by Stacy Schiff
Much of the last decade of her life was dedicated to the fine art of perfecting the past, an activity that in some views teetered on the brink of censorship. In the late 1970s Karlinsky edited the Nabokov-Wilson letters; he testifies that there was no tension between the two widows, aside from the fact that Mrs. Wilson wanted to put everything in and Véra wanted to take everything out. A scholar researching Nabokov’s fiancées was free to publish his work—so long as he did not mention Véra. She persisted not in correcting references to herself, to the marriage, to her past, but in deleting them from texts. She swore she had never said anything Boyd had quoted her as saying. She was gnomic in her pronouncements. Was it not unusual that most of her husband’s books were dedicated to her? Amis asked. “What should I answer? We had a very unusual relationship,” she offered. “You were very different from your husband,” Boyd insisted, leadingly. “Yes, but everyone was different from VN,” Véra parried. Have you ever written fiction yourself? she was asked. “No,” she replied. Her favorite VN work? “Unanswerable.” On the publication of Selected Letters in Milan, she consented to a talk, accompanied by Dmitri, with an Italian journalist. She proved the world’s worst interview subject. “Madame Nabokov, I am told you were a passionate equestrienne, that you fired a pistol, that you went up on acrobatic flights. What do you believe has been the most important thing in your life?” the journalist asked. “My life, it has been full of important things,” replied Véra, slipping deftly through the net.
It would be difficult to say that she had come into her own since Vladimir’s death; she had never really left herself. But she spoke now for and as herself. There was no more Vladimir wants me to say, asks me to say, insists I say. For some time she used the line that her husband would have agreed, or railed, or expected as a weapon; she knew as well as anyone that it is difficult to argue with a memory. As time went on she found that saying that she, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, was insulted, or unhappy, was potent enough, perhaps even more so. As Karlinsky observed, people became more attentive to Véra after VN’s death, for the right and the wrong reasons. The quiet humor, too, was more on display, at least for those who had an ear for it. Gennady Barabtarlo, whose Russian Pnin translation Véra reviewed, perhaps put it best: “Suffice it to say that she possessed a wonderful humor for which not all people had a sense.” He found her delightfully droll. “For once,” Véra wrote Beverly Loo, well acquainted with how unlikely was the scenario, “you have overpaid me.” She hoped that the insane printer Carl Proffer had located proved every bit as good as the sane one. Her nephew Michaël Massalsky reminded her of Halley’s Comet, with his infrequent visits, advertised long in advance. (She had warm feelings for him, whatever her differences with his mother.) She thanked the director of the Palace for the orchids he sent on her eighty-seventh birthday, informing him that she had decided now to start counting backwards on her birthdays, toward takeoff. She stretched against every instinct in her body to accommodate the prying biographer. She shared with Boyd all her memories of a family he had asked about, including their light-brown poodle, Dolly, finishing her account with a sly “I don’t know her patronymic.”
Increasingly the difficulty was one of communicating. She heard uncertainly, which meant one spoke to her uncertainly. A long pause might follow a question, as if to indicate that she had not heard, or grasped, the issue at hand. Then suddenly, swiftly, an exact, often very clever response would follow, accompanied by a beaming smile. Although she had been advised against typing she still, on a day that Madame Callier was not at hand and she felt she had something urgent to communicate, made her way to the machine. She was immensely frustrated by her pace at the best of times; dictating was a cumbersome procedure. Moreover, Madame Callier was often overburdened. In 1986, when the manuscript of Andrew Field’s The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov arrived, Véra did her best to annotate what she considered an error-filled text but was hampered in her efforts; Callier was busy with the tax returns, and the employment agencies who had provided help sent “young women who knew neither the grammar nor the orthography, nor half of the words I was using.” A proofreader hired to look over Barabtarlo’s Pnin “made a great number of idiotic suggestions.” She had difficulty hearing on the telephone. Her letters, often staccato and spare, began to sound like telexese.
