Vera (5 page)

Slonim passed his law exams brilliantly—he figured in the top 15 percent
of his class—in May 1890. He was no prodigy in completing the mandatory dissertation, but also worked throughout the eighteen months in which he prepared the paper, as other classmates did not. After four years as a barrister's assistant he moved on, for what under the best of circumstances may have been financial reasons. The system did not favor apprentice lawyers, who were paid irregularly and poorly; nearly half supplemented their income with outside work or with family monies. At the time of his marriage, in 1899, Evsei Slonim left the law for the tile business. Over the next years he changed profession repeatedly, prospering with each move; generally these were years of unprecedented economic growth in Russia. Of Slava Borisovna Feigin, Véra's mother, born in Mogilev on August 26, 1872, we know virtually nothing. Her family—which would play a crucial role in the Nabokovs' lives—were merchants in the city of Minsk, most likely in the grain business, of more modest means than the Slonims. The Feigins were less assimilated, or at least more often had recourse to Yiddish, otherwise absent from Véra Slonim's childhood, although it had been both parents' first language. In photos Slava Borisovna appears less often than her husband, who is always impeccably dressed, whose light-gray eyes sparkle, and who carries himself with distinction. She was a large woman with a wide jaw, dark-haired and dark-skinned, less the obvious beauty than her three daughters would be. In the rare portraits Véra Nabokov drew of her early years, the mother is nowhere to be found.
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At the time of Véra Evseevna's birth the Slonims made their home on Bassejnaya Street, in a predominately Jewish Petersburg neighborhood. The habit of nomadism was instilled early: They moved three times over the next years before settling at Furstadtskaya 9, probably just before the birth of Véra's younger sister, Sonia, in November 1908. Four blocks from the Neva, the Furstadtskaya apartment was easily the family's most impressive address, and their last before the Revolution. Next door to the handsome building is Saint Ann's Lutheran Church, a little green-and-white-columned Palladian gem; it was from the church that the Slonims rented their second-floor apartment, although by that time Evsei Lazarevich was the owner of a four-story building, in a less desirable part of town. Catherine the Great's Tauride Palace, the Duma's meeting place, stands at the end of the street; on Véra Evseevna's sixteenth birthday the Constituent Assembly would meet there for the first and last time. An eighteenth-century garden—a beautifully
landscaped field of rolling hills and winding paths—surrounded the structure. In winter a high wooden tower was constructed in the garden and flooded with buckets of water, for tobogganers; as a child Véra flew down the silvery slopes in the Tavrichesky Gardens on an upholstered sled. Some of the most prominent members of the Jewish community lived in the neighborhood, populated mostly by professionals.
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Nabokov reminds us of the obligation of all literary biographers to establish at the outset that “
the little boy was a glutton for books.” So were some little girls, nowhere more so than in cultured, logocentric Petersburg, in a country in which one dueled over literature. Véra Evseevna remembered having read a newspaper at the age of three. At the time the newspaper was probably not what a Jewish three-year-old ought best to have been reading, filled as it was with news of the 1905 pogroms, pogroms that brought to the Jewish community a fear it had not known since the Middle Ages. She could remember a poem for life after two readings, a talent that would serve her well in her chosen occupation, though not an unusual one for a Petersburger, nearly every one of whom could cite his share of Pushkin. She admitted she had been a highly precocious child, perhaps as much so as her highly precocious husband; she recalled moments from her first year of life. Mostly it is telling that she felt that the child had had gifts the mature woman did not share. It was as if she were speaking of someone else; she was always better able to applaud the talents of others.

For the most part she was educated at home with her sister Lena, although it is unclear if this was done because her health demanded it, because her parents found it fashionable (or convenient, with two girls of nearly the same age), or because she was Jewish and, like many Jewish young men, she was instructed at home and sent to school only to submit to the annual exams. Russia was in any event a country in which, well in advance of the rest of Europe, girls were educated, none more so than three daughters of a successful Petersburg lawyer, in particular one without a son on whom to settle the mantle of intellectual heir. Nina Berberova, born a few months before Véra Slonim and a few blocks from Vladimir Nabokov, early on wrote down for herself a list of professions, “
completely disregarding the fact that I was not a boy.” Like Véra, she was capable of discussing the relative merits of the Social Democrats versus the Social Revolutionaries long before she was old enough to cast a vote. Young women routinely went to law school; half the
medical faculty in prerevolutionary times were women, as were a quarter of economics students. Oddly, even when the anti-Semitic decrees had made legal careers inaccessible to Jews, government schools for girls remained open to Jewish girls.

