by Stacy Schiff
Véra Slonim’s ability to transfer the observations of one sense into the vocabulary of another—what is properly known as synesthesia and often manifests itself as “colored hearing”—must have delighted her future husband. The synesthetic cannot help seeing the world differently; for both Nabokovs, letters on the page, words in midair, appeared in Technicolor instead of black and white. The ability can be a burden as much as a luxury: Two people gifted with synesthesia fall into each other’s arms as two people with photographic memories might, or two young heirs to legendary fortunes, or—in Berlin of the early 1920s—two people who believed the recent earthquake in Japan to be the result of the Jewish/Masonic conspiracy. Two synesthetics might have a thorny discussion over breakfast as to the color of Monday, the taste of E-flat. They might commit a poem to memory chromatically; they might recognize the silhouettes of numbers. The trait is genetic—Nabokov had inherited it from his mother, from whom Véra felt his artistic sensibility generally derived—and the couple passed it on to their own son, although it predominates in females. Nabokov was fascinated to discover that while his palette differed from Véra’s, nature occasionally blended colors. His “m,” for example, was pink (pink flannel, to be exact); Véra’s was blue; their son’s pinkish-blue.
Or so he liked to believe. Sharing this information decades later with a visitor, he was interrupted by Véra, who gently attempted to set the record straight. Her “m” was strawberry-colored. “She spoils everything by saying she sees it in strawberry,” grumbled her husband, demonstrating another truth about synesthetics: Their recall is so perfect that its defects tend to be those of perception rather than of fact. Nothing is lost on the synesthetic, for whom reality—and in Véra Slonim’s case, the printed page—bears an added dimension.* For the Nabokovs it amounted to their own private son et lumière. Musical notes appear to have had no optical effect on Véra, however, as they do on many gifted with colored hearing and as they would on her son, for whom the key of a piece of music adds a shade as well. (Véra did enjoy music although her husband did not, chromatically or on any other level.) But she was well equipped to appreciate the hues of her husband’s supersaturated prose. She would have understood perfectly Clare Bishop’s insistence in Sebastian Knight that a title “must convey the colour of the book—not its subject.” For his part Nabokov delighted in the luminosity of Véra’s handwriting, her voice, her walk, tinted like the sky at dawn. Explaining the halos he and his wife saw on the page, he noted that Véra’s differed from his own. “She has different colors. And I don’t think they are quite as bright as mine. Or are they?” he asked. “You don’t want them to be,” she needled him. As quick as she may have been to efface herself on most fronts, the one thing she could not make disappear was her pride. Often it was the only thing she left behind; it was this Cheshire Cat’s smile.
From the start Nabokov extolled Véra’s acuity, her intuition. No trifle escaped her attention. Like Clare, with whom she shares other qualities, Véra “possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier.” Nabokov marveled over her later analysis of their American neighborhood: “Véra says that the top of the west face of the Hopkins’ house, corner of our street and Quarry St., ressembles [sic] a skull (quite easy to see, the dormer is the snub nose, the windows on both sides are the sockets, and old Hopkins is eighty) and that the front of the Millers’ house is strikingly like James Joyce … well it’s hard to explain, but it’s there.” She was a stickler for detail; no one who has read her husband can underestimate what that was worth. This “capacity to wonder at trifles” was for Nabokov the mark of a kind of genius, as much as was the ability to discern the connections between things. Véra was the kind of woman who came back from the hairdresser to report that sitting under the dryer had been like watching a silent movie. She was the most demanding kind of reader. If the historians of the Weimar years, eager to convey the sense of chaos that backed the artistically efflorescent life in Berlin, were to mention a general strike on page 20, then a streetcar had better not be said to be running on page 22. “All seemed on verge of collapse,” declared one scholar, commenting on these Berlin years, when the country had recovered from the hyperinflation but when its society still lay in tatters. Véra corrected him. “It now seems as if everything then seemed …,” she scrawled in his margin.
