Vladimir Nabokov was famous at Cornell, where he taught between 1948 and 1959, for a number of reasons. None had anything to do with the literature; few people knew what he had written, and even fewer had read his work. Tearing Dostoyevski to shreds in front of two hundred undergraduates made an impression, as did the pronouncement that good books should not make us think but make us shiver. The fame derived in part, too, from the fact that the professor did not come to class alone. He arrived on campus driven by Mrs. Nabokov, he crossed campus with Mrs. Nabokov, and he occasionally appeared in class on the arm of Mrs. Nabokov, who carried his books. In fact, the man who spoke so often of his own isolation was one of the most accompanied loners of all time; at Cornell, especially, he was in the constant company of his wife. And he was legendary for it.
Mrs. Nabokov sat either in the front row of the lecture hall or, more often, on the dais, to her husband’s left. She rarely missed a class, although she did occasionally teach one when Nabokov was sick, and she often proctored exams alone. She had no speaking role when her husband was in the room. Few people knew anything about her. When Nabokov referred to her, he did so slyly, calling her his assistant. The comments went like this: “My assistant will now move the blackboard to the other side of the room,” “My assistant will now pass out the blue books,” “Perhaps my assistant could find the page for me,” “My assistant will now draw an oval-faced woman”—this was Emma Bovary—“on the board.” And Mrs. Nabokov would do so. The stage directions do not figure in the published lectures.
Véra Nabokov was a striking woman, white-haired and alabaster-skinned, thin and fine-boned. The discrepancy between the hair and the young face was particularly dramatic. She was “mnemogenic,” as Nabokov wrote of Clare in “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”—“subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered.” And that is where the trouble begins. According to the faculty and the students at Cornell, she was luminous, regal, elegance personified, “the most beautiful middle-aged woman I have ever set eyes on”; she was a waif: dowdy, half-starved, the Wicked Witch of the West. To those same students and faculty emeriti went the obvious question: What was Mrs. Nabokov doing in her husband’s classroom, lecture after lecture? The answers should come prefaced with the reminder that it was Nabokov who termed rumor the poetry of truth:
No one was sure who marked the exams, and a few former students admitted that they had made a practice of smiling at Mrs. Nabokov, on the assumption that their geniality would register in their grades. It often was she who graded the blue books, though this does not explain what she was doing in the classroom. She was a mysterious, often intimidating presence in the lecture hall, and she was terrifically exacting, but she was not an ogre of a grader. Ultimately, Nabokov did have teaching assistants, one of whom remembered reading through a hundred and fifty blue books and evaluating them according to a rigorous grading scale. After reading each exam two or three times, he took the pile of blue books to Professor Nabokov’s office, hoping finally to chat with the great man. Mrs. Nabokov met him at the door, standing like a sentinel between him and her husband. She took the blue books, immediately raised all the grades to the eighties, and sent the assistant on his way.
Véra Nabokov met her husband in 1923, in Berlin. She was twenty-one. She was born in St. Petersburg, the second daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist who was—when his daughter first encountered her future husband—on the brink of losing what remained of his fortune. Probably her family had left Russia in 1920. At the time the couple met, Nabokov was a twenty-four-year-old poet, writing in Russian; Véra Slonim knew and admired his work before she met him. She had literary aspirations of her own, quickly set aside, unless marrying Nabokov, in 1925, counts. The two survived happily if meagrely on money earned from—on her part—secretarial work and commercial translations. Nabokov, for his part, was, as he put it, “a one-man finishing school,” a tennis coach, and a movie extra. By the mid-nineteen-thirties, it was abundantly clear that (a) the Nabokovs would not be returning to Russia in anything resembling the near future and (b) they must leave Germany. They spent three exceedingly difficult years in France, mostly in the South, and then departed for America. By the time they got to the boat at the end of “Speak, Memory,” three mythical, flourishing worlds had collapsed behind the Nabokovs, who had thrice ventured through the looking glass.
Véra Nabokov was thirty-eight years old when she arrived in America, with a six-year-old son, an uneasy grasp of the English language, and a husband with no long-term job prospects. According to legend, the Nabokovs had a hundred dollars of their own, which Mrs. Nabokov nearly bestowed on their first New York City cabbie, an honest man, to whom she actually owed ninety cents. Both her parents had died in Berlin; other family members and friends were living in Europe, in various stages of distress. Her German was excellent, her French near-perfect—probably it was her first language—but in her diary she admitted that she found it difficult to follow wide-ranging conversations in English. The Nabokovs’ apartment—in a West Eighty-seventh Street brownstone—was one she remembered as “a dreadful little flat.” We are used to caressing these familiar details in the light of Vladimir Nabokov and his accomplishments, but they translate into something else for Mrs. Nabokov, who never ceased to marvel over the industry of the American housewife. She wrote her sister-in-law that as a housekeeper she was not so much bad as disgusting, rather overstating the case.
