by Stacy Schiff
20 “must convey the colour”: RLSK, 70.
21 delighted in the luminosity: VN to VéN, January 17, 1924, VNA.
22 “She has different”: Field, 1977, 179.
23 “possessed, too”: RLSK, 81. The images are again conjoined in PF, 165.
24 “Véra says that the top”: VN diary, January 15, 1951, VNA.
25 “capacity to wonder”: VN, “The Creative Writer,” NEMLA Bulletin, January 1942. LL, 374.
26 sitting under the dryer: Rolf, “January,” PC.
27 general strike, to “everything then seemed”: The offender was Friedrich, Before the Deluge, VéN copy.
28 acknowledged privately: VéN to DN, June 28, 1961, VNA.
29 coddled him: Iosef Hessen, Gody izgnania (Paris: YMCA Press, 1979), 94–95. Interview with HS, February 26, 1995.
30 “the smallest and oldest”: SM, 41.
31 “All Nabokovs”: Interview with HS, March 4, 1995.
32 “He loved himself”: GIFT, 190.
33 “When we were last”: VN to VéN, July 15, 1924, VNA. An unrelated character in “Terror,” STORIES, 175, does too.
34 a number of critics: Boyd, 1991, 639. See also the work of W. W. Rowe, Gennady Barabtarlo, among others. VéN on “potustoronnost”: STIKHI, 3.
35 soul is transferred: VN to VéN, May 12, 1930, VNA.
36 “I am so certain”: VN to his mother, March 27, 1925, VNA.
37 afflicted by total recall: Richard Wilbur to author, May 21, 1997. Boyd, 1990, 278.
38 space may be finite: Boyd, 1990, 253.
39 “ex-mortals”: “Lance,” STORIES, 635.
40 “serene superknowledge”: DN, in George Gibian and Stephen Jan Parker, eds., The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov, 176.
41 small miracles: VN to VéN, January 24, 1924, VNA. To one elder he did thank for his kind words, Sirin confessed: “I write much and mindlessly.” VN to Potresov (S. V. Yablonovsky), September 28, 1921.
42 “Now I truly” and “In winding ways”: VN to VéN, January 24, 1924, VNA.
43 “circumlocutions”: “THE WALTZ INvenTION,” 10.
44 “Writing is all”: VN to Svetlana Siewert, May 25, 1923, Amherst.
45 “I am prepared”: VN to VéN, January 24, 1924, VNA.
46 among the three people: VN to VéN, December 3, 1923, VNA.
47 This was the winter: VéN remembered 1924 as the year she rendered Harold Nicolson’s Some People into Russian for her father, possibly with an eye toward an Orbis edition. The volume counted as well among VN’s favorites. (Nicolson’s “Miss Plimsoll” does seem to cast a spell on “Mademoiselle O,” which became the first installment of Speak, Memory. And which was reviewed in its British edition by Harold Nicolson.) She must have done so later, however, as Nicolson published the volume only in 1927. In a lovely interpenetration of time and generations, years later, on one of the most emotional days of her life, VéN would discuss another of her husband’s favorite books, in London, with Harold Nicolson’s son.
48 “savagely,” and “to the point”: VN to VéN, January 17, 1924, July 17, 1924, VNA.
49 Evsei Slonim’s domestic arrangements: Interview with HS, July 11, 1995. Similarly, Ellendea Proffer, Michaël Massalsky.
50 “has always had”: Anna Feigin to VéN, January 20, 1966.
51 “Anna Feigin was my cousin”: VéN to G. Shapiro, January 16, 1985, VNA.
52 pleased to report: VN to his mother, probably July 1924, VNA.
53 recopying the enclosed: VN to VéN, July 17, 1924, VNA.
54 “The sharpest jealousy”: VN to his mother, probably July 1924, VNA. “We were ridiculously”: SO, 191–92.
55 “By the way”: Boyd, 1990, 239.
56 not to have been told: Gleb Struve on Nabokov, Box 50, Folder 54, Hoover.
57 “a predatory campaign”: VN to VéN, August 24, 1924, VNA.
58 embraced Véra warmly: Interview with HS, June 30, 1997.
59 “Of what religion”: Field, 1977, 78. VéN raised no marginal objection to the line.
60 “I’m sorry he told”: DEFENSE, 115. Mrs. Luzhin has no name prior to her marriage, just as Luzhin has no name and patronymic prior to his disappearing into his passion, on the last page of the novel.
61 “Marry me, or”: Interview with Vera Kliatchkine, June 16, 1995.
62 “imariable”: Zinaida Shakhovskoy, quoting Eugenia Cannac, October 26, 1995.
63 “idiosyncratic form”: GIFT, 185.
