Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both monumental (The Boston Globe) and utterly romantic (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the emigre author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, Vera, and third for no one at all.
Without my wife, he once noted, I wouldn't have written a single novel. Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Vera, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's Vera is a triumph of the biographical form.
Synopsis
At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a riddle, Véra explores a remarkable literary partnership - that of a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated his works to his wife. Open a volume of Nabokov's and there is Véra on the dedication page. But search for her elsewhere, and his wife of fifty-two years, the woman who literally plucked Lolita from the flames, fades from view.
Véra's story, never told, never really known at all before - is based on new material, including Vladimir's diaries and letters, and family correspondence.
About the Author
Stacy Schiff's Saint-Exupéry was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for this project. She lives with her family in New York City and Edmonton, Alberta.
Reading Group Guide
This discussion guide will assist readers in exploring
Vera. Hopefully, it will help create a bond not only between the book and the reader, but also between the members of the group. In your support of this book, please feel free to copy and distribute this guide to best facilitate the program. Thank you.
1. l. Schiff describes the Russia of Vera Slonim's childhood as one in which Jewish families obligatorily engaged in "what must have seemed like a colossal, rigged game of Simon Says" (p. 20). Do you think this tells you anything about the woman who would become Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov? How did Vera Slonim's father shape the person she would become? Do you think it mattered that her mother was to a large extent invisible in her own childhood? 2. Do you think the Nabokovs' joint gift for synesthesia--"the ability to transfer the observations of one sense into the vocabulary of another" (p. 38)--had any impact on their relationship? 3. To what do you attribute Vera Nabokov's secretiveness? Relatedly, how do you explain the couple's unwillingness to answer the question of how they first met? 4. Do you see Vera Nabokov as a victim? Does your view of her change--once, or incrementally, or not at all--in the course of the biography? Does she strike you as an appealing character? 5. In your opinion, was the Nabokovs' a happy marriage? Do you think Nabokov's passionate affair of l937 left a lasting mark on the marriage? Did that affair come as a surprise to you, or did you sense it coming? 6. At Vera Nabokov's first encounter with a new Goethe scholar at Cornell, she immediately informed him, "I consider Faust one of the shallowest plays ever written" (p. l87). To what do you attribute her statement? 7. How do you reconcile Vera Nabokov's claim that her English was not strong enough to permit her to write something about her husband with the masses of letters she did compose? 8. Why do you think the author lists the reasons the Cornell students provided for Vera Nabokov's presence in her husband's classroom (pp. l75-6)? 9. What did Vera Nabokov think of Lolita? Are her feelings toward the novel consistent? To your mind, was she happy to see it published? 10. The relationship between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson is one of the great vexed literary friendships of our time. Would the friendship have played itself out differently had Vera not been part of the picture? 11. "Generally she held people--herself especially--to the standards of her husband's literature, standards to which few of us, and even fewer publishers, rise," writes Schiff (p. 305). Is it your impression that Mrs. Nabokov was reasonable and the world less so, or vice versa? l2. Why do you think the author included the l96l interlude with Filippa Rolf, the Swedish poet? When do you first become aware of her in the biography? 13. Can you explain the force of Vera Nabokov's disdain for Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago (p. 242-3)? Are you sympathetic with her sentiments? 14. What kind of childhood would you say Dmitri Nabokov had? On p. 209, his mother sends him instructions for the Lermontov translation his parents secure for him, assuring him that he can count on assistance at their end. What do you make of his having been groomed as family translator? l5. Where is Vera Nabokov reflected in her husband's work? And what does her life tell you about the creative process, and about the climate in which an artist creates? l6. What do you make of Nabokov's insistence on having his wife at his side at all times? Why did he want her there for interviews? 17. Schiff has chosen an old Russian proverb ("He likes like an eyewitness") as her epigraph to the last chapter. What is this quotation meant to signal to the reader? 18. By today's standards Vera Nabokov was hardly a woman of great accomplishments. Nor did she grow up in a household in which women played visible professional roles. Do you think of her as having had a career? Or is she something of a disappointment, from a feminist point of view? 19. What do you learn about Nabokov the man from reading about his wife? Has your opinion of him changed? 20. Are you aware as you read of an overall shape of Vera Nabokov's life, and of recurrent or overall themes in that life? Do you think all lives have themes?