Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  It is clear that the two slipped quickly into a relationship; by November Nabokov was swearing that he loved as never before, with an infinite tenderness, that he regretted every minute of the past he had not shared with Véra. The ease with which the two fell together is clearer still if we allow ourselves a glimpse at the thematic shadows the Berlin nights cast on the fictions, which is a little like saying we shall now base our idea of female anatomy on the work of Picasso. This both was and was not the case; the image is more refraction than reflection. But the trails are there all the same. During a November separation Nabokov had written Véra: “You came into my life and not the way a casual visitor might (you know, ‘without removing one’s hat’) but as one enters a kingdom, where all the rivers have waited for your reflection, all the roads for your footfall.” A month later he returned to the same image:

  Have you ever thought about how strangely, how easily our lives came together? And this is probably that God, bored up in heaven, experienced a passion he doesn’t often have. It’s as if in your soul there is a preprepared spot for every one of my thoughts. When Monte Cristo came to the Palace he had purchased, he saw on the table, among other things, a lacquered box, and he said to his major domo who had arrived earlier to set everything up, “My gloves should be here.” The latter beamed and opened this otherwise unexceptional lacquered box, and indeed: the gloves.

  “In everything from fables there is a grain of truth,” he concluded, before asking her to telephone his old apartment very late at night, so as to be certain to disturb his ex-neighbors.

  When the muckraking “biograffitist” comes along in the 1974 Look at the Harlequins! to ask how Vadim Vadimovich N. met the woman who turned his life around, our narrator shuts the door in his face—but not before referring him to See under Real, a novel written thirty-five years earlier, in English. See under Real’s actual and phonetic counterpart is The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, written thirty-five years earlier, in English. It is almost impossible to separate Véra from the fictional Clare in that novel, who “entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one’s own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there and petted despite their amazing shapes.” From the original manuscript Nabokov had deleted a line, which followed the passage about how well Clare fitted into Sebastian’s life: “They became lovers in such a speedy manner that for anyone who did not know them, she might have passed for a fast girl or he for a vulgar seducer.” Events move with the same lightning speed in The Gift, for wholly nonfictional reasons: “Despite the complexity of her mind, a most convincing simplicity was natural to her, so that she could permit herself much that others would be unable to get away with, and the very speed of their coming together seemed to Fyodor completely natural in the sharp light of her directness.”

  Between Véra and her fictional shadows there is plenty of room for distortion—“They’re all Picassos, not one is Dora Maar,” Dora Maar grumbled, dismissing nearly a decade of portraits—but Nabokov did indulge in a certain amount of autoplagiarism. His early letters to Véra sound familiar to readers of The Gift; his enchantment with her was precisely that of the preordained variety Fyodor feels for Zina, who had in turn been clipping the young poet’s work two years before she meets him. Nabokov perfectly summarized the correspondence in that novel:

  What was it about her that fascinated him most of all? Her perfect understanding, the absolute pitch of her instinct for everything that he himself loved? In talking to her one could get along without any bridges, and he would barely have time to notice some amusing feature of the night before she would point it out. And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them.

  In 1924 he had written Véra along very much the same lines, declaring: “You and I are entirely special; such wonders as we know, no one else knows, and nobody loves the way we love.” Despite her perfect understanding, Véra Nabokov was always quick to deny all resemblance between Zina and herself. She shares even that elusiveness with her fictional counterpart. When Fyodor suggests to Zina that their romance will be the very theme of his book, Zina—a character in someone else’s book to begin with—shudders. But then the result will be autobiographical!

  The self-effacement predated the literature. In the last months that Nabokov lived with his mother in Berlin, Véra did not meet his family, as Svetlana had often done. When she telephoned and wrote to him in Prague in the fall and again over the winter she did so under an assumed name. When Nabokov’s sisters asked who was calling, Véra replied “Madame Bertrand.” Already Vladimir complained that she was not holding up her side of the correspondence; he kept expecting one of his sisters to dash in excitedly, bearing an envelope from “Madame Bertrand.” This masquerade continued until 1924. Why the deliberate camouflage? In part Véra seemed determined to tread with the silent but firm footfall Nabokov found so appealing, entering “as if gliding across glass,” “airborne and unexpected,” as he had it in two November 1923 poems. She had little aptitude for drama, for which—as she may have suspected—Nabokov’s two younger sisters had a more highly developed taste; Elena Nabokov Sikorski fondly recalled having listened in on her brother’s amorous conversations. (She understood even at the time that Madame Bertrand and Véra were one and the same.) Véra may have been aware too of a need for delicacy at Nabokov’s end. A Jewish name has a certain ring to aristocratic Russian ears, and while she would have known that Nabokov’s father had championed all sorts of unpopular causes—democracy and Jewish emancipation among them—she may have been unwilling to run any risks with his mother. To a German they appeared to be two attractive Russian émigrés of about the same age; to some Russian eyes the couple did not look so eminently well-matched. It is possible too that Véra kept her name to herself simply out of what would later be revealed to be a hypertrophied sense of discretion.