At the end of 1984 her pulse dropped precipitously; Dmitri arranged for her to be taken by ambulance to the emergency room at the Lausanne hospital, where a pacemaker was installed. Véra delighted in telling friends that her heart was now connected to a battery, ticking away like a little electric clock. The incident did little to impress her fragility upon her. A 1985 letter went out: “Sorry to be so long in answering your letter. I had a pacemaker installed last week. I do not think your article is worth publishing …” The body’s betrayals continued, however. Having recovered from a bad flu, in February 1986, she fell in the apartment, “like a fool,” breaking a chair, and a rib. Her correspondence eased, especially as she suffered pains in her side for months afterward. She was eighty-four when she and Dmitri decided that an agent would be necessary; Ledig Rowohlt put the Nabokovs in touch with Nikki Smith in New York, who assumed the bulk of the correspondence and the negotiating. In 1988, encouraged by Gennady Barabtarlo, Véra went back to the La Motte Fouqué research she had begun in the mid-1950s, at Cornell. She had established a link between the German writer’s Pique-Dame and Pushkin’s Queen of Spades; having retrieved a rare copy of the 1826 novel from Germany, she had begun a scholarly essay on the subject. (Nabokov mentions the connection in an Onegin footnote without crediting Véra, adding that he will pursue the matter elsewhere.) Véra had already pursued the matter thoroughly. Barabtarlo cemented together her notecards and draft pages, publishing the research with Véra in a 1991 journal. It was quite a performance for someone who had been thought too frail to attend university.
For the most part her spirits remained good, although she was the first to admit that being old was very difficult. “You speak of depression. It’s something I’m not familiar with; I always keep myself busy,” she wrote a friend from the 1930s. She still enjoyed, and was keen to discuss, synesthesia, which had proved such a powerful part of her imagination; her grasp of images remained as sure as ever. In her eighties, she considered translating Ada into Italian. She was delighted when Nabokov appeared in print for the first time in 1986 in his—in their—native country. An excerpt from Speak, Memory had been published in a chess magazine; a one-volume anthology was in the works. Véra asked Karlinsky, whose tolerance and scholarly excellence allowed the relationship to weather its occasional storms, if he was planning a European trip that summer. “Though very old I am still alive, and ‘kicking,’ ” she assured him. He sent his 1985 biography of Tsvetaeva in response. Véra was no more approving of the woman or her marriage than she had been, but could not put Karlinsky’s work down once she had begun it. She was equally enchanted by a bibliography of VN’s work prepared by Michaël Juliar, in which she made all kinds of gratifying new discoveries. It read to her like a novel. Her pleasure now was reading about her husband, as it had once been reading her husband. The friends were now friends of his memory.
On the first day of November 1987, she fell again, in her bedroom, breaking her left hip. Surgery was scheduled, but postponed due to a circulatory problem. For the next week and a half she was in what she described as “exquisite pain.” She and Dmitri twice said their good-byes while she waited for a synthetic ball joint to be implanted. The operation was followed by a five-month hospital stay, during which she worried incessantly about Dmitri, who she felt had been buried under the still-massive business correspondence. The piles of paper that greeted her on the return from the hospital were nearly enough to send her back. She spent most of the spring in bed. She was in no shape to check a translation of any kind; she did not have the strength to hold two texts before her. She was all apologies with Boyd, whose biography chapters arrived with regularity: “For half a year I have been out o
f circulation, out of life I should say. The correspondence accumulated unanswered and I did not have the courage to make a fresh start.” The hip never entirely healed; her future walks were awkward, shuffling affairs. Soon enough she reported that moving from one room to the next was a major journey for her. Writing a letter constituted a vast enterprise. She could hold a hardcover book upright only with difficulty. She was extremely displeased to learn at the end of 1989 that she would have to move from the Palace because of renovations, especially as apartments in Montreux were difficult to come by. As usual the world proved less lucid than she. After much searching, Dmitri managed to find an apartment, although, as Véra put it, the seller did not seem to understand he had sold.
