by Stacy Schiff
Why did they stay? The Nabokovs had long thought the city a miserable dead end; the year after their marriage Vladimir had written Véra that hearing German made him sick, and that the cuisine did little more for him. He would prefer almost any provincial outpost to Berlin, a city he vowed, in a draft of Speak, Memory, that they had both disliked.† Initially Véra had admired Germany for its democratic institutions, an affection she could no longer feel. She did not frighten easily, if at all; her father had also waited until the bitter end to leave Russia. Mostly they had no place to go. Berberova’s description of the face of the continent at the time goes some way toward explaining their inertia: “On the map of Europe were England, France, Germany, and Russia. In the first, imbeciles reigned, in the second living corpses, in the third villains, and in the fourth villains and bureaucrats.” Zinaida Shakhovskoy visited the Nabokovs on Nestorstrasse in 1932 or 1933 and was surprised to find them every bit as disgusted by Russia and Russians as they were by the situation in Germany. (She pointed out to them that in their blanket condemnations they were guilty of the same kind of racism as the Germans.) They were comfortably settled with Anna Feigin, the only relative to whom Véra felt close; the arrangement reduced their living expenses considerably and provided them the great luxury of domestic help. Véra continued to work freelance assignments and to offer language lessons; her students included their great friend George Hessen, also still in Berlin. Nabokov did not find politics in any way broke his literary stride. Writers should “occupy themselves only with their own meaningless, innocent, intoxications,” he announced in 1934. “I am writing my novel. I do not read the papers.”
Years later he offered another explanation: “We were always sluggish. Gracefully sluggish in the case of my wife, terribly sluggish in my case.” He repeatedly wrote down the prolonged stay in Berlin to laziness, although when it came to dillydallying, Nabokov talked a better game than he played. He had begun to research and write The Gift; the French translation of The Defense was enjoying gratifying reviews. He heard often of his growing stature in Paris. In 1933 for the first time a far-off, tinny echo of his name sounded in America, not yet loud enough to qualify as a Sirin call. As if dwarfed by the events around the couple, the biographical record thins at this point. Ivan Bunin passed through Berlin in December 1933, having become the first Russian to claim the Nobel Prize. Both Nabokovs attended the reception held for him by the much reduced émigré community. By that time anti-Semitism had greatly increased among the city’s Russians, many of them monarchists who welcomed Hitler with open arms. (The irony of Hitler’s attributing his anti-Jewish policies to the danger of Bolshevik agitation could not have been lost on Véra.) The Russian proprietor of one of Berlin’s largest garages warned Iosef Hessen that his drivers had decided that he and Sirin—“the kike and the half-kike”—should not speak at the Bunin banquet, at any cost. Nabokov and Hessen delivered their speeches all the same, during what must have been, for every possible reason, a nerve-racking evening for Véra. Her father-in-law had been murdered, by a monarchist, at a public meeting, where a scandal had been expected; Hessen had been the one to telephone the Nabokov home with the news. The picture is otherwise blurry for the next months, the latter half of 1933 and the first of 1934, which is precisely as Véra intended it to be. In her attempts to make these prolific years look effortless she obscured one other small detail.
She reemerges on May 9, 1934—nearly nine years to the day she had met her husband—at Anna Feigin’s well-furnished apartment on Nestorstrasse. Nabokov and George Hessen’s half-brother are on that evening hunched over a chessboard. Quietly Anna Feigin escorts Véra out the door. No one other than the four people in the room, on a leafy street near the Hohenzollerndamm station in southwest Berlin, knows where she is going. Presumably by taxi the two women make the mile trip east to Berchtesgadener Strasse, where at eleven A.M., in a private clinic, after an evening’s labor and a difficult delivery, Véra will give birth to a large baby boy, “ein kleiner russischer” in the words of the attending physician. After some deliberation, the child was named Dmitri.
Everyone was startled by the news, some to the point of disbelief. Within days Vladimir had announced the baby’s arrival by (handwritten) letter to Natalie Nabokov and to Khodasevich in Paris, to Struve in London. When no congratulations were forthcoming from the latter, Nabokov wrote again: “I’ve been somewhat preoccupied by the appearance of my son Dmitri (I wrote to you about it, but you apparently took it for a joke).” His mother’s reaction was a little more gratifying: The shock had been enormous but also delicious. She was astounded by the news, highly solicitous of Véra’s health. The word “pregnant” had never been pronounced, save in the presence of the Hessens and Anna Feigin (and presumably some medical personnel); Véra had continued on her usual lesson-giving rounds, had held to her flawless posture, and had dressed with phenomenal discretion. She took some pleasure in having made an appearance at the Bunin evening without anyone’s being the wiser about her condition. Her husband wrote this down to the Russian powers of nonobservation, but failed to give credit where credit was due: Concealing a five-months-pregnant belly requires some skill. It is possible that this was neither a first nor a last pregnancy; there is some hint of a miscarriage earlier, and there was very likely another pregnancy in the summer of 1936. Superstition aside, why the secrecy? So much did Véra insist on emotional reserve that she admired it in Dmitri as a baby. The pregnancy, like the marriage, concerned only her husband and herself. And, too, nothing is quite so platitudinous as childbirth and childrearing. It takes a Nabokov to write rapturously of diapers and stroller, to locate poetry in a “postlactic all-clear signal.” The very concept of ordinariness was foreign to Véra, who had no desire for her experience to be contaminated by anyone else’s. And yet as Richard Holmes has written of Mary Wollstonecraft at a similar juncture 140 years earlier, as the guillotines clattered away outside and inside the Gallic air was thick with domestic bliss, “This extraordinary and exceptional woman had become a mother—just like any other.” Nabokov’s sister Elena shrugs when asked about the clandestine pregnancy: “That was pure Véra.”
