by Stacy Schiff
And Clare, who had not composed a single line of imaginative prose or poetry in her life, understood so well (and that was her private miracle) every detail of Sebastian’s struggle, that the words she typed were to her not so much the conveyors of their natural sense, but the curves and gaps and zigzags showing Sebastian’s groping along a certain ideal of expression.
It was most prominently in this respect that she left her mark on the fiction. She fully participated in the making of the literature in that the one highly discriminating person on the receiving end became a part of the tale for Nabokov; Véra was in this sense a little bit a character in search of an author. “She and I are my best audience,” Nabokov declared with a rolling chuckle in 1966. “I should say my main audience.” Friends felt she was the only audience he needed.
In the early days Véra constituted a large portion of her husband’s entire audience. By the early 1930s, when his star as a prose writer had risen, the Russian community in Berlin had dwindled to about thirty thousand people. It was virtually impossible for most young writers to make a living, much less to do so while attending to their talent. For those who continued to write, the rewards were few, the infighting proportionately great. Accusations of illiteracy abounded. The clamoring to publish remained keen, so much so that even the innately generous littérateur might find his virtue sorely tested: “To get into literature is like squeezing into an overcrowded trolley car. And once inside, you do your best to push off any new arrival who tries to hang on,” complained one compatriot, who displayed a sharp set of elbows where Nabokov was concerned. This is to some extent always true, but it was spectacularly so in the emigration; communities in exile are not renowned for their generosity of spirit. And in this case the desperation, the bitterness, was enhanced by the fact that the usual compensations of publishing were missing. The writers were in Europe, the readers in Soviet Russia. As V. S. Yanovsky noted, “Reviews were considered the ultimate reward, since the higher authority, the reader, was missing!” Books were issued in printings of eight hundred to fifteen hundred copies, though the latter figure was generally reserved only for Ivan Bunin, who enjoyed Olympian stature among the émigrés well before he claimed his Nobel Prize. The total print run of Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Annals), the best émigré review, in Paris, was no more than a thousand copies. Nor were things much better in Soviet Russia. One writer calculated that in order to survive in Petrograd at the time, Shakespeare would have had to turn out three plays a month. At least there a Russian writer would have had an audience.
Nabokov insisted that he had never expected writing to be a source of income; given the climate in which he began his career, this amounted to nothing so much as a glorious concession to reality. Furthermore the Nabokovs fell into a cultural bind. The more Europeanized Russians acutely felt their Russianness in Germany; at the same time they felt anything but Soviet. On a good day Vladimir praised this state of affairs. He claimed to keep his distance from the despicable spirit of the emigration, reveling in his “almost idyllic isolation.” He described his world as one of discomfort, loneliness, and “quiet, inner merriment.” Later he based his qualified admiration for Emily Dickinson on the fact that she had managed to create in double isolation: once from people, again from the ideas of her time. Véra said nothing about discomfort or loneliness or merriment. But for her it became a point of honor that her husband’s gift had developed in a near-vacuum. She essentially congratulated those who recognized as much.
Nabokov was so huge and protean a presence on the page that he left little room for those who might attach themselves to the literature. He never tired of telling his reader how he was to be read; the man who believed in the supremacy of the individual was a benevolent (sometimes not so benevolent) dictator in his prefaces. He insinuated himself everywhere. He could occupy the footnotes (Pale Fire); supply his own review (the long-unpublished last chapter of Speak, Memory); parody his flap copy (Ada); affix a fictional foreword (Lolita); respond to his editor’s qualms in an afterword (Nikolai Gogol); offer up a misleading genealogical tree (Ada again); displace even the well-meaning editor who might affix a list of his previous titles to the front matter of a novel (Look at the Harlequins!). There was no textual apparatus from which he failed merrily to swing. By definition, only an intrepid reader was going to be able to meet him on his own ground. Here Véra’s pluck, her proud sense of intellectual independence, served her well. “The people I invite to my feasts must have stomachs as strong as wineskins, and not ask for a glass of Beaujolais when I offer them a barrel of Château Latour d’Ivoire,” the older Nabokov boasted. The younger Nabokov was not quite so self-assured in regard to his art—he was more sensitive both to praise and criticism than he liked later to admit—but knew already that he was looking for an intrepid reader. Of Clare he would write: “She had imagination—the muscle of the soul—and her image was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality.” He evidently feared Véra would have difficulty stomaching only one small selection of his work, a collection of erotic poems, few of which he shared with her. Otherwise she brought to the literary front the nerves of steel she had brought to that train in the Ukraine.
