Vera

“Schiff has succeeded in creating an elegantly nuanced portrait of the artist's wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov's marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work. She effortlessly conjures up the disparate worlds the couple inhabited … a formidable challenge for a biographer—a challenge that Ms. Schiff, with this book, has most persuasively met.”

—M
ICHIKO
K
AKUTANI
,
The New York Times

“An absorbing story, illumined by Schiff's flair for the succinct insight … This portrait of a fifty-two-year marriage to a woman who was the writer's prime reader opens up Nabokov's private life.… But the triumph of
Véra
is not just in providing entrée to her famous husband. She fascinates of her own right.”

—L
YNDALL
G
ORDON
,
The New York Times Book Review

“Schiff has performed a monumental task in drawing a nuanced and fairly detailed portrait of the woman behind the mask both husband and wife conspired to create.… Writing in sprightly prose that captures the ‘verbal tennis' of the couple's interactions, [she] has given us a vivid and truthful portrait of a proud and gifted woman whose contribution to Vladimir Nabokov's life and career was immense.”

—
The Boston Globe

“A sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait. Schiff's elegant prose style [is] at once forceful and playfully allusive in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“Artful … both revolutionary and old-fashioned, an intimate biography that leaves both the dignity and the privacy of its subject intact.”

—
Newsday

“Illuminating … ‘Without my wife,' Nabokov once remarked, ‘I wouldn't have written a single novel.' … Schiff's work boldly and brilliantly illuminates how complex was this deceptively simple statement … A superb portrait.”

—L
OUISE
D
ESALYO
,
The Chicago Tribune

“Absorbing, often wildly amusing, and deeply moving … Véra's mere listening to
Lolita
did more than we shall ever know to determine what we read when we read
Lolita.”

—C
LARENCE
B
ROWN
,
The Seattle Times

“Excellent … Behind every great man is a book about a great woman. The same is true of Schiff's
Véra
, and yet it is more than just a portrait of a marriage. It is a necessary contribution to Nabokov scholarship.…
Véra
is both love story and literary study.… Schiff has done a splendid job.”

—
San Jose Mercury News

“This book offers more than a peek at the famous author through his wife's eyes. When her 1991
New York Times
obit called Véra “Wife, Muse, Agent,” it only hinted at her role, which is rescued from obscurity in Schiff's graceful prose.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Stacy Schiff is phenomenally talented, her service to the Nabokovs is utterly sincere, and the resulting book is overwhelmingly gratifying. She writes sentence after sentence of such panache that you almost believe that she has been visited by the ghost of Nabokov himself.… Schiff has given us two fascinating lives for the price of one. Whether you want to know about the husband or the wife, you should make Schiff, as Véra was for Vladimir, your ‘designated driver.' ”

—
Sunday Telegraph

“Schiff writes with a lucidity and an elegance that chimes beautifully with the Nabokovian tale she has to tell.… This cool and delectable study is all the more remarkable for being a portrait of an invisible woman. Stacy Schiff has concentrated on concrete details that reveal the outline of the absent ones.… She measures Véra's impact rather as one measures the effect of gravity, or invisible particles, by their impact on distant visible bodies … [A] wonderfully acute and delicate study.”

—
The Independent

“Schiff, no mean writer herself, shows how every reader of Nabokov should be grateful to his long-suffering wife. Her superb book, a triumph of research, rhythm, and style, casts his novels in a new light.”

—
Mail on Sunday

“At heart a love story … Stacy Schiff fills in a glaring gap in the ‘wives of' portrait gallery.”

—B
RENDA
M
ADDOX
,
Literary Review

“Schiff describes the Nabokovs as ‘the ultimate portmanteau couple' and her book is something of a portmanteau, too: two biographies for the price of one and a portrait of a marriage thrown in.… This is a rich and subtle book. It is also, at times, very moving.”

—
The Times
(London)

“The Nabokovs' partnership must be one of the most tantalising double acts in literary history … a remarkable book … it is indicative of Schiff's sureness of touch that she can make fun spring from close textual reading.… Following Schiff's bold, patient construction of Véra from the fiction (of all kinds) with which she surrounded herself approaches the delight of reading a Nabokovian fiction.”

