On their arrival in hilly Ithaca it had been decided that a car would be a necessity, despite the excellent public buses. "One of us had better learn to drive," went the thinking; Vladimir appears to have been relieved that it was not he. Vera knew her husband's peccadilloes as well as his capabilities -- when he provided an address it was almost guaranteed to be an approximate or obsolete one -- and she continues to worry about his health through the fall. She had looked into driving instruction in New York; she appears to have been eager to take the wheel.
-- Stacy Schiff, Vera (Random House, 1999)
Vera is a detailed and moving story about a relationship that was a marriage, a partnership and, as Schiff says, a brain-bridge that lasted more than fifty years. Vladimir did the teaching and the writing; Vera did the typing, the editing, the inspiring and the bill-paying and paperwork. When Vladimir was teaching and fell ill Vera would step in and take over his classes. When Lolita was a commercial success (after Vera had stopped Vladimir from burning the manuscript) Vera took charge of all the letter-writing and translations (she knew four languages). They went hunting for butterflies together and seldom were separated. The book is fascinatingly full of the details of their lives, from their meeting and marriage in Germany in 1925 to their years in America (1940-1961) and their final years in Switzerland, Vladimir dying in 1977 and Vera in 1991. The New York Times headline to her obituary read "Vera Nabokov, 89, Wife, Muse, and Agent."
No comments:
Post a Comment