Vera by Stacy Schiff

the marriage. “We were ridiculously poor, her father was ruined, my widowed mother subsisted on an insufficient pension, my wife and I lived in gloomy rooms which we rented in Berlin West, in the lean bosoms of German military families,” he recalled later. The lean German bosoms had to wait a little; it was several weeks before the newlyweds managed to live at the same address. On the evening of April 15 they broke the news over dinner to Véra’s family, in one of its configurations. “By the way, we got married this morning,” Véra said. A wedding announcement was printed, in French, and ostensibly mailed, but not very scientifically. Gleb Struve, then in Paris and in regular touch with Vladimir, was surprisednot to have been told of the marriage, which he learned about from mutual friends. Struve counted among Nabokov’s closest friends at the time. There are some hints that Nabokov feared disapproval. He admitted to Vérathat he feared his friends would not understand the most divine thing in his life, that they would launch “a predatory campaign.”
    Nabokov’s mother learned the news after the fact as well, when she visited Berlin in May. She was not surprised—she and her daughters had assumed Véra and Vladimir would marry—andembraced Véra warmly. No discomfort whatever materialized. Nabokov’s grandmother had but one question concerning the new addition to the family, a reason Vladimir may have feared a “predatory campaign”: “Of what religion is she?” On Véra’s side matters were doubtless more complicated. It may be a matter of simple coincidence that the dissolution of the Slonims’ marriage directly preceded Véra’s entering into a union of her own. Her father would have been preoccupied at the time, however. Slava Slonim’s reaction is not known, but there is every reason to assume that Véra’s approach to the matter conformed to that of Luzhin’s fiancée, in
The Defense
. When her mother tells her that Luzhin has asked for her hand in marriage, the daughter replies, “I’m sorry he told you.… It concerns only him and me.” Discretion was to Véra Nabokov the greater part of valor. The more emotionally raw the issue, the more opaque she found it desirable to be on the subject.
    Her opacity allowed her detractors plenty of room. Perhaps because Nabokov’s romantic past was so variegated, the assumption in the émigré community was that Véra had somehow coerced him into marriage. One report had her showing up at his room, pointing a pistol at his chest, and threatening, “Marry me, or I’ll kill you.” She was considered difficult, blunt, “
imariable
.” Since not everyone was as charmed by her “idiosyncratic form of directness” as her new husband, the marriage seemed altogether inexplicable, especially to the anti-Semites, which was to say a fair (and growing) proportion of the Russian community. That her father had been an estate manager impressed no one among the pedigree-conscious, who saw Nabokov as marrying down. Even Jewish friends were left with the sense that she had been the prime mover: Contrasting Véra to Sirin’s flock of female readers, an admiring acquaintance recalled: “The one who finally got Nabokov to marry her was Véra Slonim … thin and slight, blond.” Perhaps it was not so much Véra who seemed
imariable
but, in the English sense of the word, Nabokov who did not seem the marrying kind.
    Of their emotional commitment at the time more can be said. In his fiction Nabokov was killing off wives well before his marriage: The books are full of dead wives, fickle wives, lost wives, dim-witted, vulgar, slatternly, in-effectual, scheming wives. Even Mrs. Luzhin, who has in common with Véra her marriage to a master, a man tormented by his genius, cannot save her fictionalhusband from his