Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and hailed by critics as both "monumental" (Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's V├®ra, the story of 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 wifeV├®ra, and third for no one at all.
Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the twentieth century, the story of the Nabokov's fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. V├®ra, 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 Schiff's V├®ra is a triumph of the biographical form.
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“Schiff has succeeded in creating an elegantly nuanced portrait of the artist’s wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov’s marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work. She effortlessly conjures up the disparate worlds the couple inhabited...a formidable challenge for a biography—a challenge that Ms. Schiff, with this book, has most persuasively met.”
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New York Times