Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) [Hardcover]

Stacy Schiff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1999

In 1925 Vera and Vladimir Nabokov, both Russian refugees, married in Berlin. His family was ruined and hers was about to be. From that year they were inseparable. Friends, colleagues, relatives and publishers all agreed he would have been nowhere without her. Even when the marriage nearly foundered due to another woman, Nabakov wrote to his wife daily. She attended her husband's lectures replacing him when he was sick, drive the Buick in which he write Lolita and saved the manuscript several times from burning. She negotiated his contracts, corrected her husband's stories in German, his memoir in French and his poetry in Italian and translated "Pale Fire" into Russian when she was in her 80s. Yet at the same time she tried to erase herself from the public record: for several years she answered her husband's letters under an assumed name and she demanded that her husband's biographers ignore the vital role she played in his life and work. For Nabakov himself her influence was undeniable, he lit up around her and the two acted as if they were a pair of children hiding their secrets from the rest of the world. He wrote his novels for himself first, second for Vera and third for no one at all.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

She was wearing a black satin mask when they first met in 1923, and in a sense she wore a mask--that of the dutiful wife and helpmeet--throughout their 52-year marriage. Especially after the American publication of Lolita made her husband notorious in 1958, Véra Nabokov's presence at her husband's side was crucial, writes her biographer Stacy Schiff: "[It] kept the fiction in its place, reassured readers ... that Nabokov's perversities were of a different kind." But Véra Slonim (1902-91) was essential to Vladimir Nabokov's literary career from the beginning. She had a gift for handling practical matters that her spouse proudly lacked; she screened him from his publishers and his admirers with equal firmness, and in doing so she liberated him to fulfill the artistic genius they both believed he possessed. Praised for a previous biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Schiff here cements her reputation as a literary biographer of striking subtlety and perceptiveness. She establishes a strong base in chapter 1 with her excellent analysis of Véra Slonim's youth in a privileged Russian Jewish family in St. Petersburg. She then pursues her subject's elusive personality through hints in Nabokov's work and the comments of friends and colleagues. Schiff's elegant prose and eye for nuance nearly match Nabokov himself in this lucid, unsentimental portrait of a marriage. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

V?ra Nabokov was not only devoted to her husband's literary career; she was crucial to it. Schiff (Saint-Exup?ry) contends that Nabokov's public image was V?ra's doing: "we are used to husbands silencing wives, but here was a wife silencing, editing, speaking for, creating, her husband." For almost all their married lives, the Nabokovs were inseparable. Russian ?migr?s in Germany, France and then the U.S., they eked out a bare existence despite Nabokov's reputation as a stellar Russian novelist. With no market for his writing, he needed his wife to work as a translator so they could survive. After hours she also edited and translated his writings, conducted his professional affairs and maintained their marriage. Only the runaway international success of Lolita when they were in their later 50s freed the couple from scraping together a living. (A film advance gave Nabokov 17 times his annual salary at Cornell, a post that had taken years to secure.) Suddenly flush, the Nabokovs, by choice, again became ?migr?s, wealthy residents of a Swiss luxury hotel. Schiff's best pages evoke the years of adversity, as when the Jewish V?ra, regal even in penury, perilously remained in Nazi Germany until May 1937 (after non-Jewish Vladimir exited) because it was the only country where either one could legally work. Often described as "hovering" over her husband by his Cornell colleagues, V?ra was always close byAeven working as his teaching assistantAbecause, according to Schiff, he simply could not function without her. This book offers more than a peek at the famous author through his wife's eyes. When her 1991 New York Times obit called V?ra "Wife, Muse, and Agent" it only hinted at her role, which is rescued from obscurity in Schiff's graceful prose. 16 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: Pan Books Ltd; First Edition edition (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330376748
• ISBN-13: 978-0330376747
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,237,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate Woman Behind the Man, October 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (Paperback)

"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 to Véra, "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 at each sunflower in the face, they all smiled back at me with their seeds."

Although many feel the Véra should have been encouraged to develop her own considerable talents, it can be argued that she did, and that her greatest talent was that of wife and helpmate. It is certainly one she choose freely and without rancor. The fact that her husband was fortunate, indeed, cannot be denied.

Véra is a book rich in detail, analysis and affection. Like all couples and all marriages, the Nabokovs were unique and they were special. To know one, was to glimpse the other, for with the passing of years, neither was wholly himself or herself. There are those who might not have understood Véra Nabokov's choices and might not have agreed with them, but they are the ones who have never known the ecstasy of a truly close relationship. Véra Nabokov was a most fascinating woman, one that made her own choices in life and lived them most happily. We can only admire her greatly.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An awesome job on a seemingly impossible task, April 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (Hardcover)

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.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GORGEOUSLY WRITTEN AND BRILLIANTLY PUT TOGETHER, December 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (Hardcover)

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.