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Chapter 1 of Stacy Schiff's VERA
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***With Stacy Schiff's kind permission, I am forwarding -- in two parts --
Chapter One of her biography of Vera, as it appeared this morning on the
NYT web site. GD****
CHAPTER ONE
Vera
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
By STACY SCHIFF
Random House, Inc.
Read the Review
PETERSBURG 3848
The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in
a style
peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even
give
your telephone number without giving something of
yourself.
-Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol
1
* * *
Vera Nabokov neither wrote her memoirs nor considered doing so.
Even at the
end of her long life, she remained the world's least likely
candidate to set down
the confessions of a white widowed female. (She did keep a
diary of one girl's
fortunes, but the girl was Lolita.) When asked how she had met
the man to
whom she had been married for fifty-two years she begged the
question, with
varying degrees of geniality. "I don't remember" was the stock
response, a
perfectly transparent statement coming from the woman who could
recite
volumes of her husband's verse by heart. At another time she
parried with: "Who
are you, the KGB?" One of the few trusted scholars cornered
her. Here is your
husband's account of the events of May 8, 1923; do you care to
elaborate? "No,"
shot back Mrs. Nabokov. In the biographer's ears rang the sound
of the portcullis
crashing down. For all anyone knew she had been born Mrs.
Nabokov.
Which she had not. Vladimir Nabokov's version, delivered
more or less
consistently, was that he had met the last of his fiancees in
Germany. "I met my
wife, Vera Slonim, at one of the emigre charity balls in Berlin
at which it was
fashionable for Russian young ladies to sell punch, books,
flowers, and toys," he
stated plainly. When a biographer noted as much, adding that
Nabokov left
shortly thereafter for the south of France, Mrs. Nabokov went
to work in the
margins. "All this is rot," she offered by way of corrective.
Of Nabokov's 1923 trip
to France another scholar observed: "While there he wrote once
to a girl named
Vera Slonim whom he had met at a charity ball before leaving."
Coolly Mrs.
Nabokov announced that this single sentence bulged with three
untruths, which
she made no effort to identify.
In all likelihood the ball was a "`reminiscence' ... born
many years later" on the
part of Nabokov, who anointed May 8 as the day on which he had
met his
wife-to-be. A lavish dance was held in Berlin-one of those
"organized by
society ladies and attended by the German elite and numerous
members of the
diplomatic corps," in Vera's more glamorous description, and
which both future
Nabokovs were in the habit of attending-but on May 9. These
balls took place
with regular succession; Nabokov had met a previous fiancee at
one such
benefit. Ultimately we are left to weigh his expert fumbling of
dates against Vera's
equally expert denial of what may in truth very well have
happened; the scale tips
in neither direction. Between the husband's burnishing of facts
and the wife's
sweeping of those facts under the carpet, much is possible.
"But without these
fairy tales the world would not be real," proclaimed Nabokov,
who could not
resist the later temptation to confide in a visiting publisher
that he and Vera had
met and fallen instantly in love when they were thirteen or
fourteen and
summering with their families in Switzerland. (He was writing
Ada at the time of
the confession.)
* * *
However it happened, in the beginning were two people and a
mask. Vera
Slonim made a dramatic entrance into the life of Vladimir
Nabokov late on a
spring Berlin evening, on a bridge, over a chestnut-lined
canal. Either to confuse
her identity or to confirm it-it is possible the two had
glimpsed each other at a
ball earlier in the year, or that she had taken her cue from
something he had
published-she wore a black satin mask. Nabokov would have been
able to
discern little more than a pair of wide, sparkling blue eyes,
the "tender lips" about
which he was soon to write, a mane of light, wavy hair. She was
thin and
fine-boned, with translucent skin and an entirely regal
bearing. He may not even
have known her name, though it is certain that she knew his.
There is some
evidence that Vera had been the one to initiate the meeting, as
Nabokov later told
his sister had been the case. He had by 1923 come to enjoy some
recognition
for his poetry, which he wrote under the name V. Sirin, and
which he published
regularly in Rul (The Rudder), the leading Russian paper of the
emigration. He
had given a public reading as recently as a month earlier.
