Speaking of elusive evidence
John de Falbe
VERA Shortly after the publication of Lolita, Nabokov acknowledged that 'my very kind and patient wife, she sits down at her type- writer and . . . I dictate off the cards to her, making some changes and . . . very often, discussing this or that. She might say, "Oh, you can't say that . . . ", "Well, let's see, perhaps I can change it".' There has never been any doubt of Vera's immense impor- tance to Vladimir Nabokov but, until now, it has been impossible to assess her contribu- tion to his work. Since he is perhaps the century's greatest novelist and certainly its greatest literary stylist, the question of someone else's influence on his work seems legitimate.
The Nabokovs' partnership must be one of the most tantalising double acts in literary history. Although she handled his exchanges with the world at large — increasingly, as his fame grew and the couple returned to Europe — she remained astoundingly eva- sive about her relationship to her husband and his work. She is the shadow reflected in Brian Boyd's two-volume study, even though she co-operated with his enterprise. During her lifetime, any would-be commen- tators were constrained if not confounded by the extreme privacy of their subject; extreme, but not, it appears from Stacy Schiff's remarkable book, pathological: for though Vera often deliberately misled peo- ple about her role, there is no suggestion that what might be construed as a suppres- sion of her nature caused her distress.
Schiff tells us that Vera first approached Vladimir at a party in Berlin wearing a mask. She presented herself as a fan of the `We tiy to help you turn wine into water' young Russian poet Shin (Nabokov's Rus- sian-language pseudonym) and knew all his poetry by heart. Here was an admirer, read- er, memory, and muse for him. She soon also became his wife, secretary, agent, researcher and all that a writer of self-pro- claimed genius could require. Like Vladimir, she was born in Russia; unlike him she was Jewish and not rich. After the Revolution they lived in Berlin, where they married in 1925. They moved to Paris in the late Thirties, then to the US in 1940. From this point the externals of their life become less absorbing, but it is now that Vera's character begins to emerge. Despite the mutations, her mask has never been shed: it is not really a mask at all — she is simply unshakeable in her belief in his genius. It is hard not to marvel at the brilliant, deter- minedly obtuse woman who manoeuvres her husband through the hoops of campus life at Cornell, drives him thousands of miles over the US so that he can write and collect but- terflies, types his Eugene Onegin, Pale Fire and all, yes all, the rest, and negotiates the international publication of Lolita (and all the rest).
Vera is a heroic piecing together of an extraordinary character from unpromising, cussed material. Schiff appears to have interviewed anybody who might have known Vera and examined every shred of letter, and she makes brave and sensible conjec- tures about the truth of the Nabokovs' utter- ances about themselves. What she calls 'the dance of the pronouns' runs as a leitmotif throughout the book, where a letter pur- porting, say, to be written by Vera on Vladimir's behalf jumps between 'he', `I' and 'we', and it is indicative of Schiffs sure- ness of touch that she can make fun spring from close textual reading. Some of Vera's epistolary contortions are quietly hilarious: for example, to Andrew Field: 'While they keep us informed of new developments, there are a number of permission they gave before we put our foot (feet?) down.' Schiff observes: 'She fell victim to a kind of Carrol- lian paradox, labouring with all her might to efface herself, managing only to appear larg- er as a result.' If by 'larger' Schiff really means more intriguing, then I certainly found this to be true.
Schiff lightly reveals elements of Vera that are woven into the novels; she suggests how she influenced the writing, and she demonstrates her great direct influence on her husband's life. But her great achieve- ment is to remain honest, allowing that Vera was true to herself even though serving another. In the end, Vera seems to have been so perfectly in tune with Vladimir's artistic endeavours that the question of her influence dissolves. Whether seen directly or reflected in Nabokov's mirrors, she both sustains the fiction and is sustained by it. Following Schiff s bold , patient construc- tion of Vera from the fiction (of all kinds) with which she surrounded herself approaches the delight of reading a Nabokovian fiction.
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