The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (29 page)

In 1928, both her parents died from unrelated causes: her father from pneumonia and her mother from a heart attack. Véra, who had dutifully tended to her father while he was in the hospital, was also taking a course in German stenography. Her new skills proved invaluable: in Germany, with five million unemployed by 1930, she produced a solid second income, even with occasional jobs. With growing inflation, the majority of immigrants in Berlin became impoverished, allowing a local comedian to quip, “I’m a Russian emigrant, and so I live on air.”
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Despite their dependence on Véra’s salary, Nabokov was unhappy that she had jobs aside from being his literary helpmeet: “The typewriter does not function without Véra.”
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In 1928 she accepted a full-time position in the office of the commercial attaché at the French embassy, an envious job in the days of growing unemployment and economic instability. However, her prestigious position mattered only as a source of income and a means to finance Nabokov’s forthcoming butterfly expedition. His first butterfly trip to Greece in 1919 had left him with debts, which took a decade to pay off. In 1929, Nabokov’s second novel,
King, Queen, Knave
, came out; he profitably sold the German rights and settled his debts. With
little thought for tomorrow, Véra quit her well-paid job at the embassy to join her husband for a butterfly hunt in the Eastern Pyrénées.

Like Tolstoy, Nabokov wanted his wife to take interest in both his writing and his hobbies. But unlike Tolstoy, he was committed to his pursuits. Nabokov began to study butterflies in early childhood (a passion he shared with his father, along with chess and boxing) and by the age of nine had mastered all the European species. Véra was assistant lepidopterist to the man who would make drawings of butterflies in his letters, discover new species in France and in America, and still dream of another butterfly hunt almost on his deathbed. On her first major expedition, she was learning about the most efficient and humane way of catching them.

In February 1929, while traveling with her in the Pyrénées, Nabokov began to write his first masterpiece,
The Defense
. He was fully immersed in it when they returned that summer to Berlin with a splendid collection of butterflies. To allow her husband to write without distractions, Véra took him out to Kolberg, renting a humble cottage by the lake. Nabokov worked ten to twelve hours a day and Véra was prepared to buy land and settle in this isolated place. The couple paid a deposit, hoping to build a summer house in the near future, but two years later, they returned the lot to the vendor after discovering they could not keep up the payments. Véra took the episode lightly: she shared Nabokov’s disdain for things material. All her ambitions were invested in his writing career, for she believed he had more talent than any other writer of his generation. In August, when Nabokov completed
The Defense
, she proudly wrote her mother-in-law, “Russian literature has not seen its like.”
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The publication of
The Defense
in the October
Contemporary Annals
, a prominent Paris-based journal, enabled the Russian émigré community to celebrate the birth of a great writer who had emerged “from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile.”
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The majority of his readers had already fled Germany to France; literary cafés and publishing houses in Berlin were closed. In the fall of 1932, during highly successful public readings in Paris, Nabokov reported to Véra that they too must consider moving. She,
however, was opposed to leaving Germany, mainly because she was able to find employment in Berlin and doubted they could survive on Nabokov’s literary income. When a female fan offered Nabokov rooms in her chateau in the south of France, he wrote Véra that their move was “automatically” decided. Typically, he was more preoccupied with monitoring the butterfly season in spring 1933 than with the advance of fascism in Europe, writing his wife, “Just between us, for your ears only.… It’s important … for me to compare by the day the appearance of this or that butterfly in the eastern and the western Pyrénées.”
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He knew Véra would understand.

