Two things bother me about Letters to Véra, Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his wife, Véra Slonim. One is lepidoptery, the other is gush. They strike me as self- or wife-indulgent, these missives headed and peppered with declarations of adoration, yearning in separation, brimming with anticipation, glorying in fulfillment, amounting often to verbal slobber. A fifty-two-year loving marriage may well stand out laudably among literati, but need it be swooningly verbalized in letter after letter?
As for lepidoptery, which takes up progressively more and more space, it strikes me as both cruel and childish, unless you are a professional lepidopterist, which Nabokov only briefly was. Why hunt down these exquisite creatures that hurt no one as they embellish realms through which they flutter, to be killed and pinned down for gawkers to crow over? Fine for the boy Vladimir, but for a civilized novelist in knee pants with worshipful wife in tow scouring the underbrush with toy nets?
Headlong pursuits and sophomoric ecstasies can be hard reading through hundreds of pages, especially when we lack the letters of Véra. Systematically she destroyed every one she wrote, even unto marginal scribbles in Vladimir’s letters to her or his mother. We are up against a fanatical secretiveness well beyond mere privacy. But then she was strange, even including that acute accent on the E, which she invented ostensibly to preclude Véra being made to rhyme with “dearer” rather than “fairer.” What educated person would thus mispronounce it? But