In the eight years it took for the immigrant Nabokovs to metamorphose into Americans and for Vladimir to join the Cornell faculty, they continued supporting themselves in much the same way as they had in Berlin. Mrs. Nabokov gave private French lessons to unwilling victims offered up by their parents, who wanted to do what they could for the Nabokovs but realized that they would not accept charity. She worked as a secretary to several language professors at Harvard. She assisted her husband in rewriting his lectures on Russian literature, so that he could deliver them three times a week at Wellesley. And she tended—as she had done since the early days of the courtship, as Clare does in “Sebastian Knight”—to Nabokov’s literary affairs. She was her husband’s first reader; she smoothed the prose—when it was “still warm and wet”—though later, when scholars questioned this, she generally shrugged off any involvement. Still, her handwriting is there, and it is difficult not to see Véra as the fictional Clare, lifting the edge of a page in the typewriter and declaring, “ ‘No, my dear. You can’t say it so in English. . . . And if for instance,’ she would say—and then an exact suggestion would follow.” (Twenty-six years later, her husband described Véra’s role in his literary life in nearly identical words, as if quoting from his own novel.) She submitted her husband’s work to publishers; she typed and researched his lectures. At one point, she stepped in as de-facto curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Months after Nabokov’s arrival, after he placed his first poem with The New Yorker, he talked about his “horrible difficulties and distress in wielding a language new to me.” In this same time, Mrs. Nabokov’s English grew steadier, more fluent, though it would always be a little stiff, even when it was the language she claimed to write most easily, the language in which she answered her Russian correspondents.
Within a few years of their arrival in America, she was singlehandedly dealing with publishers. In part, this was because Nabokov was spreading butterflies at the museum or lecturing at Wellesley; in larger part, it was by design. (From a list of the things Nabokov bragged about never having learned to do—type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, answer the phone, fold maps, fold umbrellas, give the time of day to a philistine—it is easy to deduce what Mrs. Nabokov spent her life doing.) A great many letters opened like this: “Vladimir started this letter but had to switch to something else in a hurry, and asked me to continue on my own.” She did all she could to see to it that her husband existed not in time, only in art, and thus spared him the fate of so many of his characters, imprisoned by their various passions. The genius went into the work, not into the life—something Mrs. Nabokov had to explain regularly to family members, whose letters to her husband were turned over to her to be answered. This resulted in understandable confusion about authorship, which grew worse over the years.
In a perfectly Nabokovian way, the two identities began to blur on the page. Letters came addressed to all sorts of entities: “Dear VVs,” “Dear VerVolodya,” “Dear Author and Mrs. Nabokov.” Many of the hallmarks of Nabokov’s fiction—the doppelgängers, the impersonators, the Siamese twins, the mirror images, the distorted mirror images, the reflections in the windowpane, the parodies of self—manifested themselves in the routine the Nabokovs developed for dealing with the world, a routine that could leave a correspondent feeling as the books can: humbled by a knotty, magnificent inside joke.
In the nineteen-fifties, Véra wrote to a close Wellesley friend of theirs, “V. was asked to suggest a candidate for [a Guggenheim] and I think I composed a very adequate letter listing your high qualifications. V. signed the letter, of course, and [the] reaction was enthusiastic.” This tango, or tangle, of pronouns was used to exceedingly good effect. With two voices at their disposal, the Nabokovs could temper a remark or render it twice as cutting. Mrs. Nabokov could write to a publisher that her husband thought she might hint that they take out some ads—big ads, lots of ads. And at the same time she could render him more distant, his judgments more divine: “My husband asks me to say that he thinks ULYSSES by far the greatest English novel of the century but detests FINNEGANS WAKE.” When she needed a more neutral voice, she wrote as J. G. Smith, a fictional Cornell secretary, who shared Mrs. Nabokov’s handwriting.
