Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff (review)

HUMANITrES 499 Stacy Schiff. Vera IMrs. Vladimir Nabokov! Random House. xiv, 456. $41.95 The dusljacket for vera is a photograph of the subject, full face, leaning on her husband's shoulder, eyes turned towards him. The palely rendered picture on the title page appeared first as the jacket for Poems and Problems. The Nabokovs are playing chess. It is Vera's move. She is about to take his queen. I have on occasion reminded those who portray this marriage in an unflattering light of the Problems photo. It proVides a silent comment on the apparent negatives - the wife who drove the car (she loved it), carried the briefcase, subbed for the lecturer, typed all his materials, wrote his letters, did battle with his publishers, coped with 'real and learned helplessness' in life's most ordinary tasks. Stacy Schiff, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this biography, is a professional woman two generations younger than her subject. Although she ends her introduction by saying that Vera was 'just a wife: the rest of her pages give a different view. I wish that she had done just a little more with Mme Nabokov's father, a man noted for liis selflessness (something to genes) and perhaps allowed herself a few more daring conjectures on the effect on Nabokov of those days when 'everything [he] loved had died or been shot through the heart.' Vera Nabokov's brilliant understanding of her husband's genius shines in Schiff's reading. Because she herself had experienced loss, discrimination, and dislocation, she also must have known the devastating result of his upheavals - with tlle perspective and endurance of one whose people had been subject to persecution for much longer. But perhaps this was a conscious decision, made to respect the wishes of a woman who wanted to keep a close private relation exactly that. Those who caught glimpses of this relation were universal in speaking of their closeness. Although both resisted (as good readers) the temptation to identify them completely with 'Vaniada: writersrecord what they know, and Nabokov, creator of doubles, had a long marriage with a person whose resemblance to him in sensibility was nearly uncanny. The 'you and I' figures in Speak, Memory, the dedications of the novels, the butterfly sketches in the volumes he gave her, all attest a creative bond. She pulled the manuscript Lolita from the fire into which he had thrown it. 'We are saving this: she said. We. Having pursued the lady in a mask at a St Petersburg ball, he later told her Ihat she was the only person he could talk to. They competed not only in chess but also occaSionally in butterfly hunting, but these events are shadows in a background whose foreground is occupied by the novels. Schiffrenders the relationship mostvivid when she describes the Nabokovs in class at Cornell. 'One particularly dim Ithaca morning, Nabokov began lecturing in the dark. After a few minutes Vera left her seat in the front row to switch on tlle amphitheater lights. As she did so a beatific smile spread 500 LETTERS IN CANADA "999 over her husband's face. "Ladies and gentlemen" - he gestured ... "my assistant." The salute was a loving one; what she had done to elicit it was to flood Vladimir Nabokov in light.' 'My assistant' also puts the event into the language of magic. Vera was essential to Nabokov's creativity. No Vera, no light. Although the gesture was playful, he set his watch in Switzerland to her time when she travelled. Had she died first, he might have said, as she did to Dmitri, 'Let's rent an airplane and crash.' But this is subjunctive. Schiff rarely speculates. She concentrates mainly on what she knows and she has gone to a great deal of trouble to know it. Some of what we know has troubled those who query Vera's apparent submersion of herself in her husband, but as she herself said, in a remark Schiff quotes, 'Most of the time the truth is different from the way things look.' Her biography records the way, delicately hints at the truth, but leaves what Nabokov called the 'real plot' to the instructed intuition...