Subject
Re: Nabokov and Vera
From
Date
Body
*Jansy Mello* posted this romantic and convincing blurb, and I very much
enjoyed reading it (it's from, it says at the link, "*Paris Review*
contributor *Lauren Acampora* tells the story behind the love of Vladimir
Nabokov <http://www.brainpickings.org/tag/vladimir-nabokov/>‘s life,
thickly entwined with his momentous contribution to the literary canon:").
I suppose we all set it beside, or at least call to mind, the more complex
version accounted in Stacy Schiff's *Vera* and the widely varying responses
to the Nabokov marriage and various narratives of artist and muse, based on
that marvelous book (more varying responses than those quoted below, but
the richness is conveyed).
All in all a rather interesting set of prisms through which to read and
think VN.
http://stacyschiff.com/vera-mrs-vladimir-nabokov.html
*Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage*
[image: Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff]
- Random House
- 1999
- *Winner of the Pulitzer Prize*
- Buy online <http://stacyschiff.com/buy-books-by-stacy-schiff.html>
- Order a signed copy
<http://stacyschiff.com/order-signed-books-by-stacy-schiff.html>
"Without my wife," Vladimir Nabokov once noted, "I wouldn't have written a
single novel."
At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a
riddle, *Véra
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)* explores a remarkable literary partnership—that of
a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated
his works to his wife. Open a volume of Nabokov's, and there is Véra on the
dedication page, front and center. But search for her elsewhere, and the
woman to whom the author of Lolita was married for fifty-two years, who
carried on his correspondence in his name, fades from view.
In a beautifully limned portrait, Stacy Schiff has now restored her to
life. Schiff follows Véra Nabokov from her affluent St. Petersburg
childhood, through the dramatic escape from Bolshevik Russia, to the
streets of Weimar Berlin, where Véra makes a spectacular entrance into the
life of her future husband, then a gifted but struggling writer of Russian
verse. In the three decades that pass before he metamorphoses into the
celebrated author of *Lolita*, Véra proves to be nothing less than his full
creative partner. She had a need to do something great with her life. And
as he made clear from the start, her husband had a very great need of her.
Publishers, relatives, colleagues, agreed: "He would have been nowhere
without her." This Nabokov well realized, acutely so when the marriage
nearly foundered in the late 1930s.
In Berlin until a hair-raisingly late 1938, Véra supported the family. At
Cornell, she attended every one of her husband's lectures, replacing him
when he was sick. She drove the Oldsmobile in the back seat of which he
composed *Lolita*; she was the woman who stayed in all of Humbert Humbert's
motel rooms. She plucked the manuscript of that novel from the flames to
which its author attempted to sacrifice it, commanding, "We are keeping
this."
She proved no less steely when negotiating a publishing contract. She
transcribed her memories of their son's early days so that Nabokov could
draw on them for *Speak, Memory*. She was at all times his first reader,
his memory, his foil, his muse. She corrected his stories in German, his
memoir in French, his poetry in Italian—and translated *Pale Fire* into
Russian when in her eighties. Through it all, she proved a woman of uncanny
wisdom, a conventional wife with a splendidly unconventional mind. Largely
because of her, the hallmarks of Nabokov's fiction—the doppelgängers, the
impersonators, the Siamese twins, the mirror images, the distorted mirror
images, the parodies of self—came to manifest themselves in the routine the
couple developed for dealing with the world.
Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Vladimir's diaries
and his letters to Véra, Stacy Schiff paints a discerning portrait of an
elusive couple. Hers is a startlingly different image of the great writer,
remembered best for his pronouncements and posturing. And she gives center
stage to the disarming woman who was so much at the heart of it all, whose
influence came so much to bear on the literature. In a narrative that
combines superb scholarship with elegant prose, she offers up the crucial,
missing piece of the Nabokov story.
