Free Vera by Stacy Schiff Page B

infancy. “If you look carefully into the baby’s eyes,” she advised, “you can see all of my husband’s books.” Of this she seemed herself perfectly convinced in 1923, although predestination was perhaps not the word for it. “Oh, I have a thousand plans for you,” cries Zina in
The Gift
.
    If indeed Fate meant finally to allow Nabokov “the upper hand in his dealings with destiny,” she threw one last curveball. He missed Véra dreadfully during their January 1924 separation, when he was again in Prague with his mother and siblings. He had never imagined he could pine for Berlin, which suddenly seemed to him an earthly paradise.He was bored without her. He counted the days until their reunion. He spoke repeatedly of their soon-to-be-realized happiness. Already he wasdreaming prophetically that he was seated at a piano, with Véra turning the pages of his score. But then—with the return imminent—a small domestic disaster struck. On the morning he read of Lenin’s death, he wrote Véra sheepishly: “Something has happened (only don’t be angry). I can’t remember (for God’s sake, don’t be angry!) I can’t remember (promise that you won’t be angry), I can’t remember your telephone number.” He knew it had a seven in it, but the rest had entirely escaped him.
    * His wife always hastened to point out that she had been the third, if not the fourth, near—Mrs. Nabokov, before becoming the sole Mrs. Nabokov.
    * One event that did take place on Tuesday, May 8, 1923, was a poet’s reading of his Pushkin translations, at a bookstore. It is very possible that both Nabokov and Véra Slonim attended.
    * Nabokov chose the pseudonym in part so as not to be confused with his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, an eminent jurist and statesman, and a founder of the Constitutional Democratic party.
    â€  The rumor on the street was that Véra had written Vladimir in advance, asking that he meet her, at which meeting she appeared masked. The Nabokovs’ son never learned how his parents first met.
    â€  Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was killed by a bullet intended for a political opponent, whom he attempted to shield with his body.
    â€  Decades later in his notes to
Eugene Onegin
, he wrote with feeling about “a rejected suitor’s unquenchable exasperation with an unforgettable girl and her Philistine parents.”
    * Noting the addresses from which
Rul
subscriptions came in, editor Iosef Hessen asked: “Is there a place on earth to which Russian émigrés were not swept?”
    * Elena Nabokov Sikorski, Véra’s sister-in-law, cannot recall her ever having spoken of her mother, about whose patronymic there is even question.
    * Luzhin’s father’s mistress, the chess-playing “aunt” of
The Defense
, would have been a neighbor. Nabokov nearly was one, having lived at a rented home on Sergievskaya Street for the two years ending with the fall of 1908, when the Slonims arrived.
    * And where she might well have fallen in love with her future husband, as he would assert, had they only met.
    * As an English visitor exclaimed at the time of Véra Evseevna’s birth: “I would rather be treated as a swindler, a forger, or a vulgar assassin, than as a respectable Russian Jew!”
    * Jews commonly changed their names, both to assimilate and to disappear; often they created a multitude of spellings in order to throw Russian civil servants off their trail. Zalman Aronovich Slonim, evidently Evsei Slonim’s cousin, arrived in Petersburg under that name in 1900. The following year he became Semyon Aronovich. By 1902 he had revised his transparently Jewish patronymic and was known as Semyon Arkadievich.
    * The exceptionally gifted American she had in mind was Edmund Wilson.
    â€  Lena Slonim Massalsky was conscious enough of rank—and of her own worth—to leave a dinner if