Free Vera by Stacy Schiff

so especially if Véra Nabokov’s account of them can be believed. She remembered that her father had “made much money through the sale of Russian estates, his own, and those of some business acquaintances for whom he acted as broker.” She had very smart clothes, and happily attended all of the best dances, including plenty of charity balls. The general mood in the Russian community, which swelled that fall to over a half million members, has been described as one of defiance rather than despair. Véra’s disposition over the crises of the next years was no different. (She was constitutionally incapable of self-pity, even of self-dramatization. Her letters suffer as a result.) It was assumed that, in her words, “everybody was going back in a year, or two, or ten.” She was eighteen years old; she went stunt flying; she hoped to learn to pilot an airplane. She rode sidesaddle in the Tiergarten. She learned to shoot an automatic in a basement firing range, among a group of former White Army officers, at least a few of whom must have paid special attention to the wisp of a girl with the crystalline laugh and the impeccable posture and the ice-blue eyes.She talked, and argued, more about politics than about literature. She did not like to see the Berlin stay “deprived of its high adventure”; she shared the taste for exploit with which her future husband would infuse
Glory
, the novel that on a perfectly literal level most closely resembles his autobiography. “We went to automobile races, and boxing matches, and the celebrated Berlin variety show, Scala,” Véra recalled. She did not adhere to the “welter of vodka and tears” school of description.
    On the family’s arrival in Germany, Sonia was sent to boarding school near Lausanne, to complete her grade school education. She later returned toBerlin to attend a Russian gymnasium, and for dramatic training. Lena—who had received the highest possible grades at the Obolensky Academy and a gold medal along with them—went to Paris. At the Sorbonne she earned a degree in modern languages, returning to Berlin two years later. Véra wasdiscouraged in her plans to attend university. She had been prone to respiratory infections, and her father voted against her attending Berlin’s Technische Hochschule, as she had hoped to. She did not qualify for admission without supplementary course work, a strain he thought inadvisable. That she could have been so easily convinced seems odd, given what we know about her resolve; it may be a tribute to her father’s authority, or it may qualify as a tiny grain of defensiveness about her lack of higher education. In any event the degree in architectural engineering never materialized, though even without it she was to engage in much bridge-building—and throw the occasional stick of dynamite. Save for a stenography course in 1928, her formal schooling had come to an end. She went to work in her father’simport-export firm, probably in 1922. At about the same time Véra spent two monthsteaching herself to type, first by memorizing the keyboard, then by taking dictation from whomever she could enlist.
    At his office address on Neue Bayreuther Strasse, Evsei Slonim backed an established Moscow publisher in a literary venture. Orbis’s dual mission was to translate Western literature for Russians, and to translate the Russian classics into English, for export to America. Beginning in 1922 Véra worked in that office as well, writing and translating, both for her father and for Orbis, occasionally freelancing for the automobile firm in the building. She handled all but the German correspondence, which was entrusted to a young German woman. The Orbis office would be gone by the following year, a casualty of the inflation, but it survives as the scene of one of the few certain nonencounters between Vladimir Nabokov and Véra Slonim. Nabokov fondly remembered