by Stacy Schiff
Nabokov did not teach literature as it had been taught in America before or as it has been taught since. For one thing he taught Gogol’s “The Greatcoat,” Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place, Dostoyevsky’s Memoirs from a Mousehole. He consulted his own dictionary of literary terms. There was the “parallel interruption,” the “perry,” the “knight’s move,” the “sifting agent,” the “special dimple.” He had no use for plot or psychology; he taught that literature was in the images, not the ideas. Very little was sacred. In this he upheld the legacy of one of his own esteemed Petersburg teachers, the Symbolist poet V. V. Hippius, who was said to teach “not literature but the far more interesting science of literary spite.”* Nabokov was known, vaguely, as a writer, by the mid-1950s as the creator of Pnin, by the end of the decade as the author of Lolita, more conspicuously as the man who annually filled the Goldwin Smith amphitheater to capacity crowds when he lectured on Madame Bovary from the Sunday comics; who taught “The Metamorphosis” with the assistance of his favorite newspaper, the Daily News. The eccentricities rather than his literary reputation accounted for his legend. By the time he left Cornell, his European Literature course was among the most popular on campus.
He also taught his students how to read. More even than did the English majors, the government students, the home economics majors, the pre-meds, the mathematicians, the engineers found he was to change their lives.† “He savored words, drew vibrant word pictures, and made reading great books a joy for me and my husband to this day,” remembers Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. What even the good readers did not entirely realize at the time was that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between noon and 12:50, in the guise of teaching several hundred undergraduates how to parse Proust, Flaubert, Tolstoy, as he filled Goldwin Smith C with his booming baritone, he was teaching them how to read Nabokov. Caress the details, he directed. Art is a deception; the great artist a deceiver. Read for the tingle, the shiver up the spine. Do not read but—here he feigned a stutter—re-re-read a book. Look at the harlequins. Véra was in that amphitheater every day though no one needed to absorb the lesson less: She was already the world champion Nabokov reader. Surely she must have been a little bored on hearing for the fifth or sixth time that the moral message of Anna Karenina lay in the metaphysical love of Kitty and Levin, “on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect.” If she showed no signs of stirring in her chair, save to shoot a disparaging look at the inattentive student, to reprimand the one who had absentmindedly lit up a cigarette, it was because the lectures sounded like something other than lectures to her. Later a Cornell colleague observed that when Mrs. Nabokov had been obliged to teach in her husband’s stead she had altered not a word of his texts. In the margin eighty-four-year-old Véra chastised him. But of course she had not changed a thing! Had he not understood that her husband had been a perfectionist, that each lecture constituted a work of art? So much did she believe this that she quibbled equally with the colleague’s assessment that when teaching in her husband’s stead she delivered “as good a piece of merchandise as Nabokov the master himself.”
Nabokov had no heart condition; he was not allergic to chalk dust. For the most part at Cornell he was in robust health. To a certain extent Véra was a Seeing Eye dog; her husband was not blind but did demonstrate an unerring capacity to get lost on his way to class, on Cornell’s central Arts Quadrangle. As at Wellesley, he had difficulty locating his classroom. He was sighted wading into the wrong lecture hall; in 1958 he was unable to show his replacement to the classroom in which he had taught for nearly a decade. He appeared incapable of turning on a light. In one class he did a nervous little dance before the switch, confessing his fear of the electrical plate, which he did his best to avoid.* On campus he could be slow to recognize colleagues; “Of course you remember Bobby,” Véra might say, prompting her husband to affix a name to a face. He showed every sign of delighting in his role of befuddled professor; it is less clear if Véra was comfortable with the role that afforded her. “We did not know he was an author, but we knew he was a character,” recalled one student, less certain of what to make of his companion. Literary wives have traditionally provided assistance to their writing husbands; academic wives are meant to be trotted out for the occasional department tea. In the words of one former student, “Véra Nabokov was everywhere a faculty wife shouldn’t be—walking with him on the quad, talking to him in the halls, laughing delightedly at some joke he had whispered to her, sitting on the stage of the lecture hall while he read in a dry dull voice.”
