Vera (12 page)

At the top of Nabokov's list, of course, came the typing. With Clare in
Sebastian Knight
, Véra was virtually alone in seeing “
the uncouth manuscript
flaunting its imperfections.” Nabokov was an ardent corrector, and Véra typed and typed, beginning with the short stories in the fall of 1923, on to
Mary
in 1924, by way of stories, plays, and poems, to
King, Queen, Knave
in 1928, nearly every page her husband wrote until 1961. She worked from his dictation, setting down the works, in their final form, in triplicate. How complicit was she in the actual writing? She was more than a typist, less than a collaborator. “
She presided as adviser and judge over the making of my first fiction in the early twenties. I have read to her all my stories and novels at least twice; and she has reread them all when typing them,” Nabokov asserted later. Small wonder she knew the bulk of them by heart. The words were entirely his, but she was their first reader, smoothing the prose when it was “
still warm and wet.” When scholars questioned the arrangement she
shrugged off any active involvement, even when the handwriting is on the page. She could only have been transcribing her husband's comments, she insisted. On a mechanical level she corrected his spelling and usage; as she put it, he “was very absentminded in what concerned grammar” when composing a book.

It is all the same difficult not to picture Véra as
Sebastian Knight's
Clare, lifting the edge of a page in the typewriter and declaring, “ ‘
No, my dear. You can't say it so in English.'…‘There is no other way of expressing it,' he would mutter at last. ‘And if for instance,' she would say—and then an exact suggestion would follow.” It is even more difficult to separate Clare from Véra when Véra's other close fictional counterpart can be heard in a Berlin Café, eyes lowered, head propped on an elbow, listening to what Fyodor has written that day: “ ‘
Wonderful, but I'm not sure you can say it like that in Russian,' said Zina sometimes, and after an argument he would correct the expression she had questioned.”
^*
Zina shares with Véra the same precision in her use of language; she officiates equally “as a regulator, if not a guide.” It is perhaps not necessary to extricate Véra from Zina and Clare at all when some thirty years later, as if quoting from his own fiction, Nabokov described his wife's role in his literary life in nearly identical words.
^†

Did Véra appear in the work, each Nabokov was asked at different
times? “
Most of my works have been dedicated to my wife and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflected color in the inner mirrors of my books,” declared Vladimir. He said refractions, she said they're fictions; so far as Véra was concerned, no trace of her likeness was to be found anywhere in her husband's pages. In “Sounds,” a short story of September 1923, Nabokov introduces for the first time a
radiant, delicate, thin-wristed woman with pale, dusty-looking eyes, translucent, blue-veined skin, and hair that melts in the sunlight. (The story is autobiographical, but the woman on whom it is based—a brown-haired cousin of Nabokov's named Tatiana Segelkranz—does not answer to that description.) That physical description applies as well to Zina, into whose surname Nabokov built
some of the shimmer he associated with his wife. And it applies equally to the Véra of Nabokov's letters. Aside from the acknowledged cameo appearance in
King, Queen, Knave
(in which the Véra double has gray-blue eyes and pale hair and speaks with animation)—and a little premonition of that appearance, in “A Nursery Tale,” a story Nabokov read aloud to her father—Véra makes no entrances as herself in the work. Ultimately it is not her image but her influence that hovers over the page; she was more muse than model. The fictional description of the early years that truly conjures up Véra is that of the reader gifted with perfect understanding:

It was most prominently in this respect that she left her mark on the fiction. She fully participated in the making of the literature in that the one highly discriminating person on the receiving end became a part of the tale for Nabokov; Véra was in this sense a little bit a character in search of an author. “
She and I are my best audience,” Nabokov declared with a rolling chuckle in 1966. “I should say my main audience.”
Friends felt she was the only audience he needed.

