Vera bio review
Jorn Barger
Speaking, matrimony
By Jane A. Taubman, 04/18/99
The profession of ''Russian writer's wife'' has a long and illustrious
history. Countess Sofya Tolstaya recopied seven drafts of ''War and
Peace''; Anna Snitkina, a hired stenographer, enabled Dostoevski to
dictate ''The Gambler'' in just a month - and soon became the second
Mrs. Dostoevski. Nadezhda Mandelstam committed to memory her husband
Osip's unpublished poetry; thanks to her, it survived his death in the
gulag. In those same terrible Stalinist years, Elena Bulgakova took
down her dying husband's final pages of the great novel ''The Master
and Margarita,'' then preserved the manuscript in total secrecy for 25
years, until it could be published.
Vera (Slonim) Nabokov was, of all of them, the most fortunate in life,
and perhaps the most intimately involved in her husband's work. ''She
was more than a typist, less than a collaborator,'' writes Stacy Schiff
in her new biography, ''Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a
Marriage,'' published on the 100th anniversary of Vladimir's birth. At
various times, Schiff tells us, he referred to her as his best, his
only reader, the person for whom he wrote, and ''the inspirer of my
best thoughts.'' Schiff, author of a well-received biography of
St.-Exupery, has performed a monumental task in drawing a nuanced and
fairly detailed portrait of the woman behind the mask both husband and
wife conspired to create.
Some of Vladimir's readers and critics suspect Vera Nabokov (1902-1991)
of coauthorship of his fiction; others, without much success, have
sought in her the prototype of his heroines, including, implausibly,
Lolita. ''Most of my books have been dedicated to my wife, and her
picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflected
color in the inner mirrors of my books'' was about as much as Vladimir
would concede. That picture, as the cover photo of Schiff's book
reveals, was of a strikingly elegant woman, who seemed to grow even
more beautiful with age. Yet, as her husband's image hints, it was a
picture intentionally hidden from public scrutiny, and not only because
Vera was naturally shy and reserved.
Fittingly, she was wearing a harlequin mask the night she first met her
future husband, on a bridge in emigre Berlin in 1923. They had both
been born and raised in St. Petersburg, only blocks from each other,
the children of relative wealth and privilege. But their paths never
crossed in Russia. Surely one reason was that Vera Evseevna Slonim,
daughter of a lawyer turned businessman, was a Jew, while Vladimir
Nabokov, son of a liberal lawyer and prominent politician (V. D.
Nabokov founded Russian's Constitutional Democratic party) was a
Russian aristocrat. Vera, though never observant, proudly asserted her
Jewish origins throughout her life; Vladimir, following in his father's
footsteps, deplored anti-Semitism. But when, in 1940, he abandoned the
tight little Russian emigre world for American academe and switched
from Russian to English in his fiction, nationalists in the emigration
blamed Vera.
For most of their more than 50 years of marriage, Vladimir and Vera
Nabokov (whose marriage gave them identical initials) were devoted and
nearly inseparable, though there was at least one serious extramarital
affair, and a good deal of coed watching and dalliance, on Vladimir's
part. During the first, lean years in Germany, it was the
quadri-lingual, supremely efficient Vera who supported them both,
working as a commercial translator and typist so that Vladimir was free
to write novels, poems, and stories in Russian under the pseudonym V.
Sirin. During his years of teaching Russian and European literature at
Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, Vera was his anonymous ''assistant,''
whose duties included attending every lecture, carrying his briefcase,
providing needed quotations from her perch in the first row, and - to a
degree history tactfully does not record - reading the students' blue
books. She also wrote first drafts for many of those lectures, and even
his letters to his sister, full of excuses that Vladimir was too busy
with his writing. She continued to type at a furious pace, and added
the title of chauffeur: Vladimir never learned to drive. It was Vera
behind the wheel on those journeys across the American West in search
of rare butterflies, staying in the shabby motels immortalized in
''Lolita.''
In fact, it was Vera who saved an early draft of ''Lolita'' from
destruction by a dissatisfied author. The nymphet eventually changed
their life: Vladimir would never need to teach again, and they soon set
up permanent residence (for tax purposes, among other reasons) in
Switzerland, at the Montreux Palace Hotel. Vera began a life of
material comfort but endless work. To her fell all the details of
Nabokov's interface with the world: not only permission for interviews,
but a flood of correspondence from both admirers (often left
unanswered) and publishers. With the exception of dealing with France,
Vera acted as Nabokov's agent, carrying on all the necessary
communication in several languages, while vetting translations and
checking galleys. Letters drafted and typed by one VN were edited and
signed by the other: ''The dance of the pronouns ... allowed more
latitude in needling publishers.''
''No one who has written as much has ever been as eager to deny
responsibility for so many lines'' declares Schiff. Indeed, Vera
destroyed her own letters to Nabokov (who died in 1977 at 78), while
carefully preserving his to her. There weren't that many, for the
couple was seldom separated. Why did such a talented woman not want a
career of her own? The answer, as Schiff makes clear, was that Vladimir
Nabokov, writer, was her career, and she loved the work as well as the
boss. And if the outside world found her distant, prickly, extreme in
her anticommunism, and fanatic about her husband's stature as a writer,
it was no concern of hers. Schiff, writing in a sprightly prose that
captures the ''verbal tennis'' of the couple's interactions, has given
us a vivid and truthful, if not always likable, portrait of a proud and
gifted woman whose contribution to Vladimir Nabokov's life and career
was immense.
--
"There are whole summer weekends at certain beaches in Chicago where
the promise of America is actually fulfilled, where the Mexican family
barbecues next to the black family's picnic next to a gay volleyball
tournament across from where the elderly Poles stroll." --Sarah Vowell