by Stacy Schiff
* The two women share this taste with Pale Fire’s Sybil Shade, who translates Donne into French, as Véra did as well.
† With his brother Kirill, twelve years his junior, relations were at once more simple and more distant.
‡ In a letter about his brother’s conversion, the very mention of Catholicism conjures in Vladimir’s mind the depictions of the suffering Saint Sebastian. The name is generally not an upper-class Russian one.
§ “Why couldn’t you have married him?” Sergei implored Svetlana in the late 1930s. “He would never have turned out so badly.”
* By law he was required either to leave the country or to answer the call for mobilization within a time limit. At Véra’s urging, he did not answer the call. He was of the same mind, recalling afterward “the nightmarish feeling that accompanied the thought of French barracks.”
* As Nabokov assured the American Committee for Christian Refugees, “I have sound reasons to believe that I shall be able to make good in America.”
4
THE PERSON IN QUESTION
Anyone can create the future, but only a wise man can create the past.
—NABOKOV, BEND SINISTER
1
“I speak fluently English, French, and German,” Véra had written on her immigration documents, a claim that speaks for itself. Linguistically this third dislocation was the most jarring. She who had worked in English throughout the Berlin years was far from entirely at ease with the language; unlike her husband, she had never set foot in—much less studied or conducted business in—an Anglophone country. A full year after the arrival in New York she would recall, “I find it difficult to follow many-pronged conversations in English.” The handicap must have been all the more acutely felt in the company of academics, with whom she would spend the summer of 1941. There was every reason why those who met her in the first American years should have been struck primarily by Véra Nabokov’s silence.
Vladimir had known Véra Slonim for a matter of months when he first invited her to settle in America with him. As unrealizable as that dream had seemed in 1923, the reality proved vastly more complicated now. Nabokov had been penniless when the two married, but he had been penniless and celebrated. For the first time his reputation had not preceded him. The family had fled together, but they had done so precipitately, amid (as Vladimir had it) “the panic-stricken, gaping suitcases and the whirlwind of old newspapers,” to say nothing of the advancing Germans. All of Véra’s papers, and most of her husband’s early editions, were stashed in Ilya Fondaminsky’s basement, from which only a small portion would be recovered. Véra was thirty-eight years old, with a six-year-old son,* savings of just under one hundred dollars, and a husband with no long-term job prospects. None of these impediments—it remains to be seen if this made Véra’s life more or less pleasant—could blunt Vladimir’s essential optimism. “A miracle has occurred: My wife, my son and I have managed to repeat Columbus’s feat,” he wrote an eminent scholar, who he hoped might help him find a university position.
The taxi driver whose integrity cost him the tip of a lifetime deposited the Nabokovs at the apartment of Natalie Nabokov on May 27, 1940. Nicholas Nabokov’s first wife did all in her power to make the new arrivals comfortable, arranging for them to occupy the flat across the hall in her East Sixty-first Street brownstone until the Tolstoy Foundation located a summer sublet on upper Madison Avenue. The irrepressible Altagracia de Jannelli was on the doorstep immediately. Within days of his arrival she escorted her client to Bobbs-Merrill’s New York office; she made certain that he paid a second call at the beginning of July, when the firm’s Indianapolis-based president was in town. From these visits Vladimir concluded that the book his onetime publisher would most welcome from him was a mystery story, which, at least initially, he set out to write. By early August he had begun to rail against the publisher’s attempts to dictate length, theme, and content of the work; a Russian friend to whom he mentioned these conversations expressed surprise that anyone would have been so bold with the notoriously defiant Sirin. By the end of the summer, even while Bobbs-Merrill held out hope that Nabokov might produce a novel for their spring list, he had begun to snicker about the “genteel book, with agreeable protagonists and moral landscapes” that Jannelli expected from him, a recipe on which he would produce a startling variant later. “What I am composing now will hardly satisfy her,” he confessed of the agent, who forbade him to write in Russian, a ban he repeatedly broke. Ultimately Véra was the only beneficiary of Jannelli’s resolve. In the fall the agent reassured Bobbs-Merrill that she knew how to wring the tardy manuscript from their author. She was providing him with a typewriter, “so that his wife may whip it into reading shape.” What Véra did with the shiny new Royal was to keep Jannelli off the doorstep; she found her husband’s dogged representative a perfect nuisance. In mid-November Véra used the newly acquired machine to report to Jannelli that her husband was making some progress in his work, but that the obligations of earning a living were rather slowing his pace. Jannelli never made another sale for Nabokov. The Royal served Véra for the next twenty-five years.
