Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Vladimir was back in Paris on May 2, 1939, the day his mother died, in Prague. For want of a visa, he did not attend the funeral. A few days earlier the Nabokovs had moved to the two-room apartment for which they had so long waited, on the rue Boileau. It was practically empty, and remained so. From the rue Boileau Véra began to dispatch letters to foreign publishers on her husband’s behalf; she called on directors to inquire after the fate of his plays. Vladimir returned to London for his second round of “telephonadas” (“ ‘telephone’ + ‘armadas,’ ” he explained), none of which yielded any sign of a long-term prospect. This did not dim his roseate confidence in the future. In the course of the June trip he assured Véra that even if nothing were to come of the teaching positions, they could certainly count on some income from Sebastian Knight in the fall. He suggested she give up the rue Boileau apartment. With the security deposit they would spend the summer in the south and establish a base in London afterward, no matter what. At the same time, he picked up a translating assignment, a scientific treatise on the bone structure of mice. He felt he had acquitted himself well of his responsibilities but was painfully aware that no applause seemed to be coming from across the Channel. He was back in Paris by mid-month, and for the summer the Nabokovs again moved to the Riviera, the key to the rue Boileau still in their pockets; after the time it had taken Véra to find the apartment, she had strong feelings about relinquishing it. No teaching positions, nor any admiring reader for Sebastian Knight, materialized. “What do you expect me to do? I am a good hypnotist, but I cannot hypnotise the publishers,” cursed Jannelli, explaining her frustration at not being able to sell Mary, The Defense, King, Queen, Knave, or Glory in New York. In a way that had happened before, Nabokov’s fate was dangled before him years before it would materialize. From Mikhail Karpovich at Harvard came the first of several letters that summer describing a position teaching Russian at Cornell University. Nothing came of it. On July 1, from Fréjus, Nabokov queried the Tolstoy Foundation about the possibilities of obtaining an American visa. It cannot have been an easy summer. Still, Véra would complain later that the Riviera had lost all the charm it had held in the 1930s.

  The family returned to Paris the day before the declaration of war. In the flush of those first harried minutes after September 3, when the gas masks were handed out, when the air-raid alarms sounded nightly, they did what Vladimir’s mother had done when the first rumblings of revolution had been felt in Russia: They sent their son off, in this case with Anna Feigin to Deauville, where Dmitri remained until mid-December. They missed him, but knew the separation to be necessary. Meanwhile Vladimir redoubled his efforts to obtain American visas. He began his own blitzkrieg campaign—so different in tone and tempo from the drôle de guerre around him—bombarding the Tolstoy Foundation, Mikhail Karpovich, his cousin Nicholas, now teaching music at Wells College, with urgent requests for help. He fretted that no one understood how utterly dire was his situation. The ever-loyal Jannelli gathered precious affidavits in New York; Vladimir left her and the Tolstoy Foundation with the alarmed impression that he would be mobilized were he not to leave the country before December 10.* To his agent he dictated the kind of letter he hoped Bobbs-Merrill would submit on his behalf to the American consul. His desperation can be read in its final line: “And, please, make it quite clear to Bobbs-Merrill that, once in New York, I shall certainly write for them the novel they expect from me.” (Had she known of them, Véra would doubtless have found distressingly familiar the lengths to which Alexandra Tolstoy went for the family. To one refugee coordinator, Tolstoy suggested that if nothing could be done for Mr. Nabokov, certainly someone would be willing to offer his wife an affidavit for domestic service. The appeal echoed the thirteen-year campaign Evsei Lazarevich Slonim had waged to bring his brother to St. Petersburg.) The Bobbs-Merrill letter went out punctually, along the lines Vladimir had requested, as did an affidavit from Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For a few weeks the Nabokovs—more penniless than ever, all émigré publishing having come to a standstill—held out hope that they might leave in December, but what they were to remember as the dimmest, most miserable period of their lives lasted five months longer.

