Vera (76 page)

“
The unravelling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind,” proclaimed Nabokov. For assistance with riddles, mysteries, and enigmas of all kinds, I should like to thank: M. H. Abrams, Robert M. Adams, Martin Amis, Svetlana Andrault de Langeron, Alfred Appel, Jr., Nina Appel, Dr. Bernard Asher, Gennady and Alla Barabtarlo, Carlo Barozzi, Marie Schebeko Biche, Patricia Blake, Robert H. Boyle, Norma Brailow, Abraham Bromberg, Josef Bromberg, Matthew J. Bruccoli, Jean Bruneau, Cyril Bryner, William F. Buckley, Jr., Richard M. Buxbaum, Jacqueline Callier, Allegra Markevitch Chapuis, Ken and Phyllis Christiansen, Gardner and Florence Clark, Gerald Clarke, Dr. Bruce Cowan, Marcantonio Crespi, Vivian Crespi, Harold and Gert Croghan, Constance Darkey, Jean-Jacques Demorest, Galya Diment, Alexander Dolinin, John C. Downey, Martha Duffy, Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, Lazar Feygin, John G. Franclemont, Helen French, Natalie Markevitch Frieden, Helmut Frielinghaus, George Gibian, Christopher F. Givan, Herbert Gold, Henry A. Grunwald, Albert Guerard, Moussya Gucassoff, Lillian Habinowski, Evan Harrar, James B. Harris, Fred Hills, Nat Hoffman, Robert C. Howes, Margaret Stephens Humpstone, Joseph S. Iseman, D. Barton Johnson, Alison Bishop Jolly, Eric Kahane, Morris and Audrey Kahn, Peter Kahn, Simon Karlinsky, Serge Karpovich, Steve Katz, Alfred Kazin, Robin Kemball, Arthur Luce Klein, Vera Kliatchkine, Jill Krementz, Mati Laanso, Dan Lacy, Robert Langbaum, Frances Lange, Sophie Lannes, James Laughlin, Dmitri Ledkovsky, Marina Ledkovsky, Richard L. Leed, Maria Leiper, Elena Levin, Alan Levy, Beverly Jane Loo, Peter Lubin, Irina Morozova Lynch, Joan Macmillan, Princess Zinaida Malewsky-Malévitch, Prince Michaël Massalsky, Niclas Massalsky, William Maxwell, Joseph Mazzeo, Beatrice MacLeod, James McConkey, William McGuire, Polly Minton, Walter and Marion Minton, Tatiana Morozoff, Jenni Moulton, Helen Muchnic,
Anne Dyer Murphy, Carl Mydans, Dominique Nabokov, Ivan Nabokoff, Peter Nabokov, Benjamin Nathans, Michaël Naumann, Nigel Nicolson, Ivan Obolensky, J. D. O'Hara, William Orndorff, Stephen Jan and Marie-Luce Parker, Louise Parry, Willa Petschek, Joan de Peterson, Rodney Phillips, Otto M. Pitcher, Ellendea Proffer, Robert M. Pyle, Charles Remington, Jean Remington, Kay Rice, Oleg Rodzianko, William W. and Eleanor Rowe, Dorothy Rudo, Robert Ruebman, Joanna Russ, Michaël Scammell, Louba Schirman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Ruth Schorer, Lore Segal, Christine Semenenko, Alain Seznec, Ruth Sharp, Ron Sheppard, Nilly and Vladimir Sikorsky, Roberta Silman, David R. Slavitt, Dorothy Staller, Saul Steinberg, Dave Stephens, Roger W. Straus, Mary Struve, Ronald Sukenick, Kitty Szeftel, Marc Szeftel, Horst Tappé, Frank Taylor, Victor Thaller, Diana Trilling, Aileen Ward, Lord George Weidenfeld, Edmund White, Herbert and Jane Wiegandt, Richard Wilbur, Galen Williams, Reuel Wilson, Rosalind Baker Wilson, Miriam Worms, Helen Yakobson, Isabella Yanovsky, Dieter Zimmer. To this list should be added Nabokov's Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell students, as well as his Harvard section men, who I hope will accept a collective expression of gratitude here. They are named individually in footnotes. I have relied especially heavily on several former students, among them Jane E. Curtis, Tanya Clyman, Edouard C. Emmet, Dorothy Gilbert, Dick Keegan, Dr. Peter Klem, Katherine Reese Peebles, Harriet Dorothy Rothschild, Pedro Sanjuan, Ross Wetzsteon.

