The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (32 page)

In 1960, recovering from another promotional trip to Europe, Véra admitted to a friend, “Nomadic life is a wonderful thing—for a time. Then it becomes something of a strain. I am well qualified to say so after some forty-five years of it. However, we still remain ‘homeless.’”
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When Nabokov began to yearn for an opportunity to write in peace, Véra left society without regret. In 1961 the couple decided to choose “fruitful isolation in Switzerland,”
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where Nabokov’s sister Elena lived. Dmitry, who wanted to become an opera singer, was studying voice in Milan, across the Alps.

The town of Montreux, with its gorgeous view of the mountains and Lake Geneva, offered numerous butterfly expeditions and was perfect for Nabokov’s writing. Having no heart for housekeeping and owning things, the couple settled in the Hotel Montreux Palace. In this earthly paradise, the Nabokovs’ routine included work, meals, baths, games, and walks by the lake. They were immersed in their private business of creating, printing, correcting, translating, and admiring the works produced by “V&V, Inc.,” as Véra jokingly referred to their business.

She remarked that her husband “had the good taste” to keep her out of his books. Both defended their marriage from onlookers. Nabokov was annoyed when critics speculated about autobiography in his works. In 1969, when his new novel,
Ada
, created a stir, Nabokov demanded an apology from a reviewer who implied that Véra was his lewd heroine: “What the hell, Sir, do you know about my married life?”
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Véra was known to be more private than Nabokov. She disliked even innocuous questions about her life. When publishers Carl and Ellendea Proffer asked her where she had met Nabokov, Véra quipped, “Are you from the KGB?”
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In the 1960s, the stream of interviewers, photographers, and reporters to Montreux turned their retreat into “some miserable Yasnaya Polyana” of Tolstoy’s final years when his estate was besieged by followers. But the Nabokovs lived and worked in perfect harmony, as the writer himself described it, “in the warmest and most
candid friendship.”
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Impressed with their relationship, Nabokov’s editor, Bart Winer, remarked, “When you were in their presence the love flowing from one to another was the most extraordinary thing. I’ve never seen love like that before.”
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Véra’s contribution to Nabokov’s career was inestimable and he described it in a metaphor: “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.”
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Nabokov praised her sense of humor and perfect pitch for his ideas: “She and I are my best audience … I should say my main audience.”
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Filippa Rolf, who had become friends with the Nabokovs and was now studying at Cambridge, visited the couple, providing another metaphor for their marriage: “They are mating like butterflies behind any bush right in the middle of the conversation, and they separate so quickly that one doesn’t notice until later.”
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When Rolf talked about her favorite scenes in
Lolita
, Véra proceeded to quote them from memory, revealing that she knew her husband’s works by heart.

In 1964, launching four volumes of translation and commentaries for
Eugene Onegin
on which they had collaborated for over a decade, the couple traveled to America. Véra suffered severe abdominal pain throughout the trip but stoically concealed it during the publisher’s reception; she underwent an appendectomy after the festivities. Three years later, she traveled alone to New York when McGraw-Hill offered Nabokov a contract for $250,000 to produce all his books. She traveled by air, an additional worry for Nabokov, who wrote her, “I was dealt a hellish blow by your departure.”
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In her absence, Nabokov’s sister, Elena, a librarian in Geneva, came to keep him company.

The couple rarely parted even for a day and had matching dreams. In November 1964, Nabokov wrote in his journal that they had both dreamed of revolutionary turmoil in Russia on the same night. Nonetheless, Véra told biographer Andrew Field, who had begun collecting information in the 1960s, “We are very
different, you know. Very different.” When Field reminded her that she had previously told him they were “exactly alike,” Véra turned to Nabokov: “Is he a behaviorist, darling?” They were “exactly alike in one or two respects,” she clarified.
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An interviewer from an Israeli magazine thought the Nabokovs talked like “two famous mature actors, aware of their own importance.” Véra’s beauty also caught his eye:

Véra is one of the most impressive women I’ve ever seen. Her black suit shows a nice and well-proportioned figure. She certainly has a “Jewish look.” She talks softly and quietly. Her laughter is restrained, while his is rolling. Tears come down his cheeks, and he continually takes off his glasses as the laughter proceeds.
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Véra surprised Field by telling him there was “no reason why she should be present in her husband’s biography.” Nabokov found it amusing: “You can’t help being represented! We’re too far gone! It’s too late!”
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Eventually, she submitted “a little bit of her story,” along with a warning: “I am terribly concerned about accuracy.… ”
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But it was Nabokov’s depiction that she jealously scrutinized, checking certain passages with him, in the biographer’s presence: “Darling, he has something there which he put very cautiously and cleverly. There is something about the way you speak which is, well, there is certain unusual refinement.”
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At the final stage, Field received corrections from the couple: Véra’s amendments alone took six pages.

After half a century at a desk, her eyesight was going, her wrists hurt, and she was hospitalized with two slipped discs. This separation in 1973 overwhelmed Nabokov, who wrote in his diary, “The feeling of distress, désarroi [disarray], utter panic and dreadful presentiment every time that Véra is away in the hospital, is one of the greatest torments of my life.”
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She was number one on his list of precious possessions rescued in his dream of a hotel fire: “I saved Véra, my glasses, the Ada typescript, my dentures, my passport—in that order!”
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After
Lolita
, Nabokov continued to work at a steady pace: in all, his writings comprised twenty-nine volumes. The interest in his novels, however, was fading away. In 1976, during his final year, Nabokov still worked long hours, getting up at six. He was bound by a contract with McGraw Hill, which required him to deliver six more books over four years. Véra, still proofreading translations (she helped translate
Lolita
into Russian), handled his correspondence and accompanied him on his butterfly expeditions. She was now unable to type, and a secretary, Jaqueline Callier, came to help three afternoons a week.

“Here we are at last, my darling,” wrote Nabokov to Véra on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, decorating his card with a butterfly drawing.
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His butterfly inscriptions were expressions of love. These were resting and feeding butterflies, with rainbow-colored wings spread. Véra had a key to all the meanings of these love notes, as she alone could fully decipher the web of his poetic and fictional works.

After a bad fall on a mountain slope in Davos at seventy-six, Nabokov was repeatedly unwell. He refused to slow down, working on a new novel despite a litany of health troubles. On July 2, 1977, after contracting a cold, Nabokov died in the hospital of bronchial congestion. Véra told Dmitry: “Let’s rent an airplane and crash.” During the private funeral at Clarens Cemetery, she was composed and asked that there be “no tears, no wails, none of that.”
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She continued to live and work as if the two of them had never parted.

In her late seventies and into her eighties, she still toiled six hours a day, kept the same dictating hours for business correspondence, and continued to live in the same hotel. When in 1990 the Montreux Palace was being renovated, she moved to new rented quarters closer to Clarens Cemetery.

She helped prepare collections of Nabokov’s works and letters, worked on the Russian translation of
Pale Fire
, and filed every article about him. Critics and biographers sent their manuscripts for her endorsement. When John Updike sent an introduction to a collection of Nabokov’s lectures, Véra returned it with several pages of
notes. “What an impressively clear mind and style she has,” noted Updike. She made a personal request: “Could you please take me out of the article?”
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Véra asked other biographers to do the same: she trusted Nabokov alone to represent her.

In 1981, Martin Amis interviewed Véra for an article in
The Observer
. When he asked why Nabokov had dedicated most of his novels to her, she replied that they had had “a very unusual relationship.” She continued to believe he was the greatest writer after his fame in the West faded. Suspecting Amis did not admire Nabokov’s recently published lectures, she flew into a rage: “Mrs. Nabokov misheard a remark I made about the
first
volume of the
Lectures
, mistaking praise for dispraise.
‘What?’
she said. And, until I made myself clear, every atom in her body seemed to tremble with indignation.…

She has thick white hair and expressive, ironical eyes. She has been rather ill recently—her hearing is a little weak and she uses a stick; but even now, in her seventies, the deeply responsive face is still suffused with feminine light. It is above all a humourous face.
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When nearly blind and writing over her lines, Véra translated an unpublished story by Nabokov and was planning to translate
Ada
into Italian. She died on April 7, 1991. The headline for her obituary in
The New York Times
read, “Véra Nabokov, 89, Wife, Muse, and Agent.” Her ashes joined Nabokov’s in one urn, and a line was added to his tombstone under his name.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Elena Bulgakov: Mysterious Margarita

