Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  He returned to Paris early in March, buoyant, but all the same painfully aware that his fate hung in a delicate balance. The strain of living with that uncertainty can be read in the letters to Berlin; it took its toll as well on his health. He had suffered from psoriasis in the past, and in Paris the condition—aggravated by stress—deteriorated. The wild itching kept him from sleep and greatly affected his mood; the disease spread even to his face. (His condition was not much helped by the fact that this was a particularly cold and rainy spring in Paris.) He felt as if in constant torment, especially as he hesitated to use the ointment he had been prescribed for fear of ruining the sheets at Ilya Fondaminsky’s, where he was again a houseguest.* He could not wait to get to the Riviera, where the sun would offer some relief. In the meantime, he worried for his sanity. He was itching in other ways too; he felt he would burst if he did not get back to The Gift. He could not be more sick of his “society lifestyle.” He continued to write Véra of the admiration his work and his person evoked, not always in the most comforting terms. In England he made a less than prepossessing entrance: “My hat (which lost any and all shape after the first Parisian rain) elicits surprise and laughter, and my scarf dangles along the sidewalk, having been flattened in the process.” In Paris he left a different impression, one that was no more reassuring to his wife: “I have been encountering two breeds of ladies here,” he related early in March. “Those who quote to me excerpts from my books, and those who ponder the question of whether my eyes are green or yellow.”* He had found a French—English translating job, but was waiting for answers from all kinds of journals and publishers. In March, in another piquant example of the future shimmering through the past, Putnam’s turned down the pages they had seen of the English-language autobiography. He wanted only to write; there was too much noise at the Fondaminsky apartment for him to do so.

  To make matters worse, in February Véra began to balk at the idea of the move. “Tell yourself that our Berlin life is over—and please, get ready to go,” her husband implored her as he raced about breathlessly, attempting to establish some kind of base for the family, in France or England. But from Berlin Véra began to raise all kinds of nettlesome objections. For the next two months they sang a painfully atonal duet: He said March, she insisted on April. He said France, she said Belgium. He said France, she said Italy. He said France, she said Austria. She developed a sudden obsession with Vladimir’s mother, who had been promised a glimpse of the grandson she had not yet met; she insisted they not move west without first venturing east, as a family, to Prague. And while in Czechoslovakia, Véra hoped to spend some time at a Franzenbad sanitarium, taking the cure for rheumatism. Nabokov railed at this proposal. After all he had done to secure a foothold in London and Paris, was he really to be hauled off to the backwaters of eastern Europe, far from all opportunity? He felt he had depleted himself reaching this other, more promising, shore, and “that after your letter I truly feel like a swimmer who is being torn from a rock he has reached by some whim of Neptune, a wave of unknown origin, a sudden wind or some such thing.” This time common sense was surely on his side, he argued. Stubbornly Véra proposed that she and Dmitri make the Prague trip and meet him later, an idea to which her husband objected as well. He did not want to put off their reunion for another month. He could not believe his mother’s equilibrium depended on their visit. As for Véra’s rheumatism, the south of France would prove just as salubrious. It would also be free of doctors insisting she stay forever. A Czech sanitarium would not.

  “The Eastern side of my every minute is already colored by the light of our impending meeting,” Nabokov assured his wife, imploring her not to be jealous of his life in Paris, or of his female admirers, all of whom were powerless in comparison with her. He continued to solicit her advice on all publishing matters—What should he tell Putnam’s? Did she agree that various pages were ready for submission? Did she have a title for him?—but also could not refrain from telling her that everyone with whom he had spoken found her Prague plans foolhardy. Meanwhile the middle of March came and went. He was expecting to make a second short trip to London at the end of April; Véra wrote waspishly that she did not see the point in her joining him in France before then. He was incensed; she was effectively delaying their meeting for an entire month. Why was she so dragging her heels when they could meet before the London trip? Forced to choose for the first time between his work and his wife, Vladimir wrote that he would rather cancel that trip than go without seeing her for another four weeks. He could not assure her enough of his love—nor could he desist from reminding her that her plan was sheer insanity. Everyone agreed: The visas alone that would be required for the three of them to travel to Prague and back amounted to a life-time’s labor. If all she needed was a rest, he would assume round-the-clock care of Dmitri, in France. She remained adamant, citing what she viewed as the ironclad obligation to his mother. At last Vladimir relented, on the condition that Véra settle on the ever-sacred May 8—the anniversary of their first meeting—as a firm date for their reunion. To his consent she responded by again changing her tune, writing anew of Italy and Belgium. And in what must have irritated even more, she left him without a letter on March 28, the anniversary of his father’s murder, a date to which he was highly sensitive. He knew her to be overwhelmed—before April 1 she and Anna Feigin had emptied the Nestorstrasse apartment and moved to temporary quarters a few blocks away—but this was inexcusable. It was hardly the selfless behavior of the woman who had proved the impeccable “helpmeet, on the poetic path.”

