Author and Wife: A Couple So in Love It Was Irritating

Most of us know the secondhand-smoke effect a terrible marriage can have on family, friends and colleagues. But a really good marriage can also be a source of discomfort to those outside the magic circle. Vladimir and Vera Nabokov were the kind of devoted couple who got on people’s nerves. Quite possibly, people envied their extraordinary closeness. More likely, what people resented was their aura of exclusivity.

For the 52 years of their marriage, the Nabokovs were a genuine mutual admiration society: He delighted in her beauty, intelligence, spirit and exceptional sensitivity, so like his own. She worshiped him, not least because she was firmly convinced, from the moment she read his work in an emigre journal in Berlin in the 1920s, that he was destined to be a great writer.

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Whether dealing with her husband’s publishers, serving as his assistant in the classes he taught or contributing to his creative work, Vera, according to biographer Stacy Schiff, “did all in her power to see to it that he existed not in time, only in art. . . .” As for Nabokov, he “lit up around his wife. . . . The two comported themselves as if they shared a secret. . . . One Cornell colleague went so far as to use the ‘u’ word: ‘He was the most uxorious man I have ever met.’ ”

The middle daughter of a Russian Jewish family forced into exile by the Bolshevik Revolution, Vera Slonim first met her fellow emigre Vladimir Nabokov at a masked ball in Berlin in 1923. Despite the consternation of some friends and family members shocked by his involvement with a Jew, Nabokov and Vera married in 1925. Both were aristocrats: he in manner and in fact, she by education and disposition. Both were democratic liberals outraged by the Bolshevik destruction of Russia’s infant democracy. Both were, in the deepest sense, aesthetes: citizens of the boundaryless realms of imagination and art.

But, while Vladimir could create literary art, Vera simply understood and appreciated it. Schiff makes no attempt to persuade us that Vera was an artist manque, a woman who could have been a writer, if only she hadn’t resigned herself to the subordinate wife-of-the-genius role. There seems to be no evidence to support such a surmise. A feminist biographer might argue that the reason Vera did not even consider becoming a writer was that she had internalized the prevailing male chauvinist assumptions of her culture. But Schiff--wisely, I think--does not take this tack. Instead, her book illuminates the nature of this remarkable partnership and reminds us of the ways in which great artistic achievements may draw--or even depend--on the support of others.

Vera’s most tangible contribution to the Nabokov oeuvre was her staunch faith in the controversial novel that would catapult her respected, but not very well-known, husband into international celebrity: “Lolita.” More generally, her contribution was to create the cocoon-like atmosphere in which he worked. While he spun his imaginative creations, she kept the world at bay.

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The dynamic of their arrangement, as Schiff portrays it, may have been rooted in the temperamental differences between the ebullient, blithely self-confident Russian aristocrat and the proud, sensitive Jewish woman all too well acquainted with life’s dangers and uncertainties. Vera was a worrier. Yet despite being the more fearful of the two, she was also the more outspoken in expressing her political opinions, which, like her husband’s, were fiercely anti-Communist.

Seldom apart, the Nabokovs did not write each other many letters. The interviews they gave were carefully staged performances. Schiff has drawn on the recollections of people who knew them: editors, publishers, writers, critics, friends, students and professors. This enables her to paint a sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait of Vera’s personality: how Vera impressed those who met her. What is lacking is a sense of what it might have felt like to be Vera. Still, one cannot blame the biographer for erring on the side of caution rather than plunging presumptuously into the mind of a woman who took such pains not to reveal herself.

If Schiff is sometimes too inclined to take the Nabokovs at face value (and at their own estimation), she at least saves herself (and us) from the pitfalls of psycho-biography, an approach that would have been anathema to the Freud-hating Nabokovs. What would have pleased them is Schiff’s elegant prose style, at once forceful and playfully allusive in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.