  Since September the family had been accepting monthly thousand-franc loans from a friend who owned a Parisian cinema; Nabokov went back to giving English lessons that winter. Among his three students was Maria Marinel, the eldest sister of a conservatory-trained harp-playing trio, all of whom became devoted family friends. Maria’s younger sister, Elisaveta, offered a portrait of Véra at the time, hardly the serene Vermeer that would suffice for the years to come: Slim and lovely, Véra leaned over a bathtub, washing the family’s sheets. (On another occasion when the Nabokovs gave a small party, Véra could be heard holding forth at great length on Proust. Maria Marinel was glad to have the excuse of entertaining a disruptive Dmitri in the next room, as she felt the discussion was over her head.) Berberova provided a correspondingly bleak picture of Vladimir, whom she found lying in bed in January, ashen and destitute, after a bout with influenza. The apartment was practically free of furniture. She claimed to have brought the family a chicken, which Véra immediately set out to cook, a statement Véra later found offensive, more offensive than she could possibly have found a chicken in the winter of 1940. The family’s circumstances were not lost on Dmitri, who informed Maria Marinel, “We have a very hard life.” Véra did all in her power to shelter him from his reality. When he spent the night at Anna Feigin’s, his mother announced grandly to friends, “Tonight my son is dining out.” And his father was forthright about his desire for Dmitri to have all that of which the Revolution had deprived him. Over the winter Véra and Vladimir together prepared a series of lectures on Russian literature; by April Nabokov reported that the course was nearly ready, but that he was delivering it to the walls. At the end of 1939 he had also written a novella called “The Enchanter.” He read it, one night during the blue-out, to three friends and the woman doctor who had treated his psoriasis. Word of its unusual subject spread quickly, stories of forty-year-old seducers of prepubescent girls not being in great supply at the time. It was unpublishable and, unlike the two thousand pages of lecture notes, would do nothing to put its author on that boat to America. On the other hand the novel into which it blossomed, in another language, on another continent, would twenty years later allow the American writer Nabokov to realize precisely the reverse of what the Russian writer Sirin now dreamed. It would send Véra and Vladimir sailing back to Europe.

  A few less enduring fictions helped speed the departure. Nabokov urged the Tolstoy Foundation to assign him an invented series of well-remunerated lectures. It went without saying that this arrangement would remain purely “metaphysical.” Similar letters went out to friends, who were to assure the authorities that they would lodge the family on their arrival. The visas came through in February 1940, but the Nabokovs still lacked the $650 they needed for three steamer tickets. Nicholas Nabokov was among those who suggested that his cousin sail alone and send for his family later, when he could afford to do so. It is easy to imagine how this idea would have sat with Véra. Having had a closer view of the Nazis than most in Paris, she can have had no great desire to meet up with them again; while few in Paris that spring believed a German would ever march into the city, she would have belonged to that small minority. She had already spent much of the fall running desperately from office to office, in search of the requisite visas. Vladimir appears to have considered the idea of sailing alone, or at least was remembered by many as having been in such a panic to leave that he contemplated doing so. Véra’s determination to leave can be read in her having compromised her unassailable ethics by offering a 200-franc bribe in exchange for exit permits. In April a Jewish rescue organization headed by a former associate of Vladimir’s father offered the family half-fare tickets on a crossing. A second agency, committed to assisting non-Jews who had been victims of the Nazis’ racial policies, suppl
ied additional funds.*

