by Stacy Schiff
Of their emotional commitment at the time more can be said. In his fiction Nabokov was killing off wives well before his marriage: The books are full of dead wives, fickle wives, lost wives, dim-witted, vulgar, slatternly, in-effectual, scheming wives. Even Mrs. Luzhin, who has in common with Véra her marriage to a master, a man tormented by his genius, cannot save her fictional husband from his demons. The same holds true for Mme. Perov, the unfortunate fate-mate of the pianist in “Bachmann,” who in her devotion more closely resembles Véra. Alone among Nabokov’s couples, The Gift’s Fyodor and Zina make out well—or will once they find the keys to the apartment. The narrator of Look at the Harlequins! finds his “You,” but only on the fifth try; Sebastian Knight leaves his Véra-like Clare, with disastrous results. Boyd has made a case that many of these marriages and women are related to Véra in that they are highly imaginative inversions of her. Certainly in the fiction we more often meet her antithesis than Véra herself; in his books Nabokov would hold distorting mirrors up to his own marriage, there where Véra would habitually hold a “No Trespassing” sign. Here was an author able to write an autobiography in which his marriage seems nowhere to figure, even while that marriage—as Boyd has persuasively argued—would play a significant role in shaping his fictions.
Behind all the inversions and elisions and contortions were, however, a man and a woman ardently, uncomplicatedly in love. Nabokov’s letters of 1925 are deliriously passionate ones, more so even than those written prior to the wedding. To his sister Elena, about a year after his marriage, he offered some wisdom:
The most important thing in love is complete, radiant truthfulness—so that there won’t be any of the petty deceptions, those quick lies that are in all other human relationships—and no posing before yourself, nor before the one you love: that is the true purity of love. And in love you must be Siamese twins, where one sneezes when the other sniffs tobacco. And then you must remember that the greatest love is the simplest love, just as the best verse is that written most simply.*
Véra had a chance as well to share her convictions. She had a little more experience when she did so, having been Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov for fifty years when she wrote: “Things that are precious, honesty, tenderness, broadmindedness, life in art, and true, unselfish, touching attachment, are the greater values by far.” She could not stress enough to her correspondent the value of a good woman who loves “in a pure, unselfish way,” one capable “occasionally of sacrificing her own desires and pleasures in life to what you would rather do.” Have you been happy in love? Véra asked a young poet who came to visit in the 1960s. “We think that is all it takes,” she advised.
The evidence points to Véra’s having attributed the breakup of her parents’ household to her mother; the partnership her father enjoyed with Anna Feigin may have impressed another definition of marriage upon her. It is almost impossible to believe Véra could have enjoyed much of a relationship with her mother, given her proximity and loyalty to the woman for whom her father left Slava Borisovna. The Nabokovs spent a good deal of time with Slonim and Anna Feigin in 1925, consulting with them on most decisions. When Vladimir envisioned a vacation in Biarritz, he sought out Slonim’s advice on the subject; would the climate be good for his daughter? (The answer was no; the seaside vacation never took place.) He was entirely taken with his stately and cultivated father-in-law, who much enjoyed his prose, and whom he regularly met over a chessboard. Triumphantly he wrote his mother that Evsei Lazarevich “understands so well that the most important thing for me in life, and the only thing of which I’m capable, is to write.” Although he was nearly out of funds—perhaps precisely because he was—Slonim continued to dream. He told his new son-in-law he hoped to buy farms in France for his three daughters.
The newlyweds were separated for nearly two months in the summer of 1926, when Véra—whose health was also fragile at the time—accompanied her mother to a sanitarium. She left her husband a bouquet of roses, a box of candies, and a numbered notepad, on which he might write her daily. He did so, religiously. She was less obliging. Early on Nabokov complained that if they were to publish an anthology of their letters she would be able to take credit only for 20 percent. He urged her to catch up. In a more despairing mood he chastised her: “My darling, I am the only Russian émigré in Berlin who writes to his wife every day.” He missed her terribly, and dined nearly every evening with her father and Anna Feigin, from whom he also regularly borrowed money. He sent Véra his new poems (on the back of one letter can be read her attempts to commit the fresh verse to memory), accounts of Mary’s first reviews, word games; he reported on the activities of their stuffed animals. The puzzles and acrostics were less appreciated than the statements as to how much he missed her. She was miserable, homesick, and cold, and in her few letters complained bitterly. He offered to write her twice daily, if his doing so might in any way boost her spirits.
