Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Oddly, this correspondence of a long-lasting marriage remains doubly single-sided. Véra appears to have destroyed every letter of hers to Vladimir that she could find, and even her contribution to joint postcards to Nabokov’s mother, where she wanted to preserve his part, she rendered illegible by thickly crossing out every word.

  I had remembered all her letters to Vladimir as destroyed, until just before writing this introduction I rediscovered the transcripts I had made of three short functional letters from her. Two were found in a small briefcase that had been brought to me, perhaps in 1981, by one of Véra’s secretaries, who knew I was cataloguing the archive and had discovered the briefcase in an unlikely corner where it had escaped Véra’s vigilance. To dispel misplaced anticipation, let me quote one of these in full, from the time of the trip to New York for the exploratory operation on ten-year-old Dmitri, from about 1 June 1944:

  The trip went well. The heat was intense. Today we were at D.’s, they’re doing extra tests etc., but the operation has been definitely scheduled for Wednesday. I’ll write in more detail on Monday when I see D. again. There’ll be more X-rays in the morning. We’re waiting for a letter. All send their regards.

  Véra

  No letters from Véra to Vladimir survive, or at least none has yet been catalogued, in the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. But after I thought I had completed this introduction, including the paragraph above, I discovered to my surprise in my own files my partial transcript of a letter Véra had written to biographer Andrew Field on 9 May 1971, in which she cites a letter ‘just come to light’ that she had written to her husband. What Véra quoted to Field reports a little more of the strange fate of the ‘Life of Chernyshevsky’, chapter 4 of The Gift. Sovremennye zapiski was proud to publish ‘Sirin’ and particularly proud to feature all the rest of his greatest Russian novel, The Gift, but nevertheless firmly refused to publish chapter 4 because of its irreverent critique of the nineteenth-century radical writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky. When he arrived in the USA, Nabokov was still anxious to publish this chapter and, if he could, The Gift intact, without this hundred-page hole. When Vladimir Mansvetov and other Russian writers now based in America invited him to contribute to an anthology, he offered them the ‘Life of Chernyshevsky’. On 17 March 1941 Véra wrote from New York to Vladimir, in the midst of his guest lectures at Wellesley College:

  Mme Kodryansky was here today. ‘Chernyshevsky is an icon for socialists, and if we print this, we’ll destroy the anthology, since the Workers’ Party won’t buy it up.’ She’s in despair, but an utter chicken. Repeats Mansvetov’s words. I asked for all this in writing to send to you. I told her your opinion of censorship of any kind. Again: ‘This thing is impossible to print in America, since he’ll destroy his reputation.’ To this I told her straight: ‘Tell them he doesn’t give a damn, he can look after his reputation himself.’ ... They’re having a meeting about this today.

  Véra quoted this to Field because of her pride in her husband’s principles and his triumphs in the face of tribulation, and despite its showing something of her character, her steeliness in his defence. But in general she destroyed her letters because she thought they were not worth keeping and because they were no one else’s business. (She told me she thought her sister-in-law Elena Sikorski vainglorious to publish Perepiska s sestroy (Correspondence with his Sister) and incorporate her own letters as well as her brother’s.) In later years the woman who kept her mask up before the man she wanted to enchant now wanted to keep her mask up before the whole world, even when she had done all she could to help him become the world-famous writer she always thought he deserved to be.

  I wrote that the correspondence was ‘doubly single-sided’. Even odder than Véra’s destroying her letters is that she wrote so few in the first place. After she followed up the night of the mask, and Sirin’s poem about that night, by writing several letters to him in the south of France before she received a single letter back, their correspondence became overwhelmingly one-sided the other way, Véra often writing, it seems, only about one letter to every five of Vladimir’s. He was an assiduous and even an uxorious letter-writer, and although often exasperated by her silence, remarkably tolerant of what many in his position might have seen as a failure of the reciprocity expected in a loving relationship. The imbalance persists through every sustained spell apart, from Prague in 1924 (‘ “You are voiceless, like all that’s beautiful …” I’m already used to the thought that I won’t get a single letter more from you, my bad love, you’; ‘Don’t you find our correspondence somewhat ... one-sided? I’m so cross with you that I’ve begun this letter without a salutation’), through Véra’s sanatorium stay in 1926 (‘Tufty, I think you write too often to me! A whole two letters over this time. Isn’t that too much? Believe it or not, I write every day’; ‘Will I get a letterlet tomorrow? Is it sitting now in a railroad car, in the heat, between a letter from Mrs Müller to her cook and a letter from Mr Schwarz to his debtor?’), to Prague in 1930 (‘I am sad that you write so little, my endless happiness’), all the way to Taormina in 1970 (‘Won’t I really get news from you?’).

  Despite his recurrent disappointment, Vladimir could also be extravagant in his delight at some of the letters he did receive: ‘I received today–finally–your wonderful (stellar!) letter’; ‘My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love–do you know what–all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters’; ‘My love, I keep walking around in the letter you wrote on, on every side, I wander over it like a fly, with my head down, my love!’; ‘I read parts of your little card (about the move–terrible! I can imagine …) out loud to Ilyusha and Zinzin and they said they understood now who writes my books for me. Flattered?’

  Those who know how much Véra did for Vladimir, as administrator, agent, archivist, chauffeur, editor, research and teaching assistant and secretary and typist in four languages, often presume she was somehow subservient. She was not: she dedicated herself to serve Nabokov, but on her own terms. She was resolute and bold from the moment, just turned twenty-one, when she approached Sirin in a mask, and when she followed her invitation and his response with a whole series of letters before he had written a word to her. She carried a gun in Europe and America, and she was proud of the fact that Dmitri, a successful racing-car driver and the owner of multiple Ferraris and speedboats, was proud to say she drove like a man.

  There was something fierce in Véra, something steely as well as, in the early days, something frail. From the first she showed she would set her own terms. In his first letter to her, from that farm in the south of France, Vladimir wrote: ‘And all your letters, too, are lovely, like the white nights–even the one where you so resolutely underlined several words.’ In his next, in the phase of their evening rendezvous and strolls through glistening Berlin streets: ‘I can’t imagine life without you–in spite of your thinking that it is “fun” for me not to see you for two days ... Listen, my happiness–you won’t say again that I’m torturing you?’

  She shared Nabokov’s delight at the enchantment of life’s trifles and literature’s treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humour of any woman he had met. But where he was buoyant by nature, she was inclined to sink towards gloom. He wrote as he was about to return from his American lecture tour: ‘I love you, my darling. Try to be cheery when I come back (but I love you when you’re low, too).’ As she admitted, she was critical by nature. She never stinted on reproaches, even to the man she loved so unwaveringly. From his first exhausting trip to Paris to establish literary contacts, Nabokov wrote with exasperation: ‘but why should I tell you all this if you think I’m doing nothing?’ From London, on his first trip there for the same purpose: ‘My darling, it is unfair (as I have already written to you) to talk of my thoughtlessness ... I beg you, my love, do not direct at me any mo
re of these childish reproaches, je fais ce que je peux.’ From London, two years later: ‘I’m ready to come back to Paris, having left the Leeds castle hanging in the lilac dusk an inch above the horizon, but if this happens, believe it, it won’t be my fault–I’m doing all in my powers and possibilities,’ and the next day, ‘Do not write to me about “don’t relax” and “avenir”–this only makes me nervous. I adore you, though.’

  That toughness could be turned on others, of course. If T. H. Huxley was Darwin’s bulldog, Véra was Vladimir’s, albeit in the shape of a greyhound. But that Nabokov built his life around Véra’s steely support reveals an aspect of his character not often recognized.

  His work was acclaimed with increasing force throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as the letters record, often with embarrassment as well as justified pride, but he never sought meek acclamation. He liked his companions independent rather than deferential: acid-tongued Khodasevich, pugnacious Edmund Wilson, ebullient Ellendea Proffer, irrepressible Alfred Appel. Notoriously undeferential to others, even at moments to Shakespeare, Pushkin and Joyce, let alone to Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Mann, Eliot or Faulkner, Nabokov shows in his letters to Véra his hatred of any kind of fawning before class, power, wealth or reputation. He rarely reported on news, but this 1926 column provoked an outburst: ‘The Finnish president came to visit the Latvian one, and on this occasion, the “Slovo” editorial repeats eight times within forty-six lines the words “distinguished guests”, “our distinguished guests”. The toadies!’ His distaste for self-importance produces a damning and hilarious vignette of critic André Levinson and his adulatory family, or quick thrusts at the incidental Aleksandr Halpern, ‘who’s not very pleasant and moves carefully, to avoid spilling himself, of whom he is full’, or Kisa Kuprin, with her ‘ “let’s-talk-about-me” smile’, or Véra’s sister Sofia, whose arch coiling of herself in her sense of her own momentousness he records with fascinated distaste. He remains friends with novelist Mark Aldanov, but laments that ‘it’s as if he drinks in praise’. Nabokov could be youthfully ebullient about appreciation, even cartwheeling with pleasure as he leaves a gathering of his friends in Berlin on a night when everything he does earns their admiration, but while he spins his body he does not let his head get turned: ‘praise and more praise ... I am beginning to get sick of it: it even went as far as them saying I was “subtler” than Tolstoy. Terrible nonsense, really’; ‘To avoid later embarrassments (as happened with my letters from Paris–when I re-read them) I now and henceforth absolutely refuse to quote all the direct and indirect compliments I receive’; Gabriel Marcel ‘wants me to repeat the conférence (which he overpraises)’. He could be critical about earlier and even recent work (‘Don’t know how my ‘Mlle’ will go down today–I’m afraid it’s long and boring’; ‘I don’t give a damn about these French excrements of mine!’). Those who confuse Nabokov with his vain heroes–Hermann, Humbert, Kinbote and Van Veen–should think again. Vanity is his target, not his mode.

  Although of course capable of being irked or stingingly dismissive, Nabokov comes across in the letters as naturally generous and appreciative in his opinions of others: ‘And he, with his protruding eyes which seem to pop out from the sockets because his (morbidly sunken) cheeks are pressing on them, is very sweet’; ‘I am surrounded by hundreds of very nice people’; ‘He turned out to be a large springy darling’. In the Paris Métro, ‘I once asked a conductor what was in the composition of the stone steps that sparkled so nicely–the sparks were like the play of quartz in granite, and at this he, with unusual eagerness–giving me les honneurs du Métro, so to speak,–started explaining to me and showed me where to stand and how to look to enjoy the glitter at its best: if I described this, people would say I made it up.’

  Like any lepidopterist of his day, Nabokov pinned his butterfly catches after killing and spreading them, leading many a later headline writer to label him Vlad the Impaler. But writing to Véra, a lover of animals (they donated to the Anti-Vivisection Society), his own tenderness to animals, and his sense of their enchantment, emerges again and again:

  I save mice, there are lots in the kitchen. The servant catches them, and the first time she wanted to kill one, but I took it and carried it out into the garden and set it free there. Since then, all the mice have been brought to me with a snort: ‘Das habe ich nicht gesehen.’ I’ve already set free three of them this way, or maybe it was always the same one. It’ll hardly have stayed in the garden.

  what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous. Siamese, in colour dark beige, or taupe, with chocolate paws … and wonderful, clear-blue eyes, turning transparently green towards evening, and the pensive tenderness of its walk, a sort of heavenly circumspection of movement. An amazing, sacred animal, and so quiet–it’s unclear what he is looking at with those eyes filled to the brim with sapphire water.

  How light and obedient their little puppy seems,–yesterday he dived head-down in my side pocket where he got stuck, having burped a little blue milk.

  He showed the same tenderness towards children. He himself provides a natural transition: ‘There’s a cat sitting on each central heating stand, and a twenty-day-old wolf puppy whining in the kitchen. And how is our puppy [i.e. Dmitri], I wonder? It was strange to wake up today without the little voice walking past my door in your arms.’ Two days later, still from the home of the Malevsky-Maleviches in Brussels:

  The servant here, Boronkin, has a melancholy face but he’s very nice, fusses over the puppy and cooks wonderfully. I keep looking at babies–all the carriages here are on thick tyres. I woke up yesterday en sursaut utterly certain that my little boy had got into my suitcase and I had to open it up at once or he’d suffocate. Write me as soon as you can, my love. Boings, boings, boings against the highchair footstep in the kitchen each morning. I feel new words hatching there without me.

  ‘I feel agonizingly empty without you (and without the little warm portable boy).’ And two days later, again:

  And he, my little one? I just physically miss certain sensations, the wool of the breeches’ straps, when I unbutton and button them up, the little ligaments, the silk of the crown at my lips when I hold him over the potty, carrying him up the stairs, the circuits of a current of happiness when he throws his arm across my shoulder.

  He was taken by children’s beauty, their vitality, their vulnerability. The son of his cousin Sergey: ‘How charming little Niki is! I couldn’t tear myself away from him. He was lying, a red little thing, dishevelled, with bronchitis, surrounded with automobiles of all makes and sizes.’ Or his sister Olga’s ‘extremely attractive’ boy: ‘I gave my mite towards buying Rostislav something to wear. The only word he can say is “yes”, with lots of feeling and many times in a row: “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes”, affirming his existence.’

  Or the family of his friend Gleb Struve:

  Three of the children take after their father, very unpretty with thick freckled noses (the eldest girl is very attractive, though), but the fourth child, a boy of about ten years, also takes after his father, but a different one: he is absolutely charming, a very sweet appearance, with a haze, Botticellian,–quite lovely! Yulen’ka is chatty and dirty as in the old days, is carried away with Scouts, wears a brown jacket and a wide-brimmed hat with elastic. There was no tea when there should have been, while their ‘dinner’ consisted of Easter cake and a paskha (both dreadful)–that’s all the children got, and not because of poverty, but because of lack of discipline.

  Nabokov’s concern for children lies behind David’s role in Bend Sinister, Lolita’s, or Lucette’s in Ada. Nothing could be further from Humbert’s leering at schoolgirls than Nabokov’s eye for the littlest and frailest girl in a gym class he could see from his boarding house: ‘The teacher was clapping her hands, and the schoolgirls–really tiny–were running around and jumping in time. One girl, the littlest one, was always left behind, getting muddled and coughing thinly.’

  III

  On the jacket of Nabokov’s Sel
ected Letters, 1940–1977, John Updike would write: ‘Dip in anywhere, and delight follows. What a writer! And, really, what a basically reasonable and decent man.’ Although there is much more these letters to Véra disclose about the man, what do they allow us to discover about the writer? That depends on the reader, of course, but here are some things that strike me. The volatility, the quick changes in subject and tone and point of view, as if impersonating Véra’s reaction for a moment, or an interlocutor’s peculiar speech, or a reviewer, or a heroic Sirin:

  Now I’m floundering in the muddy water of scene six. I get so tired that my head feels like a bowling alley–and I can’t fall asleep earlier than five or six in the morning. In the early scenes there are a thousand reworkings, deletions and additions. And ultimately I’ll be rewarded with the routine sarcasm: ‘… not without poetic talent, but we must admit …’ and so on. And on top of that you–staying silent …

  No–not on your life! I’ll show myself so that the gods will flinch, covering themselves with their elbows ... Either my head will burst open or the world will–one or the other. Yesterday I ate goose. The weather is frosty: straight pink smoke puffs and the air tastes of sugar-glazed cranberries.

  His playfulness infected not only endearments but even reproaches (‘I’ll go out to buy stamps it’s bad that you write to me so seldom and a Gillette razor’) and the evasion of Hitler’s vigilance. In 1936–7, reporting to his Jewish wife, still in Berlin, on the money that he was earning from his readings and publications abroad and either sending to his mother in Prague or storing with an intermediary for Véra, he invented nonce or recurrent proxies for himself–Grigory Abramovich, Victor, Calmbrood–and would encode the currency that the proxy earned in terms that could change each time: books, journals, pages, columns, butterflies, or even ‘Semyonlyudvigoviches’ (since Véra knew Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank, and Vladimir was writing from Brussels, she could decode that this registered an amount in Belgian francs).