Moreoever he cut a
dashing figure. "He was, as a young man, extremely beautiful"
was the closest
Vera Nabokov came to acknowledging as much.
Russian Berlin was a small town, small enough that she may
also have
known the young poet's heart had been broken in January, when
his fiancee had
called off their engagement. Vera Nabokov rarely divulged
personal details under
anything less than duress. But if she had been the one to
pursue Nabokov-as
word in the emigre community had it later-there was all the
more reason for her
silence. She did not remove the mask in the course of the
initial conversation,
either because she feared her looks would distract from her
conversation (as
has been suggested), or (as seems more consistent with female
logic) because
she feared they might not. There was little cause for alarm;
she knew a surefire
way of turning a writer's head. She recited his verse for him.
Her delivery was
exquisite; Nabokov always marveled over a "certain unusual
refinement" in her
speech. The effect was instantaneous. As important to a man who
believed in
remembered futures and prophetic dreams, there was something
oddly familiar
about Vera Slonim. Asked in his seventies if he had known
instantly that this
woman represented his future, he replied, "I suppose one could
say so," and
looked to his wife with a smile. There would have been a good
deal familiar to
her about him. "I know practically by heart every one of his
poems from 1922 on,"
she asserted much later. She had attended his readings; her
earliest album of
Sirin clippings opens with several pieces from 1921 and 1922,
clippings which
show no signs of having been pasted in after the fact. The
disguise-it
retroconsciously became "a dear, dear mask"-was evidently still
in place when
the two parted that evening, on the Hohenzollernplatz in
Wilmersdorf. They could
not have seen each other more than a few times before Nabokov's
departure for
France, yet within weeks he had written her that a moth had
flown into his ear,
reminding him of her.
From France, where he went as a farmhand to recover from
his broken
engagement, Nabokov wrote two letters at the end of May. The
first he
dispatched on the twenty-fifth, to eighteen-year-old Svetlana
Siewert, the former
fiancee. He realized he should not be writing but-liberated by
geography-permitted himself the luxury. He had clearly been
reprimanded for
his persistence before. While he had told friends he could
never forgive Svetlana,
he could not help himself; she would simply have to hear the
tender things he
had to say. He had spent months composing despondent verse,
convinced that
his life was over. Svetlana and her family, he claimed, were
"linked in my
memory to the greatest happiness I ever had or will have." He
remained
stubbornly in love with her, saw her everywhere he looked. He
had traveled
through Dresden, Strasbourg, Lyon, and Nice, and felt no
differently anywhere.
He planned to continue on to North Africa, "and if I find
someplace on the planet
where neither you, nor your shadow can be found, then I will
settle there forever."
Two days later he wrote to Vera Slonim. She had already
written him at least
three times; he admitted that he had been coy and had awaited
another letter
before responding. He may have needed a little convincing: It
is the only time in
their correspondence he hesitates before setting pen to paper,
and one of the
few in which he has no need to chide her to write more often.
Was he still too
preoccupied with Svetlana? He does not sound so in his first
letter to Vera:
I won't hide it: I am so unused to the idea of people,
well,
understanding me-so unused to it that in the very first
minutes of
our meeting it seemed to me that this was a joke, a
masquerade
deception.... There are just some things that are
difficult to talk
about-one brushes off their wondrous pollen by touching
them
with words.... Yes, I need you, my fairy tale. For you
are the only
person I can talk to-about the hue of a cloud, about the
singing of
a thought, and about the fact that when I went out to
work today
and looked each sunflower in the face, they all smiled
back at me
with their seeds.
Suddenly Africa sounds less enticing. Forty-eight hours after
telling Svetlana he
will be changing continents, the young poet felt compelled to
return to Berlin, in
part for his mother's sake, in part because of a secret, one "I
desperately want to
let out."
How much did Vera know of Svetlana? Probably a good deal,
directly or
indirectly. Nabokov and Svetlana Siewert had been engaged since
1922, just
after the March 28 assassination of Nabokov's father at a
Berlin political meeting.
Vladimir had been in love with Svetlana, one of the
acknowledged beauties of the
emigration, since she was sixteen. She had agreed to the
engagement only after
the murder, so distraught was her friend in the weeks following
his father's
death: "He was a poet, and I, I was a child." She had pitied
him but did not truly
love him. While her parents had been concerned about his
liberal politics and
his ability to support their daughter, they had welcomed him as
a member of the
family. After his graduation from Cambridge University in 1922
Nabokov
summered with the well-off Siewerts in Germany; he spent every
evening with
them in Berlin. Many of his first published poems were
dedicated to Svetlana.
These she read with great pleasure. With very different
emotions she read the
diary he foisted upon her, in which he had described his
previous love affairs. (In
the neat summary of his biographer, Brian Boyd, Nabokov's had
been "a youth of
energetic sexual adventure.") Svetlana was so offended by his
descriptions that
she threw the journal across the room. Nabokov was an ardent
man, which
made her nervous. She took to calling him Tiger because of his
abundant
energy; she was a little afraid of him, put off by his
intoxicated talk of passion.
With relief, on January 9, 1923-weeks after her fiance had
published a volume
of verse in part dedicated to her-Svetlana broke off the
engagement. She cried;
he cried; everyone cried. She assured him she could not provide
him with what
he needed. Her parents explained they worried that he could not
provide her with
what she needed; he would remember them with particular emnity.
The two
removed the gold rings they had worn, which were melted down and
incorporated into religious icons. The results of the breakup
can be read in
Nabokov's poems of that winter, all of them recopied neatly
into a notebook, by
Vera.
She who had appeared disguised at the first meeting
believed in full candor; it
may have been one of her least winning characteristics. Many
years later she
allowed that it had taken her husband several months to get
over Svetlana,
although she also suggested that the matter had been settled
before she
entered the picture, which was not entirely true. Nabokov made
no secret of his
anguish in the poems he composed in mid-1923. "But sorrow not
yet quite cried
out / Perturbed our starry hour" qualifies as an open
admission; he wondered if it
was perhaps "romantic pity" that allowed her to understand his
verse so well. By
November he was writing transparently of renaissance, of the
rebirth of his
"rickety" soul. She knew precisely where she stood soon enough.
On January 8,
1924, Nabokov would write Vera Slonim: "My happiness, you know
tomorrow it
will have been exactly one year since I left my fiancee. Do I
have any regrets? No.
That had to happen, so that I could meet you."
From France Nabokov mailed his summer 1923 verse back to
Berlin. On June
24 Vera Slonim would have opened her copy of Rul to a poem that
struck
familiar chords. There could be no doubt in her mind about the
identity of the
person to whom "The Encounter" was addressed: "And night
flowed, and silent
there floated/into its satin streams/that black mask's
wolf-like profile / and those
tender lips of yours." Aloud Nabokov wondered if the two of
them were meant for
each other. "I wander and strain to hear / the movement of the
stars above our
encounter / And what if you are to be my fate ..." The verse
spoke for itself but its
epigraph was equally forthcoming. From Alexsandr Blok's
celebrated "The
Stranger" Nabokov had borrowed half a line, the other half of
which makes
reference to an unknown woman's "dark veil," much-needed
distraction to the
poet, who has been left by the woman he loves. It was a
discreet but all the
same public seduction.
Much can be gleaned from reading Rul that spring and
summer, when Vera
Slonim wrote Sirin-Nabokov with regularity. An article about
the memorial service
for his father-one of the paper's founding editors, and a
pillar of the emigre
community-had run in April, as had a piece by Nabokov's uncle
Konstantin, on
the death of Sarah Bernhardt. In and among the ads for
pawnshops, for the
tailors who could transform military uniforms into evening
wear, for magical
weight-gaining powders, the ads reminding readers that Rul
could be
purchased even in Estonia and Japan, were a series of Sirin
chess problems,
finally a two-act play by Sirin, who spent the summer focusing
on verse dramas.
On June 6 Vera Slonim published her first translation, of a
parable by the
Bulgarian writer Nicholas Rainov, from a section of the Bogomil
Legends called
"The Book of Riddles." Bulgarian is decipherable to a Russian
speaker, and
Vera had spent several weeks in Sofia, where she had picked up
something of
the language. Nabokov probably had no hand in placing the
translations,
although he was one of Rul's favorite sons; through her family
Vera was already
acquainted with at least two of the paper's editors. The pieces
may have been
done on assignment, given that she was already working as a
paid translator.
Whatever the case, she had a busy summer-four installments of
the Rainov
appeared in June-and a very different one from that of the
young poet whose
hands were worn from picking fruit in the south of France. It
was courtship by
literature in a number of ways. On Sunday, July 29, Vera
Slonim's first translation
from the English appeared, a Russian version of Edgar Allan
Poe's "Silence," a
cryptic masterpiece of prose poetry. The Poe shared the page
with a Sirin poem
penned ten days earlier, in Toulon. "Song" is a plaintive
tribute to Russia, to
which its author remains convinced they will all one day
return, a conviction it
was just barely possible still to hold at the end of 1923. The
lines of its first and
last stanzas are deliberately, rather awkwardly, constructed
around two syllables,
the Russian word for faith, or "vera."
Vera Slonim published three additional translations in
1923, one in July-she
was away from Berlin on vacation in August-and two in
September. The last
was Poe's "The Shadow," another rhapsodic, biblically styled
parable, and a
companion piece to "Silence." Financial necessity may have
accounted for her
prodigious translating that summer, the summer of the "witches'
sabbath" of
inflation. The Rul subscription that had cost 100,000 marks a
month in July was
no longer available in September, when the weekly price had
risen to 30 million
marks; by early December, a single copy of the paper sold for
200 billion marks.
By that time the Ullstein presses that had been turning out Rul
were
requisitioned to turn out money, nearly worthless by the time
it was printed. The
price of a streetcar ride from the Russian suburbs into the
heart of Berlin had
risen to the millions; in the three months between the time
Vera Slonim and
Vladimir Nabokov met and the time they were reunited, the cost
of a ticket rose
seven-hundred-fold. By the time the crisis began to be tamed,
by the time the
Reichsbank had again begun to print currency on both sides of
the paper, Vera
Slonim's signature was no longer to be found in Rul. It would
virtually disappear
from the published page, save from the front matter of her
husband's books.
Chapter One of her biography of Vera, as it appeared this morning on the
NYT web site. GD****
CHAPTER ONE
Vera
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
By STACY SCHIFF
Random House, Inc.
Read the Review
PETERSBURG 3848
The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in
a style
peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even
give
your telephone number without giving something of
yourself.
-Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol
1
* * *
Vera Nabokov neither wrote her memoirs nor considered doing so.
Even at the
end of her long life, she remained the world's least likely
candidate to set down
the confessions of a white widowed female. (She did keep a
diary of one girl's
fortunes, but the girl was Lolita.) When asked how she had met
the man to
whom she had been married for fifty-two years she begged the
question, with
varying degrees of geniality. "I don't remember" was the stock
response, a
perfectly transparent statement coming from the woman who could
recite
volumes of her husband's verse by heart. At another time she
parried with: "Who
are you, the KGB?" One of the few trusted scholars cornered
her. Here is your
husband's account of the events of May 8, 1923; do you care to
elaborate? "No,"
shot back Mrs. Nabokov. In the biographer's ears rang the sound
of the portcullis
crashing down. For all anyone knew she had been born Mrs.
Nabokov.
Which she had not. Vladimir Nabokov's version, delivered
more or less
consistently, was that he had met the last of his fiancees in
Germany. "I met my
wife, Vera Slonim, at one of the emigre charity balls in Berlin
at which it was
fashionable for Russian young ladies to sell punch, books,
flowers, and toys," he
stated plainly. When a biographer noted as much, adding that
Nabokov left
shortly thereafter for the south of France, Mrs. Nabokov went
to work in the
margins. "All this is rot," she offered by way of corrective.
Of Nabokov's 1923 trip
to France another scholar observed: "While there he wrote once
to a girl named
Vera Slonim whom he had met at a charity ball before leaving."
Coolly Mrs.
Nabokov announced that this single sentence bulged with three
untruths, which
she made no effort to identify.
In all likelihood the ball was a "`reminiscence' ... born
many years later" on the
part of Nabokov, who anointed May 8 as the day on which he had
met his
wife-to-be. A lavish dance was held in Berlin-one of those
"organized by
society ladies and attended by the German elite and numerous
members of the
diplomatic corps," in Vera's more glamorous description, and
which both future
Nabokovs were in the habit of attending-but on May 9. These
balls took place
with regular succession; Nabokov had met a previous fiancee at
one such
benefit. Ultimately we are left to weigh his expert fumbling of
dates against Vera's
equally expert denial of what may in truth very well have
happened; the scale tips
in neither direction. Between the husband's burnishing of facts
and the wife's
sweeping of those facts under the carpet, much is possible.
"But without these
fairy tales the world would not be real," proclaimed Nabokov,
who could not
resist the later temptation to confide in a visiting publisher
that he and Vera had
met and fallen instantly in love when they were thirteen or
fourteen and
summering with their families in Switzerland. (He was writing
Ada at the time of
the confession.)
* * *
However it happened, in the beginning were two people and a
mask. Vera
Slonim made a dramatic entrance into the life of Vladimir
Nabokov late on a
spring Berlin evening, on a bridge, over a chestnut-lined
canal. Either to confuse
her identity or to confirm it-it is possible the two had
glimpsed each other at a
ball earlier in the year, or that she had taken her cue from
something he had
published-she wore a black satin mask. Nabokov would have been
able to
discern little more than a pair of wide, sparkling blue eyes,
the "tender lips" about
which he was soon to write, a mane of light, wavy hair. She was
thin and
fine-boned, with translucent skin and an entirely regal
bearing. He may not even
have known her name, though it is certain that she knew his.
There is some
evidence that Vera had been the one to initiate the meeting, as
Nabokov later told
his sister had been the case. He had by 1923 come to enjoy some
recognition
for his poetry, which he wrote under the name V. Sirin, and
which he published
regularly in Rul (The Rudder), the leading Russian paper of the
emigration. He
had given a public reading as recently as a month earlier.
Moreoever he cut a
dashing figure. "He was, as a young man, extremely beautiful"
was the closest
Vera Nabokov came to acknowledging as much.
Russian Berlin was a small town, small enough that she may
also have
known the young poet's heart had been broken in January, when
his fiancee had
called off their engagement. Vera Nabokov rarely divulged
personal details under
anything less than duress. But if she had been the one to
pursue Nabokov-as
word in the emigre community had it later-there was all the
more reason for her
silence. She did not remove the mask in the course of the
initial conversation,
either because she feared her looks would distract from her
conversation (as
has been suggested), or (as seems more consistent with female
logic) because
she feared they might not. There was little cause for alarm;
she knew a surefire
way of turning a writer's head. She recited his verse for him.
Her delivery was
exquisite; Nabokov always marveled over a "certain unusual
refinement" in her
speech. The effect was instantaneous. As important to a man who
believed in
remembered futures and prophetic dreams, there was something
oddly familiar
about Vera Slonim. Asked in his seventies if he had known
instantly that this
woman represented his future, he replied, "I suppose one could
say so," and
looked to his wife with a smile. There would have been a good
deal familiar to
her about him. "I know practically by heart every one of his
poems from 1922 on,"
she asserted much later. She had attended his readings; her
earliest album of
Sirin clippings opens with several pieces from 1921 and 1922,
clippings which
show no signs of having been pasted in after the fact. The
disguise-it
retroconsciously became "a dear, dear mask"-was evidently still
in place when
the two parted that evening, on the Hohenzollernplatz in
Wilmersdorf. They could
not have seen each other more than a few times before Nabokov's
departure for
France, yet within weeks he had written her that a moth had
flown into his ear,
reminding him of her.
From France, where he went as a farmhand to recover from
his broken
engagement, Nabokov wrote two letters at the end of May. The
first he
dispatched on the twenty-fifth, to eighteen-year-old Svetlana
Siewert, the former
fiancee. He realized he should not be writing but-liberated by
geography-permitted himself the luxury. He had clearly been
reprimanded for
his persistence before. While he had told friends he could
never forgive Svetlana,
he could not help himself; she would simply have to hear the
tender things he
had to say. He had spent months composing despondent verse,
convinced that
his life was over. Svetlana and her family, he claimed, were
"linked in my
memory to the greatest happiness I ever had or will have." He
remained
stubbornly in love with her, saw her everywhere he looked. He
had traveled
through Dresden, Strasbourg, Lyon, and Nice, and felt no
differently anywhere.
