Significant Others - Véra Nabokov

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Vladimir Nabokov is best known for writing the highly controversial yet critically revered novel, Lolita. But the book might never have made it onto the shelves were it not for the other Nabokov—Vladimir's enigmatic and elusive wife, Véra.Starring: D’Arcy Carden as Véra Nabokov and Dan Bucatinsky as Vladimir Nabokov Source list:Véra by Stacy SchiffLetters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov, Ed: Olga Voronina and Brian BoydVladimir Nabokov, The Russian Years by Brian BoydVladimir Nabokov, The American Years by Brian BoydLolita by Vladimir NabokovLectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov, Ed: Fredson Bowers 

Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this episode, we discover the tale of a couple so deeply entwined, they practically shared an identity. And yet, one of them is known to all, while the other stayed practically invisible. This time on Significant Others, meet Vera Nabokov. In 1948, a Russian émigré, raised partially in Berlin, for whom English was his third language, began writing the great American novel. The final manuscript was feared in Britain and rejected by every major imprint in the States and was only released after being acquired by a French publisher of highbrow smut. Ten years later, it was breaking industry sales records. Ultimately, the book minted its author's

celebrity, spawned two films, raked in piles of cash, and coined a label for a type of preteen that is now its dictionary definition. And the book would never have existed at all if its author's wife hadn't rescued that same manuscript from the trash can in which her husband was trying to incinerate it. The book, of course, is Lolita, and its author is Vladimir Nabokov. And while those names might be fairly familiar to anyone who's ever laid eyes on a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, there is another name, just as vital to the saga, which very few people today have ever heard. And that might be exactly how Vladimir's wife Vera wanted it. I'm doing my best with the pronunciations, but in case you couldn't tell, I am not Russian.

And Nabokov himself even quibbled with the way some Russians pronounced his name, so apologies if it just doesn't sound right. The alliance between Vladimir and Vera reads like a novel of its own, in which two characters form a single protagonist. From opposing cultural ends of the Russian diaspora, they met in Berlin in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution and proceeded to weave over the next half century a joint existence that culminated in the sharing of what they called a brain bridge, where there was almost no discernible separation from one consciousness to the other, even when they dreamed at night. He wrote the books, there is no confusion about that,

but in every other regard, from diary keeping to letter writing, they conspired completely. This conjoined character was a master illusionist, like some of the literary creations Nabokov is famous for. Both halves of the couple love to give up certain facts and then refute them later, claim ignorance of their own backstories, and perpetuate myths about themselves. Vera was so fiercely private that she hid an entire pregnancy from everyone but her husband. Telling their story is a fact-checker's nightmare, especially because one half of the couple seemed determined to erase herself from the record. In her book titled Vera,

biographer Stacey Schiff does a heroic job of shedding light on this woman who actively hid from history by using every shred of evidence she left behind, from manuscript notes to date books to grocery lists. Unsolved mysteries remain, but what we can say for sure is that for 52 years, Vera Nabokov was the sun around which her husband Vladimir orbited, the radiant source of his life force. Muse, twin soul,

first and most perfect reader of nearly everything he wrote, she was his white-haired, golden-voiced guardian angel who, when her husband fell in the last year of his life, golden-voiced guardian angel who, when her husband fell in the last year of his life, tried to cushion the landing with her own elderly body. They were better matched than most couples the world will ever know. They both had synesthesia and would compare notes on the sound of thoughts and the color of letters. They both believed that time is full of echoes both forward and back, that their love had been predestined, and that they need not fear death because they would be united in whatever comes next. They both thought one of them was a genius, and they both preferred artifice to bald-faced reality. They were determined to

confound anyone who tried to pin down the actual truth of their lives, including their own son, and beginning with the question of how and when they met. Did they meet at a masked ball in 1923? No, said Vera. Did they meet a few months before that at a bookstore where he was giving a reading of some of his poems? I don't remember, she would say. Was it at a literary salon as remembered by a fellow émigré? If so,

neither one copped to it. Or did they meet as young teens on holiday with their families in Switzerland, as Vladimir once confided to a journalist? Or was that just the plot of the book he was writing at the time? When it came to their origin story, both Nabokovs preferred this version, whether it was misremembrance calcified into fact, or simply a rewriting of history that pleased them. Their first meeting took place in Berlin, on a spring evening, after a masked ball on a bridge. In a poem he wrote days later, Vladimir described the starry hour and satin streams of that flowing night under the chestnut trees. Vera refused to remove her black satin wolf mask, but what she did reveal was even more alluring. She recited his own poems to him from

