by Stacy Schiff
Why her self-effacement? The vanity was there, in ample supply. The desire, or the ability, to look herself in the eye was not. She was most comfortable in a mask, most herself when reflecting light elsewhere. This moon was no thief. She informed a biographer that she panicked every time she saw her name in his footnotes. Her sisters took a different approach, gravitating toward the spotlight, even if that meant creating one of their own. They had no trouble discoursing at length about themselves. Meanwhile Véra developed a passion for secrecy. She had both the good and the ill fortune to recognize another’s gift; her devotion to it allowed her to exempt herself from her own life while founding a very solid existence on that very selflessness. (Her father may well have shared this disposition, but the cloak of invisibility falls differently on a woman.) She was at once a model of solicitude and sincerity; on the one hand she was difficult to please, and on the other her husband could do no wrong. Nabokov’s work had always been fostered by women, all of whom had copied out his verse, but few brought to it Véra’s critical faculty. She affixed to it her own (and Zina’s) ambition, while on the page—as she would later, in a more convoluted arrangement—she assumed the passive role, allowing her husband to speak through her. Her whole being was to constitute a mask.
For all her evasions, she was not unaware of the importance of what she publicly demoted to mere assistance and what detractors identified as her spell, or domination. She acknowledged a greater role with at least one friend. Years later Leo Peltenburg’s middle daughter reminded her: “Back in Berlin, you said that someone should write a book on the influence a woman bears on her husband, in other words on stimulation, and inspiration.” Véra and her husband shared an admiration for Musset’s “La Nuit de Mai,” ten stanzas in which the patient but demanding muse urges a subject upon the despondent poet. Noted Nabokov in his 1951 diary: “V[éra] says that if Musset had been writing his ‘Nuits’ today, the conversation would have been between the poet and his secretary.” When Véra’s father had asked after Nabokov’s work in Berlin he had habitually inquired after “their work,” implicating his daughter in the process, and perhaps revealing something of his own feelings on the subject. Véra never objected to the assertion that she had been her husband’s muse.
In October 1930 she typed a letter for her husband, to Struve: “My wife and I are still trying to move to Paris—at a somewhat upbeat tempo.” Nabokov was not at his best with music and confused adagio with allegro: After the Paris trip of 1932, France was regularly discussed. In March 1933 the couple were granted visas, although they stayed put, possibly because of the pregnancy that fall. Vladimir claimed in August that they expected to move over the winter; the following spring they were entirely distracted by the birth of Dmitri. Véra asserted later that “from the moment Hitler seized power we began to prepare our departure,” a departure over which she repeatedly hesitated, even at a time when only a few thousand Russians remained in Berlin. The employment prospects remained a consideration: Early in 1935 she took a position handling foreign correspondence for an engineering firm called Ruthspeicher, manufacturers of heavy machinery, for whom she worked primarily in English. She had done a great deal of technical translating and was hired in part for that expertise. Before or just after the birth of Dmitri, she had gone so far as to design and attempt to patent a lateral parking device for cars, a retractable wheel affixed laterally to the chassis of a car. Connected to the engine, the wheel could be lowered on command, to maneuver the vehicle into position. From Berlin she submitted her design to Packard. The marvel is not that she took the initiative of doing so but that she designed the parking system when she had not yet learned to drive.
Nabokov’s memories of having accompanied Dmitri to the Grunewald date in part from that time; he was looking after their son while Véra was at the office. “As before, Véra doesn’t have a free minute; I help out as best I can,” he wrote his mother. The Ruthspeicher position proved short-lived, as the Nazis forced out the firm’s Jewish owners, and all Jewish employees with them, four months after Véra’s arrival. More than ever now the Nabokovs were struggling financially. “I’m rather sick of being so hard up,” Vladimir sighed in May 1935, just after the couple’s tenth wedding anniversary. He and Véra were perfectly exhausted, though continually delighted by Dmitri, whom they were deceiving into walking on his own. He would do so only by grasping at trees and bushes as he moved; they fixed a branch in his hand, and off he went. At eight months Véra began to teach him the names of plants and trees, always to remain a test of literacy in the Nabokov family. At about the same time she sacrificed something more than her job to the new government. As the Nazis had established strict rules about gun ownership, Véra arranged to send her pistol to Paris, with an embassy friend. The transfer proved harrowing. At lunchtime she crossed Berlin to deliver the handgun to the embassy; her taxi was immobilized by a Nazi procession. As the demonstrators passed they knocked on the car windows, rattling their cans of collection monies, demanding contributions. The pistol hidden under her clothing, Véra sat impassively, pretending she heard nothing.