64 “The one who finally”: Alexander Brailow, unpublished memoirs, 88, PC.
65 “The most important”: VN to HS, undated but probably 1926, PC.
66 “the brain-bridge”: LRL, 175.
67 “Things that are precious”: VéN to DN, November 16, 1975, VNA.
68 “We think that is”: Rolf, “January,” 51, PC.
69 “understands so well,” and the farms: VN to his mother, October 13, 1925, VNA.
70 “My pet, I am”: VN to VéN, June 29, 1926, VNA.
71 attempts to commit: VN to VéN, June 7, 1926, VNA.
72 miserable, homesick: VN to his mother, July 10, 1926, VNA.
73 the Binz trip: Interview with Abraham Bromberg, June 30, 1997.
74 “a hook on the man’s jaw”: Cited in Boyd, 1990, 274. See also Field, 1986, 102.
75They appear lost and “The foreign girl”: KQK, viii, 254. Leona Toker has pointed out that the couple’s appearance is briefer but more substantial in the Russian novel, in which they register as a sort of ambulatory emblem of true love. See Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 63.
76 “Her open dress”: VN diary, October 16, 1964, VNA.
77 “VN splashed the man’s”: VéN copy of Field, 1977, marginal note, 152.
78 Emma Bovary nomenclature: LL, 132.
79 union of Marian Evans: Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives (New York: Vintage, 1984), 210.
80 reading an obituary: VN to VéN, January 17, 1924, VNA.
81 Valentina as typist: The detective work on Valentina is not mine but Dieter Zimmer’s. See Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion, 352.
82 watershed year: Field, 1986, 83. See also Marina Turkevich Naumann, Blue Evenings in Berlin.
83 “soon after my marriage”: MARY, xiii.
84 new Turgenev: Eugenia Cannac, Russkaya Mysl 3184 (December 29, 1977). VN was not pleased by the comparison. See also Aikhenvald review, Rul, March 3, 1926.
85 oblivious to his lessons: VN to his mother, January 13, 1925, VNA.
86 eight-hour marathon: VN to his mother, October 30, 1927, VNA.
87 Véra contributed to this: VN to Field, October 2, 1970.
88 “He [Vladimir] never”: VéN notes on Field’s 1977 ms., VNA.
89 The primer has survived: See Dieter Zimmer, The Nabokovian 27 (Fall 1991), 37–40.
90 “After all, I’m afraid”: VN to VéN, January 24, 1924, VNA.
91 “everything connected”: October 1964, unpublished VN interview notes.
92 Telephone numbers: RLSK, 113. TT, 27.
93 Newark as in New York: VN to Zenzinov, May 28, 1944, Bakhm.
94 Auden and Aiken: VN to Edmund Wilson, February 16, 1946, NWL, 163.
95 “The obstructive behavior”: ADA, 571. He admitted to lending Pale Fire’s John Shade his litany of loathings, SO, 18.
96 “Stupid, inimical things”: Nurit Beretzky interview, Ma’Ariv (Israel), January 5, 1970.
97 “the uncouth manuscript”: RLSK, 34.
98 “She presided as adviser”: Interview with Herbert Gold, The Paris Review, October 1967. Repr., SO, 105. Elsewhere this was, “then my wife corrects the slips of my pencil,” Gerald Clarke interview notes, September 17, 1974.
99 “still warm and wet”: Robert Robinson, “The Last Interview,” repr. in Peter Quennell, ed., Vladimir Nabokov, 123.
100 shrugged off: See for example Alfred Appel to VN, October 17, 1970; VéN to Appel, October 30, 1970.
101 “was very absent-minded”
: VéN to Simon Karlinsky, February 27, 1978, VNA. Cf. unpublished last chapter of SM, LOC, in which VN writes of a Mr. Nabokov who “seems to combine a good deal of absentmindedness with his pedantism.”
102 “No, my dear”: RLSK, 83.
103 “Wonderful, but I’m not” and “as a regulator”: GIFT, 204–5.
104 This would have mandated: Hessen, Gody izgnania, 205.
105 “Well, after that my very”: Robert Hughes interview tape, December 28, 1965.
106 “Most of my works”: SO, 191.
107 radiant, delicate, thin-wristed: Gennady Barabtarlo reminds me that a similar presence, erect and slender and white, with a “pale conflagration” of golden hair, appears in VN’s spring 1924 story “Revenge.” See Barabtarlo, Aerial View, 6–19.
108 some of the shimmer: For a discussion of the shimmer semantically encoded in Zina’s surname, see D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression, 98ff. In 1968 VN inscribed a book, with a butterfly, to Véra. “Here’s an iridescent butterfly for my iridescent darling,” he offered, using a word related to mertsat’.
109 “And Clare, who”: RLSK, 82.
110 “She and I are”: Hughes interview, December 28, 1965.
111 Friends felt: Stephen Jan Parker to author, November 25, 1996.
112 “To get into” and “And once inside”: G. Ivanov, cited in V. S. Yanovsky, Elysian Fields, 12.
113 “Reviews were considered”: Yanovsky, 11–12. I have drawn here especially on Berberova, Williams, and Yanovsky.
114 one writer calculated: Volkov, St. Petersburg, 227.
115 “almost idyllic isolation”: VN to Vladislav Khodasevich, July 24, 1934, Berberova papers, Yale.
116 Emily Dickinson: Rolf to Tenggren, January 15, 1961, PC.
117 essentially congratulated: VéN to Morris Bishop, May 23, 1973.
118 “The people I invite”: Nantas Salvalaggio interview, Il Giorno, n.d.
119 “She had imagination”: RLSK, 81.
120 erotic poems: VéN to Boyd, May 1986, VNA.
121 “Were you really”: Interview with Ellendea Proffer, May 9, 1997.
122 a Berlin champion: Boyd interview with VéN, November 11, 1982, Boyd archive.
123 assassination plot: Interview with Vladimir Sikorsky, March 5, 1997. VéN denied all involvement in such a scheme in a Washington Times response to Andrew Field, December 22, 1986. But her affirmations tend to outweigh that protest to a biographer with whom she had fallen out: She told Ellendea and Carl Proffer, Serge Karpovich, Boyd, and her son of the Trotsky plan (HS heard of it from her brother), and others more generally of the revolver. With a laugh she admitted to Ellendea Proffer that “she had been quite carried away” (EP to author, May 9, 1997). Nor did she cavil with Field’s allusions to the assassination attempt in the margins of his 1977 and 1986 volumes, which she marked up freely.
124 “I know, with certainty” and “all these, my idle”: “Teddy,” November 1, 1923, VNA. The “seven deaths” became “seven compressed deaths” in LD, 283.
125 “Fragile, tender”: “Véra,” unpublished Aikhenvald poem, LOC.
126 “Everyone in the Russian”: Interview with Isabella Yanovsky, May 31, 1996.
127 “in the full bloom” and “the typewriter”: VN to his mother, April 4, 1928, VNA.
128 death records: I am grateful to the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin for documents relating to both Slonims’ deaths.
129 “his readiness to ignore”: Rul, June 30, 1928.
130 clerical position: There is no indication the position was anything but. Archives of the Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Quai d’Orsay, Personnel, Berlin; Nantes, Berlin ambassade, série B, série C.
131 “How to Organize”: Helen Yakobson, Crossing Borders, 157.
132 “hysterical over all sorts”: VN to VéN, July 12, 1926, VNA.
133 Even he admitted: VN to Struve, January 25, 1929, Hoover.
134 claimed to have read: Hessen, Gody izgnania, 250.
135 “was nothing more”: VN Memoriam to I. V. Hessen.
136 “only the squirrels”: SM, 303.
137 deep orange: VN to Aikhenvald, July 15, 1927.
138 exercised with the windows: VN to mother, November 28, 1925, VNA.
139 “Personally, my husband”: VéN to Robert C. Williams, February 23, 1965, VNA.
140 VN’s German: Interviews with Josef and Abraham Bromberg, May 20, 1997. Struve was convinced VN knew the language, “Vladimir Nabokov as I Knew Him and as I See Him,” 8, Hoover. Reading of DEFENSE, VéN to Ledig Rowohlt, March 8, 1960, VNA.
141 mangling it: VN to Roman Grynberg, February 18, 1967.
142 In a 1932 interview: “Meeting with V. Sirin,” Sevodnya (Riga), November 4, 1932.
143 long disliked: VN to VéN, July 4, 1926, and draft of SM, LOC.
144 he could read but not write: VN to Princeton University Press, March 29, 1975.
145 “Who wanted assimilation”: VéN copy of Williams, Culture in Exile, 282.
146 “Nansen-sical” passports: DESPAIR, 128. By LO, 27 they had become Nonsense passports. Anyone doubting the impression these sickly green papers made on the Nabokovs has only to inventory the references to them in the later work. The indignities bring to mind “the funnels and pulleys of the Holy Inquisition,” “ ‘That in Aleppo Once …’,” STORIES, 561.
147 “rat-whiskered”: SM, 276–77.
148 “criminals on parole”: SM, 276. In PNIN, 46, the passport is “a kind of parolee’s card.” Small wonder VN claimed to dote on his sacred blue American papers. As he told a French journalist in 1967: “J’éprouve une sensation de chaleur et d’orgeuil lorsque je montre mon passeport américain aux frontières en Europe.” Pierre Dommergues, Le Monde, November 22, 1967.
149 “Russian literature”: VéN to her mother-in-law, July 26, 1929, VNA.
150 relinquished the land: VéN note in Field, 1986, 155.
151 French and German stenography: VéN to Goldenweiser, March 6, 1967, Bakhm. Most of VéN’s employment history has been pieced together from her protracted reparations claim. Also PW archives, vol. 18.
152 Nabokov resented: VN to VéN, from Prague, probably 1930, VNA.
153 “my morning blind”: VN to VéN, June 20, 1926, VNA.
154 employment statistics: Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992) 96ff. Equally helpful as background for this chapter were Alix de Jonge, The Weimar Chronicle (New York: Paddington Press, 1978); Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (New York: Putnam’s, 1974); Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge.
155 “we always had”: VéN to Field, March 10, 1973.
156 proud assertion of 1935: VN to Ellen Rydelius, December 6, 1935.
157 “having developed his”: VéN to Field, March 10, 1973.
158 Anna Dostoyevsky: see Anna Dostoyevsky, Reminiscences (New York, Liveright, 1975).
159 one of his then-admirers: Zinaida Saranna (Shakhovskoy), Le Rouge et Le Noir (Brussels), November 16, 1932. His detractors went further, accusing him of repackaging foreign literature in an appropriated style. See Georgy Ivanov in Chisla, February 1930.
160 “As a young author”: VéN to Stephen A. Canada, March 4, 1966.
161 “in a German paraphrase”: GIFT, 189.
162 On Weil, Gans: VéN told Boyd that the law firm had made the transition to fiction intact, down to the last detail, February 26, 1983, Boyd archive. Goldenweiser attested to the same, to VN, July 29, 1938, Bakhm.
163 “high adventure”: VéN to Field, March 10, 1973.
164 his happiest work, Field, 1977, 158.
165 a third of what she had been earning: On his April 10, 1935, declaration of income, VN reported RM 1156 as compared to VéN’s 3300 of the previous years, LOC.
166 she flatly denied: VéN to Robert MacGregor, New Directions, July 29, 1960.
167 one visitor’s opinion: Rolf, “January,” 26. VéN was responding to Helen Lawrenson’s “The Man Who Scandalized the World,” Esquire
, August 1960, 70–74.
168 answered that they could not: Brailow, unpublished memoir, 88, PC.
169 “When are you fleeing”: Mikhail Osorgin to VN, April 28, 1933; A. Kaun to VN, December 24, 1936, LOC.
170 “in somewhat of a”: VN to Anna Shakhovskoy, November 22, 1932, LOC.
171 “I’m Jewish”: See the accounts of Zinaida Shakhovskoy, Amherst.
172 “lives in two rooms”: Galina Kuznetsova, diary entry of March 19, 1931, reprinted in Novyj zhurnal, 76 (1964).
173 On VN as houseguest: See VN, in memory of Amalia Osipovna Fondaminsky, Bakhm. Also Zenzinov correspondence, LOC.
174 crossing the streets: VN to VéN, October 17, 1932, VNA.
175 “I said to Aldanov”: VN to VéN, October 24, 1932, VNA. Others did not joke about VéN’s assistance. Asked later if she had felt professional envy for Khodasevich, Berberova protested, “There was nothing to envy there.” She then added forcefully, with a near-tragic frown, “Now Sirin was really envied by all. Because he had such a wife.” Omry Ronen to author, September 19, 1998.
176 survive otherwise: VN to VéN, November 5, 1932, VNA.
177 Jewish emigration: See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I, 62. For a sense of the last Russians in Berlin, I have leaned as well on Brailow, unpublished memoir; on Zinaida Shakhovskoy, Une maniere de vivre (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1965); and on Williams, Culture in Exile.
178 “I said, ‘they won’t’ ”: VéN to Field, March 10, 1973.
179 she got the job: VéN to Goldenweiser, May 22, 1958, Bakhm.
180 they were said to resemble: Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Folio Society, 1975), 252.
181 their bonfire: Boyd interview with VéN, November 19, 1982, Boyd archive.
182 miserable dead end: VN to VéN, August 24, 1924, VNA.
183 provincial outpost: VN to VéN, July 4, 1926, VNA.
184 “He did not have enough”: VéN interviewed by D. Barton Johnson and Ellendea Proffer, Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (January 1991), 79.
185 “thrice-damned Germany”: VN to Magda Nachman-Achariya, December 16, 1937.
186 Véra had admired: Field, 1977, 198.
187 “On the map of Europe”: Berberova, Italics Are Mine, 223.
