Vera by Stacy Schiff Read Free Book Online Page B

negotiated for the exploration rights in several mountain ranges in eastern Russia, government concessions of which were elaborate affairs. He would have received a quick education in securing timber rights from his court work on Rodzianko’s behalf. The relationship appears to have been a close and mutually satisfactory one; from 1913 until the Revolution Slonim served as the chief estate manager for Pavel Vladimirovich’s daughter, a neighbor on Furstadtskaya Street. Maria Pavlovna Rodzianko and her brother controlled a colossal fortune, including a great deal of Petersburg real estate. The finances were in a fabulously tangled state when they entrusted them to Evsei Slonim, who remained in place when Maria Pavlovna and her husband separated.The Rodzianko work constituted a prestigious position—a mere sideline according to Véra, but a time-consuming one, judging from the court appearances and the petitions filed regularly on Pavel Vladimirovich’s behalf—and one that suggests that Slonim’s politics may not have been as left-wing as could otherwise be expected of a Jewish non-barrister practicing in Petersburg. He voted with the Kadets, as did most of the intelligentsia, but the family was less radical politically than the liberal Nabokovs.
    Evsei Lazarevich’s longest-running legal concern had nothing to do withhis aristocratic neighbors. In 1900 he filed a petition for the right to enter the second guild of the St. Petersburg Merchantry, which may explain the detour he had made into the tile business the previous year. Rank mattered more than wealth in prerevolutionary Russia, and entry into the second guild would have assured Slonim of the closest thing a Jew could claim to an in-alienable right: the secure privilege of residency in Petersburg. In particular he made the case for his right to hire a Jewish clerk from the Pale of Settlement in his home. He appears to have had in mind his brother Iser, then a member of the Mogilev petty bourgeoisie. The matter was tightly regulated, as the government feared a kind of Trojan horse invasion of the capital. In a case that reads like a collaboration between Sholom Aleichem and Joseph Heller, Slonim’s petition wound its way from ministry to ministry. Briefly he had been a member of the second guild of merchants’ sons in Mogilev; he argued that by virtue of his law degree, his trade, and his present residence he should be admitted to that guild in Petersburg. In 1900 the courts ruled that he must first obtain the right to unrestricted residency in the Empire, a right conferred by the very rank he was seeking. Whether Slonim fought the verdict as he did for the sake of his daughters, whose right to reside in Petersburg was contingent on his standing; whether he fought purely for the fate of his brother; whether he fought for the additional rights for himself; or whether he fought for principle’s sake is unclear. He was known for his selflessness; legal precedent may well have been his interest. He proved uncommonly persistent. He pursued the matter for thirteen years, in which time Iser secured his right to live in Petersburg by virtue of his medical degree, and in which time the petition wound its way to the Senate. The request Evsei Lazarevich filed in October 1900 was ultimately denied in November 1913.

    Both Véra Evseevna and her future husband were quick to stress the primacy of childhood impressions. To his first biographer, Andrew Field, Nabokov confessed his belief that the “specific gravity” of childhood fixes the character of a Russian even more so than it does the character of other nationalities.Speaking for Martin in
Glory
and as himself in
Speak, Memory
, he held that prerevolutionary Russian children had a sort of genius for recollection, that their memories were somehow rendered more indelible by a destiny who knew what she was about to deprive them of. Independently Véra made the same observation in