He could offer “a sunny, simple happiness-and not an altogether common one,” a promise on which he largely delivered. Vladimir and Véra had known each other for seven months when he invited her to move to America with him. A pleasure of any extended collection of correspondence lies in the savory anticipations we read for the shimmer of the future, to which we alone are privy. Very quickly she began to color his writing.

“All the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame” could not equal, he swore in 1925, two of her letters. He could not wait for her to read his pages. He could not write a word without hearing it in her pronunciation. He was a man deeply in love.Įnchanted by Véra’s lightness, laugh, and “unique charm,” her “stretchy vowels,” “sweet long legs,” and “little dachshund paws”-he did not mention the pages of his verse that she had committed to memory-he poured out his heart. “I can’t tell you anything in words,” wailed the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century. He mangled it a bit he generally felt himself beyond language, illiterate, clumsy on the page when it came to Véra Evseevna Slonim. Their union felt to him preordained, a point he made by summoning an image from The Count of Monte Cristo. When finally they met, in their early twenties, in Germany, Nabokov believed destiny had arranged the encounter. Petersburg, where their paths crossed but never intersected. Both had been “perfectly normal trilingual children” in St. She molted too, from the fictional Mme Bertran, a code name she assumed in Berlin to disguise herself from Nabokov’s family, to the marble, monumental Véra Nabokov of Montreux. Her husband had, she explained to William Maxwell when he phoned in 1964 on New Yorker business, a “communicatory neurosis.”

It was the longest-running, most intimate correspondence of Nabokov’s life, in part because his wife quickly came to handle most others. In between came a shelf of literature, three wrenching changes of country, and nearly fifty years of marriage. When he mailed his last letter, he was a wealthy American novelist living in Switzerland, self-conscious about the quality of his Russian. Sirin,” a name that felt more familiar to him than his own. When he mailed the first missive to the woman who would become his wife, Vladimir Nabokov was a penurious, Berlin-based poet known to the émigré community as “V.

Véra and Vladimir Nabokov, Berlin, 1934 photograph by Nicolas Nabokov

Vera by stacy schiff