Véra and Vladimir Nabokov were married for fifty-two years—a record, apparently, among literary couples—and their intimacy was nearly hermetic. When they were apart, he pined for her grievously. She was his first reader, his agent, his typist, his archivist, his translator, his dresser, his money manager, his mouthpiece, his muse, his teaching assistant, his driver, his bodyguard (she carried a pistol in her handbag), the mother of his child, and, after he died, the implacable guardian of his legacy. Vladimir dedicated nearly all his books to her, and Véra famously saved “Lolita” from incineration in a trash can when he wanted to destroy it. Before they moved from a professor’s lodgings in Ithaca, New York, to a luxury hotel in Switzerland, she kept his house—“terribly,” by her own description—and cooked his food. She stopped short of tasting his meals when they dined out, but she opened his mail, and answered it.

According to Véra’s biographer, Stacy Schiff, her subject had such a fetish for secrecy that she “panicked every time she saw her name in [Vladimir’s] footnotes.” It seems inapt to call Véra’s love selfless, however: the two selves of the Nabokovs were valves of the same heart. And extravagant devotion may sometimes be the expression of vicarious grandiosity. Schiff’s biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and Véra’s name has since entered English as an eponym. Last year, an article on The _Atlantic _’s Web site concluded that the luckiest scribes are those married to “a Véra,” a spouse of either sex who liberates them from life’s mundane chores; the less fortunate long for a Véra between loads at the laundromat. There is also the option of a paid Véra, for writers of means—or of scruples.

“Letters to Véra,” the first complete volume of Nabokov’s letters to his wife, was published by Knopf this month. A lifetime of scholarship informs this massive tome, which was edited and translated from the Russian by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s definitive biographer. Its heft, however, is grossly lopsided. The period between 1923, when the couple met, and 1940, when they escaped with their six-year-old son, Dmitri, from France to New York, generated four-fifths of the correspondence. The remaining thirty-seven years, until Nabokov’s death, fill barely eighty of five hundred pages. (There are two hundred and sixty-eight additional pages of appendices and endnotes.) Because all but one of his novels in English were composed in America—“I’m an American writer,” he insisted when he was asked to define his literary identity—the most fertile decades of his career, and of Véra’s midwifery, play out offstage.

We do get a self-portrait of the young Vladimir unvarnished by Nabokovian irony. The earliest letters, intoxicated with language and desire, are intoxicating to read. A ball rolls under a chair, the only furniture in a room: “things seem to have some sort of survival instinct.” Trying to quit cigarettes, Nabokov imagines the angels smoking in Heaven like guilty schoolboys. When the archangel passes, they throw their cigarettes away, and “this is what falling stars are.” From Paris, he describes the Métro: “It stinks like between the toes and it’s just as cramped.”

Nabokov’s ambition, as a young man, was to give Véra “a sunny, simple happiness,” a rare enough commodity for Russians of their generation. They were born three years apart—he in 1899, she in 1902—and they spent their youth outrunning the murderous upheavals of the twentieth century. Many of their compatriots lost their bearings, and would never recover. But each of them found a lodestar in the other.

Véra Evseevna Slonim was born into a rich Jewish family that fled St. Petersburg during the Revolution and settled in Berlin, the de-facto first capital of the anti-Bolshevik diaspora. She was pale and fine-boned, with the huge eyes of a waif. Her elegance in speech and dress rivalled that of her husband. He liked to joke that he had turned her hair white prematurely; it gave her an ethereal aura that belied her toughness. Véra’s character, Vladimir told her, was made of “tiny sharp arrows.”

After the Slonims reached Berlin, Véra’s father, a lawyer, founded a publishing house. It was one of eighty-six that served a community of half a million émigrés who were religious about their Russianness. Véra worked in the office. She and her two sisters had been polished and educated to a high standard, mostly at home. “They were raised to be perfect,” a nephew recalled. To be perfect was to marry well. In the meantime, she taught English and translated from several languages. Some of her work was published in the journal Rul, the most prestigious of the outlets for writers in exile. One of its star contributors was a young aristocrat, ladies’ man, chess player, dandy, and lepidopterist who was earning his living as a private tutor. He signed his poetry with the pseudonym V. Sirin, but literary insiders, including Véra, knew his real name.

On May 8, 1923, Véra Slonim and Vladimir Nabokov met at a charity ball, or so he recalled. Schiff sets their meeting on a bridge, “over a chestnut-lined canal.” All accounts, including Véra’s, agree that she was hiding her features behind a black harlequin mask that she refused to lift as they meandered through the city to the Hohenzollernplatz, rapt in conversation. The mask suggests audacious premeditation. Had Véra “accosted” Sirin, as Boyd describes it? Was this an audition for which she had studied the role? And had she come with the “venerating expectation” that George Eliot attributes to Dorothea Brooke before her first meeting with Casaubon?

Nabokov later told his sister that Véra had indeed arranged the encounter. Véra refused to speak for herself to posterity. But she did admit to having memorized Sirin’s verse, including his love poems to another woman, and she recited it to him in a voice that he found “exquisite.” The writer was seduced with his own words. They were married two years later.

On the evidence of these letters, no couple ever enjoyed a more perfect complicity. In his very first sentence, Vladimir tells Véra, “I won’t hide it. I’m so unused to being—well, understood.” In 1924, he reflects, “You know, we are terribly alike.” And a few months later: “You and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love.” He was ready to give her “all of my blood.” Through their decades of vicissitudes, he referred to their marriage as “cloudless”—even to his mistress.

As the years pass, however, and the “radiance” of his passion dims, Nabokov is increasingly consumed with practical matters. By the nineteen-thirties, he seems too preoccupied to take pains with his style. For a writer who labored over his prose, that negligence—hasty sentences full of repetition—may be just a little luxury, like his cigarettes, that he knew Véra would indulge. But the substance has changed, too. There is less about his art, except for the effort to publish it, and more about his digestion. He struggles as a stateless person to obtain visas, and “our letters,” he laments, degenerate into “bureaucratic reports.” Long passages are devoted to his social rounds, a recitation, for the most part, of obscure Russian names. Perhaps Nabokov did not wish to trouble his “Pussykins” with unpleasantries like the rise of Fascism; he mentions Hitler exactly twice. On April 7, 1939, the day Mussolini invaded Albania, Nabokov is strolling in a London park, where the yellow pansies “have Hitler faces.” A few days later, he spends a morning with a fellow-lepidopterist. “We talked about everything, starting with the genitalia of Hesperiidae”—a family* of butterfly—“and ending with Hitler.”