Véra Slonim married Nabokov in 1925 and, as the editor of this collection of letters points out, “no marriage of a major 20th-century writer lasted longer”. The majority of these letters in this nearly 800-page book are from before 1950. Nabokov frequently berates Véra for her tardiness in replying. “You are voiceless,” he once complained, prophetically as it turns out: an intensely private person, Véra destroyed her own side of the correspondence. By contrast Nabokov was, says Boyd, “an assiduous and even uxorious letter-writer”. When Véra was confined to a sanatorium in 1926, he wrote to her every day. His letters are a delight: affectionate, playful and full of what his translator terms “Nabokovian verbal jauntiness”. Their love for each other was intense: “you turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed”; “I need so little: a bottle of ink, a speck of sun on the floor – and you.” From his reading (a Gide novel was “terrible nonsense”) to the cities he visited (“the London underground is hell”), this wonderfully rich collection offers memorable insights into a brilliant writer.
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