Read Online Vera by Stacy Schiff - Free Book Online

begun as an idealistic, liberal uprising had ended in totalitarianism. Véra Slonim’s nineteen-year-old husband-to-be, whom she had yet to meet, had fled with his family to the Crimea the previous November, where he was carrying on a succession of romances, and denouncing the work of Dostoyevsky for the first recorded time.
    Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as amember of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as “the spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility.” As such he was probably not greatly sympathetic to the Tsar, said to pronounce the word “intelligentsia” in much the same humor he pronounced the word “syphilis.” (Most professionals and academics belonged to the Kadet party, the party of Nabokov’s father, a center faction that had been striving toward a truly constitutional monarchy. The party of the Rodziankos—or at least of Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko—was the Octobrist party, to the right of the Kadets.) Véra Nabokovcould not object strenuously enough to the assertion that the intelligentsia had failed to oppose the Bolsheviks at the outset of the Revolution. This had not been the case in her household, or later, in the emigration, when a number of White officers figured among family friends. We know little of her active sympathies during this crucial year, a year when all was dangerous, when public transportation and electricity functioned sporadically, when looting and murder were the order of the day, but we know a certain amount of the disorder she witnessed. Upon seizing power in October the Bolsheviks made their first victims the liberals who had preceded them; the terror spread quickly and indiscriminately. Any well-to-do citizen of any political stripe was at risk. Iosef Hessen, the esteemed writer and publisher who was friendly with both the Slonims and the Nabokovs, recalled that every move, every decision, was made with heightened consciousness.A wrong step in the street could result in an ambush. More than seventyyears later, Véra Nabokov wrote to a member of the Rodzianko family, a few years older than she: “I remember vividly how we waited in line in front of the prison when we were trying to find where M. P. [Rodzianko] had been jailed. I also remember that, there being no candy, you had in your pocket several lumps of sugar, several of which you offered me.” For Jews matters were more complicated yet. The Revolution brought with it a new wave of pogroms, far more extensive than anything of the tsarist years. By late 1919 even the liberal parties would be infected by anti-Semitism, as the Jews were credited with having turned Russia upside down. Through these events an equation was forged between Communism and Jewry, an equation that explained Véra Slonim’s future politics more than she herself ever would. After the escape from Bolshevik Russia, there remained always something revolutionary in her spirit, never in her fiercely held political views. She would rather cancel a vacation than spend one in a country whose foreign policy she deemed pro-Communist. A mail strike was enough to send her running in the opposite direction.
    Along with nearly all else, her schooling was interrupted by the civil war. For at least six months after the October Revolution the Slonims lived in Moscow, where Véra did not attend class. She was back at the Obolensky Academy for a month or so before leaving Petrograd for good, a departure the family made in haste. The differing personalities of the three Slonim girls are neatly displayed in their depictions of the events that preceded their exodus, events that took place at a time when everyone had come to fear the squeal of automobile tires beneath his