More successful were the summer trips the two made together, late that July and in 1927, to Binz, an island resort that afforded Véra a view of the Baltic Sea of her childhood, from the opposite shore. The Nabokovs were chaperones the first summer for Joseph and Abraham Bromberg, ages eleven and thirteen, whose tennis games Vladimir was hired to improve. Anna Feigin had arranged the trip; she was a cousin of the boys’ father, whom she had persuaded to offer Nabokov the job. The owner of a thriving fur-trading business, Herman Bromberg had been happy to oblige. Plans do not appear to have been made in advance, and on the 1927 excursion the Nabokovs and their wards arrived at the resort to find that no rooms were available. In the bar a “flushed fellow” offered to share a bed with Véra; Nabokov responded—as one of his charges looked on—with “a hook on the man’s jaw, flooding himself and the drunk with the latter’s sticky liquor.”* They stayed elsewhere, but the image tangled itself up with two others. In King, Queen, Knave, a novel begun shortly after the trip and in part conceived on the Baltic, two tanned, self-satisfied foreigners dance in the Siren Café at a resort on the same bay. They appear entirely lost in each other. They also happen to reveal a little about how the Nabokovs were seen, at least by Nabokov:
The foreign girl in the blue dress danced with a remarkably handsome man in an old-fashioned dinner jacket. Franz had long since noticed this couple; they had appeared to him in fleeting glimpses, like a recurrent dream image or a subtle leitmotiv—now at the beach, now in a Café, now on the promenade. Sometimes the man carried a butterfly net. The girl had a delicately painted mouth and tender gray-blue eyes and her fiancé or husband, slender, elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on earth but her, was looking at her with pride; and Franz felt envious of that unusual pair.
They are quite unforgivably happy, busily speaking their incomprehensible tongue, and clearly privy to every little thing about Franz. Decades later, Vladimir dreamed of dancing with Véra. In his 1964 diary he noted:
Her open dress, oddly speckled and summery. A man kisses her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked on some fixtures on the walls (gleaming metal suggestive of ship). Detaches himself with face all bloody and stumbles away.
3
“As I was saying every name has its responsibilities,” Nabokov proclaimed on the first page of his first novel. He could not have devised a better introduction to a literary marriage had he had his new wife in mind. Their match truly was alliterative, a fact that could not have been lost on the man who would compose a small treatise on Flaubert’s ingenious Emma Bovary nomenclature.* The two quite reciprocally exchanged monograms in 1925: Véra Slonim married Vladimir Sirin and got Vladimir Nabokov; Sirin married Véra Slonim and wound up with Véra Nabokov. More than most couples, they transformed themselves in the process. It is not overstating the case to say that “Vladimir Nabokov” was the literary child of their marriage, as George Eliot has been said to be that of the union of Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes; “VN” certainly was such a construct. (So
disassociated was Vladimir from his family name after his years as Sirin that when first he saw Nabokov in print he read it as “Nobody.” His second thought was that he was reading an obituary.)
Véra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that—born at a time and place where women could and did lay claim to all kinds of ambitions—she should elevate the role of wife to a high art. (Then again the talented Russian poet whom she married would make his name as an English-language novelist.) Traditionally a man changes his name and braces himself for fame; a woman changes hers and passes into oblivion. This was not to be Véra’s case, although she did gather her married name around her like a cloak, which she occasionally opened to startling effect. She would never be forced to make a woman’s historic choice between love and work. Nor would Verochka, as Vladimir called her, squander any of her professional training, though as it happened her husband would be the direct (and sole) beneficiary of that expertise.
The consensus holds that the watershed year in Nabokov’s art was 1924–1925; that he could have written neither the title story of his first collection nor Mary, a more sophisticated work, before his marriage. That novel—which Nabokov recalled having begun “soon after my marriage in the spring of 1925”—is dedicated to his wife. It can be read as the story of a man liberated from a crippling burden of nostalgia; its émigré protagonist finds himself suddenly able to walk away from the past, which is about to pay an unsettling call. Its author was now a serious prose writer, no longer an emotionally unripe poet trafficking in fairy-tale imagery.* Véra is nowhere in the book, but neither is the title character; both women cast long shadows, one toward the past, the other over the future. Every émigré paper reviewed the novel on its 1926 publication, for the most part glowingly. On hearing excerpts from Mary read aloud at a literary gathering, Rul’s literary critic Yuly Aikhenvald declared that a new Turgenev had appeared. The new Turgenev continued to write as often as he could, while crossing Berlin regularly by streetcar on his way from one student to the next. He had already noticed that he was for the most part oblivious to his lessons, which he gave practically unconsciously.
Quickly Véra came to the rescue in his battle with the practical, the world that seems to conspire against the artist at every step. There is no evidence that—like Nora Joyce, like Sonya Tolstoy, like Emily Tennyson, who wound up a semi-invalid—she ever evaded secretarial duty. She seems to have embraced it; her sister-in-law Elena felt she lived for it. She insisted on assuming all the wage-earning responsibilities that could be rerouted in her direction. The hours could be grueling and the work enough for two; on one occasion Nabokov reported that he and Véra had put in an eight-hour marathon session, and had two ten-hour days still ahead of them.† For some time in 1927 the two translated into English the miserable dispatches of a London paper’s Russian correspondent, work that kept them up half the night as they raced to meet the journalist’s deadlines. There was money to be made as well in translating personal letters. Véra ultimately relieved her husband of this brand of drudgery; she teamed up with an English professor to rework a series of political articles. Regular employment for a foreigner—and in many cases these were highly overqualified foreigners—was spectacularly difficult to secure. Many of the young émigrés were acquainted with a Russian-German publisher named Jakow Trachtenberg, the compiler of a Russian-language textbook for Germans. Véra contributed to this project, work which Vladimir had begun; she collaborated as well on a Russian/French and Russian/German dictionary. Reminded of her grammatical labors years later she panicked, then performed her disappearing act: “He [Vladimir] never took it seriously, it was just hack work, most of it done by me. It does not exist.” The primer has survived, but Véra had nothing to fear. Neither her name nor her husband’s figures in it.