Of his literary gift Nabokov was not always as certain as he would later claim—Véra acknowledged privately that there had been doubts and failures and griefs along the way—but he had no quibbles with himself. He was the eldest and favorite of a family of three boys and two girls; his parents were said by some to have coddled him, by others to have deified him. He had been raised to believe that he stood at the center of an exquisitely opulent universe (his was the brand of prerevolutionary childhood in which it was possible to speak of “the smallest and oldest of our gardeners”), and that pride was something that he carried with him long after both that universe and its opulence had vanished. He had what can only be termed an entirely robust sense of self. “All Nabokovs are selfish,” explains his sister Elena Sikorski, who recognized her brother’s privileged position without rancor, but acknowledges that it cost others in the family dearly. He might just as well have been speaking of himself when he wrote of a minor character: “He loved himself with a passionate and completely reciprocated love.”
Véra Slonim was not nearly so much at ease with herself, but Nabokov would have had a difficult time finding in Berlin another woman who was as fiercely wed to her opinions. This confidence was a great attraction; nothing was frightening when he was with her. In Véra he found the odd combination of feminine grace and unfeminine determination that Fyodor so admires in Zina in The Gift. Not only was she unwavering in her convictions, but Véra’s convictions were not always of the commonsensical kind. In mid-1924, Vladimir wrote of having visited his father’s grave with Véra. He was still deeply affected by his loss and missed his father deeply: “When we were last at the cemetery, I felt it so piercingly and clearly: You know everything, you know what will happen after death, you know it utterly, plainly, and calmly, just as a bird knows, having sprung from its branch, that it will fly and not fall. And that is why I am so happy with you, my love.” We have no sense of what she might have told him that day, or later; we know only that neither Nabokov thought death entirely final. Véra Slonim may have been the first to have settled on that conviction; her translation work indicates an interest in the otherworldly. If Poe and Rainov have one thing in common it is a fascination with the underweave of life, a realm of substantial shadows that lies beyond that of illusory existence. For someone who appeared relentlessly literal-minded, they represented an odd choice of texts.
A number of critics have linked Nabokov’s first successful attempts at locating a reality beyond the human world to his marriage. In his 1924 play, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, for the first time in Nabokov’s work, a character moves from one world, one consciousness, to another. The word “metempsychosis”—the passing of a soul from one body to another after death—appears in Mary, his first novel. He later told Véra with satisfaction that his family had understood, on hearing him read The Eye, that the hero dies and his soul is transferred into Smurov. And in 1925, on the eve of the anniversary of his father’s death, he adopted a new tone in his letter to his mother: “I am so certain, my love, that we will see him again, in an unexpected but completely natural heaven, in a realm where all is radiance and delight.” The work is filled with characters handicapped by various mental tics: Vadim Vadimovich N. in Look at the Harlequins! suffers from an inability to turn in space as we are unable to turn in time. The narrator of “Lance” cannot approach a dream landscape head-on. (In much the same way, Nabokov complained he was afflicted by total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.) After Véra’s ent
rance into his life, he began to grapple with the idea that while space may be finite, time is not. The works teem with “ex-mortals,” with hints and glimpses of something beyond our immediate existence. This “serene superknowledge” which permeates so much of the fiction appears to have been either a direct import from Véra or a simultaneous one.
More explicitly, he thanked her for having taught him something of reason. Almost reflexively, since the age of six, he had written poetry. As a seventeen-year-old he had looked upon these poems as small miracles, 100 percent inspiration. “Now I truly do know that in art reason is the negative particle and inspiration is the positive particle, but only through the secret union of them is born that white flash, the electric trepidation of creating the perfect,” he wrote Véra in January 1924. He was spending seventeen hours a day on thirty lines of Morn. “In winding ways,” she had been the one to instill the drama in him. He had always recognized the value of intuition, but now grasped that of precision. The man who would make American amphitheaters thunder with the news that literature was to be approached with the precision of an artist and the passion of a scientist himself came to that realization when he was older than the undergraduates in those auditoriums, after he had met a woman who was the first to denounce “circumlocutions, those hangnails of speech.” Decades later he credited Véra with keeping his prose as exact as possible. “Writing is all that is dear and important to me now,” Nabokov had written Svetlana Siewert in his last letter, as a kind of renunciation. With a very different emotion, he repeated his conviction to Véra Slonim. “I am prepared to undergo Chinese torture for the discovery of a single epithet,” he claimed, exhausted by his labors on Morn.