Her audacity was soon legendary in the Russian community, in no way diminished by the fact that she carried a pistol in Berlin. Most likely it was a Browning 1900. This was not entirely unusual at the time—the city was overrun by snipers and pickpockets in the wake of the hyperinflation—but Véra had acquired the pistol earlier, and had fully intended to use it.* “Were you really practicing shooting in order to kill Trotsky?” asked a friend, years later. “Well, yes, I’m afraid I was,” confessed an amused Mrs. Nabokov, who was not yet Mrs. Nabokov at the time. She was proud to admit she was a crack shot; she claimed to be every bit as fine a marksman as her teacher, a Berlin champion. To select interviewers she confirmed that in the early 1920s she had been involved in an assassination plot, which most understood to have been aimed at Trotsky, a few to have been focused on the Soviet ambassador. She may have been inspired by—in any case she was not daunted by—the suicide mission of Fannie Kaplan, a fearless young Russian Jew who had fired her Browning three times at the well-protected Lenin in 1918, and who had been executed for the attempt. There can be little question that Véra Slonim harboured similar aspirations, which found their way into a poem Nabokov composed months after meeting her: “I know, with certainty / that in that lacquered purse of yours / —nestled against powder case and mirror / sleeps a black stone; seven deaths.”* He went on to imagine her waiting silently in a doorway for her victim to emerge, buttoning his coat. Poetically his concern is not that the assassin exposes herself to a grave danger but that her mortal business might induce her to forget him and “all these, my idle songs.”
There was little cause for alarm. Within the next four years a very different tribute was written to Véra’s derring-do. Yuly Aikhenvald, one of the elder statesmen in the emigration, was quick to applaud Nabokov’s talent; he recommended the young Sirin to both Nina Berberova and Vladislav Khodasevich. A gentle and much respected man, Aikhenvald was equally quick to notice Sirin’s valorous second. In the first years of the Nabokovs’ marriage, he composed a poem titled “Véra:” “Fragile, tender and precious, / like human porcelain / But the strength of her will is undeniable / And stern are her judgements against the base.” Under her “tranquil shroud” he could sense the stirrings of a sacrificial deed. The one he had in mind was not on the order of an assassination attempt, or even of the senseless feat that Martin performs in Glory, the sort of mission of which Nabokov admitted he dreamed during these years, when “The Romantic Age” seemed an appropriate title for that novel. This act of heroism was equally self-immolating. Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on “the poetic path.” She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: “Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said ‘Verochka.’ It meant a boxer who went int
o the fight and hit and hit.”
