Véra Nabokov was literally a woman of arms to take. He always carried a Browning loaded in his bag ... for what could happen. What had happened is that her husband's father was killed in an attack in Berlin. "Surely that influenced, but she felt like Vladimir's guardian, the revolver protected her from everything: from thieves, critics and beautiful women." Hence the title of the book, A revolver to go out at night (Gutenberg Galaxy), the lively and full of details essay by Monika Zgustova not only on Véra but also and especially on the influence she exerted on her husband.
Véra was next, more than behind, Vladimir since they met at a charity costume ball in Berlin on May 8, 1923. The party brought together Russian emigrants, white Russians. She was camouflaged behind a Venetian wolf mask. That night, she recited from memory several poems of the handsome young man and apprentice writer to impress him. Everything was planned.
"Véra was cold and calculating, as well as a fighter. The Russians characterized her as a boxer who kept hitting her opponent until she left him KO," Monika Zgustova tells THE SPHERE OF PAPER.
That May, Vladimir went to work at a farm in Provence to pick cherries, apricots and peaches for three months and from there he filled it with letters. The first one started it like this: "I'm not going to hide it, I'm not used to someone understanding me, let's put it that way." A year later they got married without notifying the Berlin City Hall.
Véra, ready and ambitious , had learned French as a child in St. Petersburg, German in exile and English when they emigrated to the United States in 1940 from Paris fleeing from the Nazis, more so because she was Jewish. After their stay there (until 1960), they settled in the Hotel Palace de Montreux (Switzerland), where in 1981, now Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Véra received a young Martin Amis. The English author told it in the book Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and other excursions (Anagram): "She has dense white hair and expressive, ironic eyes. She has recently been quite ill, does not hear much and carries a cane; but even now, In his seventies, his profoundly sensitive face continues to bathe in feminine light.It is, above all, a face full of humor. 'VN', as he sometimes calls it, used to boast that he had a better sense of humor than any woman who had never known, and it is easy to understand that and other reasons for pride. A mixture of modesty and curiosity or natural cordiality makes her a difficult subject to interview. "
Véra Slónim, maiden name, not only typed most of her novels and several times, but, for 55 years, "she corresponded with publishers and corrected the translations", in addition to translating some titles herself. She and her son Dmitri, car racer and opera singer.
Vladimir Nabokov's writing process revealed him in an evening at the Harvard Sanders Theater: after thinking about the book and for quite some time, he wrote the scenes on tabs, which Véra read and typed. "During dinner, Mrs. Nabokov analyzed what she had written and advised her how to continue. If her wife had any objection, what happened often, she rewrote the affected part. Sometimes she extended the pages in the bed and classified them, then his wife kept them in a shoebox. And finally Mrs. Nabokov was taking out the chips one after the other and copying them on page, "Zgustova writes in A revolver to go out at night . And he adds a phrase from the writer who never won the Nobel: "My wife is my first reader, and the best of them. Without her, I would never have been who I am."
The handsome, tall and athletic Vladimir had an affair that nearly wrecked his marriage. He always had a weakness for women, "both for the young and for the mature and refined", and also for the "slender and alive" (Zgustova) but the love of Irina Kokóshkina in Paris while Véra was in Berlin was about blow up the relationship. Calm the storm (the echo never disappeared), Vladimir wrote a letter to the dictation that Véra herself sent. Since then Véra bought a notebook every month so that her Volodia and herself could fix their impressions . "It is quite a symbol of how very controlling Véra was, of the need I had to know everything about the other," says Zgustova. "He never went out. Vladimir has Irina present in Lolita, in Pnin, in Ada and in other novels. What Irina says in her Russian poems is true: although at a distance, they never stopped looking for each other, of loving each other."
He adds in the novel essay that Véra was never scandalized by the erotic face of some passages from Nabokov , which was where his coldest side prevailed. Vladimir would not have endured being asked for his inspiration.
However, Véra betrayed the promise she made to her husband, already dying. He asked her to remove the manuscript of Laura's notebook that she was then writing. " It can be thought that Véra could not overcome the sacred adoration she had for him . Finally it was Dmitri who made the decision."
And it was she who saved a draft of Lolita that Vladimir had thrown into the fire. He felt insecure about his English. This was one of the great challenges of his life, going from writing in Russian to another language that as much as he knew it meant an essential registry change. "In the end he almost forced Vladimir to continue the novel, which he expected a great sales success for the taboo subject he was dealing with."
However, a confessed admirer of Nabokov's work as Javier Marías has written: "The greatest ecstasies were experienced [Nabokov] alone: hunting butterflies, setting up chess problems, translating Pushkin, writing his books."
Juan Bonilla , authentic hooligan of the author of Risa in the dark, Pale Fire and Ada or the ardor , describes it in his book Theater of Varieties (Renaissance) as "endearing, delicate, fun and exciting. One does not know if Véra is a character flatly Nabokovian or rather Vladimir Nabokov is a fantastic invention of a woman named Véra. "
Véra, who never allowed frivolities, shaped a man who liked to play (with words, with women and tennis) so that he was also famous and rich. "Through the success of Vladimir he felt his own fullness, to the point that he identified with him, even as a creator because it helped him polish his texts," says Monika Zgustova.
It was a society that worked. Two ways of understanding complementary literature and life were distributed, or assembled. In spite of everything, Véra threw him in the face, and more than once: "You have never tried to understand me"
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