Véra (Mrs.Vladimir Nabokov)
Stacy Schiff1999

Stacy Schiff brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our Vladimir Nabokov, émigré author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory , and his beloved wife, Véra. Nabokov wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, and third for no one at all. “Without my wife,” he once noted, “I wouldn’t have written a single novel.”

Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the twentieth century, the story of the Nabokovs’ fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine—a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form.