To her capacity to wonder at trifles, Véra joined an ability to deal with them, a gift she did not share with her husband. The phone number forgotten in Prague had caused Nabokov the anguish it had because the alternate means of communication bordered on the unthinkable. “After all, I’m afraid of the post office!!!” he yelped, partly in jest, partly in tribute to learned helplessness. Forty years later his list of favorite hates included “everything connected with the post: stamps, envelopes, finding the right address.” Telephone numbers proved delusions in his hands. Objects had a tendency to run for their lives in his presence. The man who was afflicted by perfect recall of his own past proved constitutionally incapable of remembering the name of someone to whom he had been introduced on repeated occasions weeks before. In America he might just as easily get off a train at Newark as in New York, might lavish on Mr. Auden praise intended for Mr. Aiken.* He lent his own list of tortures, nearly verbatim, to Van Veen in Ada: “The obstructive behavior of stupid, inimical things—the wrong pocket, the ruptured shoestring, the idle hanger toppling with a shrug and a hingle-tingle in the darkness of a wardrobe …”† From the list of the things Nabokov bragged about never having learned to do—type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, fold an umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book’s pages, give the time of day to a philistine—it is easy to deduce what Véra was to spend her life doing. She never compiled a list of favorite dislikes, at least on paper. Had she done so her catalogue would have included at least some of the following: cooking; housework; untruths; cruelty to animals, even in fiction; her husband’s inertia; snakes; ineptitude in all forms, but particularly in publishers’ royalty departments; all ambiguities not confined to fiction; talking about herself; giving the time of day to a philistine.
At the top of Nabokov’s list, of course, came the typing. With Clare in Sebastian Knight, Véra was virtually alone in seeing “the uncouth manuscript flaunting its imperfections.” Nabokov was an ardent corrector, and Véra typed and typed, beginning with the short stories in the fall of 1923, on to Mary in 1924, by way of stories, plays, and poems, to King, Queen, Knave in 1928, nearly every page her husband wrote until 1961. She worked from his dictation, setting down the works, in their final form, in triplicate. How complicit was she in the actual writing? She was more than a typist, less than a collaborator. “She presided as adviser and judge over the making of my first fiction in the early twenties. I have read to her all my stories and novels at least twice; and she has reread them all when typing them,” Nabokov asserted later. Small wonder she knew the bulk of them by heart. The words were entirely his, but she was their first reader, smoothing the prose when it was “still warm and wet.” When scholars questioned the arrangement she shrugged off any active involvement, even when the handwriting is on the page. She could only have been transcribing her husband’s comments, she insisted. On a mechanical level she corrected his spelling and usage; as she put it, he “was very absentminded in what concerned grammar” when composing a book.
It is all the same difficult not to picture Véra as Sebastian Knight’s Clare, lifting the edge of a page in the typewriter and declaring, “ ‘No, my dear. You can’t say it so in English.’…‘There is no other way of expressing it,’ he would mutter at last. ‘And if for instance,’ she would say—and then an exact suggestion would follow.” It is even more difficult to separate Clare from Véra when Véra’s other close fictional counterpart can be heard in a Berlin Café, eyes lowered, head propped on an elbow, listening to what Fyodor has written that day: “ ‘Wonderful, but I’m not sure you can say it like that in Russian,’ said Zina sometimes, and after an argument he would correct the expression she had questioned.”* Zina shares with Véra the same precision in her use of language; she officiates equally “as a regulator, if not a guide.” It is perhaps not necessary to extricate Véra from Zina and Clare at all when some thirty years later, as if quoting from his own fiction, Nabokov described his wife’s role in his literary life in nearly identical words.†
Did Véra appear in the work, each Nabokov was asked at different times? “Most of my works have be
en 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,” declared Vladimir. He said refractions, she said they’re fictions; so far as Véra was concerned, no trace of her likeness was to be found anywhere in her husband’s pages. In “Sounds,” a short story of September 1923, Nabokov introduces for the first time a radiant, delicate, thin-wristed woman with pale, dusty-looking eyes, translucent, blue-veined skin, and hair that melts in the sunlight. (The story is autobiographical, but the woman on whom it is based—a brown-haired cousin of Nabokov’s named Tatiana Segelkranz—does not answer to that description.) That physical description applies as well to Zina, into whose surname Nabokov built some of the shimmer he associated with his wife. And it applies equally to the Véra of Nabokov’s letters. Aside from the acknowledged cameo appearance in King, Queen, Knave (in which the Véra double has gray-blue eyes and pale hair and speaks with animation)—and a little premonition of that appearance, in “A Nursery Tale,” a story Nabokov read aloud to her father—Véra makes no entrances as herself in the work. Ultimately it is not her image but her influence that hovers over the page; she was more muse than model. The fictional description of the early years that truly conjures up Véra is that of the reader gifted with perfect understanding:
