Nabokov's Letters to Véra

LETTERS TO VÉRA

By Vladimir Nabokov

Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd

Illustrated. 794 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40.

 My sun, my soul, my song, my bird, my sweetheart, my pink sky, my sunny rainbow, my little music, my inexpressible delight, my softness, my tenderness, my lightness, my dear life, my dear eyes. . . . These endearments and salutations (backed up by a crowded menagerie of surrogates: Goosikins, Poochums, Tigercubkin, Puppykin) suggest a sky-filling adoration and, more than that, a helpless dependency. As early as Vladimir Nabokov’s second letter to Véra Slonim, after a couple of months of chaste acquaintanceship, he lays it all before her: “I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it — and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret — so sharp! — that we haven’t lived through it together. . . . You came into my life . . . as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.”

And so it goes on for over half a century, his ardor — at first sometimes skittishly insecure — gradually modulating into assurance and serenity. Warning: There is one seismic aberration (Paris, 1937), to which we will uneasily return.

Vladimir (rhymes with “redeemer,” he has said) was born in 1899, Véra in 1902. They met at a charity ball in Berlin in 1923, an occasion organized by the Russian émigré community — 400,000 strong, and notable for its cohesion, its material penury and its intellectual wealth. Although very different in their origins (he was patrician-artistic, she middle-class and Jewish), they were fair representatives of their high-minded and unworldly colony. That party was a masquerade; and, throughout, Véra’s mask stayed up.

He immediately had to go off to work on a farm in the South of France. As a devotee of his published verse (much of it confessional), she would have known that he had recently and tormentedly broken up with a girl he hoped to marry. Showing unusual forwardness, she wrote to him until he replied. “I won’t hide it,” begins his opening letter, where she is already ensconced as “my strange joy, my tender night.” Once he was back in Berlin the romance proceeded, on his part at least, without a trace of inhibition. They were married in the spring of 1925.

One of Nabokov’s most striking peculiarities was his near-pathological good cheer — he himself found it “indecent.” Young writers tend to cherish their sensitivity, and thus their alienation, but the only source of angst Nabokov admitted to was “the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world.” Having a husband who was so brimmingly full of fun might have involved a certain strain; still, the fact that Véra was not similarly blessed is just a reminder of the planetary norm. Indeed, their first long separation came in the spring and summer of 1926, when she decamped to a series of sanitariums in the Schwarzwald in the far southwest, suffering from weight loss, anxiety and depression.

Véra was gone for seven weeks, and Vladimir wrote to her every day. Spanning more than a hundred pages, the interlude is one of the summits in the mountain range of this book. He endeavored not only to raise her spirits (with puzzles, riddles, crosswords, which she almost invariably solved) but also to love her back to health — with punctual transfusions of his buoyant worship. Here one finds oneself submitting to the weird compulsion of the quotidian, because he tells her everything: about his writing, his tutoring, his tennis, his regular romps and swims in the Grunewald (for her the Black Forest, for him the Green); he tells her what he is reading, what he is eating (all his meals are itemized), what he is dreaming, even what he is wearing. Also, very casually, almost disdainfully (as befits the teenage millionaire he once was), he keeps noticing that they don’t seem to have any money.

There was never any money, despite their frugality and thrift; they had to watch the pfennigs, then the centimes, then the nickels and dimes, all the way up to “Lolita” in the late 1950s — more than 30 years into their marriage. His first three novels, “Mary” (1926), “King, Queen, Knave” (1928) and “The Defense” (1929), were obvious masterpieces; he talked and read to ecstatic audiences in Berlin, Prague, Brussels, Paris and London; everyone could tell he was a genius of outlandish size. (Ivan Bunin, the first Russian literature Nobelist, said soberly, “This kid has snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included.”) But there was never any money.

Their only child, Dmitri, arrived in 1934, and was rapturously received (away from him he misses “the circuits of a current of happiness when he throws his arm across my shoulder”). It was no doubt a sense of sharpened responsibility that got Nabokov out of the house and on the road, in earnest. He trolled around Europe, juggling contacts and contracts, writing reviews, reports, translations (some of them grimly technical) into and out of Russian, English and French. As late as the spring of 1939 he was in London, lobbying and angling for an academic post in Leeds — or possibly Sheffield. Nabokov in Yorkshire? This was among the multitude of human possibilities wiped out by the Second World War.

Nabokov’s father was a distinguished liberal statesman (described with memorable bitterness in Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution”); and he was semi-accidentally murdered by fascist thugs in Berlin in 1922. For all this, you get the sense that his son regarded political reality as a vulgar distraction, a series of what he called “bloated topicalities.” In Berlin the family sat through the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 (unmentioned here). Véra and Vladimir had independently fled the Bolsheviks; by 1936 he felt, with long-sublimated dread, that Nazi Germany was no place for his Jewish wife and their “half-breed” child. To prepare for their escape to France, Nabokov journeyed to Paris in early 1937 — and this is when it happened, the lapse, the shocking solecism, or what Humbert described as the “lethal delectation.” She was an experienced handful named Irina Yurievna Guadanini.

The Vladimir-Irina entanglement has been public knowledge since 1986, and Stacy Schiff has an insightful section on it in her biography “Véra” (1999). But it is freshly and piercingly painful to follow the story from the point of view, so to speak, of Nabokov’s pen. That was a dreadful brew he cooked up for himself on the Avenue de Versailles: mortal fear for wife and son, a recklessly indiscreet affair, and a hideous attack of psoriasis which, in coarse symbolism, bloodied his bed linen and his underwear. And there is the great man, the great soul, queasily teasing (“Don’t you dare be jealous”), sneering at all the “vile rumors,” and, in general, mellifluously lying his head off. The old law has never struck me with such power: People are original and distinctive in their virtues; in their vices they are compromised, hackneyed and stale. Here, there is a vertiginous swerve in the direction of the ordinary.

And it didn’t end there. In July, in Cannes, he confessed to Véra — confessed to what he felt was an authentic amour fou (mitigating the offense for us, perhaps, if not for her). Rather coolly, it seems, Véra told him to decide, to choose. Irina herself palely appeared at the seashore; but Vladimir had chosen, and it was over. “You know, I have never trusted anyone as I trust you,” he had written to Véra in 1924: “In everything enchanted there’s an element of trust.” His confession and the Irina aftermath take place offstage. But in those Paris letters the corrosive side effects of the deception are everywhere apparent. Her sudden vague indecisiveness (about joining him); his querulous exasperation; a deficit in trust, and a deficit in enchantment.

The Nabokovs appeared to get over it more quickly than this reader expects to do. “Letters to Véra,” arranged and annotated with terrifying assiduity by Brian Boyd (the world’s premier Nabokovian), is unavoidably bottom-heavy: 439 pages covering 1923-39; then, after a gap, a mere 80 pages (many of them airy) covering 1941-76. For the book to resemble a full record of their lives, the couple would have had to spend every other week apart. And they were now more or less inseparable. When he did travel without her, the daily rhythm of his correspondence immediately reasserts itself, and there is enough time and space for us to see that cloudless intimacy settle on them once again.

It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of “Lolita,” “The Enchanter,” dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Metro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy. 

Martin Amis’s most recent novel is “The Zone of Interest.”