Reviews and Praise
"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." — *Judith
Thurman*
"*Véra* is an astonishingly fine book—a tale told with wit and elegance, a
tale that succeeds in encompassing both the intimacy of a marriage and the
sweep of history...I'm in awe of Stacy Schiff's talent." — *Jonathan Harr*
"*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 tutelary spirit in the work of a great writer. Has
there ever been a literary marriage so productive, complex, and intriguing
as this one?" — *Justin Kaplan*
"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." — *Anita Shreve*
"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 biography—a challenge that Ms. Schiff, with this book, has
most persuasively met." — *Michiko Kakutani*, *The New York Times*
"An absorbing story, illuminated by Schiff's flair for the succinct
insight...This portrait of a fifty-two-year marriage to a woman who was teh
writer's prime reader open 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." — *Lyndall Gordon*, *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." — *The Los Angeles Times*
"Artful...both revolutionary and old-fashioned, an intimate biography that
leaves both the imagination 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." — *Louise
DeSalvo*, *The Chicago Tribune*
Barrie Karp
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 4:19 PM, Jansy Mello <jansy.mello@outlook.com>
wrote:
>
> *The Most Generous Book in the World: An Illustrated Celebration of the
> Little-Known Sidekicks Behind Creative Geniuses
> <http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/22/who-what-when-rothman-book/>*
>
> *by **Maria Popova <http://www.brainpickings.org/author/mpopova/>*
>
> *A heartening homage to the wives, mothers, brothers, benefactors, and
> other quiet champions behind some of history’s most lebrated geniuses.*
>
> http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/22/who-what-when-rothman-book/
>
>
>
>
>
> [image:
> http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/whowhatwhen_rothman2.jpg]
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1452128278/braipick-20>
>
> *Véra Nabokov, 1902–1991; art by Thomas Doyle*
>
> Many of these electrifying batteries of support spring from great romances.*Paris
> Review* contributor *Lauren Acampora* tells the story behind the love ofVladimir
> Nabokov <http://www.brainpickings.org/tag/vladimir-nabokov/>‘s life,
> thickly entwined with his momentous contribution to the literary canon:
>
> Their first meeting in 1923 was the stuff of legend: She wore a black
> satin mask on a bridge in Berlin and recited his own poetry to him. From
> that moment, the young writer Vladimir Nabokov felt that Véra Slonim was
> destined to share his life. In one of the passionate letters of their
> courtship, he wrote, “It’s as if in your soul there is a preprepared spot
> for every one of my thoughts.” For the next fifty-four years, he was nearly
> inseparable from the brilliant, elegant, and self-effacing woman who became
> Mrs. Nabokov.
>
> Over the half-century that followed, Véra Nabokov dedicated her life to
> bolstering her husband’s genius, in which she believed resolutely and which
> she felt honored to nurture and protect — rumor even has it that she
> carried a handgun in her purse to protect her husband from assassination at
> his public appearances, which sounds decidedly less implausible given Véra
> learned to shoot an automatic weapon as a teenager and was allegedly
> involved in an assassination plot against a Soviet despot.
>
> Acampora writes:
>
> Among her many roles, Véra was amanuensis, translator, chief
> correspondent, teaching assistant, literary agent, chauffeur, Scrabble
> partner, and butterfly-catching companion. She was the first reader of all
> her husband’s works, as well as critic, editor, and inspiration. Many
> suspected she had a hand in the writing itself; some believed Véra was the
> true author.
>
> Whether or not Véra authored any of the work will forever remain a matter
> of speculation, but she did save her husband’s magnum opus from destruction
> on several occasions when, exasperated by its narrow-minded reception
> <http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/24/lolitigation-nabokov-censorship/>,
> he attempted to burn *Lolita*. She was the first reader of all his work
> and his lifelong inspiration. The inscription on every single one of his
> novels reads, simply, “To Véra.” So intense was their psychic bond that
> they even shared the uncommon neurological condition synesthesia
> <http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/05/daniel-tammet-thinking-in-numbers/>.
> When Nabokov’s obituary stated that “their dedication to each other was
> total,” it was a statement of simple fact rather than bombast.
>
>
> Google Search
> <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&hl=en%0A>
> the archive
> <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&hl=en%0A>
> Contact <nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu>
> the Editors <nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> NOJ
> <http://www.nabokovonline.com> Zembla
> <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> Nabokv-L
> <http://web.utk.edu/%7Esblackwe/EDNote.htm>
> Policies <http://web.utk.edu/%7Esblackwe/EDNote.htm> Subscription options
> <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L> AdaOnline
> <http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/> NSJ Ada Annotations
> <http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html> L-Soft Search the archive
> <https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L> VN Bibliography
> Blog <http://vnbiblio.com/>
>
> All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.
