Vera by Stacy Schiff

1958: “An average Russian child of the beginning of this century can ordinarily record a total of reminiscences which appears staggeringeven to an exceptionally gifted American.” * She was by no means inclined to dwell on these recollections; everything in her history but little in her temperament could have made her a full-time nostalgic. She appeared almost frighteningly detached from her past. When asked about her Petersburg childhood and that of her husband, Véra Nabokov confined herself to lines like “Both of our sets of parents were extremely intelligent people.” In her eighties, she declined an offer of photos of the Furstadtskaya Street home. Her sister Lena told her son that she had been taught to look forward, never back; she spoke of wanting to put the past in a box andturn the key, twice. Véra effectively did as much, without seeming to realize that the key hung heavily on her delicate wrist. Evsei Lazarevich plainly took misfortune in stride and forged on, a habit he imparted, with some variation, to his daughters. From the opposite angle Slava Borisovna’s demeanor may have worked the same effect. She was a high-strung woman, enough so to have produced an unflappable daughter, one with no taste for any kind of unnecessary hand-wringing. As one of her closest relatives wrote Véra many years later, “Judging by your letter, you’re in a good mood, but then again, you know how to make a good mood.” The Slonim girls, living in straitened circumstances in Berlin ten years after the Russian Revolution, could not have been less similar to the more famous three sisters in Russian literature. They were taught to be proud and capable and supremely rational, to rise above and, perhaps most of all to expect, adversity. In their sixty years of correspondence the past is rarely mentioned; there were no plaintive wails for St. Petersburg.
    Some things were to be insisted upon, on the other hand. Véra Slonim learned a great number of lessons from her father, only one of which was how to hold a thirteen-year-grudge, a lesson she would put to good use. “They were raised to be perfect,” reports Lena Slonim’s son, who knew his mother and aunts were pushed hard to excel academically. They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one. † In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain climate; the lessons Véra Slonim learned were exactly the reverse of those her future husband learned in the incunabula of his first pampered eighteen years. “One is always at home in one’s past,” Nabokov would write, certainly not in reference to his wife. Evsei Lazarevich passedhis lofty sense of responsibility on to his middle daughter, whom he clearly encouraged. As she recalled later:
    A few years before the Revolution my father bought up the greater part of a small town in Southern Russia which he had planned to develop into a model little city, complete with modern canalisation and streetcar transportation, and somehow that plan so enchanted me that I was promised I would be allowed to take a hand at it when I grew up.
    As precarious as the world may have been around them, Evsei Slonim had a taste for adventure, one he fostered in his daughters. He wrote off a neighbor’s child with the remark that the child was “calm, but uninteresting.” Whenslandered in a newspaper—during the war he was cited by name as an exploitative apartment owner, after he had actually waived his rent for soldiers’ wives—he lost no time in challenging the paper’s editor to a duel. He received an apology instead.
    â€œAs a little bit of musk fills an entire house, so the least influence of Judaism overflows all of one’s life,” observed the poet Osip Mandelstam, who had