  And the mask? With its whirl of charity balls, Russian Berlin was full of masks. Nabokov’s literature is a veritable carnival of them, in which—cleverly and infuriatingly—the crucial piece of information is often disguised, a ruse Nabokov much admired in Gogol. “Is ‘mask’ the keyword?” asks Humbert in Lolita. Certainly it matters more than the charity ball, or who pursued whom. Even before she met him, Véra Slonim knew her man, counted on his being able to recognize the “delight in the semitranslucent mystery.” She sensed—was it something he had written, or something she had heard said of him?—that he would agree that “a little obscurity here throws in relief the clarity of the rest.” And she knew how to hide behind her words, which became something of a family specialty. Certainly the veils did nothing to detract from her allure as far as her husband-to-be was concerned. In his most personal apotheosis of a mask, Nabokov wrote Véra a year after their 1925 marriage: “My sweet, today I sense especially vividly that since that very day when you came to me in the mask that I have been unbelievably happy, that the golden age of my soul has begun.” He referred to his own use of disguises as “the little silk mask of an additional pen name.” Conversely, there were plenty of reasons why at twenty-one, in Berlin, Véra Slonim would be exquisitely attuned to the risk of exposing herself, above and beyond her taste in gnomic prose poems. One scrap of evidence suggests that she generally fostered a taste for camouflage, a happy weakness for a translator to have. In a 1924 letter Nabokov had asked her to describe what she was wearing. He was pleased by her response; he could picture her perfectly, so well that he was impatient to remove several items. Furthermore she had included an unnecessary accessory in her description. “But you really wouldn’t dare wear a mask,” chided Nabokov, when the two had known each other for precisely eight months. “You are my mask.”

  3

  Véra Evseevna Slonim�
�to return to Mrs. Nabokov her given name—was born in St. Petersburg on January 5, 1902. She was the second of what were to be three Slonim daughters; her birth followed by eighteen months that of her sister Helene, called Lena. Rabbinical records indicate that her parents had married on April 16, 1899. It was a second marriage for Véra’s father and late for the bride as well: He was thirty-four, she was twenty-six. Both were from the Mogilev area, in the Byelorussian Pale of Settlement, about four hundred miles from Petersburg but by all other measures several universes away. Byelorussia had the highest concentration of Jewish residents anywhere in the Empire; Mogilev was a city of forty thousand people, over half of whom were Jewish. A thriving, Europeanized, industrial center of a million inhabitants, Petersburg was the cultural and economic capital of Russia.

  Véra’s father, Evsei Lazarevich Slonim, had been born on January 30, 1865, in the predominately Jewish village of Shklov, outside of Mogilev. His father, Lazar Zalmanovich, was a member of the petty bourgeoisie, a lowranking tier on Russia’s all-important social hierarchy. Neither he nor the family’s friends were wealthy, though Véra’s grandfather did briefly prosper, long enough to ascend for several years to the Mogilev Merchantry and to see that his son attend university. Evsei Lazarevich Slonim completed his gymnasium studies with honors in 1884. He was nearly two years older than his classmates, not entirely unusual given the stringent admission standards for Jewish children, for whom Russian was not a native language. In the fall of 1884 he matriculated as a law student at St. Petersburg University, thereby circumventing his military service, scheduled for the following year.

  Slonim passed his law exams brilliantly—he figured in the top 15 percent of his class—in May 1890. He was no prodigy in completing the mandatory dissertation, but also worked throughout the eighteen months in which he prepared the paper, as other classmates did not. After four years as a barrister’s assistant he moved on, for what under the best of circumstances may have been financial reasons. The system did not favor apprentice lawyers, who were paid irregularly and poorly; nearly half supplemented their income with outside work or with family monies. At the time of his marriage, in 1899, Evsei Slonim left the law for the tile business. Over the next years he changed profession repeatedly, prospering with each move; generally these were years of unprecedented economic growth in Russia. Of Slava Borisovna Feigin, Véra’s mother, born in Mogilev on August 26, 1872, we know virtually nothing. Her family—which would play a crucial role in the Nabokovs’ lives—were merchants in the city of Minsk, most likely in the grain business, of more modest means than the Slonims. The Feigins were less assimilated, or at least more often had recourse to Yiddish, otherwise absent from Véra Slonim’s childhood, although it had been both parents’ first language. In photos Slava Borisovna appears less often than her husband, who is always impeccably dressed, whose light-gray eyes sparkle, and who carries himself with distinction. She was a large woman with a wide jaw, dark-haired and dark-skinned, less the obvious beauty than her three daughters would be. In the rare portraits Véra Nabokov drew of her early years, the mother is nowhere to be found.*