“I live in Montreux. I’m 87 years old, but soon I’ll be 88. I’m a hunchbacked old woman and I’m very hard of hearing.… This year slipped away from me somehow unnoticed,” Véra wrote Elena Levin in the fall of 1989. The birthday that felt so imminent was still four months in the future. She was virtually immobile; she did not go out. All that was left to her, she claimed, was to read and reread. Elena Levin was herself seventy-seven, but could not imagine Véra as “a hunchbacked old woman.” Twenty-five years had elapsed since the two had seen each other, but the quarter century was of little consequence. “In my memory you’re a marble-white beauty with animated facial expressions,” replied Elena, by return mail. The letter evidently meant a great deal to Véra. She did not give it up to be filed, but relegated it to the empty chocolate box in her desk drawer that held various scribblings from Vladimir. Time had done to her what neither exile nor indigence nor inept royalty departments had managed to: It had bent her to its own designs. She was grateful that someone knew to peer beneath the mask that she thought so deforming. The move to the new apartment in the spring of 1990 proved a wrench after nearly three decades at the Palace. She worried about security, that someone would break into the glass-walled dining room from the garden, where she repeatedly pointed out a black cat, an animal no one else ever saw, and which Dmitri assumed it to be a fanciful version of the barbecue. She spent her time parsing the newspapers, checking Boyd’s every word, reading aloud the work of Pushkin, Blok, Tyutchev, Nabokov with Dmitri in the evenings, attempting to teach the Italian cook English. She was less and less stable when attempting to cross a room, even fully assisted. Dmitri admitted she was not having much fun. Stephen Parker saw her late in the summer of 1990. Tears began to roll out of her still-radiant eyes when the subject turned to Vladimir.
Ellendea Proffer asked Véra in her last year if she got bored. “No, never” was the answer. A distant relative on the Feigin side spoke with her by telephone in mid-1990. “Aunt Véra, how do you feel yourself?” she inquired. “Very bad,” replied Véra, with laughter. Vivian Crespi visited her that fall, in the bedroom of the new apartment. Véra was in a wheelchair, in a black-and-white shantung shirt and black pants, perfectly coiffed, ravishingly beautiful. There was still a very real shimmer about her. The clear eyes sparkled; the wit was lambent. The two talked while Crespi drank a cup of tea. “Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked before leaving. The wheelchair bothered her; it seemed to her that Véra—so accustomed to being active—must have felt trapped. “Vivi dear, just pray that I have a quick death,” Véra whispered into her ear.
That she had, six months later. On April 6, 1991, she was taken to the Vevey hospital when she began to suffer respiratory trouble. She was unconscious when Dmitri joined her late the following afternoon. He spent several hours talking to her, stroking her hair; in tiny, subtle flutters she seemed to be attempting to express something. She died quietly that evening at ten. “Véra Nabokov, 89, Wife, Muse, and Agent,” read the New York Times headline to her obituary. Her ashes were joined, as she had requested they be, with her husband’s. A line was added to the blue-gray tombstone in Clarens so that it now reads:
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ECRIVAIN
VERA NABOKOV
It was an appropriate wording. As Alfred Appel wrote when he heard the news, it seemed that “the monument called ‘Nabokov’ (his collected work) is really the variegated work of two, that if he had indeed been a sculptor she would have written her name at the base, in very tiny print so that no one could have read it, and then stood back and flashed her best small, enigmatic smile, her Mona Lisa smile, really.” He had no idea how tiny her print had actually become. In her last days Véra was at work on a rough translation of the most intricate passages of “Gods,” an unpublished story Vladimir had written in the first days of their relationship. Her vocal cords were going, her eyesight had dimmed, she was nearly deaf, her memory was failing. She was determined to finish the work. Her handwriting, once so full-bodied and regal, was cramped and shriveled. She had begun to write over her own lines. It was as if she were dissolving into the text as, for so much of her life, she had chosen to do.