Once the secret was out it was loudly broadcast; the new father reported endless phone calls, flowers, telegrams. Véra stayed at the Schöneberg clinic for two weeks, where Vladimir visited twice daily. At home she was quickly exhausted by the “heavenly labor” involved in washing out clothing and diapers. On June 10 she was back at the typewriter, explaining her husband’s silence to his French publisher. A week later she typed a long letter to the agent who had been negotiating with that publisher; her husband was frustrated in his attempts to settle on terms for translation rights in The Defense. He was not exactly getting rich, was rather in desperate need of money. Much of the rest of the summer and fall were devoted to the transcription of Invitation to a Beheading, a first draft of which Vladimir had written in a lightning two weeks, on Véra’s return from the clinic. To his dismay the typing seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time; in November an exhausted Véra was at the machine night and day. From outside the third-floor apartment, recalled Nabokov, “we heard Hitler’s voice from rooftop loudspeakers.” Inside the typewriter clattered away, setting down the account of Cincinnatus’s life in prison, rich in mental adventures, the only kind, Véra would remind us, that matter.
* Both Nabokovs maintained that the list was offered up not as exposition but as imitation, of Pushkin. Nabokov’s inventory very nearly rivals that of the Master, who listed sixteen serious infatuations and eighteen light romances. The practice was not an uncommon one; Khodasevich compiled a list for Berberova as well.
* In the 1950s, a few Cornell students recoiled when their professor announced unselfconsciously that “Austen is a kitten, and Dickens, Dickens is a great big dog.” He read Austen with more than the usual preconceptions; Russia has not yet produced a great female novelist. On a more personal level, he did nothing to encourage the aspirations of his sister Elena, w
ho wrote to say that she too suffered from the “family disease.” She yearned to publish something of her own, and never would.
* In light of the literature, it is interesting to note that while synesthetics are generally gifted with superior memories, they often suffer from difficulties with spatial navigation.
* The second was his mother, who had until Véra’s arrival on the scene copied out nearly everything her son wrote.
* Here again Véra could not have been more generously unforthcoming. In response to a scholar’s query, she explained: “Anna Feigin was my cousin, niece of my mother. We have always been in very close relations with her. She was born in 1890. In the early fourties [sic] she joined us in New York, and in 1968 she joined us again.” She omitted only all mention of the 1920s, which is to say the heart of the matter.
* Did the way Nabokov approached Anna Karenin(a) have anything to do with his marriage? He taught the book as if its real moral message was that loveless marriages of the Karenins’ kind constitute a crime against human nature; to his mind, Kitty and Levin represent the “Milky Way” of the book. He talked about Kitty and Levin’s “brain-bridge” and “tender telepathy” in the same way that, in interviews, he wondered after Véra’s capacity for “domestic telepathy,” or described Fyodor’s ability to communicate with Zina “without any bridges.” For Kitty and Levin, “the brain-bridge is a light and luminous and lovely structure leading towards vistas of tenderness and fond duties and profound bliss.”
* Véra remembered the offer being followed by a slightly less violent sequence than did her husband: “VN splashed the man’s drink into his face and all over him.”
* Nor could Nabokov have failed to notice that his wife shared her initials with the woman we know as Tamara and Mary, and whom he had loved between 1915 and 1916 as Valentina Evgenievna Shulgin. Oddly, Valentina worked all her life as a typist.
* Russian writers commonly come to prose from poetry. As Nabokov would observe in a few pointed examples, that would be the undoing of some.
† The captivating dance of the pronouns in the Nabokovs’ correspondence begins here. What he wrote was: “I am working on a big translation, and yesterday Véra and I worked for 8 hours …”
* “I understand now the wild look that passed in his eyes. Stupid, but has happened to me before,” he confided after the misadventure.
† As he worded it on his own behalf in a 1970 interview with an Israeli journalist, the catalogue consisted of: “Stupid, inimical things: the spectacles case that gets lost; the clothes hanger that topples down in the closet; the wrong pocket. Folding an umbrella, not finding its secret button. Uncut pages, knots in shoelaces.”
* This would have mandated unusual powers of persuasion. Iosef Hessen remembered assigning twenty year-old Nabokov a translation into the Russian of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon for Rul. Hessen made a few suggestions on the proofs before passing them on to Nabokov’s father. When the proofs returned to Hessen, Nabokov Senior smiled indulgently and admitted that his son had erased all of Hessen’s corrections.
