by Stacy Schiff
Despite their feelings about Germany, the Nabokovs cast a vote in 1929 for prolonging their stay. On the return from France they purchased a modest slice of lakeside property in Kolberg, an hour southeast of Berlin. Covered by pines and birches, the parcel abutted a little beach, dotted with waterlilies. On the land they envisioned a small cottage, to be shared with Anna Feigin. They spent a fair part of the summer on the isolated property, in the primitive splendor of a mailman’s shack, swimming, swatting away horseflies, picnicking with visitors. They had as many friends in Berlin, and were as social, as they would have or be anywhere again. Vladimir reported to his mother that he was giving his wife tennis lessons—she had played as a child, but could not have had much practice since—and that her game was progressing beautifully. For her part Véra had more momentous news to share with her mother-in-law. Her son had been working consistently and well, and had already completed about half of a new novel. Everything about it set it apart from his previous books. “Russian literature,” asserted Véra, “has not seen its like.”
Vladimir finished The Defense—a novel in which a wife, with all the good intentions in the world, squelches her husband’s erratic genius—before the year was out. By that time the Nabokovs were installed in two rooms on Luitpoldstrasse, for the second time. The stock market crash in New York had disastrous effects on the German economy, the prosperity of which had been assured by a wave of foreign investment. That tide now ebbed; sawdust sausage was invented. Again the couple were forced to tighten their belts. The dream of building the house at Kolberg evaporated; Nabokov managed to set a murder scene but never a house on the property. They relinquished the land, and Véra went back to work. In April 1930, on the recommendation of the commercial attaché of the French consulate, she took a secretarial job with a law firm that acted for the French. Her monthly income was slightly less than what she had earned in her previous position, but the day was shorter as well, and the Weil, Gans & Dieckmann office was only a fifteen-minute walk from Luitpoldstrasse. For five hours a day she devoted herself to French and German stenography, French and English translation. Additionally she worked overtime when the situation demanded it. In particular she remembered Bruno Weil’s involvement in the purchase of a German factory by Renault: “I at that time not only spent an entire Sunday at one of the big hotels where our French subcontractor was staying, interpreting during negotiations and later spending countless hours reworking the French text of the agreement, but I spent a lot of time working on it at home as well, until the deal could be cut.” Throughout the 1930s she continued to give English lessons, as did Vladimir, and worked sporadically for an American agency as a tourist guide. Her principal source of supplementary income was stenography assignments, for which she was paid on a handsome hourly basis. Her clientele varied: Véra had something of an established relationship with the representative of a French perfume concern. She recorded the proceedings of an international convention on eliminating slums. Without holding what could legally be considered full-time employment, she managed to produce an income of RM 3,000 to RM 3,300 a year, or a little over half of what a well-placed banker earned at the time.
All the same Nabokov resented his wife’s job, which claimed so much of her time and energy. He especially disliked the fact that she was required to get up early; morning was not Véra’s shining hour at the best of times. (Vladimir said it all when he referred to her affectionately as “my morning blind girl.”) And she put in such a mercilessly long day! Nor was her husband the only one to rail against her commitments. German unemployment hovered around five million in 1930, when industrial wages were lower than they had been in 1914 and many families found themselves in financial straits. A married woman who accepted a job opened herself to criticism as a Doppelverdiener, or second wage earner. In 1932, by the end of which year the unemployed numbered over seven million, out of a workforce of about thirty million, a law was passed permitting the government to dismiss women who were second wage earners from public service. In any event, Véra’s schedule amply supports her later assertion that—no matter how spare the Berlin years—“we always had the possibility of earning more money, had we wanted to put more of our time into earning it.” It also to a very great extent explained Nabokov’s proud assertion of 1935: Despite having to support himself with tennis, boxing, and language lessons, he had managed in ten years to turn out seven novels and a fair selection of poems. (He did not mention the thirty-odd short stories.)