  In all of Nabokov’s work there is barely a clock that functions properly, and yet now, abruptly, in the nick of time, everything came together. The monies arrived the morning after the Germans had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, when the thunder of antiaircraft guns could be heard outside Paris. By the time the Nabokovs sailed, nine days later, the files at the Quai d’Orsay had been burned by the best-dressed cadre of arsonists in history; traffic police patrolled with rifles; the city had begun to fill with bewildered refugees from Belgium and northern France. The scene at the Gare Montparnasse was chaotic; the Germans were barely seventy miles from Paris. The Marinel-assisted departure was made in haste, amid great chaos and with some concern for Dmitri, who was running a 104-degree fever and who was plied with sulfamides all the way to the embarkation. On the same day Winston Churchill delivered his first radio address as Prime Minister, an address in which he acknowledged that the Maginot Line had been penetrated. If good-byes were said they were not extended to Sergei, who may have been left “to stutter his astonishment to an indifferent concierge,” as Vladimir later surmised, with oddly phrased contrition. Véra had listed Sergei (and not Sonia) as her nearest relative on her application for immigration; she also borrowed Ilya Fondaminsky’s avenue de Versailles address, which sounded—and was—statelier than the rue Boileau. She saw neither her brother-in-law nor Fondaminsky again. Both men were to perish in concentration camps.

  A crossing on the French Lines’ Champlain was not without drama at the best of times. Christopher Isherwood had sailed to America on the same vessel the previous year and noted that it seemed very small, “slithering down the long grey Atlantic slopes.” Compared with the Canadian cargo ship on which Véra had sailed from Yalta it must have felt luxurious, however, especially as a benevolent French Lines agent took it upon himself to assign the family to a first-class cabin. Certainly perfect comfort would have been the impression Véra conveyed. As Elisaveta Marinel wrote, given the fear of U-boat attack and Dmitri’s illness, the crossing must have been difficult, “but you, Véra Evseevna, are superhuman, and if you had the strength to get out despite the odds, then you probably arrived better than anyone else under the same circumstances.”

  Véra Nabokov left no record of what she thought as she sailed into New York harbor on May 27, 1940, but a few scraps of evidence can be assembled. She had been turned back at borders before, when in possession of a regular passport. Under more pacific circumstances, Isherwood had looked out from the same deck to find New York terrifying, visibly pulsing with New World energy. That Véra may have been flustered is confirmed by Dmitri’s recollection that his mother lost her composure precisely once in her life, and that before a bureaucratic ordeal at the Port of New York. At customs the keys to the Nabokovs’ trunk failed to materialize, turning up later in her pocket. (The trunk was opened with a firm blow of a hammer—then immediately and accidentally closed again, either by the porter or by Vladimir.) The family looked miserably lost, and very poor; the trip across Manhattan and to the Upper East Side felt interminable. In the taxi from the pier there was a comic fumble with the unfamiliar currency, when Véra attempted to bestow a hundred-dollar bill on an honest driver to whom the Nabokovs actually owed ninety-nine cents.

  There was plenty of cause for concern. For the third time a mythical, flourishing world had collapsed behind the Nabokovs, who escaped as if through a trapdoor. This one came banging down behind them. It was not literally true that they had made their way “out of the cell, which in fact was no longer there.” Despite what Vladimir liked later to claim, the building at 59, rue Boileau was not obliterated by a bomb. The Germans were in Paris on June 14, however; the Champlain hit a mine and sank on its next westbound crossing. And among the many borders they had traversed the Nabokovs had this time crossed a truly semantic divide. In Berlin and Paris a Russian counted as an émigré. In America, she was a refugee.

  * Decades later, his Russian colleagues at Cornell wondered if he had a soul, and if so, why he took such pains to hide it.

  * Despair enjoyed the distinction of having been the sole work to be accepted in Russian and very nearly rejected in the author’s English. Nabokov admitted later he was not entirely pleased with his translation, which he thought flattened the novel into “a half-baked thriller.”

