by Stacy Schiff
The family was delayed by rail strikes, first in Istanbul and again in Sofia, where Véra learned the Bulgarian she put to use in her Rainov translations. After four weeks in Sofia, Evsei Lazarevich arranged with some French soldiers for a private carriage for his family and for a special rail permit. On beds of hay they traveled to Vienna—Véra found the city architecturally glorious and greatly reminiscent of Petersburg—where they checked into a good hotel, and normal life resumed. Other émigrés traveling the same route were struck in particular by the sight of white bread and well-fed horses, something they had not seen in Russia for three years; the first weeks abroad must have felt dreamlike. Early in 1921 the family settled in Berlin. Historically Germany had been tolerant of political refugees. Furthermore, life there was cheap; it seemed the perfect place to wait out the storm. With the assistance of Peltenburg, his Dutch associate, Evsei Slonim managed to sell his Russian properties to a speculator willing to gamble that a Bolshevik regime could not last. Soon after his arrival, and having made some contacts in Bulgaria, he set up an import-export business, specializing in farm machinery.
Despite the plain facts of the dislocation—the Russian language has no word that rings with the joyous, elective sound of “expatriate”—the first years of exile were comfortable. They were so especially if Véra Nabokov’s account of them can be believed. She remembered that her father had “made much money through the sale of Russian estates, his own, and those of some business acquaintances for whom he acted as broker.” She had very smart clothes, and happily attended all of the best dances, including plenty of charity balls. The general mood in the Russian community, which swelled that fall to over a half million members, has been described as one of defiance rather than despair. Véra’s disposition over the crises of the next years was no different. (She was constitutionally incapable of self-pity, even of self-dramatization. Her letters suffer as a result.) It was assumed that, in her words, “everybody was going back in a year, or two, or ten.” She was eighteen years old; she went stunt flying; she hoped to learn to pilot an airplane. She rode sidesaddle in the Tiergarten. She learned to shoot an automatic in a basement firing range, among a group of former White Army officers, at least a few of whom must have paid special attention to the wisp of a girl with the crystalline laugh and the impeccable posture and the ice-blue eyes. She talked, and argued, more about politics than about literature. She did not like to see the Berlin stay “deprived of its high adventure”; she shared the taste for exploit with which her future husband would infuse Glory, the novel that on a perfectly literal level most closely resembles his autobiography. “We went to automobile races, and boxing matches, and the celebrated Berlin variety show, Scala,” Véra recalled. She did not adhere to the “welter of vodka and tears” school of description.
On the family’s arrival in Germany, Sonia was sent to boarding school near Lausanne, to complete her grade school education. She later returned to Berlin to attend a Russian gymnasium, and for dramatic training. Lena—who had received the highest possible grades at the Obolensky Academy and a gold medal along with them—went to Paris. At the Sorbonne she earned a degree in modern languages, returning to Berlin two years later. Véra was discouraged in her plans to attend university. She had been prone to respiratory infections, and her father voted against her attending Berlin’s Technische Hochschule, as she had hoped to. She did not qualify for admission without supplementary course work, a strain he thought inadvisable. That she could have been so easily convinced seems odd, given what we know about her resolve; it may be a tribute to her father’s authority, or it may qualify as a tiny grain of defensiveness about her lack of higher education. In any event the degree in architectural engineering never materialized, though even without it she was to engage in much bridge-building—and throw the occasional stick of dynamite. Save for a stenography course in 1928, her formal schooling had come to an end. She went to work in her father’s import-export firm, probably in 1922. At about the same time Véra spent two months teaching herself to type, first by memorizing the keyboard, then by taking dictation from whomever she could enlist.
