The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (31 page)

While Nabokov’s passion in this work was real, it could have had a different source of inspiration. In 1951, making progress with the novel, he was also pursuing and studying new species of butterflies and moths. That summer, Véra drove him through butterfly-hunting grounds in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Describing their expedition to his sister Elena, Nabokov told her how Véra navigated their Oldsmobile through poor mountain roads in Colorado in pursuit of a rare species of butterfly. He had found this nameless butterfly among museum samples, but “unbearably wanted to see it live and discover it.” They rented a lodge and he hiked with his net every morning to Telluride Mountain where, at 4,000 meters, plant food for this butterfly was found, “on an almost
vertical slope … in the snow-smelling silence.” After days of hunting among rocks and lavender, he caught the first female
Lycaeides sublivens
, “this extremely rare goddaughter of mine.”
576
He would describe his triumph in a poem, “A Discovery”: “I found it and I named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to an insect and its first describer—and I want no other fame.”
577
Nabokov’s butterfly passion seems related to Humbert’s desire to possess Lolita, a nymphet with a sensual Spanish name.

Their drive through the Rockies supplied scenery and inspiration and helped with the plot: the couple lived in the motels where Humbert keeps Lolita prisoner. In the passenger seat, Nabokov recorded Véra’s imaginative phrases on index cards: “My Oldsmobile gulps down the miles like a magician swallowing fire.”
578

Nabokov once said he would be remembered for
Lolita
and his translation of Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
, projects to which Véra contributed. Translating the poem was her idea: she told Nabokov that if the existing English versions did not satisfy him, he should try making his own. The project would become their most consuming joint undertaking, but Pushkin’s poetry proved untranslatable and the result also dissatisfied Nabokov, as he admits in his famous humorous lines “On Translating
Eugene Onegin”:
“What is translation? On a platter a poet’s pale and glaring head, a parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, and profanation of the dead.”
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In 1951, Dmitry began his undergraduate studies at Harvard. Coincidentally, that year Nabokov was invited to teach at Harvard the following spring. He and Véra could not pass up an opportunity to live close to their son. Now, they would move twice a year: in the fall, Nabokov taught at Cornell, and in the spring they left Ithaca for Cambridge.

Nabokov was now working on two writing projects simultaneously, and Véra had to switch from taking dictation on the novel to researching the history of nineteenth-century firearms for
Eugene Onegin
. Nabokov literally worked day and night: his insomniac mind refused to slow down. While he thus “tortured” himself, Véra looked
forward to the end of the book. “Although I do know that having finished one thing[,] he immediately grasps for the next.”
580

In February 1953, in Cambridge, the couple worked on commentaries to
Eugene Onegin
, which would far exceed the poem’s length. Toiling with the zeal of a student, Véra filled hundreds of index cards with her research notes. Later that spring, when Nabokov’s obsession with butterflies “turned into a true mania,”
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at his expression, she drove him to Arizona. Summer was spent in Oregon, where Nabokov hunted butterflies and wrote
Lolita;
in addition, he began a new novel,
Pnin
.

In the fall, as Nabokov worked feverishly to complete
Lolita
, Véra, on top of taking his dictation, graded hundreds of students’ papers. Recognizing her separate contribution, Cornell paid her for 130 hours of assistantship. On December 6, after four years of research and writing, Nabokov completed
Lolita
, and the couple began to worry about its publication.

Both believed
Lolita
his greatest artistic achievement, but the subject matter required them to keep it secret. Afraid to put it in the mail, Véra took the manuscript to Nabokov’s editor at
The New Yorker
, Katherine White, for her opinion, but months later the editor was still silent. In summer 1954, Nabokov asked his friend Edmund Wilson to read
Lolita
, describing it as “my best thing in English, and though the theme and situation are decidedly sensuous, its art is pure and its fun riotous.”
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Nabokov urged Wilson to keep everything he told him about the novel confidential. The couple was hoping Wilson would help advocate it, but the novel mortified him; he wrote Nabokov that “the characters and the situations are repulsive.”
583
Nabokov tried to convince Wilson that
Lolita
was “a highly moral affair,”
584
the notion Véra would later use to promote the work.

By then, the couple had received refusals from major American publishers: Simon & Schuster rejected it as “sheer pornography.” At Doubleday, an internal reviewer called the author “a remarkably perverse man.”
585
Two years later, these same publishers would compete to produce the American edition. After three decades,
Lolita
would be a reading assignment for American schoolgirls and in the 1990s would be read by young women in Tehran.

But in summer 1954, the couple feared prosecution unless a publisher was quickly found. Having exhausted opportunities in America, they decided to pursue European publication. In August, from New Mexico, where Nabokov hunted new butterfly territories, Véra contacted his literary agent in Paris, Doussia Ergaz. “My husband has written a novel of extreme originality, which—because of straitlaced morality—could not be published here.”
586
Nabokov was predicting that instead of a serious publisher, his novel would be purchased “by some shady firm,” which indeed happened.
587

In June 1955, Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press was the first to send Nabokov a contract; his publishing list included pornography. Nabokov’s agent would claim she did not realize this, although not only Girodias but his father, Jack Kahane, had published pornography. Nabokov made a costly blunder by accepting instantly and without making sure that the copyright was in his name. The couple paid for it with legal troubles when Girodias demanded fifty percent of royalties for American publication. Véra fittingly would nickname their publisher Girodias the Gangster.

Girodias immediately launched
Lolita
, producing it in September. Nabokov had wanted to publish it anonymously, but was told that the author’s name would be uncovered. He advised Girodias that
Lolita
was “a serious book with a serious purpose” and success through scandal would devastate him.
588
However, the man who published pornography welcomed scandal; what he did not anticipate was
Lolita’s
astonishing success.

At Christmas, Graham Greene named
Lolita
one of the three best books of the year in London’s
Sunday Times
. Simultaneously, the editor-in-chief of
The Sunday Express
, John Gordon, attacked the novel as “sheer unrestrained pornography.”
589
Diverse opinions put the book at the center of attention, and a serious publisher, Gallimard, wanted to produce a French edition. More controversy was created when copies of
Lolita
, smuggled across the Channel, were
seized in London. But this only encouraged German and Scandinavian publishers to buy rights. In December,
Lolita
was banned in France, but when Girodias sued the French government the ban was lifted; the case became known as “l’affaire
Lolita
.”
590

Success through scandal did not devastate Nabokov: to the contrary, it made him a celebrity. Véra was now handling a flurry of letters from American publishers who wanted to produce the novel. Girodia’s unrealistic demands discouraged many, however, until Putnam managed to overcome legal obstacles and took it on. In August 1958,
Lolita
was published in America, and at once began to climb the bestseller list. Within three weeks, a hundred thousand copies were sold, making it the most successful novel since
Gone With the Wind
. In September, Harris-Kubrick Pictures purchased the
Lolita
rights for $150,000, a sale negotiated with Véra on the phone while Nabokov, who refused to take the call, stood nearby. As
Lolita
became a number-one bestseller, Véra observed in her diary that Nabokov was “serenely indifferent” to his fame, occupied with regular work: he had just finished a new story and was spreading two thousand butterflies. When the
Times Literary Supplement
praised Nabokov as unequaled among contemporary English writers, Véra remarked that “without
Lolita
this would have taken another fifty years to happen.”
591

The couple’s success was soured when a novel by another Russian writer began to compete. Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
, released in America in September 1958, four weeks after
Lolita
, was soon outselling it. Clearly jealous, the Nabokovs referred to Pasternak’s novel as “trash” and portrayed the author as “a Bolshevik.”
592
They claimed that Pasternak’s abuse at home was fabricated and that
Zhivago
was a Soviet plant. Véra complained to a friend that
Lolita
was “squeezed out by that pitiful and miserable ‘book’ by the lowly Pasternak, whom V. is reluctant to badmouth.…”
593
Meanwhile, Nabokov wrote to Dwight Macdonald at
The New Yorker
, “Had not
Zhivago
and I been on the same ladder … I would have been glad to demolish that trashy, melodramatic, false, and inept book.” He was also trying to influence Jason Epstein at
The New York Review of
Books
, writing him that
Zhivago
was “dreary conventional stuff.”
594
Wilson thought Nabokov was behaving badly toward Pasternak and wrote a magnificent review of
Zhivago
, distinguishing it as “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.” Pasternak had to possess “the courage of genius” to create this novel in a totalitarian state.
595
That fall, Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize, but had to renounce it under pressure from Soviet authorities. He died of a heart attack two years later.

Like most émigrés, the Nabokovs were unforgiving of the Communist state and showed no sympathy for people who lived there. With the exception of Mandelstam’s poetry, they rejected literature of the entire Soviet period. They would also dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s novels as third-rate journalism.
596

Now that they were free from financial constraints, the couple planned their retirement. Nabokov’s last lecture at Cornell was to be in January 1959. Before Christmas break, students lined up at their professor’s office with copies of
Lolita
, only to learn that Nabokov did not sign his books. When a desperate student asked Véra whether she could sign his copy, she gave him a note as proof that Nabokov gave no autographs.

Writing to publishers before
Lolita
, Véra compared Nabokov with Tolstoy and Proust. After
Lolita’s
publication, she objected to any comparison, describing Nabokov as “a completely individual writer.… If you want to compare, please compare the present work to his other publications … recommend his books as just that: his books.”
597
As Nabokov’s fame grew, so did Véra’s responsibilities: she was handling a flood of correspondence, telephone queries, and contracts. She wrote Filippa Rolf, Nabokov’s Swedish female fan and poet:

I have to carry on the whole business side—not only the enormous correspondence with publishers and agent (we only have one agent, in Paris, and I handle most of the other rights myself), but also investments, banks, planning future moves, etc. etc. And since I have had very little experience in
business matters before, everything is far from smooth. But my husband has neither experience nor time for all this, so there is no choice for me but try to do my best, on a general “hit-and-miss” basis.
598

In September 1959, the couple journeyed to launch
Lolita
in Europe. Having come to America as refugees, they were returning as guests of honor: in two decades, Nabokov had become an American writer and a celebrity. There was a display of his editions on the ship, and Véra was confronted with the question of where her husband had met the
real
Lolita. She still anticipated such questions in 1981, when Martin Amis visited her in Switzerland: “These
questions
you will ask. Where are these
questions
?”
599

During their European tour, the British, French, and Italian editions of
Lolita
were launched. Because of the French ban and threat of prosecution by the British, interest in the novel soared. George Wiedenfeld wrote Nabokov that
Lolita
was the most discussed book in Britain before publication. On November 5, the publication eve, Wiedenfeld and his business partner Nigel Nicholson hosted a party for three hundred guests at the Ritz Hotel in London. While everyone anticipated news from the government, Nabokov alone looked unperturbed: according to a correspondent from
Time
&
Tide
, he seemed not to know “what the party was all about.” Emotions ran high when Nicholson announced that the British government had decided against prosecution. Véra, usually composed, was wiping tears from her eyes.

In France, a newspaper headline read, “Madame Nabokov is 38 Years Older than the Nymphet Lolita.”
600
At fifty-seven, Véra could take this for a compliment. During the French publisher’s reception, reporters separated Véra from Nabokov and discovered that without her he was disoriented. Earlier, he had made a serious blunder by failing to recognize James Harris, producer of the
Lolita
film, who introduced himself as “the man who just bought Lolita.” Nabokov took him for a fan and muttered, “I hope you will enjoy reading it.”
601
In Rome, Véra made the news by telling the press how she had saved
Lolita
from the fire. In his turn, Nabokov asked
the reporter: “Hasn’t this been a pleasant conversation? Isn’t it true that my wife is a marvelous person?”
602