Significant Others - Stacy Schiff on the Nabokovs

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Biographer Stacy Schiff joins Liza to discuss the lengths she went to in researching her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Véra. A full list of Stacy Schiff’s books can be found here:https://www.stacyschiff.com/books-and-essays-by-stacy-schiff.html

Welcome back to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. Yesterday's episode was all about Vera Nabokov and her husband Vladimir. I've been curious about Vera Nabokov ever since I heard how she rescued the manuscript of Lolita from the trash can. But I'd pretty much written off ever learning more about her because I heard that the Nabokov estate was very closed to researchers. But then along came Pulitzer Prize winner Stacey Schiff, and she pulled off a miracle of biography. And she's here to talk with us about it today. Stacey, thank you so much for being here. I'm such a fan of your work. I am entirely delighted to join you. That's so nice of you. What drew you to her as a subject? I think it's one of those situations where because we know little, there's a tremendous,

very appealing mystery at the center of the story. At the outset, I think I knew only these facts. I knew that nearly every book is dedicated to her. I knew that she was Jewish and her husband was not, but it was a fairly unusual marriage in that respect, given his origins. I knew that she carried a gun in her purse, and I knew that she went to class every day he lectured when he was at Cornell. And I think it was from those sort of disparate points that I started. It seemed to me at the time that the people had shied away from the Nabokovs because they were so imposing, as you suggest. And I think that also probably drew me closer.

I remember reading about your process gathering all of the information that you did ultimately find and that it was kind of intense and lengthy. And I'm wondering if you could sort of give us a little recap of what that was like. I love that question. Thank you. Because this is when the biographer gets to basically apply for sympathy from every angle. The motherlode of material was still in Switzerland with Dmitri Nebokov, the sole child of Veron Vladimir. So that was really base camp and needless to say, a very expensive and inconvenient base camp. But everything, almost everything was at that point in Dimitri's basement, which was a dark and dusty place. But of course, I was in heaven there. Most of that material today, all of that

material today in theory is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, which would have been much more convenient. And there was good news and there was bad news. The good news was that which would have been much more convenient. And there was good news and there was bad news. The good news was that Vera, from the get-go, had recognized her husband's genius and had saved every scrap of paper from the earliest poems from the early 1920s on. She had Dimitri's report cards, there were recipes, there was everything. The bad news was that she had a tendency to want to disappear from the picture and that she very often erased her side of the story. So that one of the best things that I had or one of the most valuable things I had was a set of page proofs for an earlier Nabokov biography, which Vera had corrected,

but then she erased all of her comments. So I was literally sitting there holding these kind of onion skin pages up to the light, trying to read what she'd actually written. And that was sort of a metaphor for writing the book in many ways. And then there were lucky breaks along the way. Nabokov had had an ex-fiancé before. Vera is the second fiancé. And one night in the middle of the night, I woke up and thought, oh my goodness, why am I assuming she's not around, which she indeed was living in a nursing home in upstate New York. And there were friends in the Russian immigration then living in Paris who were extremely forthcoming, not always great fans of Vera's. There was an entire chorus in the Cornell students because Nabokov had taught so many over so many years and made such an intense impression.

There was the New Yorker crew and the editors, the people who had published Lolita and the earlier, tried to publish Lolita and had published earlier books. And then there was sort of the obligatory papers that kind of revealed themselves at the back of some old friend's lingerie drawer. There was one set of those. And then I guess the icing on the cake was a set of love letters of Nabokov's that I desperately wanted, which were in the hands of some rather shady Russian characters in Paris who agreed. Naturally. Naturally, exactly. And who had offered, this is pre-cell phones, of course, they had offered to drive me to an undisclosed location if I asked no names to discuss the terms in which they would

give these papers to me. I thought, I am not cut out for this. And the deal was at this undisclosed location, no GPS in those days, that I could read the documents if I would agree to pinch a few papers from Dmitry Nabokov's archive for them. I know. So needless to say, I never read those letters. International espionage. Biography as international espionage, not what I had signed up for. And then because you mentioned Vera and the burning of Lolita, that was one of those sort of old canards, I thought. The story that Vera walks into the backyard and there is Vladimir trying to burn his pages. Had that really happened or is that just one of those sort of legends that had been handed down over and over? And it was in a Paris archive that I finally found an interview in which she herself tells the story.