4
Véra’s resourcefulness stood her in good stead in 1928, when her husband was at work on his second novel. Late in 1927 her father had fallen ill with what he believed after a few months to be malaria. Vladimir was “in the full bloom of my literary strengths” in the spring, turning out manuscript pages at a steady clip. Véra fortified him with a special concoction of eggs, cocoa, orange juice, and red wine, but could do little for Evsei Slonim, whose health continued to deteriorate. Eleven chapters into King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov grumbled that “the typewriter doesn’t function without Véra,” who was exhausted from caring for her father. Sixty-three-year-old Slonim was installed in a sanitarium, where Véra appears to have been the daughter elected to look after him. She spent every other evening at his bedside. His health did not improve, and he died—of sepsis resulting from bronchopneumonia—on the afternoon of June 28, 1928. Véra, who somehow wound up on the death records as his wife, was responsible for the burial. (Sonia was living and working in Paris. A technical translator for a steel concern, Lena was in Berlin, but the arrangements fell to Véra.) Two days later an obituary ran in Rul, which—even allowing for the exaggerated tone of Russian obituaries—draws a picture consistent with the rest of the evidence, of a man of great personal dignity, distinguished by “his readiness to ignore his own needs for the sake of others, to deny himself anything in order to make others happy.” Nabokov was busy putting the finishing touches on King, Queen, Knave, a chilly, beautifully observed novel about an ill-fated love triangle; Véra was distracted in her grief by her mother, who had spent a certain amount of time at sanitariums and was ill throughout much of the year. On August 17, a week shy of her fifty-sixth birthday and after a brief hospital stay, Slava Slonim too died, of a heart attack. Five days later she was buried in the Jewish cemetery, alongside the husband from whom she had been separated. Anna Feigin signed for the burial.
Whatever emotional effect the dual losses had on Véra, the financial fallout made itself most immediately felt. She claimed that she went to work at this time to pay the expenses incurred in her father’s illness; she made no mention of her mother’s expenses, which could not have been negligible. That year she attended stenography school; she was already an accomplished enough typist to have been coaching friends. On the recommendation of a friend, she took a clerical position in the office of the commercial attaché of the French consulate, located a streetcar ride from the Nabokovs’ rooms on Passauer Strasse. She owed the job to Raisa Tatarinov, a Jewish émigré who had organized a loose-limbed literary group, one of the two which Nabokov regularly attended. (It was at a 1926 reading held by this group that Aikhenvald had made the Turgenev comparison; if Véra and Vladimir met before the masked evening in 1923, they did so at the Tatarinovs’.) Véra had more dignified work than many of her compatriots; the aristocrats famously drove taxis, but the émigré intelligentsia supported itself in any way it could. Raisa Tatarinov, who held a law degree from the Sorbonne, also worked as a secretary. Nina Berberova strung beads and addressed thousands of Christmas cards. Elsa Triolet designed jewelry. Those whose German was good paid the rent composing articles like “How to Organize Your Kitchen.” A very great deal of cross-stitching and cigarette-rolling got done. Nabokov coached tennis; he and Iosef Hessen’s son, George, organized an exhibition match to attract boxing pupils. He continued to give English lessons, an occupation that provided free meals as well as travel benefits.
October 1928 brought welcome news: Ullstein offered 7,500 marks for the German rights in King, Queen, Knave. This was several times what the publisher had paid for Mary and a fortune compared with what Vladimir was earning as a tutor. Much to the consternation of her boss at the consulate, Véra quit her job early in the winter. Her husband was eager to indulge his childhood passion for butterfly collecting; an expedition was planned for the southern Pyrenees, of which he had been dreaming for some time. It is almost impossible to believe that Véra did not experience some misgivings about the plan, much though she later reported on her desertion with glee; her husband reproached her more than once for being “hysterical over all sorts of utterly foolish, practical thoughts.” Even he admitted that their financial situation was not altogether rosy. Moreover, unemployment was on the rise in Berlin. One incentive for the 1929 trip was to meet with Gleb Struve, in the hope that Nabokov’s friend and early champion might arrange for meetings with French publishers and translators. That dinner took place early in February during the Nabokovs’ two-day stay in Paris. Several days later Véra was hunting her first butterflies and mastering her husband’s system for killing his catches; she was careful always to see that he did so in the most humane way possible. From the Pyrenees Vladimir groused that he was spending more time with his butterflies than with his pen, but Véra managed to photograph him at his makeshift desk, at work on the first pages of what became The Defense.* The photo reveals that the four-volume Dahl—the Russian cousin of the OED and a volume that Nabokov claimed to have read from cover to cover at least four times—had made the trip to France with the couple. Vladimir had originally hoped to stay in France until August but by late June, probably for financial reasons, the Nabokovs were back in Berlin.