At his office address on Neue Bayreuther Strasse, Evsei Slonim backed an established Moscow publisher in a literary venture. Orbis’s dual mission was to translate Western literature for Russians, and to translate the Russian classics into English, for export to America. Beginning in 1922 Véra worked in that office as well, writing and translating, both for her father and for Orbis, occasionally freelancing for the automobile firm in the building. She handled all but the German correspondence, which was entrusted to a young German woman. The Orbis office would be gone by the following year, a casualty of the inflation, but it survives as the scene of one of the few certain nonencounters between Vladimir Nabokov and Véra Slonim. Nabokov fondly remembered having climbed the stairs to Evsei Slonim’s office, debating with his university friend Gleb Struve the fair price to ask for the Dostoyevsky translation they were contemplating. He met with his future father-in-law, and he left the office. Fate is merciful in some ways, a tasteless, prankish, absentminded, clumsy, uncooperative cheat in others. She did not introduce Vladimir Nabokov to Véra Slonim that day. But neither did she saddle him with a Dostoyevsky translation, for which he might never have been paid.
It is highly improbable that anyone ever placed a telephone call from Petersburg 3848, the Slonim home on Furstadtskaya, to Petersburg 2443, two miles away, where the Nabokovs’ doorman would have answered. This did not prevent Vladimir from contemplating the long history of his and Véra’s near-encounters. In Russia they had had mutual friends—both knew different members of the same prominent families—but they did not meet. Nonetheless Nabokov took it upon himself to divulge that he and his future wife had been strolled by their governesses side by side in a Petersburg garden. “They could have met many times when they were children; at dancing class, perhaps; it bothers them, and they go over it,” a visitor reported, in the 1960s. By some accounts the two had acted as extras in the same Berlin movies. Véra had twice summered near his family’s country estate. Nabokov positively contorted himself in his attempts to glimpse the workings of the Fate that had finally bent his and Véra’s roughly parallel paths; repeatedly he “directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past,” just as Van would later do in Ada.
What would have happened had there been no Russian Revolution? Andrew Field asked Véra. Two sentences into her answer she was interrupted by her husband: “You would have met me in Petersburg, and we would have married and been living more or less as we are now!” he asserted peremptorily. For the two not to have met and married remained wholly unimaginable to the man with the protean imagination: He held an almost religious conviction about the stubborn inevitability of their union. He who had been so much buffeted about by history—who having lost his country, his father, and his fiancée, had every reason to believe, as he did, that Fate was ill-inclined toward him—preferred to see coincidence as a marvelous artist. Fate holds a place of honor in Russian literature and Nabokov did nothing to dethrone her; her combinational moves are to be seen in every one of his novels, a body of work often said to be distinctly un-Russian. As Brian Boyd has made clear, destiny’s contortions in bringing together Véra Slonim and Nabokov—or at least Nabokov’s view of those contortions—lends a thematic design to a whole catalogue of fictions.*
In front of others Véra Nabokov was happy to indulge her husband’s insistence on destiny’s near-misses in Petersburg and final, foreign triumph. She herself spoke of Fate’s devious ways. She shared her husband’s retrospective capacity and had at least as robust a visual memory. But she did not share her husband’s obsession with reconfiguring the near-misses and the uncanny parallels of the past. It was the uncertain past that concerned him, the uncertain future that concerned her. She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands. She had ample reason for doing so. For a Jew in Russia to be a fatal
ist was tantamount to inviting disaster. Nabokov trusted in a thematic design which could not have looked quite so dazzling, so sure-handed, to someone who was in the habit of gingerly tiptoeing one step ahead of destiny. Véra made only one small acknowledgment to predestination, many years later. When a publisher asked for a publicity photo of her husband, she sent one of him in his infancy. “If you look carefully into the baby’s eyes,” she advised, “you can see all of my husband’s books.” Of this she seemed herself perfectly convinced in 1923, although predestination was perhaps not the word for it. “Oh, I have a thousand plans for you,” cries Zina in The Gift.
If indeed Fate meant finally to allow Nabokov “the upper hand in his dealings with destiny,” she threw one last curveball. He missed Véra dreadfully during their January 1924 separation, when he was again in Prague with his mother and siblings. He had never imagined he could pine for Berlin, which suddenly seemed to him an earthly paradise. He was bored without her. He counted the days until their reunion. He spoke repeatedly of their soon-to-be-realized happiness. Already he was dreaming prophetically that he was seated at a piano, with Véra turning the pages of his score. But then—with the return imminent—a small domestic disaster struck. On the morning he read of Lenin’s death, he wrote Véra sheepishly: “Something has happened (only don’t be angry). I can’t remember (for God’s sake, don’t be angry!) I can’t remember (promise that you won’t be angry), I can’t remember your telephone number.” He knew it had a seven in it, but the rest had entirely escaped him.
