Vera Read online

  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.* 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.”*

  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.

  Through these mine-infested waters Evsei Lazarevich cut a careful if confident path. His career was marked on all sides by the on-again, off-again game of acculturation: When he had come to Petersburg—and he appears to have been the first in his family to have done so—his name was Gamshey Leizerovich.* Under that name he earned his legal degree, which secured his right to settle in Petersburg. Each semester he secured residency papers, renewed with each return from a visit to Mogilev, and extended when necessary. He was part of a huge wave of Jewish law students that greatly alarmed the State; by 1890 nearl
y half the Empire’s apprentice lawyers were Jewish. The release of these statistics set off a furor. Within a matter of years it was next to impossible to do what Evsei Lazarevich had dreamed of doing in 1884. Between 1889 and 1896 no Jews were admitted to the bar anywhere in the Empire. Over the next eight years—when Evsei Lazarevich would himself have relinquished the idea of sitting for his law boards—only fifteen Jewish candidates were approved. Jewish lawyers represented a particular embarrassment to the State because they were able to argue against the laws that had been promulgated to keep them in their places.

  And this was, in part, what Evsei Lazarevich spent the next years doing. His actual legal career was short-lived: He worked as an apprentice for the four years following his graduation, for two Jewish barristers, the second of whom had an established practice and appears to have arranged for his lodging. Almost certainly because of the new restrictions—this was the year he should have passed the bar—he moved house and changed professions; the year of his marriage found him working for a large tile business, evidently owned by the Jewish family of a law school classmate. Possibly with the help of his wife’s dowry, he opened a kitchen tile company in 1900, which he ran for several years. The business entitled him to a trade certificate but did not automatically confer on him the rights of a merchant of the second guild. Whatever he did immediately afterward proved profitable, as he was able to buy a building in 1907 and to obtain his first telephone number. Other members of the family joined him in the capital: a brother, Iser Lazarevich, practiced dentistry and lived with his family in Slonim’s building, into which a cousin, an engineer, moved a few years later. An older brother, David Lazarevich, appears to have moved to Petersburg with or just before Evsei Lazarevich, but not to have stayed in the city. An uncle enjoyed some prominence in business circles.

  Véra Nabokov remembered her father as a lumber merchant. He was “a born pioneer in the truest sense, having taught himself forestry and priding himself on never allowing a tree to be felled without having one planted in replacement. He also built a little railway, a kind of feeder line, on one of the estates to bring timber close to the bank of Zapadnaya Dvina, down which river it was floated to Riga, tied up into enormous rafts by skilled peasants.” At least after 1909, he did so in conjunction with a Dutchman named Leo Peltenburg, a man who became a close friend and who would be instrumental in helping Slonim to transfer his assets abroad at the time of the Revolution. Also the father of three daughters, Peltenburg was a kindhearted man, quick to dispense wisdom and good cheer. Véra reserved a soft spot for him in her heart; she corresponded with him all her life. Leo Peltenburg ran a one-man firm, with agents throughout Russia and Germany; he traveled often to Petersburg, along with his daughters. For Evsei Slonim there were more than the usual advantages in having a foreign partner. What Véra Nabokov left unsaid in her impressive report on her father is that the timber trade—Russia’s second-largest export business at the time—was a predominately Jewish one. And as such, additional regulations applied. The Jewish lumber merchant could not freely fell timber. He could not build or operate sawmills. He was obliged to ship his timber abroad in log form, which was less profitable than shipping lumber. He could ship only through specified ports (Petersburg was not among them); he could not lease land from the railroads in order to store his inventory. Of this Véra made no mention. There was every reason, however, why she would have a natural ear for a narrative technique later described as a “system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.”

  Slonim put his legal training to good use over these years. In a number of court petitions he represented Pavel Vladimirovich Rodzianko, an eminent industrialist—his brother was chairman of the Duma—engaged in a number of gold-mining operations. Slonim negotiated for the exploration rights in several mountain ranges in eastern Russia, government concessions of which were elaborate affairs. He would have received a quick education in securing timber rights from his court work on Rodzianko’s behalf. The relationship appears to have been a close and mutually satisfactory one; from 1913 until the Revolution Slonim served as the chief estate manager for Pavel Vladimirovich’s daughter, a neighbor on Furstadtskaya Street. Maria Pavlovna Rodzianko and her brother controlled a colossal fortune, including a great deal of Petersburg real estate. The finances were in a fabulously tangled state when they entrusted them to Evsei Slonim, who remained in place when Maria Pavlovna and her husband separated. The Rodzianko work constituted a prestigious position—a mere sideline according to Véra, but a time-consuming one, judging from the court appearances and the petitions filed regularly on Pavel Vladimirovich’s behalf—and one that suggests that Slonim’s politics may not have been as left-wing as could otherwise be expected of a Jewish non-barrister practicing in Petersburg. He voted with the Kadets, as did most of the intelligentsia, but the family was less radical politically than the liberal Nabokovs.

