A Revolver to Carry at Night

February 15, 2024
This quasi-historical work views Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, V�ra, at different points in their lives. Zgustova, a Czech-born writer living in Spain, looks first at Vladimir in 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland, as his nimble mind dances among memories--boyhood in St. Petersburg, exile in Berlin--while struggling with his last novel and last illness. The third chapter focuses on a pivotal episode that is referred to throughout the book, V�ra's ultimatum in Cannes, 1937, as Vladimir's lover, Irina Guadanini-Kokoshkin, visits the French resort to find out where she stands. Zgustova traces V�ra's thoughts and memories on a long, snowy drive to Boston in 1964 to rejoin her husband after seeing their son, Dmitri, perform with the Metropolitan Opera. The final section finds the widowed V�ra in Montreux still tending to her husband's work and thinking about how Irina got into some of his novels. The book, smoothly translated by Jones, ends with a bibliography of some 25 volumes. The meandering portrait of the couple features many real-life allusions and details that will be familiar to cognoscenti (with perhaps a few liberties taken). But it is V�ra who emerges as Zgustova's central figure, the person who often carries in her purse the gun in the title, although her main weapon is her will. Her Cannes ultimatum quashes Vladimir's last great love, and she closely monitors her flirtatious genius thereafter. She insists on their leaving the U.S., a country he has come to love, and Dmitri says at one point that "keeping him in Montreux is her vendetta against him. She's a Mafia boss." Yet Stacy Schiff in the biography V�ra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage (1999) sees her shielding, controlling dominance as largely aimed at making it easier for him to write. Zgustova's angle on V�ra looks harshly black and white in areas where gray seems fairer. A provocative take on an intriguing marriage.

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March 29, 2024

No one really knows what goes on inside a marriage except the participants, and occasionally, not even they know. Zgustov�'s (The Silent Woman) latest novel spans 40 years of Vladimir and V�ra Nabokov's marriage, with a postscript 13 years after Vladimir's death. Identified with a wolf multiple times throughout--and like a wolf--V�ra takes what she wants: Vladimir. V�ra believes that her intense involvement in every part of Vladimir's life is crucial to establishing his literary success. This is perhaps true. Sections are narrated by V�ra, Vladimir, their son Dmitri, and Irina, with whom Vladimir has a brief, passionate affair that almost ended his marriage. It's never clear if what binds Vladimir and V�ra is precisely love, and Zgustov� implies it was need, at least on his side. As Dmitri says of his mother, "Every family has its pillar, and she is ours." Though the revolver of the title never goes off, its appearance at a party speaks to V�ra's most present emotion, fear, and her most intense characteristic, tenacity. VERDICT In fictionalizing the Nabokovs, Zgustov� adds to the literary couple's mystique and shifts readers' focus from the writer to the wife, who literally plucked his career-making manuscript from the fire.--Jessica Epstein

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