by Stacy Schiff
For leisure she read about the Old Masters, primarily Vermeer and Georges de La Tour; this was one of her favorite pastimes. She was at her desk no fewer than six hours a day, as prosaic as ever in her reports. But a note of pathos sounds just beneath the lacquer-hard surface. She thanked Loo for having come all the way to Montreux to see her in the spring of 1978; she was deeply touched by the publishers who offered to visit. She sounded almost surprised when someone from the distant past wrote her. She seemed to live in expectation of being forgotten, was pleased when she discovered that was not. (At their ends, friends like the Christiansens hesitated to write, worried they were presuming, and were just as taken aback by Véra’s heartfelt responses. Somehow it never seemed to occur to anyone that she actually enjoyed receiving mail, which she did.) There was almost a note of entreaty to the letters, thought Elena Levin. “Don’t forget me,” Véra implored the Appels. She remained as plainspoken as ever. In 1983 she wrote Alfred Appel, “I do hope you will visit Europe some day before I leave it for good.”
She never tired of telling friends that the work kept her sane, healthy, happy. At the same time she continued in her quiet protests. At eighty-one, still spending full days at her desk (her writing desk had become her writing armchair), she was still insisting she lacked all epistolary gifts. Sylvia Berkman asked if Véra might write something about Vladimir, a question she was not alone in posing; Véra replied that neither her Russian nor her English was strong enough. She was not to be a writing widow, like Fanny Stevenson or Anna Dostoyevsky, not even a faux writing widow, like Florence Hardy, whose name went on the so-called biography her husband had written of himself, and dictated to his wife, before his death. She did not care to have the last word. While she admired Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of a marriage that was in many respects similar to her own under radically different circumstances, she expressed no desire to emulate Mrs. Mandelstam. Nor did she subscribe to any kind of widows’ network. There was no being tigresses together; there was no consulting on publishing procedures, as there had been between Countess Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoyevsky. She would read Carl Proffer’s 1987 The Widows of Russia, a work on the women who upheld and fostered and transmitted a literature, but if she saw anything familiar in the text, or in its cast of committed, culture-preserving characters, she offered no reflections on it. She had always held herself apart, insisted, as much as her husband, on the supremacy of the individual. Given the work in which she had so deeply immersed herself for five decades, that sense was understandable. Less easy to grasp was the diffidence, which had for so many years been read as arrogance. She was inundated with requests for meetings, interviews, opinions, by those who wanted to talk about literature, or just talk: “Since they cannot talk to V. they ask if they can talk to me (faute de mieux).” And this, she added, after she had done everything in her power, all her life, to avoid meeting new people.
Much of the late 1970s were consumed by yet another translation effort. Having corrected Speak, Memory in German, Look at the Harlequins! in French, her husband’s poetry in Italian, she undertook a translation of Pale Fire into Russian. She backed into the project accidentally, having agreed to check the work of a young poet, commissioned by the Proffers. The task was arduous—William Buckley remarked that he would have thought such a rendering impossible, but had long known “that nothing is impossible for you”—but not as arduous as were the battles with the original translator. To her horror Véra determined that he had no sense of her husband’s work, little grasp of English, and a disastrous conception of Russian, especially literary Russian. After a number of rounds she gave up on his version, retranslating the novel herself from beginning to end, finishing only in 1982. Years into the project, with only about seventy pages to go, she felt no great sense of triumph. If she compared her work with the original she was maddeningly disheartened. “But at least it is all exact,” she consoled herself.
The manner in which credit was negotiated for the work is instructive. Initially, Véra had no intention of lending her name to the project. Given the amount of time she dedicated to the task, she later agreed to a line indicating that the translation had been made under her supervision. When the Russian Pale Fire was inadvertently announced without any mention of her contribution, she felt honor-bound to assert herself. She had proposed a shared credit so as to spare the poet’s feelings; now her own had been badly hurt. She regretted having been so “stupidly generous” in the first place. Having spent years correcting someone else’s “illiteracies and errors,” she insisted on sole credit. It was as if she were willing to step forward only out of spite. “I have now decided to be ruthless,” she warned the Proffers. She was adamant about this formulation, as a bibliographer who later stumbled discovered. He was duly notified that all mention of the poet must disappear. “This is very important to me,” Véra stressed.
The Pale Fire translation was but one of many projects competing for her attention. More so than ever before, she was her husband’s representative, the quicksilver mediator between a divine sensibility and its earthly interpreters. It had long been her job to set translators, cover artists, royalty departments, journalists, on the straight and narrow. She did so all the more stringently now. She admitted that she was perhaps a bit more pious than was necessary, but did not see how she could act differently. Only Vladimir could have granted special dispensations, and he was not around to do so. She doubted he would want a poem of his to appear in an anthology alongside a mystical salute to Lenin. And when in doubt, she explained to the volume’s editor, her rule was to abstain. She apologized to an editor for her punctiliousness: “You may find my corrections to be only details,” she explained, “but style consists of details.” VN had held that style alone should constitute a writer’s biography; only in this respect was Véra writing her husband’s story. In preparing his Cornell lectures for publication she subscribed to a simple rule, citing a case her father had spoken about that had clearly much impressed her. A Roman author had requested in his will that nothing whatever be added to his work. On the other hand, his heirs should feel free to eliminate whatever they liked. She remained as always alert to the misprint, the slight, the inaccuracy, the mangled line, the lapse of logic. Nothing escaped her vigilance, as John Updike discovered when he submitted his introduction to the first volume of lectures. It was returned to him with Véra’s three incisive pages of notes. (Her seventeenth point: “A personal request: Could you please take me out of the article?”) “What an impressively clear mind and style she has,” Updike commented, revising his pages.