Véra must have concurred with her husband about the long hours and the early mornings. Neither prevented her from returning home to hear, and to type, what he had written between lessons in the course of his day. In the decade following the marriage he wrote in a white heat: most of The Eye in the first two months of 1930; Glory between May and the end of the year; Laughter in the Dark (then Camera Obscura) in a matter of months immediately afterward; stories and poems for Rul until its October 1931 demise; a draft of Despair between June and September 1932. For Véra this added up to a great mountain of pages, sublimely different from those she spent her days transcribing.* Nabokov reported that he held his novels in his head, already formed, fully developed film ready to be printed, but he indulged all the same in the usual orgies of corrections. There is a reason why his books are filled with paeans to smart typists. There were paeans on Véra’s side—retrospective paeans anyway—to the arrangements of the early 1930s as well. She made a virtue of necessity, as her father had done in floating timber to Riga on ingeniously constructed rafts, not because it was the best way, but because it was the best way for a Jew to do so while observing the letter of the law. She saw to it that her husband benefited from his cultural isolation. In this she was exactly the reverse of The Defense’s Mrs. Luzhin, eager to saturate her husband in the real world so as to spare him the painful, lonely communion with his own obsessive genius. Without mentioning quite how he had managed the feat, Véra boasted of Nabokov’s “having developed his talent to a luxurious blooming virtually in a vacuum,” of his having lived “a life within and practically outside of a milieu of strangers.” Others found this to be a description of a living hell; there was a rash of émigré suicides. Véra made of their disenfranchisement an exalted thing.
Nabokov was to pay a price for this creative independence among the émigré community. Especially as his star rose in the 1930s, that community was happy to point out how un-Russian were his works, how “foreign” (read: Jewish) was the company he kept. Even one of his then-admirers wrote that King, Queen, Knave read like a beautiful translation from the German; that The Defense took place in outer space; that Glory was wholly devoid of Russian atmosphere. The more the critics attempted to tie him to his Russian roots, the more he, the consummate escape artist, attempted to confound them; much of his later resistance to the idea of literary schools and influences could be explained by these years, when his readers were few and their need to claim him great. Though the uncertainty clearly took its toll on Véra, she maintained later that the artistic considerations alone had value, that the financial considerations were not merely secondary but unreal. Which made them her department, along with other apparitions like landlords and grammar books and postage stamps. When an aspiring Paris-based writer gracelessly imposed on Nabokov in the 1960s for advice and perhaps something a little more concrete, Véra responded for her husband. Bluntly she explained that he was unsympathetic to his correspondent’s plight: “As a young author, he too could not make a living with writing alone but gave lessons (English and tennis) and made innumerable and very dull translations for businessmen and journalists.” She recommended this approach to the craft as the best one—it was the key to independence—though she might more honestly have suggested the young man find a wife.
Véra conceded that a great many isolated moments of her past surfaced in her husband’s novels, and the offices of Weil, Gans made the transition intact. Musically rechristened Traum, Baum & Käsebier, the firm comes to us as the corporate victims of
Margot’s crank calls in Laughter in the Dark. These they well earned, based on the description of the firm of the same name in The Gift. Zina’s accounts are so vivid that Fyodor is able to describe the offices down to its resident wildlife, its distressed furniture, the carbon paper wilting in the heat. The shamelessly self-promoting Weil has been transformed into the shamelessly self-promoting Traum, who advises the French embassy instead of the French consulate. A generous layer of grime covers everything in sight; Zina’s officemate reeks of carrion; her work consists of shorthand depositions for divorce cases, such as that of the man who has accused his wife of sexual congress with a Great Dane. The place reminds Fyodor of Dickens “in a German paraphrase,” but that is only because Fyodor cannot himself identify it as pure and vintage Nabokov, with its hilarious and unflinching attention to the grotesque, the tasteless, the self-important.
Alexis Goldenweiser, a highly esteemed attorney from a prominent Kiev family, wrote Nabokov on reading these pages of The Gift in newspaper form in 1938. He had often paid visits to Traum, Baum & Käsebier; the firm was then called Weil, Gans & Dieckmann. He delighted in the accuracy of Nabokov’s depiction; he knew well the decrepit staircase that led to the opulent suites. And he could confirm that Bruno Weil’s pronounced Francophilia was born of energetic rainmaking, as is that of his fictional counterpart. In The Gift, Nabokov has the lead partner writing popular biographies of figures like Sarah Bernhardt in his desire to cozy up to his French clientele. Weil wrote on Dreyfus, to the same end. In an odd twist of fate, it would be Alexis Goldenweiser, twenty years later and on another continent, who—insofar as anyone ever succeeded in doing so—would induce Véra to document these years. He elicited from her all we know of her chimerical days at Weil, Gans & Dieckmann, in order to file her reparations claim against the German government.