Often, she would write and sign her husband’s letters for him, but it was generally clear when she had done so. Nabokov masqueraded as Véra, however: many letters were drafted by him in the third person, in his wife’s driest tone, and left for Mrs. Nabokov to type and sign. He would borrow her identity, though she never made an attempt to borrow his. Because his wife was at his side, he could speak in the first-person plural. And, because so frequently the correspondence is not with Nabokov but about Nabokov, a whole other being is created—a monument called VN, someone who is not even Nabokov. He delighted in explaining that the living, breathing, breakfast-eating Nabokov was but the poor relative of the writer, and was only too happy to refer to himself as “the person I usually impersonate in Montreux.” In many ways, this distant, unapproachable VN was Véra Nabokov’s construct. How else could Nabokov have established this statuesque other self? With the assistance of Véra, the real Vladimir Nabokov disappeared; it was as if Thomas Pynchon were to enter the federal witness-protection program. All this sleight of hand culminated in another delusional mirror trick, one worthy of “Despair”: the word in Montreux was that Véra Nabokov was her husband’s ghostwriter, because she was always seen by tradespeople at her desk, and he—who wrote in bed, or standing at his lectern, or in the bath—never was.
Where is Véra Nabokov in the literature? Everywhere and nowhere. She was clearly more muse than model: her influence rather than her image hovers over the page. She is less in evidence as author than as inspiration and instigation; she is named in the original title of “Speak Memory”—“Conclusive Evidence,” with the two “V”s Nabokov liked so much—and, of course, on the dedication page of nearly every novel. The guiding hand is easier to document than her presence as muse, though Nabokov acknowledged the latter role in interviews, and Brian Boyd talks about it at length in his marvellous biography. “Speak, Memory” has been read as a book-length tribute to Véra; “Look at the Harlequins!,” written many years later, calls out more loudly to be read the same way.
Certainly some of the most fertile years of Nabokov’s life immediately followed the marriage. Between 1925 and 1935, he wrote as if in a fever. When Véra Slonim met Vladimir Nabokov, he was a poet; he finished his first novel months after they were married, his eighth before the decade was out. In 1924, he recorded a dream in which he sits at the piano with Véra at his side, turning the pages of the score. Forty years later, he had a similar dream, in which he is dictating a new novel to Véra, conscious as he is doing so that it “will please and surprise” her that he is suddenly able to speak aloud with great eloquence. All the same, we can see her more clearly guiding her husband’s oeuvre as she was said to guide his elbow at Cornell to nudge him along to class. In 1944, when more of Nabokov’s energy was going into his lepidopteral work than into his writing, he wrote to Edmund Wilson, “Véra has had a serious conversation with me in regard to my novel. Having sulkily pulled it out from under my butterfly manuscripts I discovered two things, first that it was good, and second that the beginning 20 pages at least could be typed and submitted. This will be done speedily.” (The novel became “Bend Sinister.” Wilson responded on reading it, “My only possible criticism would be that you sometimes write slightly involved sentences.”) We know that Mrs. Nabokov put her foot down when her husband announced that he planned to write a novel about Siamese twins; we have the story “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster” instead. We know that for “Speak, Memory” she wrote out her recollections of their son Dmitri’s early days, at Nabokov’s request. The ambitious project of translating Pushkin began at Véra’s urging. Nabokov had complained bitterly about the existing translations; she innocently suggested that he try a hand at it himself. Here she gives Tolstoy’s wife the greatest run for her money. She may not have transcribed “War and Peace” countless times, but she did type all three thousand pages of the “Onegin” manuscript, and spent hours researching the notes.
Did she enjoy the work? She must have had her qualms. In 1959, after completing a more modest translation on which she had collaborated, she wrote to a friend, “I vow that this is the last translation I shall agree to let him do as long as I live!” There were still five years of work to be done on “Eugene Onegin.”
Most famously, “Lolita” would have been conceived but never born without Mrs. Nabokov. The book returned the favor: if she had not existed at the time of its American publication, her husband would have had to invent her, so strongly did people identify Humbert Humbert with Vladimir Nabokov. At publication parties, admirers told Mrs. Nabokov that they had not exactly expected the author to show up with his white-haired wife of thirty-three years. “Yes,” she would respond, smiling, unflappable. “It’s the main reason why I am here.” Twice, at least, Nabokov set out to feed the novel to the Ithaca incinerator, exactly as John Shade does with his drafts in “Pale Fire.” Nabokov was stopped by his wife. She was the woman who drove the Oldsmobile in the back seat of which he wrote the novel; she was the woman who slept in all Humbert Humbert’s motel rooms. She made the arrangements for the book’s publication. At one time, she scurried around New York carrying an unmarked brown paper bag in which lay the manuscript that her husband had described to his editor as a “time bomb.” Is there a trace of Mrs. Nabokov in the novel? No, but her fingerprints are all over it. (Some people insisted on searching for her. After Lionel Trilling met the Nabokovs, in Ithaca, he told his wife he had a vague feeling that Véra Nabokov was Lolita.)
