![]() ![]() ![]() She stopped short of tasting his meals when they dined out, but she opened his mail, and answered it.Īccording to Véra’s biographer, Stacy Schiff, her subject had such a fetish for secrecy that she “panicked every time she saw her name in footnotes.” It seems inapt to call Véra’s love selfless, however: the two selves of the Nabokovs were valves of the same heart. Before they moved from a professor’s lodgings in Ithaca, New York, to a luxury hotel in Switzerland, she kept his house-“terribly,” by her own description-and cooked his food. Vladimir dedicated nearly all his books to her, and Véra famously saved “Lolita” from incineration in a trash can when he wanted to destroy it. She was his first reader, his agent, his typist, his archivist, his translator, his dresser, his money manager, his mouthpiece, his muse, his teaching assistant, his driver, his bodyguard (she carried a pistol in her handbag), the mother of his child, and, after he died, the implacable guardian of his legacy. ![]() When they were apart, he pined for her grievously. Véra and Vladimir Nabokov were married for fifty-two years-a record, apparently, among literary couples-and their intimacy was nearly hermetic. ![]()
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