Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR STACY SCHIFF’S

  VÉRA

  (MRS. VLADIMIR NABOKOV)

  “Schiff has succeeded in creating an elegantly nuanced portrait of the artist’s wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov’s marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work. She effortlessly conjures up the disparate worlds the couple inhabited … a formidable challenge for a biographer—a challenge that Ms. Schiff, with this book, has most persuasively met.”

  —MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times

  “An absorbing story, illumined by Schiff’s flair for the succinct insight … This portrait of a fifty-two-year marriage to a woman who was the writer’s prime reader opens up Nabokov’s private life.… But the triumph of Véra is not just in providing entrée to her famous husband. She fascinates of her own right.”

  —LYNDALL GORDON, The New York Times Book Review

  “Schiff has performed a monumental task in drawing a nuanced and fairly detailed portrait of the woman behind the mask both husband and wife conspired to create.… Writing in sprightly prose that captures the ‘verbal tennis’ of the couple’s interactions, [she] has given us a vivid and truthful portrait of a proud and gifted woman whose contribution to Vladimir Nabokov’s life and career was immense.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait. Schiff’s elegant prose style [is] at once forceful and playfully allusive in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Artful … both revolutionary and old-fashioned, an intimate biography that leaves both the dignity and the privacy of its subject intact.”

  —Newsday

  “Illuminating … ‘Without my wife,’ Nabokov once remarked, ‘I wouldn’t have written a single novel.’ … Schiff’s work boldly and brilliantly illuminates how complex was this deceptively simple statement … A superb portrait.”

  —LOUISE DESALYO, The Chicago Tribune

  “Absorbing, often wildly amusing, and deeply moving … Véra’s mere listening to Lolita did more than we shall ever know to determine what we read when we read Lolita.”

  —CLARENCE BROWN, The Seattle Times

  “Excellent … Behind every great man is a book about a great woman. The same is true of Schiff’s Véra, and yet it is more than just a portrait of a marriage. It is a necessary contribution to Nabokov scholarship.… Véra is both love story and literary study.… Schiff has done a splendid job.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “This book offers more than a peek at the famous author through his wife’s eyes. When her 1991 New York Times obit called Véra “Wife, Muse, Agent,” it only hinted at her role, which is rescued from obscurity in Schiff’s graceful prose.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Stacy Schiff is phenomenally talented, her service to the Nabokovs is utterly sincere, and the resulting book is overwhelmingly gratifying. She writes sentence after sentence of such panache that you almost believe that she has been visited by the ghost of Nabokov himself.… Schiff has given us two fascinating lives for the price of one. Whether you want to know about the husband or the wife, you should make Schiff, as Véra was for Vladimir, your ‘designated driver.’ ”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  “Schiff writes with a lucidity and an elegance that chimes beautifully with the Nabokovian tale she has to tell.… This cool and delectable study is all the more remarkable for being a portrait of an invisible woman. Stacy Schiff has concentrated on concrete details that reveal the outline of the absent ones.… She measures Véra’s impact rather as one measures the effect of gravity, or invisible particles, by their impact on distant visible bodies … [A] wonderfully acute and delicate study.”

  —The Independent

  “Schiff, no mean writer herself, shows how every reader of Nabokov should be grateful to his long-suffering wife. Her superb book, a triumph of research, rhythm, and style, casts his novels in a new light.”

  —Mail on Sunday

  “At heart a love story … Stacy Schiff fills in a glaring gap in the ‘wives of’ portrait gallery.”

  —BRENDA MADDOX, Literary Review

  “Schiff describes the Nabokovs as ‘the ultimate portmanteau couple’ and her book is something of a portmanteau, too: two biographies for the price of one and a portrait of a marriage thrown in.… This is a rich and subtle book. It is also, at times, very moving.”

  —The Times (London)

  “The Nabokovs’ partnership must be one of the most tantalising double acts in literary history … a remarkable book … it is indicative of Schiff’s sureness of touch that she can make fun spring from close textual reading.… Following Schiff’s bold, patient construction of Véra from the fiction (of all kinds) with which she surrounded herself approaches the delight of reading a Nabokovian fiction.”

  —The Spectator

  “A scholarly, readable look at a remarkable literary duo.”

  —Library Journal

  “Véra has met her match in Stacy Schiff, whose biography is a model of subtle searching, and elegant scholarship. It lucidly dissects the three people involved in the Nabokov marriage: Véra, Vladimir, and their joint creation, the author VN. It makes clear that if, as Schiff proposes, Nabokov was for much of his life a ‘national treasure in search of a nation,’ Véra was his anchor, his emotional and imaginative refuge, ‘the country in which he lived.’ ”

  —HILARY SPURLING, Daily Telegraph

  “Engrossing and utterly romantic … [Véra] was his wife in the most complete and complicated sense of the word. Schiff’s elegant prose and fanatical attention to detail establish this unequivocally.”

  —New York

  “Elegant … a sensitive rendering of one of the century’s great love stories. The book probes delicately into the considerable mysteries at the heart of a happy marriage.”

  —WILL BLYTHE, Mirabella

  “As much a love story as a straightforward biography … This being the Nabokovs we’re talking about, though, it’s also a tale of soul mates who defy conventional expectations and explanations.”

  —Salon

  “The fascinating story of a modern woman who made a life-long career as her husband’s intellectual companion, secretary, manager, and guardian angel.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Véra is a beautiful book. Built on a heroic scale, it is subtle, intimate, and richly argued. Almost every page projects a truly remarkable woman and her part as a tutelary spirit in the work of a great writer. Has there ever been a literary marriage as productive, complex, and intriguing as this one?”

  —JUSTIN KAPLAN

  “There are many good reasons to be interested in the life of Véra Nabokov, but the best one is that Stacy Schiff has written it. She is the rising star of literary biography: witty, lucid, penetrating, and humane.”

  —JUDITH THURMAN

  “Shy, perfectionist, polyglot, Véra Nabokov emerges as one of the great Russian literary wives, as crucial to her husband’s work as Anna Dostoevsky or Sonya Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff’s triumph is that she has put in all the tones and half-tones in this shaded portrait of the brilliant writer’s inspired and inspiring collaborator.”

  —EDMUND WHITE

  “If this one were only the story of an uncommon marriage, a marriage so profound as to renew the word’s meaning, it would be a book well worth reading—interesting, entertaining, smart, sad, and funny. So much the better that it is about the marriage of one of the century’s most original writers and the women who made it possible indeed, necessary, for him to become that person.”

  —TRACY KIDDER

  “I am truly in love with this book. Schiff’s sentences are magnificent, deceptively complex, full of insight and
fact and distance and wry humor, so that every page is a kind of mini feast. Were I a reviewer I would be straining to find words to describe this book—unlike anything I’ve ever read—words that are not overused and thus devalued, words like ‘exquisite’ and ‘breathtaking,’ which are both appropriate and true. And the detail! It is extraordinary.”

  —ANITA SHREVE

  ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF

  Saint-Exupéry: A Biography

  Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1999 by Stacy Schiff

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  This work was published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 1999

  Excerpts from the previously unpublished letters of Edmund Wilson copyright © 1999 by Helen Miranda Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., on behalf of the Estate of Edmund Wilson.

  Excerpts from previously unpublished Nabokov material © the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.

  Reprinted with the kind permission of Dmitri Nabokov.

  A portion of this work was originally published in slightly different form

  in The New Yorker, February 19, 1997.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schiff, Stacy.

  Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) : portrait of a marriage / Stacy Schiff.

  — Modern Library pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Random House, 1999.

  Romanized record.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78176-5

  1. Nabokov, Véra. 2. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Relations with women. 3. Spouses of authors—Russia—Biography. 4. Authors, Russian—20th-century—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov.

  PG3476.N3Z8626 2000

  813′.54—dc21

  [B] 99-42413

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  For Marc

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Stacy Schiff

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  1 PETERSBURG 3848

  2 THE ROMANTIC AGE

  3 THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  4 THE PERSON IN QUESTION

  5 NABOKOV 101

  6 NABOKOV 102

  7 PAST PERFECT

  8 AUTRES RIVAGES

  9 LOOK AT THE MASKS

  10 THE LAND BEYOND THE VEIL

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  INTERVIEWER: Could you say how important your wife has been as a collaborator in your work?

  NABOKOV: No, I could not.

  —THE LISTENER, OCTOBER 23, 1969

  This is the story of a woman, a man, and a marriage, a threesome that adds up any number of ways. For Véra and Vladimir Nabokov the arithmetic was simple: The elements amounted to a single entity. “There is only one real number: One,” argues a doubly fictional character at the center of Nabokov’s first English-language novel. Other writers came in pairs, recalls a long-term publisher, but none with the Nabokovs’ intensity. They were the ultimate portmanteau couple. “It was as close a marriage as I was ever present at,” remembers William Maxwell, speaking for countless others. Even her detractors held that Véra Nabokov participated in her husband’s work to an unprecedented degree. And that was in the Russian league, in which the competition is fierce.

  The Nabokovs came—and went—as a couple. Most people never saw him without her. Not only were they inseparable but their sentences fused, on the page and in person. They shared a datebook. Their handwritings invade each other’s notebooks; he would begin from one end, she from the other. Three years into the marriage Vladimir apologized to his mother for writing her in pencil; Véra was in the next room correcting proofs, with what was presumably the couple’s only pen. Thirty-five years later Véra lodged the same complaint. She was writing in pencil because her pen always seemed to be in use somewhere. Only as she came to the end of her letter did her husband return it to her. They did the biographer no favors: They spent very little time apart. Why could they not be like Louise Colet and Flaubert, one hundred letters and only six visits in over a year and a half? The Nabokovs’ struck many as one of the great love stories.

  Who was she? “She was just a wife,” remembered a publisher with whom she corresponded, on her husband’s behalf, for three decades. “She was the international champion in the Wife-of-Writer Competition, adding intelligence to the usual equation,” recalled a friend. “She was the Saint Sebastian of wives,” concluded another. Whoever she was, when it came to self-display she favored the negative comparison. She was not a Russian aristocrat. She was not her husband’s first fiancée. She was decidedly not—on this point she was emphatic—a lady driver. She was no Dark Lady of the Sonnets; she neither wrote the books nor starred in them. She appears in only one credited cameo in the fiction. Appropriately, she makes her entrance attempting to coax a black cat out of hiding. Lolita was always Dolores on the dotted line; Véra Nabokov was the dotted line, a walking ellipsis. “She was a Polish princess, wasn’t she?” asked a translator who worked with her closely. One publisher was under the impression that she was French. Several of her husband’s students knew her to be a German countess. A fair number of her correspondents got her patronymic wrong. Her husband’s chroniclers, working in her lifetime, had no choice but to write around her.

  Nabokov thought he would be remembered for two works—his Eugene Onegin translation and Lolita—one of which Véra had suggested, the other of which she had salvaged. The two projects that meant the most to him in the later years were a Russian translation of Lolita and the revised edition of Speak, Memory. Véra collaborated on the first and contributed to the second. The original Nabokovian, she was a full creative partner in everything her husband did. She had a need to do something great with her life. And as he made clear from the start, Nabokov had a very great need of her. Lawyers, publishers, relatives, colleagues, friends, agreed on one point: “He would have been nowhere without her.” Her marriage put her in the spotlight; her nature made her drift toward the shadows. As did some of her responsibilities, which demanded silence. Nabokov spoke fondly of having composed in the car, “the only place in America with no noise and no draft.” Véra was the one who parked him there, under a tree, in the remote western outposts he so loved. And then obligingly disappeared from the picture.

  To one person she remained always hugely visible. Nabokov was supremely conscious of her presence. He lit up around his wife; he played off of her. The two comported themselves as if they shared a secret. With visitors later in life they resembled nothing so much as two children plotting, in code, about how much they dared tell the adults. One Cornell colleague went so far as to use the “u” word: “He was the most uxorious man I have ever met.” Nabokov thought his wife discerning, wise, whimsical, and much else as well. In 1949 he registered his disapproval of the object of a student’s affection, whom he did not consider a raving beauty. But beauty isn’t everything, protested the Cornellian. “Mr. Keegan, Mr. Keegan, that’s just a conceit we carry on with. Beauty is everything,” Professor Nabokov assured him. An American admirer sought out the couple in Italy during the summer of 1967. They were walking down a mountain trail, butterfly nets in hand. Nabokov was jubilant. Earlier in the day, he had sighted a rare species, precisely the one he had been looking for. He had gone back for his wife of forty-two years. He wanted her to be with him when he made his capture.

  His image was flattering, but so was the image he saw reflected back at hi
m. One of the discarded titles within the works was “Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror”; in Nabokov’s case, the mirror was to be found in his wife’s brilliant blue eyes. The illusion stands prominently at the center of the highly refractive literature, as it does at the center of the marriage. Nabokov reveled in being a figment of Véra’s imagination, which is no wonder, given who she thought he was. When she met him she felt that he was the greatest writer of his generation; to that single truth she held strong for sixty-eight years, as if to compensate for all the loss and the turmoil, the accidents of history. She did all in her power to see to it that he existed not in time, only in art, thus sparing him the fate of so many of his characters, imprisoned by their various passions. The genius went into the work, not the life—something Véra Nabokov had to explain regularly to family members, whose letters to her husband were turned over to her to be answered. This resulted in understandable confusion about authorship, which grew worse over the years.

  It has been said that the Nabokovs “refined their marriage to a work of art.” Both partners wrung an immense amount of creative mileage from it. In singular ways this was as true in Berlin in the 1920s as it was in upstate New York in the 1950s and Switzerland in the 1970s. After the advent of Lolita, the public Nabokov, the voice of Nabokov, was Véra’s. We are accustomed to husbands silencing wives, but here was a wife silencing, editing, speaking for, creating, her husband. In many ways, the distant, unapproachable, irreproachable “VN” was her construct. To begin to pry the couple apart is to see what lay beneath the monument, the figure in the carpet.

  Véra Nabokov—she added the accent when she arrived in America, so that the name would be pronounced to rhyme with “dare ah”—was an eminent woman because she was married to an eminent man, more exactly a man whom she helped to achieve eminence. She is important for what she reveals about her husband. Which is a very great deal; the marriage was at the heart of his existence. It defined them both. It shaped his work. The keen-eyed Saul Steinberg may have put it best: “It would be difficult to write about Véra without mentioning Vladimir. But it would be impossible to write about Vladimir without mentioning Véra.” Hers was a life lived in the margins, but then—as Nabokov teaches us—sometimes the commentary is the story.