NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both "monumental" (
The Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (
New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's
V ra (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 wife, V ra, and third for no one at all.
"Without my wife," he once noted, "I wouldn't have written a single novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' 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.