The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (30 page)

With the onset of the Second World War in the fall of 1939, the couple began to plan yet another flight. Fortune smiled on them when the émigré writer Mark Aldanov gave up an offer to teach a summer course in Russian literature at Stanford; he passed it to Nabokov, who seized the opportunity and wrote to accept. Alexandra Tolstoy, the writer’s youngest daughter and head of the Foundation in her father’s name (it aided Russian refugees in America), helped Nabokov secure entry visas for his family. Ivan Bunin, the first Russian writer awarded the Nobel Prize (in 1933), recommended Nabokov in a letter to universities, praising him as a writer of “exceptional talent” and “a profound student of Russian language and literature.”
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Meanwhile, Véra queried French officials about their exit permits and, to speed the process, resorted to a bribe. Having placed 200 francs in front of an official, she spent two months fearing that they would arrest her for bribery before Nabokov received the passports. But as Nabokov remarks in
Speak, Memory
, the bribe was administered “to the right rat at the right office.” He remained detached from world politics and newspaper headlines, writing his lectures on Russian literature and solving chess problems at night, while separated from blacked-out Paris by opaque curtains: “Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled.… Sleeping in the next room were you and our child.…”
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In addition, the Nabokovs were aided by the New York-based Jewish rescue organization, which sold them tickets to cross the Atlantic at half price and helped raise the remaining half. The organization was managed by a friend of Nabokov’s father who remembered his efforts fighting official anti-Semitism in Russia. In May 1940, when antiaircraft guns could already be heard outside Paris, the family boarded
Champlain
, the last boat to leave France before the occupation. Theirs was a comfortable escape in a first-class cabin. Nabokov took a valuable part of his butterfly collection and entrusted the balance along with his archive to a friend, the writer Ilya Fondaminsky, who was determined to stay in Paris. Arrested as a Jew (even though he had adopted
Christianity), Fondaminsky would perish in Auschwitz in 1942. Nabokov’s brother Sergei, a homosexual, would also die in a concentration camp.

On May 28, their boat arrived in New York, and Nabokov cheerfully informed an acquaintance, “A miracle has occurred: My wife, my son and I have managed to repeat Columbus’s feat.”
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Their first cab ride in Manhattan became one of those humorous stories Véra liked to tell. She misread the meter and gave a driver one hundred dollars, instead of ninety cents. The honest New Yorker said he wouldn’t be driving cabs if he had that amount of change. Eight years later, fully assimilated to America, Véra drove her husband across the continent in their Oldsmobile and could even change a tire on the roadside.

The Nabokovs were remarkably adaptable: in a few months, they felt that America had become their home and praised their new country. In the summer, they were invited to stay in Vermont at the country house of Mikhail Karpovich, a friend and a Russian history professor at Harvard. The place, surrounded by birch trees, reminded them of Russia (the Solzhenitsyns later bought an estate in Vermont for the same reason). The serenity of the New England countryside soon helped erase the painful memories of Europe. Hunting butterflies with her husband, Véra sounded enthusiastic: “I’ve had wonderful luck. I’ve gotten many things he didn’t get.… Once I saw a butterfly that he wanted very much, and he wouldn’t believe me that I had seen it.”
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America realized Nabokov’s dreams as a writer and as a scientist, who relished an opportunity to study butterflies on a new continent: that fall, he began lepidoptera research at the American Museum of Natural History.

In 1941, Nabokov received an appointment as a lecturer in comparative literature at Wellesley College for women, where he would be the first to teach Russian language and literature. In the spring, they traveled across America with former student Dorothy Leuthold, making stops along the highway to pursue butterflies. At the Grand Canyon National Park, Nabokov discovered an unidentified brown-colored specimen, which he called
Neonympha dorothea
,
after the student; Véra caught two more on the roadside with just her hands.

While Nabokov divided his time between entomology, writing, and teaching, Véra assisted him in all these pursuits. To a university colleague who asked how he had time to write, Nabokov replied, “In the morning I peer at the genitalia of butterflies; in the afternoon, I teach Russian grammar to students at Wellesley; in the evening I get into bed with a mug of hot milk and write.”
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This intense schedule could be maintained because Véra occasionally substituted for him at lectern and microscope. Nabokov spent so much time at his microscope that Véra had to waken him, “not from sleeping but from butterflies.”
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In 1942, when he went on a lecture tour to South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, she replaced him at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, where he had been appointed a Research Fellow. He would write her to ask how many trays of butterflies she had filled, and Véra reported her progress.

Véra’s influence increased progressively with her involvement in her husband’s work. She could tell Nabokov what he should write and publish next and, apparently, this delighted him. In January 1944 Nabokov wrote Edmund Wilson how she had persuaded him to complete his novel
Bend Sinister
and that he had “sulkily pulled it out” from underneath his lepidoptera papers to discover it was worth doing.
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“My wife, of course, is a wonderful adviser. She’s my first and best reader,” he told a reporter several years later, upon this novel’s publication.
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Edmund Wilson was at once impressed and surprised by the amount of work Véra did for her husband. In 1946, he wrote Elena Thornton, his future wife, who would also become the central figure in his life, “Véra is wonderful with Volodya: she writes all his lectures, types his manuscripts, and handles all his publishing arrangements. She also echoes all his opinions—something which would end by making me rather uncomfortable but which seems to suit Nabokov perfectly.”
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Around this time, Nabokov had a poetry reading, attended by his students. Véra was in the front row, and
Nabokov had brief discussions with her during the reading. One of his students found it fascinating that Nabokov consulted his muse as to which of his love poems he should read next.

When in 1948, at the end of his term at Wellesley, Nabokov fell ill with bronchitis, Véra took over his elementary and intermediate language classes. Students found that she had more discipline as an instructor and was a better teacher. Some colleagues shared this view: when Nabokov’s application was being considered by another university, one of them told his potential employer, “Don’t bother hiring him;
she
does all the work.”
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At Wellesley, Nabokov was passed over for promotion because of his anti-Communist views and opposition to teaching Soviet literature. Interest in it had increased when America became a Soviet ally in the Second World War. The Nabokovs despised liberals who sympathized with Soviet Russia; they supported McCarthy even after his downfall.

That same year, Nabokov received a long-sought appointment as professor of Russian at Cornell, where his literature classes would become legendary. Véra helped develop a new Russian literature course meant to accommodate more students, and she even wrote some lectures, employing his style. She would, however, downplay her involvement, telling a biographer that Nabokov revised her text until not a word of the original remained. During his lectures, he liked to grade famous writers’ works: he gave Dostoevsky a C minus. Véra would launch her attacks on writers during faculty parties: she condemned Jane Austen and told a specialist in Goethe that
Faust
was “one of the shallowest plays ever written.”
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Since Nabokov also liked to provoke people, he would find nothing wrong with what she had to say.

A narcissist, Nabokov divided literature into books he wished he had written and books he had written. His students heard him say he surpassed Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a second tongue. Véra’s endorsement nurtured his ego; so when a student praised his lectures in European literature, Nabokov, with childlike vanity, asked him to repeat his remark to his wife.

Both cared little for people outside their marriage, which inspired a student’s reflection: “Inseparable, self-sufficient, they form a multitude of two.”
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As Nabokov’s chauffeur, Véra drove him to campus; there she prompted him when they met faculty and staff. Like Dostoevsky, whom he disliked, Nabokov had trouble remembering faces and names and needed his wife to remind him who was who. The couple would enter the lecture hall together: Véra carried Nabokov’s briefcase, opened the door for him, put his notes on the lectern, and occasionally rushed to fetch his glasses from the car. Nabokov introduced her to the students as his assistant. She would sit in the front row or near the lectern, and Nabokov seemed to address her alone. Occasionally, she would prompt Nabokov or signal him to stop laughing at some passages in Gogol because nobody could understand what he was saying. She found quotations for him and spelled difficult words on the board since he was allergic to chalk dust. Grading exams was also her responsibility, and she made comments for both of them. When a former student sent a letter remembering Véra’s assistantship, she readily signed her reply, “Mrs. Nabokov, still V.N.’s ‘assistant.’”
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In Ithaca, they led a nomadic existence, occupying vacated homes during owners’ sabbaticals. Having to pay for Dmitry’s private schools, the couple could not afford other arrangements. Nabokov’s salary as a lecturer was then between $5,000 and $6,000. Having to move once or twice a year, with Véra doing all the driving, packing, and housekeeping, they kept possessions to a minimum. Nabokov did not own even a desk, writing in the car, in the bathroom, in bed, or at someone else’s desk in the houses they occupied.