When in 1933 Hitler seized power and assaults on Jews, Communists, and intellectuals spilled onto the streets of Berlin, it was no longer possible to remain blind: the threat of ethnic cleansing had become real. Véra carried a handgun in her purse, which nearly got her in trouble when restrictions on personal firearms were introduced: she was on her way to the French Embassy to dispatch the pistol to Paris when her taxi was stopped by a Nazi procession.
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In March, Véra lost her secretarial position at the Jewish law firm Weil, Ganz and Dieckmann and feared that she was no longer employable. Blond, with flawless German, she, however, continued to find jobs. She was unexpectedly offered a position as a stenographer during the International Congress of Wool Producers. When she told her German employer that she was Jewish, he surprised her with, “Oh, but it does not make any difference to us. We pay no attention to such things.” Véra would laugh as she related the episode.
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Before her interview in May, she witnessed a book-burning accompanied by slogans, “German students march against the un-German spirit.”

On May 10, 1934, Véra gave birth to their only son Dmitry in a private Berlin clinic. She continued to make money almost until her delivery; her pregnancy was kept secret from most friends and even from her mother-in-law. Nabokov visited her and Dmitry in the maternity clinic near the Bayerischer Platz, where they remained for two weeks, and each time he had to walk past the portraits of Hindenburg and Hitler adorned with spring flowers.
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Upon Vera’s return from the hospital, Nabokov began a new novel,
Invitation to a Beheading
. He wrote it in “one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration.”
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The novel was prompted by the onset of dictatorships in Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s Russia. From their third-floor apartment, the couple could hear Hitler’s harangues resounding through loudspeakers: “We heard his voice.”
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True to his conviction that artistry came first, Nabokov had made little application of political content in the past. But this novel, which would become one of his best in the Russian language, was an allegory on a dictatorial state destroying an intellectual. Revising the novel, unlike writing the first draft, took months. Nabokov dictated his revisions to Véra, who resumed her responsibility as his typist and secretary one month after returning from the hospital; the couple was still working on the manuscript in December. That year brought a major development in Nabokov’s career: his London agent sold the rights to
Camera Obscura
and
Despair
to the British publisher Hutchinson.

Nabokov’s virtuoso style created serious difficulty for his translators. The German and French versions of
The Defense
did not satisfy the couple, while the English translation of
Camera Obscura
frustrated them. Nabokov translated his latest novel
Despair
into English himself, although unsure of his skills. In 1935, in search of a translator who could help with the final draft, Véra phoned the British embassy, asking whether they knew of “an experienced man of letters with a fine style.” The embassy employee quizzed her: “Would you like H. G. Wells?” Véra dismissed the irony, replying, “I might.”
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Actually, such an arrangement would have perfectly suited Nabokov, who had met Wells during his visit to Russia and admired his works at age fourteen.

Nabokov worked with great productivity, completing seven novels, short fiction, and a play in less than a decade. During these years, along with financial support, Véra assisted him in every way possible. While she stayed at home with the baby, their debts accumulated. But in 1936, she managed to find a position at the engineering firm Ruths-Speicher, where she handled foreign
correspondence. Inevitably she soon lost her job, along with other Jewish employees. The risks Véra was facing as a Jew sped up Nabokov’s search for teaching positions and contacts outside Germany. In his letters to European friends, he described his situation as desperate and was ready to grasp at a slightest prospect of work.

That year, Sergei Taboritsky, the man who had assassinated Nabokov’s father, was appointed as second in command in Hitler’s department for émigré affairs. Véra insisted that Nabokov leave Berlin immediately, and early in 1937 he left on a reading tour of Europe. While visiting Belgium, France, and England he looked for an academic job, which would help secure his family’s move.

But in Paris, Nabokov had an affair with the beautiful and divorced Irina Guadanini, a fan of his. Guilt-ridden and worried about his family in Berlin, he developed a bad case of psoriasis. In anxious letters to Véra, he asked her to speed up her departure from Berlin. On April 15, he reminded her that it was their twelfth anniversary.
“My love, my love
, how long it’s been since you’ve stood before me, and God.… And somehow one visualizes the Siamese twins being separated.”
545
Véra procrastinated as though unaware of the danger she and Dmitry faced in Nazi Germany.