He planned to continue on to North Africa, "and if I find
someplace on the planet
where neither you, nor your shadow can be found, then I will
settle there forever."
Two days later he wrote to Vera Slonim. She had already
written him at least
three times; he admitted that he had been coy and had awaited
another letter
before responding. He may have needed a little convincing: It
is the only time in
their correspondence he hesitates before setting pen to paper,
and one of the
few in which he has no need to chide her to write more often.
Was he still too
preoccupied with Svetlana? He does not sound so in his first
letter to Vera:
I won't hide it: I am so unused to the idea of people,
well,
understanding me-so unused to it that in the very first
minutes of
our meeting it seemed to me that this was a joke, a
masquerade
deception.... There are just some things that are
difficult to talk
about-one brushes off their wondrous pollen by touching
them
with words.... Yes, I need you, my fairy tale. For you
are the only
person I can talk to-about the hue of a cloud, about the
singing of
a thought, and about the fact that when I went out to
work today
and looked each sunflower in the face, they all smiled
back at me
with their seeds.
Suddenly Africa sounds less enticing. Forty-eight hours after
telling Svetlana he
will be changing continents, the young poet felt compelled to
return to Berlin, in
part for his mother's sake, in part because of a secret, one "I
desperately want to
let out."
How much did Vera know of Svetlana? Probably a good deal,
directly or
indirectly. Nabokov and Svetlana Siewert had been engaged since
1922, just
after the March 28 assassination of Nabokov's father at a
Berlin political meeting.
Vladimir had been in love with Svetlana, one of the
acknowledged beauties of the
emigration, since she was sixteen. She had agreed to the
engagement only after
the murder, so distraught was her friend in the weeks following
his father's
death: "He was a poet, and I, I was a child." She had pitied
him but did not truly
love him. While her parents had been concerned about his
liberal politics and
his ability to support their daughter, they had welcomed him as
a member of the
family. After his graduation from Cambridge University in 1922
Nabokov
summered with the well-off Siewerts in Germany; he spent every
evening with
them in Berlin. Many of his first published poems were
dedicated to Svetlana.
These she read with great pleasure. With very different
emotions she read the
diary he foisted upon her, in which he had described his
previous love affairs. (In
the neat summary of his biographer, Brian Boyd, Nabokov's had
been "a youth of
energetic sexual adventure.") Svetlana was so offended by his
descriptions that
she threw the journal across the room. Nabokov was an ardent
man, which
made her nervous. She took to calling him Tiger because of his
abundant
energy; she was a little afraid of him, put off by his
intoxicated talk of passion.
With relief, on January 9, 1923-weeks after her fiance had
published a volume
of verse in part dedicated to her-Svetlana broke off the
engagement. She cried;
he cried; everyone cried. She assured him she could not provide
him with what
he needed. Her parents explained they worried that he could not
provide her with
what she needed; he would remember them with particular emnity.
The two
removed the gold rings they had worn, which were melted down and
incorporated into religious icons. The results of the breakup
can be read in
Nabokov's poems of that winter, all of them recopied neatly
into a notebook, by
Vera.
She who had appeared disguised at the first meeting
believed in full candor; it
may have been one of her least winning characteristics. Many
years later she
allowed that it had taken her husband several months to get
over Svetlana,
although she also suggested that the matter had been settled
before she
entered the picture, which was not entirely true. Nabokov made
no secret of his
anguish in the poems he composed in mid-1923. "But sorrow not
yet quite cried
out / Perturbed our starry hour" qualifies as an open
admission; he wondered if it
was perhaps "romantic pity" that allowed her to understand his
verse so well. By
November he was writing transparently of renaissance, of the
rebirth of his
"rickety" soul. She knew precisely where she stood soon enough.