* His wife always hastened to point out that she had been the third, if not the fourth, near—Mrs. Nabokov, before becoming the sole Mrs. Nabokov.
* One event that did take place on Tuesday, May 8, 1923, was a poet’s reading of his Pushkin translations, at a bookstore. It is very possible that both Nabokov and Véra Slonim attended.
* Nabokov chose the pseudonym in part so as not to be confused with his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, an eminent jurist and statesman, and a founder of the Constitutional Democratic party.
† The rumor on the street was that Véra had written Vladimir in advance, asking that he meet her, at which meeting she appeared masked. The Nabokovs’ son never learned how his parents first met.
† Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was killed by a bullet intended for a political opponent, whom he attempted to shield with his body.
† Decades later in his notes to Eugene Onegin, he wrote with feeling about “a rejected suitor’s unquenchable exasperation with an unforgettable girl and her Philistine parents.”
* Noting the addresses from which Rul subscriptions came in, editor Iosef Hessen asked: “Is there a place on earth to which Russian émigrés were not swept?”
* Elena Nabokov Sikorski, Véra’s sister-in-law, cannot recall her ever having spoken of her mother, about whose patronymic there is even question.
* Luzhin’s father’s mistress, the chess-playing “aunt” of The Defense, would have been a neighbor. Nabokov nearly was one, having lived at a rented home on Sergievskaya Street for the two years ending with the fall of 1908, when the Slonims arrived.
* And where she might well have fallen in love with her future husband, as he would assert, had they only met.
* As an English visitor exclaimed at the time of Véra Evseevna’s birth: “I would rather be treated as a swindler, a forger, or a vulgar assassin, than as a respectable Russian Jew!”
* Jews commonly changed their names, both to assimilate and to disappear; often they created a multitude of spellings in order to throw Russian civil servants off their trail. Zalman Aronovich Slonim, evidently Evsei Slonim’s cousin, arrived in Petersburg under that name in 1900. The following year he became Semyon Aronovich. By 1902 he had revised his transparently Jewish patronymic and was known as Semyon Arkadievich.
* The exceptionally gifted American she had in mind was Edmund Wilson.
† Lena Slonim Massalsky was conscious enough of rank—and of her own worth—to leave a dinner if she did not think she had been well seated.
* Mandelstam knew something of this straight-spined tradition as well: “My father often spoke of my grandfather’s honesty as of some lofty spiritual quality. For a Jew, honesty is wisdom and almost holiness.”
* If such a thing happened, no one else in the family was aware of it.
* Véra Nabokov’s speaking proudly of these events did not preclude her quibbling with every detail of the account when they were set in print by others. Doubtless she would find fault with this one as well.
* And as W. W. Rowe has demonstrated, Nabokov is frequently at work in the background, quietly arranging patterns, from Quilty’s appearances in Lolita to the benevolent squirrels in Pnin.
2
THE ROMANTIC AGE
Oh my joy, when will we live together, in a beautiful place, with a mountain view, with a dog yapping outside the window? I need so little: a bottle of ink, and a spot of sunshine on the floor—oh, and you. But the last isn’t a small thing at all.