memory, a move which turned out to be even more seductive than the tender lips noted in the poem's second stanza. Not to sully this lovely romantic scene with facts, but according to biographer Schiff, Vera was by that point already a fan of Nabokov, who wrote then under the pen name V. Sirin. She started collecting clippings of his work two years before that night on the bridge, and with her near-photographic memory, could still recite them flawlessly 50 years later. She would have known from his poems that Nabokov had just been dumped by his fiancée. Everyone knew who Sirin really was. Also, gossip traveled quickly in their close-knit community of Russian expats. And apparently, Vladimir told his sister at one point that the meeting had

even been arranged by Vera. So yes, predestined love, sure. But also, it sounds like 21-year-old Vera may have made a strong play for the 24-year-old aristocratic celebrity genius who was kind of like a blend of JFK Jr. and John Lennon. And it worked. This is notable not only for the obvious reasons, but because of their deeper cultural differences as well. Nabokov had been born in Russia into the upper class. His grandmother was a baroness. There are photos of him as a child wearing a lace collar like a little Romanov. Vera's family, meanwhile, was Jewish.

Antisemitism was rampant in the Russia of Vera's youth, and as a precocious five-year-old, she could have been reading about pogroms in the daily newspaper. Her family was educated. One-upping her future husband, she was quadrilingual as a child. And though they were not wealthy, she enjoyed the trappings of bourgeois living

like tutors and governesses. She had access to education like any Russian girl of higher social status, but she was acutely aware that she was a member of an oppressed and openly persecuted tribe. She was deeply proud of her heritage and essentially later disowned a sister who appeared to be trying to pass as Catholic. It was the one

point of fact about herself that she ever asserted in print, correcting a newspaper that called her a Russian aristocrat by writing to them that she was Russian and Jewish. But there is reason to believe she felt that Vladimir was above her in the eyes of the world. So while we can't say for certain where, how, or even exactly when their first meeting took place, Ivera did nothing more forward than recite Nabokov's own verses to him from memory. It was a bold move. A week later, he published the poem he wrote about that night in the local literary magazine. It was a private communication masquerading as a public one.

As if from the swaying blackness of some slow-motion masquerade, onto the dim bridge you came. What did my heart discern in you? How did you move me so? Did I experience a dim sketch of other irrevocable encounters? Perhaps you, still nameless, were the genuine, the awaited one. What if you are to be my fate? That's not the whole thing, but you get the picture.

Dude was romantic. He called her his fairy tale and said he had never been so understood and that he was certain he had never loved before as he loved her now, not with any of the 28 women who held a space in his heart before her. You and I are so special. The miracles we know, no one knows. And no one loves the way we love. He wrote her daily, often twice,

a habit that would continue whenever they were apart until the day he died. He chided her sometimes for not reciprocating nearly enough. Although she was as literate as he and brilliant in her own right, she may have been somewhat shy of writing to the author of letters like this one from 1924. My delightful, my love, my life. I don't understand anything. How can you not be with me? I'm so infinitely used to you

that I now feel myself lost and empty without you, my soul. You turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed. You put a glint of happiness on everything, always different. Sometimes you can be smoky pink, downy, sometimes dark-winged. And I don't know when I love your eyes more, when they are open or shut. I don't know how to tell you how I love, how I desire you. Such agitation and such divine peace. Melting clouds immersed in sunshine, mounds of happiness. in sunshine, mounds of happiness. And I am floating with you, in you, aflame and melting. And a whole life with you is like the movement of clouds, their airy, quiet falls, their lightness and smoothness, and the heavenly variety of outline and tint, my inexplicable love. That would be a hard act to follow.

Vera's words, where we can find them committed to the page, are direct, practical, even funny. But there is no question who is the artist in the family. And no question either about where the artist got his inspiration. When Humbert Humbert describes Lolita's blue sulks and rosy mirth, it's hard not to hear the echo of young Vera as seen through Vladimir's eyes. Two years after that meeting on the bridge, Vladimir and Vera were united, both in marriage and in a shared vision of him conquering the literary world. He was already established locally,

but making the Russian scene in Berlin meant little to the rest of the world, and it paid even less. Throughout their life together, Vera either earned money as a clerk and a translator, or saved them money by doing all that and more for her husband, unpaid. She would never say she supported him, perhaps to spare his vanity, perhaps to spare her own. But her support paid off. In the first ten years of their marriage, he was able to churn

out whole collections of poetry, short stories, and seven novels, hailed by Vera as unparalleled in the Russian language. In 1933, when the general exodus from Berlin was gathering steam, the Diemer left for Paris to meet with publishers and suss out a potential relocation for the family. Vera stayed behind to work, including as a stenographer for a Nazi minister, with whom she was characteristically transparent. I said to the German to whom I was talking,

but are you sure you want me? I'm Jewish. Oh, he said, but it does not make any difference to us. We pay no attention to such things. Who told you we did? Vera had a history of narrow escapes. Her family fled Petrograd in 1918 as the rail ties were being pulled up behind them. In 1940, she and Vladimir and their toddler son Dmitry barely made it out of France just hours before the Germans marched into Paris. And back in 1933, she almost gave her husband a nervous breakdown by lingering too long in Berlin.

Hitler's voice was blaring from rooftop speakers, and she had already shipped off her trusty pistol, which she carried in the hopes of assassinating Trotsky. But she seemed in no hurry to join her husband on the safer side of the German border. He wrote her multiple letters a day, pleading with her to get out, but she stonewalled him, changing her plans again and again.

What was the holdup? Well, it turned out to be the small matter of a mistress in Paris, about whom Vera had recently learned through an anonymous letter. Was she considering leaving the marriage, or just punishing her errant husband? No one can say, especially since Vera dismissed the entire episode when asked about it later, and she personally destroyed whatever letters she had written to Vladimir during their life together, sometime before she died.

The mistress, however, did no such thing. And so, we have evidence that the affair was delirious and prolonged. Vladimir's passion for this other woman was the mirror image of his passion for his wife. Their love was also predestined, apparently. He could not live without her or Vera, etc. He could not live without her or Vera, etc. Here Vera was, a young mother nearly trapped behind enemy lines with her very young son, who has already conscripted her life to her husband's use,

not only because she loves him and believes in him, but because he's made her feel as if she was uniquely created to be loved by him, as if she alone can serve that profound purpose. Learning that there is someone else? Brutal. Eventually, Vera came to her senses and realized that subjecting herself and her son to Nazi rule was not the best weapon to use in a lover's spat, and Vladimir ultimately forced himself to end his affair. It was not his first transgression, this is a fact he confessed to his lover, but end his affair. It was not his first transgression, this is a fact he confessed to his lover, but not his wife. Women had always flocked to him,

especially when he was young and beautiful, and he was clearly a man who did not favor, or could not abide, solitude. He had, as they say, a lot of love to give, perhaps more than one woman could handle, though Vera did her best to be enough. Even years later, while teaching at Wellesley, when Vera was never more than a campus away, middle-aged Vladimir still managed to strike up an intense flirtation with a student

that progressed to hand-holding and kissing and long walks around campus. His ardor proved overwhelming for the 20-year-old, and she cut things off the minute he professed his love for her. It's unclear if Vera ever knew about the romance, but soon after, she became her husband's shadow. Perhaps she was thinking, fine, he needs a constant connection to a love object, then let it be me. In her semi-official role as his assistant, she followed him everywhere on campus, opening doors for him, minding his umbrella, and sitting conspicuously front and center, if not at his side, for every lecture. The students at Wellesley, and then later Cornell, were fascinated by Vera, the woman with the snowy hair and impeccable posture, who might calmly correct her lecturing husband or supply a forgotten bit of information. Who was she exactly?

