Largely because of her, the hallmarks of Nabokov's fiction-the doppelgängers, 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self-came to manifest themselves in the routine the couple developed for dealing with the world.ĭrawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Vladimir's diaries and his letters to Véra, Stacy Schiff paints a discerning portrait of an elusive couple. Through it all, she proved a woman of uncanny wisdom, a conventional wife with a splendidly unconventional mind. She corrected his stories in German, his memoir in French, his poetry in Italian-and translated Pale Fire into Russian when in her eighties. She was at all times his first reader, his memory, his foil, his muse. She transcribed her memories of their son's early days so that Nabokov could draw on them for Speak, Memory. She proved no less steely when negotiating a publishing contract. She plucked the manuscript of that novel from the flames to which its author attempted to sacrifice it, commanding, 'We are keeping this.'

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. At Cornell, she attended every one of her husband's lectures, replacing him when he was sick. In Berlin until a hair-raisingly late 1938, Véra supported the family. 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. And as he made clear from the start, her husband had a very great need of her. She had a need to do something great with her life. In the three decades that pass before he metamorphoses into the celebrated author of Lolita, Véra proves to be nothing less than his full creative partner. Petersburg childhood, through the dramatic escape from Bolshevik Russia, to the streets of Weimar Berlin, where Véra makes a spectacular entrance into the life of her future husband, then a gifted but struggling writer of Russian verse. Schiff follows Véra Nabokov from her affluent St. In a beautifully limned portrait, Stacy Schiff has now restored her to life. 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. Open a volume of Nabokov's, and there is Véra on the dedication page, front and center. 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. WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE “Without my wife,” Vladimir Nabokov once noted, “I wouldn't have written a single novel.”Īt once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a riddle, Véra (Mrs.

Vera mrs vladimir nabokov