The tradition of educating upper-class women dated back to the nineteenth century, and the upper classes still being infected by the Francophilia of those years, the language in which girls were educated was French. It was a prerequisite at the Princess Obolensky Academy, which Véra and Lena Slonim attended, sporadically, between 1912 and 1917. The school was not necessarily the most elite of the private schools for girls in Petersburg, but it was one of the most expensive. Petersburg was a cosmopolitan city—its wealthy inhabitants subscribed to the London
Times
and to the
Saturday Evening Post
—and German was also taught at the Obolensky, although Véra Evseevna felt she mastered the language mostly in Berlin. For the time and place the Slonim girls were perfectly normal quadrilingual children. At home French was their first language (Véra's was accentless); from her eleventh year, English was the language of play; Russian essentially qualified as a third tongue. When Lena and Sonia Slonim left Petersburg they claimed to be fluent in five languages. Véra's fourth was German and she does not appear to have had a fifth, unless, as has been suggested, it was
telepathy.

Our only glimpse of Véra Slonim's academic record is her Obolensky report from the end of her sixth form, the equivalent of an advanced placement year. She submitted to the examinations in the spring of 1917, which supports her assertion that she had begun her studies uncommonly early. At least three years younger than her classmates, she entered school only after
special permission had been obtained from the Ministry of Education. She was fifteen, and at the time reading the Russian edition of William James's
The Principles of Psychology
. Her strengths were more in languages and mathematics than in the sciences, and she excelled—her grade here surpassed even those in French and German—at algebra. Her passion for engineering and all things mechanical may already have been born at the time.

At home the girls, at least the older girls, were entrusted to a governess. Véra Slonim remembered having asked when she would be free of her chaperone and having received the disappointing response “
When you are married.” Years later Lena Slonim would tell Véra how shocked she was by her own son's independence after the close surveillance of their Russian childhoods. Most of their time was spent in the company of those hired to teach them; a whole corps of people was recruited for instruction in ballet, piano, and tennis, and to see to it that the girls were properly steeped in the classics.
Dickens, Byron, Tolstoy, Maupassant, and the English poets constituted a
large part of the fare. Tutors, like all help, were easy to find and could be had for abysmally low wages; even the relatively poor in Petersburg could afford to keep servants. Véra's time with her parents was limited to Fridays, when the family came together in the evenings, presumably out of a religious instinct if not for a traditionally observant Sabbath. The household was not a hugely social one, although the Slonims did vacation with relatives. In the summer, when Petersburg is hot and fetid and unlivable, the family decamped, as did everyone who could afford to; large portions of the city were deserted through the silver-skied months. The Slonims shared the Russian taste for Finland, just over the border from Petersburg; the summer resorts of which were packed with Russians. Véra passed her childhood summers on the sand and the little wooden
walkways at Terioki, where games were organized for the children; on the exquisite beaches along the Bothnian coast; and at least once in Territet, Switzerland, a few miles from the Montreux Palace Hotel, where her sixty-two years of nomadism would at last come to an end.
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From this or another Swiss trip she returned to Petersburg in 1914, the blinds of the railway car drawn along the way, although they were some distance from the front. Photos reveal an intent, ravishing blonde, with her paternal grandmother's and her father's light eyes, otherwise a fair version of her darker, round-faced older sister, who appears more willing to smile for the camera. The two are perfectly groomed and impeccably dressed, often in identical outfits. As a
relative later reminded Véra, hers was a luxurious childhood, though this was not a matter on which the Slonim girls were invited to dwell.
Evsei Lazarevich raised his daughters to understand that while they should never think it a disadvantage to belong to a good family, they should never assume it to be an advantage either.