Vladimir would say that Russian Berlin “was nothing more than a furnished room, rented out by a crude and malodorous German woman.” Beyond that stood a crude stage set of a corner of the world they had left behind. All seemed, and much was, counterfeit. Very little of the country wore off on the couple, who—with the exception of a few months in 1932, when they had enough money for only one room—generally took two rooms, one for each of them, and used a communal bath. (For better or worse these were years when the economy had made boarders something of the rule; the middleclass family without a lodger raised suspicions.) Both Véra and Vladimir caught the new German craze for sunbathing; they spent a certain amount of time lounging in the less than spectacularly clean Grunewald, where, as Nabokov famously remembered, “only the squirrels and certain caterpillars kept their coats on.” They remained lifelong sun worshipers, Vladimir bronzing to a deep orange, Véra to a pinkish brown. The Weimar passion for calisthenics also made an impression. Nabokov reported to his mother months after the marriage that regardless of the weather, he and Véra exercised with the windows open, stark naked, every morning. Dealings with the rest of the world fell to Véra, who assumed the lion’s share of negotiating with landlords, often a delicate process in the couple’s case; she could have written her own account of the appropriated overcoat. In the tradition of the Jewish scholar’s wife as she had existed two or three generations before, Véra was the one familiar with the marketplace. It was she who had a better command of the local language than the learned author with whom she lived.
Nabokov insisted on his lack of German, but it should be stressed that his definition of linguistic competence differed from most people’s. (Véra’s version of this was categorical: “Personally, my husband had no contacts with any Germans at all and never learned, or tried to learn, the German language.”) He was perfectly able to understand a movie in German; he and Véra went every few weeks to the cheap neighborhood cinema, not only for foreign films. He communicated with the Bromberg boys, who had forgotten their Russian, in German. The German translation of The Defense was read aloud to him, for his approval. Later he would say that his German was only good enough to allow him to read entomological journals, which is roughly equivalent to saying that one’s English is only accomplished enough to enable one to practice medicine. It was strong enough—or something was—to enable him to rewrite the English translation of Kafka. He clearly made some attempt at speaking the language, not only because it would have been quite impossible for him not to, but because he admitted to mangling it. His summer charges laughed at his efforts. The point was less linguistic than philosophical; he wanted no part of this never-adopted country, which he had long disliked.* And the isolation suited him. As the tide of the Russian emigration ebbed
, leaving the Nabokovs increasingly alone in Berlin, Vladimir confessed that he was happier in a country in which his Russian stood in no danger of corruption, as it might have in France.
The language barrier was but one of several, constructed on both sides. For two very different sets of reasons the Nabokovs had lived outside the norms in Russia. Now another whole set of conventions failed to apply. Véra herself could not stress how little they cared to be part of Germany. “Who wanted assimilation?” she challenged one historian. In no way was she, as he had asserted, “in search of citizenship.” This was fortunate, as the couple’s situation was irregular from the start. In June 1925 they obtained Nansen passports, soon enough demoted to “Nansen-sical” passports. Green Nansen documents were issued as of 1922 to the stateless, who enjoyed few legal rights, and who, with the papers in hand, were condemned to interminable bureaucratic deliberations each time they hoped to travel or work; the documents proved more effective in closing doors than in opening borders.* Nabokov later railed brilliantly against these humiliations, recalling with a sweet sense of revenge the insults a few émigrés managed to hurl at the “rat-whiskered” functionaries who controlled their fates. Their statelessness in these years would have as much to do with the Nabokovs’ later obsession with rights and privileges as did the stateliness of their childhoods. All the same, when Vladimir cursed the German zeal for imposing forms and regulations on foreigners—for treating them like “criminals on parole”—he did not seem aware that his wife had already had a full dress rehearsal for this state of affairs. She was well accustomed to belonging to a colony. The criminal treatment may have seemed to her unjust, but would also have felt familiar.