  At the time of Véra Evseevna’s birth the Slonims made their home on Bassejnaya Street, in a predominately Jewish Petersburg neighborhood. The habit of nomadism was instilled early: They moved three times over the next years before settling at Furstadtskaya 9, probably just before the birth of Véra’s younger sister, Sonia, in November 1908. Four blocks from the Neva, the Furstadtskaya apartment was easily the family’s most impressive address, and their last before the Revolution. Next door to the handsome building is Saint Ann’s Lutheran Church, a little green-and-white-columned Palladian gem; it was from the church that the Slonims rented their second-floor apartment, although by that time Evsei Lazarevich was the owner of a four-story building, in a less desirable part of town. Catherine the Great’s Tauride Palace, the Duma’s meeting place, stands at the end of the street; on Véra Evseevna’s sixteenth birthday the Constituent Assembly would meet there for the first and last time. An eighteenth-century garden—a beautifully landscaped field of rolling hills and winding paths—surrounded the structure. In winter a high wooden tower was constructed in the garden and flooded with buckets of water, for tobogganers; as a child Véra flew down the silvery slopes in the Tavrichesky Gardens on an upholstered sled. Some of the most prominent members of the Jewish community lived in the neighborhood, populated mostly by professionals.*

  Nabokov reminds us of the obligation of all literary biographers to establish at the outset that “the little boy was a glutton for books.” So were some little girls, nowhere more so than in cultured, logocentric Petersburg, in a country in which one dueled over literature. Véra Evseevna remembered having read a newspaper at the age of three. At the time the newspaper was probably not what a Jewish three-year-old ought best to have been reading, filled as it was with news of the 1905 pogroms, pogroms that brought to the Jewish community a fear it had not known since the Middle Ages. She could remember a poem for life after two readings, a talent that would serve her well in her chosen occupation, though not an unusual one for a Petersburger, nearly every one of whom could cite his share of Pushkin. She admitted she had been a highly precocious child, perhaps as much so as her highly precocious husband; she recalled moments from her first year of life. Mostly it is telling that she felt that the child had had gifts the mature woman did not share. It was as if she were speaking of someone else; she was always better able to applaud the talents of others.

  For the most part she was educated at home with her sister Lena, although it is unclear if this was done because her health demanded it, because her parents found it fashionable (or convenient, with two girls of nearly the same age), or because she was Jewish and, like many Jewish young men, she was instructed at home and sent to school only to submit to the annual exams. Russia was in any event a country in which, well in advance of the rest of Europe, girls were educated, none more so than three daughters of a successful Petersburg lawyer, in particular one without a son on whom to settle the mantle of intellectual heir. Nina Berberova, born a few months before Véra Slonim and a few blocks from Vladimir Nabokov, early on wrote down for herself a list of professions, “completely disregarding the fact that I was not a boy.” Like Véra, she was capable of discussing the relative merits of the Social Democrats versus the Social Revolutionaries long before she was old enough to cast a vote. Young women routinely went to law school; half the medical faculty in prerevolutionary times were women, as were a quarter of economics students. Oddly, even when the anti-Semitic decrees had made legal careers inaccessible to Jews, government schools for girls remained open to Jewish girls.

  The tradition of educating upper-class women dated back to the nineteenth century, and the upper classes still being infected by the Francophilia of those years, the language in which girls were educated was French. It was a prerequisite at the Princess Obolensky Academy, which Véra and Lena Slonim attended, sporadically, between 1912 and 1917. The school was not necessarily the most elite of the private schools for girls in Petersburg, but it was one of the most expensive. Petersburg was a cosmopolitan city—its wealthy inhabitants subscribed to the London Times and to the Saturday Evening Post—and German was also taught at the Obolensky, although Véra Evseevna felt she mastered the language mostly in Berlin. For the time and place the Slonim girls were perfectly normal quadrilingual children. At home French was their first language (Véra’s was accentless); from her eleventh year, English was the language of play; Russian essentially qualified as a third tongue. When Lena and Sonia Slonim left Petersburg they claimed to be fluent in five languages. Véra’s fourth was German and she does not appear to have had a fifth, unless, as has been suggested, it was telepathy.

  Our only glimpse of Véra Slonim’s academic record is her Obolensky report from the end of her sixth form, the equivalent of an advanced placement year. She submitted to the examinations in the spring of 1917, which supports her assertion that she had begun her
studies uncommonly early. At least three years younger than her classmates, she entered school only after special permission had been obtained from the Ministry of Education. She was fifteen, and at the time reading the Russian edition of William James’s The Principles of Psychology. Her strengths were more in languages and mathematics than in the sciences, and she excelled—her grade here surpassed even those in French and German—at algebra. Her passion for engineering and all things mechanical may already have been born at the time.