With her directness and literalism, Véra labored to preserve the poetry and mystery—to her mind the two essential aspects—of her husband’s work. The indignities piled up, as they always had, but now she faced them alone, or with the help of Dmitri, who spent part of the year in Montreux, and who since the mid-1970s had been translating his father’s work into Italian. How could The Defense’s British paperbacker even dream of putting such a pseudomodern abomination on the cover? She agreed the work of a young Russian writer was promising but wished he did not imitate her husband quite so much. She battled as ferociously, as directly, on the page as she had a half century earlier; if she had not been the original Zina Mertz, she had certainly inherited her idiosyncratic directness. “No one else—not students, colleagues here, Nabokov scholars elsewhere—returns a critical serve with such force,” Boyd wrote, thanking Véra for her comments on his pages. When George Hessen published his memoirs she commented that she had always known of his deep affection for Vladimir but had been touched to see it in print. What she had not known was what a dreadful writer Hessen was. In 1979 Harry Levin reviewed The Nabokov-Wilson Letters in The New York Review of Books. “I was not going to say anything about Harry’s article about The Letters, but I like to be quite frank, and so perhaps I had better say that the article distressed me very much,” Véra wrote Elena. It was a year and a half before she explained her indignation.
On top of th
is affront arrived Shakhovskoy’s 1979 In Search of Nabokov, published in Paris. Véra was willing to overlook the personal attacks, what she read as flagrant anti-Semitism, even the insinuation that she had participated in the writing of her husband’s books. What she could not stomach were the charges leveled against Vladimir. As she saw it, Shakhovskoy—to whom she referred by her married name, Malévitch—had two objectives: “1) to prove my hatred (entirely imagined by her) for Russia and the Russian people; 2) my having brought about VN’s estrangement from a) Russia and b) Christianity and God (and the Maleviches).”* This was beneath contempt, where Véra intended to leave it. But as Madame Malévitch seemed intent on a second objective—to “connect him [VN] with pedophilia, and insinuate that VN had commerce, if not with the devil himself, then at least with some of his representatives”—she contemplated legal action.† (The matter was complicated by the fact that the two women shared a lawyer. Louba Schirman, who had so ingeniously freed the Nabokovs from Girodias, was also a close friend of Shakhovskoy’s.) In a meeting in Montreux with Dmitri, Schirman counseled Véra against taking action; a suit would only focus attention on the book. She cannot have had an easy time doing so, but Véra turned the other cheek. The issue flared up again two years later, when Ullstein brought out the volume in Germany. Véra felt this publication more acutely. She believed that Russian readers would recognize Shakhovskoy’s charges for what they were but that the German public would not. Schirman hesitated to pursue the matter, which Ledig Rowohlt advised Véra to drop as well. In his opinion the book was boring and would go unread. Generally friends agreed that the biography amounted to character assassination, but a few relations suffered. How could you have failed to notice the baseness, the villainy, all the vulgarity, Véra rebuked one Parisian friend? Shyly she asked Natalie Nabokov, who had been so kind to her in America, if she had joined her sister’s faction. “I shall not love you less,” wrote the woman who knew one could judge a man as much by his enemies as by his friends, “but I shall not write you anymore.” The correspondence ended there.
All of these battle cries went out from a woman who continued to profess that she was alternately too lazy or too tired to attend properly to her work. She was suffering from Parkinson’s disease; when the tremor was strong and she was obliged to receive visitors, she hid her hands under a shawl. She avoided dinner invitations; she did not dare attempt a cup of tea. After 1980, she no longer ventured into the hotel restaurant, telling visitors she was not fit to sit out a whole meal. Her health never constituted an excuse, despite the obstacles it presented: She had attempted to use a tape recorder for her Pale Fire corrections but found that her fingers were too weak to manipulate the controls of the machine. Her hearing had faded to the point that a scholar’s taped translation proved useless. Her right arm continued to hang limp. There remained a vast discrepancy between the woman and her words. At one point she received a sixteen-page memo from a German authors’ guild, a right-minded organization. She appealed to Ledig Rowohlt to intervene. “I loathe organizations. I am suspicious of all questionnaires, detest unnecessary paperwork—in a word I would not like to have anything to do with VG Wort.” It was difficult to believe that the woman behind this letter was a frail and decorous seventy-eight-year-old who described herself as an invalid. A Lausanne-based scholar who worked with Véra on VN’s poetry was taken aback by the contrast “between her physical frailty on the one hand and, on the other, her calm sense of purpose, her firm will, and the remarkable clarity of her mind and intellect.”