More than simply literary agents were kept at bay over the summer months. As the New York heat and humidity disagreed with Véra and Dmitri, the family decamped for the Vermont farm of Harvard historian Mikhail Karpovich, their base until mid-September. The Karpoviches’ 250-acre property—Nabokov described it affectionately as “a ram-chakal farmhouse haunted by great sulky porcupines, song-of-Bernadette-smelling skunks, fireflies and a number of good moths”—amounted to a lively Russian colony set amid the mountains of southern Vermont. The hospitality of the learned Karpovich and his huge-hearted wife, Tatiana, was unrivaled; the sprawling farmhouse and its outlying buildings were filled perpetually with visitors, often distinguished ones. As the Karpoviches had elected not to install electricity, running water, or a telephone line, there were no luxuries about the Vermont property beyond the essential ones: animated discussion, the commotion of children, incessant tea-drinking, wild raspberries. Vladimir continued to think of his future “with a certain horror,” but the operative feeling that summer was one of immense relief. He profited from the moment of repose to commune with the local butterflies. Karpovich’s eleven-year-old son, Sergei, remembered the new arrival running about the area with his net, clad only in a pair of shorts; the half-naked Russian made quite an impression on the local farmers. At least some of Véra’s day was claimed by the gaggle of children, her own and others’. “Vladimir Vladimirovich” proved a mouthful for the Karpovich offspring, who took to calling her husband by his patronymic alone. Véra spent her time correcting them. Had they no idea whom they were addressing so carelessly?
From their summer idyll the Nabokovs were gently summoned back to New York by Alexandra Tolstoy. She had spent these months, as she would much of the fall, dispatching letters in all directions on the family’s behalf, to those who might offer Vladimir work as well as to those who might advance funds. By September she had arranged for an interview with Nicholas Wreden, the Russian-born manager of the Scribner’s bookstore. Vladimir had promised Alexandra Tolstoy that he “would be glad to take any work that would give me and my family a chance for existence,” but returned from Scribner’s with a markedly different attitude. Wreden, who proved the immediate salvation to a number of refugees, had proposed that he begin by wrapping packages, from nine to six. The pay was sixty-eight dollars a month. With more amusement than indignation the man whom Tolstoy had been describing in her letters as the contemporary Russian writer of the greatest promise declared, “One of the few things that I decidedly do not know how to do is to wrap anything.” Furthermore, the family could not live on sixty-eight dollars a month, especially if he had no time in which to earn additional funds. At the end of a restorative summer he felt doubly besieged, by flu and by anxiety.
In New York the Nabokovs settled at 35 West Eighty-seventh Street, in what Véra remembered as “a dreadful little flat.�
�� They had two rooms in the brownstone; their telephone was a few flights of stairs away in the doorman’s quarters. Daily Véra walked Dmitri to the private school at which Natalie Nabokov had arranged for him to enroll at full scholarship. His English came quickly; Véra was proud to observe that within months of entering the first grade he was “promoted” to the second. Vladimir began tutoring three older women studying at Columbia, with whom he was pleased. Great lovers of Russia all, they appeared to him to “brilliantly debunk the émigré preconception of the lacquered emptiness of the American mind.” He volunteered as well at the Museum of Natural History, arranging the Old World Lepidoptera collections. Soon the Tolstoy Foundation’s efforts, along with his own, began to bear fruit. He was commissioned to write his first English book reviews; arrangements were made for a series of guest lectures. In December he received an invitation he qualified as his “first success.” A ten-week summer position at Stanford University that Aldanov had dangled before his eyes the previous year in Paris was offered to him for 1941. Dorothy Leuthold, one of the three Columbia students, volunteered to drive the family cross-country, in her new Pontiac.
