Subject
Stacy Schiff's Vera/2 (fwd)
From
Date
Body
2
* * *
Nearly a half million Russians had settled in Berlin over the
previous three years,
when the ruble went a long way and the city was cheaper for
those fleeing the
Revolution than any other. Its suburbs, where residence permits
could be
obtained easily, proved especially welcoming. There were émigré
Russian
everythings: Russian hairdressers, Russian grocers, Russian
pawnshops,
Russian antique stores, Russian foreign-exchange speculators,
Russian
orchestras. There were two Russian soccer teams. To some it
seemed as if the
Russians had taken over Berlin; these were not downtrodden,
frightened
refugees but a sophisticated, vibrant community of
professionals and
aristocrats. Rul was one of 150 Russian-language newspapers and
journals;
by 1923 Berlin outshone Petrograd and Moscow as the center of
Russian book
publishing. Eighty-six Russian publishing firms were founded in
Berlin, one of
them by Evsei Slonim, VĂ©ra's father. He and a partner briefly
opened a firm called
Orbis. VĂ©ra worked in the office during the days, evidently in
order to earn the
money for horseback riding in the Tiergarten. All of this would
change with the
inflation; the next years of exile were to be substantially
leaner. By 1924, the
center of the Russian emigration would shift to Paris. But for
a few more months
Russian cultural life burned on brightly in Berlin, with a
slate of readings and
festive gatherings each evening.
With Nabokov's return, the romance continued through the
fall of 1923 on the
sidewalks of Berlin, in the southwest suburbs of the city. In
their meandering the
two were hardly alone. The poet Nina Berberova, who had yet to
meet either VĂ©ra
or Vladimir, remembered that "all of us sleepless Russians
wandered these
streets until dawn." The critic Vladislav Khodasevich, with
whom Berberova lived
for a decade, remembered a sea of "clinging couples like
statues"; those lovers
were to be frozen in every doorway in Nabokov's Glory, in
whispering
mid-embrace. In October Nabokov's sisters and younger brother
moved with
their mother to Prague, where she could claim a Czech
government pension.
Vladimir accompanied the family, whom he surprised with the
precipitate
announcement that he was returning to Berlin, for reasons that
became clear
only later. VĂ©ra helped him to retain a room at a
boardinghouse; she lived with
her family a fifteen-minute walk away. Their
assignations—arranged by note or
telephone—took place on street corners, near railway bridges,
in the Grunewald.
Nabokov's winter poems are saturated in images of VĂ©ra, a
slender shadow
detaching itself from the velvety darkness, poised to explore
the black magic of
the Berlin streets. The world may have been falling apart
around them, but the
poetry is full of enchantment and rebirth, as eight months
before it had been full
of self-pity and despair. Nabokov was yet to coin the phrase,
but there is
everywhere proof that he had found in VĂ©ra a companion who
could devise a
harlequin: "Divining, you notice all/all night's silhouetted
games/I start to
talk—you answer, / as if rounding off a line of verse." Acutely
aware that he was in
the company of a translator, he felt impelled to choose his
words with an
invigorating exactitude. He sensed that with VĂ©ra one had to
speak "amazingly."
He cursed the telephone, over which everything came out so
wretchedly. He
feared bruising her with an "inept endearment." At once he
seized upon
something a later admirer was to describe thusly: "With her for
a reader, the
classics would reveal themselves like paintings liberated from
layers of
carelessly applied varnish." He felt she spoke with enormous
distinction. Never
has any woman received so many tributes to her vowels.
It is clear that the two slipped quickly into a
relationship; by November Nabokov
was swearing that he loved as never before, with an infinite
tenderness, that he
regretted every minute of the past he had not shared with VĂ©ra.
The ease with
which the two fell together is clearer still if we allow
ourselves a glimpse at the
thematic shadows the Berlin nights cast on the fictions, which
is a little like
saying we shall now base our idea of female anatomy on the work
of Picasso.
This both was and was not the case; the image is more
refraction than reflection.
But the trails are there all the same. During a November
separation Nabokov
had written VĂ©ra: "You came into my life and not the way a
casual visitor might
(you know, `without removing one's hat') but as one enters a
kingdom, where all
the rivers have waited for your reflection, all the roads for
your footfall." A month
later he returned to the same image:
Have you ever thought about how strangely, how easily our
lives
came together? And this is probably that God, bored up in
heaven,
experienced a passion he doesn't often have. It's as if
in your soul
there is a preprepared spot for every one of my thoughts.