When Mrs. Nabokov appears in the fiction, she does so more often as her anti-self than as her actual self. The wives in Nabokov’s work are more often women who got or get away: they are dead wives, fickle wives, lost wives, dimwitted, vulgar, slatternly, ineffectual, scheming wives. By comparison, Clare, in “Sebastian Knight,” seems a later incarnation of a figure who appears in Nabokov’s work beginning the year Véra and Vladimir met. In “Sounds,” a short story of September, 1923, Nabokov introduces a radiant, delicate, thin-wristed woman with pale, dusty-looking eyes and hair that melts in the sunlight. That physical description applies equally to Zina, in “The Gift,” the first novel that anyone who knew the Nabokovs in Berlin will mention when Véra’s name comes up. Nabokov’s narrators can be ardent admirers of bright typists, of whom Clare’s description surely most closely corresponds to Mrs. Nabokov:
Sibyl Shade resembles Mrs. Nabokov in superficial ways; a Véra double makes a cameo appearance on the arm of the author in “King, Queen, Knave.” But only the “You”s of “Speak, Memory” and of “Look at the Harlequins!”—the “You”s of which Nabokov flatly refuses to speak—truly reflect his wife.
While Nabokov himself admitted that some kind of refracted picture of Véra often appeared in the mirrors of his works, Mrs. Nabokov categorically denied any resemblances. Of course I am not Zina, she would protest: Zina is only half Jewish, I am entirely Jewish. In the same way, Nabokov had a fondness for disclaiming any resemblance of his characters to himself: But he misidentified a butterfly—I would never do such a thing! But he speaks German better than French—therefore the character is not I! To complicate the issue, Mrs. Nabokov, so punctilious about everything concerning her husband, did her best to be vague, noncommittal, or flat-out inaccurate on her own count. When she was asked how she had met her husband, she was not beneath telling even a good friend, “I don’t remember.” On one occasion, when Nabokov began to reveal to an American scholar how he and Véra had met, Véra interrupted her husband’s account with a fierce “Who are you, the K.G.B.?” Other wives have been exiled from the history books; this one energetically banished herself.
There is no need to labor the fictional correlatives—first, because while we are busy searching for Véra Nabokov in the novels we have this imposing version of him in her letters. And in life itself Nabokov was in many ways his own fictional counterpart As one of his favorite publishers warned, “It is a false idea to imagine a real Nabokov.” He invented himself, was constantly impersonating himself, was as much in life as on the page a performer performing, a conjurer conjuring. And the magician’s act, as it developed over the years, required an assistant.
Resentment of Mrs. Nabokov accumulated in equal proportion to the mystique. Who was this “Grey Eagle” in the classroom, the students wondered, while the faculty—very much aware that Nabokov had no Ph.D., no graduate students, no freshmen, and, by the mid-fifties, enviably high enrollments—chafed at the husband-and-wife routine. When Nabokov was being considered for a job elsewhere—and he searched for one within years of arriving at Cornell—an ex-colleague discouraged the idea: “Don’t bother hiring him; she does all the work.”
Nabokov did nothing to check this kind of sniping. He told his students that Ph.D. stood for “Department of Philistines.” He left office hours to Véra. And he treated even his own fine performances flippantly. When a friend insisted on attending one of his lectures, Nabokov conceded, “Well alright, if you want to be a masochist about it.” His colleagues were jealous of the enrollments, mystified by the butterfly net, astounded by the loyalty of the wife. In this last, they echoed the sentiments of Edmund Wilson, who hated her exam administering and her general devotion. In his journal he griped, “Véra always sides with Volodya, and one seems to feel her bristling with hostility if, in her presence, one argues with him.” Other writers’ wives were asked pointblank why they could not be more like Véra, who was held up as the gold standard, the International Champion in the Wife-of-Writer Competition, as the novelist Herbert Gold has termed it.