From Prague he returned to Berlin with a near-complete manuscript in his bag. He knew the pages would not be lost on Véra. Already he had written that she was among the three people who understand his every comma, and one of those was now dead.* Relatedly or not, he loved her “savagely, endlessly,” “to the point of fainting.” The January reunion must have been sweet, but the rest of the winter was a stressful time for Véra, still working for her father. This was the winter when the economy took its toll, claiming what remained of Slonim’s assets. He withdrew from Orbis at the end of the year; by 1925 he was entirely ruined. Probably at his office Véra typed The Tragedy of Mr. Morn; her days of translating for publication had come to an end, a fact that suggests that she had not undertaken the assignments purely for financial reasons. If anything she would have been in greater need of the income now.
Throughout 1923 and midway into 1924, Véra lived with her parents on Landhausstrasse. There was trouble on the home front that year, a probable cause of the distress to which Nabokov’s letters allude. Lena, returned from the Sorbonne, had taken a room with the family of Rul editor Iosef Hessen. At some point in 1924 Véra’s parents went their separate ways; Evsei Slonim set up house around the corner with Anna Lazarevna Feigin, twenty-five years his junior. “Aniuta” Feigin was the daughter of his wife’s brother, which from a no less complicated angle made her Véra’s cousin. Véra and Anna had known each other since childhood. An energetic and enterprising woman who had graduated from gymnasium in Minsk and conservatory in Petersburg, Anna Feigin had arrived in Berlin two years after the Slonims. In Germany she studied both bookkeeping and music theory; through Evsei Slonim’s good offices, she went to work as a representative for Leo Peltenburg.*
Slava and Evsei Slonim appear not to have reconciled; they were living apart at the time of their deaths. And the repercussions were felt, quite strongly, along party lines. Véra and Sonia, whatever their sympathies with their mother, remained close to Anna Feigin, whose advice Véra actively sought over the next five decades. Véra dutifully accompanied her mother on a sanitarium visit at the time of the separation, as she would the following summer, but she did so sullenly. Lena distanced herself from the family, with whom her relations were to remain troubled. Anna Feigin felt she had treated Evsei Slonim’s eldest daughter impeccably, but that Lena “has always had a capacity for unexpected idiocy.” Lena held a lifelong grudge against Anna Feigin, for reasons which had more to do with her own marriage than with Anna Feigin’s involvement with her father. The three sisters—all of whom made their careers working with language—were to have a fiendishly difficult time communicating with one another. Even the events of the next twenty years would not be enough to heal the wounds.
The family as Véra had known it in Russia ceased to exist after 1924. She searched for a room in August; most likely it was around this time that she began to tutor language students. Vladimir suggested she take a room in his boardinghouse—he felt he should be seeing her forty-eight hours a day—which she did not do. The romance was by 1924 quite serious; it had long before been physically consummated, and by midsummer the two considered themselves engaged. Nabokov was pleased to report to his sisters that when he walked down the streets of Russian Berlin he left a gratifying rustle of “That’s Vladimir Sirin” in his wake. He had to beat the girls away with a stick. On the other hand he felt ready to settle down, and with his letter he included a photo of his intended. In other ways, too, the relationship matured. Véra’s involvement in her father’s affairs diminished—Orbis closed without having published a single title—but she had plenty of new responsibilities. Nabokov was supporting himself, as it sometimes seems was half the emigration, tutoring English. (He referred to Véra as his only serious competition as an English teacher in Berlin; she worked at improving her vocabulary in her spare time.) From Prague that July he asked Véra to find him a few additional lessons. And would she mind recopying the enclosed poems, and submitting them both to Rul? He missed the rustle of her eyelashes against his cheek, but he did not appear to miss any literary ambition she might herself have once entertained, if indeed he knew of any. She could have had no doubt about his feelings on this subject. Seemingly apropos of nothing, in the same letter to his family in which he announced his intention to marry, he added: “The sharpest jealousy of all is that between one woman and another, and that between one littérateur and another. But when a woman envies a littérateur, that can amount to H2SO4 [sulfuric acid].”