Early in October Vladimir misplaced a phone number with which his cousin Nicholas had supplied him, further proof, if proof were needed, that telephone numbers proved delusions in his hands. His first meeting with Edmund Wilson was arranged by note. “Dear Mr. Wilson,” he began, “I would have telephoned myself, but cannot find your number.” The first years in America were more about livelihood than about literature; it was Edmund Wilson more than anyone who helped Nabokov to connect the two. By December the eminent American critic was suggesting—the idea could not have been more comical in retrospect—that the two collaborate on a translation of Pushkin’s verse play Mozart and Salieri, a translation that would be published in The New Republic the following spring. At the same time Véra invited Wilson and his then-wife, Mary McCarthy, to a small party, to be thrown not at the Nabokovs’ apartment but at the more comfortable hotel lodgings of their Berlin friends Bertrand and Lisbet Thompson, who had emigrated earlier. The end-of-the-year celebration would be canceled, but the Nabokov-Wilson correspondence was off and running. Over the next years it proved one as rich in strong opinion, from Nabokov’s end, as it was in trade secrets, from Wilson’s: How to give your publisher the slip. How to avoid having to review a novel by Thomas Mann. When to wriggle free of an option clause. How to secure a Guggenheim. Where poetry could be made to pay. How to extort an extra one hundred dollars from an editor. How to circumvent “a man named Ross” who persisted in editing people at The New Yorker. Nabokov’s immediate concerns were not yet so delicious; 1940 was one of the few literature-free years of his life. At the same time he had never worked as hard as he did that winter, preparing his Stanford classes, writing reviews, filling in at the museum, angling for a position as a guest lecturer.
With Dmitri at school, Véra was free to work again, at least part-time. In this respect the swelled immigrant community in New York proved helpful. In January the lawyer Alexis Goldenweiser put her in touch with a Russian colleague who needed assistance with his foreign correspondence. He offered Véra a nine-to-seven job, which she explained was not feasible. The attorney proposed that she handle his French correspondence only, for which he offered a paltry sum. While she was grateful to Goldenweiser for his recommendation, she made it clear that this remuneration was insufficient. One of her greatest attributes—independent of, but in tandem with, her husband—was her sense of her own worth. For all of the selfless devotion, Véra could never be said to underestimate herself. She should not be working for forty cents an hour, just as her husband should not be writing a mystery novel. In 1941 she was saved by her unwillingness to compromise. Almost immediately a better position turned up, at a Free French newspaper, the only job other than that for her husband to which she affixed the adjective “fabulous.” Probably she began work at the paper at the end of January.
She would have been highly conspicuous on West Eighty-seventh Street. Well before she opened her mouth, no one would have mistaken Véra Nabokov for an American. Neither of the elder Nabokovs appeared remotely well fed, a look that Véra wore better than her gaunt husband. (When he arrived at Wellesley College for a guest lecture in March, Vladimir over-heard a cafeteria cook swear, “We are going to put some fat on the bones of that man,” a promise on which, indirectly, Wellesley made good. In the eyes of a friend’s daughter, Véra looked as if she were about to blow away.) In a long black dress and a long black coat, Véra introduced Dmitri to the Statue of Liberty, the Fulton Street fishmarket, the Bronx Zoo, the Staten Island Ferry. She was for him a part of those enchantments. In those rounds she looked decidedly foreign, and would the more so the farther she ventured from New York. Nor could Dmitri—despite the “American” in which he was soon chattering away fluently—be mistaken for a native. Nicholas Nabokov and his second wife dined with the new arrivals at the Russian Tea Room just before Christmas 1940. The more recent Mrs. Nabokov—Nicholas would leave behind four of them, whose activities were routinely conflated with Véra’s—remembered Dmitri spectacularly bundled in fur, a picturesque and decidedly exotic sight. The following summer the seven-year-old left an indelible impression while exploring the upper reaches of a Stanford amphitheater in shorts resembling lederhosen, a felt hat with a feather jauntily perched on his head. In Berlin and Paris a Russian accent was a Russian accent; in New York it was simply, and distinctly, foreign. The alienation must have been fierce, at a time when America was not yet at war and not yet much concerned with the messy world beyond its shores. As Nabokov reminds us, “Stranger always rhymes with danger.”
It had never been much in Véra’s power to bow to the local mores, and after three migrations she was all the more unwilling to do so. There was generally less suppleness to her persona than to that of her husband, who took to America as he took to most things, with a bantering, inquisitive enthusiasm. Véra’s memory of Dmitri and the fur reveals something of her unyielding approach to the New World that winter:
On walks through Central Park, D., aged 6 and wearing his furcoat brought over from Europe, would be approached one by one by 6, 8 or 10 little and not so little boys to be teasingly asked “Are you a boy or a girl?” and would patiently reply to each “No, I am a boy, and this kind of coat is worn by boys where I come from,” which, at times, so much astonished the interrogators that the bantering beginning would result in a long and friendly talk.
She lamented that this gentleness would be bred out of her son by American schools.