It has been said that the Nabokovs refined their marriage into a work of art. More to the point, their marriage had been refined by the art of work. The business correspondence began to snowball after “Lolita,” when Mrs. Nabokov might write four letters a day to a single publisher. “I wrote you today but Vladimir asks me to do so again,” she began a note to Putnam’s in 1958. Many of these letters are layered like Neapolitan ice cream—in English, French, Russian. The typewriter went everywhere, not for him but for her. There is no evidence of such a thing as a vacation; Dmitri Nabokov observed, “Her attention span for pure amusement was quite limited.” In the mid-sixties, when the Nabokovs travelled through Italy, Mrs. Nabokov negotiated a clause in a Putnam’s contract from each town. After “Lolita,” the public Nabokov, the voice of Nabokov, was Véra Nabokov’s. The student who mentioned ventriloquism was not far off.
When Nabokov wanted information on the film version of “Lolita,” he wrote to Stanley Kubrick several times. Véra signed one letter: “Vladimir asks me to tell you he will be glad to hear from you provided you don’t mind talking to him though me.” For some reason, VN also felt compelled to write himself, or as himself: “I would be glad to talk to you but I abhor telephone conversations, especially long distance. If you will talk to my wife I shall stay at her side during the talk.” Nabokov would rarely come to the phone; word went out that he was being held hostage by his wife.
How, insofar as she recognized this, did she feel about it? She apologized to friends about the delays in writing, but rarely allowed apology to veer into complaint. Here she is in 1963, as close to the edge as she appears to have ventured: “I am completely exhausted by Vladimir’s letters (I mean those he received and I have to answer) and it is not merely physical work but he also wants me to make all the decisions which I find more time-consuming than the actual typing. Even when Dmitri was very young and I had no help, I still had more leisure than I do now. Mind you, I do not complain, but I do not want you to think that I am merely lax.” Usually, she stressed how unqualified she was for her job. Just after the publication of “Lolita,” she wrote to a friend about the impossible pressure of work—especially, she said, because her husband refused to take the least interest in his own business matters. “Besides, I am by no means a Sévigné, and writing ten to fifteen letters in one day leaves me limp.” Twenty-five years later, nothing having changed except the workload, she told the same friend that she was a very poor letter writer, had been all her life, yet for the last thirty or forty years had been doing nothing else. A little mournfully, she admitted at one point that all her grandchildren were literary. But she doted upon them, with meticulous attention. She worked harder and harder as the years went by. She corrected “Speak, Memory” in German, “Strong Opinions” in French, Nabokov’s poetry in Italian, and then undertook a translation of “Pale Fire” into Russian after her husband’s death. The last translation was difficult, she wrote friends, but at eighty she was alone and unwell, and the work made her happy. That year, she estimated for her lawyers that she was at her desk for six hours a day, on correspondence, negotiations, and translations. A few people had long realized how much she was working. In the early seventies, the critic Alfred Appel offered some advice: “You mustn’t apologize for being behind in VN’s correspondence. There is only one solution. Go on strike for better working conditions and hours. Walk in front of the Montreux Palace”—the hotel that was their home in Switzerland—“with a picket sign, something along the order of ‘VN unfair to auxiliary services.’ It would certainly have one kind of effect or another.”
Of course, she did not do this; the personal letters are instead filled with concerns over how hard Nabokov is working, how difficult it is to prevail upon him to take a rest. And she was highly qualified for the job. Her Russian was—in her husband’s estimation—“stupendous”; her memory for poetry was exceptional (among much else, she knew “Eugene Onegin” and virtually all of Nabokov’s verse by heart); she was supremely sensitive to a well-turned sentence; she seemed to thrive on living a life outside her own. She was the ideal aide-de-camp in the war against poshlost. Like Nabokov, she experienced synesthesia, in their case the ability to see letters and visualize sounds in color. She was such a perfectly logical choice of a wife for Nabokov that the fact that he had married her for anything other than practical reasons was easily overlooked. She shared her husband’s eye for detail: in his diary Nabokov frequently cited her poetic, offhand observations. Few saw this side of her. She allowed little of her charm onto paper; one had to gain her trust before witnessing the humor, the tenderness, the sprightly turns of phrase. (During a visit with friends at the Montreux Palace, Nabokov spooned sugar into his coffee but missed the cup. Brightly, Véra informed him, “Darling, you have just sweetened your shoe.”) More often, people saw the fierce partisan, battling for literary credit in a world of philistines. She did not seem to be aware of the ill will, of her reputation as a dragon lady. If she knew that a shy, morbidly private, highly principled woman could easily appear prickly, aloof, and intransigent, she did not seem to care. The perfect magician’s assistant, she could be sawed in half with no loss of dignity or composure.
