Vera, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov
by Stacy Schiff
Summary
Stacy Schiff follows Vera Slonim from a prosperous Jewish family in prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg through the exile that scattered her relatives across Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Istanbul, and Sofia before she finally settled with her father in Berlin, where he helped run a publishing house and where, in 1923, she began the relationship with the writer Vladimir Nabokov that would organize the rest of her life. Schiff narrates their unlikely 1925 marriage, unusual among aristocratic Russian emigres for crossing into a Jewish family, and then the decades in which Vera effectively erased her own ambitions to become her husband's editor, typist, agent, driver, and, by Schiff's account, the reason several of his manuscripts survived at all.
The book's most striking material concerns Lolita: Schiff traces more than one occasion on which Vera pulled the manuscript back from the fire after Vladimir, discouraged or afraid of the novel's reception, tried to burn it himself, and the book credits her directly with the novel's survival to publication. Schiff follows the couple to the United States in 1940, through the lepidoptery expeditions across the American West where Vera drove and once carried a handgun to protect her husband, and on to Switzerland's Montreux Palace Hotel, where they lived out their later years, and where, after Vladimir's 1977 death, Vera faced his instruction to burn his final unfinished manuscript and could not bring herself to do it.
Schiff writes from interviews and letters to recover a woman who spent her adult life working to stay invisible, and reading the book means watching a genuinely brilliant, difficult partner emerge from behind a husband's fame through the very archive she tried hardest to keep private. It suits a reader interested in literary marriage and in how much of a famous writer's finished work depended on a collaborator history nearly left out entirely.
Historical Context & Significance
Vera won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography over finalists Bobbie Ann Mason's Clear Springs and Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter. It was an early high point in Schiff's career as a biographer, which she went on to build with books on Benjamin Franklin, the Salem witch trials, and Cleopatra, the last of which won the PEN Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
Reviewers praised Schiff for reconstructing a woman who left almost no personal record by design, working instead from the letters, interviews, and secondhand testimony of people who had known the deliberately private Vera Nabokov. The book remains the standard account of a marriage widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most consequential literary partnerships, precisely because so much of Vladimir Nabokov's finished work passed through his wife's hands before it reached a reader.