The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (28 page)

Véra Nabokov: Making a Single Shadow

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fter a half century together, the Nabokovs still wondered why they hadn’t met earlier. They could have met in Petersburg as children: born only three years apart, they might have walked the same parks with their governesses. As a teenager, Véra belonged to the dance group in which Nabokov’s classmates participated and knew boys from the private Tenishev School, his alma mater.

Despite their closeness, the couple came from strikingly different backgrounds: Nabokov was born into a family of Russian aristocracy, though with a tradition of liberalism, while Véra grew up in a family of Jewish immigrants from the Mogilev area, the Belarusian Pale of Settlement, a region of Imperial Russia along the Lithuanian and Polish borders where Jews were allotted permanent residence.

Véra’s father, Evsey Lazarevich Slonim, had a law degree (he passed his bar exams with distinction); however, government
restrictions to the bar for Jews stymied his career. Though not a practicing Jew, he believed changing his religion would be dishonorable and instead switched his career, becoming a successful businessman. At thirty-four, he owned a tile business and started a family, marrying twenty-eight-year-old Slava Borisovna Feigin in 1899. Of her mother Véra gives scarce information, mentioning that she came from a Jewish merchant family in Minsk. Proud of her father, Véra called him a pioneer: he taught himself forestry, became a timber exporter, and built a railway to bring timber to the bank of the Western Dvina River. Evsey Slonim’s wealth before the Revolution allowed him to buy part of a town in Southern Russia. Véra was excited by his plan to modernize its infrastructure, hoping to participate in the grandiose project. In her teens she wanted to be an engineer and was interested in physics.
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Born on January 5, 1902, Véra was the second of three Slonim daughters growing up in Petersburg’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Though their parents’ first language was Yiddish, the daughters were taught French as their first tongue. Like noble children, Véra was brought up at home by governesses; she learned English as her second language, while Russian became her third. German was part of the curriculum at the Princess Obolensky School, an expensive private institution where she took her annual exams. A sickly child, often ill with bronchitis, a condition for which the damp Petersburg climate was responsible, Véra was believed too fragile to attend the school regularly. Her parents underestimated her vitality: she lived to be eighty-nine.

Nabokov’s parents did not spare funds in educating their oldest son. Family chauffeurs drove Nabokov to Tenishev School, to the disdain of his classmates, which he took unconcernedly. Aside from the gymnasium, Nabokov received instruction from outstanding tutors: the famous painter and designer Mstislav Dobuzhinsky gave him drawing lessons at thirteen.
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Dobuzhinsky was a great teacher—Marc Chagall was one of his students.

Véra’s family made summer trips to Europe, visiting Finland and Switzerland. Once, they stopped a few miles away from the
Montreux Palace Hotel, where Véra was to live her final years with Nabokov. Her husband-to-be frequently traveled to Europe with his parents and, at eleven, while visiting Germany, had an early taste of living in exile.

Although they were growing up during a turbulent decade, it was still possible for their propertied families to lead normal lives, even through the start of the First World War. The 1917 Revolution changed everything: the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, of which Nabokov’s father was a member. (A professor of criminology and a famous liberal, he was executive secretary of the Provisional Government.) Lenin promptly established a Bolshevik dictatorship and outlawed rival political parties. The Constitutional Assembly, Russia’s first Parliament, was also liquidated. Lenin proposed arresting the leadership of the Kadets, or Constitutional Democrats. As one of the Kadet leaders, Nabokov’s father went into hiding and escaped with his family to the Crimea in December 1917.

Véra’s family also faced gloomy prospects. The newly formed Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, had extraordinary power to arrest, investigate, and carry out sentences; tens of thousands were executed without trial in the first years after the Revolution.
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Véra’s family, however, managed to survive and keep their fortune. Véra remembered “a long nocturnal search by a band of soldiers” coming to arrest her father, who wisely did not sleep at home.
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After the incident, the family decided to flee. Slonim went alone to Kiev, apparently unaware that the city was becoming a battleground between the Reds and the Whites in the Civil War. In addition, during 1918–19, the Ukraine was ravaged by Jewish pogroms on a scale unseen before. The rest of the family took a train to Belarus to stay with relatives. Because the railways were practically paralyzed, their travel would take many days, and in the end they were rerouted south to Odessa.