  * Biskupsky did manage to wreak havoc with Véra’s family, but not on the front she had anticipated. Lena’s husband, Prince Nicolai Massalsky, was a Russian scholar, no friend of the fascists. Biskupsky’s committee supplied a passport in Massalsky’s name to a White Russian officer, who in that guise participated in all sorts of anti-Semitic activities, beautifully sullying Massalsky’s reputation. (It was a peculiarly Nabokovian twist, this creation of the “disreputable namesake,” sounding like something out of the short story “Conversation Piece, 1945”—or like the kind of wizardry Golyadkin believes to be practiced on him in Dostoyevsky’s The Double.) That incident—and the generally anti-Semitic behavior of the Russians who remained in Berlin under Hitler—forever soured Lena on her countrymen. “I don’t know a single Russian, White, Red, Green, or of any other color, and I avoid them like the plague,” she wrote Véra in 1960, from Sweden. Véra learned of Biskupsky’s treachery years after the fact. So far as the Nabokov family went, Biskupsky did nothing when Vladimir’s brother Sergei was arrested much later by the Gestapo, assuring family members there was no cause for concern.

  * But in a different apartment, this time on the avenue de Versailles; Amalia Fondaminsky had died in 1935. The earlier apartment, on the rue Chernoviz, made its way into the final chapter of Pnin.

  * Véra grappled with the same riddle. “His eyes were not actually hazel, but somewhere between hazel and green,” she concluded later.

  * And an irresistible one. Introduced to a particularly striking woman at a Paris reading in 1940, the first two words out of his mouth were “Anna Karenin!”

  * As it happened, he chose the name of the paternal great-grandmother, Baroness Nina von Korff. The Baroness had married her daughter off to her lover, so that she could continue her affair in peace.

  * The scene is eerily prefigured in Nabokov’s 1927 poem “The Snapshot.” In it an “accidental spy” is captured lurking in a beach shot taken by the photographer of his wife and son. Oddly, Irina had copied the poem into her 1937 diary. As it happened, Véra arrived an hour after Irina. She learned later that her rival had remained on the beach, watching her.

  † In her devotion she was initially encouraged by her mother. “If he loves you, then even later you can take him away from her,” she advised Irina, just after the Cannes fiasco.

  * Of course I am not Zina, she would say dismissively. Zina is only half-Jewish, and I am entirely Jewish.

  * He succeeded. The Bobbs-Merrill reader, reviewing the novel for a second time, hailed it as “light, popular fiction,” the last time anyone would say as much of a work by Nabokov.

  † The only hints of philandering in the correspondence appear in letters of the thirties, to Gleb Struve from Prague, which Nabokov several times assured his friend was filled as ever with girls, and to Khodasevich, from Berlin, in 1934: “Berlin is very fine right now, thanks to the spring, which is particularly juicy this year, and I, like a dog, am driven wild by all sorts of interesting scents.”

  * Nabokov had been happy to write off Orlando—which he read with the rest of Woolf in 1933—as first-rate drivel. Were anyone strong-stomached enough to venture closer, something surely could be said about Woolf’s version of time-travel, the visions of Persian markets superimposed on 1920s London, and The Gift, begun at the time. In any event Nabokov knew when he began The Gift that he was not the first to attempt a hybrid of fiction and history; Orlando is a novel with an index, one with a mind of its own.

  † One cannot help but think of Humbert Humbert and the “fragments of a novel” he defends to Charlotte.

  * On this ridge, at Dmitri’s age, Humbert Humbert would lose his
mother to lightning.

  * Speaking of himself in the third person, he offered up this assessment of the only thing he had in common with Joseph Conrad: “both men might have chosen French as readily as English.”

  † Angus Cameron at Bobbs-Merrill gave Jannelli permission to write whatever she liked in his name, if only because he never again wanted to face the convoluted copyright and translation situation the firm had tackled with Laughter.

  * Fondaminsky put a less romantic and slightly inaccurate spin on it. “You must realize,” he told others in the emigration, “he lives with his wife and child in one room. In order to create, he locks himself in a tiny toilet, sits there like an eagle and types.”

  † Nabokov did not feel so confident of his English as to forgo having it checked by a native speaker, as was the case with his next few books. Lucie Léon Noel reviewed it with him, paragraph by paragraph. Her husband was working simultaneously with Joyce.