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Stacy Schiff's _Vera_ (fwd)
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From today's NYTBR:
April 25, 1999
Nabokov's Perfect Reader
And a bright star in the annals of helpmeets.
Related Links
Celebrating Nabokov's Centenary with collected reviews,
articles, writing
samples and audio
Audio Special: Nabokov: A Centenary Celebration
Slide Show: Vladimir Nabokov Photo Album (15 photos)
First Chapter: 'Vera'
By LYNDALL GORDON
When Vladimir Nabokov thought of
writing a novel about the love life of
Siamese twins, his wife, Vera, put a
stop to it. When ''Tom Sawyer'' was proposed
as reading for the Nabokovs' 12-year-old son,
she refused it on the ground that Tom takes
to girls at too young an age. Why then did
Vera do her utmost to back ''Lolita,'' her
husband's 1955 novel about the lechery of
middle-aged Humbert Humbert with his
12-year-old stepdaughter?
This admirable biography of Vera offers
answers -- most obviously, her worship of
what she perceived to be her husband's
superior art -- but, rightly, Stacy Schiff does
not attempt to explain away the enigma that
Vera presents. In her earliest manifestation,
a Jewish girl wearing a mask recites
Nabokov by heart when, in 1923, she makes
her dramatic approach to the aristocratic,
Cambridge-educated writer, a beautiful man pursued by cuter
women and
already a figure among Russian expatriates in Berlin.
Vera's performance as the voice of his art, her
''understanding,'' proved magical
to Nabokov, who was at that time mourning a broken engagement
to the
desirable and popular Svetlana Siewert (whose photo, printed
here, teases the
viewer with the naughty glamour of a grown-up nymphet in socks
and braids tied
with bows). In her place Nabokov found himself confronted by a
faceless ''fairy
tale'' of a girl who had the power to transform herself into
the artist's dream of the
perfect reader. Vera offered to ground this higher dream in
practicality: Nabokov
needed comforts, he told her, ''for the sake of not thinking
about them.'' So Vera
took over wage earning in the troubled Berlin of the late
1920's and early 30's, as
well as other distractions: ''From the list of things Nabokov
bragged about never
having learned to do -- type, drive, speak German, retrieve a
lost object, fold an
umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book's pages, give the time
of day to a
philistine -- it is easy to deduce what Vera was to spend her
life doing.'' Her
management recalls Jewish tradition, in which a wife honors a
luftmensch by
freeing him of worldly burdens. This is a high-minded dream,
and Nabokov
continued to pursue nubile young women.
The marriage in 1925 was unannounced, and in 1934 Vera managed
to conceal
her pregnancy until her son was born. A later disguise was as a
silent Polish
princess acting as ''assistant'' to Nabokov when he lectured at
Cornell in the late
1940's and early 50's, switching on lights and ready with
quotations, but really
(as Schiff astutely suggests) she provided attentive reflection
of Nabokov's
stature in a way that spurred him on. She fell in love with his
work, and it
remained the passion of her life. This makes an absorbing
story, illumined by
Schiff's flair for the succinct insight: Vera, unlike her
husband, was ''less
interested in costumes than disguises.'' Yet ''Vera'' will not
reveal the substance
of her passion to people who haven't read the novels; instead
it details the trivia
that surround publication. With the appearance of the
scandalous ''Lolita,'' the
biography slows to the pace of a train stopping at many
stations; many
passengers -- interviewers, sycophants of celebrity -- crowd on
board, while
Vera's final, more banal appearances are recorded at length:
the sophisticate in
mink and the widow orchestrating a posthumous legend through
denials of truth.
No one, according to Schiff, ''is so
much a character in someone
else's drama as the new
immigrant.'' Vera remakes herself
repeatedly as the couple move from
Berlin to Paris to America and finally
back to Europe. In America she is a
vocal faculty wife -- disconcerting the
guests at Cornell dinners with her
McCarthyism and preference for J.
D. Salinger over Jane Austen. Her
performance made it ''difficult to
determine who was starring in
whose fiction: America in the
Nabokovs', or the Nabokovs in
America's. Neither had a vaguely
accurate idea of the real life of the
other.'' Their exile from Russia had
followed on earlier marginal
positions: Nabokov's because his
father had been a liberal aristocrat,
sympathetic to Jews; and Vera's as
a Jew whose father, Evsei Slonim,
had studied at the University of St.