Whether she knew the extent of her husband’s Wellesley indiscretions or not, she would have realized that her presence at his side effectively did prevent straying of another kind. The Wellesley exploits remain the last recorded acts of near-adultery, to be followed only by unsubstantiated hints and a great deal of head-turning. Véra was typing drafts of Lolita during the first five years in Ithaca, when her husband was charting sexual maturation and studying sexual perversion, withdrawing The Subnormal Adolescent Girl from the library, flipping through The Best in Teen Tales, The American Girl, Calling All Girls, taking notes on Clearasil and Tampax, reviewing Havelock Ellis. If the first-person narrator of Look at the Harlequins! is to be trusted, Véra knew well not to be personally “ruffled by a too robust erotic detail”; she would have understood this research to be conducted in the service of art. More likely she was concerned with her husband’s tendency to veer into the off-color anecdote. These were the mild-mannered Eisenhower years, and out of her earshot Vladimir rather pushed the envelope. When he attempted to do so in his assistant’s presence he appealed to her with the look of a mischievous schoolboy. Nor did he desist from the kind of provocative comments that had secured him his reputation in Berlin, a reputation that had found its way to Cornell via convoluted émigré pathways and, to some, suggested a different reason for his wife’s dancing attendance on him. At least he adopted a fresh set of similes. When he saw an attractive favorite student again in 1958 he was quick to assure her that she was looking more than ever like Audrey Hepburn.
Véra was an encyclopedia, but so was Vladimir. The seminar courses in particular were punctuated by mini-conferences between the professor and his assistant. One Russian Literature course ground to a halt when, outlining the genealogy of the princes of Kiev during his lecture on The Song of Igor’s Campaign, Vladimir could not recall a name and date. He turned to Véra, who provided the fugitive information. When his classes were small, Nabokov arranged for them to meet in his living room, where Véra always appeared with a snack and usually remained for the duration of the hour. She was not retiring. When Professor Nabokov began extemporaneously to recite Pushkin for his students he was interrupted by a quiet voice from the far end of the room: “No, Volodya, that’s not right.” A protracted debate ensued, the students bemused by this head-on conflict. “Darling, you’re absolutely right, you’re absolutely right,” Nabokov at last conceded, as in fact she was. These melees made abundantly clear to those present that the cookie-supplying Véra was also her husband’s professional and intellectual partner. The final for Nabokov’s fall 1952 Russian Poetry course (enrollment: six) was administered at the couple’s dining room table. Véra plied the students with tea and cookies throughout.
Apart from the occasional digressions, all of which sounded as lapidary as the lectures themselves, Nabokov generally had a very firm idea of what was going to come out of his mouth. And he had an equally good idea of what he had said afterward. All of the lectures were preprepared, no tautology in this case: Nabokov claimed later that they had been delivered practically from memory.* Occasionally a gem would slip from his lips and—with real delight—he would stop in mid-lecture to jot it down. This was unnecessary, as someone else in the room was assiduously mopping up the bons mots. Doubtless there were discussions in the evening of the day’s performance—Had he killed off Emma Bovary as brilliantly as he had the year before? Had anyone in the roo
m caught the Hemingway swipe?—but it is unlikely that Véra’s grades carried much weight with this student. He knew a happy turn of phrase when he saw one. And from the outset his flamboyant account of Pushkin’s duel—as much a digression on the culture of dueling as an account of the great poet’s agonizing death—had had the desired effect. One student looked to the back of the room after Pushkin’s death in Ithaca in 1948. Véra, along with several colleagues and a visiting friend, was dissolved in tears. While she kept upstarts in their places she provided the same service for the lecturer. His own high entertainment was not lost on Professor Nabokov, who could collapse in laughter at the dais, tears streaming down his face. From her perch the earnest assistant would gesture to him. He was laughing so hard that no one could understand a word of what he was saying. From this behavior the inevitable conclusion presented itself: Mrs. Nabokov had no sense of humor.
