Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

Even without the Pulitzer Prize, which this book won for Biography, Schiff's scrupulously written paean to marriage--well, to one complex marriage in particular--would stand out as an extraordinary achievement. Including vivid writing that reminds one of the best fiction, and strong research that follows the trajectory of two strong-willed "characters," Vera and Vladimir, this is a work of Richard Ellmann-like quality, and it will be remembered.

"Vera was a pale blonde when I met her, but it didn't take me long to turn her hair white."The above was taken from one of Nabokov's own journal entries and, although it may seem humorous, it is no doubt true. Pulitzer-Prize winner, Stacy Schiff, suggests, even in the title of her book, that Véra Nabokov was a woman who was only capable of being known as Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. Her relationship with her famed husband, no matter what its course, was the defining factor of her life. And Véra would have it no other way.Véra Nabokov has been described as Vladimir Nabokov's "disciple, bodyguard, secretary-protector, handmaiden, buffer, quotation-finder, groupie, advance man, nursemaid and courtier." She is, not unjustly, celebrated as being the ultimate Woman Behind the Man.Véra graduated from the Sorbonne as a master of modern languages, but, sadly, she did not keep copies of her own work as she did her husband's. In fact, she probably would have denied that her own work was worth keeping, although everything leads us to believe otherwise.In addition to transcribing, typing and smoothing Valdimir's prose while it was still "warm and wet," Véra cut book pages, played chauffeur, translated, negotiated contracts and did the many practical things her famous husband disdained. This remarkable woman even made sure that the butterflies he collected died with the least amount of suffering.A precocious child who read her first newspaper at the age of three, Véra was born into a middle-class Jewish family at the beginning of the twentieth-century in Czarist St. Petersburg. In 1921, with the advance of communism, her family settled in Berlin. It was there that she met the dapper and non-Jewish Vladimir. Their marriage would last fifty-two years and be described as an intensely symbiotic coupling.Although Vladimir traveled and conducted several affairs, Véra supported him throughout, struggling to raise their son amidst the Nazism that was beginning to fester in Berlin. Blaming herself for her husband's infidelity, Véra managed to rejuvenate her marriage and the couple moved again--this time to New York City--where Véra typed Valdimir's manuscripts in bed while recovering from pneumonia. Forever believing in her husband's creative instincts, Véra stood by his art even when debt threatened to overtake them. It was she who intervened on the several occasions when Vladimir attempted to burn his manuscript of Lolita.Véra Nabokov's tombstone bears the epithet, "Wife, Muse and Agent," and Nabokov knew the immensity of the debt he owed her. Late in life, he even refused to capture a rare butterfly he encountered in a mountain park for the sole reason that Véra was no longer at his side. Like her husband, Véra had highly developed aesthetic tastes and the two enjoyed a "tender telepathy." Often described as "synesthetes," the couple would have debates about "the color of Monday, the taste of E-flat." It is certainly without exaggeration that Nabokov wrote

This was a biography I found spellbinding as much for the force of its story as for the beauty of its language. There are hidden pleasures here as there are in Nabokov; each one makes you feel that a first-rate biographical intelligence is at work. And I can't say I've ever read a better portrait of Nabokov, anywhere. None of his chroniclers write with anything close to Schiff's style or sensitivity. Not to mention her insight, which is remarkable.

Literary biography rarely gets as good as this: a witty, subtle, perceptive, and elegantly written portrait. Wonderfully researched, Vera is also the product of a first-rate mind. How lucky Vera Nabokov is to draw Stacy Schiff as her biographer. I am simply in awe.

This is the book Nabokov fans have been waiting for, but suspected would never (COULD never) be written. From the opening sentences it's clear that Schiff has the stuff equal to her daunting task--to get behind the artfully constructed public face of two of the most brilliant, but most private, people ever to enter the public eye. Schiff does it with awesome research and a, by turns, witty, moving, penetrating, sometimes acerbic, but always admiring prose. The portrait of Vera, you feel, is definitive, but so, too, is the portrait of Vladimir--a portrait that points up the flaws and gaps in earlier depictions, like that of the dutifully plonking Boyd biographies with their laughable "interpretation" of Pale Fire. That Schiff is delineating the dynamic of a highly unique marriage (not just the two complex personalities that made up that marriage) makes her accomplishment seem all the more miraculous. Finally, Schiff's method is ultimately Nabovian in that she gives us a portrait of the master without peering at him directly: the book is Vladimir reflected in Vera's pale fire--which, as it turns out, is the best way to see him whole. Or, rather, to see them BOTH whole. After reading this book, it is impossible to speak of either Vladimir, or Vera, as a single entity, ever again.