Petersburg, shifting from the shtetl
to an urban merchant class --
fastidiously dressed, with a neatly
trimmed beard, educating his
daughters at the Princess
Obolensky Academy, yet still
unforgettably apart in Russian
society.
Outsiders, then, by birth and training, the Nabokovs became
natives of their
exclusive union. The view that Vera was ''just a wife'' starts
this biography with an
ironic taunt, for no platitude of wifely concern fits a human
creature convinced that
she has joined with a god. Her self-effacement masked nothing
less. Poverty,
debts and hideously furnished rooms in Cambridge, Mass. (as
they bided their
time on the outskirts of Harvard), were peripheral to their
acts of transformation.
For wherever they stood, part of them wasn't there. They had
something in
reserve. Call it art, pride, or their guardianship of the
Russian imagination
(Pushkin, mainly, and Lermontov; excluding Dostoyevsky and,
emphatically,
Pasternak, an archrival in the fame stakes of the time), which
they arrogated to
themselves alone, savaging others' translations. Their
invincibility flashed its
warnings in Vera's flinty directness and Nabokov's impudent
humor -- a double
act, conspiratorial, defiantly inexplicable, which empowered
them till he died in
1977.
Schiff persuasively pursues the expatriate phenomenon of
''rapid acculturation
and abiding separateness.'' This portrait of a 52-year marriage
to a woman who
was the writer's prime reader opens up Nabokov's private life,
complementing
the two-volume biography by Brian Boyd. But the triumph of
''Vera'' is not just in
providing entree to her famous husband. She fascinates in her
own right as the
''emigre'' of Berlin and Paris who appears in America a mere
''refugee,'' a
white-haired wraith hunting butterflies in her odd black dress.
Here, she crossed
a ''semantic divide'' that posed the ultimate challenge of
metamorphosis in the
shadow of a dazzling man. The lives of the obscure can be as
intriguing as the
lives of the famous. ''The question now inevitably asks itself,
whether the lives of
great men only should be recorded,'' remarked Virginia Woolf,
who, as always,
anticipates us with her darting subversion. ''And what is
greatness? And what is
smallness?''
Lyndall Gordon's most recent biography, ''A Private Life of
Henry James: Two
Women and His Art,'' was published this month.
April 25, 1999
Nabokov's Perfect Reader
And a bright star in the annals of helpmeets.
Related Links
Celebrating Nabokov's Centenary with collected reviews,
articles, writing
samples and audio
Audio Special: Nabokov: A Centenary Celebration
Slide Show: Vladimir Nabokov Photo Album (15 photos)
First Chapter: 'Vera'
By LYNDALL GORDON
When Vladimir Nabokov thought of
writing a novel about the love life of
Siamese twins, his wife, Vera, put a
stop to it. When ''Tom Sawyer'' was proposed
as reading for the Nabokovs' 12-year-old son,
she refused it on the ground that Tom takes
to girls at too young an age. Why then did
Vera do her utmost to back ''Lolita,'' her
husband's 1955 novel about the lechery of
middle-aged Humbert Humbert with his
12-year-old stepdaughter?
This admirable biography of Vera offers
answers -- most obviously, her worship of
what she perceived to be her husband's
superior art -- but, rightly, Stacy Schiff does
not attempt to explain away the enigma that
Vera presents. In her earliest manifestation,
a Jewish girl wearing a mask recites
Nabokov by heart when, in 1923, she makes
her dramatic approach to the aristocratic,
Cambridge-educated writer, a beautiful man pursued by cuter
women and
already a figure among Russian expatriates in Berlin.
Vera's performance as the voice of his art, her
''understanding,'' proved magical
to Nabokov, who was at that time mourning a broken engagement
to the
desirable and popular Svetlana Siewert (whose photo, printed
here, teases the
viewer with the naughty glamour of a grown-up nymphet in socks
and braids tied
with bows). In her place Nabokov found himself confronted by a
faceless ''fairy
tale'' of a girl who had the power to transform herself into
the artist's dream of the
perfect reader. Vera offered to ground this higher dream in
practicality: Nabokov
needed comforts, he told her, ''for the sake of not thinking
about them.'' So Vera
took over wage earning in the troubled Berlin of the late
1920's and early 30's, as
well as other distractions: ''From the list of things Nabokov
bragged about never
having learned to do -- type, drive, speak German, retrieve a
lost object, fold an
umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book's pages, give the time
of day to a
philistine -- it is easy to deduce what Vera was to spend her
life doing.'' Her
management recalls Jewish tradition, in which a wife honors a
luftmensch by
freeing him of worldly burdens. This is a high-minded dream,
and Nabokov
continued to pursue nubile young women.
