Whether you want to know about the husband or the wife, you should make Schiff, as Véra was for Vladimir, your ‘designated driver.’ ” 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. “Stacy Schiff is phenomenally talented, her service to the Nabokovs is utterly sincere, and the resulting book is overwhelmingly gratifying. When her 1991 New York Times obit called Véra “Wife, Muse, Agent,” it only hinted at her role, which is rescued from obscurity in Schiff’s graceful prose.” “This book offers more than a peek at the famous author through his wife’s eyes. It is a necessary contribution to Nabokov scholarship.… Véra is both love story and literary study.… Schiff has done a splendid job.” The same is true of Schiff’s Véra, and yet it is more than just a portrait of a marriage. “Excellent … Behind every great man is a book about a great woman. “Absorbing, often wildly amusing, and deeply moving … Véra’s mere listening to Lolita did more than we shall ever know to determine what we read when we read Lolita.” “Illuminating … ‘Without my wife,’ Nabokov once remarked, ‘I wouldn’t have written a single novel.’ … Schiff’s work boldly and brilliantly illuminates how complex was this deceptively simple statement … A superb portrait.” “Artful … both revolutionary and old-fashioned, an intimate biography that leaves both the dignity and the privacy of its subject intact.” Schiff’s elegant prose style at once forceful and playfully allusive in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.” “A sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait. “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 couple’s interactions, has given us a vivid and truthful portrait of a proud and gifted woman whose contribution to Vladimir Nabokov’s life and career was immense.” LYNDALL GORDON, The New York Times Book Review “An absorbing story, illumined by Schiff’s flair for the succinct insight … This portrait of a fifty-two-year marriage to a woman who was the writer’s prime reader opens up Nabokov’s private life.… But the triumph of Véra is not just in providing entrée to her famous husband. Schiff, with this book, has most persuasively met.”

She effortlessly conjures up the disparate worlds the couple inhabited … a formidable challenge for a biographer-a challenge that Ms. “Schiff has succeeded in creating an elegantly nuanced portrait of the artist’s wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov’s marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work.

Vera by stacy schiff