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Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by

critics as both "monumental" (The Boston Globe) and "utterly

romantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's Véra (Mrs.

Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest

literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the émigré

author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak,

Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife,

Véra, and third for no one at all.

"Without my wife," he once noted, "I wouldn't have written a single

novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of

the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage

reads as vividly as a novel. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is

its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently

as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy

Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form.

INTRODUCTION

1　PETERSBURG 3848

2　THE ROMANTIC AGE

3　THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

4　THE PERSON IN QUESTION

5　NABOKOV 101

6　NABOKOV 102

7　PAST PERFECT

8　AUTRES RIVAGES

9　LOOK AT THE MASKS

10　THE LAND BEYOND THE VEIL

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Stacy Schiff 's Saint Exùpery was a finalist for the 1995

Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New

York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Times Literary

Supplement. She lives with her family in New York City and

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

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CHAPTER 1

PETERSBURG 3848

The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its

wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you

can even give your telephone number without giving something of

yourself.

--Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol

Véra Nabokov neither wrote her memoirs nor considered doing so.

Even at the end of her long life, she remained the world's least

likely candidate to set down the confessions of a white widowed

female. (She did keep a diary of one girl's fortunes, but the girl

was Lolita.) When asked how she had met the man to whom she had

been married for fifty-two years she begged the question, with

varying degrees of geniality. "I don't remember" was the stock

response, a perfectly transparent statement coming from the woman

who could recite volumes of her husband's verse by heart. At

another time she parried with: "Who are you, the KGB?" One of the

few trusted scholars cornered her. Here is your husband's account

of the events of May 8, 1923; do you care to elaborate? "No," shot

back Mrs. Nabokov. In the biographer's ears rang the sound of the

portcullis crashing down. For all anyone knew she had been born

Mrs. Nabokov.

Which she had not. Vladimir Nabokov's version, delivered more or

less consistently, was that he had met the last of his fiancées in

Germany.* "I met my wife, Véra Slonim, at one of the émigré charity

balls in Berlin at which it was fashionable for Russian young

ladies to sell punch, books, flowers, and toys," he stated plainly.

When a biographer noted as much, adding that Nabokov left shortly

thereafter for the south of France, Mrs. Nabokov went to work in

the margins. "All this is rot," she offered by way of corrective.

Of Nabokov's 1923 trip to France another scholar observed: "While

there he wrote once to a girl named Véra Slonim whom he had met at

a charity ball before leaving." Coolly Mrs. Nabokov announced that

this single sentence bulged with three untruths, which she made no

effort to identify.

In all likelihood the ball was a "'reminiscence' . . . born many

years later" on the part of Nabokov, who anointed May 8 as the day

on which he had met his wife-to-be. A lavish dance was held in

Berlin--one of those "organized by society ladies and attended by

the German elite and numerous members of the diplomatic corps," in

Véra's more glamorous description, and which both future Nabokovs

were in the habit of attending--but on May 9. These balls took

place with regular succession; Nabokov had met a previous fiancée

at one such benefit.* Ultimately we are left to weigh his expert

fumbling of dates against Véra's equally expert denial of what may

in truth very well have happened; the scale tips in neither

direction. Between the husband's burnishing of facts and the wife's

sweeping of those facts under the carpet, much is possible. "But

without these fairy tales the world would not be real," proclaimed

Nabokov, who could not resist the later temptation to confide in a

visiting publisher that he and Véra had met and fallen instantly in

love when they were thirteen or fourteen and summering with their

families in Switzerland. (He was writing Ada at the time of the

confession.)

However it happened, in the beginning were two people and a mask.

Véra Slonim made a dramatic entrance into the life of Vladimir

Nabokov late on a spring Berlin evening, on a bridge, over a

chestnut-lined canal. Either to confuse her identity or to confirm

it--it is possible the two had glimpsed each other at a ball

earlier in the year, or that she had taken her cue from something

he had published?--she wore a black satin mask. Nabokov would have

been able to discern little more than a pair of wide, sparkling

blue eyes, the "tender lips" about which he was soon to write, a

mane of light, wavy hair. She was thin and fine-boned, with

translucent skin and an entirely regal bearing. He may not even

have known her name, though it is certain that she knew his. There

is some evidence that Véra had been the one to initiate the

meeting, as Nabokov later told his sister had been the case. He had

by 1923 come to enjoy some recognition for his poetry, which he

wrote under the name V. Sirin,* and which he published regularly in

Rul (The Rudder), the leading Russian paper of the emigration. He

had given a public reading as recently as a month earlier. Moreover

he cut a dashing figure. "He was, as a young man, extremely

beautiful" was the closest Véra Nabokov came to acknowledging as

much.

Russian Berlin was a small town, small enough that she may also

have known the young poet's heart had been broken in January, when

his fiancée had called off their engagement. Véra Nabokov rarely

divulged personal details under anything less than duress. But if

she had been the one to pursue Nabokov--as word in the émigré

community had it later?--there was all the more reason for her

silence. She did not remove the mask in the course of the initial

conversation, either because she feared her looks would distract

from her conversation (as has been suggested), or (as seems more

consistent with female logic) because she feared they might not.

There was little cause for alarm; she knew a surefire way of

turning a writer's head. She recited his verse for him. Her

delivery was exquisite; Nabokov always marveled over a "certain

unusual refinement" in her speech. The effect was instantaneous. As

important to a man who believed in remembered futures and prophetic

dreams, there was something oddly familiar about Véra Slonim. Asked

in his seventies if he had known instantly that this woman

represented his future, he replied, "I suppose one could say so,"

and looked to his wife with a smile. There would have been a good

deal familiar to her about him. "I know practically by heart every

one of his poems from 1922 on," she asserted much later. She had

attended his readings; her earliest album of Sirin clippings opens

with several pieces from 1921 and 1922, clippings which show no

signs of having been pasted in after the fact. The disguise--it

retroconsciously became "a dear, dear mask"--was evidently still in

place when the two parted that evening, on the Hohenzollernplatz in

Wilmersdorf. They could not have seen each other more than a few

times before Nabokov's departure for France, yet within weeks he

had written her that a moth had flown into his ear, reminding him

of her.

From France, where he went as a farmhand to recover from his broken

engagement, Nabokov wrote two letters at the end of May. The first

he dispatched on the twenty-fifth, to eighteen-year-old Svetlana

Siewert, the former fiancée. He realized he should not be writing

but--liberated by geography--permitted himself the luxury. He had

clearly been reprimanded for his persistence before. While he had

told friends he could never forgive Svetlana, he could not help

himself; she would simply have to hear the tender things he had to

say. He had spent months composing despondent verse, convinced that

his life was over. Svetlana and her family, he claimed, were

"linked in my memory to the greatest happiness I ever had or will

have." He remained stubbornly in love with her, saw her everywhere

he looked. He had traveled through Dresden, Strasbourg, Lyon, and

Nice, and felt no differently anywhere. He planned to continue on

to North Africa, "and if I find someplace on the planet where

neither you, nor your shadow can be found, then I will settle there

forever."

Two days later he wrote to Véra Slonim. She had already written him

at least three times; he admitted that he had been coy and had

awaited another letter before responding. He may have needed a

little convincing: It is the only time in their correspondence he

hesitates before setting pen to paper, and one of the few in which

he has no need to chide her to write more often. Was he still too

preoccupied with Svetlana? He does not sound so in his first letter

to Véra:

I won't hide it: I am so unused to the idea of people, well,

understanding me--so unused to it that in the very first minutes of

our meeting it seemed to me that this was a joke, a masquerade

deception. . . . There are just some things that are difficult to

talk about--one brushes off their wondrous pollen by touching them

with words. . . . Yes, I need you, my fairy tale. For you are the

only person I can talk to--about the hue of a cloud, about the

singing of a thought, and about the fact that when I went out to

work today and looked each sunflower in the face, they all smiled

back at me with their seeds.

* Nabokov chose the pseudonym in part so as not to be confused with

his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, an eminent jurist and

statesman, and a founder of the Constitutional Democratic

party.

? The rumor on the street was that Véra had written Vladimir in

advance, asking that he meet her, at which meeting she appeared

masked. The Nabokovs' son never learned how his parents first

met.

* Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was killed by a bullet intended for

a political opponent, whom he attempted to shield with his

body.

? Decades later in his notes to Eugene Onegin, he wrote with

feeling about "a rejected suitor's unquenchable exasperation with

an unforgettable girl and her Philistine parents."