The tiles from which Véra Nabokov's life can be reconstructed are small and my debts proportionately great, especially to the individuals who supplied correspondences, memoirs, and documents of various kinds: Dimitri Andrault de Langeron, Norma Brailow, Natalie Barosin, Mary Bellino, Lewis Dabney, Brian Gross, Lillian Habinowski, Hans Georg Heepe at Rowohlt, Glenn Horowitz, Alan Jolis, Ron Kohls at the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin, Michaël Juliar, Polly Kemp, Elena Levin, Lilla Lyon, Prince Michaël Massalsky, Dr. Doris Nagel, Inger Nielsen at the Wellesley College Alumnae Association, Albert N. Podell, Ellendea Proffer, Terry Quinn, Hélène Sikorski, Susan Strunk at the Office of Public & Congressional Affairs, FOIA Section, Lidia Tanguy, Tompkins County Clerk Aurora Valenti, William Vesterman.

The bulk of the Nabokovs' papers make their home at the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library, a researcher's heaven. In addition I am indebted to the following institutions for access to, and in many cases permission to quote from, their collections: the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College, and in particular Stanley J. Rabinowitz and Tanya Chebotarev; the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris; Kathy
Whalen, Manuscripts Librarian at the Bryn Mawr College Library; the CBC Radio Archives; the Central State Historical Archive of the City of St. Petersburg; the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University Library; Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, and above all to the peerless Phil McCray; the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, in particular Janie C. Morris; the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Institut Mémoires de l'Edition Contemporaine, Paris; the Library of Congress; Slavic and East European Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Saundra Taylor, Curator of Manuscripts, and the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, and curator Kathryn Beam; the archives of the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d'Orsay, Paris; the archives of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries; the Russian State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg; the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg; Nathalie Auerbach at the Stanford University Archives; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Tolstoy Foundation, especially Cyril Galitzin; the University of Toronto archives; the Washington University Libraries, St. Louis, Missouri; the Wellesley College Archives, where I plagued Wilma R. Slaight; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. At the Nabokov family archive in Montreux, Switzerland, Oxana Chkolnik and Béatrice Chiaradia were unfailingly helpful.

Anatolij Chayesh and Dmitri Elyashevich provided invaluable research assistance in St. Petersburg, as did Robert E. Lee, who doubled as translator.

This book could neither have been researched nor written without generous fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I owe personal thanks to many people, chief among them Harold Augenbraum, Marc de La Bruyère, David Colbert, Mary Deschamps, Dr. Orli Etinger, Joshua Karant, Mameve Medwed, Philip Milito, Gavriel Shapiro, Nikki Smith, and Peter Straus.

Brian Boyd strongly discouraged me from attempting this biography, then proceeded to assist generously with its research. For both acts of humanity he has my gratitude. His footsteps are large, and I have done my best to avoid attempting to fill them. Stephen Crook at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library should know already of my admiration and if he does not, can read of it here. He is a prince among men, which makes him emperor of archivists. I am indebted to Bob Loomis for many things, but especially for his consummate skill with a pencil. He should be grateful to two
individuals who read before him, and took half the calls that might have been rerouted in his direction: Lois Wallace, incomparable agent, and Elinor Lipman, steadfast and superior friend.