Her husband, a quick-change artist by nature, began almost immediately, consciously and not, to toy with the local idiom. His wardrobe told an interesting tale, especially about a man whose work is so rich in lived illusions. Almost as if in a fable, he met in quick succession a series of individuals who counted among his staunchest supporters in his new world. Chief among them were Harry Levin, then a promising junior instructor in Harvard’s English Department, and his Russian wife, Elena, from a liberal background similar to Vladimir’s. The young couple had spent their 1939 honeymoon at the Karpoviches’ farm, at which time Levin had abandoned his cast-off tweed blazer in a closet. When the Levins were introduced to the Nabokovs in the fall of 1940, the Nabokovs were returning from Vermont; Vladimir sported the retired blazer, to whose provenance he remained oblivious.* Over that summer Karpovich had passed on to Vladimir an ultramarine suit of which Nabokov was fond and in which he delivered his 1941 Stanford lectures. Additional hand-me-downs came his way from Serge Koussevitzky. It is not surprising that prior to George Hessen’s immigration Nabokov prepped him by advising that he must “play the real American.” Early on the couple appear to have realized that for Vladimir’s professional survival they could not too much align themselves with the Russian community, a decision that would cost them later.
Véra engaged in none of this molting; generally she was less interested in costumes than disguises. Willingly or not, she was engaged
in a new game, in a new language, in which the rules were ill defined for newcomers. The possibilities for ridicule were enormous, especially for someone with a heightened sensitivity to propriety, an investment in remaining inconspicuous. At half her age her father had effected a similar transformation: His move from a Yiddish-speaking shtetl to a Petersburg university was a move from the religious to the secular world, from one class to another, but it must have been less traumatic than was his thirty-eight-year-old daughter’s in 1940. The “rapid acculturation and abiding separateness” that was said to describe the life of the St. Petersburg Jew equally well described these first refugee years in America, where so much was possible and at the same time so much was alien. Véra recognized the difficulties inherent in the enterprise. She spoke eloquently about the “pathetic attempt of a very small and bewildered individual to throw an anchor of his own amidst the incomprehensible, tossing, perhaps frightening element around him,” although when she did so she was speaking of Dmitri on the arrival in America. She seems to have had little interest in reinventing herself, only in inventing an American writer where there had been a gifted Russian one, in seeing that the twice-deposed king with whom she traveled recover his scepter.
In March 1941 Nabokov arrived in Wellesley for a two-week guest lectureship, which he owed indirectly to Karpovich. Véra was in bed with a crippling case of sciatica, an illness that cost her the newspaper job. In sixteen days Vladimir wrote her no fewer than eight times. Almost immediately he did so with good news: Edward Weeks had bought “Cloud, Castle, Lake” for The Atlantic, a deal the two men sealed over breakfast that week. Vladimir solicited his wife’s advice as to what he should do next. Was it wiser to attempt something in English, or write a piece in Russian and then translate it?* Even at this delicate moment in his metamorphosis he made light of his predicament, citing an invented text that would be written in 2074 about the linguistic travails of Vladimir Sirin. He reveled in his attempts at deciphering Americans. “I’ll be so bold as to assume that when they say, ‘It will be a tragedy when you go away,’ that that is the simplest American politeness,” he asserted. But in confidence he admitted that he was bored and longed to come home; when he feared he could not fill fifty minutes he dragged out his lecture by covering the blackboard with the names of Russian writers. He punctuated his letters with comments clearly aimed at dissipating any jealousy his wife might be harboring. At Véra’s end fidelity was doubtless less at issue than were finances. She failed to place a section of The Gift in a Russian anthology in which Vladimir had hoped it might appear; she had no money; she was rapidly piling up debts. Further she was unwell. Lisbet Thompson and one of Nabokov’s Columbia students checked on her daily and accompanied Dmitri to the park. The doctor paid regular calls. Vladimir had himself been borrowing money during his trip; he came home via the Chekhov Theatre in Ridgefield, Connecticut, for which he had proposed to work up a stage adaptation of Don Quixote, but found on March 28 that he lacked the funds to return to New York. (He lodged in the actors’ dorm but took care to specify that it was the male actors’ dorm.) Véra might have worried that quixoticism could be contagious when her trainfare-less husband was offered, and rejected, a permanent position in Ridgefield: “It’s true, it is quaint here, but all the trees have been chemically treated, so there probably aren’t many butterflies.”