When
Monte Cristo came to the Palace he had purchased, he saw
on
the table, among other things, a lacquered box, and he
said to his
major domo who had arrived earlier to set everything up,
"My
gloves should be here." The latter beamed and opened this
otherwise unexceptional lacquered box, and indeed: the
gloves.
"In everything from fables there is a grain of truth," he
concluded, before asking
her to telephone his old apartment very late at night, so as to
be certain to disturb
his ex-neighbors.
When the muckraking "biograffitist" comes along in the 1974
Look at the
Harlequins! to ask how Vadim Vadimovich N. met the woman who
turned his
life around, our narrator shuts the door in his face—but not
before referring him
to See under Real, a novel written thirty-five years earlier,
in English. See under
Real’s actual and phonetic counterpart is The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight,
written thirty-five years earlier, in English. It is almost
impossible to separate
VĂ©ra from the fictional Clare in that novel, who "entered his
life without knocking,
as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague
resemblance to
one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly
getting used to the
strange creatures she found there and petted despite their
amazing shapes."
From the original manuscript Nabokov had deleted a line, which
followed the
passage about how well Clare fitted into Sebastian's life:
"They became lovers in
such a speedy manner that for anyone who did not know them, she
might have
passed for a fast girl or he for a vulgar seducer." Events move
with the same
lightning speed in The Gift, for wholly nonfictional reasons:
"Despite the
complexity of her mind, a most convincing simplicity was
natural to her, so that
she could permit herself much that others would be unable to
get away with, and
the very speed of their coming together seemed to Fyodor
completely natural in
the sharp light of her directness."
Between VĂ©ra and her fictional shadows there is plenty of
room for
distortion—"They're all Picassos, not one is Dora Maar," Dora
Maar grumbled,
dismissing nearly a decade of portraits—but Nabokov did indulge
in a certain
amount of autoplagiarism. His early letters to VĂ©ra sound
familiar to readers of
The Gift; his enchantment with her was precisely that of the
preordained variety
Fyodor feels for Zina, who had in turn been clipping the young
poet's work two
years before she meets him. Nabokov perfectly summarized the
correspondence in that novel:
What was it about her that fascinated him most of all?
Her perfect
understanding, the absolute pitch of her instinct for
everything that
he himself loved? In talking to her one could get along
without any
bridges, and he would barely have time to notice some
amusing
feature of the night before she would point it out. And
not only was
Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a
very
painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single
shadow, were
made to the measure of something not quite
comprehensible, but
wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding
them.
In 1924 he had written VĂ©ra along very much the same lines,
declaring: "You and
I are entirely special; such wonders as we know, no one else
knows, and
nobody loves the way we love." Despite her perfect
understanding, VĂ©ra
Nabokov was always quick to deny all resemblance between Zina
and herself.
She shares even that elusiveness with her fictional
counterpart. When Fyodor
suggests to Zina that their romance will be the very theme of
his book, Zina—a
character in someone else's book to begin with—shudders. But
then the result
will be autobiographical!
The self-effacement predated the literature. In the last
months that Nabokov
lived with his mother in Berlin, VĂ©ra did not meet his family,
as Svetlana had
often done. When she telephoned and wrote to him in Prague in
the fall and
again over the winter she did so under an assumed name. When
Nabokov's
sisters asked who was calling, VĂ©ra replied "Madame Bertrand."
Already
Vladimir complained that she was not holding up her side of the
correspondence; he kept expecting one of his sisters to dash in
excitedly,
bearing an envelope from "Madame Bertrand." This masquerade
continued until
1924. Why the deliberate camouflage? In part VĂ©ra seemed
determined to tread
with the silent but firm footfall Nabokov found so appealing,
entering "as if gliding
across glass," "airborne and unexpected," as he had it in two
November 1923
poems. She had little aptitude for drama, for which—as she may
have
suspected—Nabokov's two younger sisters had a more highly
developed taste;
Elena Nabokov Sikorski fondly recalled having listened in on
her brother's
amorous conversations. (She understood even at the time that
Madame
Bertrand and VĂ©ra were one and the same.) VĂ©ra may have been
aware too of a
need for delicacy at Nabokov's end. A Jewish name has a certain
ring to
aristocratic Russian ears, and while she would have known that
Nabokov's
father had championed all sorts of unpopular causes—democracy
and Jewish
emancipation among them—she may have been unwilling to run any
risks with
his mother. To a German they appeared to be two attractive
Russian émigrés of
about the same age; to some Russian eyes the couple did not
look so eminently
well-matched. It is possible too that VĂ©ra kept her name to
herself simply out of
what would later be revealed to be a hypertrophied sense of
discretion.
