Stacy Schiff - Vera

VRA

(MRS. VLADIMIR NABOKOV)

Schiff has succeeded in creating an elegantly nuanced portrait of the artists wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokovs marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work. She effortlessly conjures up the disparate worlds the couple inhabited a formidable challenge for a biographera challenge that Ms. Schiff, with this book, has most persuasively met.

M ICHIKO K AKUTANI , The New York Times

An absorbing story, illumined by Schiffs flair for the succinct insight This portrait of a fifty-two-year marriage to a woman who was the writers prime reader opens up Nabokovs private life. But the triumph of Vra is not just in providing entre to her famous husband. She fascinates of her own right.

L YNDALL G ORDON , The New York Times Book Review

Schiff has performed a monumental task in drawing a nuanced and fairly detailed portrait of the woman behind the mask both husband and wife conspired to create. Writing in sprightly prose that captures the verbal tennis of the couples interactions, [she] has given us a vivid and truthful portrait of a proud and gifted woman whose contribution to Vladimir Nabokovs life and career was immense.

The Boston Globe

A sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait. Schiffs elegant prose style [is] at once forceful and playfully allusive in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.

Los Angeles Times

Artful both revolutionary and old-fashioned, an intimate biography that leaves both the dignity and the privacy of its subject intact.

Newsday

Illuminating Without my wife, Nabokov once remarked, I wouldnt have written a single novel. Schiffs work boldly and brilliantly illuminates how complex was this deceptively simple statement A superb portrait.

L OUISE D ESALYO , The Chicago Tribune

Absorbing, often wildly amusing, and deeply moving Vras mere listening to Lolita did more than we shall ever know to determine what we read when we read Lolita.

C LARENCE B ROWN , The Seattle Times

Excellent Behind every great man is a book about a great woman. The same is true of Schiffs Vra, and yet it is more than just a portrait of a marriage. It is a necessary contribution to Nabokov scholarship. Vra is both love story and literary study. Schiff has done a splendid job.

San Jose Mercury News

This book offers more than a peek at the famous author through his wifes eyes. When her 1991 New York Times obit called Vra Wife, Muse, Agent, it only hinted at her role, which is rescued from obscurity in Schiffs graceful prose.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Stacy Schiff is phenomenally talented, her service to the Nabokovs is utterly sincere, and the resulting book is overwhelmingly gratifying. She writes sentence after sentence of such panache that you almost believe that she has been visited by the ghost of Nabokov himself. Schiff has given us two fascinating lives for the price of one. Whether you want to know about the husband or the wife, you should make Schiff, as Vra was for Vladimir, your designated driver.

Sunday Telegraph

Schiff writes with a lucidity and an elegance that chimes beautifully with the Nabokovian tale she has to tell. This cool and delectable study is all the more remarkable for being a portrait of an invisible woman. Stacy Schiff has concentrated on concrete details that reveal the outline of the absent ones. She measures Vras impact rather as one measures the effect of gravity, or invisible particles, by their impact on distant visible bodies [A] wonderfully acute and delicate study.

The Independent

Schiff, no mean writer herself, shows how every reader of Nabokov should be grateful to his long-suffering wife. Her superb book, a triumph of research, rhythm, and style, casts his novels in a new light.

Mail on Sunday

At heart a love story Stacy Schiff fills in a glaring gap in the wives of portrait gallery.

B RENDA M ADDOX , Literary Review

Schiff describes the Nabokovs as the ultimate portmanteau couple and her book is something of a portmanteau, too: two biographies for the price of one and a portrait of a marriage thrown in. This is a rich and subtle book. It is also, at times, very moving.

The Times (London)

The Nabokovs partnership must be one of the most tantalising double acts in literary history a remarkable book it is indicative of Schiffs sureness of touch that she can make fun spring from close textual reading. Following Schiffs bold, patient construction of Vra from the fiction (of all kinds) with which she surrounded herself approaches the delight of reading a Nabokovian fiction.

The Spectator

A scholarly, readable look at a remarkable literary duo.

Library Journal

Vra has met her match in Stacy Schiff, whose biography is a model of subtle searching, and elegant scholarship. It lucidly dissects the three people involved in the Nabokov marriage: Vra, Vladimir, and their joint creation, the author VN. It makes clear that if, as Schiff proposes, Nabokov was for much of his life a national treasure in search of a nation, Vra was his anchor, his emotional and imaginative refuge, the country in which he lived.

H ILARY S PURLING , Daily Telegraph

Engrossing and utterly romantic [Vra] was his wife in the most complete and complicated sense of the word. Schiffs elegant prose and fanatical attention to detail establish this unequivocally.

New York

Elegant a sensitive rendering of one of the centurys great love stories. The book probes delicately into the considerable mysteries at the heart of a happy marriage.

W ILL B LYTHE , Mirabella

As much a love story as a straightforward biography This being the Nabokovs were talking about, though, its also a tale of soul mates who defy conventional expectations and explanations.

Salon

The fascinating story of a modern woman who made a life-long career as her husbands intellectual companion, secretary, manager, and guardian angel.

Kirkus Reviews

Vra is a beautiful book. Built on a heroic scale, it is subtle, intimate, and richly argued. Almost every page projects a truly remarkable woman and her part as a tutelary spirit in the work of a great writer. Has there ever been a literary marriage as productive, complex, and intriguing as this one?

J USTIN K APLAN

There are many good reasons to be interested in the life of Vra Nabokov, but the best one is that Stacy Schiff has written it. She is the rising star of literary biography: witty, lucid, penetrating, and humane.

J UDITH T HURMAN

Shy, perfectionist, polyglot, Vra Nabokov emerges as one of the great Russian literary wives, as crucial to her husbands work as Anna Dostoevsky or Sonya Tolstoy. Stacy Schiffs triumph is that she has put in all the tones and half-tones in this shaded portrait of the brilliant writers inspired and inspiring collaborator.

E DMUND W HITE

If this one were only the story of an uncommon marriage, a marriage so profound as to renew the words meaning, it would be a book well worth readinginteresting, entertaining, smart, sad, and funny. So much the better that it is about the marriage of one of the centurys most original writers and the women who made it possible indeed, necessary, for him to become that person.

T RACY K IDDER

I am truly in love with this book. Schiffs sentences are magnificent, deceptively complex, full of insight and fact and distance and wry humor, so that every page is a kind of mini feast. Were I a reviewer I would be straining to find words to describe this bookunlike anything Ive ever readwords that are not overused and thus devalued, words like exquisite and breathtaking, which are both appropriate and true. And the detail! It is extraordinary.