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Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov by Stacy Schiff |
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NABOKOV, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH, 1899-1977 AUTHORS' SPOUSES | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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CHAPTER 1 PETERSBURG 3848 The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself. --Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol V?ra Nabokov neither wrote her memoirs nor considered doing so. Even at the end of her long life, she remained the world's least likely candidate to set down the confessions of a white widowed female. (She did keep a diary of one girl's fortunes, but the girl was Lolita.) When asked how she had met the man to whom she had been married for fifty-two years she begged the question, with varying degrees of geniality. 'I don't remember' was the stock response, a perfectly transparent statement coming from the woman who could recite volumes of her husband's verse by heart. At another time she parried with: 'Who are you, the KGB?' One of the few trusted scholars cornered her. Here is your husband's account of the events of May 8, 1923; do you care to elaborate? 'No,' shot back Mrs. Nabokov. In the biographer's ears rang the sound of the portcullis crashing down. For all anyone knew she had been born Mrs. Nabokov. Which she had not. Vladimir Nabokov's version, delivered more or less consistently, was that he had met the last of his fianc?es in Germany.* 'I met my wife, V?ra Slonim, at one of the ?migr? charity balls in Berlin at which it was fashionable for Russian young ladies to sell punch, books, flowers, and toys,' he stated plainly. When a biographer noted as much, adding that Nabokov left shortly thereafter for the south of France, Mrs. Nabokov went to work in the margins. 'All this is rot,' she offered by way of corrective. Of Nabokov's 1923 trip to France another scholar observed: 'While there he wrote once to a girl named V?ra Slonim whom he had met at a charity ball before leaving.' Coolly Mrs. Nabokov announced that this single sentence bulged with three untruths, which she made no effort to identify. In all likelihood the ball was a ''reminiscence' . . . born many years later' on the part of Nabokov, who anointed May 8 as the day on which he had met his wife-to-be. A lavish dance was held in Berlin--one of those 'organized by society ladies and attended by the German elite and numerous members of the diplomatic corps,' in V?ra's more glamorous description, and which both future Nabokovs were in the habit of attending--but on May 9. These balls took place with regular succession; Nabokov had met a previous fianc?e at one such benefit.* Ultimately we are left to weigh his expert fumbling of dates against V?ra's equally expert denial of what may in truth very well have happened; the scale tips in neither direction. Between the husband's burnishing of facts and the wife's sweeping of those facts under the carpet, much is possible. 'But without these fairy tales the world would not be real,' proclaimed Nabokov, who could not resist the later temptation to confide in a visiting publisher that he and V?ra had met and fallen instantly in love when they were thirteen or fourteen and summering with their families in Switzerland. (He was writing Ada at the time of the confession.) However it happened, in the beginning were two people and a mask. V?ra Slonim made a dramatic entrance into the life of Vladimir Nabokov late on a spring Berlin evening, on a bridge, over a chestnut-lined canal. Either to confuse her identity or to confirm it--it is possible the two had glimpsed each other at a ball earlier in the year, or that she had taken her cue from something he had published†--she wore a black satin mask. Nabokov would have been able to discern little more than a pair of wide, sparkling blue eyes, the 'tender lips' about which he was s Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both 'monumental' (The Boston Globe) and 'utterly romantic' (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's V?ra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the ?migr? author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, V?ra, and third for no one at all. 'Without my wife,' he once noted, 'I wouldn't have written a single novel.' Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. V?ra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's V?ra is a triumph of the biographical form. '????????A sensitive rendering of one of the century's great love stories.'--Mirabella '????????I am truly in love with this book. Schiff's sentences are magnificent, deceptively complex, full of insight and fact and distance and wry humor, so that every page is a kind of mini feast.'--Anita Shreve '????????An absorbing story, illumined by Schiff's flair for the succinct insight.' ????????--The New York Times Book Review '????????V?ra is an astonishingly fine book--a tale told with wit and elegance, a tale that succeeds in encompassing both the intimacy of a marriage and the sweep of history. I found it a great pleasure to read. And I'm in awe of Stacy Schiff's talent.'--Jonathan Harr |
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