Vera
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff, was published in April
1999 by Random House. (Jacket photo: Philippe Halsman ©
Halsman Estate) Excerpts from
the book are now available in Zembla, with the kind permission
of Stacy Schiff and Random House.
At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a riddle, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) explores a remarkable literary partnership-that of a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated his works to his wife. Open a volume of Nabokov's, and there is Vera on the dedication page, front and center. But search for her elsewhere, and the woman to whom the author of Lolita was married for fifty-two years, who carried on his correspondence in his name, fades from view.
In a beautifully limned portrait, Stacy Schiff has now restored her to life. Schiff follows Vera Nabokov from her affluent St. Petersburg childhood, through the dramatic escape from Bolshevik Russia, to the streets of Weimar Berlin, where Vera makes a spectacular entrance into the life of her future husband, then a gifted but struggling writer of Russian verse. In the three decades that pass before he metamorphoses into the celebrated author of Lolita, Vera proves to be nothing less than his full creative partner. She had a need to do something great with her life. And as he made clear from the start, her husband had a very great need of her. Publishers, relatives, colleagues, agreed: "He would have been nowhere without her." This Nabokov well realized, acutely so when the marriage nearly foundered in the late 1930s.
In Berlin until a hair-raisingly late 1938, Vera supported the family. At Cornell, she attended every one of her husband's lectures, replacing him when he was sick. She drove the Oldsmobile in the back seat of which he composed Lolita; she was the woman who stayed in all of Humbert Humbert's motel rooms. She plucked the manuscript of that novel from the flames to which its author attempted to sacrifice it, commanding, "We are keeping this."
She proved no less steely when negotiating a publishing contract. She transcribed her memories of their son's early days so that Nabokov could draw on them for Speak, Memory. She was at all times his first reader, his memory, his foil, his muse. She corrected his stories in German, his memoir in French, his poetry in Italian-and translated Pale Fire into Russian when in her eighties. Through it all, she proved a woman of uncanny wisdom, a conventional wife with a splendidly unconventional mind. Largely because of her, the hallmarks of Nabokov's fiction-the doppelgдngers, the impersonators, the Siamese twins, the mirror images, the distorted mirror images, the parodies of self-came to manifest themselves in the routine the couple developed for dealing with the world.
Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Vladimir's diaries and his letters to Vera, Stacy Schiff paints a discerning portrait of an elusive couple. Hers is a startlingly different image of the great writer, remembered best for his pronouncements and posturing. And she gives center stage to the disarming woman who was so much at the heart of it all, whose influence came so much to bear on the literature. In a narrative that combines superb scholarship with elegant prose, she offers up the crucial, missing piece of the Nabokov story.
About the author:
Stacy Schiff is the author of Saint-Exupery: A Biography. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she lives in New York City and in western Canada.
Praise for Vera:
"Vera is a beautiful book. Built on a heroic scale, it is subtle, intimate, and richly argued. Almost every page projects a truly remarkable woman and her part as tutelary spirit in the work of a great writer. Has there ever been a literary marriage so productive, complex, and intriguing as this one?"
-Justin Kaplan"There are many good reasons to be interested in the life of Vera Nabokov, but the best one is that Stacy Schiff has written it. She is the rising star of literary biography: witty, lucid, penetrating and humane."
-Judith Thurman"If this were only the story of an uncommon marriage, a marriage so profound as to renew the word's meaning, it would be a book well worth reading-interesting, entertaining, smart, sad, and funny. So much the better that it is about the marriage of one of the century's most original writers and the woman who made it possible, indeed necessary, for him to become that person."
-Tracy Kidder" Vera Nabokov emerges from these pages a steely but lonely character, far more complex than Vladimir. Stacy Schiff's triumph is that she has put in all the tones and halftones in this shaded portrait of the brilliant writer's inspired and inspiring collaborator."
-Edmund White"I am truly in love with this book. Schiff's sentences are magnificent, deceptively complex, full of insight and fact and distance and wry humor, so that every page is a kind of mini feast. Were I a reviewer I would be straining to find words to describe this book-unlike anything I have ever read-words that are not overused and thus devalued, words like exquisite and breathtaking, which are both appropriate and true. And the detail! It is extraordinary."