Himself a “semiphantom in a light foreign suit,” Nabokov taught English, boxing and tennis. He translated “Alice in Wonderland” into Russian. Vera found a series of secretarial jobs. Officially the couple were stateless, having been issued Nansen passports, a document that in Nabokov’s view essentially identified its holder as “a criminal on parole.” Those documents turned travel into a herculean labor; whole correspondences would be devoted to the procurement of visas. Nabokov missed his mother’s funeral, in Prague, for want of one. The authorities seemed to view the foreigners among them, he noted, “with the preposterous disapproval with which certain religious groups regard a child born out of wedlock.”

While there would be some debate later as to whether the Nabokovs constituted genteel or dire poverty, their finances were undeniably delicate, the more so after their son was born in l934. By that time h istory had again begun to overtake them. Vera lost her job when the Nazis dismissed the Jewish owners of her firm. With some urgency the couple began to cast about for a new address. The second city of the Russian emigration, Paris, seemed the obvious refuge. The situation grew grimmer in the fall of 1936, when the man who had murdered Nabokov’s father was named to Hitler’s Department of Émigré Affairs. His mandate, Vera explained, was to register every Russian in Berlin.

Nabokov began a full-scale campaign for the right person, lectureship or publishing contact that might propel the family from Germany. By November he pronounced their position “desperate in the extreme.” He searched everywhere for a foothold. “I am not afraid of living in the American boondocks,” he assured a Massachusetts acquaintance, both men deaf to any hint of prophesy. Nabokov might just as easily have become a great writer of the subcontinent: Was there work anywhere, he pleaded late in the year, if not in Britain or the United States, then in India or South Africa? The couple remained officially stateless, culturally orphaned. A gust might have nudged them in any direction.

“We’re slowly dying of hunger and nobody cares,” Nabokov confided to a Paris-based cousin in 1937, shortly before the appeals paid off. While France was unhappy about the influx of foreigners — it had been less welcoming to foreigners than Berlin — Nabokov managed to secure a work visa. Vera arrived to be greeted by immense swastikas flying before Albert Speer’s pavilion at the International Exposition. The family split up, camping at separate addresses so as not to overwhelm their generous hosts.

Nabokov had meanwhile acquired a literary agent in New York. She made no headway placing translations of his Russian novels. His latest, she informed him, was “dazzlingly brilliant” and hence wholly without promise for the American market. She suggested something more topical, an idea that left her client hyperventilating. “Nothing,” he would roar later, “bores me more than political novels and the literature of social unrest.” He was, he enlightened his representative, neither Sinclair Lewis nor Upton Sinclair. (Ultimately he tossed the two over the cliff together, as “Upton Lewis.”) Weeks later, in the bathroom of a Paris studio apartment, he began — “a champion figure skater switching to roller skates,” as he complained, speaking for whole cadres of displaced professionals — to write in English.

Neither an academic post nor a publisher materialized. Nabokov was again offering English lessons in September 1939 when gas masks were handed out and air raid alarms began to sound. How was it possible, he wailed, that no one understood their straits? Émigré publishing shuddered to a halt. He was nearly mobilized. In Russian that winter he wrote a novella about a 40-year-old seducer of prepubescent girls. It did nothing to speed him to the continent on which it would blossom, though another fiction did: An American refugee organization promised him a lecture series, understood to be purely “metaphysical.” The visas came through though still the family could not afford steamer fare. Two charitable organizations chipped in. “I have sound reasons to believe that I shall be able to make good in America,” Nabokov assured the American Committee for Christian Refugees.