E
lena met Mikhail Bulgakov when both were in their mid-thirties and in their second marriages. They were instantly attracted to each other: it was love that “lasted for the rest of my life.”
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Elena left her husband, a high-ranked military officer, to join the penniless and harassed writer, whose talent she admired, embracing “poverty, risk, and uncertainty.” Her devotion to Bulgakov, who was almost unpublished during his lifetime, inspired the love story of the Master and Margarita in his best novel, which had the same title. The novel survives only because Elena preserved it and tirelessly pursued its publication.

Born on October 21, 1893, Elena grew up in a cultured family of mixed origins. Her father, Sergei Markovich Nurenberg, was long believed to be a Baltic German. However, biographer Lydia Yanovskaya provides convincing evidence that his origins were different.
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Born Shmul-Yankel Nirenberg, Elena’s father came from the city of Berdichev in the northern Ukraine, the second-largest Jewish
community in the Russian Empire. Orphaned early, he pursued a university education in Tartu, an Estonian city under Russian control. Baptized a Lutheran, he adopted a Christian name to overcome restrictions for Jews on education and the professions.

Elena’s mother, née Alexandra Alexandrovna Gorskaya, was an ethnic Russian from the family of a defrocked Orthodox priest. (The disciplinary matter which led to his dismissal is unknown.) Nurenberg, who fell in love with this Russian girl, converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy to marry her. After the wedding in 1889, the couple lived in several Baltic cities before moving to Riga. Elena was born there, the third child in a family of two girls and two boys. Her early years were spent in the culturally vibrant city by the Baltic Sea where German, Yiddish, Latvian, and Russian were spoken on the streets and one could attend the Russian Theater and the Deutsches Theater. The city was home to Isaiah Berlin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

German was the language of commerce and culture, while Russian was the language of administration, to which Elena’s father belonged: he worked as a teacher and later as a tax inspector. Nurenberg was well read and published articles on education, finance, and theater. His passion for the theater influenced Elena and her older sister Olga to dream of stage careers. Decades later, remembering her anticipation of a new performance, Elena wrote her older brother Alexander, “How splendid was our childhood, how much did we experience, while listening to music or sitting at the Russian theater … how rich was our life.” Elena and Olga were drawn to artistic milieus as long as they lived, although they did not pursue acting. Olga was employed for decades at the Moscow Arts Theater as secretary to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, associate of the legendary director Konstantin Stanislavsky. This was where Elena came to see Bulgakov’s popular play
The Days of the Turbins
.

Bulgakov liked Elena’s stories about her childhood, which resonated with his early memories. He had been raised in Kiev, another multicultural city, in a close-knit and cordial family. Bulgakov’s father was a professor of comparative religion at the Kiev
Theological Academy. His mother, like Elena’s, was a daughter of a priest, but of an archpriest of the Orthodox Church, to be precise. The children received an excellent education, were widely read and musical; Bulgakov’s love of theater and the opera began in childhood. Like Elena, he maintained strong ties to his family, grateful for the upbringing he received; he portrays his mother and siblings in his first novel
The White Guard
.

The women’s gymnasium in Riga gave Elena a solid knowledge of French and German. Later, she would translate French literature and also help Bulgakov with research. When her family moved to Moscow during the First World War, Elena learned to type and, like her sister, became a secretary, but at the
Izvestiya
newspaper. At twenty-five, she married Yuri Neelov, son of the famous tragic actor and political anarchist, Mamont Dalsky. (He gave Fyodor Shalyapin his first acting lessons for the opera stage.) Her first marriage was interrupted by the Civil War. In 1920, her husband was dispatched to the Western front as an adjutant to the 16th Red Army commander, Evgeny Shilovsky. When Elena came to see her husband, Shilovsky fell in love with her and promptly dispatched his adjutant to the Southern front. Her marriage was soon terminated and Elena was free to remarry.