Her lawyer was impressed when—in the dimly lit bar of the Pierre Hotel in 1967—she managed to bully her husband’s American publisher into making unprecedented concessions. This she did without saying a word. The same lawyer thought her nearly clairvoyant when she insisted on cost-of-living increases in her husband’s contracts—increases that proved highly lucrative. The lawyer had not been in Petersburg in the nineteen-tens or Berlin in the twenties; Mrs. Nabokov had. She was accustomed to having the bottom fall out of her world. For Nabokov, this left a mark on the fiction; for his wife it seems to have shaped a personality. For her, the trapdoors were very real.
Her frustrations were those of living an orderly life in a disorderly world, of producing perfectly set texts in a universe in which typesetters are human. She held people—herself especially—to the standards of her husband’s literature: standards to which few of us, and even fewer publishers, rise. She and Dmitri allowed Nabokov what the world had tried to cheat him of: stability, privacy, an atmosphere of Old World taste and original humor, of strong opinion and exquisite, uncorrupted Russian. For many years, he was a national treasure in search of a nation; Véra was a little bit the country in which he lived. Together, they occupied an isolated kingdom of their own, the kind of world out of this world in which Nabokov’s characters often find bliss. “Inseparable, self-sufficient, they form a multitude of two,” one former Cornell student observed. What could have been more disorienting than that long Ithaca series of rented houses, with rented cats and rented silverware and rented family photographs? No wonder Nabokov treated it all as if it were unreal. It was. He was happy to insist on his isolation, to prove that he had been someone else’s pipe dream. When one biographer presented him with a list of people he expected to interview, Nabokov annotated the list. The notes read, “Dislikes me personally / hardly know him / an enemy / knew him very little / unknown to me / knew him slightly / not sure ever met him / never met him / unknown to me / a cousin / a man of great imagination, who saw me last in 1916 / a figment of [your] imagination.”
Back, then, briefly, to the Cornell classroom. We shall never know exactly what Mrs. Nabokov was doing there, just as we shall never know which was Flaubert’s parrot. (She did own a gun, though there is no evidence of her having carried it to class; Nabokov was generally in robust health, and was not allergic to chalk dust. She was an encyclopedia, but so was he.) A hint of an answer may lie in “Bachmann,” a 1924 short story. Bachmann’s stellar career at the piano takes off the first day his admirer Mme. Peroy sits down, “very straight, smooth-haired,” in the front row of one of his concerts. It ends the first night she fails to appear, when, after seating himself at the piano, Bachmann notices the empty seat in the middle of the first row. One Cornellian appeared to appreciate Bachmann’s secret in recalling the performances of Professor Nabokov. “It was as if he were giving the lectures for her,” the student mused. Nabokov claimed that the best audience an artist can imagine “is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.” Referring to Mrs. Nabokov, he told an interviewer, “She and I are my best audience, you see. I should say my main audience.” For whom else could he have been speaking when one day he listed on the blackboard the names of the five greatest Russian poets? They included one named Sirin, his own pen name from the Berlin years. ‘Who is Sirin?” asked an intrepid student. “Ah, Sirin. I shall read from his work,” Nabokov answered with a straight face and no further explanation. On a particularly dim Ithaca morning, Nabokov began lecturing in the dark. After a few minutes, Véra got up from her seat in the front row to turn on the amphitheatre lights. As she did, a beatific smile spread across her husband’s face. “Ladies and gentlemen.” He gestured proudly from the front of the room. “My assistant.”
Probably the person who tried to become the most invisible was—to the man on the stage—the most visible. Surely she knew this. No one seems to have dared ask her if she felt oppressed, eclipsed—or, for that matter, central, indispensable, a full creative partner. She was too busy deflecting attention for anyone to get a chance to ask; the more you leave me out, she told one biographer, the closer to the truth you will be. She raised Being Mrs. Nabokov to a science and an art but pretended that such a person had never existed. She clearly felt that she stood not in her husband’s shadow but in his light. When she met him, she felt that he was the greatest writer of his generation; to that single truth she held strong for sixty-six years, as if to compensate for all the loss and the turmoil, the accidents of history. One Cornell colleague noted in an article that when Mrs. Nabokov was forced to deliver her husband’s lectures she modified not a word. In the margin, Mrs. Nabokov chastised him. But of course she had not changed a thing! Had he not understood that each lecture was a work of art?
An American admirer happened upon the Nabokovs in Italy in 1967. They were walking down a mountain trail, butterfly nets in hand. Nabokov was jubilant; earlier in the day, he had sighted a rare specimen, precisely the one he had been looking for. He had gone back to find Véra. He had wanted her to be with him when he made his capture. ♦
