Letters to Vera

The letters of the great writer to his wife--in their first publication--tell a long and beguiling love story and document anew the creative energies of an artist who was always at work.

No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokov's to Vera Slonim. She shared his delight at the enchantment of life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humor of any woman he had met. From their meeting in 1923, Vladimir's letters to Vera form a narrative arc that tells a half-century long love story, one that is playful, romantic, pithy, and memorable. At the same time, the letters tell us much about the man and the writer. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everything--animals, people, speech, the landscapes he encountered--and learn of the poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays, and translations on which he worked ceaselessly. This delicious volume contains 21 photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters themselves and the puzzles and doodles Vladimir often sent to Vera. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd.

OLGA VORONINA was deputy director of the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg and the Nabokov Estate representative in Russia before receiving a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. She is now Assistant Professor of Russian and Director of Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Bard College.

BRIAN BOYD, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, wrote an MA thesis that Vladimir Nabokov called "brilliant" and a PhD thesis that Vera Nabokov thought the best thing written on her husband to date. His biography of Nabokov won awards on four continents; his criticism has been translated into seventeen languages. He has edited Nabokov's English-language novels, autobiography, butterfly writings, and translations from Russian poetry.