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Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)by Schiff, Stacy
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Book DescriptionModern Library. Trade PaperBack. 0375755349 A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. 2000 Modern Library Trade PaperBack . Very Good. 2000. Book summaryThis story of the remarkably long and happy marriage of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov emphasizes Véra's extraordinary devotion, which manifested itself in ways that were pivotal to Nabokov's work as both a writer and a teacher. The book brings both Nabokovs to life, and provides fascinating revelations about Vladimir's adulteries, Véra's influence on LOLITA, and--most remarkably--her unwavering contentment with her role in his life as chauffeur, teaching assistant, secretary, muse, and steadfast defender.Media Reviews"Schiff details grudges, infidelities and weaknesses, but she never loses sight of the sincerity and beauty of the couple's love. And she does...a thorough job of exposing both the mundane and the dramatic aspects of the duo's relationship." -- Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon "Schiff's entertaining biography powerfully argues that in effacing herself for her husband's aggrandizement, Véra Nabokov entered history arm in arm with one of the century's greatest men of letters." -- Kirkus "It would be easy to read Vera Nabokov's story as a tragedy of female artistic talent squandered in the service of egomaniacal male genius...but in fact Shiff's elegant biography is anything but a whining plaint of oppression. It is, instead, a sensitive rendering of one of the century's great love stories. The book probes delicately into the considerable mysteries at the heart of a happy marriage, and in so doing belies the prevailing notion of the writer's wife as an unfortunate helpmeet to be pitied." -- Will Blythe, Mirabella "This portrait of a 52-year marriage...opens up Nabokov's private life....But the triumph of VERA is not just in providing entrée to her famous husband. She fascinates in her own right..." -- Lyndall Gordon, New York Times Book Review "The earlier chapters are the strongest in this well-researched book....[W]hen the book comes to the American and Swiss years of the Nabokovs' lives, the weight of the reminiscences and anecdotes slows the pace of the narrative." -- Brenda Maddox, Literary Review First LineThis is the story of a woman, a man, and a marriage, a threesome that adds up any number of ways. For Vera and Vladimir Nabokov the arithmetic was simple: the elements amounted to a single entity. Publisher NotesWinner 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 Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the émigré author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, Véra, 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. Véra, 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 Véra is a triumph of the biographical form. ExcerptVéra saw her husband always before her; he saw her image of him....She had both the good and the ill fortune to recognize another's gift; her devotion to it allowed her to exempt herself from her own life. From the list of things Nabokov bragged about never having learned to do--type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, fold an umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book's pages, give the time of day to a philistine--it is easy to deduce what Véra was to spend her life doing. Other Recommended Books
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