It is doubtful whether he could have endured either the long years of material and psychological constraint or the sun-burst of high fortune without the magic of a 52-year marriage to an utterly remarkable woman. Now resplendent vengeance lay to hand and the role of Nabokov's wife, Vera, was of the very first importance. When fame and wealth came, overnight as it were, they left in their wake decades of misery, of non-recognition outside a small circle, of academic jobbery. The facts of enforced emigration, of successive exile and precarious refuge, the violent deaths of Nabokov's father and brother at the hands of totalitarian thugs, the sense of a miraculous at-homeness in Russia and Russian now lost, may help explain Olympian ironies and a fierce privacy (sacrificed, however, when the books, and Lolita above all, were to be hyped internationally). Nabokov on Pasternak does not make for pleasant reading. Where a potential rival looms, the mechanisms of defensive denigration are almost instantaneous. The allowed pantheon is small: Flaubert, Gogol, Pushkin, Proust and Joyce.

It may take generations to unravel what there is in these celebrated damnations of deliberate provocation and what there is of autonomous insight.

As were his magisterially dismissive verdicts on such vulgar frauds as Dostoevsky, Freud, Faulkner or Balzac. The master's sarcasm, his contempt for those inadequately endowed to penetrate, let alone judge, his work, was legend. And a real Minotaur sits at its imaginary heart. Even the Nabokov index to Onegin is a minefield of multilingual traps, clues and Ariadne's threads in a labyrinth of dizzying complexity. Moreover, in the leviathan minutiae of Nabokov's notes to his questionable but crucial 'translation' of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the Nabokovians have before them a never-to-be equalled, let alone surpassed, exhibition of their own byzantine craft and aspirations. More even than Joyce, the art of Nabokov invites, challenges and derides, with degrees of amused hauteur, the febrile labours, the servile ingenuities of the learned decoder. Acrostics, anagrams, palindromes, puns, neologisms, spangle the many layered confections of his style. There is scarcely a line in his poetry or corruscating paragraph in his prose not crammed with allusions, cross-reference, calculated (often arcanely, cunningly misleading) echo. Nabokov wrote in at least three main tongues - French, Russian, Anglo-American - and wove another dozen languages, including those of entymology and botany, into his polyglot virtuosity. It reflects the almost uncanny concordance between these writings and the very nature of the academic enterprise. The reason for this plethora lies not only with the manifest fascination exercised by Vladimir Nabokov's brilliantly assembled persona and the diversity, volume and singular genius of much of his writings.

Vera mrs vladimir nabokov