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tributes to her vowels.
    It is clear that the two slipped quickly into a relationship; by November Nabokov was swearing that he loved as never before, with an infinite tenderness, that he regretted every minute of the past he had not shared with Véra. The ease with which the two fell together is clearer still if we allow ourselves a glimpse at the thematic shadows the Berlin nights cast on the fictions, which is a little like saying we shall now base our idea of female anatomy on the work of Picasso. This both was and was not the case; the image is more refraction than reflection. But the trails are there all the same. During a November separation Nabokov had written Véra: “You came into my life and not the way a casual visitor might (you know, ‘without removing one’s hat’) but as one enters a kingdom, where all the rivers have waited for your reflection, all the roads for your footfall.” A month later he returned to the same image:
    Have you ever thought about how strangely, how easily our lives came together? And this is probably that God, bored up in heaven, experienced a passion he doesn’t often have. It’s as if in your soul there is a preprepared spot for every one of my thoughts. When Monte Cristo came to the Palace he had purchased, he saw on the table, among other things, a lacquered box, and he said to his major domo who had arrived earlier to set everything up, “My gloves should be here.” The latter beamed and opened this otherwise unexceptional lacquered box, and indeed: the gloves.
    â€œIn everything from fables there is a grain of truth,” he concluded, before asking her to telephone his old apartment very late at night, so as to be certain to disturb his ex-neighbors.
    When the muckraking “biograffitist” comes along in the 1974
Look at the Harlequins!
to ask how Vadim Vadimovich N. met the woman who turned his life around, our narrator shuts the door in his face—but not before referring him to
See under Real
, a novel written thirty-five years earlier, in English.
See under Real’s
actual and phonetic counterpart is
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, written thirty-five years earlier, in English. It is almost impossible to separate Véra from the fictional Clare in that novel, who “entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one’s own. She stayed there forgetting the way outand quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there and petted despite their amazing shapes.” From the original manuscript Nabokov had deleted a line, which followed the passage about how well Clare fitted into Sebastian’s life: “They became lovers in such a speedy manner that for anyone who did not know them, she might have passed for a fast girl or he for a vulgar seducer.” Events move with the same lightning speed in
The Gift
, for wholly nonfictional reasons: “Despite the complexity of her mind, a most convincing simplicity was natural to her, so that she could permit herself much that others would be unable to get away with, and the very speed of their coming together seemed to Fyodor completely natural in the sharp light of her directness.”
    Between Véra and her fictional shadows there is plenty of room for distortion—“They’re all Picassos, not one is Dora Maar,” Dora Maar grumbled, dismissing nearly a decade of portraits—but Nabokov did indulge in a certain amount of autoplagiarism. His early letters to Véra sound familiar to readers of
The Gift;
his enchantment with her was precisely that of the preordained variety Fyodor feels for Zina, who had in turn been clipping the young poet’s work two years before she meets him. Nabokov perfectly summarized the correspondence in that novel:
    What was it about her that fascinated him most of all? Her perfect understanding, the absolute pitch of her instinct for