>
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L
enjoyed reading it (it's from, it says at the link, "*Paris Review*
contributor *Lauren Acampora* tells the story behind the love of Vladimir
Nabokov <http://www.brainpickings.org/tag/vladimir-nabokov/>‘s life,
thickly entwined with his momentous contribution to the literary canon:").
I suppose we all set it beside, or at least call to mind, the more complex
version accounted in Stacy Schiff's *Vera* and the widely varying responses
to the Nabokov marriage and various narratives of artist and muse, based on
that marvelous book (more varying responses than those quoted below, but
the richness is conveyed).
All in all a rather interesting set of prisms through which to read and
think VN.
http://stacyschiff.com/vera-mrs-vladimir-nabokov.html
*Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage*
[image: Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff]
- Random House
- 1999
- *Winner of the Pulitzer Prize*
- Buy online <http://stacyschiff.com/buy-books-by-stacy-schiff.html>
- Order a signed copy
<http://stacyschiff.com/order-signed-books-by-stacy-schiff.html>
"Without my wife," Vladimir Nabokov once noted, "I wouldn't have written a
single novel."
At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a
riddle, *Véra
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)* explores a remarkable literary partnership—that of
a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated
his works to his wife. Open a volume of Nabokov's, and there is Véra on the
dedication page, front and center. But search for her elsewhere, and the
woman to whom the author of Lolita was married for fifty-two years, who
carried on his correspondence in his name, fades from view.
In a beautifully limned portrait, Stacy Schiff has now restored her to
life. Schiff follows Véra Nabokov from her affluent St. Petersburg
childhood, through the dramatic escape from Bolshevik Russia, to the
streets of Weimar Berlin, where Véra makes a spectacular entrance into the
life of her future husband, then a gifted but struggling writer of Russian
verse. In the three decades that pass before he metamorphoses into the
celebrated author of *Lolita*, Véra proves to be nothing less than his full
creative partner. She had a need to do something great with her life. And
as he made clear from the start, her husband had a very great need of her.
Publishers, relatives, colleagues, agreed: "He would have been nowhere
without her." This Nabokov well realized, acutely so when the marriage
nearly foundered in the late 1930s.
In Berlin until a hair-raisingly late 1938, Véra supported the family. At
Cornell, she attended every one of her husband's lectures, replacing him
when he was sick. She drove the Oldsmobile in the back seat of which he
composed *Lolita*; she was the woman who stayed in all of Humbert Humbert's
motel rooms. She plucked the manuscript of that novel from the flames to
which its author attempted to sacrifice it, commanding, "We are keeping
this."
She proved no less steely when negotiating a publishing contract. She
transcribed her memories of their son's early days so that Nabokov could
draw on them for *Speak, Memory*. She was at all times his first reader,
his memory, his foil, his muse. She corrected his stories in German, his
memoir in French, his poetry in Italian—and translated *Pale Fire* into
Russian when in her eighties. Through it all, she proved a woman of uncanny
wisdom, a conventional wife with a splendidly unconventional mind. Largely
because of her, the hallmarks of Nabokov's fiction—the doppelgängers, the
impersonators, the Siamese twins, the mirror images, the distorted mirror
images, the parodies of self—came to manifest themselves in the routine the
couple developed for dealing with the world.
Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Vladimir's diaries
and his letters to Véra, Stacy Schiff paints a discerning portrait of an
elusive couple. Hers is a startlingly different image of the great writer,
remembered best for his pronouncements and posturing. And she gives center
stage to the disarming woman who was so much at the heart of it all, whose
influence came so much to bear on the literature. In a narrative that
combines superb scholarship with elegant prose, she offers up the crucial,
missing piece of the Nabokov story.