On the train to Odessa, Véra had an encounter with the Petliura militia, Ukrainian nationalists responsible for some of the pogroms. When the Petliura men entered their car and began to terrorize a
Jew, Véra, just seventeen, came to his defense: “He has a right to be here. There’s no need to throw him out or threaten him.”
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Véra claimed that her conduct inspired the respect of several Petliurovets, who even escorted the family to Odessa. Whether these men knew Véra was also Jewish is unknown; nonetheless, they delivered the message to Slonim about the family’s reroute.

The Slonims managed to reunite despite the chaos of the Civil War. From Odessa, where their father found them, they headed to the Crimea, the final stronghold of the White Army. Arriving in Yalta at the end of 1919, they lived there for six months in a villa. The Crimea was another place where Véra and Nabokov could have met: he was in Livadia, a suburb of Yalta.

In March 1920, the Slonims boarded a Canadian ship to cross the Black Sea. The center of emigration was Berlin, with its low cost of living; in the early twenties it attracted half a million people from Russia. In 1921, when Véra’s family arrived in Berlin, the Nabokovs had moved there from London. Their flight from the Bolsheviks a year earlier was more dramatic: their Greek vessel
Nadezhda
, which they boarded during the retaking of the Crimea, was fired at from shore. Sitting on deck with his composed father, Nabokov played chess, a game he would later share with his wife.

Unlike many emigrants who lost their fortunes in Russia, Véra’s father had connections and recovered his wealth by selling his Russian assets to a German businessman who was betting against the permanence of the Bolsheviks. Slonim also acted as a broker for his acquaintances, helping them with similar “phantom sales.”
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Thanks to his resourcefulness, the three Slonim sisters completed their education in the finest schools in Europe. Lena, the eldest, obtained a degree in modern languages from the Sorbonne; Sonia went to a boarding school in France and later studied in Germany. Véra wanted to enter Berlin’s Technische Hochschule but was stopped by an admission requirement to take additional courses. Her father thought it was too much of a strain for the sickly Véra, despite the fact that she was strong enough to take riding lessons.

Slonim invested his capital in an import-export business, specializing in agricultural machinery; further, in 1923 he became a partner in Orbis, a publishing house, set up to produce literary classics in translation. Nabokov’s father was also a publisher in Berlin, where 150 newspapers and journals (and eighty-six publishing enterprises) were started to satisfy the demand of the cultured Russian immigrants. Véra began to work for her father’s ventures, learned to type, and was entrusted with foreign correspondence. She nearly met Nabokov when he came to Orbis to negotiate with her father a fee for translating Dostoevskys’ work. But soon the publishing house went out of business without producing a single book. In 1924, Slonim’s enterprises were ruined by the severe inflation that devastated the German economy after the Versailles Treaty, which imposed huge war reparations.

By 1923 Nabokov had attained some recognition for his poetry, which he published under a pseudonym, Sirin. Russian Berlin was a fairly small community, and the circle of intellectuals attending Nabokov’s poetry evenings even smaller. Nabokov later told his biographer that as a young man he possessed
“tremendous
charm.” Véra amended this description: “And humor. Charm and humor.”
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She had begun to esteem him as a poet even before they were acquainted, attended his readings, and clipped his publications from the liberal émigré newspaper
Rul
, which Nabokov’s father helped set up in 1920.

On May 8, 1923, Véra finally met Nabokov at a charity ball for Russian émigrés. She was wearing a black mask with a “wolf-like profile,” as he describes it in a poem,
The Encounter
. Decades later, questioned by biographers, Véra denied meeting her husband at a ball.
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It seems that she was guarding her past from becoming, in Akhmatova’s words, “a fragrant legend.” Interestingly, she does not reveal where she did meet Nabokov. Nora Joyce, on the other hand, liked to change her story of how she met her husband.
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Véra’s companionship helped fill the void that Nabokov experienced with his father’s loss. (In March 1922, Vladimir Nabokov
senior was shot during an assassination attempt on the leader of his Kadet party, Paul Milyukov, whom Nabokov shielded with his body.)