My most considerable debt is to Dmitri Nabokov, who—above and beyond opening the archives—afforded me the biographer's greatest luxury: He allowed me to torture him with questions without ever reversing the equation. From the beginning he understood perfectly why I needed not only his parents' correspondence but that 1943 grocery list, the one on which his father suggested his mother acquire a “monster pineapple.”

Notes for primary sources follow; a list of select secondary sources appears in the Bibliography,
this page
. Except where indicated, all archival materials can be found at the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Some of Nabokov's letters remain in private collections, abbreviated as PC.

Family names have been rendered as follows: VN (Vladimir Nabokov), VéN (Véra Nabokov), DN (Dmitri Nabokov), HS (Nabokov's sister Elena [Hélène] Sikorski).

Translations from the Russian are by Robert E. Lee; from the Swedish by Scott A. Mellor and Susan Brantly; from the Italian by Karina Attar; from the French by the author. Russian translations may vary slightly from previously published texts.

Nabokov's texts, and the collections in which his papers or related documents can be found, have been abbreviated as follows (unabbreviated Nabokov titles appear in all caps):

1
“There is only one”: RLSK, 111.

2
Other writers: Interview with Frank Taylor, May 17, 1995.

3
“It was as close”: Interview with William Maxwell, May 4, 1995. As Carl Proffer told Brian Boyd, “They seemed as one person.” Boyd notes of April 28, 1983, Boyd archive. Similarly, Vivian Crespi, April 5, 1995; Matthew J. Bruccoli, April 18, 1995; Herbert Gold, June 22, 1995.

4
Even her detractors: Interview with Zinaida Shakhovskoy, October 26, 1995.

5
Apologizing for the pencil: VN to his mother, January 24, 1928, VNA. VéN to Elena Levin, March 10, 1963, PC.

6
“She was just”: Interview with James Laughlin, July 27, 1995.

7
“She was the international”: Herbert Gold to author, June 19, 1995.

8
“She was the Saint”: Interview with Alfred Appel, April 19, 1995.

9
lady driver: VéN to DN, July 1, 1960, VNA.

10
credited cameo: KQK, 232.

11
“She was a Polish”: Interview with Helmut Frielinghaus, May 28, 1996.

12
Several of her husband's: Interviews with Joanna Russ, May 6, 1996 (a German princess), Marvin Shapiro, October 22, 1996 (a Russian countess), Peter Klem, September 25, 1996. French: Interview with Ivan Obolensky, May 31, 1996.

13
write around her: “There is a hole at the center of Nabokov's biography, and there always will be; it is part of the romance of his story,” concluded Boyd, after twenty-seven chapters and two thousand pages.
The Nabokovian
27 (Fall 1991), 27. See also Andrew Field,
Nabokov: His Life in Part
(New York: Viking, 1977), 180: “Without drawing a picture of Véra Evseevna myself I will say only that virtually all the printed descriptions I have read of her strike me as wholly or seriously wanting.” They could not get closer; both men were writing in her lifetime.

14
the two projects: VN diary entry, March 10, 1966, VNA.

15
“He would have been”: Interview with William Maxwell, May 4, 1995. Echoed by Beverly Loo, Louba Schirman, HS, Joseph Iseman, Vivian Crespi.

16
“the only place in America”: Alan Nordstrom,
Ivy
magazine (New Haven), February 1959.

17
lit up around his wife: Interview with Isabel Kleigman, July 27, 1996. Similarly, Dick Keegan, Herbert Gold.

18
shared a secret: Interview with Carol Levine, September 10, 1996.

19
“He was the most”: Interview with Joseph Mazzeo, January 7, 1997.

20
“Mr. Keegan”: Interview with Keegan, January 15, 1998.

21
An American admirer: Interview with Evan Harrar, August 26, 1996.

22
“Portrait of the Artist”: DESPAIR, 201.

23
“refined their marriage”: Gerald Clarke, “Checking in with Vladimir Nabokov,”
Esquire
, July 1975, 67.