The nature of the Nabokovs’ poverty has been the subject of some dispute. Véra objected heatedly to one depiction of it: “The point of émigré life was that even people who were much worse off than we, never allowed the financial considerations to occupy even one tenth part of their consciousness.” She held that her father did not discuss his financial woes, even after having been utterly ruined. They may never have discussed it, but the Nabokovs’ was alternately genteel poverty, proud poverty, golden poverty, dire poverty. One thing it was not was unusual poverty. Few other émigrés were any more fortunate. In Paris many were already starving. (Again Nabokov’s definition was different. “I, you understand, need comforts not for the sake of comforts, but for the sake of not thinking about them,” he had explained to Véra in the early days of the relationship.) And his star seemed to wax as his fortune waned. It was all very well and good that Albert Parry had proclaimed of him in The New York Times that “our age has been enriched by the appearance of a great writer,” but it was nonetheless true that he did not own a single decent pair of pants. And Véra had seen the last of her steady jobs. Her work permit was revoked on ethnic grounds, not long after the Ruthspeicher job. The bleakest years were yet to come.
At many times, but especially in the first six years of his life, when their finances were as delicate as they would ever be, Dmitri represented the couple’s only luxury. In Hitler’s Berlin, Véra and Vladimir spun a Russian-speaking cocoon around their son, who grew up in as sheltered a context as had his mother, in a fair approximation of the silken comfort of his father. Bundled in furs, Dmitri rolled about Berlin in the Rolls-Royce of prams, on loan from a taxi-driving poet. Few mothers have enjoyed such elegant tributes as does Véra in her husband’s autobiography; Nabokov eulogized the scrupulous care with which she attended to their son’s diet and general hygiene, the patience with which she indulged his passions. (In Speak, Memory, that unlikely how-to book, he offers one crucial piece of advice: “I appeal to parents: never, never say, ‘Hurry up,’ to a child.”) Dmitri grew quickly, to the point where at twenty months he was mistaken in a photo for a five-year-old. A more silent tribute yet to Véra is woven into Speak, Memory, in which her name figures nowhere in the text. Before composing his pages on Dmitri’s early years, Nabokov asked his wife to set down her impressions. Aside from a few phrases, none of those recollections found its way directly into the final manuscript. But if anyone has ever wondered how Nabokov knew what Véra felt on a windy railroad bridge near Nestorstrasse, it is because she described for him the long waits for trains to pass below, Dmitri in his lambskin, she in her black cloth coat, “my feet hurting with the cold, my hands only kept from going numb by holding his in my right, then in my left (that incredible amount of heat his big baby body generated!)” Nabokov made the memory his own, confirming their cup-half-empty, cup-half-full world-views: “… and the fervency of his faith kept him glowing, and
kept you warm too, since all you had to do to prevent your delicate fingers from freezing was to hold one of his hands alternately in your right and left, switching every minute or so, and marveling at the incredible amount of heat generated by a big baby’s body.”