And the mask? With its whirl of charity balls, Russian
Berlin was full of masks.
Nabokov's literature is a veritable carnival of them, in
which—cleverly and
infuriatingly—the crucial piece of information is often
disguised, a ruse Nabokov
much admired in Gogol. "Is `mask' the keyword?" asks Humbert in
Lolita.
Certainly it matters more than the charity ball, or who pursued
whom. Even
before she met him, VĂ©ra Slonim knew her man, counted on his
being able to
recognize the "delight in the semitranslucent mystery." She
sensed—was it
something he had written, or something she had heard said of
him?—that he
would agree that "a little obscurity here throws in relief the
clarity of the rest." And
she knew how to hide behind her words, which became something
of a family
specialty. Certainly the veils did nothing to detract from her
allure as far as her
husband-to-be was concerned. In his most personal apotheosis of
a mask,
Nabokov wrote VĂ©ra a year after their 1925 marriage: "My sweet,
today I sense
especially vividly that since that very day when you came to me
in the mask that I
have been unbelievably happy, that the golden age of my soul
has begun." He
referred to his own use of disguises as "the little silk mask
of an additional pen
name." Conversely, there were plenty of reasons why at
twenty-one, in Berlin,
VĂ©ra Slonim would be exquisitely attuned to the risk of
exposing herself, above
and beyond her taste in gnomic prose poems. One scrap of
evidence suggests
that she generally fostered a taste for camouflage, a happy
weakness for a
translator to have. In a 1924 letter Nabokov had asked her to
describe what she
was wearing. He was pleased by her response; he could picture
her perfectly, so
well that he was impatient to remove several items. Furthermore
she had
included an unnecessary accessory in her description. "But you
really wouldn't
dare wear a mask," chided Nabokov, when the two had known each
other for
precisely eight months. "You are my mask."
(Continues...)
(C) 1999 Stacy Schiff All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-679-44790-3
* * *
Nearly a half million Russians had settled in Berlin over the
previous three years,
when the ruble went a long way and the city was cheaper for
those fleeing the
Revolution than any other. Its suburbs, where residence permits
could be
obtained easily, proved especially welcoming. There were émigré
Russian
everythings: Russian hairdressers, Russian grocers, Russian
pawnshops,
Russian antique stores, Russian foreign-exchange speculators,
Russian
orchestras. There were two Russian soccer teams. To some it
seemed as if the
Russians had taken over Berlin; these were not downtrodden,
frightened
refugees but a sophisticated, vibrant community of
professionals and
aristocrats. Rul was one of 150 Russian-language newspapers and
journals;
by 1923 Berlin outshone Petrograd and Moscow as the center of
Russian book
publishing. Eighty-six Russian publishing firms were founded in
Berlin, one of
them by Evsei Slonim, VĂ©ra's father. He and a partner briefly
opened a firm called
Orbis. VĂ©ra worked in the office during the days, evidently in
order to earn the
money for horseback riding in the Tiergarten. All of this would
change with the
inflation; the next years of exile were to be substantially
leaner. By 1924, the
center of the Russian emigration would shift to Paris. But for
a few more months
Russian cultural life burned on brightly in Berlin, with a
slate of readings and
festive gatherings each evening.
With Nabokov's return, the romance continued through the
fall of 1923 on the
sidewalks of Berlin, in the southwest suburbs of the city. In
their meandering the
two were hardly alone. The poet Nina Berberova, who had yet to
meet either VĂ©ra
or Vladimir, remembered that "all of us sleepless Russians
wandered these
streets until dawn." The critic Vladislav Khodasevich, with
whom Berberova lived
for a decade, remembered a sea of "clinging couples like
statues"; those lovers
were to be frozen in every doorway in Nabokov's Glory, in
whispering
mid-embrace. In October Nabokov's sisters and younger brother
moved with
their mother to Prague, where she could claim a Czech
government pension.
Vladimir accompanied the family, whom he surprised with the
precipitate
announcement that he was returning to Berlin, for reasons that
became clear
only later. VĂ©ra helped him to retain a room at a
boardinghouse; she lived with
her family a fifteen-minute walk away. Their
assignations—arranged by note or
telephone—took place on street corners, near railway bridges,
in the Grunewald.