Nabokov’s letters reveal that a spiritual bond between himself and Véra was formed in a matter of months: “You came into my life and not the way a casual visitor might … but as one enters a kingdom, where all the rivers have waited for your reflection, all the roads for your footfall.”
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She was his ideal listener, as he implied in a poem of the time: “I start to talk—you answer, as if rounding off a line of verse.”
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Her translation of the parable
Silence
by Edgar Allan Poe appeared in the same issue of
Rul
as his poem. In addition, Poe enthralled Nabokov over the years.

Although the couple lived in Berlin, their values and mentality remained Russian. Like Tolstoy, who gave Sophia his intimate diary before marriage, revealing his sexual past (a story told in
Anna Karenina)
, Nabokov gave Véra his private journal, expecting her understanding. Véra, for whom the fictional episode, along with its connotations, had been known since childhood, “passed” his test. Nabokov also gave her his Don Juan list, drafted in imitation of Pushkin and containing twenty-eight real “victories.” It was his rite of entry to the world of classical literature. His contemporary émigré poets also compiled such rosters. Vladislav Khodasevich made a Don Juan list for his wife Nina Berberova, while Bunin wanted to enumerate “lost opportunities.”
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Véra’s future role became apparent to Nabokov in 1924: he dreamed that he was playing the piano while she turned the pages. It was an incredible dream, since Nabokov was musically deaf and bored by Tchaikovsky’s operas, but it augured a perfect marriage. He wrote Véra, “You and I are entirely special; such wonders as we know, no one else knows, and nobody loves the
way
we love.”
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By then, Véra was typing his short stories and, after publishing a few more translations, had ended her independent literary activity.

On April 15, 1925, after two years of courtship, the couple registered their marriage in a civil ceremony at the Berlin town hall. Theirs was a discreet wedding: Véra chose two distant acquaintances
as witnesses. The same day, while they were dining at her parents’ place, she casually told her mother, “By the way, we got married this morning.”
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The couple could not afford a celebration: Véra’s father was bankrupt and Nabokov’s widowed mother lived on a pension in Prague. Nabokov himself had only enough money to pay for the ceremony and could not even tip the doorman who congratulated the newlyweds as they were leaving the town hall.

Over the next decade they struggled with poverty, living in cheap apartments. An insomniac, Nabokov wrote at night; during the day, he taught languages, boxing, tennis, and fencing. Véra gave English lessons, collaborated with her husband in translating, and assisted with his other projects taken on for the money. She contributed, for example, to a Russian textbook for Germans and collaborated with him on a Russian-French and a Russian-German dictionary. They were resourceful, as she pointed out: “We always had the possibility of earning more money, had we wanted to put more of our time into earning it.”
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They actually dreamed of a time when their independence could be sustained through Nabokov’s literary work.

Despite privation, Véra was supportive of Nabokov’s writing, as were her parents. Nabokov was delighted to earn his father-in-law’s acceptance when he revealed, over chess, that writing was most important to him. Understanding that writing was worth the shared sacrifice was typically Russian. In a letter to his sister Elena the year he married, Nabokov revealed he expected his beloved to merge with him into a single entity: “In love you must be Siamese twins, where one sneezes when the other sniffs tobacco.”
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Véra watched Nabokov grow into a prose writer: in winter 1925, she typed his first novel
Mary
, along with revisions. Like Tolstoy, Nabokov was an ardent reviser, having remarked that he was prepared “to undergo Chinese torture for the discovery of a single epithet.”
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He took Véra’s technical help for granted: his mother had copied everything he wrote in his youth.

Yuli Aikhenvald, a friend of Nabokov and a reputable literary scholar, was quick to certify Véra as the perfect guide on her
husband’s “poetic path.”
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Aikhenvald was already an expert on Russian literary wives: in 1925, he had edited and introduced a famous compilation,
The Two Wives
, with excerpts from Sophia Tolstoy’s and Anna Dostoevskys’ autobiographies. Whether Véra read it at the time, she undoubtedly knew about these women’s contributions and was herself beginning to play an important role in Nabokov’s career. Decades later, he admitted that she “presided as adviser and judge” over his early fiction. “I have read to her all my stories and novels at least once; and she has reread them all when typing them.”
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Previously, only two people had occupied such a prominent place in Nabokov’s writing career—his parents. Five years into their marriage, while writing
Glory
, he read his chapters to Véra every night. During the day, she worked at a law firm, handling correspondence and stenographic assignments in English, French, and German.