2
Véra Evseevna Slonim, of Berlin-Schöneberg, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokoff, of Berlin-Wilmersdorf, married at the Wilmersdorf Rathaus on April 15, 1925. They had known each other for just under two years; they were unable later to agree on how long they had been engaged. The signal event that was to inform Véra Slonim’s next sixty-six years could not have taken place more anticlimactically. Their witnesses at the town hall ceremony were two of their more distant acquaintances, chosen by virtue of their being precisely that. There are no photos of blushing brides, beaming grooms; there are no photos at all. Even the rhapsodic Nabokov could not coax poetry out of the early days of the marriage. “We were ridiculously poor, her father was ruined, my widowed mother subsisted on an insufficient pension, my wife and I lived in gloomy rooms which we rented in Berlin West, in the lean bosoms of German military families,” he recalled later. The lean German bosoms had to wait a little; it was several weeks before the newlyweds managed to live at the same address. On the evening of April 15 they broke the news over dinner to Véra’s family, in one of its configurations. “By the way, we got married this morning,” Véra said. A wedding announcement was printed, in French, and ostensibly mailed, but not very scientifically. Gleb Struve, then in Paris and in regular touch with Vladimir, was surprised not to have been told of the marriage, which he learned about from mutual friends. Struve counted among Nabokov’s closest friends at the time. There are some hints that Nabokov feared disapproval. He admitted to Véra that he feared his friends would not understand the most divine thing in his life, that they would launch “a predatory campaign.”
Nabokov’s mother learned the news after the fact as well, when she visited Berlin in May. She was not surprised—she and her daughters had assumed Véra and Vladimir would marry—and embraced Véra warmly. No discomfort w
hatever materialized. Nabokov’s grandmother had but one question concerning the new addition to the family, a reason Vladimir may have feared a “predatory campaign”: “Of what religion is she?” On Véra’s side matters were doubtless more complicated. It may be a matter of simple coincidence that the dissolution of the Slonims’ marriage directly preceded Véra’s entering into a union of her own. Her father would have been preoccupied at the time, however. Slava Slonim’s reaction is not known, but there is every reason to assume that Véra’s approach to the matter conformed to that of Luzhin’s fiancée, in The Defense. When her mother tells her that Luzhin has asked for her hand in marriage, the daughter replies, “I’m sorry he told you.… It concerns only him and me.” Discretion was to Véra Nabokov the greater part of valor. The more emotionally raw the issue, the more opaque she found it desirable to be on the subject.
Her opacity allowed her detractors plenty of room. Perhaps because Nabokov’s romantic past was so variegated, the assumption in the émigré community was that Véra had somehow coerced him into marriage. One report had her showing up at his room, pointing a pistol at his chest, and threatening, “Marry me, or I’ll kill you.” She was considered difficult, blunt, “imariable.” Since not everyone was as charmed by her “idiosyncratic form of directness” as her new husband, the marriage seemed altogether inexplicable, especially to the anti-Semites, which was to say a fair (and growing) proportion of the Russian community. That her father had been an estate manager impressed no one among the pedigree-conscious, who saw Nabokov as marrying down. Even Jewish friends were left with the sense that she had been the prime mover: Contrasting Véra to Sirin’s flock of female readers, an admiring acquaintance recalled: “The one who finally got Nabokov to marry her was Véra Slonim … thin and slight, blond.” Perhaps it was not so much Véra who seemed imariable but, in the English sense of the word, Nabokov who did not seem the marrying kind.