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Capturing Vera, the
elusive Nirs. Nabok

@ Vera (Mrs. Viadimir
Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff,
Vintage, 501 pp, $22.95

Katharine Hamer

News Reporter
khamer@nsnews.com

WIFE, muse, and as:
tant to the butrerfly-collect-
ing author of Lolita, Véra
Nabokov was fiercely outspo-
ken but always managed,

somehow, to keep parts of
herself hidden in shadows.

Shortlisted for her biogra-
phy of Antoine de Saint-

Exupéry, Stacy Schiff walked
away with a Pulitzer prize for
this volume: a literary work in its own right.

In many ways, Véra comes across as a sort of proto-Yoko Ono figure: constantly at her hus-
band’s side, she played intermediary between the writer and the press, the agents, the personal
correspondents who wrote to Nabokov but received a reply from Véra.

Schiff details the frustration felt by many of those unable to get a response direct from
Viadimir, but observes of his wife: “For many years she was unaware of the ill will. It took her
some time to see that a shy, overworked, morbidly private, highly principled woman could
appear prickly, humourless, aloof, and intransigent. For the most part she did not care.”

Though as an adult she never attended synagogue, Vér. clung passionate to her identity as
a Jew. She fell out with her sister Lena because of the latter’s post-war conversion to

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