Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

About this book

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both "monumental" (The Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (New York magazine) Stacy Schiffs Vra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the migr author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak Memory--wrote his books first for himself second for his wife Vra and third for no one at all. "Without my wife " he once noted "I wouldnt have written a single novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America spanning much of the century the story of the Nabokovs fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Vra both beautiful and brilliant is its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiffs Vra is a triumph of the biographical form.