  Evsei Lazarevich’s longest-running legal concern had nothing to do with his aristocratic neighbors. In 1900 he filed a petition for the right to enter the second guild of the St. Petersburg Merchantry, which may explain the detour he had made into the tile business the previous year. Rank mattered more than wealth in prerevolutionary Russia, and entry into the second guild would have assured Slonim of the closest thing a Jew could claim to an in-alienable right: the secure privilege of residency in Petersburg. In particular he made the case for his right to hire a Jewish clerk from the Pale of Settlement in his home. He appears to have had in mind his brother Iser, then a member of the Mogilev petty bourgeoisie. The matter was tightly regulated, as the government feared a kind of Trojan horse invasion of the capital. In a case that reads like a collaboration between Sholom Aleichem and Joseph Heller, Slonim’s petition wound its way from ministry to ministry. Briefly he had been a member of the second guild of merchants’ sons in Mogilev; he argued that by virtue of his law degree, his trade, and his present residence he should be admitted to that guild in Petersburg. In 1900 the courts ruled that he must first obtain the right to unrestricted residency in the Empire, a right conferred by the very rank he was seeking. Whether Slonim fought the verdict as he did for the sake of his daughters, whose right to reside in Petersburg was contingent on his standing; whether he fought purely for the fate of his brother; whether he fought for the additional rights for himself; or whether he fought for principle’s sake is unclear. He was known for his selflessness; legal precedent may well have been his interest. He proved uncommonly persistent. He pursued the matter for thirteen years, in which time Iser secured his right to live in Petersburg by virtue of his medical degree, and in which time the petition wound its way to the Senate. The request Evsei Lazarevich filed in October 1900 was ultimately denied in November 1913.

  Both Véra Evseevna and her future husband were quick to stress the primacy of childhood impressions. To his first biographer, Andrew Field, Nabokov confessed his belief that the “specific gravity” of childhood fixes the character of a Russian even more so than it does the character of other nationalities. Speaking for Martin in Glory and as himself in Speak, Memory, he held that prerevolutionary Russian children had a sort of genius for recollection, that their memories were somehow rendered more indelible by a destiny who knew what she was about to deprive them of. Independently Véra made the same observation in 1958: “An average Russian child of the beginning of this century can ordinarily record a total of reminiscences which appears staggering even to an exceptionally gifted American.”* She was by no means inclined to dwell on these recollections; everything in her history but little in her temperament could have made her a full-time nostalgic. She appeared almost frighteningly detached from her past. When asked about her Petersburg childhood and that of her husband, Véra Nabokov confined herself to lines like “Both of our sets of parents were extremely intelligent people.” In her eighties, she declined an offer of photos of the Furstadtskaya Street home. Her sister Lena told her son that she had been taught to
look forward, never back; she spoke of wanting to put the past in a box and turn the key, twice. Véra effectively did as much, without seeming to realize that the key hung heavily on her delicate wrist. Evsei Lazarevich plainly took misfortune in stride and forged on, a habit he imparted, with some variation, to his daughters. From the opposite angle Slava Borisovna’s demeanor may have worked the same effect. She was a high-strung woman, enough so to have produced an unflappable daughter, one with no taste for any kind of unnecessary hand-wringing. As one of her closest relatives wrote Véra many years later, “Judging by your letter, you’re in a good mood, but then again, you know how to make a good mood.” The Slonim girls, living in straitened circumstances in Berlin ten years after the Russian Revolution, could not have been less similar to the more famous three sisters in Russian literature. They were taught to be proud and capable and supremely rational, to rise above and, perhaps most of all to expect, adversity. In their sixty years of correspondence the past is rarely mentioned; there were no plaintive wails for St. Petersburg.

  Some things were to be insisted upon, on the other hand. Véra Slonim learned a great number of lessons from her father, only one of which was how to hold a thirteen-year-grudge, a lesson she would put to good use. “They were raised to be perfect,” reports Lena Slonim’s son, who knew his mother and aunts were pushed hard to excel academically. They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one.† In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain climate; the lessons Véra Slonim learned were exactly the reverse of those her future husband learned in the incunabula of his first pampered eighteen years. “One is always at home in one’s past,” Nabokov would write, certainly not in reference to his wife. Evsei Lazarevich passed his lofty sense of responsibility on to his middle daughter, whom he clearly encouraged. As she recalled later: