Véra Nabokov neither wrote her memoirs nor considered doing so. Even at the end of her long life, she remained the world’s least likely candidate to set down the confessions of a white widowed female. (She did keep a diary of one girl’s fortunes, but the girl was Lolita.) When asked how she had met the man to whom she had been married for fifty-two years she begged the question, with varying degrees of geniality. “I don’t remember” was the stock response, a perfectly transparent statement coming from the woman who could recite volumes of her husband’s verse by heart. At another time she parried with “Who are you, the KGB?” One of the few trusted scholars cornered her. Here is your husband’s account of the events of May 8, 1923; do you care to elaborate? “No,” shot back Mrs. Nabokov. In the biographer’s ears rang the sound of the portcullis crashing down. For all anyone new she had been born Mrs. Nabokov.
Which she had not. Vladimir Nabokov’s version, delivered more or less consistently, was that he had met the last of his fiiancées in Germany. “I met my wife, Véra Slonim, at one of the émigré charity balls in Berlin at which it was fashionable for Russian young ladies to sell punch, books, flowers, and toys,” he stated plainly. When a biographer noted as much, adding that Nabokov left shortly thereafter for the south of France, Mrs. Nabokov went to work in the margins. “All this is rot,” she offered by way of corrective. Of Nabokov’s 1923 trip to France another scholar observed: “While there he wrote once to a girl named Véra Slonim whom he had met at a charity ball before leaving.” Coolly Mrs. Nabokov announced that this single sentence bulged with three untruths, which she made no effort to identify.
– Stacy Schiff
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