Name: Letters to Véra
Price: 25.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN: 9780307476586

No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokov’s to Véra 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 first encounter in 1923, Vladimir’s letters to Véra chronicle a half-century-long love story, one that is playful, romantic, and memorable.

At the same time, the letters reveal much about their author. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everything—animals, people, speech, landscapes and cityscapes—and glimpse his ceaseless work on his poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays, and translations. This delightful volume is enhanced by twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters and the puzzles and drawings Vladimir often sent to Véra.

With 8 pages of photographs and 47 illustrations in text

“Extraordinary and wonderful…. Some of the most rapturous love letters anyone has ever written.” —The Spectator

“A self-portrait of the young Vladimir unvarnished by Nabokovian irony. The earliest letters, intoxicated with language and desire, are intoxicating to read.” —The New Yorker

“It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation…the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy.” —Martin Amis, The New York Times Book Review

“Letters to Véra, a five-decade epistolary love story, is like being handed a celebrity’s unlocked iPhone. Pry away…. I still hope for Nabokovian romance.” —Elle

“A fascinating collection of correspondence…. A wife—and indeed, a son—who could inspire such caring and creative letters as these deserve to be included in Nabokov’s literary legacy.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Letters to Véra opens the workshop door and shows us Vladimir not in his accredited hard-shell case of genius but as a soft, vulnerable practicing writer…. Again and again, we see what Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire, calls the magic of a mind ‘perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements.’” —Harper’s Magazine

Letters to Véra

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