Letters to Véra Read online

  Back together in Berlin by the end of January 1924, they soon considered themselves engaged. When in August Vladimir travelled for two weeks to join his mother at the riverside town of Dobřichovice, near Prague, his first letter back to Véra began: ‘My delightful, my love, my life, I don’t understand anything: how can you not be with me? I’m so infinitely used to you that I now feel myself lost and empty: without you, my soul. You turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed–you put a glint of happiness on everything.’ A few short notes in Berlin, in a similar vein, reflect the foreglow of their marriage there on 15 April 1925 (sample letter, complete: ‘I love you. Infinitely and inexpressibly. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and here I am writing this. My love, my happiness’).

  Both Vladimir and Véra earned their main incomes by tutoring in English, and in late August 1925 Vladimir was paid to accompany his principal tutee, Aleksandr Sack, first to a Pomeranian beach resort, then on a high-spirited walking tour through the Schwarzwald, which he recorded in short postcard-prose snapshots, before Véra joined them in Konstanz.

  A year later, the summer of 1926 introduced more complex moods. Véra was sent with her mother to sanatoria in the Schwarzwald to gain weight she had lost to anxiety and depression, while Vladimir remained in Berlin with his regular tutees. Véra had made her husband promise to send her a daily report–what he ate, what he wore, what he did–and Vladimir loyally obliged.

  Never again do we have such a sustained day-by-day record of his response to his world. In the gap between his first novel, Mashen’ka (Mary), written in 1925, and his second, Korol’, Dama, Valet (King, Queen, Knave), written in late 1927 and early 1928, his life seemed relaxed and summery: tutoring (which often seemed little more than long bouts of sunbathing, swimming and cavorting in the Grunewald), tennis, reading and patches of writing; a critique of recent Soviet fiction for his friends in the Tatarinov literary circle; a poem he wrote for Russian Culture Day; a mock-trial of Pozdnyshev, the murderer in Tolstoy’s story ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, with Nabokov playing Pozdnyshev and triumphantly reinterpreting the role; a short story swiftly conceived and swiftly executed; for the Tatarinov circle again, a list of what made him suffer, ‘starting with the touch of satin and ending with the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world’. In order to buoy up Véra and to keep her at a sanatorium until she had gained the weight that he and her father both thought she needed, Vladimir, always playful by nature, laboured–and here the effect is sometimes laboured indeed–to entertain and amuse her, upping the ante as the separation continued. He started each letter with a new salutation, at first apparently in honour of the names of the small animal toys they collected, and becoming more and more bizarre (Lumpikin, Tufty, Little Old Man, Mosquittle); he added puzzles for her, crosswords, codes, labyrinths, riddles, word-combination games; and finally he invented a German editor of his puzzle section, a Mr Darling, who supposedly interfered with what he wanted to write.

  Berlin had been the hub of the first Russian émigrés to flee the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. Between 1920 and 1923 the city housed over 400,000 Russians, many of them artists and intellectuals. But when the German Mark was restabilized after the end of the hyperinflation of 1923, life in Germany rapidly became dearer. By the end of 1924 most émigrés had moved to Paris, where they largely remained until the Second World War convulsed the continent.

  To ensure he would not dilute his Russian by living in a city where he knew the local language, Nabokov stayed in Berlin. By 1926 he was already the recognized literary star of the emigration there, as can be seen in the rapturous reception he provoked at Russian Culture Day celebrations, which he describes in a slow prose striptease to Véra. Nabokov continued to grow rapidly as a writer–although Rul’, where he still published most of his work, was little read in Paris–and he and Véra lived relatively carefree in Berlin thanks to their extremely modest lifestyle and a spare but adequate income from his tutoring, from the German translations of his first two novels, and from Véra’s part-time secretarial work.

  By 1929, when Sirin began to publish The Defence in the Paris journal Sovremennye zapiski, the best-paying and most prestigious émigré literary outlet, the novelist Nina Berberova could respond to the first instalment: ‘A tremendous, mature, sophisticated modern writer was before me, a great Russian writer, like a Phoenix, was born from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile. Our existence from now on acquired a meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved.’ Novelist and poet Ivan Bunin, the doyen of émigré writers and soon to become the first Russian Nobel laureate in literature, commented on The Defence in his own mode: ‘This kid has snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included.’

  Prague was the third most important of European émigré centres, with a lively group of scholars attracted by grants from the Czech government. When Nabokov travelled there in May 1930 to see his family, he was a literary star there too, though he was more concerned with his mother’s straitened circumstances (including bedbugs and cockroaches), his sisters’ marriages, his younger brother’s literary longings, and Box, the dachshund too old now to recognize him.

  His next trip away from Véra, in April 1932, was again to Prague and his family. He was fascinated by his new nephew, Olga’s son Rostislav, and appalled at the boy’s neglect by his parents. Only rereading Flaubert, rediscovering with wry detachment his own early verse, and being introduced to the butterflies in the National Museum redeemed his displeasure with the dark city without and the bedbugs within.

  Perhaps the gloom also owes something to the absence of the glow of endearments throughout the 1932 letters, which we have been able to access only through the recordings Véra Nabokov made into my tape-recorder in December 1984 and January 1985. Researching my Nabokov biography, I had persisted for years in asking Véra for the letters. Rather than allow me to read them myself, she at last agreed to read out as much as she could bear into my cassette-recorder. Somehow since then (apparently in the late 1990s) the entire batch of 1932 originals has vanished. Since much of the passion and play evident in the other manuscript letters was selected out by Véra as she read, 1932 suffers, and the April 1932 trip in particular.

  The letters of October and November 1932 also depend on what Véra chose to record, but lose less of their force because so much of this trip reports a triumphal progress that she was only too happy to help commemorate. In October, Vladimir and Véra travelled to Kolbsheim, near Strasbourg, to stay with Nabokov’s cousin Nicolas, the composer, and his wife Nathalie. When Véra returned to Berlin, Nabokov remained a few days in Kolbsheim then travelled on to Paris, where he stayed a month. Here Sirin’s fame made him the toast of émigré writers (Bunin, Vladislav Khodasevich, Mark Aldanov, Boris Zaytsev, Berberova, Nikolay Evreinov, André Levinson, Aleksandr Kuprin and many more) and editors (above all Ilya Fondaminsky and Vladimir Zenzinov of Sovremennye zapiski), most of whom he had not or had barely known in person before. Many of them made him the focus of a campaign to earn him as much money as possible through public readings and through contacts with French publishers (Grasset, Fayard, Gallimard), writers (Jules Supervielle, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Paulhan) and translators (Denis Roche, Doussia Ergaz). Nabokov’s letters of autumn 1932 abound with incisive pen-portraits of Russian and French literary figures, and his surprised delight at their generosity to him, especially that of the ‘very sweet and saintly’ Fondaminsky, an editor and the chief funder of Sovremennye zapiski.

  In 1932, still in Berlin, the Nabokovs moved into the quiet–and for them cheap–apartment of Véra’s close cousin Anna Feigin. Their son Dmitri was born in May 1934. With Hitler consolidating power, Véra no longer able to earn an income, and Dmitri to feed, they had good reason to seek extra money in the short term and a more secure future elsewhere in the long term. In pursuit of the longer term, Nabokov translated Despair into English himself and wrote his first French story, the half-memoir ‘Madem
oiselle O’, before travelling in January 1936 to Brussels, Antwerp and then Paris to give a series of literary readings to both Russian and French audiences and to forge still stronger ties with the French literary world. He swiftly became friends with Franz Hellens, Belgium’s best writer. In Paris, staying with Fondaminsky and Zenzinov, he found himself inducted into the highly sociable émigré literary set, often more deeply than he wanted–his description of being dragged off to dinner by Bunin is a classic of social discomfort–and he had a major success in a joint public reading with Khodasevich. Again, his impressions of other writers and his energy and persistence as a rather desperate networker dominate the letters.

  Late in 1936 Sergey Taboritsky, one of the right-wing assassins of Nabokov’s father in 1922, was appointed Hitler’s second-in-charge of émigré affairs. Véra insisted to her husband that he had to flee Germany and find a way for the family to set up a life in France or England. Late in January 1937 he left Germany for the last time, stopping again to give a reading in Brussels before heading to Paris to stay again with Fondaminsky. He had written an essay in French for the centenary of Pushkin’s death and had begun to translate his stories into French. His readings to Russian and French audiences in public spaces and grand private homes were highly successful, but he could not obtain a carte d’identité, let alone a work permit. At the end of January he began a passionate affair with Irina Guadanini, a part-time poet, supporting herself as a dog-groomer, whom he had met the previous year. The stress of deceiving Véra exacerbated Vladimir’s chronic psoriasis to nightmarish levels. Meanwhile, he was trying to bring Véra to France, but with her anxiety about finances and her sense that he was too blithely optimistic about prospects, she refused to move from Berlin. In late February he crossed to London for readings and to establish contacts in the literary and publishing worlds there, especially in the hope of finding not only publishers for a short autobiography he had written in English and an English collection of his stories but possibly even an academic post. Despite his excellent contacts and strenuous efforts, he earned little and could establish no beachhead.

  He returned to Paris at the beginning of March and resumed the affair. The correspondence with Véra became more and more fraught as he tried to persuade her to quit Germany and join him in the south of France, where Russian friends of friends had offered places to stay. He wanted Véra to bypass Paris, but she had got wind of the affair and wanted to join him anywhere but France: Belgium, Italy or especially Czechoslovakia, where they could show Elena Nabokov her grandson. When Véra reported the rumour of the affair, Nabokov denied it. The persistent tension between them expressed itself not in further explicit accusations and denials but through moves and counter-moves in the plans for their reunion–‘a painfully atonal duet’, in Stacy Schiff’s apt phrase. Complicating their lives and their letters were the nightmare difficulties of arranging visas for Véra and Dmitri to leave Germany, and for Vladimir to leave Paris, for Prague, where Véra’s firm resistance to his French plans meant they were eventually reunited–Vladimir travelling via Switzerland and Austria to avoid Germany–on 22 May.

  After six weeks there they travelled back to France, again skirting Germany, and settled in Cannes. When Nabokov confessed to the affair, marital storms ensued before subsiding into a spurious calm, after he swore it was all over–though he continued to write to Guadanini. Fearing the end of their relationship, Guadanini travelled down to Cannes, despite his telling her not to, on 8 September. He saw her, sent her back to Paris, and the affair was over, although it would take longer for Vladimir and Véra to return to their old emotional footing. After over a year in Cannes, Menton and Cap d’Antibes, they travelled north to Paris. Nabokov now had an American agent, who managed to place Laughter in the Dark, his rewriting of a translation of his Kamera obskura, with Bobbs-Merrill. But despite the critical acclaim from Russian-speaking readers in France, England and the United States for his other, more complex fictions, his work proved too original to find other publishers outside the emigration. Unable to obtain a work permit, Nabokov found it increasingly difficult to support his family by his writing. Poverty began to bite, and he looked more and more gaunt.

  Hoping to find a refuge beyond France, Nabokov wrote his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, early in 1939. In April he travelled to London where he had learned of a vacancy in the Russian department at Leeds University, which might open a space in London or Sheffield, if the Leeds appointment went to one of the candidates applying from universities there. His letters back to Véra in Paris record that the exhausting pace of his networking in his 1936 and 1937 trips had intensified still further, but despite high-level support from Russian and English academics and literati, he came away with friendships but little else except hopes that were soon dashed. A return trip at the beginning of June, occasioning another spate of letters, advanced his prospects no further.

  Only chance allowed him to extricate himself and his family from Europe. Novelist Mark Aldanov, who had been offered a teaching position in creative writing at Stanford University for the summer of 1941, felt his English too poor to accept and passed the invitation along to Nabokov. This at last allowed Nabokov to obtain an exit permit from France, and although visas and funding across the Atlantic took a long time to secure, the Nabokovs sailed into New York on 28 May 1940, only two weeks before the fall of Paris. In New York Nabokov found tutoring jobs and reviewed for New York newspapers, and, through his meeting with Edmund Wilson, for the New Republic. Through his cousin Nicolas he secured an invitation to two weeks of lectures at Wellesley College in March 1941, prompting his next batch of letters to Véra. At the time of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, Nabokov’s anti-Sovietism amplified the appeal of his lectures–he could not quite believe the compliments–and led to a full-year appointment at Wellesley in 1941–2. But after that academic year, and despite having published The Real Life of Sebastian Knight at the end of 1941 and appearing regularly in the Atlantic and even in the New Yorker, Nabokov found himself financially compelled to undertake lecture tours through the American South in October 1942, the Midwest in November, and to Virginia in December. Even more than during his Wellesley tour in 1941, he had the time to pass on to Véra his observations and adventures in encountering America, his most Pninian day producing the longest letter of all–three thousand words.

  With impermanent but annually renewed positions teaching Russian at Wellesley and researching Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1943 until 1948, then the security of a professorial appointment at Cornell from 1948 to 1959, Nabokov had few occasions now to be separated from Véra for long. In June 1944, while Véra took Dmitri to New York for an exploratory operation that turned into an appendectomy, Vladimir remained at work in Cambridge. On 6 June, D-Day, he succumbed to a spectacular bout of food poisoning, which he relished describing in hilarious detail, along with the ordeal of hospitalization–from which he fled in his pyjamas. Only a distinguished lecture invitation to the University of Kansas in 1954 produced another thin sheaf of letters to Véra during the years he was writing his autobiography, Lolita, Pnin and his translation of and commentary to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

  In 1958, Hurricane Lolita swept North America and much of Europe. By 1959 Nabokov could take early retirement from Cornell and travel with Véra to Europe, partly to visit his sister Elena, now in Geneva, and partly to watch over Dmitri, now training as an opera bass in Milan. Although not planning to remain there, the Nabokovs soon found Europe a welcome refuge from the pressures of fame in America. In these European years there was little to keep them apart. Only one sustained volley of letters fills this spell, when Vladimir, eager to catch the first butterflies, travelled on ahead to a holiday in Taormina, Sicily, in early April 1970. After that, the ‘correspondence’ dwindled to scraps, like the shortest of all, a three-word note, ‘forty-five springs!’ accompanying a wedding anniversary bouquet. Three words, but they manage to pun on the Russian words fo
r ‘year’ and ‘summer’: when the plural is needed for the usual Russian word for ‘year,’ god, the plural of ‘summers,’ let, usually fills the gap; Nabokov’s further substitution suggests that all their years together had been springs.

  II

  As the change of pace in describing these last years and decades indicates, circumstances had changed enormously for the Nabokovs. That is part of the fascination of the letters: the continuity of the writer’s voice and vision, but expressed so differently through all the marked changes in his life and love, through all the shifting contexts and demands on him as character and correspondent: farmhand and incognito poet in 1923; son, brother and budding playwright in early 1924; tutor and paid travelling companion in 1925; relaxed stay-at-home support in 1926; returning son and brother in 1930 and 1932; touring writer and literary networker in 1932, and later, compounding these roles, also frazzled job-seeker and exasperated visa-seeker in 1936, 1937 and 1939, as well as marital deceiver and near-suicidal psoriatic in 1937; prospective teacher on a charm campaign in 1941; impoverished travelling lecturer in 1942, hospital patient in 1944, distinguished travelling lecturer in 1954; relaxed vacationer in 1970. In some ways the changes reflect normal life-stage progressions, in others emphatically singular experiences: a carefree young and early married life as a part-time professional; an acclaimed but uncommercial author for a disappearing émigré audience; a hit visiting lecturer, an itinerant jobbing lecturer, a secure professor; and a rich and famous writer. And in some ways the changes reflect the normal progression of lasting love, as well as the singularity of Vladimir’s and Véra’s characters from that first masked moment: passionate early declarations and the difficulties of adjustment; coping with other anxieties and demands, including a boisterous child, an affair, an ailing mother and an encroaching tyranny; recalibrations to a new and in some ways still-precarious life in a new country; final attunements so serene they needed only the quietest of reaffirmations.