Reviews and Praise
"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." — *Judith
Thurman*
"*Véra* is an astonishingly fine book—a tale told with wit and elegance, a
tale that succeeds in encompassing both the intimacy of a marriage and the
sweep of history...I'm in awe of Stacy Schiff's talent." — *Jonathan Harr*
"*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 tutelary spirit in the work of a great writer. Has
there ever been a literary marriage so productive, complex, and intriguing
as this one?" — *Justin Kaplan*
"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." — *Anita Shreve*
"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 biography—a challenge that Ms. Schiff, with this book, has
most persuasively met." — *Michiko Kakutani*, *The New York Times*
"An absorbing story, illuminated by Schiff's flair for the succinct
insight...This portrait of a fifty-two-year marriage to a woman who was teh
writer's prime reader open 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." — *Lyndall Gordon*, *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." — *The Los Angeles Times*
"Artful...both revolutionary and old-fashioned, an intimate biography that
leaves both the imagination 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." — *Louise
DeSalvo*, *The Chicago Tribune*
Barrie Karp
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 4:19 PM, Jansy Mello <jansy.mello@outlook.com>
wrote:
>
> *The Most Generous Book in the World: An Illustrated Celebration of the
> Little-Known Sidekicks Behind Creative Geniuses
> <http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/22/who-what-when-rothman-book/>*
>
> *by **Maria Popova <http://www.brainpickings.org/author/mpopova/>*
>
> *A heartening homage to the wives, mothers, brothers, benefactors, and
> other quiet champions behind some of history’s most lebrated geniuses.*
>
> http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/22/who-what-when-rothman-book/
>
>
>
>
>
> [image:
> http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/whowhatwhen_rothman2.jpg]
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1452128278/braipick-20>
>
> *Véra Nabokov, 1902–1991; art by Thomas Doyle*
>
> Many of these electrifying batteries of support spring from great romances.*Paris
> Review* contributor *Lauren Acampora* tells the story behind the love ofVladimir
> Nabokov <http://www.brainpickings.org/tag/vladimir-nabokov/>‘s life,
> thickly entwined with his momentous contribution to the literary canon:
>
> Their first meeting in 1923 was the stuff of legend: She wore a black
> satin mask on a bridge in Berlin and recited his own poetry to him. From
> that moment, the young writer Vladimir Nabokov felt that Véra Slonim was
> destined to share his life. In one of the passionate letters of their
> courtship, he wrote, “It’s as if in your soul there is a preprepared spot
> for every one of my thoughts.” For the next fifty-four years, he was nearly
> inseparable from the brilliant, elegant, and self-effacing woman who became
> Mrs. Nabokov.
>
> Over the half-century that followed, Véra Nabokov dedicated her life to
> bolstering her husband’s genius, in which she believed resolutely and which
> she felt honored to nurture and protect — rumor even has it that she
> carried a handgun in her purse to protect her husband from assassination at
> his public appearances, which sounds decidedly less implausible given Véra
> learned to shoot an automatic weapon as a teenager and was allegedly
> involved in an assassination plot against a Soviet despot.
>
> Acampora writes:
>
> Among her many roles, Véra was amanuensis, translator, chief
> correspondent, teaching assistant, literary agent, chauffeur, Scrabble
> partner, and butterfly-catching companion. She was the first reader of all
> her husband’s works, as well as critic, editor, and inspiration. Many
> suspected she had a hand in the writing itself; some believed Véra was the
> true author.
>
> Whether or not Véra authored any of the work will forever remain a matter
> of speculation, but she did save her husband’s magnum opus from destruction
> on several occasions when, exasperated by its narrow-minded reception
> <http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/24/lolitigation-nabokov-censorship/>,
> he attempted to burn *Lolita*. She was the first reader of all his work
> and his lifelong inspiration. The inscription on every single one of his
> novels reads, simply, “To Véra.” So intense was their psychic bond that
> they even shared the uncommon neurological condition synesthesia
> <http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/05/daniel-tammet-thinking-in-numbers/>.
> When Nabokov’s obituary stated that “their dedication to each other was
> total,” it was a statement of simple fact rather than bombast.
>
>
> Google Search
> <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&hl=en%0A>
> the archive
> <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&hl=en%0A>
> Contact <nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu>
> the Editors <nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> NOJ
> <http://www.nabokovonline.com> Zembla
> <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> Nabokv-L
> <http://web.utk.edu/%7Esblackwe/EDNote.htm>
> Policies <http://web.utk.edu/%7Esblackwe/EDNote.htm> Subscription options
> <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L> AdaOnline
> <http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/> NSJ Ada Annotations
> <http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html> L-Soft Search the archive
> <https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L> VN Bibliography
> Blog <http://vnbiblio.com/>
>
> All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.
>
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L