The antics made for a highly picturesque classroom. One day Nabokov came to class with the wrong edition of Anna Karenina. He had only his Russian copy, from which he began to read aloud as planned, with great relish. Ten minutes into his dramatic and incomprehensible performance Mrs. Nabokov returned to the lecture hall, waving an English edition in the air. Without a word, in midsentence, he switched to the page she held open before him. There was plenty of drama in the contrast between the two performers: Professor Nabokov the buffoon, the showman, the sage, the evangelist, the classroom conjurer, “pulling,” as a colleague put it, “rabbits out of textual top hats,” seemed the polar twin of the stern, sphinxlike person beside him. Whereas Véra appeared always in a nondescript, monochromatic wardrobe—to most viewers it registered as a single black dress, a baggy sweater over a long, shapeless skirt—Vladimir bloomed forth in all the pageantry the American 1950s had to offer. Véra’s heightened sensitivity to color seems to have had no effect on outfitting her husband. His Cornell students were as startled by the salmon-colored shirts as they were by his assistant’s austere elegance.* The pink shirt was matched to a blue sweater and knotted with a yellow tie, all three components struggling for supremacy under the regulation tweed blazer; he was almost the walking incarnation of the creative writer trying to break out of the professorial straitjacket.† It was assumed that she, whoever she was, was the aristocrat. The adjectives that most commonly attached themselves to her suggested as much. She was formidable, regal, stately, imperious; she reminded students of nothing more than a Borzoi. She terrified a great number of Cornellians. Which made the benevolent gesture all the more appreciated. “Once she smiled at me and made my week,” recollected one student fondly.
Dmitri Nabokov has suggested three reasons why his mother attended his father’s lectures: so as to be completely up-to-date in the event that she had to substitute for him; because she was a full creative partner in all he did; because he wanted her to be there. A hint of her calling can be found in “Bachmann,” a short story Nabokov wrote the year after he had met Véra. Bachmann’s stellar career at the piano takes off the first day his admirer Mme. Perov sits down, “very straight, smooth-haired,” in the front row of one of his concerts. It ends the first night she fails to appear, when, after seating himself at the piano, Bachmann’s eye catches on the empty seat in the middle of the first row. A few Cornellians seemed to appreciate Bachmann’s secret in recalling the performances of Professor Nabokov. “It was as if he were giving the lectures for her,” a former student mused, echoed by several others. Another alumnus had the sense that Nabokov found lecturing for himself and his wife a more gratifying task than attempting to raise the students up by their illiterate bootstraps. Surely the person who tried to make herself the most invisible was—to the man on the stage—the most visible. And surely she knew this. For whom else could he have been speaking when he listed on the blackboard the names of the five greatest Russian poets? The name Sirin stood out for its obscurity. “Who is Sirin?” asked an intrepid graduate student, as she and a friend grew suspicious. “Ah, Sirin, I shall read from his work,” Nabokov answered with a straight face and no further explanation. After class some of the students who heard these tributes raced across the quadrangle to the card catalogue. And there discovered, as Nabokov’s Harvard students had, the true identity of that elusive Russian master.
His eyes lit up when his assistant was around, but the effect went further. On a particularly dim Ithaca morning Nabokov began lecturing in the dark. After a few minutes Véra left her seat in the front row to switch on the amphitheater lights. As she did so a beatific smile spread across her husband’s face. “Ladies and gentlemen”—he gestured proudly from the front of the room to the back—“my assistant.” The salute was a loving one; what she had done to elicit it was to flood Vladimir Nabokov in light, which, for both of them, was the desired effect. She was not meant so much to impress her husband’s greatness on his students, although to many the occasional glance was interpreted as “Do you have any idea who he is?” The adulation was instead meant to ricochet between them. Nabokov saw in his wife’s eyes the image to which he aspired; she saw before her the performer she had done so much to underwrite. She allowed him not to walk, but to talk, into his own reflection. With his assistant in the room he was able to achieve the effect he had aspired to in Conclusive Evidence, as he described it in the memoir’s long-unpublished final chapter, which he had expected to represent the volume’s most important pages, the summation and analysis of his themes. He might better have called them an account of the magician laying out his equipment. Posing as a fictitious reviewer and speaking of himself in the comfortable third person, he wrote: “But one is inclined to think that his [Mr. Nabokov’s] true purpose here is to project himself, or at least his most treasured self, into the picture he paints. One is reminded of those problems of ‘objectivity’ that the philosophy of science brings up. An observer makes a detailed picture of the whole universe but when he has finished he realizes that it still lacks something: his own self.” For this trick he needed an assistant.
