that memoir to the French period of his exile, Nabokov made no mention there of his two months in southern France in 1923, and the first volume of Brian Boyd’s magisterial biography spends scarcely two of its 523 pages detailing this episode, which was to remain dear to Nabokov all his life.

Although the Provence region is world-renowned, the Provencal community of Solliès-Pont has no such claim to fame. Its population today is around 11,000, and a freeway links it to the port city of Toulon about 10 miles away. But for the hundred-year stretch between 1850 and 1950, it consistently had just 2,700 to 3,000 inhabitants. And it was a “fruit-market town” when Nabokov was there, according to Boyd’s biography. Yet the agricultural bounty of the area was the very reason that the 24-year-old son of former gilded St. Petersburg aristocracy arrived on the scene in June 1923.

Nabokov’s exile from Russia was then in its fourth year, and at a low point. He was grief-stricken and dispirited. First, his beloved father had been assassinated in Berlin by a bullet meant for someone else. It was the worst tragedy of his young life. Then a second heartbreak befell him when his engagement to a teenage beauty named Svetlana Siewert was called off in January 1923, mainly because her parents could not cope with the fact that he lacked a “steady job.” To recharge his batteries and soothe his shattered psyche, Nabokov decided to become a farmhand. His restorative communion with nature was centered on the Domaine de Beaulieu, a large estate owned by Shulim Bespalov, a wealthy industrialist and shipping magnate who had lived in Odessa before the revolution. The estate still exists, though today it is referred to as Le Grand Beaulieu.

“The farm lay on flat, burgundy-and-milk-chocolate-colored soil, bordered on one side by a low bush-clad ridge,” and its centerpiece was a “sandstone-and-tile farmhouse, half stately home, half barracks,” in Boyd’s description. Such were Nabokov’s quarters at the start of his farm laborer stint. His fellow fruit-pickers were Italians, with whom he imbibed cheap wine during lunch breaks. He spent his leisure time skinny-dipping in the Gapeau River and tanning himself under the namesake sun of Solliès-Pont. His arrival came amid cherry season, and local historian Louis Béroud noted that Nabokov “particularly liked the cherry trees on the plateau of Les Pourraques, above the community of Solliès-Toucas.”

Decades later, Nabokov reminisced to a biographer on his dearth of beginner’s luck in the orchard. “The first time I worked quite fast and took the ripest cherries and put them inside this basket which was lined with… oilcloth. I hung it on a branch. It tumbled down and all the cherries were spoiled. I had to start all over again.”

The early poetry of place Nabokov wrote was his prelude to the immortal works to come. But in this particular poem, a considerable something was quite literally lost in translation. An online search for the “Прованс” of the Troika album yields a different poem. That’s because it is in fact a two-poem cycle, whose first poem is marked simply with a numeral 1. The second poem is part of the Прованс cycle, but it is given a different name, “Сольнце” (“The Sun”). Four decades later, when Nabokov translated the two-cycle poem into English, he included only the second one and titled it “Provence.”

In the first poem, which has no English translation, Nabokov places himself, “dusty and happy,” in the shade of an olive tree as he unfastens his sandal straps. He proclaims to be a “vagabond gladdened by his fate, without amazement, without worry.” And he concludes the stanza saying that perhaps, under that olive tree, along that road, he will recall an unidentified “you.”

Nabokov’s literary output in Solliès-Pont was not limited to short poems, however. After it was arranged for him to bunk in a room all by himself, he set about composing two verse dramas, Dedushka (The Grandfather) and Polyus (The Pole). In addition, he continued his contributions to the Berlin émigré newspaper Rul (The Rudder), in which his verses had been regularly appearing under the pseudonym V. Sirin. The new lines were a subtle courtship via newsprint with another contributor who had recently joined the publication’s lineup, a certain V.S. The initials stood for Véra Slonim. Nabokov had met her in Berlin just before his departure, and she would replace Svetlana Siewert as the woman he was destined to marry.

As for actual farm work, Nabokov plunged into it with aplomb, although he often couldn’t help but give in to the diversion of entomology while on the job. He indulged his passion for collecting insects and astounded a British butterfly chaser when, after keeping watch over the Brit’s vehicle, used the scientific names of assorted species to inquire whether he had caught any of them.

The harvest moved from cherries to apricots and peaches, then gave way to days of weeding cornfields and pruning apple and pear trees. The task that brought Nabokov the most enjoyment was watering the fields. After several weeks of toil for the Bespalovs, the budding writer apparently decided that Solliès-Pont had produced in him the desired effect, so he called it a summer. His route back to Berlin included stopovers in Toulon, Marseille, Nice, and Paris.

Solliès-Pont’s brief brush with future literary genius in the summer of 1923 is a distant memory today, one that is not publicized by those in the business of highlighting notable things from their community’s past. But Le Grand Beaulieu was identified by the regional government as a culturally important site worthy of preservation. However, that designation seems to stem from its position of importance to the Knights Hospitaller many centuries ago, not the connection with Nabokov.

Yet the significance to Nabokov of the time in Solliès-Pont is evidenced in the fact that it made its way into his work. In his novel Подвиг (1932; published in English as Glory in 1971), Nabokov re-creates his summer in Solliès-Pont, known in the book as Molignac. The Italians, the cherry-picking, and the nocturnal sounds of the frogs and nightingales are all there. And like Nabokov, who wrote a desperate letter to Svetlana that summer, Martin, the novel’s hero, writes an equally fruitless missive to his Sonia.

Today, even amid the breakneck pace of modernity, the calming pleasures of the dappled countryside around Le Grand Beaulieu still offer the respite Nabokov felt there. The St. John the Baptist fountain with its “rounded rim,” the winding lanes branching in all directions from the bracing waters of the Gapeau, the abundance drawn from the land, all these can still be enjoyed much as they were then.

Just how was it, though, that Nabokov found his way to a nondescript town in southern France and shed his charmed life for that of a common laborer? The answer is simple, yet beguilingly so: he was invited there by a longtime family friend, a learned agronomist who had led the short-lived Crimean government during the Civil War. His name was Solomon Krym.

Krym was a Constitutional Democrat and therefore held political views close to those of Nabokov’s father, who served as minister of justice in the Krym government. Elected to represent Crimea in two iterations of the pre-revolutionary Russian Duma, Krym was also a generous philanthropist who funded the establishment of Taurida National University, the first institution of higher learning on the peninsula. Additionally, Krym was a prominent member of the Crimean Karaite community. He spent several years in a civil marriage with Vera Egiz, who subsequently became the wife of the influential twentieth-century Karaite hakham (spiritual leader) Seraya Shapshal.

However, Krym’s attempt to govern Crimea in accordance with his ideals during the Civil War ran into obdurate opposition from the leaders of the White Army, who believed that the wartime circumstances required nothing less than strict martial law. His ethnicity also worked against him. “Many leaders of the White movement and the Whites in general were very anti-Semitic,” said Mikhail Kizilov, an Oxford-educated Russian scholar of Crimea. “This is why the government of Karaite Solomon Krym… did not seem particularly trustworthy to them. They also did not like its liberal and democratic character.”

With the armed forces arrayed against him, Krym was forced to acquiesce and watch helplessly as his side’s hold on Crimea melted away. Both he and the Nabokov family were aboard the same ship into exile, the Nadezhda. But whereas the Nabokovs ended up in Berlin, Krym presumably figured that his agronomy expertise would serve him best in the vineyards of Côte de Provence, and he chose France as his destination. In 1923, he was in the employ of the Bespalovs at the Domaine de Beaulieu and thus in a position to suggest that some time there might be good for Nabokov.

According to Boyd’s biography, Krym became a good friend of Nabokov during those two months. Whether that friendship lasted beyond the writer’s summer in Provence is not known, but there were opportunities in later years for their paths to cross. And Krym became like his young protégé in another respect as well, authoring a compilation of five stories in 1925 titled Crimean Legends.

Both in Crimea and in exile, Krym was an indefatigable patron of science-related endeavors. His sponsorship of archaeological digs allowed Crimean treasures to be unearthed, and the research station atop the Crimean mountain of Kara Dag, named for founder Terenty Vyazemsky, owes much to his assistance. “Without Solomon Krym’s involvement, the Kara Dag biostation might have remained a project that existed only on paper,” said Nadya Grafova, a Moscow archivist who is working on a biography of Krym.

He applied his agricultural prowess as the manager of the Domaine de Beaulieu for several years. Later, he traveled to British-mandate Palestine to study crop-growing methods there, as well as to England to share winemaking insights. A newspaper obituary written by Prince Dmitry Obolensky describes Krym’s intentions to build a mud bath complex in the French Riviera resort town of Hyères. He wanted to re-create the mud therapy spas of Saki, a Crimean wellness hub widely known among Russians. The man dubbed “Wise Solomon” lived out his days at an estate and farm near Toulon that he called “La Crimée,” the French name for Crimea.

Krym married while he was in France, but he and his wife had no children of their own. He did adopt a son named Rurik, though. It is unknown exactly where Rurik was born or how he came to be adopted by Krym. “For now, there are more questions than answers about Rurik,” Grafova said.