Otherwise Véra admitted to little deprivation, citing only the “high adventure” of these years, the same words her husband uses in describing Martin’s oblique triumph in Glory, which Nabokov thought his happiest work. The emigration, the couple’s limited finances, the dispersal of his family, allowed Vladimir to live a little bit outside the world. Véra did the rest. She had the marketable skills, as did her sisters, both of whom were working as secretaries and interpreters at the time. (During the brief period of the 1930s when all three Slonim sisters were married, they were also all three supporting their husbands.) She was perfectly at ease with both facets of the observation her father had made of her new husband: Writing was indeed the most important thing in the world to him, as well as the one thing of which he was supremely capable. She was the family’s primary wage earner throughout these years, yet she never acknowledged as much, occasionally displaying her own loose grasp of reality. (In 1934, when Véra was out of work, Nabokov alone brought in a third of what she had been earning between 1930 and 1933.) She flatly denied that she had supported her husband, in one visitor’s opinion because admitting she had done so might reflect poorly on Vladimir. He was on this count entirely happy to embrace reality. When a Russian-Jewish friend felt the chill in the air and decided it was time to leave Germany, he asked if the Nabokovs would be doing so as well. Vladimir answered that they could not because of Véra’s job.
5
Increasingly those political winds made themselves felt. In June 1932, the Reichstag was dissolved and the ban on the SA and SS lifted. Communists and Nazis scuffled in the streets. By the end of the summer an unofficial civil war was brewing. For many the elections of 1933 would be the cue to leave Germany. Food shortages had already begun to make themselves felt; bombs and grenades exploded in the streets. Soon enough the Nabokovs’ correspondence began to resound with a chorus of “When are you fleeing Berlin?” The couple focused in this case more on the smaller than on the larger picture. They set their sights on their August move from their single room to two large rooms offered them in Anna Feigin’s apartment on Nestorstrasse, and on Véra’s September vacation. For reasons of economy, they elected to spend the vacation in a French village outside of Strasbourg, to which they had been invited by Vladimir’s cousin. The Kolbsheim cottage had been lent to Nicholas Nabokov. His wife, Natalie; her sister, Zinaida Shakhovskoy; and their mother, Princess Anna Shakhovskoy, were vacationing in France at the time. While in Kolbsheim Vladimir’s career was discussed at some length; Princess Shakhovskoy proposed that he offer some readings to the émigré communities in France or Belgium. While admitting that he was “in somewhat of a dead-end situation,” the writer haggled a little over the terms. All the same, after Véra returned to Berlin, her husband left Kolbsheim for Paris, where he explored the possibilities of resettling. In France as well Véra was treated to a little preview of things to come. On the Russian Orthodox calendar the celebration of the Greek martyr-sister Véra—to the Orthodox a saint’s day is more important than a Russian’s actual birth date—falls on September 30. When Princess Shakhovskoy came down for breakfast that morning in 1932 she congratulated Véra warmly on the occasion. Evidently with some indignation, Véra responded, “I’m Jewish, Princess!” What may have been a simple correction was heard by some in the room as a battle cry. It would come back to haunt Véra later.