What did she think she was doing in the classroom? A little bit of keeping her husband in line. Perhaps mopping up the bons mots; this was the woman who would compare her husband’s brain to an oil well. Despite Nabokov’s later blustering about how a tape recorder could have replaced him, there is evidence of real anxiety in the early days at Cornell. He was overwhelmed by Ithaca, uneasy in the classroom. Initially Véra may have been in place to ease the stage fright; long after he had left academia, Nabokov had regular nightmares that he was about to deliver a lecture but could not decipher his notes. Her attendance certainly made her husband happy, and in the simple and irreversible emotional equation that defined the Nabokovs’ lives this made her happy. In his 1977 biography, Field cites Nabokov’s remark that he “likes to be able to watch faces as he reads.” What Vladimir had actually said, however, and what one Nabokov had excised, was that “Nabokov likes to be able to watch his wife’s face as he reads.” It was always a pleasure for Véra to hear Vladimir read what he had written; what music lover would object to regular performances of Callas singing “Casta Diva”? Early on the couple considered the lectures to be publishable material; this Ithaca delivery of them was the polishing of a private work-in-progress, an act at which Véra had long been present. She never thought it anything but a privilege to hear the translation of Madame Bovary corrected annually, much though she must occasionally have felt she should have stayed home and cleared her desk. She grumbled periodically about the blue-books, often about the correspondence, on rare occasion about the driving, never about the classroom routine. Nor did she shrink from the appellation “my assistant,” which to her ears sounded like an honorific. It was the appellation she later chose for herself when on her tax return she was required to declare a profession. When the student who had been surprised to learn the identity of Nabokov’s assistant wrote his former professor years later, he asked him to pass on regards to “your charming wife (your ‘assistant,’ I recall).” Véra answered the letter, signing off, “(Mrs.
Vladimir Nabokov, still V.N.’s ‘assistant’).”
She had a further, more personal interest in the lectures. The amphitheater lights went on over her husband, but they did so to allow him to sing the praises of the writer’s best creation: his reader. It was the excellent reader who saved the artist again and again from “being destroyed by emperors, dictators, priests, puritans, philistines, political moralists, policemen, postmasters, and prigs”—as from snow shovels, department meetings, dustballs, bluebooks, lube jobs. Véra knew where she sat in her husband’s private pantheon. She showed no sign of having felt oppressed, eclipsed—or, for that matter, central, indispensable, a full creative partner. At all times she appears to have believed that she stood not in her husband’s shadow but in his light. The tacit participation worked two rather paradoxical effects. It established her as everywhere present in a life from which she sought—and fought—to absent herself. What one student remembered as the “quality of her presence” vividly colored her husband’s classroom, a room in which he spoke eloquently about—this, too, was Madame Bovary—absence as a kind of “radiant presence.” And because Véra worked so diligently to submerge her identity, another had to be created for her. As she would have learned from Literature 325 and from a manuscript she had typed, facts will persist in sticking to us, they “cannot be discarded by the most ardent nudist.” By the time she had grown into her English-language self she had become something of a fiction, an amalgam of the sphinx, the Countess, and the Gray Eagle. She made none of the energetic attempts to wriggle free of this mask that her husband discussed when lecturing on Kafka and Gogol’s fantastic worlds. Every artist’s wife knows this fate, though the process is rarely so public. Erect in her chair, her coat thrown back around her shoulders, Véra sat for hours and hours for a portrait that resembled her only slightly in the end. Of all the characters conjured into being at Cornell, this one—variously and perplexedly described as disciple, bodyguard, secretary-protector, handmaiden, buffer, monitor, quotation-finder, groupie, advance man, professorial understudy, nursemaid, courtier—proved among the most original.