From Véra’s pages on Dmitri’s childhood, written when he was sixteen, we know a great deal about what mattered to her. Her first lines afford no surprise, coming from the would-be Trotsky assassin: “He was always so brave. In every new experience he would exhibit a degree of courage unexpected in one so small.” Victory mattered, as did the right weapons: “He often got the worst in an exchange of physical arguments but always got his little victory in the verbal skirmishes.” She delighted in his perceptions of color, his innate gentleness, his neologizing, his discretion, his fascination with the technical, his strengths as a storyteller. (These indicate that he was not impervious to the world around him. This three-year-old’s invented hero walked to the Italian frontier, where he was sent back for want of a visa.) In June 1936 Véra and Dmitri spent ten days in Leipzig, where they stayed with Anna Feigin in the Brombergs’ spacious apartment. In Berlin Vladimir missed them terribly; it was the second separation of the year, as he had been on a triumphant reading tour in France and Belgium in January. Véra took Dmitri to a sort of petting zoo in the city, but as she observed, the “sudden exposure to nature had an unexpected result. A baby who loved to run around (and a fast runner he was) suddenly became a little lap-baby.” He refused to return to the ground, and for the next few days insisted on being carried, exclusively by an exhausted—he was “a big baby, a heavy armful of a baby”—Véra. Vladimir was fascinated to learn that his son should be afraid of squirrels, but doubtless worried, too: Véra appears to have been pregnant during this trip. As exhausted as her husband knew her to be with Dmitri, he advised her to remain motionless as much as possible. He wrote a little wistfully of a secretarial job about which a friend had called Véra, but which he knew she could not accept.
While in Paris and Brussels in January, Nabokov had begun a full-scale campaign, a search for the person, the publishing contract, that might expedite their move to Paris. “My fate” had taken on a new connotation; he had done his best to interest as many friends and acquaintances in it as possible. He met masses of people, everyone from France’s Edmond Jaloux to Franz Hellens, Belgium’s foremost writer. (“You would really like Hellens!” he wrote Véra. “He’s the premier writer of Belgium, and his books don’t bring him a thing!”) It was far more difficult to pull up stakes now than it would have been in 1931 or 1932, when Vladimir was still joking about the suitcase-dusting that went on in the émigré community each time word leaked out of an all-night meeting of the government. He and Véra had had a little tussle over the English edition of Despair; the novel had been sold to Hutchinson in London, but the author had been desperately unhappy about their translation and had asked to have a hand at it himself. Vladimir asked Véra to send his revised version; she had balked, of the opinion that it was not yet entirely polished. He attempted to reason with her: Its imperfections were no more numerous than the “birthmarks” on any of his Russian-language manucripts. Four months later, when Véra was in Leipzig, Vladimir reported that the British publisher was not exactly convinced by the revision. What should he answer?* The better his work got, the more difficult it seemed to be to get it translated, and the more dire the family’s financial straits. In May he wrote the historian Mikhail Karpovich, who was to play a great role on the other side of the looking glass, in America, and whom he had met briefly, to ask if perhaps some sort of teaching position might be arranged. Was there any hope? “I am not afraid of living in the American boondocks,” swore Vladimir. “I could, in addition to an elementary Russian course, teach one on the side on French literature.” By November he conceded that he was at his wits’ ends, that his position was “desperate in the extreme.” Was there work anywhere, if not in Great Britain or North America, then in India or South Africa?
In the fall of 1936, his “fate” became what Véra feared might more accurately be labeled his “plight.” The monarchist politician General Biskupsky—one of the most reviled figures in the emigration, a man of so many schemes it was impossible to say where, if anywhere, his loyalties lay—had been named head of Hitler’s Department of émigré Affairs in May. As his undersecretary he appointed Sergei Taboritsky, who had been convicted for the 1922 murder of Nabokov’s father. (Véra was careful to say that Taboritsky was not simply a Monarchist—“there were decent people among the Monarchists”—but a true Russian fascist.) According to Véra, Taboritsky’s mandate was “ferreting out Russian Jews and maintaining a corps of Russian fascist translators and intelligence agents to interrogate prisoners of war.” Her first concern was for her husband, especially in September, when Biskupsky began to register all Russians in Berlin.
Vladimir continued to issue all-points bulletins but found the fates curiously indifferent to his distress signals. “We’re slowly dying of hunger and nobody cares,” he wrote Zinaida Shakhovskoy. She had already proved a guardian angel and did again now, quickly arranging for him to read in Brussels, from which city he would continue on to France. By January 19, 1937, Nabokov was on Belgian soil, never to return to Germany. Later Véra explained: “My husband was abroad before I was because I insisted on his departure as soon as Taboritsky was released from prison and appointed a member of the commission for managing the Russian refugees in Germany.”* She had remained behind to prepare for their definite emigration. In the ensuing correspondence—once again “allegro” would be the wrong tempo for the final exodus from Berlin, where the anti-Semitic laws had been extended, and a true ethnic cleansing had begun—there is no hint that life in Berlin might have been uncomfortable for her. That both Taboritsky and the head of the Foreign Policy Office believed the evil in the world to be the single-handed work of Jews appeared to have made no impression on her at all.
2
Between January 18, 1937, when she put him on a train for Belgium, and May 22, when they were reunited, Véra received a letter from her husband every day, sometimes twice a day. In those four tense months he did everything he could to advance his career, with the possible exception of write. His Brussels reading was beautifully arranged by Shakhovskoy and provides a clearer sense of Nabokov’s definition of linguistic fluency, from which the geography of the next years derived. Excusing himself for “son pauvre frangais d’etranger,” he went on to lecture on Pushkin in faultless French. The real triumph was the Parisian evening, which was sold out in advance; the appearance represented something of the return of the prodigal poet. Nabokov was introduced by Khodasevich, who observed, among other things, that Sirin’s heroes are all of them artists, even when art is not exactly their métier. To an overfilled auditorium Vladimir read for over an hour and a half from his novel-in-progress, The Gift. The applause was deafening. The most captious thing that could be said of the evening was said by the large-hearted Aldanov: “I will refrain from saying whether one need write the way Sirin does. But at present, he alone can write that way.” The accolades accumulated over the next week, as Nabokov began a whirlwind tour of the French and Russian salons. He was toasted everywhere, introduced to everyone, to the French writers who might be able to arrange for translations of his work, the editors who might help him place stories. “I’m the toast of the town, I’m surrounded by hundreds of the kindest people,” he informed his wife, moving from lunch to Café to reception. As a Nansen passport holder, he could obtain no French working papers; his ability to settle in France depended on these connections. Despite the compliments, despite the bravura performance at the January reading, this made for exhausting work. In the same February letter in which he described for Véra his greatest triumph to date—a reading James Joyce had attended, after which the two had chatted, mostly about Joyce’s eyesight—he wrote of his first visit to Gallimard, an interview he had had some difficulty arranging. Having been told by the publisher’s rec
eptionist that Gaston Gallimard was occupied with another caller, he installed himself in the waiting room. Eventually the receptionist went to lunch, leaving him alone. An hour after the agreed-upon meeting time he wandered back to where he assumed Gallimard’s office to be; the publisher too had left for lunch. Twenty years later—after Gallimard had published Despair but rejected Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, and Speak, Memory—the firm again became Nabokov’s publisher. The reception would be dramatically different.
He continued on his social rounds in February in London, with two readings and a great number of dinners. He inquired after lecturing possibilities in England but was not overly optimistic. He had begun a version of an autobiography, in which he tried to interest publishers; fragments of it would be folded into Sebastian Knight. He saw scores of people, including his nontranslator H. G. Wells. By comparison the days in Paris seemed like a vacation. He was universally charming, as only a writer in pursuit of a publisher can be. He kept a very un-Nabokovian list of all those to whom he was introduced. This effort took its toll. After two weeks he reported that he was exhausted from all the sherry, from the constant strain of being cheerful, from the serial introductions. Between each appointment he spent unaccountable amounts of time in the London subway, which depleted him further. “I am rather fed up with the whole business, and I so desperately want some peace, you and the muse,” he wrote Véra. All the same the London prospects began to burn brighter. By the end of the month letters were flying in all directions on his behalf. The country was expensive but he felt the food was good; he could easily see his family installing themselves in London. He thought they could realistically manage as much, after a summer in the south of France. He counted on a reunion by mid-March, at the latest. “I have never loved you as I love you now,” Vladimir swore, worried that his wife was tired and lonely. He reminded her of the Peltenburgs’ insistence that she visit them in Holland; perhaps she should go now? She should keep in mind that she at least had Dmitri. He had no such consolation, and missed them both dreadfully. He longed for her. He was counting the days until March 15.