—
The Spectator

“A scholarly, readable look at a remarkable literary duo.”

—
Library Journal

“Véra has met her match in Stacy Schiff, whose biography is a model of subtle searching, and elegant scholarship. It lucidly dissects the three people involved in the Nabokov marriage: Véra, Vladimir, and their joint creation, the author VN. It makes clear that if, as Schiff proposes, Nabokov was for much of his life a ‘national treasure in search of a nation,' Véra was his anchor, his emotional and imaginative refuge, ‘the country in which he lived.' ”

—H
ILARY
S
PURLING
,
Daily Telegraph

“Engrossing and utterly romantic … [Véra] was his wife in the most complete and complicated sense of the word. Schiff's elegant prose and fanatical attention to detail establish this unequivocally.”

—
New York

“Elegant … a sensitive rendering of one of the century's great love stories. The book probes delicately into the considerable mysteries at the heart of a happy marriage.”

—W
ILL
B
LYTHE
,
Mirabella

“As much a love story as a straightforward biography … This being the Nabokovs we're talking about, though, it's also a tale of soul mates who defy conventional expectations and explanations.”

—
Salon

“The fascinating story of a modern woman who made a life-long career as her husband's intellectual companion, secretary, manager, and guardian angel.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Véra
is a beautiful book. Built on a heroic scale, it is subtle, intimate, and richly argued. Almost every page projects a truly remarkable woman and her part as a tutelary spirit in the work of a great writer. Has there ever been a literary marriage as productive, complex, and intriguing as this one?”

—J
USTIN
K
APLAN

“There are many good reasons to be interested in the life of Véra Nabokov, but the best one is that Stacy Schiff has written it. She is the rising star of literary biography: witty, lucid, penetrating, and humane.”

—J
UDITH
T
HURMAN

“Shy, perfectionist, polyglot, Véra Nabokov emerges as one of the great Russian literary wives, as crucial to her husband's work as Anna Dostoevsky or Sonya Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's triumph is that she has put in all the tones and half-tones in this shaded portrait of the brilliant writer's inspired and inspiring collaborator.”

—E
DMUND
W
HITE

“If this one were only the story of an uncommon marriage, a marriage so profound as to renew the word's meaning, it would be a book well worth reading—interesting, entertaining, smart, sad, and funny. So much the better that it is about the marriage of one of the century's most original writers and the women who made it possible indeed, necessary, for him to become that person.”

—T
RACY
K
IDDER

“I am truly in love with this book. Schiff's sentences are magnificent, deceptively complex, full of insight and fact and distance and wry humor, so that every page is a kind of mini feast. Were I a reviewer I would be straining to find words to describe this book—unlike anything I've ever read—words that are not overused and thus devalued, words like ‘exquisite' and ‘breathtaking,' which are both appropriate and true. And the detail! It is extraordinary.”

—A
NITA
S
HREVE

Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1999 by Stacy Schiff

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

This work was published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 1999

Excerpts from the previously unpublished letters of Edmund Wilson copyright © 1999 by Helen Miranda Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., on behalf of the Estate of Edmund Wilson.

Excerpts from previously unpublished Nabokov material © the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.
Reprinted with the kind permission of Dmitri Nabokov.

A portion of this work was originally published in slightly different form
in
The New Yorker
, February 19, 1997.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schiff, Stacy.
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) : portrait of a marriage / Stacy Schiff.
— Modern Library pbk. ed.
p.  cm.
Originally published: New York : Random House, 1999.
Romanized record.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78176-5
1. Nabokov, Véra. 2. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Relations with women. 3. Spouses of authors—Russia—Biography. 4. Authors, Russian—20th-century—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov.
PG3476.N3Z8626 2000
813′.54—dc21
[B]        99-42413

Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1

For Marc

Cover

Also by Stacy Schiff

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

About the Author

—T
HE
L
ISTENER
, O
CTOBER 23, 1969