During the couple’s longest separation, lasting four months, they painstakingly discussed the time and place of their reunion. Véra wanted to meet in Prague on May 8, the day of their first encounter, and applied for a Czech visa. She had promised to visit her mother-in-law with the grandson. Nabokov, reluctant to leave Irina, was hoping for a reunion in France. The exchange continued until Véra prevailed; Nabokov went to Prague, unaware that he was to meet his mother for the last time.

Véra and Dmitry, three, crossed the German border on May 6, 1937, the year the segregation of Germany’s Jews began. However, the Nabokovs were more occupied with private matters than with world events: a cooling off of their relationship made them miserable. In July, the couple moved to Cannes, where Nabokov confessed his love affair. Véra already knew about it from an anonymous letter; she coldly encouraged her husband “to join the
lady if he was in love.”
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Nabokov replied, “Not now.” He later acknowledged that his uneasy conversation with Véra made him feel as depressed as the evening his father died. In summer, the couple resumed their intimacy, and Véra began to translate
Invitation to a Beheading
into English. When Irina turned up in Cannes in September, Nabokov asked her to leave. As he had written to Véra that year, “My dear love, all the Irinas in the world are powerless.” Years later, when preparing his letters for publication, Véra added her editorial comment: “Various ladies by that name who flirted with or had designs on VN.”
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During their three years in France, the couple survived on occasional royalties from the émigré press.
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They could not get jobs without the required permanent passports. But while the Nabokovs were hard up, they escaped the fate of the majority of Russian émigrés in France, who were starving. In Paris, where the couple moved in the fall 1938, they were still quite impoverished. According to émigré writer Nina Berberova, their apartment was bare, with the exception of Dmitry’s room, which displayed an abundance of toys and a silver-painted Mercedes pedal car, which someone had given him for his second birthday.

On the floor lay toys, and a child of exceptional beauty and refinement crawled among them. Nabokov took a huge boxing glove and gave it to the boy, telling him to show me his art, and Mitya
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, having put on the glove, began with all his child’s strength to beat Nabokov about the face. I saw this was painful to Nabokov but he smiled and endured it. With a feeling of relief I left the room when this was over.
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In their small apartment, Dmitry occupied the biggest room: there he drove his Mercedes and slept, while Nabokov would write in the bathroom, placing a suitcase across the bidet. There was no money for a decent flat. Nabokov appealed to the Russian Literary Fund in the United States for financial help, describing his situation
as desperate. The Fund could only send $20, but Nabokov’s other pleas reached Sergei Rachmaninov in America. Although the two of them never met, the composer admired Nabokov’s prose and cabled him twenty-five hundred francs. In addition, Rachmaninov gave Nabokov a box of his old clothing and a suit, which the writer would wear at Stanford in 1941. The money allowed the couple to rent a larger place, where, in December 1938, Nabokov began his first novel in English,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
.

Nabokov decided to switch to English for practical reasons: he was trying to reach out to a wider audience. This inspired Véra’s remark that while Nabokov’s relationship with English had started as a marriage of convenience, it grew into “a tender love affair.” For the benefit of future biographers, she added that her remark did
not
apply to their marriage.
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His first writing attempt in English had been a biographical sketch in 1935. The
New York Times Book Review
noticed the piece and praised it generously: “Our age has been enriched by the appearance of a great writer.”
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The sketch was later reworked into his recollections
Speak, Memory
, where Nabokov employs Véra’s description of their son’s early childhood, written at his request. He weaved her account into his story and wrote it from their joint perspective:

We shall never forget, you and I, we shall forever defend, on this or some other battleground, the bridges on which we spent hours waiting with our little son (aged anything from two to six) for a train to pass below.… On cold days he wore a lambskin coat, with a similar cap, both a brownish color mottled with rime-like gray, and these, and mittens, and the fervency of his faith kept him glowing, and kept
you
warm too, since all you had to do to prevent your delicate fingers from freezing was to hold one of his hands alternately in your right and left, switching every minute or so, and marveling at the incredible amount of heat generated by a big baby’s body.
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