Suddenly Africa sounds less enticing. Forty-eight hours after

telling Svetlana he will be changing continents, the young poet

felt compelled to return to Berlin, in part for his mother's sake,

in part because of a secret, one "I desperately want to let

out."

How much did Véra know of Svetlana? Probably a good deal, directly

or indirectly. Nabokov and Svetlana Siewert had been engaged since

1922, just after the March 28 assassination of Nabokov's father at

a Berlin political meeting.* Vladimir had been in love with

Svetlana, one of the acknowledged beauties of the emigration, since

she was sixteen. She had agreed to the engagement only after the

murder, so distraught was her friend in the weeks following his

father's death: "He was a poet, and I, I was a child." She had

pitied him but did not truly love him. While her parents had been

concerned about his liberal politics and his ability to support

their daughter, they had welcomed him as a member of the family.

After his graduation from Cambridge University in 1922 Nabokov

summered with the well-off Siewerts in Germany; he spent every

evening with them in Berlin. Many of his first published poems were

dedicated to Svetlana. These she read with great pleasure. With

very different emotions she read the diary he foisted upon her, in

which he had described his previous love affairs. (In the neat

summary of his biographer, Brian Boyd, Nabokov's had been "a youth

of energetic sexual adventure.") Svetlana was so offended by his

descriptions that she threw the journal across the room. Nabokov

was an ardent man, which made her nervous. She took to calling him

Tiger because of his abundant energy; she was a little afraid of

him, put off by his intoxicated talk of passion. With relief, on

January 9, 1923--weeks after her fiancé had published a volume of

verse in part dedicated to her--Svetlana broke off the engagement.

She cried; he cried; everyone cried. She assured him she could not

provide him with what he needed. Her parents explained they worried

that he could not provide her with what she needed; he would

remember them with particular emnity.? The two removed the gold

rings they had worn, which were melted down and incorporated into

religious icons. The results of the breakup can be read in

Nabokov's poems of that winter, all of them recopied neatly into a

notebook, by Véra.

She who had appeared disguised at the first meeting believed in

full candor; it may have been one of her least winning

characteristics. Many years later she allowed that it had taken her

husband several months to get over Svetlana, although she also

suggested that the matter had been settled before she entered the

picture, which was not entirely true. Nabokov made no secret of his

anguish in the poems he composed in mid-1923. "But sorrow not yet

quite cried out / Perturbed our starry hour" qualifies as an open

admission; he wondered if it was perhaps "romantic pity" that

allowed her to understand his verse so well. By November he was

writing transparently of renaissance, of the rebirth of his

"rickety" soul. She knew precisely where she stood soon enough. On

January 8, 1924, Nabokov would write Véra Slonim: "My happiness,

you know tomorrow it will have been exactly one year since I left

my fiancée. Do I have any regrets? No. That had to happen, so that

I could meet you."

From France Nabokov mailed his summer 1923 verse back to Berlin. On

June 24 Véra Slonim would have opened her copy of Rul to a poem

that struck familiar chords. There could be no doubt in her mind

about the identity of the person to whom "The Encounter" was

addressed: "And night flowed, and silent there floated / into its

satin streams / that black mask's wolf-like profile / and those

tender lips of yours." Aloud Nabokov wondered if the two of them

were meant for each other. "I wander and strain to hear / the

movement of the stars above our encounter / And what if you are to

be my fate . . ." The verse spoke for itself but its epigraph was

equally forthcoming. From Alexsandr Blok's celebrated "The

Stranger" Nabokov had borrowed half a line, the other half of which

makes reference to an unknown woman's "dark veil," much-needed

distraction to the poet, who has been left by the woman he loves.

It was a discreet but all the same public seduction.

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媒体评论

A sensitive rendering of one of the century's great love

stories.--Mirabella

"        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."--Anita Shreve

"        An absorbing

story, illumined by Schiff's flair for the succinct insight."

        --The New York

Times Book Review

"        Véra is an

astonishingly fine book--a tale told with wit and elegance, a tale

that succeeds in encompassing both the intimacy of a marriage and

the sweep of history. I found it a great pleasure to read. And I'm

in awe of Stacy Schiff's talent."--Jonathan Harr --

Review