Much has been said of the unreality of St. Petersburg, a
splendid stage set of a city built on a swamp in the world's most inhospitable climate. Its colors are Scandinavian. Its buildings are plagiarized from Venice and Amsterdam by architects born in Italy, France, and Scotland. Its pink granite embankments were originally Finnish. Its aspirations were highly un-Russian, something not lost on the rest of the Empire, to which it scarcely seemed to belong; its paper mills and shipyards and steelworks were British-, Dutch-, and German-owned. This Venice-inspired mirage would grow wildly, from a population of 1.5 million in the year of Véra Evseevna's birth to 2.5 million in 1917. On all levels, a city of Petersburg's stature at Petersburg's latitude—that of southern
Alaska—represented a triumph of reason over realism. Its impressive statuary waited out the blizzards under makeshift wooden pyramids; its residents braced themselves for floods every autumn; spring announced itself with the crash of massive blocks of ice breaking up on the Neva. (For Véra Evseevna, the
scratch-scratch, rasp-rasp of the servants sweeping snow from the roofs registered as a particularly festive sound; it signaled that the thaw was near.) In the dead of winter, when the ice storms raged, it could be dark for as many as nineteen hours a day. The only city where the wind blows from four directions, as Gogol had it, Petersburg was at the same time a capital that was meant to appear imposing, while behind its gorgeous Palladian façades all was decidedly more precarious. Even the stones themselves were counterfeit: There is no quarry remotely near Petersburg, much of which was constructed of plaster over brick, beautifully doctored to appear majestic, permanent. Small wonder Petersburgers clung to those certainties they could. “
One cannon shot was heard at exactly 12 o'clock,” remembered Véra Nabokov, “and all of Petersburg adjusted their watches.”

For Véra's family little was as reassuringly certain as that midday explosion. The Slonims were Jewish at a time and in a place where their last name colored their every move.
The words “Russian” and “Jew” had come together only in about the middle of the nineteenth century, at the time of Véra Evseevna's grandparents, and hung together uneasily, more awkwardly even than did “liberal aristocrat” for Nabokov's father. In one historian's phrasing, the words “Russian Jew” still constituted “less a description than an aspiration.” Only in 1861 was a Jew with a university degree officially awarded the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement; eighteen years later that right was reluctantly extended to Jewish graduates of all institutions of higher learning. At that time most St. Petersburg Jews were still unable to read Russian. In Jewish families living in the most elite Petersburg neighborhoods at the turn of the century—and the Slonims were not yet doing so—about half still spoke Yiddish at home. A tiny and wary minority, they both felt and were made to feel alien. The risk of expulsion followed them everywhere. Jews of the Pale were dismissed as Jews of the provinces, but even Petersburg Jews, even an assimilated family like the Slonims in their native country, were said to belong to a “colony.”
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And that colony was engaged, between the judicial reforms of the 1860s and the Revolution, in what must have seemed like a colossal, rigged game of
Simon Says. A few rights were granted the Jews; it was understood that every right not expressly granted was denied. The Jewish statutes of 1914 ran to nearly a thousand pages, all of them ripe with complications and contradictions. Even someone who had read them all could remain in doubt as to what exactly was permitted and what was not. This left one in a constant state of possible infraction. Furthermore, the rules were subject to change at any time. The Jews could be expelled from the city one minute, invited to stay the next. A Jewish law graduate could practice diligently as an apprentice, or he might be pressured to leave the city, as without having passed the bar he had no right to residency. If he asked to submit to his law boards so as to secure his right to residency, he might be told there were no vacancies in the Jewish quota for testing. And if he was lucky enough to find a place despite the odds, he might, after passing the bar, learn he could not practice in Petersburg as a new percent rule had recently taken effect. A Jew could serve on a jury, but not as a foreman. A Jew could play in a military band but not lead one. A Jewish soldier could pass through Petersburg on leave but was required to spend his furlough outside of the city. There were quotas for how many Jews could be admitted to hospitals. Jews could die, but only in specified numbers. It was a source of outrage that—in flagrant disregard for the law—Jews continued to compete for cemetery space in quota-defying numbers. For the right to reside in Petersburg countless professionals registered as domestic servants, including the
greatest historian of Russian Jewry, several renowned artists, and one future president of Israel. The case that most seized the public imagination was that of a young woman who registered as a prostitute in order to attend university; she was expelled when it was discovered that she was not practicing her trade. Nor were the city's most privileged Jews unaffected by these restrictions. When the “Railroad King”
Simon Poliakov donated a dormitory to St. Petersburg University, Jews were specifically barred from living in it.