Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingVéra
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreWinner 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.
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and The Witches: Salem, 1692.
Anna Fields has received five Audie nominations from the Audio Publishers Association and is proud to have won in 2004 for All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki. She has also been honored by Audiofile magazine with more than a dozen Earphones Awards. She has voiced over 250 audiobooks.
Reviews
“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.”
“An absorbing story, illumined by Schiff’s flair for the succinct insight.”
“Schiff describes the Nabokovs as ‘the ultimate portmanteau couple’ and her book is something of a portmanteau, too: two biographies for the price of one and a portrait of a marriage thrown in…This is a rich and subtle book. It is also, at times, very moving.”
“Illuminating...‘Without my wife,’ Nabokov once remarked, “I wouldn't have written a single novel.’...Schiff’s work boldly and brilliantly illuminates how complex was this deceptively simple statement...A superb portrait.”
“[Schiff] has given us a vivid and truthful portrait of a proud and gifted woman whose contribution to Vladimir Nabokov’s life and career was immense.”
“A sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait. Schiff’s elegant prose style [is] at once forceful and playfully allusive in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.”
“A sensitive rendering of one of the century’s great love stories.”
“This book offers more than a peek at the famous author through his wife’s eyes. When her 1991 New York Times obit called Vera ‘Wife, Muse, and Agent’ it only hinted at her role, which is rescued from obscurity in Schiff’s graceful prose.”
“This is a subtle and canny biography of a very smart but prickly woman. Véra… managed to so intertwine herself in [Vladimir’s] personal, intellectual, and literary endeavors that it becomes difficult, or impossible, to separate her from him.”
“[A] riveting portrait…Anna Fields’ intelligent narration is necessary to convey the life of such a woman adequately. Highly recommended.”
“The fascinating story of a modern woman who made a life-long career as her husband’s intellectual companion, secretary, manager, and guardian angel…Schiff’s entertaining biography powerfully argues that in effacing herself for her husband’s aggrandizement, Vera Nabokov entered history arm in arm with one of the century’s greatest men of letters.”
“Schiff here cements her reputation as a literary biographer of striking subtlety and perceptiveness…Schiff’s elegant prose and eye for nuance nearly match Nabokov himself in this lucid, unsentimental portrait of a marriage.”
Expand reviews