On January 8,
1924, Nabokov would write Vera Slonim: "My happiness, you know
tomorrow it
will have been exactly one year since I left my fiancee. Do I
have any regrets? No.
That had to happen, so that I could meet you."
From France Nabokov mailed his summer 1923 verse back to
Berlin. On June
24 Vera Slonim would have opened her copy of Rul to a poem that
struck
familiar chords. There could be no doubt in her mind about the
identity of the
person to whom "The Encounter" was addressed: "And night
flowed, and silent
there floated/into its satin streams/that black mask's
wolf-like profile / and those
tender lips of yours." Aloud Nabokov wondered if the two of
them were meant for
each other. "I wander and strain to hear / the movement of the
stars above our
encounter / And what if you are to be my fate ..." The verse
spoke for itself but its
epigraph was equally forthcoming. From Alexsandr Blok's
celebrated "The
Stranger" Nabokov had borrowed half a line, the other half of
which makes
reference to an unknown woman's "dark veil," much-needed
distraction to the
poet, who has been left by the woman he loves. It was a
discreet but all the
same public seduction.
Much can be gleaned from reading Rul that spring and
summer, when Vera
Slonim wrote Sirin-Nabokov with regularity. An article about
the memorial service
for his father-one of the paper's founding editors, and a
pillar of the emigre
community-had run in April, as had a piece by Nabokov's uncle
Konstantin, on
the death of Sarah Bernhardt. In and among the ads for
pawnshops, for the
tailors who could transform military uniforms into evening
wear, for magical
weight-gaining powders, the ads reminding readers that Rul
could be
purchased even in Estonia and Japan, were a series of Sirin
chess problems,
finally a two-act play by Sirin, who spent the summer focusing
on verse dramas.
On June 6 Vera Slonim published her first translation, of a
parable by the
Bulgarian writer Nicholas Rainov, from a section of the Bogomil
Legends called
"The Book of Riddles." Bulgarian is decipherable to a Russian
speaker, and
Vera had spent several weeks in Sofia, where she had picked up
something of
the language. Nabokov probably had no hand in placing the
translations,
although he was one of Rul's favorite sons; through her family
Vera was already
acquainted with at least two of the paper's editors. The pieces
may have been
done on assignment, given that she was already working as a
paid translator.
Whatever the case, she had a busy summer-four installments of
the Rainov
appeared in June-and a very different one from that of the
young poet whose
hands were worn from picking fruit in the south of France. It
was courtship by
literature in a number of ways. On Sunday, July 29, Vera
Slonim's first translation
from the English appeared, a Russian version of Edgar Allan
Poe's "Silence," a
cryptic masterpiece of prose poetry. The Poe shared the page
with a Sirin poem
penned ten days earlier, in Toulon. "Song" is a plaintive
tribute to Russia, to
which its author remains convinced they will all one day
return, a conviction it
was just barely possible still to hold at the end of 1923. The
lines of its first and
last stanzas are deliberately, rather awkwardly, constructed
around two syllables,
the Russian word for faith, or "vera."
Vera Slonim published three additional translations in
1923, one in July-she
was away from Berlin on vacation in August-and two in
September. The last
was Poe's "The Shadow," another rhapsodic, biblically styled
parable, and a
companion piece to "Silence." Financial necessity may have
accounted for her
prodigious translating that summer, the summer of the "witches'
sabbath" of
inflation. The Rul subscription that had cost 100,000 marks a
month in July was
no longer available in September, when the weekly price had
risen to 30 million
marks; by early December, a single copy of the paper sold for
200 billion marks.
By that time the Ullstein presses that had been turning out Rul
were
requisitioned to turn out money, nearly worthless by the time
it was printed. The
price of a streetcar ride from the Russian suburbs into the
heart of Berlin had
risen to the millions; in the three months between the time
Vera Slonim and
Vladimir Nabokov met and the time they were reunited, the cost
of a ticket rose
seven-hundred-fold. By the time the crisis began to be tamed,
by the time the
Reichsbank had again begun to print currency on both sides of
the paper, Vera
Slonim's signature was no longer to be found in Rul. It would
virtually disappear
from the published page, save from the front matter of her
husband's books.