She proved a gold mine to scholars, having committed to memory not only what was in the books but what was no longer in them. For Véra as for Zina, the word combinations amounted to archaeological ruins that “stood for a long time on the golden horizon, reluctant to disappear.” She occasionally astonished a scholar by letting slip a palimpsestic truth, some telling tidbit that had failed to make the final cut. She was a kind of walking key to the works. She regularly identified Cornell colleagues in Pnin; she could authenticate a text; she could suggest a liberty the honest translator would not otherwise have hazarded. Boyd confronted her with an anonymous literary parody of 1940, from a Russian newspaper published in New York. Was the piece Nabokov’s? “Could be,” nodded Véra, taking it from him. “Beyond a doubt,” she asserted after a few paragraphs. “Absolutely,” she concluded at the end of the column, with a laugh. Did a particular meaning accidentally occur in a line from Invitation to a Beheading? she was asked. “My husband would never commit a coincidence,” came the reply. Were it not for all the archival and editorial work, concluded one friend, she would have been a prominent Nabokov critic. Dmitri found her omniscient.
Omniscience has a price; like any oracle she inspired fear. Even members of the immediate family were terrified of her, as were most of her husband’s editors. She ruled by cordial but distant fiat. As the Lausanne scholar quickly discovered, she knew all of her husband’s verse—from 1921 on—by heart. When a journalist mentioned Paul Bowles in her presence, she immediately demonstrated that she knew and understood Bowles’s work better than he. She remained as adamantine as ever in her judgments. You ask, she wrote the Paris friend whom she had rebuked for having misread the Shakhovskoy volume, why there are no worthwhile new Russian poets and writers. They did exist. The problem was that most of them were illiterate. She gave voice to only one warmhearted regret: that her grandchildren were all of them literary.
5
On September 26, 1980, Dmitri called his mother to say that he would not be home for lunch, as expected. He had had a little accident. That was something of an understatement, as Véra discovered before the afternoon was out. Between Montreux and Lausanne, his Ferrari had spun out of control, bouncing between guardrails and bursting into flames. As he forced himself from the burning car, Dmitri’s back, hands, and hair had caught fire. Minutes after speaking with his mother that Friday, he lapsed into a coma. He had suffered third-degree burns over 40 percent of his body. He had also broken his neck. It would be three and a half months—and six skin grafts—before Véra saw her son again up close. When she visited him in the hospital burn unit she would be brought outside the glass-walled room, in a wheelchair. Dmitri turned the lights down low. He could feel her gaze; she seemed to regard him “like a rare animal.” She passed on Dmitri’s understatement—she wrote the family accountant that Dmitri was under the weather—but nonetheless focused much of her energy on his recovery. Those who saw her at this time easily glimpsed the fragile woman beneath the steely exterior; she was nearly out of her mind with worry. This was not conveyed by the voice on the page. “The car was wholly burned to a crisp,” she informed one relative. “Dmitri has seen a wonderful return from the other side of the Styx,” she assured another. She apologized to Carl Proffer for her inability to vet a Pnin translation. Between the final pages of the Pale Fire manuscript and her calls and visits to the hospital she was insanely busy.
Dmitri spent a total of forty-two weeks in intensive care and rehabilitation. Martin Amis was on hand shortly after the worst was over, having secured Véra’s consent to an interview about her life with VN for the London Observer. Amis found Mrs. Nabokov’s humor and warmth much on display, though he was himself largely “frozen with deference.” Dmitri was still living at the Lausanne hospital but joined his mother; his scorched fingers made an impression. Véra observed the striated skin on her son’s arms and asked solicitously when the “purple lace” was likely to disappear. She hoped Amis could reassure her that he drove with immaculate care. Stephen and Marie-Luce Parker also visited Montreux at the time. When Dmitri stepped out of the room at one point Véra turned to the couple: “Don’t ever let your children get burned.”
One bargain she did not make with the gods in the course of Dmitri’s recovery was to be more forgiving. The Amis piece was edited like any other; Véra recoiled when she saw that Amis intended to repeat her observation that VN “was as a young man extremely beautiful,” a remark she categorically deni
ed having made. (And that Amis vividly remembered having heard. It remained in the piece.) Simon Karlinsky’s draft introduction to Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature arrived during Dmitri’s convalescence; it was shot through with admiration for VN’s work, but Véra deemed it unacceptable, on the grounds that Karlinsky’s approach to literature did not accord with her husband’s. An erudite scholar in his sixties, Karlinsky had been a discerning reader of Nabokov since the age of twelve. He rallied eloquently to his own defense; Véra had misread the piece, which was not intended to diminish her husband in any way. Véra proved in equal parts thick-skinned and hypersensitive. She could not impress upon Karlinsky how much his essay had upset her. (She most resisted Karlinsky’s persuasive attempts to locate Nabokov within a historical continuum, where she felt he neither belonged nor aspired to belong. To her mind her husband had neither peers nor equals.) The little victories in the verbal skirmishes still mattered. To the editor of the volume, who agreed to forgo Karlinsky’s pages, she wrote with unusual fervor: “You are not a publisher, you are an angel.”