husband or supply a forgotten bit of information. Who was she exactly? She couldn't have been anything but royalty, they posited. They called her the Countess, the Princess, the Grey Eagle. The information vacuum worked in her favor. Perhaps that's why she persisted in clinging to a veil of privacy. The black satin mask of mystery continued to suit her well. She became her husband's everything, and not just emotionally. She filed his notes, erased his blackboard, graded his papers, even taught his classes for months when he was working on his books or recovering from surgery. But teaching was never more than a job for Nabokov. His lectures on literature are fantastic reads, but they were mercenary pieces, not passion projects. The real work always was art, fiction, novels, poetry. He knew he deserved a place on the shelf between Gogol

and Tolstoy, Joyce and Shakespeare. So student-free summers were happy hiatuses for the couple, which they dedicated to Thelma and Louise-ing it around the American West in search of butterflies. Lepidoptery was the only passion that could compete with writing for Nabokov. It was the only other thing he ached to do. And he taught Vera to love it too, or at least to go along. He even discovered a species which he named the Karner Blue. On the road, both Nabokovs were cheerily nomadic. Chased out of Arizona by a rattlesnake, killed in the

nick of time by Vladimir the Valiant, they immediately transplanted themselves to a hilltop in Ashland, Oregon. The thousands of miles of driving were in Vera's hands, literally. Vladimir abdicated, luckily, as he was abysmal and unlicensed, but she loved it and bragged to her friends in her 60s that she had driven more than 200,000 miles over the course of their American summers. When not stalking flying changelings, Nabokov was writing. In the car, in motel parking lots, in a series of rented cabins, many of which are memorialized in the fictions they incubated. This is how and where Lolita was born. In what her author would call prison cells of paradise,

with yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine, when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain. Here's a bit more through the prism of Humbert Humbert. Voraciously we consumed those long highways. In rapt silence, we glided over their glassy black dance floors. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness. A low sun in a platinum haze, Inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze, with a warm peeled peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still nooms above a wilderness of clover, and clawed Lorraine clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure, with only their cumulus part

conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick silverish water and harsh green corn. The whole arrangement opening like a fan somewhere in Kansas. And this was not even his mother tongue. Anyway, road tripping across America is as essential to the book as the twisted love story. And the book itself is a kind of twisted love letter to America, the country that was almost too prudish to publish it. When it came time to send the novel out, the family were headed for dire financial straits, a condition that was unfortunately quite familiar. Nabokov's previous books were financial failures,

and her recent story had been rejected by The New Yorker. Vera had taken to resuscitating old French translations of her husband's early Russian stories and lobbing them at Parisian publishers in the hopes of bringing in some cash. It's hard to believe that the practical bill-paying half of this couple in this moment did not dissuade the writing half from courting publishers with a book described by its author as

a novel which deals with the problems of a very moral middle-aged gentleman who falls very immorally in love with his stepdaughter, a girl of 13. But Vera was certain of its worth. She called it... A great novel, based on an idea that Volodya believes has never been explored,

at least not in the way that he has done so. To her sister-in-law, she wrote, It's frightening, but it is a great book. Hide it from your son. Vladimir worked on it intermittently for three years and was plagued by doubts the whole time. Having gathered information on sexual deviation and marriage with minors, he blacked out the research notes in his diary as one might now scrub a browser history. More than once, Vera found him in the yard feeding pages of the manuscript into a flaming trash can. Get away from there, she said, reaching her hand into the fire to rescue the paper and stamp out the flames. The match was struck twice more in subsequent years, but luckily, Vera was always nearby.

Again and again, reason prevailed over artistic insecurity, until finally she said definitively, We are keeping this. She worried that if he destroyed the book, he would be haunted by it forever. When it was finally finished, after a sustained sprint of 16-hour writing days, they passed it around New York under a great cloak of secrecy, with legal pledges to keep the author's name from the public record. They had to avoid sending the pages through the Postal Service

because of laws against the distribution of any publication deemed lewd or immoral. Nabokov refused to put his name on the book at all. A series of rejections, tinged with disgust, did not boost their confidence. The novel that had ultimately taken five years to write was rejected by every major American publishing house, and friends who had gotten their eyes on the text were saying Vladimir had lost his mind. Throughout, Vera remained convinced of the book's greatness, in spite of the response of what she called the American publishing industry's

straight-laced morality. Finally, the novel found a publisher in France, the same man who brought us Story of O, which is kind of like Fifty Shades of Grey for grad school. The only caveat was that Nabokov must put his name on it. Desperate for cash and fearing he was otherwise out of options, the author agreed. But it was dangerous. Among the reputational risks, Cornell University, where Nabokov was employed, could terminate him for moral turpitude.

