April 15, 1925, is an important date for 20th-century literature. On that auspicious day, less than two years after meeting her at a charity ball in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov married fellow Russian émigré Véra Slonim, establishing a partnership—both romantic and literary—that would last until Nabokov’s death in 1977, seeing him through the writing and publication of nineteen novels, hundreds of short stories, plays, poems, and one brilliant, oft-revised memoir.
Véra’s contributions to Vladimir’s literary success are the stuff of legend, so much so that her very name has become synonymous with the selfless artist’s spouse who not only provides emotional and domestic support, but goes above and beyond with administrative and creative help, serving as editor, assistant, agent, secretary, and more. Unsurprisingly, the role of “Véra” has overwhelmingly fallen to the woman in any given couple (Leonard Woolf, famously supportive of Virginia, is the male exception that proves the rule).
But it’s not as if we know about Véra’s role in Vladimir’s legacy because of anything she said; in fact, Véra was so tight-lipped about the couple’s 52-year marriage that Nabokov biographer Stacey Schiff once said of her:
From the start I knew that Mrs. Nabokov was the worst kind of subject: She was formal, she was stoic, she was private, selfless and capable of self-dramatization—all the qualities on which biography tends to founder.
And as Miranda Popkey points out, Véra didn’t want any of her words alongside Vladimir’s for posterity:
Véra destroyed all her letters to her husband; she blacked out her contributions to joint postcards to Vladimir’s mother. [...] What other “versions of their story” Véra’s missing letters to Vladimir might suggest, we will never know. And yet: Her careful self-erasure creates a kind of black hole, a magnetic absence. Véra may well have been driven to destroy her letters to Vladmir by a desire for privacy—of which there is ample evidence: when Véra was pregnant with their son Dmitri, she concealed her condition from many of the couple’s closest friends through “careful dress and posture and silence.” But her reserve piques, rather than dissuades, interest. And Véra, intelligent as she was, cannot have been ignorant of this possibility.
For many obvious reasons it’s a great shame that Véra destroyed her letters, not least because it would be great to read what got Vladimir the newlywed so worked up in this letter to Véra postmarked August 19, 1925:
My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love—do you know what—all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters.
And though she definitely wouldn’t like it, we’ll give Véra—massager of manuscripts, soother of nerves, stenographer, major domo—the last word (spoken to Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd): “The more you leave me out, the closer to the truth you’ll be.”
