![]() ![]() It has often been reported how Véra drove the Oldsmobile across the United States while her ‘Volodnya’ wrote Lolita. With this biography, Stacy Schiff fills in a glaring gap in the ‘wives of’ portrait gallery. ‘No, you’re not!’ she said, and he obeyed. She vetoed his wish to write a novel about the love life of Siamese twins. Her critical tolerance was not indiscriminate. Three times during the Cornell years she rescued Lolita from the bonfire, believing it to be a great book and a subtle probe ‘to the depths of a horrible maniac’. ![]() She pushed and guarded her husband through what was not – for a long time after leaving Russia where he was established – a brilliant career. She produced their only child, Dmitri, in 1934. Véra Slonim Nabokov (born in St Petersburg in 1902 died in Montreux in 1991) married the writer in Berlin in 1925. She shared his long exile, as he went from Berlin to Paris to American academia to Switzerland, where they ended their days. She helped him chase, catch and classify butterflies. His beautiful, clever, capable, devoted Véra did it all for him and gave his lectures, too, when he was indisposed. Vladimir Nabokov could neither drive nor type, nor remember a telephone number. When considering wives of twentieth-century artists, the line between muse and typist can be hard to find. ![]()
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