His Better Half

Donald Rayfield

His Better Half

Letters to Véra
By Vladimir Nabokov (Translated and edited by Olga Voronina & Brian Boyd) (Penguin Classics 864pp £30)

Nabokov: 'yellow-blue bus'

Letters from Vladimir Nabokov could be as welcome to their recipients as an enquiry from the taxman or a reproach from an ex-spouse. His most helpful American supporter, Edmund Wilson, was berated for a 'hopeless infatuation with the Russian language' and 'incomprehensible incomprehension of ... Eugene Onegin'. Nabokov's much-abused first biographer, Andrew Field, who tried too hard to probe his subject's friends, relatives and ancestors, was not only dismissed as a 'rat' writing 'tripe', but also told, 'The style and tone of your work are beyond redemption.' Yet within the tiny inner circle formed by his wife, Véra, and son, Dmitri, Nabokov was unfailingly affectionate and attentive, and in all the surviving correspondence there are few scorpion stings. Perhaps the only chilling aspect is that such love for his wife and son left Nabokov with relatively little sympathy for his widowed mother and struggling siblings.

The letters span fifty-three years; the bulk stem from the mid-1920s and the 1930s, when Vladimir and Véra were often in different European countries, as he, like so many Russian émigré literati, desperately sought publishers, translators, academic employers and residence permits, and she remained in Berlin, where she worked as a secretary. From 1940 on, ensconced in the USA, and later living on the earnings of Lolita in Montreux's best hotel, the couple were only sporadically parted, so that little light is shed on the English-language phase of Nabokov's career. Véra wrote when she felt it necessary and restricted herself to everyday essential problems. Little was therefore lost when she destroyed all but a few phrases of her own letters to Vladimir.

What seems to emerge is a portrait of a marriage of which most male writers can only dream: a wife who devotes all her talents, energy and steely character to nurturing her husband's genius and promoting his fame. (Véra's biographer, Stacy Schiff, simply called her a 'shrewish, controlling dragon-lady' and compared extracting information from her with extracting an angry cat from its box at the vet's.) In his foreword to this book, Brian Boyd presents a condensed version of his extensive and canonical biography of Nabokov. His very first sentence - 'No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer than Vladimir Nabokov's' - is his only wrong call: Anthony Powell's sixty-five years of marriage to Lady Violet Pakenham is the obvious record-holder. Field in his biography, frustrated by the Nabokovs' manipulation, relied too much on gossip, speculation and psychoanalysis; Boyd, who won the family's total trust and who stuck to what was corroborated by documents or respectable sources, has superseded him. Nevertheless, he lets his love of Nabokov downplay, even ignore, uncomfortable facts.

One such fact is Nabokov's 1937 love affair in Paris with the young blonde Russian émigrée Irina Guadanini. It is clear (from other sources) that Véra, stuck in Prague with her mother-in-law and infant son, was told in an anonymous letter of the affair. The content of her letters to Nabokov that spring and summer can only be guessed at; the nervous tone that enters Nabokov's mixtures of cloying affection with irritable self-justification belies the sincerity of his declarations during the previous fourteen years: 'I can imagine how exhausted you are, my darling, and how overstrung, but believe me, you will get much better over summer.' Boyd dismisses Irina as a 'part-time poet who supported herself as a dog-groomer', which is about as fair as calling Catherine Walston, Graham Greene's great love, a part-time ballroom dancer who enjoyed herself as a Scrabble player. Guadanini's poems (published in Munich in 1962 and Russia in 2012) include a number of lyrics that are as good as Nabokov's; and long after the affair was broken off at Véra's insistence, the two interacted in their work. In 1961 Irina published under the pseudonym Aletrus a story, 'Tunnel', which not only describes the end of their affair, but also echoes the end of Nabokov's still suppressed The Magician, a story that she had heard from her best friend, a doctor who treated Nabokov for the psoriasis from which he suffered during the affair. The later editions of Lolita carry an afterword in which Nabokov claims to have been inspired by a monkey drawing the bars of its own cage; that idea is not connected to any theme of the novel, but it echoes an image in a poem by Guadanini.

Nabokov's last letter to Irina told her to 'return my letters. There was a lot of writer's exaggeration in them.' However, Nabokov did not commit the ultimate cruelty. Had he deserted Véra, she (as a Jew) and their son would have been murdered by the Nazis - as was his homosexual brother, Sergei - and he would probably not have turned into a major English-language novelist. Even so, affectionate marital intimacy took time to restore. What does not emerge from these letters is the fact that it took all Véra's vigilance, as well as the self-preserving instincts of Wellesley College students, to protect Vladimir from going too far with any other young, adulatory females.

The problem with translating Nabokov's private letters into English, as Olga Voronina makes clear in her foreword, is that diminutives, so natural in Russian, sound coy, even sickly in English: 'Mosquittle', 'Goosikins', and so on would have sounded better just as 'Little Mosquito' and 'Little Goose'. Once the embarrassment is overcome, what do the letters give us? The servitude and misery of talented Russians trying to get a footing in the academic and literary worlds of Western Europe are better rendered by Nabokov in his fiction, particularly in his finest Russian novel, The Gift. In letters to Véra, Nabokov is sparing with his opinions, which were often delightfully outrageous, about fellow writers, though André Gide is here added to the rubbish heap on which he had already dumped T S Eliot and Thomas Mann. We can now doubt Nabokov's avowed ignorance of German. His explanation for lingering so long in Berlin, where the Nazis made the murderer of his father one of the leaders of the Russian community, was that at least it kept his Russian pure, since he did not know the language there. This is puzzling, since his work shows signs that he had read Kafka in the original. The letters to Véra contain sentences in German with grammatical mistakes obviously due to contempt for, not ignorance of, the language, and he records being rebuked in Prague for speaking German to a fellow Slav.

In reporting his encounters abroad, Nabokov at times tried to reassure Véra by emphasising the defects in reputedly beautiful women (Nina Berberova's protruding gums and her hips like laundry bags; Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya is 'a haggish old woman with a face extraordinarily like a galosh'). He also constantly assessed the degree of either Jewishness or homosexuality in the men he met. As Véra was Jewish and Nabokov a determined enemy of anti-Semitism, the first can only be seen as a remnant of Russian aristocratic prejudice; the second was probably due to the discomfort Nabokov felt at having a flagrantly homosexual brother and uncle. But given the frequency of Nabokov's remarks - 'pederasts were up in arms [at] a life of Chaikovsky, their bum-buddy', for instance - one cannot blame Field for his provocative attempts to apply Freudian theory to his subject.

Prepossessing characteristics emerge, too. Nabokov was fond of animals and, like Chekhov in his Yalta years, took trouble to release house mice the servant had caught. His language-teaching techniques were innovative, showing how English, repeated fast, can be transformed into Russian. In the letters he writes 'yellow-blue bus'; in Wellesley College this became 'yellow-blue vase', which if spoken quickly becomes Ya liubliu vas ('I love you'). In the British Joint Services Russian course this method was developed: students were instructed to recite 'Does your arse fit you?' faster and faster until it evolved into the Russian word Zdravstvuite ('Hello').

Happy love letters, like happy families, tend to be less interesting than unhappy ones. This book will not transform our understanding of Nabokov the writer or the man - in any case, many of these letters have already been used by biographers or included in previous selections of Nabokov's correspondence. But exemplary translation and annotation make this collection something of a biography in itself.

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