Amazing. But she tended to tell stories and then backtrack or point out to people that they had made errors, but not point out which the errors were. So she would say of a biographer, you know, there are three errors in that sentence, but she wouldn't say what the errors were. So there was a lot of having to read between the lines and turning the carpet over and holding up onion skin to the light. And I thought I was insane. I thought, this is ridiculous. What am I doing digging for this woman? And I think the person who saved me early on was Saul Steinberg, the artist, because he had known the couple in Switzerland. And I went to see him and I had barely walked into his apartment when he said, you could write about Vera without ever

once mentioning Vladimir, but you could never write about Vladimir without writing about Vera. Oh, that's amazing. And I just thought, thank goodness. The international espionage was worth it. That's exactly right. You risked your life for something. Why do you think that she was so slippery, so intentionally slippery? I thought about that for many hundred pages. I think to a certain extent, she hails from the sort of Russian wife of writer tradition, in which that is pretty much the etiquette. I think she recognized from the get-go that she was married to genius, or even before she was married to genius, I think she realized she was in the presence of genius and didn't want to get in its way. And I think there was just a certain old

world decorum there where she didn't really feel like revealing too much of herself and felt that was untoward in some way. I think the old adage about she didn't feel she stood in his shadow, she felt she stood in his light very much applies here. She felt that the greatness was his, and she wanted to do nothing to distract from it or to obscure it. To me, when I was reading about her in your pages she's so dedicated to merging into him in a way that it felt to me like the ambition had to be channeled through him because it couldn't find any path of its own because of the time that she was born into so know, it's one thing to be dutiful or to be following the conventions or,

and it feels even, I think you give evidence for all many possibilities. And one of those being, you know, coming from a place where she had to escape home more than once, how many times? Twice, three times in her life, right? She had to flee, literally. Several times. Yeah. Because there's several steps out of Russia and then Russia to Germany and then Germany to France and then France to the United States. So it's really a series of escape hatches. Right. And of course, being part of a persecuted

people, there's, I would imagine, an inclination toward safety through obscurity. How much do you think that that's just like being stuck in a modern perspective, to be reading some of that as a kind of thwarted ambition beyond just doing what she thought she was asked to do by her society? I think you're astute when you say ambition because I think she felt she had a job, she had a calling, and that there is a tremendous, the ambition was all for her husband, ultimately all for whatever the entity the two of them create is. But the ambition is very much there and very palpably there. And she is a very forceful public relations agent, protector, ultimately agent, in fact, for him. It is she obviously who walks Lolita to various publishers,

it's she who deals with not just the tax lawyer, but the lawyer, the movie people, most editors who come calling, the Cornell students who have a very obscure question. And so they come to the doorstep. And of course, she's protecting Vladimir from coming to the door. So she answers the question herself and they're just floored. This white-haired woman happens to know the answer to this very abstruse query. So there's a great deal of that, but I think it's rare to find any inkling of her expressing any dissatisfaction with that state of affairs. And I think that's the thing that we trip over today. I think there's one letter in which she writes to an old friend just as the French edition of Lolita is coming out. And she says, basically, I'm inundated with paperwork.

I'm not doing anything of value of my own. And that's one of the rare times where she uses the words of my own because the rest of the time, really, that ambition is being channeled toward him and toward getting him the recognition that the world just seems so hesitant to deliver. She's completely convinced he's the greatest writer in existence, and it just takes the world decades to catch on. Were you surprised by the affair, or had you known about that going in or expected it going in? The affair had been written about before by Brian Boyd. Nabokov has an affair in the 30s

when he's in Paris and Vera's in Berlin. And I had the date book that the mistress and Nabokov has an affair in the 30s when he's in Paris and Vera's in Berlin. And I had the date book that the mistress and Nabokov jointly keep in which they sort of play hangman together and do all, you know, it's a very alluring book. the fact that she knows for seemingly months what's happening, but neglects to mention it, to mention to her husband that she knows what he's doing in Paris. I mean, there's a real restraint there. He's basically saying, please come to Paris. And she's throwing every obstacle in the path and keeping her distance as much as possible. I will admit that when I wrote the chapter in which she's having the affair, I felt sick to my stomach the entire time. It's a very hard one to deal with, particularly because he comes out of those years almost writing his way back into the marriage, writing these odes to marital fidelity. I mean, it's almost as if he's making it up to Vera on the page. So it packs a very powerful punch. When I was reading it, even though I clearly,

you know what the answer is going to be when you reveal that she's aware of this affair, but because she's so strong, I just loved her so much already. And again, this is the modern perspective, but I was like, is she going to leave? I was like, she can possibly put up with this. And so I found myself very surprised by the way that she responded to it. And in some senses, in other senses, it makes sense that she's sort of like, yeah, she's going to stay and fight, you know. But I agree with you. It's very heroic. Right. something in a very kind of devious way or a very oblique way. When she does the collected letters, when she does Nivokov's collected letters, she overloads that year with letters to her. I'm sure that's not an accident that she's essentially stressing how much and how ardently he's writing her at a time when she would have known that the rest of the world was going to

find out there was something else going on. So there's a little sort of defensive crouch there done in the most artful way. And she's literally withholding herself from him as possibly as punishment, right? Refusing to come to Paris when he wants, as the Nazis are shutting down Berlin, right? Correct. And her life is in danger, and she walks around with that pistol and is not giving anyone what they want. And she's asked to work for a Nazi. I mean, it's just, she's, well, you know, she's remarkable. It is remarkable. I also think that, obviously, we're looking at that with 20-20 hindsight. Does she know she's going to have to leave Germany?

And one does have to wonder with that whole emigre community, they've already been uprooted once. The world has already crumbled behind them once. Do they really have any inkling that this is, you know, it doesn't seem possible that this is going to happen to them all over again, because they do make two such enormous leaps across the globe. It's incredible. What, if anything, was surprising in what you learned? Because, you know, over the course of all of that scholarship, the most surprising or something that comes to mind? There were so many things because she was so little known.

And I, like you, responded to her as if she were a heroine. One of the first readers of the book, a feminist of note whom I will not name, basically said to me, I wanted to throw the book across the room because she was so deferential, so subordinate to her husband. It drove me crazy. And I had precisely the opposite reaction. So that also surprised me. I think I was surprised by her engagement with him on the page. in the works, not just in those refracted images of her, but so much that she contributes to the books in terms of just the glancing remark or the memory of Dimitri's childhood, so many of her phrasings that actually find their way onto the page. And I think just the pronounal stew

that the two of them come up with. I mean, these are two people who share a diary. I mean, of them come up with. I mean, these are two people who share a diary. I mean, it's remarkable to see her molt from sort of I to we to him in one sentence, and she does. And that's a very, it's just sort of a fascinating leap. I think I was newly married when I wrote the book, and I think just the idea of turning a marriage into a work of art was very interesting to me, and how she does that at a time when they're dealing with such a paucity of resources. They're very much trying to find their footing. Their world is very fragile. And here she is holding tight to this one conviction that has kept them afloat and that will obviously, ultimately with Lolita, impress itself upon everyone else at long last.

The gun I never resolved, by the way, when you say were the great surprises. There was a gun permit, along those lines of the things that the researcher never finds. She did file a gun permit for the gun and she claimed she needed it for fending off dangers when they were butterfly hunting out west, which is entirely possible. But two people had to write on her behalf, this tells you how long ago this was, in order for her to have the license to get the gun. And I was not allowed to have that file. Today, perhaps one would be able to obtain it. But that was a question I was never able to answer. Kind of fitting that there's a mystery that can't be solved, right? Very much so.

It feels almost like an affront to the Nabokovs to really button it all up. I mean, especially with a marriage that's that tight. I mean, one of the things that was also interesting is how much the world does not smile upon a very tight, happy marriage, how off-putting that could be to so many people. There was a lot of envy. At Cornell, there was obviously a great resistance. As one of Nabokov's colleagues says at one point when Nabokov's being considered for a job elsewhere, and the colleague basically butts in and says, why would you hire him? She does all the work. So there's a real sense of why is Vera answering my letter? Why is Vera answering the phone? Why can't I get through to Nabokov himself? Who does he think he is? And a lot of

them kind of playing bad cop, bad cop in maligning modern writers. So, you know, from one end of the room, one of them will trash Auden. And then from the other end of the room, the other one would trash Auden. And it wasn't an act that everyone appreciated. Sure. No, they weren't worried about making other people happy. That seems to be one of the secrets to their success. That is true.

That is true. What's one of my favorite things, though, is his list of esteemed writers who he just trashes. I love it. But the opposite list, the list of modern writers whom he admires is a very short one. Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. And women do not fare well in his estimation generally on the page. Jane Austen. That's correct. Jane Austen is one of the few exceptions. Exactly. And she's a little kitten and Tolstoy is a great big dog, exactly. So even there, she doesn't fare well. On that note, I'm very curious about your writing process because I'm not a person who grew up tending to want to read nonfiction. My husband can attest I always have my nose in a novel and he's always reading history and saying to me, I'm interested in what actually happened in the world.

And I'm like, nope, not me. But it's one of the things I love about your books so much is they are very, very literary, and the writing is so beautiful. And especially in this case, so fitting. I felt like you, there were so many gorgeous turns of phrases. And when I was writing my little script, I was so worried about subconsciously borrowing or stepping on your toes in any way. I tried to really kind of highlight it whenever I was using your language. But was it intimidating? Because you clearly keep in mind the tenor of the subject that you're focusing on. Was it intimidating to be writing about one of the greatest writers that we've known in his estimation and a lot of ours? Or did it lend itself? Did it make it somehow sort of easier to get into the flow? First of all, thank you. That was incredibly

sweet of you. I've always wondered about that in terms of the Oscar Wilde biographer. I'd hate to have to share a page with Oscar Wilde, right? I mean, just get out of the way and give him plenty of room. I suspect because I was primarily writing about her, I didn't come down with a case of Nabokovitis or whatever it is that sometimes does plague people who write about him, the style is very infectious. Needless to say, it's a little hard to imitate, and you really don't want to go down that hole. So I liked to think it added simply to the richness of the story because he is so insanely quotable and so fluid on the page. work that in many ways lends itself to the fluidity of the marriage, that there was some parallel there between the tools with which I had to work and the story I had to tell. I will admit that I came to this partly out of just an obsession with his pages. So I knew them fairly well and didn't want to burden the reader with, you know, didn't want to make the reader feel he was, you know, taking a crash course in Nabokov. I wanted the book to read as if it were a portrait of her. So there was a certain keeping him at bay. And you'll notice, for example, he's not really ever born in this book. It's in a footnote. So there was a certain trying to downplay, if anyone could ever manage to do so, the genius of Nabokov while at the same time saluting it. I think that's a

strange, wishy-washy answer to your question, but it's a little bit, the analogous thing would be, I did a book about Cleopatra and Cicero kept stealing her thunder. I had to sort of keep relegating Cicero to the end notes because he so steals the show. And there was a little bit of that at work here as well. It's hard to keep the men out of the room, you know? Who would you rather have dinner with, Vera Nabokov or Cleopatra? Can I have both simultaneously? I think I would, you know, it's such a great one. I hadn't really thought about this until you put the two in the same sentence. I think I would be terrified of both in different ways. I think I would be more certain I would survive the dinner with Vera. Vera was a pretty steely character.

And I think that, I think it would be fascinating. I mean, when you live with someone for that long, there's just such a desire. I mean, I remember being at Dimitri Debokov's and just wanting to touch the costume jewelry that he still had. There's such a wanting to sort of sift through the relics. And I think the curiosity would just be immense, especially because you think, did I get it right? I think there's always that fear of, and I've had this in the middle of the night, what if I got it wrong? So possibly because she's a 20th century subject, possibly because I can more easily relate, I have more of an inner life, a sense of her inner life than I could

possibly have of Cleopatra's, I would opt for Vera. They're both pretty terrifying company though. Yeah, but fascinating. Okay, my final question for you is, and you do not need to answer or you can answer in any way you want. Do you have a significant other in your life, not necessarily romantic partner, but someone who has been integral to your work? I do. He's downstairs. He is, and I think I had mentioned this. We must have gotten married a few years before the Nabokov book. And I was very much sort of casting about after my first book for at least a family story, if not a story of a relationship, partly because narratively, I thought it would be richer and more interesting to write about several people. And partly I think because I was sort of wondering what is this thing I have just got myself into called marriage. However, here we are 30 whatever years later and still married,

and he is the first reader. I have a novelist friend and my husband, Mark, who are the first readers. The novelist friend reads largely for character and language and flow and all the niceties of life. And Mark reads for logic and historical accuracy often. So they read very differently. I would hate to become like Nabokov and dedicate every book to him, but he's somewhere in there, certainly with every page. That's lovely. Well, we're in his debt too. I'll let him know that because he was the one who set up the microphone. Oh, yes. Well, we need the help more than ever with that stuff. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for doing this.

I'm so honored. Thanks again to Stacey Schiff for her beautiful work. Please do yourself a favor and read all of her books. The links are in the show notes. And join us next time to hear about how a prophet helped a caged bird to sing. And finally, if you enjoyed what you heard today, be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.