Vera by Stacy Schiff Page A

demons. The same holds true for Mme. Perov, the unfortunate fate-mate of the pianist in “Bachmann,” who in her devotion more closely resembles Véra. Alone among Nabokov’s couples,
The Gift’s
Fyodor and Zina make out well—or will once they find the keys to the apartment. The narrator of
Look at the Harlequins!
finds his “You,” but only on the fifth try; Sebastian Knight leaves his Véra-like Clare, with disastrous results. Boyd has made a case that many of these marriages and women are related to Véra in that they are highly imaginative inversions of her. Certainly in the fiction we more often meet her antithesis than Véra herself; in his books Nabokov would hold distorting mirrors up to his own marriage, there where Véra would habitually hold a “No Trespassing” sign. Here was an author able to write an autobiography in which his marriage seems nowhere to figure, even while that marriage—as Boyd has persuasively argued—would play a significant role in shaping his fictions.
    Behind all the inversions and elisions and contortions were, however, a man and a woman ardently, uncomplicatedly in love. Nabokov’s letters of 1925 are deliriously passionate ones, more so even than those written prior to the wedding. To his sister Elena, about a year after his marriage, he offered some wisdom:
    The most important thing in love is complete, radiant truthfulness—so that there won’t be any of the petty deceptions, those quick lies that are in all other human relationships—and no posing before yourself, nor before the one you love: that is the true purity of love. And in love you must be Siamese twins, where one sneezes when the other sniffs tobacco. And then you must remember that the greatest love is the simplest love, just as the best verse is that written most simply. *
    Véra had a chance as well to share her convictions. She had a little more experience when she did so, having been Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov for fifty years when she wrote: “Things that are precious, honesty, tenderness, broadmindedness, life in art, and true, unselfish, touching attachment, are the greatervalues by far.” She could not stress enough to her correspondent the value of a good woman who loves “in a pure, unselfish way,” one capable “occasionally of sacrificing her own desires and pleasures in life to what you would rather do.” Have you been happy in love? Véra asked a young poet who came to visit in the 1960s. “We think that is all it takes,” she advised.
    The evidence points to Véra’s having attributed the breakup of her parents’ household to her mother; the partnership her father enjoyed with Anna Feigin may have impressed another definition of marriage upon her. It is almost impossible to believe Véra could have enjoyed much of a relationship with her mother, given her proximity and loyalty to the woman for whom her father left Slava Borisovna. The Nabokovs spent a good deal of time with Slonim and Anna Feigin in 1925, consulting with them on most decisions. When Vladimir envisioned a vacation in Biarritz, he sought out Slonim’s advice on the subject; would the climate be good for his daughter? (The answer was no; the seaside vacation never took place.) He was entirely taken with his stately and cultivated father-in-law, who much enjoyed his prose, and whom he regularly met over a chessboard. Triumphantly he wrote his mother that Evsei Lazarevich “understands so well that the most important thing for me in life, and the only thing of which I’m capable, is to write.” Although he was nearly out of funds—perhaps precisely because he was—Slonim continued to dream. He told his new son-in-law he hoped to buy farms in France for his three daughters.
    The newlyweds were separated for nearly two months in the summer of 1926, when Véra—whose health was also fragile at the