From 1997: Stacy Schiff on the very Nabokovian marriage of Vladimir and Véra.
Vladimir Nabokov was famous at Cornell, where he taught between 1948 and 1959, for a number of reasons. None had anything to do with the literature; few people knew what he had written, and even fewer had read his work. Tearing Dostoyevski to shreds in front of two hundred undergraduates made an impression, as did the pronouncement that good books should not make us think but make us shiver. The fame derived in part, too, from the fact that the professor did not come to class alone.
· Because Nabokov had a heart condition, and she was at hand with a phial of medicine to jump up at a moment s notice.· Because Nabokov was allergic to chalk dust—and because he didn’t like his handwriting.· Because she was his encyclopedia, if ever he forgot anything. Véra Nabokov met her husband in 1923, in Berlin. She was twenty-one. She was born in St. Petersburg, the second daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist who was—when his daughter first encountered her future husband—on the brink of losing what remained of his fortune. Probably her family had left Russia in 1920. At the time the couple met, Nabokov was a twenty-four-year-old poet, writing in Russian; Véra Slonim knew and admired his work before she met him.
In a perfectly Nabokovian way, the two identities began to blur on the page. Letters came addressed to all sorts of entities: “Dear VVs,” “Dear VerVolodya,” “Dear Author and Mrs. Nabokov.
Certainly some of the most fertile years of Nabokov’s life immediately followed the marriage. Between 1925 and 1935, he wrote as if in a fever. When Véra Slonim met Vladimir Nabokov, he was a poet; he finished his first novel months after they were married, his eighth before the decade was out. In 1924, he recorded a dream in which he sits at the piano with Véra at his side, turning the pages of the score.
But best of all she was one of those rare, very rare women who do not take the world for granted and who see everyday things not merely as familiar mirrors of their own femininity. She had imagination—the muscle of the soul—and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality.
Resentment of Mrs. Nabokov accumulated in equal proportion to the mystique. Who was this “Grey Eagle” in the classroom, the students wondered, while the faculty—very much aware that Nabokov had no Ph.D., no graduate students, no freshmen, and, by the mid-fifties, enviably high enrollments—chafed at the husband-and-wife routine.
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