—NABOKOV TO VÉRA SLONIM, AUGUST 19, 1924
1
Here is what she must have known by the time she married him: That he was the most gifted Russian writer of his generation. That he was a man of titanic self-absorption. That he had a certain knack for falling in love. That he had an equivalent lack of ability for taming the practical world. How much of this she knew when she fell in love with him is unclear. On only one aspect of the appeal did she offer comment: “Don’t you think it was more his verse than his face that attracted?” she asked rhetorically. That the verse could have eclipsed the rest of the package says a good deal about Véra Slonim’s commitment to literature; twenty-four-year-old Nabokov, lithe and still dapper and aristocratic-looking, left an impression. Women flocked to him. In the minutes that had elapsed between Svetlana’s retreat from the scene and Véra Slonim’s appearance on it, at least three women had laid claim to his time, if not his heart. Those names did not figure on the list of conquests he drew up for Véra in the early days of their courtship, a list on which twenty-eight names precede Svetlana’s.* (The roll call is composed on a piece of Evsei Slonim’s letterhead.) He felt he could tell her everything, and appears to have done so, with happier results than those he had achieved with Svetlana Siewert. At no time was Nabokov shy about his string of overlapping conquests, explaining in 1970 why he did not want two stressed in particular: “I’ve had many more love affairs (before my marriage) than suspected by my biographers.” He regretted, though, the artistic energy those adventures may have cost him, especially in light of the emotional return. Of Véra Slonim’s prior romantic history we know nothing, save that—if she arranged to meet a man alone on a dark street for what were plainly extraliterary reasons—there presumably was one.
She was not particularly happy in 1923, and may have been entirely miserable. Her discontent reverberates throughout Nabokov’s letters. In the same missive in which he wrote that he could not commit a word to the page without hearing how she would pronounce it, he swore that what he most wanted was to provide her with a sense of well-being, “hardly an ordinary happiness.” There was reason for her to be dispirited at home, though even later in life Véra Nabokov asserted that she had a tendency to focus on the negative side of things. That habit was obvious in the first months of the relationship, when Vladimir asked her not to deprive him of his faith in their future together, repeatedly assured her that their separations were not enjoyable for him, begged her not to resent his absences or second-guess his feelings. At times his fascination with her prickliness—he had written that she was made of “tiny, sharp arrows” and that he loved each one of them—wore thin. Was she trying to make him fall out of love with her? If she had fallen out of love with him he wished she would say so directly: “Sincerity above all!” he swore. “At first I decided to just send you a blank sheet of paper with little question marks in the middle, but then I didn’t feel like wasting the stamp,” he wrote from Prague, puzzled and a little hurt by
her silence. She tortured herself and consequently tortured him. Did she not understand that life without her was unbearable? He acutely felt her “sharp corners,” which he found difficult to navigate. “I feel pain from your corners / Love me without hesitation / Without these numerous torments / Do not abbreviate the encounters / Or dream up any separations,” he entreated, in an untitled and unpublished poem.
Possibly Véra was taking a page from the international handbook of intellectual coquetry. Had she had any inkling of what lay ahead for the woman who was to marry V. Sirin, she might well have hesitated for a moment now. One thing is certain: She did not share her future husband’s genius for happiness. Her evasions wrought rhapsodic tributes from him: “You see,” he averred, “I am speaking with you like King Solomon.” Only in these protests of devotion can we read of Véra’s hesitation; at some indeterminate point between 1925 and her death she destroyed her letters to Nabokov. Discretion does not seem to have been at issue so much as merit. His words, even the private ones, had a value for posterity. She felt strongly that hers did not. She disowned her literary work as well, shrugging off the Rul pieces as juvenilia. The woman who saved every shred of her husband’s published work kept no copies of her own translations. She was certain she would disapprove of them if ever she reread them, which she did not. (They are exact, but not inspired.)
Nabokov made no secret of his feelings about women writers—a symptom of provincial literature, he asserted—and Véra may have been sensitive to this prejudice.* She was neither the first nor the last woman to renounce her literary aspirations on falling in love with a writer. Boyd feels she could have been a writer of talent had she chosen to be, but believed so fervently in Nabokov’s gift that she felt she could accomplish more by assisting him than she might have on her own. Nabokov’s 1924 description, written on a day when he was overjoyed not to have to chastise Véra for her silence and could instead acknowledge a “stellar” communication, reveals all we know of her letters of the 1920s: “You know, we are awfully like one another. In letters, for example: We both love to (1) unobtrusively insert foreign words, (2) quote from our favorite books, (3) translate our impressions from one sense (sense of sight, for example) into the impressions of another sense (sense of taste, for example), (4) ask forgiveness at the end for some imaginary nonsense, and in many other ways.”