In Paris Vladimir saw a good deal of his new friend, the poet Nina Berberova, and fell quickly into the welcoming arms of Ilya and Amalia Fondaminsky, wealthy patron saints of the emigration, whom the Nabokovs had met in Berlin.* Fondaminsky, a onetime Socialist Revolutionary commissar, was now publishing Contemporary Annals. Eternally optimistic, financially secure, he was one of the few in a position to transcend all émigré squabbles. By the end of the month Vladimir had moved in with the couple, and Madame Fondaminsky was to be found at her typewriter, transcribing pages of Despair for the author. (Vladimir warned Véra that she would need to redo the text all the same.) During the stay he wrote her nearly every day, with news, to pass on compliments, for opinions, for advice. At least two kinds of directives followed from Véra’s end. He had made all the calls she suggested, to publishers and translators; he had written his letters. And yes, in accordance with her request, he promised to be careful crossing the streets of Paris. He submitted Despair around; he reported on a long, debauched evening from which he had awoken at two-thirty the following afternoon; he toyed with the idea of writing something in French. He reported on a conversation he had had with Mark Aldanov, one of the best of the older generation of émigré critics, who despite advanced degrees in three fields could not fathom the younger novelist’s humor. His confusion is understandable. “I said to Aldanov, ‘Without my wife, I wouldn’t have written a single novel,’ ” Vladimir reported. Aldanov replied that news of Véra’s heroic assistance had already reached Paris. It is impossible to tell if Vladimir was surprised that a statement he made sincerely was shrugged off by Aldanov, or if he made the statement in jest and was astonished when Aldanov took it seriously. Generally he was pleased with his visit—his prodigious output of the last years had secured his reputation as the best writer in the emigration, though the epithet made some sputter—and convinced they should move immediately. Véra was less sanguine, especially as she would be unable to work legally in France. She did not agree with her husband that they could survive otherwise. Partly as a consequence, neither Nabokov was in Paris on December 10, 1932, when Véra’s younger sister, Sonia, married an Austrian-Jewish engineer. It would be five years before Véra would again set foot in France, and by then the circumstances would be far different.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor, and the loudspeakers began to blare; at the end of February the Reichstag burned. Within weeks Jews were being paraded barefoot through the streets by Nazi youth. In its German edition, Laughter in the Dark sold precisely 172 copies that year, when another Russian import of the 1920s began to sell briskly: It was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Volumes of Mein Kampf sailed out of bookstores all over the city. In the spring the first Jewish laws were promulgated; the Weil, Gans offices closed, without warning. (The firm re
opened for a short time later, with a skeleton staff.) Still, despite her husband’s pull to Paris, despite the brown-uniformed SA teams tramping throughout the Grunewald, the assaults on Jewish lawyers, the mass rallies, Véra remained rooted in Berlin. With her light hair she was a less obvious target than some. And she was by no means alone in her stubbornness. Her sister Lena, married to a titled Russian named Massalsky, remained in the city as well. Plenty of Berliners had left, but plenty stayed; Jewish emigration between 1934 and 1937 dropped off considerably. Véra Nabokov did not precisely keep a low profile, as has been suggested. With relish she told the story of having been advised by her former consulate boss to call the office of a German minister then organizing an international congress, for a stenography assignment. “I said ‘they won’t engage me, don’t forget I’m Jewish.’ But he only laughed and said ‘they will. They have been unable to get anyone else.’ I did as I was told, and was accepted with alacrity, whereupon I said to the German to whom I was talking ‘but are you sure you want me? I’m Jewish.’… ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘but it does not make any difference to us. We pay no attention to such things. Who told you we did?’ ” The wool producers’ convention was to begin the next day; she got the job. Dutifully she copied down the speeches of four Nazi ministers.
By that time swastikas hung in every street. Uniformed Nazis had begun to make the rounds of Cafés, soliciting donations to the party. It was not wise to refuse them. Véra Nabokov cannot be imagined tipping a coin into one of those metal boxes; she can only have avoided Cafés. The newspapers were filled with new rules—they were said to resemble nothing so much as a school magazine—but only one Nabokov was reading them anyway.* The first boycott of Jewish businesses was held on April 1, when storm troopers were posted at the doors of all establishments. Véra witnessed firsthand the destruction of a culture in May 1933 when she stumbled upon a book-burning on her way home. It was twilight; she stayed long enough to hear the crowd burst into patriotic song but hurried on before the storm troopers began to prance around their bonfire. Tens of thousands of volumes went up in flames; though Nabokov would set his own little conflagrations under Marx and Freud, the sight of Berlin youths doing the same must have sent chills down the spine. By the fall, it was considered seditious to buy those authors’ books.