Not for a second had she believed you could go home again, but she understood that patience prevails, that, as her husband had remarked, “the movements of stars may seem crazy to the simpleton, but the wise men know that the comets come back.” So did the black cat, a fat, fluffy animal who put in a single appearance the afternoon of the funeral, as if to pay his respects, and then disappeared for good. Six months after Véra’s death Leningrad became St. Petersburg again. After 1987, you could even buy a copy of Lolita there. In 1959 Véra had predicted that the critics had not even begun to write about that book. Finally, around the world, they had. A vast number of things went with her—we know now but a fraction of what he and she knew—which was exactly as she had wanted it. Her name survived her, on those pages that so perfectly recapitulate the theme of the life, near but keeping a respectful distance from the works that follow, proffered by her husband, in a line as straightforward as any Nabokov ever wrote. Surrounded by a deep and comfortable sea of blank space, she is right there—one end of a luminous brain-bridge—plain as day, front and center, hidden in full view.
* She had asserted that the actress looked “shopworn.” And on the very outside chance that she had not said as much to Appel, it should be noted that she had used the same adjective in describing Lollobrigida in a letter to the Bishops.
* The fault was not entirely theirs. Because Véra signed always “Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov,” she reduced her Russian correspondents to asking awkwardly after her patronymic, which she rarely supplied. As a result she often became “Véra Pavlovna” or “Véra Nikolaevna.”
† The relationship had always balanced on provocation and finally foundered on Eugene Onegin, the translation of which Wilson denounced—as Nabokov knew he would—in the July 1965 New York Review of Books. More amazing than its demise is the fact that the friendship survived as long as it did. Wilson never read The Gift, was disappointed in Bend Sinister, did not like Despair as much as Laughter, which he did not like as much as Sebastian Knight, cared even less for Lolita, could not finish Ada. The first of his own books he had inscribed for his Russian friend had been To the Finland Station, which he hoped would persuade Vladimir to reconsider his opinion of Lenin. A faculty wife who stopped by the Nabokovs, on the happy weekend immortalized in Upstate, felt the two men were in the process of tearing each other limb from limb.
* “One has to know how to loathe,” he had declared in 1927. Forty-six years later, Joyce Carol Oates observed of his work: “Nabokov exhibits the most amazing capacity for loathing that one is likely to find in serious literature, a genius for dehumanizing that seems to me more frightening, because it is more intelligent, than Celine’s or even than Swift’s.”
† To an interviewer she responded immediately, on hearing Véra Evseevna’s name, “She had many complexes.” Asked to elaborate, she did, very clearly, “Of course—she was Jewish.”
* Shakhovskoy argued the same point nonfictionally, writing in a 1981 book review that Nabokov’s universe had become increasingly glacial, “a frozen desert.”
* The biographical misadventures spawned fictions of th
eir own, one of which serves as an apt counterpoint to “The Desert.” An aging Russian émigré novelist celebrated for a scandalous volume, a conflicted biographer, and an alabaster-skinned, white-haired Jewish wife all appeared in 1985 in Roberta Smoodin’s Inventing Ivanov. The occasional line jumps energetically off the page: “Sometimes when she [the glorious, flirtatious, Garbo-like, white-haired wife-of-writer] looks at her face in the mirror and marvels at her appearance, at the fact that she looks to be not much past forty, when in fact she is over sixty, she thinks that the secret, really, is living entirely for someone else, giving one’s life away as one gives coins to mendicants, old clothes to Goodwill.” Mrs. Ivanov’s husband predeceases her; having had for so long no life separate from his, she wonders how she might possibly proceed. “How,” she asks herself, “can a character exist without her novelist?” Véra would face neither this particular dilemma nor Smoodin’s novel for a few more years. But Smoodin’s conclusions provide a sort of accidental answer to Shakhovskoy’s. At the end of the day Mrs. Ivanov walks out from under her husband’s shadow—she pauses briefly in the arms of the waiting biographer—and into the real world, which bursts into Technicolor. Death has liberated her from her days of forced servitude.
* According to Shakhovskoy’s circle, these dedications were added later at Véra’s bidding, so as “to present to the world the image of a ‘loving couple.’ ”
* The biographical account she would have found most acceptable would doubtless have resembled Mrs. Shade’s entry in the Pale Fire index: “Shade, Sybil, S’s wife, passim.” She would have shuddered at Véra Evseevna Nabokov’s lengthy index entry in Boyd’s second volume, which begins with “advises N not to burn Lolita,” and ends with “as writer of N’s letters.”