Véra was her husband’s first reader. She smoothed the prose when it was “still warm and wet,” though later, when scholars questioned this she generally shrugged off any involvement. Véra submitted her husband’s work to publishers; she typed and researched his lectures. From a list of the things Nabokov bragged about never having learned to do—type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, answer the phone, fold maps, fold umbrellas, give the time of day to a philistine—it is easy to deduce what Mrs. Nabokov spent her life doing. A great many letters opened like this: “Vladimir started this letter but had to switch to something else in a hurry, and asked me to continue on my own.”

Many of the hallmarks of Nabokov’s fiction—the doppelgängers, the impersonators, the Siamese twins, the mirror images, the distorted mirror images, the reflections in the windowpane, the parodies of self—manifested themselves in the routine they developed for dealing with the world. In a perfectly Nabokovian way, their two identities began to blur on the page. Letters came addressed to all sorts of entities: “Dear VVs.”

- Barbara Bloom