Nabokov's winter poems are saturated in images of VĂ©ra, a
slender shadow
detaching itself from the velvety darkness, poised to explore
the black magic of
the Berlin streets. The world may have been falling apart
around them, but the
poetry is full of enchantment and rebirth, as eight months
before it had been full
of self-pity and despair. Nabokov was yet to coin the phrase,
but there is
everywhere proof that he had found in VĂ©ra a companion who
could devise a
harlequin: "Divining, you notice all/all night's silhouetted
games/I start to
talk—you answer, / as if rounding off a line of verse." Acutely
aware that he was in
the company of a translator, he felt impelled to choose his
words with an
invigorating exactitude. He sensed that with VĂ©ra one had to
speak "amazingly."
He cursed the telephone, over which everything came out so
wretchedly. He
feared bruising her with an "inept endearment." At once he
seized upon
something a later admirer was to describe thusly: "With her for
a reader, the
classics would reveal themselves like paintings liberated from
layers of
carelessly applied varnish." He felt she spoke with enormous
distinction. Never
has any woman received so many tributes to her vowels.
It is clear that the two slipped quickly into a
relationship; by November Nabokov
was swearing that he loved as never before, with an infinite
tenderness, that he
regretted every minute of the past he had not shared with VĂ©ra.
The ease with
which the two fell together is clearer still if we allow
ourselves a glimpse at the
thematic shadows the Berlin nights cast on the fictions, which
is a little like
saying we shall now base our idea of female anatomy on the work
of Picasso.
This both was and was not the case; the image is more
refraction than reflection.
But the trails are there all the same. During a November
separation Nabokov
had written VĂ©ra: "You came into my life and not the way a
casual visitor might
(you know, `without removing one's hat') but as one enters a
kingdom, where all
the rivers have waited for your reflection, all the roads for
your footfall." A month
later he returned to the same image:
Have you ever thought about how strangely, how easily our
lives
came together? And this is probably that God, bored up in
heaven,
experienced a passion he doesn't often have. It's as if
in your soul
there is a preprepared spot for every one of my thoughts.
When
Monte Cristo came to the Palace he had purchased, he saw
on
the table, among other things, a lacquered box, and he
said to his
major domo who had arrived earlier to set everything up,
"My
gloves should be here." The latter beamed and opened this
otherwise unexceptional lacquered box, and indeed: the
gloves.
"In everything from fables there is a grain of truth," he
concluded, before asking
her to telephone his old apartment very late at night, so as to
be certain to disturb
his ex-neighbors.
When the muckraking "biograffitist" comes along in the 1974
Look at the
Harlequins! to ask how Vadim Vadimovich N. met the woman who
turned his
life around, our narrator shuts the door in his face—but not
before referring him
to See under Real, a novel written thirty-five years earlier,
in English. See under
Real’s actual and phonetic counterpart is The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight,
written thirty-five years earlier, in English. It is almost
impossible to separate
VĂ©ra from the fictional Clare in that novel, who "entered his
life without knocking,
as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague
resemblance to
one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly
getting used to the
strange creatures she found there and petted despite their
amazing shapes."
From the original manuscript Nabokov had deleted a line, which
followed the
passage about how well Clare fitted into Sebastian's life:
"They became lovers in
such a speedy manner that for anyone who did not know them, she
might have
passed for a fast girl or he for a vulgar seducer." Events move
with the same
lightning speed in The Gift, for wholly nonfictional reasons:
"Despite the
complexity of her mind, a most convincing simplicity was
natural to her, so that
she could permit herself much that others would be unable to
get away with, and
the very speed of their coming together seemed to Fyodor
completely natural in
the sharp light of her directness."
Between VĂ©ra and her fictional shadows there is plenty of
room for
distortion—"They're all Picassos, not one is Dora Maar," Dora
Maar grumbled,
dismissing nearly a decade of portraits—but Nabokov did indulge
in a certain
amount of autoplagiarism. His early letters to VĂ©ra sound
familiar to readers of
The Gift; his enchantment with her was precisely that of the
preordained variety
Fyodor feels for Zina, who had in turn been clipping the young
poet's work two
years before she meets him. Nabokov perfectly summarized the
correspondence in that novel:
What was it about her that fascinated him most of all?
