Vera Quotes

“Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“He was universally charming, as only a writer in pursuit of a publisher can be.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“Briefly (Vladimir Nabokov) caught the (Superman) fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the the Man of Steel's wedding night.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“It would be difficult to write about Véra without mentioning Vladimir. But it would be impossible to write about Vladimir without mentioning Véra.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on “the poetic path.” She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: “Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said ‘Verochka.’ It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“He wrote Véra sheepishly: “Something has happened (only don’t be angry). I can’t remember (for God’s sake, don’t be angry!) I can’t remember (promise that you won’t be angry), I can’t remember your telephone number.” He knew it had a seven in it, but the rest had entirely escaped him.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands. She had ample reason for doing so. For a Jew in Russia to be a fatalist was tantamount to inviting disaster. Nabokov trusted in a thematic design which could not have looked quite so dazzling, so sure-handed, to someone who was in the habit of gingerly tiptoeing one step ahead of destiny.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as""the spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“She took the Saturday Review’s 1962 test, “Your Literary I.Q.,” and outscored VN by a long shot;”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Proust fared better. “I cannot even begin to tell you how much pleasure we both derive from the mere presence of LA RECHERCHE in our dwelling,” Véra thanked her husband’s Gallimard editor, but this before she had begun the Maurois-edited volume, into which she was appalled to see that a great number of slips and misprints had crept. She could not help it; hers was the kind of eye to which typos positively leapt.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Nicholas Nabokov’s first wife did all in her power to make the new arrivals comfortable, arranging for them to occupy the flat across the hall in her East Sixty-first Street brownstone until the Tolstoy Foundation located a summer sublet on upper Madison Avenue.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Eventually the receptionist went to lunch, leaving him alone. An hour after the agreed-upon meeting time he wandered back to where he assumed Gallimard’s office to be; the publisher too had left for lunch. Twenty years later—after Gallimard had published Despair but rejected Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, and Speak, Memory—the firm again became Nabokov’s publisher. The reception would be dramatically different.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“He and Véra were perfectly exhausted, though continually delighted by Dmitri, whom they were deceiving into walking on his own. He would do so only by grasping at trees and bushes as he moved; they fixed a branch in his hand, and off he went.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Véra expressed a desire even to hurry it along. “I wish it would go all white,” she sighed in 1948, when it was very nearly there. “People will think I married an older woman,” her husband protested, to which, without blinking, Véra replied, “Not if they look at you.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Much of the rest of the summer and fall were devoted to the transcription of Invitation to a Beheading, a first draft of which Vladimir had written in a lightning two weeks, on Véra’s return from the clinic. To his dismay the typing seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time; in November an exhausted Véra was at the machine night and day. From outside the third-floor apartment, recalled Nabokov, “we heard Hitler’s voice from rooftop loudspeakers.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Mostly they had no place to go. Berberova’s description of the face of the continent at the time goes some way toward explaining their inertia: “On the map of Europe were England, France, Germany, and Russia. In the first, imbeciles reigned, in the second living corpses, in the third villains, and in the fourth villains and bureaucrats.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“honesty very nearly constituted a religious principle for her.* She believed in full candor, which was not the same as full disclosure.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Mandelstam wrote of the Jewish tutor who first introduced him to the concept of Jewish pride and whom he failed to believe, as he could see the tutor put that pride away as soon as he set foot again in the street.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“There was every reason, however, why she would have a natural ear for a narrative technique later described as a “system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Young women routinely went to law school; half the medical faculty in prerevolutionary times were women, as were a quarter of economics students. Oddly, even when the anti-Semitic decrees had made legal careers inaccessible to Jews, government schools for girls remained open to Jewish girls.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Russia was in any event a country in which, well in advance of the rest of Europe, girls were educated, none more so than three daughters of a successful Petersburg lawyer, in particular one without a son on whom to settle the mantle of intellectual heir.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“You came into my life and not the way a casual visitor might (you know, ‘without removing one’s hat’) but as one enters a kingdom, where all the rivers have waited for your reflection, all the roads for your footfall.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

“Never had he sounded so much like one of his characters, brought down by his passion, unable to escape his own private abyss, heartrendingly separated from his own self-image”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“Véra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that – born at a time and place where women could and did lay claim to all kinds of ambitions – she should elevate the role of wife to a high art. […] Traditionally, a man changes his name and braces himself for fame; a woman changes hers and passes into oblivion. This was not to be Véra’s case, although she did gather her married name around her like a cloak, which she occasionally opened to startling effect. She would never be forced to make a woman’s historic choice between love and work. Nor would Verochka, as Vladimir called her, squander any of her professional training, though as it happened her husband would be the direct (and sole) beneficiary of that expertise.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one. In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain time.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera

“Dimitri had driven his mother back to Montreux from the Lausanne hospital at dusk on July 2, in his blue Ferrari, on the last day of his father's life. Véra had sat silently for a few minutes and then uttered the one desperate line Dimitri ever heard escape her lips, "Let's rent an airplane and crash.”
― Stacy Schiff, Vera