Vera (mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

Stacy Schiff's biography traces the life of Véra Nabokov, wife of the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, arguing that she was an indispensable creative partner whose contributions to one of the twentieth century's greatest literary careers have been almost entirely obscured, largely by Véra's own design. Schiff contends that the public persona known as "VN," the distant and unapproachable literary master, was in significant measure Véra's construct, and that the marriage shaped both the work and the man behind it.

Véra Evseevna Slonim was born on January 5, 1902, in St. Petersburg, the second of three daughters in a cultivated Jewish family. Her father, Evsei Slonim, was a lawyer turned lumber merchant who navigated the elaborate anti-Jewish legal restrictions of Imperial Russia with quiet determination, waging a 13-year court battle for admission to the St. Petersburg Merchantry, a merchant guild that conferred full residency rights. The Slonim girls were educated at home and at the Princess Obolensky Academy, raised to speak French, English, Russian, and German, and taught to be proud, capable, and prepared for adversity. The Revolution of 1917 destroyed this world. The family fled Petrograd, enduring a harrowing freight-train journey through the Ukraine, where teenaged Véra defended a fellow Jewish traveler against anti-Semitic soldiers. After stops in Constantinople and Sofia, the Slonims settled in Berlin in early 1921.

The meeting that defined Véra's life took place on a spring Berlin evening in May 1923, when she appeared before the young poet Vladimir Nabokov, who had gained recognition in émigré literary circles under the pen name V. Sirin, wearing a black satin mask. She recited his verse; the effect was instantaneous. Nabokov, who had recently suffered a broken engagement to Svetlana Siewert, wrote to Véra from France that summer: "I won't hide it: I am so unused to the idea of people, well, understanding me." Their courtship unfolded on the sidewalks of Berlin that fall, with Véra telephoning and writing under the alias "Madame Bertrand" to conceal her Jewish surname from his aristocratic Russian family. The period surrounding their marriage marked a watershed in Nabokov's art; critics agreed he could not have written his first mature works before the marriage.

They married at the Wilmersdorf town hall on April 15, 1925, with no photographs and two distant acquaintances as witnesses. From the start, Véra assumed the practical burdens of the marriage. She typed virtually everything Nabokov wrote from 1923 through 1961, working from dictation and producing final copies in triplicate. She was more than a typist but, as Schiff is careful to note, less than a collaborator: She corrected his grammar, challenged his word choices, and served as his first and most demanding reader. She was also the family's primary wage earner throughout the Berlin years, working as a secretary and stenographer while giving language lessons. She flatly denied she had ever supported her husband, apparently because admitting as much might reflect poorly on him.

The Berlin years brought personal losses and rising danger. Véra's parents separated around 1924; both died by 1928. In May 1934, she gave birth to a son, Dmitri, in such secrecy that even close friends were startled by the news. As the Nazi regime tightened its grip, Véra witnessed a bookburning and had her work permit revoked after the Nazis forced out her employer's Jewish owners. In January 1937, Vladimir left for Belgium and France, never to return to Germany. During a four-month separation, Véra received an anonymous letter informing her that Vladimir was having an affair with Irina Guadanini, a Russian émigré in Paris. He confessed in July 1937, describing the evening as the most horrible night of his life after his father's murder. Véra blamed herself for having neglected him under the pressures of childcare and poverty. The affair ended when Irina traveled to Cannes in September to intercept Vladimir, and he told her he could not leave his marriage. Simultaneously, he was completing The Gift, his ode to fidelity and his most loving fictional portrait of a Véra-like heroine, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first English-language novel.

The family fled Paris in May 1940, days before the Germans entered the city, sailing to New York with savings of under $100. Schiff chronicles the difficult first American years: temporary apartments, borrowed money, and Vladimir's struggle to establish himself in a language not his own. Véra gave language lessons, worked at Harvard's Romance Languages department, and managed her husband's fledgling American career. The literary critic Edmund Wilson became Vladimir's most important advocate, and a succession of academic appointments at Wellesley College, Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and finally Cornell University provided precarious stability. At Wellesley, Vladimir flirted with students, and one junior, Katherine Reese Peebles, had a brief romantic involvement with him before dropping his course.

The Cornell years, beginning in 1948, saw Véra become the legendary, unexplained presence in her husband's classroom. Sitting on the dais as "my assistant," she retrieved dropped chalk, provided quotations on cue, graded examinations, and kept office hours. Students speculated wildly: She was his mother, his encyclopedia, a bodyguard with a gun. She was dubbed "the Gray Eagle" and "the Countess." Meanwhile, she drove Vladimir everywhere, managed all domestic logistics, prepared his lectures, and handled his expanding correspondence. Her presence served multiple functions: She kept her husband on track, prevented further romantic straying, and constituted the audience for whom he performed.

Most critically, Véra rescued Lolita. On at least two occasions, Nabokov attempted to burn the manuscript in the backyard. Véra fished the pages from the flames, commanding, "We are keeping this." She typed drafts through the early 1950s, hand-delivered the manuscript to editors under conditions of strict secrecy, and in August 1954 wrote the letter to Doussia Ergaz, a Paris-based literary agent, that led to the novel's publication by Maurice Girodias's Paris-based Olympia Press. Five major American publishers had rejected the book. The same month she wrote that letter, Véra was diagnosed with breast cancer in New Mexico and traveled alone by train to New York for surgery; the tumor proved benign.

Published in America in August 1958, Lolita sold 100,000 copies within three weeks and transformed the Nabokovs' lives. Schiff details the whirlwind that followed: movie rights sold to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and producer James Harris for $150,000, Vladimir's resignation from Cornell, a triumphal European tour, and the couple's permanent settlement at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland in 1961. In Montreux, Véra perfected the role she would play for the rest of her husband's life. She adopted the signature "Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov," creating through her correspondence the distant, unapproachable monument known as "VN." She managed all business affairs, negotiated contracts, battled Girodias for a decade over the Olympia agreement, vetted translations in multiple languages, and screened all visitors. In 1967, she negotiated a landmark $250,000 contract with McGraw-Hill for 11 books, insisting on a cost-of-living provision that her lawyers found eccentric but that proved prescient when double-digit inflation arrived.

Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in a Lausanne hospital, with Véra and Dmitri at his side. When a nurse rushed to offer condolences, Véra pushed her away. On the drive home, she uttered the one desperate line Dmitri ever heard from her: "Let's rent an airplane and crash." Her life after Vladimir changed remarkably little. She continued managing his estate, translating Pale Fire into Russian, checking translations, vetting biographies, and defending his reputation, despite Parkinson's disease, failing eyesight, and a broken hip. She died on April 7, 1991, at eighty-nine. Her ashes were joined with Vladimir's at Clarens, the tombstone reading: VLADIMIR NABOKOV / ECRIVAIN / VERA NABOKOV. In her last days she had been working on a translation of an unpublished story Vladimir had written in the first days of their relationship, her once-regal handwriting cramped and fading, as if she were dissolving into the text as she had, for so much of her life, chosen to do.