Stacy Schiff's subtle use of Nabokov's lyricism (in his letters to his wife) is as exquisite as the scholarship that is this book. This is elegant prose, dissected into an engrossing read, with meticulousness that avoids laboriousness. Who was she and just how much did she influence literature? So when I ran across Véra, I was intrigued. Though I didn’t care for the story of Lolita or its emotionally disturbed main character, Humbert and his idée fixe, I admired the prose. I loved Spring in Fialta and for a while now, I’ve anticipated reading Speak, Memory. Lectures on Literature beseeches me from my bedside table each night.

Inseparable, self-sufficient, they form a multitude of two. This is a biography that is as much about Vladimir as it is about Vera because according to people who knew them, they were one, indeed: She was 'mnemogenic'-subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered. She was radiant, regal, elegance personified, a head-turner. She was also the integral half of Vladimir Nabokov, the man who was a great writer but a “helpless” individual a socially awkward professor who even after years at a university, still got lost on his way to class a man who didn't know how to rent an apartment or keep a bank account a playboy and flirt.

She was a lover of the arts and literature a woman who spoke four languages and taught and translated modern langauages. This is how Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife, Véra. She lives in New York City.įor you are the only person I can talk to-about the hue of a cloud, about the singing of a thought, and about the fact that when I went out to work today and looked each sunflower in the face, they all smiled back at me with their seeds. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions. All three were New York Times Notable Books the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique.

Vera by stacy schiff