Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

In 1925 Vera and Vladimir Nabokov, both Russian refugees, married in Berlin. His family had been ruined and hers was about to be. From that year they were inseparable. Friends, colleagues, relatives, and publishers all agreed he would have been nowhere without her. Even when the marriage nearly foundered because of another woman, Nabokov wrote to his wife daily. She attended her husband's lectures, replaced him when he was sick, drove the Buick in which he wrote Lolita, and saved the manuscript several times from burning. She negotiated his contracts, corrected her husband's stories in German, his memoir in French, and his poetry in Italian, and translated "Pale Fire" into Russian when she was in her eighties. Yet at the same time she tried to erase herself from the public. For several years she answered her husband's letters under an assumed name, and she demanded that her husband's biographers ignore the vital role she played in his life and work. For Nabokov himself, her influence was undeniable: he lit up around her, and the two acted as if they were a pair of children hiding their secrets from the rest of the world. He wrote his novels first for himself, second for Vera, and third for no one at all.