LA Times on Vera
Jorn Barger
Book News June 7, 1999
BOOK REVIEW Author and Wife: A Couple So in Love It Was Irritating
VERA (MRS. VLADIMIR NABOKOV) Portrait of a Marriage; by Stacy Schiff;
Random House; $27.95, 460 pages
By MERLE RUBIN, Special to The Times
Most of us know the secondhand-smoke effect a terrible marriage can
have on family, friends and colleagues. But a really good marriage can
also be a source of discomfort to those outside the magic circle.
Vladimir and Vera Nabokov were the kind of devoted couple who got on
people's nerves. Quite possibly, people envied their extraordinary
closeness. More likely, what people resented was their aura of
exclusivity.
For the 52 years of their marriage, the Nabokovs were a genuine mutual
admiration society: He delighted in her beauty, intelligence, spirit
and exceptional sensitivity, so like his own. She worshiped him, not
least because she was firmly convinced, from the moment she read his
work in an emigre journal in Berlin in the 1920s, that he was destined
to be a great writer.
* * *
Whether dealing with her husband's publishers, serving as his assistant
in the classes he taught or contributing to his creative work, Vera,
according to biographer Stacy Schiff, "did all in her power to see to
it that he existed not in time, only in art. . . ." As for Nabokov, he
"lit up around his wife. . . . The two comported themselves as if they
shared a secret. . . . One Cornell colleague went so far as to use the
'u' word: 'He was the most uxorious man I have ever met.' "
The middle daughter of a Russian Jewish family forced into exile by the
Bolshevik Revolution, Vera Slonim first met her fellow emigre Vladimir
Nabokov at a masked ball in Berlin in 1923. Despite the consternation
of some friends and family members shocked by his involvement with a
Jew, Nabokov and Vera married in 1925. Both were aristocrats: he in
manner and in fact, she by education and disposition. Both were
democratic liberals outraged by the Bolshevik destruction of Russia's
infant democracy. Both were, in the deepest sense, aesthetes: citizens
of the boundaryless realms of imagination and art.
But, while Vladimir could create literary art, Vera simply understood
and appreciated it. Schiff makes no attempt to persuade us that Vera
was an artist manque, a woman who could have been a writer, if only she
hadn't resigned herself to the subordinate wife-of-the-genius role.
There seems to be no evidence to support such a surmise. A feminist
biographer might argue that the reason Vera did not even consider
becoming a writer was that she had internalized the prevailing male
chauvinist assumptions of her culture. But Schiff--wisely, I
think--does not take this tack. Instead, her book illuminates the
nature of this remarkable partnership and reminds us of the ways in
which great artistic achievements may draw--or even depend--on the
support of others.
Vera's most tangible contribution to the Nabokov oeuvre was her staunch
faith in the controversial novel that would catapult her respected, but
not very well-known, husband into international celebrity: "Lolita."
More generally, her contribution was to create the cocoon-like
atmosphere in which he worked. While he spun his imaginative creations,
she kept the world at bay.
* * *
The dynamic of their arrangement, as Schiff portrays it, may have been
rooted in the temperamental differences between the ebullient, blithely
self-confident Russian aristocrat and the proud, sensitive Jewish woman
all too well acquainted with life's dangers and uncertainties. Vera was
a worrier. Yet despite being the more fearful of the two, she was also
the more outspoken in expressing her political opinions, which, like
her husband's, were fiercely anti-Communist.
Seldom apart, the Nabokovs did not write each other many letters. The
interviews they gave were carefully staged performances.
Schiff has drawn on the recollections of people who knew them: editors,
publishers, writers, critics, friends, students and professors. This
enables her to paint a sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait of
Vera's personality: how Vera impressed those who met her. What is
lacking is a sense of what it might have felt like to be Vera. Still,
one cannot blame the biographer for erring on the side of caution
rather than plunging presumptuously into the mind of a woman who took
such pains not to reveal herself.
If Schiff is sometimes too inclined to take the Nabokovs at face value
(and at their own estimation), she at least saves herself (and us) from
the pitfalls of psycho-biography, an approach that would have been
anathema to the Freud-hating Nabokovs. What would have pleased them is
Schiff's elegant prose style, at once forceful and playfully allusive
in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.
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