The woman behind the man …

… The Enduring Enigma of Véra Nabokov | Literary Hub,.(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Véra is now perhaps most famous for having saved an early draft of Lolita from an incinerator, but it’s in these individually unremarkable anecdotes, these dreary lists, that the force of her everyday necessity is most powerfully felt. As Schiff writes in her introduction, quoting the illustrator Saul Steinberg: “It would be difficult to write about Véra without mentioning Vladimir. But it would impossible to write about Vladimir without mentioning Véra.”

She remains an enigma because that is what she wanted to be.