Her perfect
understanding, the absolute pitch of her instinct for
everything that
he himself loved? In talking to her one could get along
without any
bridges, and he would barely have time to notice some
amusing
feature of the night before she would point it out. And
not only was
Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a
very
painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single
shadow, were
made to the measure of something not quite
comprehensible, but
wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding
them.
In 1924 he had written VĂ©ra along very much the same lines,
declaring: "You and
I are entirely special; such wonders as we know, no one else
knows, and
nobody loves the way we love." Despite her perfect
understanding, VĂ©ra
Nabokov was always quick to deny all resemblance between Zina
and herself.
She shares even that elusiveness with her fictional
counterpart. When Fyodor
suggests to Zina that their romance will be the very theme of
his book, Zina—a
character in someone else's book to begin with—shudders. But
then the result
will be autobiographical!
The self-effacement predated the literature. In the last
months that Nabokov
lived with his mother in Berlin, VĂ©ra did not meet his family,
as Svetlana had
often done. When she telephoned and wrote to him in Prague in
the fall and
again over the winter she did so under an assumed name. When
Nabokov's
sisters asked who was calling, VĂ©ra replied "Madame Bertrand."
Already
Vladimir complained that she was not holding up her side of the
correspondence; he kept expecting one of his sisters to dash in
excitedly,
bearing an envelope from "Madame Bertrand." This masquerade
continued until
1924. Why the deliberate camouflage? In part VĂ©ra seemed
determined to tread
with the silent but firm footfall Nabokov found so appealing,
entering "as if gliding
across glass," "airborne and unexpected," as he had it in two
November 1923
poems. She had little aptitude for drama, for which—as she may
have
suspected—Nabokov's two younger sisters had a more highly
developed taste;
Elena Nabokov Sikorski fondly recalled having listened in on
her brother's
amorous conversations. (She understood even at the time that
Madame
Bertrand and VĂ©ra were one and the same.) VĂ©ra may have been
aware too of a
need for delicacy at Nabokov's end. A Jewish name has a certain
ring to
aristocratic Russian ears, and while she would have known that
Nabokov's
father had championed all sorts of unpopular causes—democracy
and Jewish
emancipation among them—she may have been unwilling to run any
risks with
his mother. To a German they appeared to be two attractive
Russian émigrés of
about the same age; to some Russian eyes the couple did not
look so eminently
well-matched. It is possible too that VĂ©ra kept her name to
herself simply out of
what would later be revealed to be a hypertrophied sense of
discretion.
And the mask? With its whirl of charity balls, Russian
Berlin was full of masks.
Nabokov's literature is a veritable carnival of them, in
which—cleverly and
infuriatingly—the crucial piece of information is often
disguised, a ruse Nabokov
much admired in Gogol. "Is `mask' the keyword?" asks Humbert in
Lolita.
Certainly it matters more than the charity ball, or who pursued
whom. Even
before she met him, VĂ©ra Slonim knew her man, counted on his
being able to
recognize the "delight in the semitranslucent mystery." She
sensed—was it
something he had written, or something she had heard said of
him?—that he
would agree that "a little obscurity here throws in relief the
clarity of the rest." And
she knew how to hide behind her words, which became something
of a family
specialty. Certainly the veils did nothing to detract from her
allure as far as her
husband-to-be was concerned. In his most personal apotheosis of
a mask,
Nabokov wrote VĂ©ra a year after their 1925 marriage: "My sweet,
today I sense
especially vividly that since that very day when you came to me
in the mask that I
have been unbelievably happy, that the golden age of my soul
has begun." He
referred to his own use of disguises as "the little silk mask
of an additional pen
name." Conversely, there were plenty of reasons why at
twenty-one, in Berlin,
VĂ©ra Slonim would be exquisitely attuned to the risk of
exposing herself, above
and beyond her taste in gnomic prose poems. One scrap of
evidence suggests
that she generally fostered a taste for camouflage, a happy
weakness for a
translator to have. In a 1924 letter Nabokov had asked her to
describe what she
was wearing. He was pleased by her response; he could picture
her perfectly, so
well that he was impatient to remove several items. Furthermore
she had
included an unnecessary accessory in her description. "But you
really wouldn't
dare wear a mask," chided Nabokov, when the two had known each
other for
precisely eight months. "You are my mask."
(Continues...)
(C) 1999 Stacy Schiff All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-679-44790-3