In the early days Véra constituted a large portion of her husband's entire audience. By the early 1930s, when his star as a prose writer had risen, the Russian community in Berlin had dwindled to about thirty thousand people. It was virtually impossible for most young writers to make a living, much less to do so while attending to their talent. For those who continued to write, the
rewards were few, the infighting proportionately great. Accusations of illiteracy abounded. The clamoring to publish remained keen, so much so that even the innately generous littérateur might find his virtue sorely tested: “
To get into literature is like squeezing into an overcrowded trolley car. And once inside, you do your best to push off any new arrival who tries to hang on,” complained one compatriot, who displayed a sharp set of elbows where Nabokov was concerned. This is to some extent always true, but it was spectacularly so in the emigration; communities in exile are not renowned for their generosity of spirit. And in this case the desperation, the bitterness, was enhanced by the fact that the usual compensations of publishing were missing. The writers were in Europe, the readers in Soviet Russia. As V. S. Yanovsky noted, “
Reviews were considered the ultimate reward, since the higher authority, the reader, was missing!” Books were issued in printings of eight hundred to fifteen hundred copies, though the latter figure was generally reserved only for Ivan Bunin, who enjoyed Olympian stature among the émigrés well before he claimed his Nobel Prize. The total print run of
Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Annals
), the best émigré review, in Paris, was no more than a thousand copies. Nor were things much better in Soviet Russia.
One writer calculated that in order to survive in Petrograd at the time, Shakespeare would have had to turn out three plays a month. At least there a Russian writer would have had an audience.

Nabokov insisted that he had never expected writing to be a source of income; given the climate in which he began his career, this amounted to nothing so much as a glorious concession to reality. Furthermore the Nabokovs fell into a cultural bind. The more Europeanized Russians acutely felt their Russianness in Germany; at the same time they felt anything but Soviet. On a good day Vladimir praised this state of affairs. He claimed to keep his distance from the despicable spirit of the emigration, reveling in his “
almost idyllic isolation.” He described his world as one of discomfort, loneliness, and “quiet, inner merriment.” Later he based his qualified admiration for
Emily Dickinson on the fact that she had managed to create in double isolation: once from people, again from the ideas of her time. Véra said nothing about discomfort or loneliness or merriment. But for her it became a point of honor that her husband's gift had developed in a near-vacuum. She
essentially congratulated those who recognized as much.

Nabokov was so huge and protean a presence on the page that he left little room for those who might attach themselves to the literature. He never tired of telling his reader how he was to be read; the man who believed in the supremacy of the individual was a benevolent (sometimes not so benevolent) dictator in his prefaces. He insinuated himself everywhere. He could occupy
the footnotes
(Pale Fire);
supply his own review (the long-unpublished last chapter of
Speak, Memory);
parody his flap copy
(Ada);
affix a fictional foreword
(Lolita);
respond to his editor's qualms in an afterword
(Nikolai Gogol);
offer up a misleading genealogical tree (Ada again); displace even the well-meaning editor who might affix a list of his previous titles to the front matter of a novel
(Look at the Harlequins!
). There was no textual apparatus from which he failed merrily to swing. By definition, only an intrepid reader was going to be able to meet him on his own ground. Here Véra's pluck, her proud sense of intellectual independence, served her well. “
The people I invite to my feasts must have stomachs as strong as wineskins, and not ask for a glass of Beaujolais when I offer them a barrel of Château Latour d'Ivoire,” the older Nabokov boasted. The younger Nabokov was not quite so self-assured in regard to his art—he was more sensitive both to praise and criticism than he liked later to admit—but knew already that he was looking for an intrepid reader. Of Clare he would write: “
She had imagination—the muscle of the soul—and her image was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality.” He evidently feared Véra would have difficulty stomaching only one small selection of his work, a collection of
erotic poems, few of which he shared with her. Otherwise she brought to the literary front the nerves of steel she had brought to that train in the Ukraine.