But then the author Graham Greene publicly referred to Lolita as one of the three best English-language novels of the year. Soon after that, a high-profile condemnation denounced the novel as sheer unrestrained pornography, going on to say anyone who published or sold it in London would surely go to prison. You can't buy publicity like that. Publishers everywhere began clamoring for it, even as the British Home Office got it banned in Paris. All this excitement was well and good, but for the Nabokovs, everything depended upon the novel being proved high art. Anything less would be a failure they could not afford. We can debate whether or not a depraved person is capable of producing something of artistic value,

but for the Nabokovs, the question was reversed. Was this work about a depraved character capable of having artistic merit? Or was this some kind of confessional by a sexual deviant that did not deserve to be taken seriously? As editors, publishers, and writers continue to haggle over questions like these, increasing numbers of copies were smuggled out of Europe for eager eyes elsewhere. Anais Nin claims to have made a tidy profit by upcharging friends for her suitcase full of contraband. Meanwhile, Nabokov's newly released novel, Pnin, about a comically ill-fated professor, was finding

legitimate literary success in America and helped to mollify those whose sensibilities had been injured by the trickier text. And so, as demand for Lolita and evidence of its author's respectability grew, American publishers finally began calling to acquire the rights. For scholars, Lolita is a literary masterpiece, densely textured with dazzling language and genius symbolism, like the use of Aztec red to describe both Lolita's bathing suit and the car that's driven by the antagonist Quilty. Genius because, as it has been noted, Aztecs are known for tearing out hearts. But these virtues are less easily grasped in real time by the general

reading public than the fact that there is creepy sex stuff in it. Also, does the creepy sex stuff invalidate the literary achievement? Well, if the author himself is creepy, then yes, it might. See R. Kelly. But if the author is a serious writer with purely intellectual and or artistic interest in the creepy bits, then maybe we can tolerate our own discomfort with the subject matter. In other words, if the author is a decent man in a faithful long-term marriage whose wife is age-appropriate, then maybe it's all okay. So, far from being the nameless author of an incendiary but important work as he was once determined to be, Nabokov's own character

became the main piece of evidence in the trial determining where Lolita belonged in the literary canon. And as any good defense lawyer will attest, you can't have a trial like that without the wife. The fiercely private Vera had to step out of the margins at last. She knew full well how important her role was in the court of public opinion, and therefore in the fortunes of the book, and therefore both her family's finances and her husband's legacy. At a publishing reception in New York, people were surprised to see the man who inhabited Humbert Humbert on the page show up with his entirely respectable middle-aged wife. Vera replied,

Yes, it's the main reason why I'm here. The novel was a huge hit in America, thanks ultimately to publisher Walter Minton having discovered a copy of the book lying around the living room of an exotic dancer with whom he was consorting. As Lolita hit the top of the bestseller list, it was seized by Canadian customs and banned for the second time in France. The only book with an equally successful debut in America had been Gone with the Wind. Reporters were now everywhere, writing profiles galore, and Vera was primarily responsible for wrangling both them and their product.

The fact that the marriage had not been entirely faithful, and that Nabokov the man was not entirely immune to the charms of young women, could not compete with the image of the alluring Mrs. N with her regal bearing and her striking beauty, as stunning as her husband's prose on the page and equally indivisible from him. Sometimes, reality is no match for illusion. Not that her fidelity or their happiness was untrue, but both Vladimir's dalliance with the young co-ed and his earlier works remind us that Humbert Humbert did of of course, spring from his head. And isn't every portrait a self-portrait to some degree? Privately, Vera decried most reviewers' treatments

of Lolita the girl. She wrote in their shared diary, Lolita, discussed by the papers from every possible point of view except one, that of its beauty and pathos. I wish somebody would notice the tender description of the child's helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heart-rending courage. They all miss the fact that the horrid little brat, Lolita, all miss the fact that the horrid little brat, Lolita, is essentially very good indeed.

But she did not voice her criticism of the criticism in public. As the book's popularity grew and grew, so did its authors. Vera's job as PR agent, money manager, contract counselor, tax advisor, translation proofer, secretary, and Nabokov whisperer threatened to overwhelm her. She spent the last 20 years of her life continuing to shepherd her husband's substantial literary legacy, as well as the husband himself. Schiff writes, from the list of the things Nabokov bragged about never having learned to do, type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, fold an umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book's pages, give the time of day to a Philistine, it is easy to deduce what Vera was to spend her life doing. They were labors of love, but labors nonetheless, largely unpaid

and in enormous amounts. Luckily, she was able to keep not only her affection but her sense of humor through it all. When she was anxious in midlife for her naturally light hair to go completely white, her husband said, People will think I'm married to an older woman. To which she retorted, Not if they look at you. Vera Nabokov was a woman of many names. Russian friends and family still thought of her as Vera Pavlovna, or Vera Nikolaevna. Her epistolary handle was Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, which made no sense in their native Russian.

But Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov was a creature who functioned on the page as a kind of bad cop for the couple to unleash on anyone who needed to be dealt with, in anything from contract negotiations to rental leases. For professional dealings, she took on V.N., a persona that represented the writer but was often voiced by the writer's wife. But her dearest self is found on her husband's dedication page. To Vera, he wrote, at the start of every book from 1950 on. As Schiff observes, traditionally a man changes his name and braces for fame. A woman changes hers and passes into oblivion. For Vera, it was both at once. A friend who observed their marriage up close

found the brain bridge to be almost palpable. They recited poetry in unison and played at conversation like two tennis professionals with a single ball. Vladimir caught and held his wife's hand as she passed him candy in a movie theater. The friend said, they are mating like butterflies behind any bush right in the middle of the conversation, and they separate so quickly that one doesn't notice until later. But any separation was hardly bearable for Nabokov. He nearly fainted when watching her cross a busy street, was inconsolable during her cancer scare,

and wrote in his diary when she was having back surgery, The feeling of distress, désarroi, utter panic, and dreadful presentiment every time that Vera is away in the hospital is one of the greatest torments of my life. They lived in a state of complete osmosis, according to their French publisher. Another friend wrote to them, I need not specify if I speak to one or both of you. You blend and separate at will. They kept a diary that seemed to record the thoughts of a single being with two heads.

It was the realization of Vladimir's love ideal, which he had described to his sister during his early days with Farah. In love, you must be Siamese twins, where one sneezes when the other sniffs tobacco. If she had died first, he would likely have followed quickly. As it was, she outlived him by 14 years, long enough to take care of everything that needed to be taken care of, just as she had been doing their entire life. Her final decade and a half was spent handling correspondence,

finding a home for his archives, and settling their estate. When she died, her ashes were joined with his under a stone that had his name on top, her name on the bottom, and the French word for writer in the middle. Jason Epstein, Nabokov's longtime friend and editor, once said, It is a false idea to imagine a real Nabokov. It might be just as much folly to try to understand the real Vera. She was a meticulous archivist who edited herself out of her husband's story as it was being written. Some spouses rankle when being overshadowed by their other half. She ran for the shade his persona threw.

She told biographer Brian Boyd, The more you leave me out, the closer to the truth you will be. The most she would ever admit was this, Writing is Vladimir's life's work, and he has many things he wants to say. As for me, I am trying to help him. As for me, I am trying to help him. Her younger self was the inspiration for Lolita. Her mature presence was the foil that proved her husband's credibility and cemented his success.

To her husband, a man with what has been called a genius for memory, she was at once the young siren and the elegant anti-nymphet. A character and its opposite. A doubling that only a Nabokov could properly pull off. The love story of these two might make some people roll their eyes. To others, it might be life goals. He needed a partner who would be both worthy and tolerant of his devotion, and he found a match more perfect than anything he could have dreamed up. Unique and captivating in her own right, she nevertheless thrived as his shadow, his reflection, his imprint.

Their ambitions aligned perfectly in a kind of double vision of his singular talent. Flaubert famously said that the novelist should be, in his book, like God in the universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible. Nabokov was all over his own books. Instead, it was his wife who exemplified the Flaubertian principle. Most of my works have been dedicated to my wife, and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflected color in the inner mirrors of my books. Or as Vera put it, I am always there, but well hidden. Special thanks to Darcy Carden and Dan Bukatynski for bringing the Nabokovs to life.

I'd also like to thank my significant other for never making me hunt butterflies. Join us tomorrow for a conversation with the woman who literally wrote the book on Vera Nabokov, Pulitzer Prize winner Stacey Schiff. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources, but most often I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles, which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting

and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. Finally, if you have an episode suggestion, let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters, and we tend to focus only on a few of them. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples. Our executive producers are Joanna Solitaroff, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes

Brown, with additional help from Emily Prill. Research and fact-checking by Ella Morton. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista.