Free Vera by Stacy Schiff Page A

having climbed the stairs to Evsei Slonim’s office, debating with his university friend Gleb Struve the fair price to ask forthe Dostoyevsky translation they were contemplating. He met with his future father-in-law, and he left the office. Fate is merciful in some ways, a tasteless, prankish, absentminded, clumsy, uncooperative cheat in others. She did not introduce Vladimir Nabokov to Véra Slonim that day. But neither did she saddle him with a Dostoyevsky translation, for which he might never have been paid.

    It is highly improbable that anyone ever placed a telephone call from Petersburg 3848, the Slonim home on Furstadtskaya, to Petersburg 2443, two miles away, where the Nabokovs’ doorman would have answered. This did notprevent Vladimir from contemplating the long history of his and Véra’s near-encounters. In Russia they had had mutual friends—both knew different members of the same prominent families—but they did not meet. Nonetheless Nabokov took it upon himself to divulge that he and his future wife had beenstrolled by their governesses side by side in a Petersburg garden. “They could have met many times when they were children; at dancing class, perhaps; it bothers them, and they go over it,” a visitor reported, in the 1960s. By some accounts the two had acted as extras in the same Berlin movies. Véra had twice summered near his family’s country estate. Nabokov positively contorted himself in his attempts to glimpse the workings of the Fate that had finally bent his and Véra’s roughly parallel paths; repeatedly he “directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past,” just as Van would later do in
Ada
.
    What would have happened had there been no Russian Revolution? Andrew Field asked Véra. Two sentences into her answer she was interrupted by her husband: “You would have met me in Petersburg, and we would have married and been living more or less as we are now!” he asserted peremptorily. For the two not to have met and married remained wholly unimaginable to the man with the protean imagination: He held an almost religious conviction about the stubborn inevitability of their union. He who had been so much buffeted about by history—who having lost his country, his father, and his fiancée, had every reason to believe, as he did, thatFate was ill-inclined toward him—preferred to see coincidence as a marvelous artist. Fate holds a place of honor in Russian literature and Nabokov did nothing to dethrone her; her combinational moves are to be seen in every one of his novels, a body of work often said to be distinctly un-Russian. As Brian Boyd has made clear, destiny’s contortions in bringing together Véra Slonim and Nabokov—or at least Nabokov’s view of those contortions—lends a thematic design to awhole catalogue of fictions. *
    In front of others Véra Nabokov was happy to indulge her husband’s insistence on destiny’s near-misses in Petersburg and final, foreign triumph. She herself spoke ofFate’s devious ways. She shared her husband’s retrospective capacity and had at least as robust a visual memory. But she did not share her husband’s obsession with reconfiguring the near-misses and the uncanny parallels of the past. It was the uncertain past that concerned him, the uncertain future that concerned her. She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands.She had ample reason for doing so. For a Jew in Russia to be a fatalist was tantamount to inviting disaster. Nabokov trusted in a thematic design which could not have looked quite so dazzling, so sure-handed, to someone who was in the habit of gingerly tiptoeing one step ahead of destiny. Véra made only one small acknowledgment to predestination, many years later. When a publisher asked for a publicity photo of her husband, she sent one of him in his