Her audacity was soon legendary in the Russian community, in no way diminished by the fact that she carried a pistol in Berlin. Most likely it was a Browning 1900. This was not entirely unusual at the time—the city was overrun by snipers and pickpockets in the wake of the hyperinflation—but Véra had acquired the pistol earlier, and had fully intended to use it.
^*
“
Were you really practicing shooting in order to kill Trotsky?” asked a friend, years later. “Well, yes, I'm afraid I was,” confessed an amused Mrs. Nabokov, who was not yet Mrs. Nabokov at the time. She was proud to admit she was a crack shot; she claimed to be every bit as fine a marksman as her teacher,
a Berlin champion. To select interviewers she confirmed that in the early 1920s she had been involved in an
assassination plot, which most understood to have been aimed at Trotsky, a few to have been focused on the Soviet ambassador. She may have been inspired by—in any case she was not daunted by—the suicide mission of Fannie Kaplan, a fearless young Russian Jew who had fired her Browning three times at the well-protected Lenin in 1918, and who had been executed for the attempt. There can be little question that Véra Slonim harboured
similar aspirations, which found their way into a poem Nabokov composed months after meeting her: “
I know, with certainty / that in that lacquered purse of yours / —nestled against powder case and mirror / sleeps a black stone; seven deaths.”
^*
He went on to imagine her waiting silently in a doorway for her victim to emerge, buttoning his coat. Poetically his concern is not that the assassin exposes herself to a grave danger but that her mortal business might induce her to forget him and “all these, my idle songs.”

There was little cause for alarm. Within the next four years a very different tribute was written to Véra's derring-do. Yuly Aikhenvald, one of the elder statesmen in the emigration, was quick to applaud Nabokov's talent; he recommended the young Sirin to both Nina Berberova and Vladislav Khodasevich. A gentle and much respected man, Aikhenvald was equally quick to notice Sirin's valorous second. In the first years of the Nabokovs' marriage, he composed a poem titled “Véra:” “
Fragile, tender and precious, / like human porcelain / But the strength of her will is undeniable / And stern are her judgements against the base.” Under her “tranquil shroud” he could sense the stirrings of a sacrificial deed. The one he had in mind was not on the order of an assassination attempt, or even of the senseless feat that Martin performs in
Glory
, the sort of mission of which Nabokov admitted he dreamed during these years, when “The Romantic Age” seemed an appropriate title for that novel. This act of heroism was equally self-immolating. Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on “the poetic path.” She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: “
Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said ‘Verochka.' It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit.”

Véra's resourcefulness stood her in good stead in 1928, when her husband was at work on his second novel. Late in 1927 her father had fallen ill with what he believed after a few months to be malaria. Vladimir was “
in the full bloom of my literary strengths” in the spring, turning out manuscript pages at a steady clip. Véra fortified him with a special concoction of eggs, cocoa, orange juice, and red wine, but could do little for Evsei Slonim, whose health continued to deteriorate. Eleven chapters into
King, Queen, Knave
, Nabokov
grumbled that “the typewriter doesn't function without Véra,” who was exhausted from caring for her father. Sixty-three-year-old Slonim was installed in a sanitarium, where Véra appears to have been the daughter elected to look after him. She spent every other evening at his bedside. His health did not improve, and he died—of sepsis resulting from bronchopneumonia—on the afternoon of June 28, 1928. Véra, who somehow wound up on the
death records as his wife, was responsible for the burial. (Sonia was living and working in Paris. A technical translator for a steel concern, Lena was in Berlin, but the arrangements fell to Véra.) Two days later an obituary ran in
Rul
, which—even allowing for the exaggerated tone of Russian obituaries—draws a picture consistent with the rest of the evidence, of a man of great personal dignity, distinguished by “
his readiness to ignore his own needs for the sake of others, to deny himself anything in order to make others happy.” Nabokov was busy putting the finishing touches on
King, Queen, Knave
, a chilly, beautifully observed novel about an ill-fated love triangle; Véra was distracted in her grief by her mother, who had spent a certain amount of time at sanitariums and was ill throughout much of the year. On August 17, a week shy of her fifty-sixth birthday and after a brief hospital stay, Slava Slonim too died, of a heart attack. Five days later she was buried in the Jewish cemetery, alongside the husband from whom she had been separated. Anna Feigin signed for the burial.