In 1950, when Nabokov was hospitalized with neuralgia, Véra took his place at the lectern, reading his notes. Always eager to praise his wife, Nabokov remarked she was “doing an amazing job” at university.
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In her turn, Véra admired his performance, telling a friend that he was reading
“grandiose
lectures, in an enormous auditorium.”
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Nabokov carefully staged his presentations. In 1952, during a popular class in European literature taught in a planetarium to some four hundred students, he played with a
switch, sending beams of light to constellations while announcing, “In the firmament of Russian literature … this is Pushkin.… This is Gogol! This is Chekhov!” Then raising a window blind, he would let sunlight flood the room: “And that is Tolstoy!”
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Describing her husband’s lectures to an acquaintance, Véra wrote with exaggeration that five hundred and forty registered students “intently listen and applaud” after each lecture.
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While Nabokov’s lectures were inspiring, his teaching methods did not appeal to everyone. He could give a bad grade to a student for challenging his view on Dostoevsky. A student walked out of his class when he called Freud a “Viennese quack.”
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Véra described Nabokov as the greatest living writer long before
Lolita
was published. Writing Nabokov’s letters, both business and private, she promoted him—in the third person—though the words were often his. When her correspondents protested that she exceeded her authority, Nabokov would stand up for her: “My wife does not make herself the ‘echo’ of anything; she merely is kind enough to jot down my queries and apprehensions.”
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Some correspondents were further annoyed when she replied on Nabokov’s behalf. Professor William Lamont asked Nabokov to supplement his list of under-appreciated masterpieces of European literature, but it was Véra who responded. She suggested Lamont add Nabokov’s novel
The Defense
to his list, describing it as “one of the best novels ever written in Russian.” Lamont promised to include her “talented boy friend’s novel” on his list, an ironic remark that provoked Véra’s infuriated response. She retorted that she recommended Nabokov’s novel as a connoisseur of Russian literature, not as his loyal and devoted
wife
.
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Nabokov began writing
Lolita
in 1950, although the idea was conceived earlier while he was still working at Wellesley College for Women. It was a daring story about a middle-aged man obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl whom he sexually exploits. The topic was taboo and Nabokov even attempted to burn his drafts, but Véra stopped him in front of an incinerator. She saved
Lolita
and later insisted on its publication. Both realized that
Nabokov could lose his professorship if the novel was interpreted as pornography: promoting it in America was illegal. But the couple could also remember how Tolstoy’s unpublishable novella,
The Kreutzer Sonata
, succeeded beyond expectations.

Tolstoy’s contentious novella, the story of a man who kills his wife, was the first fictional work in Russia exploring a crime of passion. It generated unprecedented interest, becoming the most read and discussed fictional work in late nineteenth-century Russia. Tolstoy increased its emotional intensity by making his provocative work the first-person account of a criminal. The government ban only helped promote it: the novella circulated in numerous underground copies, creating a sensation.

Lolita
, also a passionate and psychologically correct account of a criminal, explores his sexual obsession with a prepubescent girl. Nabokov studied newspaper reports on sex crimes, read monographs on girls’ sexual maturation, and traveled on buses to hear schoolgirl talk. His knowledge of the subject would deceive even his sophisticated readers. They would think that Nabokov and his notorious hero, Humbert, were the same man. Nadezhda Mandelstam told Carl Proffer that Nabokov could not have written
Lolita
unless he had the “same disgraceful feelings for little girls.”
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Christopher Hitchens felt that Nabokov had invested his personal fascination with the topic and that he “had thought about it a lot.”
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