Rurik’s departure from France cannot be dated even roughly. The earliest mention of him appears to be in the March 1951 issue of a monthly local-interest magazine from Great Neck, New York; that was almost 15 years after the death of his adoptive father. At some point, Rurik added a second “m” to his surname, giving it a different spelling from Solomon’s. He was 30 years old and working as a translator for the fledgling United Nations when he was interviewed for the article, which describes him as resembling in both speech and appearance the French-American movie actor Charles Boyer.

“I was born in Russia but exited to France when my father’s estate was wiped out by the Revolution,” he told the Great Neck Circle. The article notes that he had earned two degrees from the Sorbonne as well as an M.A. from Columbia University and was working on a doctorate from New York University. It goes on to say that he did translation at the UN from French and Russian into English.

Sometime later, he transferred to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which entailed a move to Vienna. His title was principal officer of economic studies, and he wrote at least a handful of articles in the agency’s flagship publication, the IAEA Bulletin.

Rurik Krymm was also the brother-in-law of Alexander Dolgun, an American who became something of a cause célèbre in the 1970s after his release from years of horrific imprisonment in the Soviet Union. The ordeal was recounted in minute detail in the 1975 book Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag.

Krymm died in Vienna in 1979. One of his two children is still alive, but his recollection is that his father disclosed very little to the family about childhood memories. That precludes a more intimate understanding of his father Solomon, the exiled agronomist who helped make Vladimir Nabokov whole again in the summer of 1923. In addition, Toulon has lost its entire legacy of Krym. His La Crimée estate in the suburb of La Garde was sold by Rurik in 1946 and was not preserved. Krym was buried in the La Garde cemetery on a plot that had a 15-year concession, but his grave was likewise not preserved.

Krym’s undying fondness for his Karaite homeland, expressed in the name he gave to his residence, defined him to such an extent that Obolensky wrote the following in Krym’s obituary: “He loved Russia, but for him, Russia did not exist without Crimea, just as Crimea did not exist without Russia.” That love was returned in 2016. Following the Russian annexation of the peninsula, a billboard with an image of Solomon Krym appeared in Simferopol amid campaigning for Duma seats, reminding Crimean voters that this exercise had a shining historical precedent. “I am sure that Krym, although he was a liberal politician, would have been happy to see the Crimea again be part of Russia,” Kizilov said.

In 1939, Nabokov was once again in France, a Parisian final act before the next phase of his exile brought him to the US. And he again wrote an emotive poem about a place. The English translation of this one, titled “To Russia,” would also appear in Poems and Problems, the same volume that contains “Provence.” From the opening line, it is a cry of torment directed at the country responsible for the predicament of the self-described “Russian poet.”

Will you leave me alone? I implore you!
Dusk is ghastly. Life’s noises subside.
I am helpless. And I am dying
Of the blind touch of your whelming tide.

He who freely abandons his country
on the heights to bewail it is free.
But now I am down in the valley
and now do not come close to me. …

But for that, through the tears, oh, Russia,
through the grass of two far-parted tombs,
through the birch tree’s tremulous macules,
through all that sustained me since youth,

with your blind eyes, your dear eyes, cease looking
at me, oh, pity my soul,
do not rummage around in the coalpit,
do not grope for my life in this hole

because years have gone by and centuries,
and for sufferings, sorrow, and shame,
too late—there is no one to pardon
and no one to carry the blame.

Sixteen years had passed since he came to Solliès-Pont in search of solace for his similarly tortured soul. The fruit groves of southern France, the swims in the Gapeau River, the labor in cultivated earth, and the friendship of Solomon Krym were his therapy, the Domaine de Beaulieu his sanatorium. The writing he did there doubled as a patient progress record, with “poems that charted his reviving spirits,” wrote Boyd.

Given the amount of time Nabokov spent in Francophone environments over the course of his life, it is striking that in all his years as a writer he produced only two texts in the language. His literary legacy in French is based on his marvelous translations of leading Gallic authors, such as Arthur Rimbaud and Romain Rolland. He truly was a consummate trilingual craftsman and thus a deserving inclusion in Julia Kogan’s Troika ensemble. To describe his ability to create such triple masterpieces, he was fond of saying, “My head speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear speaks French.”

As was the case with his homeland, Nabokov also never returned to the fruit-market town in Provence, according to historian Louis Béroud. So how profound was the significance in his life of those fleeting two months? Nabokov himself provided a clue in 1977, when that memory finally spoke. In Béroud’s telling, it was the eve of the writer’s death, and the people to whom he was closest were gathered around him in Montreux, Switzerland. As his life was ebbing away, he told them: “I have loved France. I have loved Provence. And I have loved Solliès-Pont.”