The marriage in 1925 was unannounced, and in 1934 Vera managed
to conceal
her pregnancy until her son was born. A later disguise was as a
silent Polish
princess acting as ''assistant'' to Nabokov when he lectured at
Cornell in the late
1940's and early 50's, switching on lights and ready with
quotations, but really
(as Schiff astutely suggests) she provided attentive reflection
of Nabokov's
stature in a way that spurred him on. She fell in love with his
work, and it
remained the passion of her life. This makes an absorbing
story, illumined by
Schiff's flair for the succinct insight: Vera, unlike her
husband, was ''less
interested in costumes than disguises.'' Yet ''Vera'' will not
reveal the substance
of her passion to people who haven't read the novels; instead
it details the trivia
that surround publication. With the appearance of the
scandalous ''Lolita,'' the
biography slows to the pace of a train stopping at many
stations; many
passengers -- interviewers, sycophants of celebrity -- crowd on
board, while
Vera's final, more banal appearances are recorded at length:
the sophisticate in
mink and the widow orchestrating a posthumous legend through
denials of truth.
No one, according to Schiff, ''is so
much a character in someone
else's drama as the new
immigrant.'' Vera remakes herself
repeatedly as the couple move from
Berlin to Paris to America and finally
back to Europe. In America she is a
vocal faculty wife -- disconcerting the
guests at Cornell dinners with her
McCarthyism and preference for J.
D. Salinger over Jane Austen. Her
performance made it ''difficult to
determine who was starring in
whose fiction: America in the
Nabokovs', or the Nabokovs in
America's. Neither had a vaguely
accurate idea of the real life of the
other.'' Their exile from Russia had
followed on earlier marginal
positions: Nabokov's because his
father had been a liberal aristocrat,
sympathetic to Jews; and Vera's as
a Jew whose father, Evsei Slonim,
had studied at the University of St.
Petersburg, shifting from the shtetl
to an urban merchant class --
fastidiously dressed, with a neatly
trimmed beard, educating his
daughters at the Princess
Obolensky Academy, yet still
unforgettably apart in Russian
society.
Outsiders, then, by birth and training, the Nabokovs became
natives of their
exclusive union. The view that Vera was ''just a wife'' starts
this biography with an
ironic taunt, for no platitude of wifely concern fits a human
creature convinced that
she has joined with a god. Her self-effacement masked nothing
less. Poverty,
debts and hideously furnished rooms in Cambridge, Mass. (as
they bided their
time on the outskirts of Harvard), were peripheral to their
acts of transformation.
For wherever they stood, part of them wasn't there. They had
something in
reserve. Call it art, pride, or their guardianship of the
Russian imagination
(Pushkin, mainly, and Lermontov; excluding Dostoyevsky and,
emphatically,
Pasternak, an archrival in the fame stakes of the time), which
they arrogated to
themselves alone, savaging others' translations. Their
invincibility flashed its
warnings in Vera's flinty directness and Nabokov's impudent
humor -- a double
act, conspiratorial, defiantly inexplicable, which empowered
them till he died in
1977.
Schiff persuasively pursues the expatriate phenomenon of
''rapid acculturation
and abiding separateness.'' This portrait of a 52-year marriage
to a woman who
was the writer's prime reader opens up Nabokov's private life,
complementing
the two-volume biography by Brian Boyd. But the triumph of
''Vera'' is not just in
providing entree to her famous husband. She fascinates in her
own right as the
''emigre'' of Berlin and Paris who appears in America a mere
''refugee,'' a
white-haired wraith hunting butterflies in her odd black dress.
Here, she crossed
a ''semantic divide'' that posed the ultimate challenge of
metamorphosis in the
shadow of a dazzling man. The lives of the obscure can be as
intriguing as the
lives of the famous. ''The question now inevitably asks itself,
whether the lives of
great men only should be recorded,'' remarked Virginia Woolf,
who, as always,
anticipates us with her darting subversion. ''And what is
greatness? And what is
smallness?''
Lyndall Gordon's most recent biography, ''A Private Life of
Henry James: Two
Women and His Art,'' was published this month.