† In 1965 he told an interviewer, “Well, after that my very kind and patient wife, she sits down at her typewriter and I, I dictate, I dictate off the [index] cards to her, making some changes and very often, very often, discussing this or that. She might say, ‘Oh you can’t say that, you can’t say that.’ ‘Well, let’s see, perhaps I can change it.’ ”
* Handguns are everywhere in the novels. Brownings turn up in the plays The Man from the USSR and The Event, though neither gun—introduced in the fourth act and the second act respectively—will go off in the last.
* The detachable magazine of the Browning held seven rounds.
* Nabokov lent the Roussillon outpost to another artist furiously composing a masterwork: Hermann at the end of Despair.
* The confusion over the language issue was partially of Nabokov’s own making. In his 1944 Nikolai Gogol, he claimed to know “three European languages,” a collection that could only have included German. For his 1947 Guggenheim application, he had acquired a “fair knowledge of German.” By 1975, he could read but not write the language. What survives of his attempts to write in that language vigorously supports his claim that his German was execrable.
* It was a cruel irony that the documents took their name from Fridtjof Nansen, the polar explorer.
* She may well have looked forward to the pages at home. Anna Dostoyevsky remembered the hours in which she took down her husband’s dictation as among the happiest in her life.
* On their return to France in 1931, the Fondaminskys had reported that Sirin-Nabokov “lives in two rooms with his wife, a very fine and delicate woman.”
* As Véra remembered of her husband: “He did not have enough German to read a novel, and did not read the German newspapers.”
† By 1939, for added reasons, it had become “thrice-damned Germany.” The line was later deleted from the last chapter of Speak, Memory.
3
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Yes, the mirror reflection is always there.
—NABOKOV TO MARC SZEFTEL
1
“Véra was a pale blonde when I met her, but it didn’t take me long to turn her hair white,” Nabokov chuckled to a journalist. Atypically, an entire chromatic age was lost on him. Early in the marriage, slate streaks appeared in the hair that melted in the sunlight. Véra reported with pride that it had begun to turn when she was twenty-five. As a new mother in her early thirties, she was grayer (and thinner) yet; she looks as wan as she reportedly felt. In a few years she would be almost entirely pearl-gray. By her mid-forties, the opalescent bob paled to a radiant cloud of white. (Lena Massalsky’s hair did the same at the same age, although the sisters would not discover this until later.) Véra expressed a desire even to hurry it along. “I wish it would go all white,” she sighed in 1948, when it was very nearly there. “People will think I married an older woman,” her husband protested, to which, without blinking, Véra replied, “Not if they look at you.” She would be as striking in the late 1940s, with the pearly hair and the alabaster skin—the discrepancy between the hair and her young face was particularly dramatic—as she had been in the mask-wearing 1920s. She took great pride in the white halo, which seemed somehow to match her refinement, her agelessness; it removed her from all categories. It lent her an air of divinity. With delight she shared one hairdresser’s amazement: Her color could not be reproduced artificially. Hers alone was the genuine article. Well before then she was very aware of her looks; the reflections in her husband’s fiction were not the only ones she thought distorted. “The camera and I have been at odds since I was a child,” she grumbled. The statement reveals a certain vanity and, too, a loose grasp of the truth. Véra Nabokov was beautiful, and she photographed beautifully.
She was highly conscious of presentation and appeared always impeccably dressed and coiffed, even when the Nabokovs had nothing. It is easy to imagine her standing before a mirror, less easy to imagine her meeting her own reflection there. Already she had eyes mostly for her husband. It was his portrait—the portrait of an artist—she saw in the looking glass. He knew enough about the makers of literature to realize how much he benefited from that attention. In 1931 he had written Struve:
People of the writing variety—homo scribo or scribblingus—are extremely conceited and vain, and resemble in that way certain women who immediately seek themselves out in a summertime group photograph, can’t get enough of themselves, and always return, through the entire album, to that photo, though they pretend to be looking at their neighbors and not themselves.
Véra saw her husband always before her; he saw her image of him. This optics-defying arrangement sustained them at a time and in a place when little else did; it was the first in what was to be a repertoire of deceptive techniques, for which the couple had only begun their magic act. Already Vladimir had acquired a reputation for being impenetrable, almost impossible to get to know. “The thoughts a
nd feelings of the other person rebounded from him as from a mirror,” observed another émigré. This was a cardinal sin among Russians, for whom it is a virtue to be “open-souled,” among whom one speaks not “one on one,” not “en tête-à-tête,” but “soul to soul.”* Among the many who found Sirin brilliant, brittle, and impenetrable was the man before the looking glass, who cut from Speak, Memory a reference to “the mirrory quality of his [Sirin’s] personality.” (The ever-charitable Aldanov held that watching Nabokov and Bunin talk was like watching two movie cameras trained on each other.) Véra so much existed in Vladimir’s achievements, and in her pride in those achievements, that conversation with her could prove equally flattening. When she called the British embassy in search of a translator “who would be an experienced man of letters with fine style,” she heard nothing facetious in the suggestion that perhaps H. G. Wells might be capable of tackling the job. Her sense of humor—usually quite lively, and one of the qualities Nabokov professed to admire most about her—failed her utterly at such moments.