  On insult she heaped injury. The supremely capable Véra had neglected to obtain hard currency for the Prague trip. Her husband exploded: How could she accuse him of carelessness? If she had only listened to him they would already be together in France. On April 6 she wrote vaguely that she would make a final decision about Prague in the days to come. Quite accurately, her husband observed that she appeared not to be reading his letters. “What is the problem, what is it about this plan that evokes in you such confusion, while the most complicated and most awkward (as it turns out) traipsing across Czechoslovakia seems to you easily accomplishable?” He was frantic. “Without that air that comes from you I can neither think nor write nor do anything else,” he swore. He wanted only to get back to The Gift. The separation was unbearable; her waffling made it infinitely worse. He strove to control his considerable anger but she did not make this easy. It was as if every time he mentioned a minor triumph that might propel them west, she found a frivolous reason to steer east. He suspected that his wife was exhausted, but she was exhausting him, too.

  In mid-April Véra began in a different vein. On or just after their twelfth wedding anniversary, she wrote her husband that she had been told he was having an affair, with a Russian woman whom she named. He replied that the slander did not surprise him in the least. He had heard similar rumors himself, though according to the scuttlebutt in Paris, the affair was not with the acquaintance Véra mentioned, but with Nina Berberova. The truth was that every one of his moves was noted and remarked upon, maliciously, in the émigré community. In those circles his lack of politics raised eyebrows, as did his lack of religious conviction; his nonobservance of Orthodox Easter was providing a fresh source of tongue-wagging. It had been noted that he drank hot chocolate, not Pernod, like an honest writer. Mostly though it was his talent that won him enemies. With Fondaminsky he puzzled over his relationship with Bunin; the very mention of Nabokov’s name was said to send the Nobelist into a fit. “Of course he doesn’t like you,” Fondaminsky agreed. “You spread it all around that you’re the best Russian writer.” Vladimir challenged him. “What do you mean I spread it around?” “Well, you write,” Fondaminsky sputtered. The situation was more ridiculous yet in Vladimir’s eyes: Bunin envied not his literary talent, but “ ‘the success with women’ with which shallow gossip rewards me.” He counseled his wife to summon as much contempt for these rumors as did he. He always told her everything, and w
ould continue to do so. There was no call for hysterics, which she had displayed. And again he begged her to stick to their new itinerary. He would meet her in Toulon, after her trip to Prague.

  While her husband was doing his best to be patient with her, Véra suddenly lost all patience with Berlin. Before Vladimir could even reassure her of his fidelity she had hatched a new plan. She would fly to Paris immediately, lodging in her sister Sonia’s hotel room, with Dmitri. Something had evidently rattled her, which was not difficult to imagine in a country where Jewish doctoral students were barred from exams, where signs reading “Jews Not Admitted” hung in bakeries and butcher shops. Surely by 1937 Véra had seen enough red flags in her life. (She could not have been particularly reassured by a visit with Zinaida Shakhovskoy’s brother, Ioann, a future Orthodox archbishop of San Francisco. He stopped by at about this time, noting that the Nabokovs appeared to be leaving Germany. Véra explained that it was not healthy for Jews to stay, to which Shakhovskoy replied that they ought instead to stay and suffer.) Vladimir deemed Véra’s sudden Parisian plan a costly and awkward alternative. Should she not bypass Paris altogether? He wholly sympathized with the torments of living “among the rascals,” however, and—if she felt she had the courage—suggested she leave immediately for the Riviera. They went another round, he sketching the cottage he had found for them and outlining their living expenses, at least half of which would be his responsibility; she writing again of Prague. Twelve weeks after Véra had sent him off from Berlin, Vladimir surrendered, in a letter written in a blind fury. “I lack the strength to draw out this long-distance chess game,” he conceded, promising that if she would leave immediately for his mother’s he would apply for a visa and meet her there. At least that way they would be together on May 8, if in Prague. Meanwhile the second chapter of The Gift had come together in his mind, commas and all. Shortly after receiving this letter Véra and Dmitri left for Prague, arriving on May 6. Véra breathed a deep sigh of relief as they crossed the border.

  On the cardinal eighth—the only May 8 the couple would spend apart—Nabokov was still writing from Paris. He was a helpless victim of bureaucratic torture. No amount of beating his head against the wall at the Czech consulate would produce the required visa. (His predicament was complicated by the fact that his Nansen passport was about to expire.) He needed for Véra to apply pressure at the Prague end. Under no circumstances should she come to France, or he would never obtain the necessary papers. He begged her to arrange things for him; she wrote indignantly that he was not making a serious effort to join her. Never in his life had he been so wretched. In his mind’s eye he could barely see her clearly; he worried that Dmitri would fail to recognize him. Their correspondence had disintegrated into “a series of petty bureaucratic reports,” and he knew all he needed to know of the situation in Prague from what she had written of her adventures with a bedbug. He begged her not to add to his torment by writing of her anxiety about the wait. If he had not committed suicide in February, when the psoriasis had driven him to the brink, it had only been because of her. After a last-minute relay among consulates and embassies, more in debt than ever, his affairs in perfect disarray but with a new story in mind, he boarded an eastbound train on May 20. Two days later the couple was reunited. This was the trip that was to be described years later, without inflection, as the visit to Prague, “to which we journeyed to show our child to my mother in the spring in 1937.”

  Nabokov found his wife perfectly miserable and in poor health. The stay in Prague was short and bittersweet; he may have suspected when he said good-bye to his mother that year that he was doing so for the last time. (He could not have known that he would never see his sister Olga again, and that twenty-two years would elapse before he would see his favored sister, Elena.) After a few days the family decamped for Franzenbad, where Véra submitted to a series of mudbaths. During her treatments Vladimir journeyed back to Prague, for a reading, and to visit with his mother. Véra moved south to Marienbad, where Anna Feigin met her; Nabokov arrived days later—and several days later than expected—bearing volumes of Kipling and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue for his wife. He had resisted the idea of meeting in Marienbad but made good use of his stay, writing “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” one of his favorite stories, and his only short story of 1937. At the end of June the family pushed on to Paris, where Vladimir again lodged at Fondaminsky’s. Véra and Dmitri were invited to stay at the Brombergs’, on the rue Massenet, where there was a spare bedroom. Briefly they visited the International Exposition, which was drawing record crowds to Paris; the immense swastika at the top of Albert Speer’s German pavilion spoke more to the future than did the brilliant displays of colored light. On July 7 the Nabokovs left for Cannes, where they settled in a modest hotel several minutes from the beach. Finally Vladimir could bask in the sun, as he had longed to do throughout the Parisian months. By this time he was well acquainted with an odd property of the clear light of day, one he articulated later in the year: “Sunlight is good in the degree that it heightens the value of shade.” And he discovered as well the reason for his wife’s irritability, her indecision, her sudden love affair with eastern Europe.

  3

  A week after the arrival in Cannes, Vladimir confessed what Véra had long suspected. He was in the midst of a delirious love affair. The woman was the one named in Véra’s letter, Irina Yurievna Guadanini. He was still very much in the “delicious daze of adultery.” He could not shake his infatuation, and thought he would have to leave Véra. She avowed that her response was simple: “I suggested that he ought to join the lady if he was in love.” In truth her response appears to have been less antiseptic, much more in keeping with the heartfelt advice she offered a young poet later: “You should never give up what you love.” Nabokov wrote his mistress that Véra was not going to release him from the marriage. At the same time he could not think of living without Irina. He did not see how he could return to his former life; he pleaded now for Irina’s patience, as he had pleaded for Véra’s months earlier. He reported that the evening of the revelation—it was probably Bastille Day 1937—had been, save for the evening of his father’s murder, the most horrible night of his life. For Véra it could only have been the most horrible, without exception.

  She could often be blinded by her confidence in human reason—as was said of a vigorous woman of an earlier century, “She was not more reasonable, in the last resort, than the rest of humanity. She paid in full and stoically, the penalty of supposing herself to be so”—but where her husband was concerned her instincts were infallible. Although Vladimir had written openly of having spent time with Irina Guadanini, Véra had had her suspicions, as early as mid-February. She knew from her father that men left women; the emigration, and the dislocations of Berlin in the 1920s, had in no way reinforced the bonds of matrimony. She had always been one of her husband’s most astute readers; the daily correspondence had been—exactly as Nabokov would later observe of Sirin’s sentences—“clear but weirdly misleading.” Who better to ferret out the truth from between his lines? All of the urgent requests that she join him immediately had elucidated one striking detail: Vladimir did not want his wife anywhere near Paris. The fears of which she had written her husband had been confirmed in a detailed, unsigned four-page letter that arrived in mid-April, just as the Paris-Prague tug-of-war intensified. Véra was certain that Irina’s mother had sent the letter, presumably to speed the disintegration of the marriage. Others speculated it had been Fondaminsky, with whom Véra was in touch, and who was well disposed toward her. The author of the anonymous missive—it was in French, but patently written by a Russian—reported at length on Vladimir’s infatuation with Irina, “a pretty woman, blonde and neurasthenic like him,” adding that Nabokov had accumulated a great number of enemies in the literary community. This does not sound like Fondaminsky, or in general like the work of a well-wisher.

  Nabokov was an instinctive flirt.* He had met both Irina Guadanini and her mother, Vera Koko
shkin, during his 1936 trip to Paris, after which he had written them jointly. Madame Kokoshkin had been less won over than her daughter. The older woman found the writer brilliant—she agreed he was a “20th century miracle”—but frightening. Vladimir had begun seeing Irina romantically early in February; her head full of his poetry, she had attended the January 1937 reading, and he had called on her three times the following week. Three years younger than Véra, Irina was a vivacious and highly emotional blonde, briefly married, now divorced. Her laugh was musical; she had a lively sense of humor; she took great joy in playing with words. Once again Nabokov was seduced by a fine memory for verse. Her Petersburg background was not dissimilar from his. In and around Paris Irina Yurievna eked out a living as a dog groomer. She had a reputation, only enhanced by the involvement with Nabokov, as a siren. Nabokov’s allure was established fact as well; when a friend’s twenty-one-year-old daughter telephoned Fondaminsky to ask if he might arrange for her to meet his illustrious houseguest, Fondaminsky laughed. He was not surprised by the request, assuring his caller that all women, regardless of age, fell under Sirin’s charm. He also invited her to a private reading the writer was to give at his apartment two days later, of the English autobiography. This would have been in late February or early March. Already Vladimir was surrounded by admirers but smiling only at the blue-eyed blonde at his elbow. Mark Aldanov pointed her out, “the femme fatale, the breaker of hearts.” When Vladimir spoke of the disintegrating state of affairs in Germany, noting that “the novelist was God’s translator” at reading the writing on walls, tears glittered in Irina’s eyes. “How beautiful!” she swooned. She did not leave his side that evening, or any more often than was necessary that spring. He had called her immediately upon his arrival in London in February. It was the coup de foudre; she worshiped the imprint his head left on her pillow, his abandoned cigarette butt in the ashtray. With tears streaming down his face, he professed to her mother his perfect inability to live without her. The closest the relationship came to earth appears to have been the games of hangman the two played in Irina’s notebook.